West wakes up to toxic reality Terrorists' willingness to use bioweapons is no longer in doubt Tom Mangold and Jeff Goldberg Vancouver Sun

Saturday, October 13, 2001

The evidence was everywhere. It simply needed coordination and analysis.

First, the West slept through Timothy McVeigh's Oklahoma wake-up call with its dreadful implications of the fashionable new terrorist psychosis of self-sacrifice and children as "collateral damage."

Next, incontrovertible warnings surfaced that Islamic fundamentalist terrorists were preparing biological and chemical weapons in their war of hatred on the West. This too had been unwisely left to moulder in the free world's pending tray.

Nearly every intelligence agency in the world got a heads-up. From Kazakhstan to Egypt, from Sydney to Tashkent, from satellite photos over Afghanistan, to court testimony in Los Angeles and New York, zephyrs of often unconfirmed or uncorroborated evidence became a storm of intelligent assumption.

By the time Mohamed Atta, one of the Sept. 11 hijackers, strolled into a Florida crop-dusting company to ask pointed questions about the mechanics of loading and flying its plane, the intention was terribly clear. And just so there could be no mistake, U.S. Attorney-General John Ashcroft confirmed that a search of computers, computer disks, and personal baggage of another suspect in custody revealed a significant amount of information downloaded from the Internet on the use and applications of pesticides and crop dusting.

Assuming Osama bin Laden's benevolence toward the United States does not quite reach to helping Florida's farmers extinguish black flies, the alternative speaks for itself.

In the end, Atta decided on self-immolation and the explosive murder of thousands of New Yorkers. But the first idea has not gone away, and it never will.

- - -

In June 1994, Peter Probst, the secretary of defence's key expert on bio-terrorism throughout the 1990s, co-authored a ground-breaking, classified Pentagon report, Terror 2000: The Future Face of Terrorism.

The still-secret study identified the new faces of terror and laid out extraordinary and prescient scenarios of the biological threats the West confronted. Probst even predicted a form of the Sept 11 outrage. The report was received initially with some skepticism by senior defence department officials, who found it too alarmist. It did not receive wide dissemination.

The March 1995 sarin gas subway attack by the Japanese cult Aum Shinrikyo, which injured more than 5,000 people and panicked Japan, should have been a dramatic warning for U.S. bio-defence planners of a new kind of anarchic and suicidal dimension to terrorism. The cult's terror activities took the CIA by surprise, but the comparatively small number of deaths -- twelve -- and the group's lack of technical expertise served only to diminish the real message.

What was not widely known was that the group previously had launched bio-terror attacks in Tokyo and elsewhere in Japan. Anthrax and botulinum toxin were sprayed in public, but the attempts ended in failure. As a result, throughout the relieved Western counter-terrorism agencies, the full implications never quite sank in.

To be fair, since 1995, Pentagon planners have been contemplating all kinds of new bio-terrorism scenarios. For instance, last year, Lieutenant-Colonel Michael Dickey, USAF, in a paper for the Counter-Proliferation Center at the Air War College, Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama, postulated how bin Laden might use cruise missile warheads filled with biological agents against the U.S. mainland or its overseas assets.

Assuming bin Laden had state sponsorship -- which would help him obtain a cruise missile or remotely piloted "drone" aircraft -- he could then legitimately acquire several merchant freighters.

The ships' containers could then be suitably equipped with the right cargo of cruise missiles or unmanned air vehicles. These devices could then be launched unnoticed, in the evening, from offshore, when the wind was right, carrying sprayers dispensing a persistent form of anthrax or bio-toxin. Sounds about as crazy as launching hi-jacked airliners at the World Trade Center.

Only now are scenarios as bizarre as Dickey's being taken off the shelf, dusted, and re-read with renewed concentration. Here's what Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld said five days after the WTC/Pentagon attacks. "One has to know," Rumsfeld noted, "that a terrorist can attack at any time and any place using any technique ... what they can do is use these asymmetrical threats of terrorism and chemical warfare and biological warfare and ballistic missiles and cruise missiles and cyber attacks."

Senior officials from both the CIA and the United Nations have now agreed that bin Laden has a very active chemical weapons program under way in Afghanistan, albeit using fairly primitive, but deadly gases.

A year ago, in March, a young Afghan in Jalalabad who had recently trained at one of bin Laden's mountainous camps in northeastern Afghanistan warned he had seen men there from Chechnya, Sudan, Libya, Iraq, Iran, Cuba and North Korea, including doctors, engineers, chemical engineers.

