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Posted on 10/21/2001 9:44:38 AM PDT by maquiladora

In the summer of 1992, Bill Patrick, America's veteran designer of biological weaponry, took a call from the CIA he had been half-expecting for weeks. The agency wanted him to interview a Russian defector.

Patrick had not thought about devising an agent of germ warfare since the US programme he ran was scrapped by the Nixon administration in 1969. But he was now the West's leading expert on what had come to be known as 'bio-defence'.

The CIA agents escorted Patrick to a safe house on the outskirts of Washington and introduced him to a short man from Kazakhstan, to whom he handed his business card, which had the skull and crossbones on it.

Kanatjan Alibekov smiled in recognition. After two months of debriefing goons from the CIA and academics with little knowledge of what he was talking about, Dr Alibekov had found his opposite number on the American side. Here, in the muggy heat, was someone he could trust and respect, and who would understand the story he had to tell.

During 17 years inside the Soviet germ weapons programme, Alibekov had been promoted to the deputy directorship of Biopreparat, a supposedly civilian wing of the communist chemical weapons programme. And from that vantage point he had enjoyed an overview of the stockpiling of hundreds of tons of 'Bacillus Anthracis' - anthrax - and other germ agents for use against the United States and other Nato enemies.

Patrick left the debriefing armed with the knowledge that, during the final days of the Cold War, the USSR was bristling with chemical weaponry. One single plant at Stepnogorsk in the emerging independent state of Kazakhstan could have been producing two tons of anthrax a day. And even if the threat of world war had gone, the nightmare of bio-terror was just beginning.

Last week, nightmare became reality in the US. Germ warfare was declared in a limited, crude and clumsy way: anthrax sent by mail in small quantities is not contagious beyond a few people at most, but the dreaded Rubicon in the history of terrorism had been crossed.

It turned the media into a fortress; it has closed down Capitol Hill for the first time during what is precariously being called a 'time of peace'.

Now, three questions hang over the latest bio-terrorist crisis detonated by the carnage on 11 September. Is this 'weaponised' anthrax? Where is it coming from? And who will be next?

The week opened with anthrax beginning to cloud over public attention even from a war that its air force - and before long its troops - would be fighting in Afghanistan. Powder had been sent, lethally, to the offices of American Media Inc, in Florida, and now more arrived: at the nearby St Petersburg Times , at the New York Times and in the office of a name known to everyone in America - NBC's Tom Brokaw - at the Rockefeller Centre in the heart of Midtown Manhattan.

On Monday, a child at ABC television in Manhattan was diagnosed with exposure to the germ and the spectre of biological terror climbed the green lawns of Capitol Hill and into the temple of America democracy: an infected letter to Tom Daschle, leader of the Senate. The following day, investigators and experts made a discovery even more potent than the letter itself - the most worrying development yet in the series of attacks that had already rattled the nation. The type of anthrax used was of a kind indicating the terrorists had access to germ weapons capable of inflicting far bigger casualties.

The challenge to serious bio-terrorists in the long term is not to create anxiety but to pose a threat - to produce germs that could be spread as a mist that can remain live and be retained in the nostril and lung. And the following day the experts' worst fears were realised: 30 people had been exposed to the germ sent in Daschle's letter. In the ensuing panic, Congress was closed; no one was dead but there was one serious casualty: the leadership of America. 'WIMPS!' said the New York Post ; 'The Leaders Who Ran Away From Anthrax'.

The germs sent to Florida, New York and Washington appeared to be of the same strain - thus connecting one to the other, if not to any discoverable source. The Manhattan offices of New York Governor George Pataki were evacuated after being hit.

The US was now playing a gambling game. Not whether, but who, when and where next? Few expected the next victim to be a postal worker in Trenton, New Jersey, who developed cutaneous anthrax after handling the letters to Brokaw and Daschle. Also positive was a worker at a mail facility that delivers to the Capitol. More predictable was the vile missive sent to Brokaw's opposite number, Dan Rather of CBS television, completing the triad of three major networks. On Friday, it was the New York Post , the newspaper's offices in Rio de Janeiro, and a second postal worker in Trenton.

None of this, however, illuminated the path that the toxin had taken - was it brought from a foreign nation, or made domestically with the help of a rogue scientist? Nor was it known whether the attackers can make or obtain larger quantities than those being dispatched. 'I do think that in one form or another a state must have been involved,' a germ weapons expert told the New York Times, 'or it could be the employees of a former state, such as a Russian scientist'.

For a state to be involved in such an attack on an American senator would take President George Bush into uncharted waters even during these remarkable times. On the eve of the Gulf war, his father debated the use of nuclear weapons against Saddam Hussein were he to launch a germ attack against the US. The US had instead sent Saddam a letter reading: 'Your country will pay a terrible price if you order unconscionable acts.'

