Milton Leitenberg
excerpted Wrom: TZRCLBDXRQBGJSNBOHMKHJYFMYXOEAIJJPH
the Biological Weapons Threat to the United States, "White
Paper" prepared for the Conference on Emerging Threats
Assessment. Biological Terrorism, at the Institute for Security
Technology Studies, Dartmouth College, July 7-9, 2000 (Citations
Omitted).
The discussion of this subject in the United States, beginning around
1996 following the disclosure of the 1990 to 1994 efforts by the
Japanese Aum group to produce BW agents, and its use of the chemical
agent Sarin in 1995, has been characterized by gross exaggeration, hype,
misinformation, and, at times, even simple ignorance. It was
overwhelmingly dominated by two clichés which were repeated ad
infinitum: "It is not a matter of whether, just when," and
"The nation will face within five years...." Five years have
in fact now passed. Brian Jenkins (whose consulting group apparently
staffed the July 2000 Report of the National Commission on Terrorism)
characterized the discussion that ensued as "fact free
analysis," and that in the absence of a validated threat, anxieties
had been converted into conclusions. At a conference held by the
Chemical and Biological Arms Control Institute on April 29-30, 1999 (the
first of two two-day meetings under the rubric of "Bioterrorism in
the United States: Calibrating the Threat"), Jenkins pointed out
that when terrorist acts which could be relatively easily achieved, such
as aircraft hijackings or product tamperings first appeared as means
used by terrorists, the rate of these events increased sharply year by
year within five years. But the Aum experience has so far proved to be a
single data point, and not the beginning of a trend.
Instead, what we have seen are many hundreds of hoaxes. Hoaxes
are not BW, they are not "anthrax," and they are
not "BW events." Nor are they terrorist consideration
of the use of BW (or as phrased in the Defense Science Board Summer
Study of 1997, demonstrations of "...the breadth of weaponry
available" to terrorist groups), and they should not be counted in
statistical compendia as such. A hoax is a hoax, and nothing
else.
Two brief, but more expert assessments were provided to Congress
early in 1999. John Lauder, Special Assistant to the Director of Central
Intelligence for Proliferation, told the House Permanent Select
Committee on Intelligence on March 3, 1999, that "...the
preparation and effective use of BW by both potentially hostile states
and by non-state actors, including terrorists, is harder than some
popular literature seems to suggest." One should note that the
statement included even "potentially hostile states,"
which would certainly make it even more difficult for "non-state
actors." And Col. David Franz, then the Deputy Commander of the US
Army’s Medical Research and Materiel Command told the Senate
Intelligence Committee that BW terrorism is difficult to carry
out, and that it would require a "...large well-funded terrorist
program or state sponsorship."
Estimates by official US government agencies of actual activities by
terrorist groups to obtain biological weapons is contradictory. In
February 1996, the US Defense Intelligence Agency responded to a
question by the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence by stating
that, "We have no conclusive information that any of the terrorist
organizations that we monitor are developing chemical, biological, or
radiological weapons." In the same year, the FBI Section Chief for
Domestic Terrorism told Congress that "to date, our investigations
in the United States reveal no intelligence that rogue nations using
terrorism, international terrorist groups, or domestic groups are
planning to use these [nuclear, biological, or chemical] deadly weapons
in the United States." As an indication of how confusion gets
introduced, even by the very same sources, on January 28, 1998, FBI
Director Louis Freeh testified before Congress on threats to US national
security. He noted that the FBI, which has jurisdiction over terrorism
in the US, had opened over 100 cases in 1997 about the threat,
development, or use of WMD, including biological agents, which was more
than double the amount from the year before. Freeh noted that a
significant fraction of the cases involved threats that had no basis in
fact, and that most of the actual interest in biological threats seemed
aimed against limited personal targets. He indicated, however, that up
to approximately 30 investigations concerning WMD were continuing at the
FBI. There never was a subsequent statement by any FBI official to
clarify that all the remaining cases – as well as those in 1998 and
1999 – were all hoaxes.
Official statements made in 1999 were both variable and ambiguous. In
June 1999, a "Fact Sheet" on "Chemical-Biological
Warfare" prepared by the US Department of State opened with the
following lines: "The Department of State has no information to
indicate that there is a likelihood of use of chemical or biological
agent release in the immediate future. The Department believes the risk
of the use of chemical/biological warfare is remote, although it cannot
be excluded." Two statements by CIA officials in 1999 and 2000 were
different. In March 1999, Dr. John Lauder, of the US Central
Intelligence Agency, stated that "Beyond state actors, there are a
number of terrorist groups seeking to develop or acquire BW
capabilities," and reference was then made to the Osama bin Ladin
network, for whom "acquire" rather than "develop"
would probably be more appropriate.
