"Chemical (and biological weapons) work. They are undergoing revolutionary developments which make them practical and very lethal participants in those human affairs which are ultimately resolved with blood and iron. Be ignorant and be damned, and condemn your children as well."
- James A.F. Compton, September 1987
At about the time that Dr. Compton wrote that introduction to his substantial primer, Military Chemical and Biological Agents, Jane Orient published an article on the subject in The Journal of the American Medical Association entitled, "Chemical and Biological Warfare: Should Defenses be Researched and Deployed?" There were some sobering observations even then, when such matters were regarded as arcane, especially where these concerned Third World nations and their relationships with the West.1
Dr. Orient pointed out that against civilian populations, chemical and biological weapons were extremely attractive because of simple economics: Casualties might cost $2,000 per square kilometer with conventional weapons, $800 with nerve gas and a single dollar with biological weapons. Saddam Hussein probably asked himself long ago why he needed to go nuclear when other options were so much cheaper.
Richard Butler, the Australian executive chairman of UNSCOM, the U.N. Special Commission (on Iraq), tended to reinforce this view. Deadly germs, he said in a recent interview, were still the most mysterious and dangerous weapons in Iraq's hands. "They are easier and cheaper to make than any other arms and can be deployed with less difficulty."
Looked at from another perspective, Butler also stated that they must be of immense value to the country "if it is important enough (for Iraq) to forgo the billions of dollars in revenues that it could have obtained if its (weapons) programs were fully disclosed to the United Nations." It is estimated that Baghdad has lost about $120 billion in oil receipts since sanctions were put in place. This figure is roughly double the value of the international aid package given to South Korea in late 1997 to put its economic house in order. For what reason is Iraq crippling itself?
BIOLOGICAL BLACK HOLE?
A spokesman for the U.N. Special Commission on Iraq, Ewen Buchanan, might have provided part of the answer. He told Middle East Policy in New York that Iraq's refusal to allow the U.N. weapons inspectors to do their work “represents a black hole of uncertainty that faces the international community.” It was a serious matter with enormous long-term consequences, he added. Particularly relevant, according to Buchanan, was Baghdad's refusal to cooperate on biological warfare issues:
That side of UNSCOM's work had not only been the most difficult, but of the four options - nuclear, chemical, biological and long-range missiles - Iraq had been singularly intransigent about what it had done with all its biological-weapon assets. The lengths to which Baghdad had gone in order to prevent bio warfare inspections were quite extraordinary, and it is this aspect that really worries.
Still unaccounted for, Buchanan explained, were 30 tons of Iraq's biological warfare agents. The tally included 1,900 liters of botulinum toxin, 8,500 liters of anthrax and two tons of aflatoxins, which in its various mycotoxinic states - if dispersed in aerosol and droplet clouds - could in theory poison the entire world. Trichothecene mycotoxins (by-products of fungal metabolism) are said to have been produced by the old Soviet Union for use in a variety of wars from Afghanistan to Laos to Kampuchea, though there are those who maintain that this was a red herring devised to confuse detractors.
Significantly, the 30 tons is only Iraq's declaration, and one which UNSCOM has not been able to verify. Also, the commission told the Security Council last June that the quantity of yeast extract (a growth agent) known to UNSCOM to have been imported for Saddam Hussein's bio warfare program by the Technical and Scientific Materials Import Division, would be sufficient for three to four times more anthrax production than was declared by Iraq.
BW SHELL GAME
This is why Al Hakam, one of those obscure, sand-brown, quasi-military establishments stuck away in the desert a short distance from the Tigris River, about 60 kms southwest of Baghdad, was found to be so interesting shortly after UNSCOM started its work. Initially, it had nothing more to attract notice than its size: a succession of oddly dispersed large buildings, warehouses, living quarters, workshops as well as recreational areas spread out over about 24 sq kms. Apart from the standard fence and guard posts such as one finds everywhere in the Middle East (together with some well-camouflaged bunkers), there appeared to be almost no security. Because the place seemed innocuous, coalition forces did not touch it during Desert Storm.
