Russia likely culprit in anthrax outbreak

18 Oct, 2001 10:58 AM4 mins to read

LONDON - The hunt for the source of the weapons grade anthrax that shut down the heart of the United States political establishment yesterday has already produced many false trails.

Much of the focus has been on Iraq, but the world's leading germ warfare experts say the finger of suspicion points more directly at Russia's rundown military industrial complex.

If the finger of suspicion falls on any one country "the obvious one is Russia, it's a league ahead of Iraq", said one senior adviser to United Nations weapons inspectors for Iraq.

Other countries thought to be working on a biological weapons programme include Iran, North Korea, Libya, Cuba, Egypt and Pakistan.

Unemployed top Russian scientists who helped run the Soviet Union's illegal and secret germ warfare programme appear to be a likely source of the anthrax outbreak in the US. It is known that Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network has tried to buy ingredients for weapons of mass destruction in Russia.

The secret Russian germ warfare programme was set up in the 1970s to allow Moscow to cheat on its treaty commitments to destroy all its anthrax and other germ warfare stocks. Experts believe that parts of that vast programme are still operating.

The scientists who worked on the programme at the Biopreparat agency - and who were thrown out of work when it was officially disbanded in 1992 - may have sold their secrets on the open market.

The full extent of Russia's cheating was revealed to the CIA by the deputy director of Biopreparat, Ken Alibek, when he defected in 1992.

Alibek has described how the Soviet Union churned out two tonnes of anthrax a day at Stepanagorsk in his native Kazakhstan, and how the Russians covered up an 1979 anthrax outbreak in the Urals.

He told a US Congressional committee last week that "there are pieces of Biopreparat that are still running - some with a very high level of secrecy".

He also said that no one knows where up to 50 Russian scientists with anthrax weaponisation secrets might be now.

"Any dedicated individual can learn how to make weapons-grade anthrax. If they had an adviser, it would be easier," said Dick Spertzl, a biowarfare expert in the US. But turning the laboratory-produced liquid into the powder spores is much more tricky. "The knowledge of drying is not that common."

Experts said Iraq had concentrated on the liquid variety of anthrax, which could infect its victims via so-called "drop tanks" or aerosols. Only three countries, Iraq, the US and Russia, have weaponised anthrax. Britain said in 1956 that it was ending its offensive anthrax programme.

A highly potent, finely milled anthrax powder has infected almost 30 staff of the US Senate.

Sources have variously described the powder which has hit four US cities as "weapons grade", "high quality" and "professional".

The US abandoned its own offensive programme in 1969, and says it is concentrating on bio-defence.

Iraq is believed to possess at least 8.4 tonnes of concentrated anthrax in liquid form, despite telling UN weapons inspectors that all stocks had been destroyed in 1991. Like Russia, it has a concealment programme to hide its germ warfare programme.

The spokesman for the UN inspectors charged with disarming Iraq, Ewen Buchanan, said: "We had concerns that Iraq was attempting to store it as a dry product, but no hard evidence."

Three of the 19 hijackers of the September 11 attacks have been linked to Chechnya and the ringleader, Mohamed Atta, twice met an Iraqi intelligence agent in Prague. But US officials said such meetings did not prove Iraq's involvement.

Why might Saddam Hussein cooperate with terrorists bent on attacking the US, in the knowledge that the Americans would retaliate with a devastating strike?

One UN adviser said that Iraq, which has won widespread Arab support in its bid to break out of the 10-year-old UN sanctions, had "too much at stake" to take part in such action.

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