Bio Terrorism -- The Secret Story of the Soviet Bio Weapons Program

Another TV project that went nowhere ---- but one that I still think has merit.  

Bio Terrorism – Pandora’s Box

Written by

Michael Rose

The devastating events of September 11, 2001 have been compared to Pearl Harbor.  While shocking, many fear that the worst is yet to come.  The next time, the attack may come from the “poor man’s hydrogen bomb,” killer pathogens like anthrax, smallpox and the plague released by bio terrorists. 

The attacks will be silent and untraceable.  Unlike a plane crash – there will be no cataclysmic event to signal that the assault has begun.  The nation will wake up to the nightmare of thousands of terminally ill citizens.  We’ll see horrors not known since the plagues of the Middle Ages.  It will be a calamity that we can barely comprehend.

The means of producing and delivering these catastrophic killers were developed by US and Soviet scientists whose Cold War mission was to invent the impossible and prepare for the unspeakable.  All of this work was done in secret.  What worries the experts is, that with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the scientists who created these most lethal forms of ancient killers, and the means to deliver them, are now hawking their skills on an eager open market.

We’ll reveal, for the first time on television, how this situation came about.  The audience will learn how Western intelligence agencies were misled about the ongoing development of the massive Soviet bio weapons program colloquially known inside the government as “bugs and gas.”

The audience will be astonished to find out the enormity of the Soviet’s gigantic germ labyrinth that stretched from the Soviet Council of Ministers, to the Soviet Academy of Sciences, through the Ministries of Defense, Health and Agriculture and into an ostensibly civilian pharmaceutical agency, Biopreparat.

We’ll see how American and allied intelligence failed to see this develop and show that the consequences of this massive intelligence failure is the probable dissemination of deadly germ weapons.  This is a detective story.

To help us unravel this mystery, we’ll first turn to Ken Alibek, who worked for seventeen years in key positions in the Soviet bio weapons field before defecting to the West.  He left in order to alert the world about Moscow’s secret production of hundreds of tons of anthrax, smallpox and plague germs meant for hurling at the United States and its allies.  The amounts dwarfed anything US experts had ever imagined.  Alibek painted a clear picture of the biological war machine that employed thirty thousand people at more than forty sites across Russia and Kazakhstan.  We’ll then interview other former lab workers, scientists, intelligence officers, senior government officials, public health workers and journalists to help us understand how this threat developed and its consequences today. 

We’ll discover the dangerous remnants of this deadly trade and track the rogue scientists who may be selling their skills to the highest bidders.

We’ll see how vulnerable America is to a bio weapons attack and talk to those who are searching for a way to lure these evils back into Pandora’s Box.

Bio Terrorism – Pandora’s Box

POTENTIAL INTERVIEW SUBJECTS

Ken Alibek (Kanatjan Alibekov) defected to the United States in the early 1990s, after working for seventeen years inside the Soviet biological weapons program.  His detailed overview of the USSR’s efforts caused US experts to revise their assessment of the threat biological weapons pose.

William Broad is a senior science writer at The New York Times and has twice shared the Pulitzer Prize with colleagues there.  His most recent book is The Universe Below.

Gary Crocker joined the State Department’s intelligence arm in 1974 as a junior analyst.  He soon gravitated to the area of biological and chemical weapons and made it his mission to gather evidence that the Soviets had embarked on production of old-fashioned germ weapons like anthrax and futuristic research into bioengineered pathogens.

Richard Danzig was appointed undersecretary of the navy in 1993 and quickly turned his attention to the dangers of germ weapons.  Despite numerous warnings, the military was reluctant to grapple with the issue and budget cuts further undermined efforts to prepare for the possibility of germ warfare.  Partly due to Danzig’s efforts, the Joint Chiefs of Staff finally recommended vaccinations for anthrax and increased the budget for chemical and biological defense programs.

Stephen Engelberg is a senior investigative editor for The New York Times whose projects include a series of articles on germ warfare and terrorism.

David Kelly was among the first recruited by UNSCOM to conduct on-site biological weapons inspections in Iraq.  His skill as an interrogator had helped him uncover the Soviet Union’s experiments with smallpox.  Kelly spent nearly four years and made countless trips to Iraq to piece together the information about Iraq’s darkest weapons secrets, including the locations of buried biological bombs and missile warheads.

Joshua Lederberg has been predicting the future of germ weapons longer than anyone else has.  At 75 years of age, he’s been at it longer than almost anyone else.  A winner of the Nobel Prize in 1958 for his discovery of genetic exchanges in bacteria, he has long been an outspoken foe of biological and recombinant (genetically engineered) weapons.

Douglas MacEachin served as Head of the CIA’s Soviet analysis office from 1984 – 89.  He was on of the most determined skeptics about the existence of a Soviet biological weapons program.  The defection of Vladimir Pasechnik (see below), MacEachin changed his mind.  The zealots, he admitted, turned out to have had a point.

Matthew S. Meselson did pioneering research as a Harvard biologist in the early 1960s.  Brought to Washington by the Kennedy administration, he quickly became a devout critic of germ weapons.  He authored several papers arguing against the need to biological armaments.

Judith Miller is a senior writer for The New York Times.  Since joining the paper in 1977, she has reported extensively from throughout the world including the Middle East, where she served as Cairo bureau Chief.  Her most recent book is Germs: Biological Weapons and America’s Secret War.

Vladimir Pasechnik, a top Soviet scientist, defected to Britain in 1989.  He revealed that the Soviet Union had produced long-range missiles, and was working to modify cruise missiles, to spread germs; and that the USSR had succeeded in creating a new, genetically improved version of the bubonic plague.  His revelations shocked even the most hardened Soviet critics.

Bill Patrick started his career as a research microbiologist but joined America’s bio weapons program in 1951.  He rose to become chief of the Product Development Division and went on to become a germ warfare consultant to federal agencies and private clients.  He was the expert brought to Oregon to investigate the 1984 Rajneeshee germ assault on local citizens.  He warned the attack was a foretaste of things to come.  At a 1995 gathering of officials from the US, Canada, Britain and Japan, shortly after the sarin attack in Tokyo, Patrick detailed how a terrorist could mount a germ attack on the World Trade Center using a blender, cheesecloth, a garden sprayer and readily available hospital supplies.

Larry Seaquist was assigned to help coordinate defense against biological warfare as American troops were gathering in the deserts of Saudi Arabia during Operation Desert Storm.  A career navy officer and aide to one of the Pentagon’s top policy officials, he prepared a highly classified memo outlining America’s vulnerability to biological weapons.  Some details of his report remain classified as secret to this day.

Richard Spertzel was recruited by UNSCOM, at age 61, to serve as a biological weapons inspector in Iraq after the Persian Gulf War.  His instant, almost photographic recall of names, dates and places, made him a natural-born weapons inspector.  It was Spertzel who made the connection that eluded American analysts and allowed UNSCOM to identify Al Hakam, a supposed animal feed factory, as Iraq’s most important germ production facility.

Andy Weber helped arrange and lead an unprecedented American mission in 1995 to a formerly closed Soviet germ weapons production, test and storage site in Kazakhstan.  Over the next several years, as a Pentagon official, he uncovered numerous attempts by Iran to court Russia’s best biologists.  Weber worked with allies at the Departments of State, and Energy, the intelligence agencies and the Pentagon, to persuade skeptics in the Clinton administration to increase money for scientific collaborations with Russian scientists.  Senior officials, however, were more preoccupied with the possibility of “loose nukes: than the possibility of “loose bugs.”