How different it was at the Iraqi chemical warfare plant at the Muthanna State Establishment, the original location for Iraq's biological weapons program. It was flattened by Allied bombers in 1991. Muthanna not only had air defenses and gun towers, but incorporated three separate and well-defended perimeter fences. Researchers there carried out lethality evaluations of several biological weapons (BW) agents in animals and examined their growth characteristics and survivability. Agents investigated were anthrax, botulinum toxin (among the deadliest biological agents known to man) and, to a lesser extent, aflatoxin and ricin, work on which was concentrated elsewhere. That was before the Iraqis moved everything to Salman Pak, a 30-minute drive southeast of the capital.
Directly after the war, Al Hakam, with its fermentation tanks and ancillary equipment, was one of the places declared by the Baghdad regime as having a legitimate biological capability. The Iraqis stressed that everything that went on there had a "strictly peacetime application": Al Hakam, they told U.N. inspectors, was involved in the production of single-cell protein in yeast as a supplement for chicken feed and in the cultivation of BT (Bacillus thuringiensis), a bacterium that acts as an insecticide when applied to crops. On the face of it, there was no reason to believe otherwise. In any event, those products presented to the United Nations as proof were found to be professionally made.
It took U.N. inspectors four more years to discover that the Iraqis were lying and that Al Hakam was the key to Iraq's BW program. Mass production of Bacillus anthracis was started there in 1989. Eventually 8,500 acknowledged liters of liquid with an anthrax spore count of 10 per milliliter were produced, of which most was used to fill weapons. The rest was secretly stored at the facility.
Iraq later admitted to Rolf Ekeus, former head of UNSCOM, that it had produced half a million liters of botulinum toxin and anthrax and that research work on mycotoxins had begun.2
CALAMITY AVOIDED
U.N. officials in New York say they were always suspicious about what was going on at Al Hakam. There had been many probings and false leads before the Iraqis finally admitted that Al Hakam was the site of a plant producing agents for biological warfare.3 That happened shortly before the defection of Saddam Hussein's son-in-law, when Iraqi officials were forced to concede that they had begun an offensive BW program by July 1975.
The first breakthrough came late in 1994 when UNSCOM discovered that the Technical and Scientific Materials Import Division (TSMID) of the Ministry of Industry and Military Industrialization had imported quantities of culture media on behalf of the Ministry of Health. Although Baghdad claimed that the material was intended for disease diagnosis in hospital labs, the TSMID shipment totaled 39 tons packed in 25-100-kilogram drums, which in itself created suspicion. Usually it comes in packages weighing 100-500 grams.
Also, the quantity was wildly inconsistent with medical needs, as under normal circumstances hospitals use only small amounts. Moreover, the types of media imported were not suited for diagnostic purposes; rather, they were ideal for the cultivation of BW agents such as anthrax. By early 1999, almost 20 tons of these imported culture media remain inadequately unaccounted for.
This was followed by disclosures made by Iraqi General Waffiq al Sammaraai, former head of Saddam's Military Intelligence, who fled the country in 1995 fearing for his life. Speaking from London where he was subsequently granted asylum,4 he said that apart from nuclear, chemical and missile assets, Iraq had "retained 255 containers of BW materials, 230 in dry form (which had no expiry date) and 25 in liquid," which, he said, would deteriorate with time. The powder is surmised to be anthrax and the liquid botulinum toxin.
The ultimate break came with the defection to Jordan in August 1995 of Lt. Gen. Hussein Kamel Hassan, son-in-law of the Iraqi dictator. As the mastermind behind Iraq's NBC [nuclear, biological, chemical] weapons programs, his disclosures remain one of the intelligence coups of the century, though he paid for it with his life. His revelations forced the Iraqis to admit that they had produced and weaponized one lethal bacterial agent and two toxins.5
There was more. General Kamel provided information about 25 warheads, 16 of which were filled with botulinum toxin, five with anthrax and four with aflatoxin. By his own account, there was enough of the first two agents, under optimum conditions, to kill a million people. The original target, he admitted, had been Israel and Coalition Forces as well as some of the Arab states that had sided with the West in the Gulf War.
