IP: Bioterrorism: America's Newest War Game

From: believer@telepath.com Subject: IP: Bioterrorism: America's Newest War Game Date: Mon, 26 Oct 1998 06:07:57 -0600 To: believer@telepath.com Source: The Nation http://www.thenation.com/issue/981109/1109PRIN.HTM BIOTERRORISM AMERICA'S NEWEST WAR GAME BY PETER PRINGLE "Catastrophic Terrorism" roars the headline over an article in the current Foreign Affairs. The three distinguished authors--John Deutch, a former director of Central Intelligence; Ashton Carter, an ex-Pentagon assistant secretary; and Philip Zelikow, a former member of the National Security Council--declare with unswerving certainty that "the danger of weapons of mass destruction being used against America and its allies is greater now than at any time since the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962." Any act of "catastrophic terrorism," they say, could have the effect of Pearl Harbor; it could divide America into a "before and after." This is no shot across the bow of a sleeping ship. America is now spending $7 billion a year defending itself against backpack nuclear bombs, canisters of nerve gas and petri dishes of germ weapons planted in crowded cities by an as-yet-unknown adversary. So many different agencies are shoring up the nation's defenses against mega-terrorism, says the government auditor, that it's hard to keep track of where all the money is going, let alone whether it is being spent wisely. Any new government project tagged with the word "terrorism" goes to the top of the pile in Congress. The Pentagon is ordering devices to sniff out nerve gases and deadly germs. National Guard units that normally deal with floods and hurricanes are being trained as chemical and biological SWAT teams. Under the threat of another war with Iraq, all 2.4 million American troops are being vaccinated against anthrax, and companies are scrambling to provide the vaccines--including, notably, a company founded by Adm. William Crowe Jr., a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The FBI wants to send more agents into embassies abroad and is demanding its own planes to shuttle investigative teams around the world. Local and state governments used to dealing with flu epidemics are preparing for the nightmare gas or microbe attack. And one can only imagine what antiterrorist projects the CIA has been dreaming up with its "black" budget of covert ops. Now the players in this new war game have got a new title for their grim pursuit. The thrust of "Catastrophic Terrorism" is a grand reorganization of the Pentagon, CIA and FBI bureaucracies to eliminate the perennial agency overlaps and gaps between "foreign" and "domestic" terrorism. The authors want to pool intelligence at the FBI, create new Catastrophic Terrorism Response Offices, already dubbed CTROs, and cut the two dozen agencies with shopping lists for vaccines, gas sniffers and protective clothing down to one--the Defense Department--because, they say, the Pentagon has the expertise when it comes to rapid acquisition. The operation sounds like it's a few steps short of war mobilization. All but the new title, perhaps, could have been predicted (the original choice, "Grand Terrorism," was rejected on the grounds that there is nothing grand about this method of warfare). Beached by the fall of Communism and the end of the cold war, planners in the Pentagon and military think tanks have been circling a number of new threats: First it was drug wars and then "rogue" states; but international terrorism has an enduring quality in the annals of "threat politics." By dividing the phenomenon into two distinct parts--conventional and catastrophic--Deutch, the quintessential academic/consultant to the Pentagon and the defense industry, and his co-authors have mirrored the old cold war categories of conventional and nuclear weapons. Conventional terrorist weapons are truck bombs filled with fertilizer explosive. Catastrophic terrorist weapons are nuclear, chemical and especially biological--the very weapons President Nixon renounced three decades ago in an effort to prevent their spread to other countries. The sixties US arsenal of biological weapons--then the world's largest and most sophisticated--has come back to haunt those now charged with the defense of the nation. Chemical weapons of mass destruction have been used in state-sponsored warfare--by Iraq against Iran and its own Kurdish population--and fragments of Saddam Hussein's dismantled Scud missiles were alleged by US investigators to have traces of VX, the deadliest of all nerve gases. The worry is that such weapons could also be used by Islamic fundamentalist groups such as the one that President Clinton said he was concerned about when he recently authorized the firing of cruise missiles at a pharmaceutical plant in Sudan--or by groups such as the Japanese cult Aum Shinrikyo, or by homegrown US adherents to survivalism. No one denies the threat of catastrophic terrorism, but the pace at which it has taken center stage as the prime threat to US security is almost as unnerving as the threat itself. In the media, Russian defectors talk alarmingly of new strains of untreatable anthrax and deadly cocktails of