A North Korean trainer, the young Afghan revealed, had brought chemical weapons that were stored in caves and mud-and-stone houses.

U.S. intelligence analysts had previously divined from satellite photos that bin Laden's team had set up very primitive bio-chemical research facilities near the town of Khoust and at the Abu Khahab Camp north of Jalalabad. Numerous dead animals, including rabbits and dogs, were later spotted on aerial photos of locations near bin Laden's training camps.

This year, in July, a known bin Laden terrorist began to take some of the wraps off these closely guarded secrets at a trial in New York. Ahmed Ressam, the Algerian-born terrorist arrested on the U.S./Canadian border as he plotted to bomb Los Angeles International Airport during the 2000 millennium celebrations, testified at the trial of an associate that he was personally trained at bin Laden's Khalden camp in Afghanistan.

It was there, in 1998, that he personally watched the instructors kill a dog in a cage using cyanide gas. He was taught, he said, how to put this device near the ventilation systems of office and government buildings.

Ressam also quietly informed his government debriefers that bin Laden was interested in using low-flying aircraft to dispense toxic materials. In other words, the crop-duster scenario was ending its gestation period.

Another form of corroboration of bin Laden's intentions has emerged during the past two years from intelligence agencies in the Middle East, including Kuwait and Egypt. These agencies have acquired evidence suggesting that militant Islamic terrorists allied with bin Laden have tried to obtain chemicals and biological agents from Eastern Europe and the former Soviet republics.

(Even one of the most cynical Western intelligence officers confirmed to us in October that bin Laden has been trying very hard to acquire these bio-agents.)

In June 1999, at the Hykstap Base north of Cairo, the Egyptian Supreme Military Court heard the case against several hard men from various radical Islamic terrorist cells closely allied with bin Laden. One of them, Ahmed Salala Mabruk, the head of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad's military operations, admitted his group had chemical and biological weapons for use against more than 100 U.S. and Israeli targets. The plans had been on a computer disk seized when he was arrested by the CIA in Azerbaijan.

The disk was later handed to Egyptian prosecutors in Cairo. Evidence showed the terrorists had obtained samples of anthrax "and other poisons" from a factory in "an East Asian country." The biological agents had been sold for a price equivalent to $3,695. Confessions by another defendant, Ahmad Ibrahim al-Najar, revealed a Czech Republic source also had been approached and had been willing to sell a quantity of botulinum toxin for the equivalent of $7,500.

The laboratory concerned asked no questions about the purchasers or the purpose of the request. Both men were sentenced to hard labour for life.

Then, just twelve months later, the focus really began to narrow. In June 2000, officers from the Australian Defence Intelligence Organization on high alert to protect the summer Olympics in Sydney from terrorist attacks received reliable evidence that bin Laden's associates had recently purchased anthrax and bubonic plague from arms dealers in Kazakhstan.

This location was highly significant, since some of the world's most lethal bacteria, viruses and toxins are actually available for free in Kazakhstan -- just below the dirty, scarred surface of Vozrozhdeniye Island, once the locus of the old Soviet Union's biological weapons testing centre.

It was at this remote and wind-swept dot of land in the Aral Sea, known appropriately as Hell's Island and located between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, that the Soviets tested germs like anthrax, plague, tularemia, and Q fever on live animals. Not the most efficient clean-up men, the soldiers and scientists who vacated the island after the collapse of the Soviet empire simply left active remnants from this lethal cocktail in the soil. Before they left, Soviet soldiers also buried giant stainless steel canisters of extremely virulent anthrax strains -- enough to destroy the world several times over -- and buried them in huge pits. Neither Kazakhstan nor Uzbekistan has been formally told by Moscow the precise nature and location of this deadly detritus. Experts sent by the Pentagon in 1995 took soil samples and were horrified to find still-viable anthrax spores that had been "hardened" and weaponized by the Soviet military.

Hell's Island remains heavily polluted, and the surrounding waters have receded recently to such an extent that the island has morphed into a peninsula. Consequently, any potential terrorist or fearless arms dealer can now walk or drive to the unguarded site, dig up his bacteria or toxin of choice, and then breed the microorganisms or sell them. That's what stoked the Australians' fears when they discovered that bin Laden's terrorists had their eye on an Olympic Games spectacular.

Ken Alibek, who oversaw the entire Soviet biological weapons development and testing program before his defection to the U.S., explains: "It's no big deal for terrorists to get a sample of anthrax from the island. You just go to the general area where the weapons were tested. The anthrax will survive in the soil for decades. It's Soviet military battle strain anthrax No. 836 [among the most deadly, weather-resistant, and sprayable anthrax ever created].