Subsequent disclosures in Iraq revealed that the missiles had survived the war as well as searches by UNSCOM. They were hidden in railway and irrigation tunnels or buried on the banks of the Tigris River to protect them from bombing raids. Months later, the Iraqis said, everything was transported to a desert site called Nebai and destroyed, though the United Nations had expressed doubts that this was ever done. The consensus is that they are still hidden away somewhere in the wastes of Iraq. Also, none of the warhead production records have been surrendered, raising questions as to exactly how many were made.6
It is noteworthy that the Iraqi dictator had every intention of using these weapons in combat. This is evidenced by two American intelligence reports, one from the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), the other from the CIA.7
The DIA report (October 11, 1991) describes a modified Su-22 Sukhoi Fitter of which a photo had been taken during Operation Desert Storm. The plane, with Iraqi markings, was at the Tallil air base outside An Nasiriyah, roughly halfway between Baghdad and Kuwait. It revealed "what resembled a chemical/biological spray tank on the port-side pylon. Enlargements of the original photo showed an air scoop on the top front of the tank, giving rise to the hypothesis about a possible biochemical spray tank." Hoses and tubing attached to a partly destroyed vehicle parked alongside might have indicated a non-standard decontamination vehicle for biological and chemical munitions.
A later (sanitized) CIA report, titled Iraqi BW Mission Planning reads: "In the fall of 1990 (the Iraqi President) ordered plans to be drawn up for the airborne delivery of a BW agent.... It called for a test mission of three MiG-21s to conduct an air raid (deleted) using conventional high explosive ordnance. If these aircraft were able to penetrate (deleted) then a second mission was to take off within a few days of the first, using the same flight path and approaches. The second mission, also comprising three MiG-21s and carrying conventional ordnance, was to serve as a decoy for a single Su-22. They would follow the same route but fly (at an altitude) of between 50m and 100m. Optimum delivery altitude for the BW agent was judged at 50m at 400 knots...."
On the first day of the war, the three MiG mission took off from Tallil but were almost immediately shot down. The launch of the Su-22, the same aircraft with the modified tanks mentioned in the DIA report, was canceled. There are also reports of a Mirage F1 at Kut Air Force Base with belly-drop tanks which could carry 2,000 liters of biological media.
If there had been any doubt about Saddam's intentions in the Gulf War, these two reports are explicit enough to dispel it. And since Tallil is much closer to the Gulf than to Israel, allied ground forces were almost certainly the target. Doubts have been expressed about the potential efficacy of the operation because the warheads on the BW bombs had no altitude fusing.
Some idea of the damage that might be caused by one aircraft spraying a single biological agent in a 2km line with downwind travel of 20 km was given by the World Health Organization in a publication Health Aspects of Chemical and Biological Weapons (Geneva) in 1970. An urban attack in which 50 kgs of dried anthrax in a suitable aerosolized form is disseminated would affect an area well in excess of 40 sq kms, it states. Such an act could result in hundreds of thousands of deaths; "in addition to causing primary casualties, the spores of the bacteria that cause anthrax are hardy and could survive for decades, possibly making the region hazardous for years."
It is instructive that British germ warfare experiments in 1942 with B. anthracis on Gruinard Island off the coast of Scotland caused the place to remain off-limits for more than 40 years. Tests conducted in 1981 showed that anthrax spores were still detected in 20 out of 153 soil samples, most of them embedded up to three inches in the ground where they had been strewn on impact.
A PANDORA'S BOX OF VECTORS
Once the real purpose of Al Hakam became evident, UNSCOM went to work "removing, destroying and rendering harmless" everything that might be construed to be associated with a BW program at the base. It took six weeks, May through June 1996. Machinery and equipment were stripped, crushed, mashed, cut apart with acetylene torches or buried in cement - a very thorough procedure. Meanwhile, following other leads, U.N. inspectors had discovered similar facilities at Salman Pak, Fudaliyah, Taji and the Daura Hoof and Mouth Disease Vaccine complex on the outskirts of Baghdad.
Some facilities were left intact; Daura's vaccine production is essential for livestock survival in the region, though evidence later revealed that there was also research on viral warfare agents (including hemorrhagic conjunctivitis, human rotavirus and camelpox). Here, too, offending items were removed for destruction. To prevent further BW work, Daura's air-handling facilities were filled with concrete.
During the November 1997 confrontation between Saddam and the United Nations, there were several reports that UNSCOM had managed to uncover further evidence that Saddam Hussein was engaged in a substantial clandestine chemical and biological warfare program. London's Observer trumpeted a headline story to that effect. It was simply not the case.