smallpox and Ebola; teenage hackers invade super-secret Pentagon computers; Aum Shinrikyo is said to be back in force, if not in action, after the Tokyo subway nerve gas incident; and three Texans are charged with plotting to assassinate President Clinton with a cactus needle coated with botulin flicked from a cigarette lighter. Outside the calm of the international affairs departments of MIT and Harvard (where Deutch and Carter work), or the offices of the Washington Beltway "bandits" bulging with profits from new contracts related to terrorism, or indeed in the Pentagon itself, where new acronyms bloom, a sense of panic is in the air. Expert after expert says it's not a question of if but when this doomsday will occur. The media cast around for bogymen and find Russia with its rusting biological weapons labs and penniless scientists who could aid and abet the new bioterrorists. Actually, in most years since 1980 the number of Americans killed by terrorists has been fewer than ten, but the toll can suddenly jump. In 1983, 271 Americans were killed by terrorist attacks, most of them in the bombing of the Marine barracks in Lebanon. Then came bombs at the World Trade Center in 1993 (six dead, 1,000 injured), the Oklahoma City federal building in 1995 (168 dead, 500 injured) and the Khobar Towers Air Force housing complex in Saudi Arabia in 1996 (nineteen dead, 500 injured). The World Trade Center in New York is often taken as a starting point for the new concern. What if the World Trade Center bomb had been nuclear, or had dispersed a deadly pathogen? In the rush to play a new war game there is always a tendency to hype the threat. Last November Defense Secretary William Cohen appeared on TV holding a bag of sugar claiming the equivalent amount of anthrax spores would be enough to kill half the population of Washington, DC, an illustration that would only be valid if the dispersal were perfect and the wind were always blowing in the right direction. Republican Senator Fred Thompson, chairman of the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee, asked meekly of the terrorist threat, "Is it being overblown?" (The pun was apparently unintended.) There is, after all, no 100 percent protection against chemical or biological weapons--as there was no 100 percent protection against nuclear weapons. That doesn't prevent the rise of a new threat industry, of course, but one must ask whether there is a way of averting catastrophe other than building Fortress America. One of the true believers in the need for elaborate defenses against germ weapons is none other than President Clinton. He became a convert, and started pushing for stockpiles of vaccines, after reading--among all the intelligence reports on terrorism and the Iraq crisis--a novel titled The Cobra Event, about a fictitious germ attack on Manhattan using a mixture of smallpox and cold viruses. Chemical and biological warfare is great fiction material, of course, but are we in danger of being unable to separate fact from fiction? The author of the novel, Richard Preston, also wrote a non-fiction account of the rise of "bioterrorism" in a March issue of The New Yorker. The article quoted a Russian who was involved in the Soviet biological weapons program named Kanatjan Alibekov, who had been the Number Two in charge of the weapons section of the archipelago of Soviet biological plants known as Biopreparat. He "defected" in 1992, a year after the fall of Communism, and changed his name to Ken Alibek. In The New Yorker he said the Soviets had built huge plants for the production of biological weapons. In the 1972 Nixon-negotiated Biological Weapons Convention, which prohibited the development, production and stockpiling of these weapons, there was a loophole; the treaty did not prevent countries from building a production line for such weapons and keeping it in reserve. This is what the Soviets did--something US intelligence had known about for some time. But Alibek claims that the Russians had actually used these facilities to produce tons of deadly anthrax, some of which had been genetically engineered so that available vaccines were useless, and some of which may have been put into the warheads of intercontinental ballistic missiles. Alibek also asserted that the Russians had experimented with deadly cocktails of smallpox spiked with the Ebola virus, which causes internal hemorrhaging, and with Venezuelan equine encephalitis, a brain virus. For almost a dozen breathless pages, The New Yorker treated its readers to gruesome details of the power of these pathogens, pausing only when the author, himself out of puff, asked the key question: Does anyone believe Alibek? Or is he, as a defector who has apparently outlived his usefulness to the CIA's covert intelligence world, trying to make a buck in civvy street by exaggerating the importance of his information? Preston consulted an old cold warrior, Bill Patrick, the retired US biological warfare expert who was chief of product development for the US Army's biological warfare laboratories at Fort Detrick, Maryland. Patrick, quite reasonably for an old campaigner, takes the defector on trust; if Alibek doesn't know what the Soviets were