"All rodents living there will carry plague and tularemia," Alibek continues. "If a terrorist finds and kills a rodent, he can extract the organs and isolate the BW agents.

"In my opinion, if a terrorist is committed and knowledgeable, it's not a big problem to get strains of anthrax there. They need some primitive equipment and simple protection, and need to know a little microbiology and some isolation techniques."

- - -

Last year, we gained exclusive access to a former Soviet biological weapons facility outside Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan. Security at the site was virtually non-existent. The gate guards went home after 6 p.m. The Institute for Plant Genetics is working on a secret project to develop a toxic fungus that will kill the poppy plants over the border in Afghanistan.

Ken Alibek also knew the Uzbeki facilities in Tashkent and Nukus, by the Aral Sea, very well. "They worked in two areas," he recalls, "anti-crop weapons and anti-livestock weapons, including anthrax. The same strains of anthrax could be used against humans."

We walked through a security system that eschews body searches (going in or coming out) and were escorted through a series of deeply decayed buildings. Windows are smashed, some are missing, toilets are unspeakable and never cleaned, sinks are dirtier than anything you may have on your hands. The institute's director, a friendly expert on biological agents, Dr. Abdukarimov Abdusattar, wears shoes that are so old the sole of one is parting from its host. We were shown 40-year-old giant chillers from East Germany that once housed the anthrax. It would take nothing to steal from these antique iceboxes; there were no guards in the building. A few staff members looked on with suspicion and hostility. Abdusattar admitted the institute is desperately short of money and sponsorship. Wages are not always paid. The temptations to sell a few bugs must be overwhelming.

Alibek confirms: "It's more than easy to penetrate these places -- it's unbelievably easy to acquire information and to buy or steal samples of biological agents from these facilities. Anyone could do it, a businessman or an arms broker."

Uzbekistan has its own fundamentalist Islamic movement, the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), which works closely with the next-door Taliban government and is allied with bin Laden.

The easiest way for bin Laden to buy his way into biological terrorism would be to use one of his many worldwide commercial enterprises and front companies; these cut-outs could purchase the services of disaffected scientists and technicians with a biological weapons background. Scientists like that would rather work with established companies than for little-known individuals.

Both the CIA and Britain's MI6, and other Western intelligence agencies, have managed to maintain during the past decade a "watch list" of top former Soviet biological weapons specialists. This system has worked well, and there have been no confirmations that any of these key figures has been tempted to go to such dangerous locations as Baghdad, Kabul, or Pyongyang. But maintaining this watch has been time-consuming and expensive.

A senior Western intelligence officer in Europe confirms that some of the men on the watch list are now on the international market, their services up for hire. In some cases, these specialists are being quietly bought off with work subsidized by the U.S. and Britain, but others remain guns for hire. For instance, in Stepnogorsk, Kazakhstan, where the Soviets ran the largest bio-weapons production plant ever built, the facility is closed, but many of the still unemployed specialists have become restless.

Alibek warned Congress two years ago that Russia's new open society posed another danger -- it allowed for "billions of dollars" of advanced Soviet bio-technology research, related to their bio-weapons program, to be available at universities and in publications "to anyone for the cost of a translator."

Another potentially disturbing problem was reported in September by the Washington Times, which said U.S. intelligence officials had uncovered new information implicating the Russian Mafia and bin Laden's terrorist group, al Qaeda, in the trade of components for weapons of mass destruction, including chemical and biological weapons.

- - -

We may never know how all this effort to acquire these terrible chemical and biological weapons was intended to end. But one can guess.

Mohamed Atta's visit to the quiet, single-runway airfield in South Florida was a determined attempt to mount the first-ever airborne biological attack. The choice of a crop duster was perfect. The Iraqis have for years been working on a small light plane with virtually no radar profile that could be equipped to spray anthrax on the public.

David Kelly, the veteran British and United Nations arms control inspector who took investigative teams to Iraq several times after the Gulf War, explains: "The Iraqis developed a special drop tank which could carry some 2,000 liters of anthrax. An electric Venturi pump would expel the anthrax and lay it down along the correct line source. If the wind was right and the anthrax spores dry and the right size, it would be quite horribly effective."

Atta's careful questioning of employees at the Belle Glade State Municipal Airport hardly disguised his intention. How many gallons of fuel could the planes hold, how many gallons of chemicals, how fast were the planes and how tricky to fly, what was the speed and the range? Other men of Middle Eastern appearance extensively recorded video of the planes and even tried to photograph the cockpits. These curious visits continued until a week before the September attacks on Manhattan and Washington.

