It took years of dogged persistence and the accretion of many facts to get Iraq to fess up to its bioweapons program. The final tally was grim: Iraq had filled hundreds of bombs and missiles with anthrax and other agents. It had experimented with camelpox, a benign bug in its own right but more likely a stand-in for the much more worrisome smallpox virus. And it had begun to make small amounts of anthrax powder. Even so, inspectors left Baghdad in 1998 for the last time with the nagging feeling that they had never really gotten to the bottom of Iraq’s program. Its true arsenal of bioweapons, they suspect, had been many times larger than officials had admitted–in the production of anthrax, perhaps four times larger. And they had never confirmed the destruction of even Iraq’s declared arsenal. According to Ray Zalinskas, a former inspector now at the Monterey Institute for International Studies in California, the Iraqis could have reconstituted their bioweapons program in a mere six months.
Three years later a powdery, fluffy and extremely deadly form of anthrax arrives via the U.S. mails to Sen. Tom Daschle’s office in Washington, D.C. Where does it come from? Senior White House officials say they don’t know. The most widely accepted theory, put forth by the FBI, is that the source is domestic. As the White House said last week, that would have to be somebody with a Ph.D. in microbiology and access to a sophisticated lab (a disgruntled scientist from the U.S. bioweapons labs, perhaps?). To some experts, however, the homegrown theory has never rung true. “The domestic scenario is bull—-,” says Richard Spertzel, formerly a U.N. inspector in Iraq and a U.S. bioweapons expert. If the attacks are the work of Al Qaeda terrorists, they would have to be making anthrax themselves or getting it from somebody else. Spertzel and Bill Patrick, a leader in the U.S. bioweapons program from 1951 to 1986, believe Iraq is the leading candidate as sponsor of the anthrax attacks.
Perhaps Spertzel and Patrick have a festering need to settle old scores with Dr. Germ and her cohorts. Perhaps it’s a professional bias, a natural tendency to emphasize the things they know (Iraq) at the expense of things they don’t. Perhaps it’s just plain correct. It’s certainly plausible. How much anthrax powder did each of those letters contain? Perhaps a tablespoon. How much does Saddam Hussein have at his disposal? Enough for a mass mailing from hell. Last week speculation over Iraqi involvement got a boost from the U.S. Army’s Fort Detrick laboratory in Frederick, Maryland. A scientist at the lab told Patrick that he had seen brown markings in the anthrax indicative of bentonite, a type of clay. Since U.N. inspectors found bags of bentonite in Iraq’s Al Hakam facility, the finding points to Iraq as the source of the anthrax. Later in the week a White House spokesman said that follow-up tests failed to find bentonite and adamantly denied an Iraqi connection. The Fort Detrick scientists won’t comment, but Patrick remains convinced that those brown markings, if indeed present in the anthrax, would implicate Iraq.
The question of bentonite speaks to the key characteristic that makes the anthrax spores found in the letter attacks so dangerous: their ability to hang for a relatively long time in the air, drifting around on minute currents of wind. To understand what bentonite has to do with this so-called aerosol form of anthrax requires a brief foray into the intricacies of bioweapons production.
Making anthrax into a weapon is a bit like making wine. The process is both elaborate and subtle. Anthrax, as it exists in nature, varies widely in virulence, so you have to select a particularly virulent strain. Then you have to brew the bacteria in a fermenter until it produces a dark slurry, which then has to be concentrated at least tenfold. Iraq incorporated such a slurry into bombs and missiles, and Dr. Germ had also experimented with nozzles that would spray a fine mist from a helicopter or drone aircraft. Spraying a crowd in this way would cause some deaths but probably not many. To kill lots of people, what you want is an aerosol.
The ability to “aerosolize” anthrax was the big breakthrough that Patrick achieved at Fort Detrick, and for which he holds several secret patents. The exact techniques are still secret, but one of them involves spray-drying the slurry–shooting it out through nozzles so that it makes a fine mist, which dries into fine particles. (This spraying is done inside evenly heated coffin-shape boxes, several of which were found in Iraq.) It’s a tricky step. The particles have to be small enough to be breathed into the lungs, but not so small they’re exhaled right out again–between 1 and 10 microns (millionths of a meter) is about right. And the particles can’t cling to one another, which means they have to have no electrostatic charge.