What is clear is that there are more BW assets, as there are probably more nuclear facilities, as evidenced by the incompatibility of declared nuclear-related items compared to those recovered, as well as the subsequent attempt by Iraq to acquire hydrofluoric acid, a chemical used in the production of uranium hexafluoride (UF) feedstock (Jane's Intelligence Review, December 1997). The truth, according to UNSCOM's Ewen Buchanan, is that while the inspectors might have come close to doing so, they found nothing new.
"What is relevant," Buchanan added, "is that by the time we pulled out, the Iraqis were at the very end of the road with their arsenal of lies and duplicity. We followed every lead they ever gave us. Consequently, by the time the crunch came they had no room in which to maneuver." Buchanan maintains that UNSCOM would accept no more stories or excuses, as almost all of them had led to red herrings in the past, which was one of the reasons for the impasse.8
It is instructive that by mid-1998, UNSCOM was monitoring almost 90 biological facilities throughout Iraq, including a wide variety of institutions such as universities, breweries, food processing plants as well as production facilities for vaccines, antibiotics, bio pesticides and single-cell protein (SCP), which Baghdad had claimed earlier were being produced at Al Hakam.
Here is a look at what was being done at other Iraqi BW establishments:
- Laboratory-scale research on anthrax (caused by B. anthracis), botulinum toxin (Clostridium botulinum), gas gangrene (C. perfrigens), fungal toxins (including aflatoxin and trichothecene mycotoxins) as well as ricin (extracted from the seeds of the castor bean plant, Ricinis communis) were among tasks performed at Salman Pak, an average-sized place about 40 km out of Baghdad. Much of this was confirmed by Richard Spertzel, chief of the Biology Section at UNSCOM.
- Dr. Spertzel, a 28-year veteran of biological warfare and biomedical defense in the U.S. Army, had visited Iraq as a member of UNSCOM many times. He was part of the controversial team that visited the country in January 1998. It was then that Spertzel insisted that his group be given access to a prison where, he claimed, the Iraqis had conducted BW experiments on dogs. He had explicit photographs to back up his claim. Other reports spoke of BW experiments on humans, though Iraq denied this.
- Staff at Salman Pak (for a while, the national BW headquarters) carried out toxicity evaluations of all the agents mentioned above as well as others. The Iraqi scientists also examined their growth characteristics and survivability. Eventually they conducted initial scale-up production research with a view to ultimately incorporating BW (and CW) in the warheads of Scud missiles being adapted for the purpose. Some of these, as we have seen, were ready for firing at the start of Desert Storm.
At Fudaliyah (innocuously named the Agricultural and Water Resources Research Center and located in the northeast suburbs of Baghdad) the Iraqis say nearly 2,000 liters of concentrated aflatoxin came off a production line, a figure disputed by UNSCOM as being far too high for the size of the place. The Taji Single Cell Protein Plant (also north of the city) was being used for the production of botulinum toxin in the late eighties.
The inclusion of aflatoxin in Saddam Hussein's BW program is puzzling. Aflatoxin is a carcinogen from wheat or peanut mold. It causes cancer, but this debilitating process might take years. Consequently aflatoxin has no immediate application to modern-day warfare. The rationale for going ahead with this project appears to be “while we in Iraq will suffer your bombs, a certain percentage of your attackers will develop liver cancer by the time they are fifty.” Its use underscores the lack of cost-effectiveness of some of the weapons' programs embarked on by the Iraqis over the years.9
Iraq initially experimented with aflatoxin mixed with chemical riot-control agents. U.N. officials told me that the intent was to spray the chemical on Kurdish and other ethnic minorities (opposed to rule from Baghdad) in the hope that it would eventually produce an untraceable spike of cancer in the years ahead.
UNSCOM has listed five more Iraqi sites involved in research in CW agents. These are in addition to the ten nuclear and nine ballistic missile sites, the latter including weaponization, production and test facilities.
REAPING THE WHIRLWIND
Iraq's biological warfare program was started in 1974, five years before Saddam Hussein took power. Although in 1972 Iraq had joined 140 other nations and signed the BWC to forgo the production or acquisition of all BWs or toxins, Baghdad's Al Hazan Ibn Al Hathem Institute was founded secretly two years later under a chemical-corps officer who reported directly to the president. Much of the early work was targeted at opponents of the regime. An effort was also made to destabilize Iran economically by poisoning crops, a good 15 years before open war broke out between the two countries.