doing, then who does? But other scientific experts, not given a hearing until page twelve of the thirteen-page New Yorker article, ranged from skeptical to dismissive. One was Dr. Peter Jahrling, the chief scientist at the US Army medical research Institute of Infectious Diseases. He was one of Alibek's original debriefers. Jahrling told The New Yorker, "His [Alibek's] talk about chimeras [mixtures] of Ebola is sheer fantasy, in my opinion." Preston also consulted Joshua Lederberg, the Nobel Prize­winning molecular biologist and a member of a working group at the National Academy of Sciences who advises the government on biological weapons and the potential for terrorism. Lederberg told Preston, "It's not even clear to me that adding Ebola genes to smallpox would make it more deadly." Putting these comments higher up in the article would have been more responsible journalism, clearly, but it would also have spoiled the story. The week before the New Yorker article ran, Alibek was given his first television exposure, on Diane Sawyer's PrimeTime Live show. "Biological weapons. They're real, they're here...smallpox, Ebola, anthrax," was how the hourlong show began. Alibek told Sawyer that the Russians had created a deadly genetic merger of smallpox and Ebola. "In this case, [the] mortality rate [is] about 90 percent, up to 100 percent. No treatment techniques," warned Alibek. "How many people could they have killed?" Sawyer asked him. "The entire population of Earth several times," he replied. ABC generously shared Alibek with the New York Times, which, in return, promoted Sawyer's show on its front page with an interview with the former Soviet scientist--including a warning (not mentioned by Sawyer) that Alibek was considered by US intelligence to be credible about the "subjects he knows firsthand...[but] less reliable on political and military issues." Sawyer's search for Soviet malfeasance took her to Ekaterinburg (formerly the Soviet city of Sverdlovsk), where, in 1979, an accidental release of anthrax spores from a Soviet military compound killed more than sixty people. After reports of the accident reached the West through Soviet émigrés, Moscow claimed the deaths were because of anthrax-tainted meat (anthrax is endemic in the region). Matthew Meselson, the Harvard molecular biologist and the scientist who was instrumental in persuading Nixon to outlaw biological weapons in 1969, led a team of investigators to Sverdlovsk. In 1994 Meselson proved in an article in Science, the journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, that in fact there had been a release of anthrax spores from the military compound, and he confirmed nearly seventy deaths. But Sawyer, who spent four months researching the show, never interviewed Meselson or anyone from his team, including Jeanne Guillemin, a sociologist at Boston College who had cross-checked a Russian casualty list with hospital records, local interviews and grave sites. Instead, Sawyer referred to an unnamed director of a Sverdlovsk military hospital as saying there had been 259 victims--but not how many of the victims had died. Sawyer's staff called Professor Meselson the night before the program aired, but merely to ask his help with the pronunciation of a number of drugs used to treat the victims: penicillin, cephalosporin, chloramphenicol and corticosteroids. In a further effort to suggest that more spookiness was afoot, Sawyer recorded that at the end of 1997 Russian scientists had published a paper in the British medical journal Vaccine describing the creation of a genetically engineered anthrax strain that was resistant to standard Russian anthrax vaccine. "Might the Russians be creating germs that can resist vaccines?" asked Sawyer. But was there really anything sinister about the Russian work? Were the Russian experiments threatening a new kind of catastrophic terrorism, or were Russian scientists simply studying the lethality of anthrax, which is endemic in Russia? Sawyer didn't mention that Western intelligence had known about the new anthrax strains for almost two years--from an unclassified International Workshop on Anthrax held at Winchester, England, in September 1995. The Russian scientists had openly described their experiments at the meeting sponsored by a number of commercial, charitable and professional organizations independent of the US and British governments. Bioterrorism, biocriminals, bioweaponeers--all good buzzwords for novelists and movie makers who will continue to sound alarms and attract influential followers, no doubt; but the fact is, there have been only two serious uses of biological weapons in this century: one by the Japanese Imperial Army against China, and the other a failed attempt by Aum Shinrikyo to disperse anthrax spores. So if there are terrorists out there wanting to use biological or chemical or nuclear weapons, how good is our intelligence about them? In hearings before Congress in 1995 the CIA admitted that its terrorism intelligence desk somehow missed the 1994 sarin gas attack by Aum Shinrikyo in Matsumoto, which killed seven people--although the event had been reported in the Japanese and European press and even in the US-owned International