Nor was it clear whether the al-Qaida network of Osama bin Laden was involved, although the President said he was convinced of a connection. The CIA circulated an assessment earlier this year saying al-Qaida had no more than a 'crude' biological weapons capability.

After the first appearances of anthrax at NBC television and the New York Times 10 days ago, sections of the US intelligence community, politicians and experts in the field were quick to see the hand of Saddam Hussein. First among them was the former CIA head, James Woolsey. Next came Richard Butler, a former director of the Unscom (United Nations Special Commission) project to root out Saddam's massive arsenal of chemical and biological weapons and supervise their destruction.

Butler went on to say that he believed the connection between Iraq and the anthrax attacks had been made in Prague. The argument completed a series of associations: the suspected suicide pilot Mohamed Atta was known to have met Iraqi intelligence officials in Prague, and Egyptian authorities had told the CIA that al-Qaida militants interrogated in Cairo had obtained small amounts of anthrax in the Czech capital.

In the years following the Gulf war, UN inspectors found the Iraqi regime had invested vast resources in building up reserves of liquid anthrax. Iraq told the inspectors - as they were given the runaround - that all of it had been dumped into the ground, but Unscom never determined how much was destroyed.

All the week political machinations over blaming Iraq went on behind the scenes. A finger pointed at Saddam Hussein strengthened the hand of the powerful Pentagon faction under Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, anxious to spread the Afghan war westward against the same regime it had argued should be top pled on the slipstream of victory in 1991, with US backing for insurgent Shias and Kurds.

Iraq is the prime suspect because of the quantities of anthrax it is known to have stockpiled, second only to Russia, and of Saddam's open sponsorship of international terrorism. During their inspections, Unscom officials sometimes even found a geographical proximity between the germ weapons facilities and a terror network. One former inspector, Raymond Zilinskas, says the Salman Pak plant was less than a mile from what the Iraqis had dubbed 'an anti-terrorist training camp'. 'In fact,' says Zilinskas, 'it was a terrorist training camp.'

Unscom was forced to quit Iraq in December 1998, with the team believing it had destroyed most of the 8,500 litres of concentrated anthrax and 19,000 litres of undiluted botulinum toxin that Saddam admitted he had after years denying a biological weapons programme. Anthrax production began in June 1990, on the eve of the invasion of Kuwait.

Some of those Unscom officials now work at a joint 'biodefence' project between George Mason University in Virginia and Dr Alibekov's company in the West, Advanced Biosystems - now, coincidentally, being consulted by the authorities and hosts to an international seminar on bio-terrorism next month.

These officials say Iraq is likely to have hidden up to four times as much anthrax as Saddam confessed to having, and twice as much botulinum. The woman who, close to tears, finally admitted the anthrax programme to Unscom, British-educated Dr Rihab Taha (known as 'Dr Germ'), is still in place; and one of the former leaders of Unscom, Richard Spertzel, now deputy director of the US bio-weapons research facility at Fort Derek, Maryland, believes that if Saddam was trying to manufacture a new generation of bio-weapons, it would be of global potency. But if the anthrax was coming from Iraq, where had they got it from, and what kind of chemical was it?

In testimony to the House of Representatives last week, the man who had now changed his name to Kenneth Alibek recalled his time as Dr Alibekov, running the Soviet Biopreparat programme across 40 complexes, manufacturing anthrax, Black Death, smallpox and other germ agents. The programme's function, he said, was to 'weaponise' the germs - to stabilise, dry and mill them into particles for spreading by explosions - or just aerosol sprays and on air currents. The question now haunting the US authorities is whether the anthrax now blowing around the Capitol is of 'weapons grade' or not.

Stepnogorsk, core of the Biopreparat programme, is a place that appears on no map; the plant is no more than a PO Box number - 2076. And it was here that Andy Weber, a young military diplomat and first secretary to the fledgling US embassy to Kazakhstan, ventured in June 1995. The decayed plant at which Dr Alibekov had work confirmed all he had told Bill Patrick in 1992. Weber's team found remnants of lab equipment, vast chambers and underground filling rooms where anthrax had been fitted to missiles and bombs.

The team then went on to another, even more shocking location: Vozrozdheniya Island in the Aral Sea - or 'Voz', as the Americans called it - which shares a coastline with Uzbekistan. Here was not only a massive germ-weapons testing range, but the world's biggest dump for weapons-grade anthrax. What had happened since the signing of the 1972 Biological Weapons Treaty was that trains full of anthrax had made the journey across the steppes to Voz Island and poured the sludge into the ground.