For its seed stock, Iraq turned to American and European suppliers of biological materials to supplement indigenous strains. Much was bought in gram-sized vials over the counter, as it were, from the American Type Culture Collection (ATCC) in Rockville, Maryland. From 1985 onwards, the company supplied anthrax, C. botulinum and C. perfringens at a cost which averaged $78 per order, all of it sent by mail.
Negotiations for the purchase of growth media were begun in 1987. A year later the first order of almost 40 tons was delivered, enough to produce four or five tons of bacteria, of which a single drop can be lethal. Some came from a company in Bedford, England, more from the Swiss firm Fluka Chemie. No one questioned what it was to be used for. Just about every intelligence service in the West must have been aware what was going on, yet nothing was done about it until after the Gulf War.
Nor did Iraq experience any problems acquiring industrial-scale fermenters. This dual-use equipment is the same as that used to make common yeast-based products like beer. Western companies were queuing up to oblige; Baghdad paid, as usual, in bundles of large-denomination dollar bills. Spray dryers (which turn germ-laden slurries into dry powder) were bought from the Niro Atomiser Company of Denmark.
As with all such facilities, decontamination was always a problem. At Al Hakam and elsewhere, most equipment was fitted with plug-in segments that could be rapidly connected and disconnected for greater flexibility. For this purpose, the Iraqis used a mixture of potassium permanganate and formaldehyde, which did a thorough cover-up job, though everything first had to be dismantled. This took a day or two, but since the United Nations only conducted three dedicated biological inspections in the first four years after the Gulf War, it seems that Saddam was confident he could do as he pleased.
The West, by its own admission, was aware of Iraq's BW potential. Much had appeared in print on the subject over the years, underscored by the effort that went into inoculating the soldiers who took part in Desert Storm against an acknowledged chem/bio-warfare threat. Why was such a serious lapse allowed to occur? As one observer pointed out, it was almost as if some elements within UNSCOM were working for Saddam.
This issue has been raised often enough. Each time the reply from the U.N. officer responsible has pointed to the lack of a smoking gun. But the West had reams of evidence of previous BW programs and what Iraq had been shopping for. Yet almost all effort expended in the first 40 months of UNSCOM activity in Iraq was devoted to uncovering nuclear, chemical and missile assets. The BW threat was placed on the back burner, even though, as far as a crippled Iraq was concerned, it had the most immediate potential.
Colonel David Franz, former commander of the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) and a member of various UNSCOM contingents, counters that, while some might be critical of U.N. efforts in Iraq, it was never easy. The UNSCOM/Iraq example, he said, “is the best case we will ever have, and even after Dick Spertzel got the job and really pushed hard, we may never verify the stuff. It is just more difficult than the chemical or nuclear side under such circumstances.”10
Dr. Spertzel, still trying to uncover Saddam's BW programs until the last day that inspections were permitted, takes the strong view that the evidence was there for exploiting all along: “The problem was that there was no driving force, no impetus to exploit the BW issue within UNSCOM.” He concurs that much more could and should have been done.11
Much escaped the notice of the three countries considered the most adept at monitoring such things in the Middle East: Israel, Britain and the United States. They also badly underestimated the amount of botulinum (by a thousand fold) and anthrax (by a factor of eight) that Iraq had made.12 Spertzel reckons that it could be very much higher. Also, with Iraq vanquished, the allies had the clout to do something about its intransigence. This influence was allowed to dissipate to the point where an unresolved confrontation has effectively allowed Saddam Hussein to do as he pleases because there is no longer anybody looking over his shoulder.
Granted, Dr. Jonathan Tucker of the Monterey Institute of International Studies has pointed out, it is an exceedingly difficult problem: “Overhead reconnaissance has proved nearly worthless for estimating production capacity in the BW area. Intelligence services have to rely almost exclusively on humint [human intelligence], which by definition is fortuitous and unsystematic."
Much of the early BW research in Iraq was conducted (on small mammals) at Salman Pak and Muthanna, which until then had been devoted to CW research under the supervision of two British trained Iraqis. The BW team leader was Rihab Taha, who obtained her doctorate in microbiology at East Anglia University. She is married to a general in the Iraqi armed forces. For years she has been assisted by Amer Saadi, who was later promoted to the rank of major general. Most observers in Iraq regard Ms. Taha as the eminence grise behind Iraq's BW program.