However, a statement by CIA Director George Tenet in March 2000 was
actually somewhat of a retreat. He stated:
...we remain concerned that terrorist groups worldwide continue to
explore how rapidly evolving and spreading technologies might enhance
the lethality of their operations. Although terrorists we’ve
preempted still appear to be relying on conventional weapons, we know
that a number of these groups are seeking chemical, biological,
radiological, or nuclear agents. We are aware of several instances in
which terrorists have contemplated using these materials.
Among them is Bin Ladin, who has shown a strong interest in chemical
weapons. His operatives have trained to conduct attacks with toxic
chemicals or biological toxins.
Two points are notable: first that chemical, biological, nuclear and
radiological were lumped together, and second that "trained to
conduct attacks" is not the same as Dr. Lauder’s "develop or
acquire BW capabilities." Tenet’s reference to "biological
toxins" also suggests ricin as the agent in question, for which
there are other suggestions, together with efforts by the Bin Ladin
network to obtain simple chemical agents rather than any effort by them
to produce either chemical or biological agents.
There were repeated statements in 1999, most prominently in the
September 1999 GAO report, Combatting Terrorism: Need for
Comprehensive Threat and Risk Assessment of Chemical and Biological
Attacks, that no threat analysis of this subject -- an
examination of specific potential actors, their capabilities and
intentions, and potential feasibilities – had ever been prepared
inside the US government. Instead, contractors had produced
vulnerability analyses, scenarios of effects that would follow release
of a BW agent. As indicated in the previous section, those systematic
studies that have surveyed relevant events over the past 50 or 100 years
uniformly predict that the most likely event will be, as they have in
the past, the use of easily available off-the-shelf chemicals,
individual poisonings, or the use of the most simply prepared toxins,
such as ricin. A terrorist use of a BW agent is best characterized as an
event of extremely low probability, which might –
depending on the agent, its quality and its means of dispersion --
produce high mortality (or economic damage if it is an anti-plant or
anti-animal agent). Table 5 presents Brian Jenkins’s April 1999
summary of the way the problem had been addressed in the previous
several years. A very similar conclusion was reached by a US General
Accounting Office report released in March 1999. It stated that
...plans developed by the Department of Health and Human Services
for "medical consequence management" after a chemical or
biological terrorist attack appear to be "geared toward the
worst-possible consequences from a public health perspective and do
not match intelligence agencies’ judgments on the more likely
biological and chemical agents a terrorist group or individual might
use."
An essentially similar assessment was also reached by the Monterey
group after their database study was completed.
U.S. policy-makers and several outside analysts have predicted
catastrophic consequences if a terrorist group or an individual –
alone or with state sponsorship – ever mounts a major chemical or
biological attack. These alarmist scenarios have been based on the
potential vulnerability of U.S. urban centers to chemical or biological
attack and the growing availability of relevant technology and
materials. But these scenarios have not drawn on a careful assessment of
terrorist motivations and patterns of behavior.
With more than a hundred terrorist organizations active in the world
today, the challenge is to identify groups or individuals who are both
motivated and capable of employing chemical or biological agents
against civilians. Yet instead of examining historical cases in which
terrorists sought to acquire and use such agents, the Clinton
administration, as well as many outside analysts, developed their threat
assessments and response strategies in an empirical vacuum. Lacking
solid data, they fell back on worst-case scenarios that may be remote
from reality.
The tendency of U.S. government officials to exaggerate the threat of
chemical and biological terrorism has been reinforced by sensational
reporting in the press and an obsessive fascination with catastrophic
terrorism in Hollywood films, best-selling books, and other mainstays of
pop culture.
The past five years have been characterized, then, by:
(1) spurious statistics (hoaxes counted as "biological"
events)
(2) unknowable predictions
(3) greatly exaggerated consequence estimates
(4) gross exaggeration of the feasibility of successfully producing
biological agents by non-state actors, except in the case of
recruitment of highly experienced professionals, for which there is no
evidence to date
(5) the apparent continued absence of a thorough threat assessment;
and,
(6) thoughtless, ill-considered, counterproductive, and extravagant
rhetoric.
Perhaps the epitome of all this was the executive-level exercise in
the spring of 1998 when "40 officials from more than a dozen
federal agencies met secretly near the White House to play out what
would happen if terrorists attacked the United States with a devastating
new type of germ weapon." The exercise was based on a scenario
taken from a science-fiction thriller which had impressed the President:
the postulated production of a viral "chimera" combining two
viruses, smallpox and a hemorrhagic fever. But no such organism exists,
and its fabrication would be a feat which virologists at USAMRIID, the
US biological defense laboratories, believe is currently beyond the
capability of the most advanced scientists and facilities to achieve,
and perhaps is technically impossible.