The dump was a wasteland, cursed by no sign of living animals but the stench of 'non-human primates' killed in hideous experiments. The scientists used to envy the doomed monkeys' daily ration of bananas, joked Weber's Kazak hosts. From Stepnogorsk and Voz Island led a trail of proliferation - the former was employing 30,000 people when it was shut down in 1992, among them the bearers of know-how, secrets, weapons recipes. According to Alibek, 7,000 of them were trained in how to make a deadly weapon of one type or another. But direct connections between the anthrax leak to Islamic fundamentalists in states bordering ravaged Afghanistan were not the urgent concern of the US or Russian intelligence services - rather, their worries were over expertise to programmes already running in Iraq, Iran and North Korea. Dr Amy Smithson at the Henry L. Stimson Centre in Washington DC wrote a report in 1994 entitled 'Toxic Archipelago' in which she argued that once Soviet authority over Biopreparat ended, there were leaks across the Middle East, into territory where terrorists or their sponsors could easily obtain it.

Among the certain recipients, she says, was Syria, after the sacking of General Anatoly Kuntsevich by Boris Yeltsin, found to have committed 'numerous and gross violations' in his dealings of chemicals with Damascus. Another country was Iran, says Smithson, which began recruiting unemployed experts from Stepnogorsk.

Whatever the political and geographical source of the biological attack on America, the authorities are trying to ascertain what strain of anthrax is involved. One strain that has emerged as a potential seed type is known as the Ames strain, which the US tried to weaponise before its Cold War biological weapons programme was halted by President Nixon in 1969. Although it was distributed around the world, it is unclear whether Saddam got his hands on it.

However, Iraq was able to obtain a virulent form of anthrax, known as the Vollum strain, from the American Type Culture Collection, a laboratory in Virginia, before the Gulf war. That was the strain Iraq used and turned into weapons, according to Unscom.

But investigators emphasise that a relatively impotent strain does not rule out foreign sponsorship. They say it is conceivable that a foreign government or terrorist organisation picked a domestic strain to throw off federal investigators. 'There's no indication that it came from the Russian or Iraqi programmes, but you can't rule that out,' said a federal scientist familiar with the investigation.

Out of thousands tested, only seven people have proved anthrax-positive, although dozens more show signs of exposure. Investigators strongly believe anthrax exposure cases in New York, Washington and Florida are linked to the 11 September attacks and that remaining al-Qaida individuals or cells are behind them - but officials say they lacked concrete evidence or intelligence to explain who sent the anthrax-contaminated letters.

Signalling the lack of fresh leads, FBI director Robert S Mueller III said the government would offer a $1 million reward for information leading to the conviction of anyone responsible for anthrax attacks. John Potter, head of the US post office, said his office would send a postcard 'to everyone in America' within a week outlining how to handle suspicious mail.

But one place in which the two investigations do overlap is New Jersey. Of the 133 on the FBI list still being sought, many live or once lived in the state. Investigators in the anthrax attacks have focused on a square mile of the Arab-American Ewing suburb of Trenton, about 40 miles south of Manhattan, where they believe the letters to Daschle and NBC were posted.

Authorities are especially interested in two Indian-born men thought to have been part of a planned fifth hijacking on 11 September that was thwarted when all jets were grounded after the World Trade Centre and Pentagon strikes.

Growing evidence of links between terrorist cells and New Jersey has put the law enforcement in the state on high alert. The state FBI office has assigned three separate task forces to investigate the hijacking, anthrax and potential for attack. It has deployed hundreds of officers to secure bridges, tunnels, nuclear power plants, government offices and other potential targets.

Moreover, at least six of the 11 September hijackers are believed to have lived in Paterson, including Hani Hanjour, who is understood to have steered the American Airlines jet into the Pentagon.

Lead hijacker Mohamed Atta, who expressed suspicious interest in crop dusters, bought a plane ticket to Spain from a Paterson travel agency, and Nawaq al-Hamzi, another Flight 77 hijacker, and Hanjour rented at least three cars from a dealership in nearby Wayne shortly before the attacks. The question now is whether or not the anthrax creeping across the country and across each hour of news is 'weaponised' or 'non-weaponised'. The administration is doing all it can to urge prudence.

Tom Ridge, chief of the new White House-based Office of Homeland Security, on Friday reiterated the assurances of officials in saying that it was not of weapons grade. It was a scaling back on what officials had said privately after the Daschle letter, introducing the new category of 'professional grade'.

Richard Spertzel was the spearhead of Unscom's early inspections, a genial man whose grandfatherly looks deceived the Iraqis, whom he came to infuriate with his stubbornness. It was he who then had to push his own sceptics into rooting out Iraq's secret, and finally prized the confession from 'Dr Germ' Taha. Crucially, Spertzel was the one bio-inspector who showed less interest in the fixation of toxins to bombs or missiles, as in their ability to be spread by sprays - he was impressed by al-Hakam's aerosol generators and spray tanks.

Now, Spertzel is among those to be impressed by the sophistication of the anthrax that arrived in Senator Daschle's office.

'If 29 people are being contaminated,' he told The Observer, 'there's definitely an expert manufacturer in there, to make it fine enough to lodge in the nostrils. It's what you would expect from weapons-grade anthrax... It is evidently very readily airborne.'

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