Her mentor for a long time, until he was arrested by the Iraqis on charges of espionage, was Abdul Nassir Hindawi (see Middle East Policy, February 1999). Hindawi made a name for himself in microbiology after graduating from Mississippi State University and originally inspired Saddam with strategic scenarios of cheap military victories using gas and germs. This was the same man who was responsible for the atrocities at the Kurdish settlement of Halabja.
U.N. officials say that Hindawi’s papers were never surrendered. Iraq told UNSCOM in September 1997 that the scientist's perceived objectives were “to produce a viable deterrent in answer to a possible Israeli nuclear attack.”
A QUESTION OF CREDIBILITY
It was Dr. Spertzel, among the most prescient of Saddam's critics, who ventured the opinion that because the United Nations devoted so little effort to Saddam's BW program, the Iraqis eventually became overconfident. “Perhaps they did not believe that sampling would take place,” he told a symposium on bio-weapons proliferation in Washington, DC, in October, 1996.13 He reckons that Iraq has been particularly skillful at using disinformation techniques to twist seemingly trivial events to its political advantage. In 1994, for example, UNSCOM conducted a biological audit at the Al Hakam facility in which samples were collected from fermenters and other equipment at various locations within the site. Sewers and septic systems were also tapped.
The sampling, he says, “took place at a time when we were trying to persuade the Iraqis to acknowledge their past BW production activities, including the role of the Al Hakam plant. Yet Iraq tried to convince some members of the U.N. Security Council that there was nothing in UNSCOM's allegation by claiming that we had ‘sampled all over Al Hakam including the toilets’ and found no evidence of misdeeds.” Considerable effort was needed to counter this perception, he told the gathering.
Later the same month, an inspection at the plant obtained samples providing the first positive indication that Iraq was producing a very small, particle-size Bacillus thuringiensis (BT) product lacking pesticidal activity. This was a turning point, even though under normal circumstances BT is not a BW agent but a legitimate product. Since the BT found being made at Al Hakam did not have any insecticidal activity (and had a dry particle size far too small to be of use for application to crops), UNSCOM could only conclude that it was being produced and dried as a training exercise for the production of anthrax, which is cultured under similar conditions.
Asked whether UNSCOM took samples to confirm that the microbial agents declared by Iraq were present (or rather, tended to identify undeclared BW agents that might be present in the samples), Dr. Spertzel said that both approaches were used: “Although UNSCOM is obligated to verify Iraq’s declarations, samples are analyzed for a variety of BW agents, both declared and undeclared.” The United Nations had not tested samples for every possible microbial pathogen; instead the organization tended to look for the standard list of BW agents, and for very good reasons.
He explained that there was clearly a limit to how much testing could be done without producing some sort of result. “The commission could not afford to make repeated allegations about illicit BW agent production that were not corroborated by sampling and analysis. After several negative results, the commission would lose all credibility with the U.N. Security Council.” This was obviously what Baghdad was waiting for.
Dr. Spertzel went on: “The situation is such that, if there are grounds to suspect that Iraq is producing agents (other than those which it had declared), it would be worthwhile to sample for the undeclared agent and risk a negative finding.... rumors and unverified intelligence suggests at least one site where Iraq has produced a BW agent that it has not yet acknowledged.” This aspect was among his objectives when he returned to Iraq last January prior to the final withdrawal of all U.N. personnel.