Herald Tribune. Such revelations suggest that a new, multi-agency National Intelligence Center, as proposed by Deutch et al. in Foreign Affairs, might not only be a good idea but a necessity. But why a whole new bureaucracy? Why the Manhattan Project syndrome? The Aum Shinrikyo story suggests that a small band of well-trained researchers who tap into publicly available information could be as useful as national information centers, wiretaps and grand jury investigations. The risk in rushing to meet the new threat--any new threat--with new departments of counter-espionage and counter-weapons is that the old art of deterrence through international treaties will take a back seat. The United States already has a policy that criminalizes terrorist activity at home, including the post­Oklahoma City Anti-Terrorism Act of 1996. It also supports sanctions against countries promoting terrorism and corporations exporting material that could be used to produce weapons of mass destruction. In the article on catastrophic terrorism, Deutch et al. mention the proposal of Harvard professor Meselson and his law professor colleague, Philip Heymann, for an international convention making it a crime for individuals to engage in the production of biological or chemical weapons. The existing chemical and biological conventions apply only to states. The idea is to deter national leaders, such as Saddam Hussein, and groups such as Aum Shinrikyo, from seeking to develop chemical or biological weapons, and to discourage corporations from assisting them because the scientist or the CEO could be arrested. If such a treaty had existed and been supported by the United States in the eighties when Iraq was using poison gas and developing biological weapons, the suppliers and advisers on whom Saddam depended could have been brought to trial. The proposal is being co-promoted by Meselson's longtime ally in the fight to eliminate chemical and biological weapons, Julian Perry Robinson of the University of Sussex in England. The crimes are carefully defined in the precise language of the chemical and biological conventions, now ratified by 120 and 141 countries respectively. Under the proposed law any nation that is party to the existing conventions would be bound either to prosecute or to extradite a violator. Such treaties already in effect are aimed at piracy, genocide, airline hijacking and harming diplomats on active duty. If the proposal becomes law, terrorists would have their support group cut from under them; there is even the suggestion of a reward for anyone who provides information leading to a perpetrator's arrest. Maybe the fiction writers will pick up the idea too. Then, who knows whether the FBI or some adventurer from the plaintiff's bar--bringing, say, a class action on behalf of aggrieved shareholders of a company caught trading in anthrax--will be the first to be responsible for the arrest of the culprits? The next generation of terror novels should be filled with "biocriminals" and "chemothugs." For an alternative view, and relief from the drumbeat of the New Threat merchants, one can turn to this quarter's Foreign Policy, a rival of Foreign Affairs. In an article titled "The Great Superterrorism Scare," Ehud Sprinzak, a professor of political science at Jerusalem's Hebrew University, suggests that the voices of doom are mistaken. Their concept of post­cold war chaos breeding terrorist fanatics is simply not supported by the evidence of three decades. "Despite the lurid rhetoric, a massive terrorist attack with nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons is hardly inevitable. It is not even likely," he writes. "Terrorists wish to convince us that they are capable of striking from anywhere at any time, but there is really no chaos. In fact, terrorism involves predictable behavior, and the vast majority of terrorist organizations can be identified well in advance." Such views tend to go unheard by doomsayers. The Republicans added $9 billion to the military budget, including several additional millions for antiterrorism projects, by emphasizing unpreparedness--sure to be a big issue in Election 2000. --- Peter Pringle, a British journalist, reported on the end of the cold war from Washington and Moscow for The Independent of London. Join a discussion in the Digital Edition Forums. Or send your letter to the editor to letters@thenation.com. The Nation Digital Edition http://www.thenation.com Copyright (c) 1998, The Nation Company, L.P. ----------------------- NOTE: In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107, this material is distributed without profit or payment to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving this information for non-profit research and educational purposes only. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml ----------------------- **************************************************** To subscribe or unsubscribe, email: majordomo@majordomo.pobox.com with the message: (un)subscribe ignition-point email@address or (un)subscribe ignition-point-digest email@address **************************************************** www.telepath.com/believer ****************************************************