By late December it was still hauntingly unclear who had dropped several anthrax letters into the US mail shortly after September 11. Terrorist followers of Osama bin Laden were, of course, prime suspects. And yet federal investigators seemed to believe that the finely milled anthrax required a technical sophistication not available to the Al Qaeda network. But in truth, cooking up deadly germ weapons doesn’t require that a terrorist be a brilliant microbiologist. He can always just hire one to do it for him. Consider a troubling report in Newsweek magazine on a recent discovery by US intelligence: “One or more Russian scientists were working inside Afghanistan with Al Qaeda operatives. Evidence from the scene indicates that the renegade Russians were helping Al Qaeda to develop anthrax.”
Chilling, yes- but also all too predictable. Just weeks earlier, Massachusetts Sen. Ted Kennedy had urgently warned of the threat posed to America by the collapse of the former Soviet Union’s germ weapons program, which has left top Russian biologists bitter and unemployed and their germ facilities alarmingly unsecure. At an October hearing on bioterrorism, Kennedy said America’s “first priority” must be to prevent an attack. “That means… using the renewed partnership between the United States and Russia to make sure that dangerous biological agents do not fall in the hands of terrorists. We’ve worked with Russia to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons, and we must work together now to prevent the spread of biological weapons.” Speaking in Boston days later, Kennedy was even more emphatic, saying that the US must do “whatever is necessary” to keep Russia’s biological weapons safe and secure.
Kennedy intended to put some money where his mouth was, as he and Tennessee Republican Sen. Bill Frist rushed to put together a bioterrorism bill that Congress could act on before the end of the year. After days of frantic negotiating, Kennedy and Frist introduced a huge, $3.2 billion package that seemed to address every relevant need–from research on new vaccines to stockpiling of medicines to grants for state public health systems. Indeed, the bill was so sprawling and ambitious that one think-tank expert on the issue mocked it as “a royal mess,” loaded with pet initiatives designed to attract as many co-sponsors as possible. But there was something noticeably missing from Kennedy’s bill. Despite his passionate calls for action, the final product made no mention of the Russian bio-threat. Early drafts of the bill included tens of millions of dollars in new spending for cash-starved programs in the former Soviet Union. But in trying to buy off potential germ warfare freelancers in Russia, Kennedy ran afoul of familiar problems in the Senate. Turf-conscious colleagues said the issue should be left to foreign aid and military budgeteers. Frist and others urged him to limit the bill to domestic responses. And so Kennedy left his fight for another day. The question is, will that day come before it’s too late?
When people think of defending against bioterror, they tend to focus on things close to home: training doctors, stockpiling Cipro, mass-producing smallpox vaccine. But while these domestic responses are critical, in the long run the foreign-policy dimension is just as important.
For starters, consider the scale of the problem. At its peak in the 1980s, the Soviet Union’s germ-warfare program- whose enormity has only become clear in the past few years- employed more than 70,000 people at some 60 facilities. Their public renunciation of bioweapons notwithstanding, the Soviets produced a breathtaking array of at least 50 killer agents, including anthrax, smallpox, tularemia, Marburg, plague, and, according to one top defector, a genetically engineered “ebolapox” virus that combines the virulence of smallpox with the lethality of Ebola.
Most of the Soviet stockpile of germ weapons has been destroyed. But the germ cultures remain in labs scattered around the former Soviet republics that, in terms of security, are something less than Fort Knox. Last year, for instance, the General Accounting Office found that, while some facilities were sleek and modern, “much of the [Russian] infrastructure was severely deteriorated.” Even in cases where Russian germ labs are well guarded on the outside, there are often no security measures to prevent a rogue scientist from smuggling out germ cultures. Unlike cumbersome nuclear materials, such cultures aren’t hard to carry around. Indeed, they can be easily smuggled in a vial the size of a thumbnail.
Could a Russian scientist be convinced to do such a thing? A dejected and hungry one might well be. Unfortunately, thousands of former Soviet scientists are presumed to be under-employed or out of work altogether, their jobs eliminated at the end of the Cold War and in some cases their labs literally dismantled. Those still at work for the government- men and women who were once highly paid and pampered by the Communist regime- now report earning wages of $100 per month or less. As the director of one Russian biological institute told Amy E. Smithson, director of the Chemical and Biological Nonproliferation Project at Henry L. Stimson Center, a Washington think tank on arms and national security issues, more than two years ago, “Now it is possible to buy [virus] strains because the scientists are working without bread.”
Long before the reports of Russian scientists in Afghanistan, outsiders were trying to exploit this situation. Iran is said to have already lured away several Russian scientists with wages of about $50,000-$60,000 per year. US intelligence reports suggest that Russians sold fermenting equipment to Iraq. Officials at three biological institutes visited by the General Accounting Office said they had been contacted by representatives of outlaw states.
A trickle of US grant funding has begun to quarantine the problem. America has paid to melt down equipment that could be used to produce germ weapons and helped to build new pharmaceutical plants that put former germ scientists to work on more peaceful products. In other cases, Russian scientists are helping the US to research deadly germs and develop new vaccines against them. One program is bringing Russian scientists to Yellowstone Park to help study an outbreak of the infectious livestock disease brucellosis among bison there.
So far, this work has been done on a budgetary shoestring. Smithson says that in the 1990s the United States spent a total of just $20 million on grants to bioweapon scientists. That’s in part because of isolationists in Congress who have never given up their Cold War-era suspicion of the Russkies. Shortly before his death last August, House Armed Services Committee vice chairman Floyd Spence (R-South Carolina) was still warning that joint US-Russian programs “could exacerbate the risk of a renewed Russian offensive biological weapons effort.” Funding for these Russian outreach programs has grown in recent years, to about $12 million in 2001 alone. But this outlay remains paltry compared to spending on other anti-terror priorities. For instance, Congress has spent more than $3 billion since 1992 on securing former Soviet nuclear weapons. Just stockpiling enough smallpox vaccine for every American will cost the US about $500 million.
Early drafts of Kennedy’s bill raised hopes that Congress might get serious about putting Russia’s germ scientists to work, reducing the temptation to sign up with the highest bidder. Smithson says she was elated by early reports that Kennedy intended to boost funding for programs with Russia by tens of millions of dollars. “Wow, that would be great,” she recalls thinking. “We’d finally be funding these programs in a way that would reach all these scientists.”
But it looks like she’ll have to wait until next year. Let’s hope Russia’s scientists can hang on that long.