The Germs Men Play With

As with the ISI and the Taliban, the famous American blind eye is very visible here too, says Sunil Jain

Germs: Biological Weapons and America’s Secret War
By Judith Miller, Stephen Engelberg, William Broad
Simon & Schuster
Price: $22

As threats of bioterrorism multiply, will these moonwalkers now be regular fixtures in cities around the world? And as they rush to check distress calls, who will trace the tonnes of germs unaccounted for?

You’ve all heard of how the US, through the ISI, funded and armed the Mujahideen to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan, of how the Taliban was born from this eventually. And how the US constantly turned a blind eye to the ISI’s nurturing of an organisation that wreaked terror in Kashmir and other parts of India.

Well, as this brilliant New York Times investigation shows, the anthrax story’s much the same: of a superpower cynical enough to plan germ warfare on its enemies, of a superpower that ignored germ warfare of its allies, of a superpower that refused to engage in checking this menace, and finally of a superpower that’s now been immobilised because of this. Except, with every nation as deeply vulnerable today, there’s little time for moral outrage or superiority.

During the Reagan years, for instance, US intelligence agencies issued reports that Iraq was well on its way to building a bacteriological arsenal. On September 29, 1988, three months after the intelligence agencies’ report was completed, a scientific supplies company in Maryland (from where the Rajneesh ashram people bought their salmonella germs from to poison Oregon) shipped 11 strains of germs, including four types of anthrax, to Iraq — one, by the way, was a strain developed by the US for germ warfare in 1951. But at that time, American officials viewed Iraq as more of an ally against a Soviet-Iran axis, never mind Iraq’s use of nerve gas against its Kurdish minority.

Similarly, in 1991, when the US discovered the extent of the massive Soviet offensive biological warfare programme, Bush Senior decided to keep quiet about it as the knowledge that the Soviets had blatantly flouted the germ weapon treaty for two decades would hamper Gorbachev’s reforms efforts — ‘‘by that time, Gorbachev was pretty embattled’’, is how Robert Gates, Bush’s deputy national security advisor, put it.

Worse, after the disintegration of the Soviet empire, when American scientists got to see just how large the Soviet arsenal was, the US didn’t do enough. It helped dismember ex-Soviet germ laboratories, but by not providing alternative facilities, allowed ex-Soviet scientists to wander into the hands of whoever could pay — the Iraqis, the Iranians, whoever. Just to get an idea of what we’re talking of, at peak levels the Soviets produced 4,500 tonnes of anthrax (against the US’s 0.9) and even 100 tonnes of small pox — it’s still feared that the Soviets weaponised even more bizarre forms of small pox.

In an investigation that covers pretty much most aspects of mankind’s horrible experiments with germ warfare — Tatars in the 14th century hurled dead bodies foul with plague at their enemies — over the centuries even, it’s difficult to figure out what’s more horrible. Is it, for instance, the fact that in the 1950s American scientists dropped cluster bombs on US cities with non-infectious aerosols to judge the efficacy of the delivery mechanism? The cities of Saint Louis, Minneapolis and Winnipeg with climates and sizes similar to Soviet targets were chosen for this.

Or was it the fact that the US planned germ warfare to kill leaders it didn’t like, like Patrice Lumumba in the Congo or Castro in Cuba, that was truly terrifying? Or was it the fact that deadly bacteria was so easily available? The Rajneeshees certainly had no trouble ordering deadly strains in 1984. But even in 1998, a few years after the United States tightened its rules, the Pentagon began an ambitious venture to see if it could build a germs factory with commercially available materials. Armed with $1.6 million, a small team began buying new and second-hand equipment in March 1999, and by the summer of 2000 built a facility in Nevada, and turned out two pounds of anthrax simulants. And no, no one got to know.

It gets worse. Though just four people have died from the spate of anthrax letters/hoaxes in the US, mock drills by the authorities, such as in Denver just last year, ‘‘resulted’’ in several thousand people dying. Antibiotics could be distributed to just 140 persons an hour, utterly inadequate for a city of two million.

Germs, which is the result of an investigation over three years from Washington to Kazakhstan to Japan to Russia by The New York Times, is clearly a must-read for all the above reasons — by the way, the very first anthrax letter in the US was delivered to Judith Miller, one of Germs’s co-authors.

Ironically, some of the examples in the book even beat those in thrillers like Cobra Event. Sergei Popov, a Soviet scientist, for instance, modified the Legionella and injected it into guinea pigs. The symptoms, Popov said, were unusual. The initial paralysis was of the rear legs, so half the animal was paralysed, and half still active, the front legs struggling to move the dead hindquarters.

Rogue science just came alive.