Atta also attempted to arrange a loan from a government agency and a bank to buy a crop duster. It seems unlikely that all this effort would have been concentrated on what might have been their Plan B if they did not have access to a quantity of biological or chemical agents. That must leave a deep nagging fear within the joint FBI-CIA Counter-Terrorism Centre. After all, there's always tomorrow.

Can bin Laden's cells mount a sophisticated bio-terrorist assault now without the help of a state sponsor?

On balance, probably not. There are certain very real scientific and technical complexities to overcome to effectively produce and disperse bio-agents for use as weapons of mass destruction. But it is not difficult to acquire the source viruses, bacteria and toxins. Anthrax is available and easily grown in the right nutrient -- a science student could do it. Many other killer bio-agents are available, including botulinum toxin and bubonic plague.

Smallpox is much, much harder to obtain (nearly impossible without state sponsorship), but if bin Laden were to use it, it could be catastrophic for a world that has neither the immunity against this ancient scourge, nor the time to produce sufficient antidotes and vaccinations.

Besides the world's two official repositories, in the United States and Russia, the CIA believes secret samples of smallpox probably still remain in North Korea and Iraq, and possibly in China, Cuba, India, Iran, Israel, and Pakistan (though there is no proof about these unauthorized locations).

Of all the so-called rogue states that may discern some advantage in working with Islamic fundamentalist terror gangs, the obvious candidate is Iraq. With its long and unpleasant history of using chemical warfare against its own citizens and its still-active biological warfare program, Iraq continues to develop bio-weapons mainly to deal with its "old enemy" Iran (but not, surprisingly, Israel.)

Khidir Hamza, Saddam's chief nuclear weapons designer who defected to the U.S. in 1995, recalls an interesting conversation he had a year earlier with a Palestinian commando from an Iraqi training camp. The guerrilla fighter, Abu Khalid, told him: "Each trainee in our command carries a device that we are required to plant at our targets, which include major water reservoirs and food storage areas. On some missions we even wear gas masks and special protective suits."

Says Hamza: "This young man clearly meant to imply that they were training to plant chemical or biological weapons abroad."

Peter Probst, who retired this year as assistant director for terrorism intelligence for the Secretary of Defence, has seen what he believes may be evidence of Iraq's support for al-Qaeda. "I believe bin Laden is receiving help from Saddam," he says. "This goes back to the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. They have symbiotic relations. There has been help on occasions from Iraq on al-Qaeda operations in Germany and Afghanistan."

Iraq's intensive program has been run since the mid-1980s by the formidable, London-educated Dr. Rihab Taha, who is known to Western intelligence as "Toxic Taha." The program involved targeted research on anthrax, plague, botulinum toxin and Clostridium perfringens (gas gangrene), as well as camelpox (a cousin of smallpox), aflatoxin (a mould), and ricin.

Iraq's scientists developed an array of weapons to disperse these agents (bombs, rocket warheads, artillery shells, and sprayers), and they conducted inhalation and blast experiments on large animals, beagle dogs (from Germany), sheep, Rhesus monkeys (from the United Kingdom), and chimpanzees.

Test centres were created at Salman Pak and Al-Hakam. By 1990, Al Hakam was making 6,000 litres of concentrated botulinum toxin and 8,400 litres of anthrax culture.

Iraq's aerial delivery systems were virtually fully developed, with a special emphasis on modified aerial pesticide sprayers to disperse bacterial agents. These devices were to be carried on what were called "Death Drones," modified basic flight trainers purchased from the Czech Republic. George Robertson, former British secretary of state for defence (now secretary-general of NATO), said in 1998: "These aircraft had been fitted with two underwing stores [tanks] carrying 300 litres of anthrax ... if this had been sprayed over a built-up area it could have killed millions of people."

Hamish Killip, a British UN weapons inspector who went to Iraq several times, recalls: "It was the Iraqi drop tanks that I knew would really send biological warfare over the horizon."

The CIA was told by Iraqi opposition groups and Czech intelligence of a meeting between a very senior Iraqi intelligence officer and Mohamed Atta earlier this year in Prague. It may just be coincidence that Atta and his cell was soon asking leading questions about crop dusting in Florida.

Ultimately, because the technical obstacles can be solved by any intelligent scientist sympathetic to the cause, the prospect of a bio-terrorism attack remains worrying. There are now also new sociological and psychological reasons that arouse the post-Sept. 11 fear that the other shoe has yet to drop.