PROLIFERATION RAMPANT
It seems obvious that if Iraq is going to make mischief with its BW assets, it would be carefully coordinated and almost certainly clandestine. By their very nature, biological agents lend themselves to subversion. Consider the implications if the Aum Shinrikyo cult had made use of botulinum toxin or anthrax instead of the sarin chemical agent in their attack in the Tokyo subway system (The sarin count that they used was only about 30-percent pure and was disseminated in a highly inefficient manner, by evaporation from plastic bags punctured with sharpened umbrellas). The death count and the scale of terror, had they used these BW media and disseminated them as a particulate aerosol (a complicated and difficult task), casualties might have been higher by orders of magnitude. There could have been a fatality rate well in excess of 50 percent instead of the 0.2 percent actually experienced. The volume of sarin needed to saturate any given area is roughly equivalent to 10,000 times the amount of botulinum toxin needed to cause the same effect.14 Also, not much publicity has been given to a binary cyanide device which was to have been triggered at the same time by an explosive charge and which was spotted by an alert janitor in a subway restroom. It was subsequently deactivated.15
This was not the first time that the Aum Shinrikyo had been criminally active. It had released botulinum and anthrax three times before with no discernible effects, largely, it is thought, because of an unknown failure in production or weaponization. In April 1990, the cult rigged a vehicle to disseminate botulinum toxin through the engine's exhaust around Japan's Parliament. In June 1993, the leaders decided to disrupt the planned wedding of Crown Prince Naruhito in downtown Tokyo, again, from an adapted vehicle. Later the same month they attempted to spread anthrax around the capital using a sprayer system on the roof of an Aumowned building in Eastern Tokyo. It was the failure of these three biological attacks that led the cult to try sarin.
It has been claimed (but never substantiated) that in October 1980 the French authorities made a startling discovery demonstrating how vulnerable the world is to biological terrorism. The Paris police raided a residence suspected of being a safe house for the German Red Army Faction. As they conducted their search, they found documents that revealed a strong working knowledge of lethal biological agents. They came across a bathtub containing many flasks filled with what turned out to be clostridium botulinum. These were to have been dispersed around town and in the Metro.16
There have also been such people active in the United States. In 1995, some members of a Minnesota militia group were convicted for the possession of ricin, which they had produced themselves for use in retaliation against local government officials.17 A year later, an Ohio man with connections to an extremist group was able to obtain bubonic plague cultures through the post. In both cases, it mattered little to the perpetrators that innocent family members might also die.
During my own visit to Beirut in mid-1997, I was told by contacts who had close links with Pasdaran elements (Iran's Revolutionary Guards) in the Bekaa that the Sudan government had recently taken an unusual interest in BW. Here too there is an Iraqi connection. A report appeared in November 1997 in the Paris-based Al Watan Al-Arabi newspaper18 claiming that with the blessing of Sudanese leader Hassan al-Turabi the Sudan “had started a chemical and bacterial factory in the Khartoum-Bahri suburb of Kubar.” The report even gave details about the location of a meeting which was held at Turabi's home in the Khartoum suburb of al Manshiya. Apparently, Iraq had moved some of its BW agents first to Libya and then overland into Sudan. This was done, it said, with the support of Usama bin Laden, the Afghan-based Saudi Islamicist who for a long time maintained close ties to Tehran's supreme guide, Ayatollah Ali Khameini. Bin Laden's operations then were apparently coordinated by Iran's Pasdaran.
Both Turabi and Bin Laden have subsequently been linked to the bombing of the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia in June 1996, where 19 U.S. military personnel were killed and 260 injured.19 Bin Laden since then has also been connected to the two U.S. embassy bombings in East Africa.
A RUSSIAN ROLE
Though the United Nations is no longer directly involved in Iraq, UNSCOM is busier than ever. In January 1999, it forwarded two reports to the president of the Security Council, one on the current state of affairs with respect to the disarmament of Iraq's proscribed weapons and the other on monitoring and verification in Iraq.
There were other developments too. Questions were raised by the United Nations a year before about the possible sale by Russia of equipment that might have been used to produce quantities of biological weapons. According to the UNSCOM spokesman, the answers given by Moscow were “unsatisfactory.” U.S. and British officials maintained that the plant said to be under discussion was to have included several fermentation vessels with a total capacity of about 50,000 liters. They pointed out to the Russians that such things could be used to grow anthrax spores or cultivate botulinum toxin. An American source told Middle East Policy that talks between Iraq and Russian companies about supplying dual-purpose equipment included “at least one official from the Russian government.” The United Nations wanted to know why this was allowed to happen.
In a letter to Sergey Lavrov, the Russian permanent representative to the United Nations, Richard Butler said that his teams had discovered, during the course of routine inspections, documents relating specifically “to a project for a program of cooperation between Iraq and Russian companies in the field of single cell protein production.” Mr. Butler reminded the Russian ambassador that in the past Iraq had used dual-purpose SCP production as a very effective cover for pursuing a most sophisticated bioweapons program. He was in possession of evidence, he wrote, that Iraq was “still interested in this sort of work.”