In the 1990s the Iraqis had only begun to learn this art. When U.N. inspectors examined the fermentation tanks at the Al Hakam plant, which Taha claimed were used for making pesticides, they indeed found traces of Bacillus thuringiensis. But DNA tests showed that the bacteria had been re-engineered so that it wouldn’t produce the pesticide toxins. So what was the point? The mystery was solved when Spertzel’s team examined sprayer nozzles at Al Hakam and found that they were designed to produce a mist of particles far too fine for a pesticide, but just right for an anthrax aerosol. Spertzel concluded that the Bt, a close cousin of Bacillus anthracis, was being produced merely to test production processes for anthrax. Sacks of bentonite, also found at the site, apparently were a key ingredient in the drying process. When added to the concentrated anthrax slurry, bentonite helps increase its density, much like adding flour to batter, and neutralizes static charge. This gives the slurry the right consistency so that when sprayed it forms the proper mist.
The debate over bentonite may be a red herring. Finding it wouldn’t constitute proof of Iraqi involvement. Bentonite isn’t found naturally in Iraq–Taha and company had to import it–but elsewhere it’s commonplace. Although Iraq is the only country known to use bentonite in bioweapons, it’s possible that some other state program uses it. By the same token, a lack of bentonite wouldn’t necessarily exonerate the Iraqis; they may have turned to another additive, such as silica, to make their deadly aerosol. The most important fact remains that Saddam Hussein is by now likely in command of a formidable bioweapons arsenal. The U.N. reported that Iraq had tested at least seven biological agents for use against humans. By its own admission, Iraq produced about 8,500 liters of concentrated liquid anthrax. A single milliliter of this brew contained roughly 1 billion deadly anthrax spores, which means the number of doses Iraq produced all told is impossible to imagine. Then there were 19,400 liters of botulinum toxin and 340 liters of Clostridium perfringens spores, which can cause potentially fatal gastrointestinal illnesses. All three agents were incorporated into aerial bombs and modified Scud missiles. Inspectors also found that Iraq had imported 40 tons of a bacterial-growth medium, half of which was never accounted for. And although inspectors destroyed Al Hakam and a handful of other facilities in the 1990s, Iraq still had 80 biological institutes that could easily have been converted to bioweapons facilities.
By all accounts Iraq has been able to keep its scientific teams intact. “They were very highly educated, exceptional engineers. They had a lot of theoretical knowledge,” says Tim McCarthy, a former inspector now at the Monterey Institute. And then there’s the vast talent pool from the former Soviet Union, whose bioweapons capability was miles ahead of anything the Iraqis ever did. Biopreparat, as the Soviet program was called, had engineered antibiotic-resistant strains of anthrax. And it had perfected a “vacuum drum drying” method of producing anthrax powder that was staggeringly efficient–the program at its height churned out 4,500 metric tons a year, compared with the U.S. program’s puny 1 metric ton per year, according to Patrick. What happened to all that anthrax is anybody’s guess. In the past few years the United States has spent $3 billion to secure Soviet weapons of mass destruction and keep weapons experts gainfully occupied, but only $40 million has gone toward the bioweapons program, says Amy Smithson, a bioweapons expert at the Henry L. Stimson Center in Washington. She estimates that more than 7,000 Soviet experts have the know-how to run a clandestine bioweapons facility for any country willing to pay them. It’s hard to believe that at least some of them aren’t working for Al Qaeda or Iraq. “If so,” says Patrick, “the capability of the Iraqis has gone up monstrously.”
For the moment, it may be politically expedient for the U.S. government to ignore the Iraqi connection. There’s certainly no ironclad case. Saddam Hussein may turn out to have nothing to do with the anthrax sent through the U.S. mails. But he’s got to be pleased at the terror it has spread. And he is surely taking notes on the potential for future biological-warfare attacks.