We now know the terrorists have crossed the Rubicon of self-preservation and moral boundaries; we know that they have access to the biological materials and can easily be taught how to disperse them. Even if they are unlucky and fail to grind them down to the correct size for lethal inhalation, or the bacteria die before doing their work, or roast in the sunlight, or are uselessly blown away by the wind, the many failure scenarios miss one truly alarming point.

At the first shred of evidence that a credible bio-terrorism attempt has taken place, the public infrastructure will begin to collapse. Even a small terrorist attack will do the trick. Law and order could only survive under a vicious martial law system.

{Part II below)

-- Anonymous, October 14, 2001

Answers

Probst is gloomy: "The psychological fall-out would be devastating, a much bigger problem than the deaths. Think of the possible scenarios. What if a terrorist group attacked three or four cities at the same time? What if there were a statement saying there would be more attacks unless their demands were met? What if they used two agents, one fast-acting and one slow-acting? What if the terrorist leader told you that your government has not told you the truth?"

Here's what happened when an outbreak of highly contagious pneumonic plague hit the diamond district of Surat, in western India in 1994, After the first seven deaths were announced -- along with a sketchy initial diagnosis, frightened and hysterical residents began to flee the city. Numerous hospital personnel, knowing what they knew, also left hurriedly. Within four days, half-a-million panicked people had abandoned the deserted vicinity. India suffered severe economic losses -- estimated at $2 billion -- although only 56 victims died nationwide.

A more immediate example of how a biological attack could bring economic chaos is the recent foot-and-mouth disease epidemic in the United Kingdom. Animal farming may never recover, agriculture has been devastated, and the ripple effect has badly hurt tourism.

Probst argues that "agricultural terrorism is aimed at the soft underbelly of a nation's economy." "If biological warfare is the terrorist's nuke," he says, "then agricultural weapons are designed to make a nation's economy implode. That could be the next big thing."

Dr. Donald A. Henderson is also bracing for the worst. Henderson, the director of the Center for Civilian Biodefense Studies at Johns Hopkins University, is renowned for his role in leading the World Health Organization to wipe out smallpox in 1977. A White House science adviser in the first Bush Administration, he will now head a new national commission advising the current Bush/Thompson/Ridge team on bio-terrorism preparedness. "I'm afraid," Henderson says, "that there will eventually be a bio-terrorism attack -- it's just a question of when. After Sept. 11, the temptation to use weapons of mass destruction will become more and more attractive. The technology is a surmountable problem. It is not easy, but it is not that hard.

"Look at it this way -- the men who flew the planes into the World Trade Center did not know and didn't need to know how to build aircraft."

One of the most difficult aftershocks from the murder of thousands of innocent men and women is that conspiracy theorists and the old "what if" brigade have been given renewed vigour, and credibility. There will be some hysteria, much stupidity (as fools gather gullible audiences), a little panic, some despair. All bets on improbable terrorist scenarios are currently off.

This is also the moment to remind ourselves that madmen are not supermen, the laws of physics apply equally to them. The correct application of biological and chemical weapons to kill large numbers of people remains a complex but not impossible scenario.

In the late '70s, faced with similar but less terrible scenarios from the Japanese Red Army, Carlos the Jackal, the German Baader Meinhoff, Black Panthers and extreme angries of the Left and the Right, all of their networks were eventually rolled up by dedicated counter-terrorist agencies, working slowly but surely to expose, expel, arrest and imprison. A horrified public reaction to the terror helped. The movements began to atrophy even before their leaders were caught, killed, or committed suicide.

Islam's terrorist cells -- much larger and more pervasive than we believed, far better financed and technically more adroit, and armed with religious rather than political fervor -- are now having their historical moment.

But we have seen them at last, we know roughly where they are, like the flash of sun glinting from a sniper's rifle.

It is a beginning.

Tom Mangold is a senior correspondent for BBC Panorama and Jeff Goldberg is his Washington producer. They are the co-authors of Plague Wars: The Terrifying Reality of Biological Warfare, (St. Martin's Press; 2000).

© Copyright 2001 Vancouver Sun

-- Anonymous, October 14, 2001

OG,

Thanks - excellent article!

"At the first shred of evidence that a credible bio-terrorism attempt has taken place, the public infrastructure will begin to collapse. Even a small terrorist attack will do the trick. Law and order could only survive under a vicious martial law system."

Considering what we've been through so far, I think we're doing quite well. I dread what form "the other shoe" might take, and our resulting response. No wonder gun sales are up 500%!

-- Anonymous, October 14, 2001