Observers noted that the issue raised questions about exactly how much Moscow knew about these dealings. Also, if there were Russian companies freelancing in Iraq, why didn't Mr. Yeltsin's government put a stop to it? Mr. Butler stated that at the very least that would be in line with agreed UNSCOM principles to which the Russians are signatories. He said that while documents showed that the Russians had presented an offer to the Iraqi delegation, and that Saddam Hussein's Military Industrialization Corporation later decided to accept it, "the UN had no information regarding the present disposition of the venture." Mr. Butler wrote to Mr. Lavrov on January 5, 1998, and it took them months to reply.
A U.N. source told me that the issue was not solely about "technologies." The Iraqis had proved conclusively and on several occasions that they had all the know-how and the expertise to cultivate the most advanced bacteriological pathogens. “What they don't have,” he said, “is hardware.” Much of their old equipment was destroyed at the behest of UNSCOM following various inspection tours within Iraq. “Clearly, the Russian stainless vessels would be ideal for launching another germ-warfare program.”
CONCLUSION
Colonel Franz warns that the UNSCOM experience in Iraq and the current perceived threat of biological terror to the cities of the West underscore the unique difficulty the free world faces in dealing directly with regimes that would employ legitimate dual-use facilities and equipment to develop cheap mass-casualty weapons covertly.20 "The threat demands an integrated approach. That includes effective intelligence programs, physical and medical countermeasures, education of health-care providers and other responders," he states. Most important of all, he says, "conventional military strength and a clear national policy regarding response to a BW attack on Americans or American cities is vital."
To repeat James Compton's curse, "Be ignorant and be damned."
1 Jane Orient, The Journal of the American Medical Association, August 1987, p. 644-8.
2 Laurie Mylroie & James Ring Adams, "Saddam's Germs," The American Spectator, Vol. 28, No. 11, November 1995, p. 60-2.
3 David Franz, Commander, U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, Fort Detrick, MD, personal interview, January 12, 1988.
4 "Iraq Unlikely to Give up Nuclear Option," Jane's Intelligence Review - Pointer, Vol. 003-9, September 1, 1996.
5 Jonathan Tucker, Biological Weapons Proliferation Concerns, Center for Nonproliferation Studies, Monterey Institute of International Studies (prepared for NATO Advanced Study Institute in Budapest, Hungary, July, 1997), p. 25.
6 R. Jeffrey Smith, "Iraq's Drive for a Biological Arsenal," The Washington Post, November 21, 1997.
7 DIA US DoD GulfLINK file # 22010067.92.a; CIA GulfLINK file# 062596_cia_74624_01.txt.
8 Ewen Buchanan, UNSCOM's external relations adviser, succession of interviews, U.N. HQ: December 1997.
9 Eric Croddy, Chemical and Biological Warfare: An Annotated Bibliography (Lanham, MD & London: Scarecrow Press, 1997), personal interview, December 1997.
10 Franz, personal letter, January 12, 1988.
11 Spertzel, personal interview, U.N. HQ, New York: January 6, 1998.
12 R. Jeffrey Smith, p. 3-4.
13 Richard O. Spertzel, "Lessons from the UNSCOM Experience With Sampling and Analysis," in Jonathan B. Tucker (ed), The Utility of Sampling and Analysis/or Compliance Monitoring of the Biological Weapons Convention (Livermore, Calif: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Report #CGSR-97-001 ), pp. 17-25.
14 Kathleen C Bailey (ed), Director's Series on Proliferation (Livermore, Calif: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, May 23, 1994).
15 Croddy, personal interview, January 1998.
16 Joseph D. Douglass, America the Vulnerable: The Threat of Chemical and Biological Warfare (Lexington, Mass: Lexington Books, 1987). Some maintain that this event might be apocryphal.
17 Commentary: Why Should We Be Concerned About Biological Warfare? The Journal of the American Medical Association, August 1997, pp. 431-2.
18 Jihad Salim, "Secrets of al-Manshiyah: Meeting between Hasan al-Turabi and Ayman al-Zawahiri," AlWatan Al-Arabi (in Arabic), Paris: October 31, 1997.
19 Chris Kozlow, "The Bombing of the Khobar Towers: Who Did it and Who Funded it," Jane's Intelligence Review, p. 555.
20 Franz, personal communication, USAMRIID.
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