Spectator's Journal / Saddam's Germs
Adams, James Ring & Mylroie, Laurie
Saddam's Germs by Laurie Mylroie and James. Ring Adams This man's purpose is lawless, lawless are the plans in his mind; for his thought is only to destroy and to wipe out nation after nation....
...There are no written orders or other documents detailing its alleged destruction, and it's unlikely that anyone in Iraq would eliminate one of Saddam's most lethal weapons on the basis of an oral command...
...Botulinum doesn't have a long shelf life...
...Iraq mastered the difficult task of producing just the right size of anthrax spores...
...That stockpile has probably perished, but Iraq may have cooked up a new batch...
...A terrorist attack could spread devastation on the cheap and still be deniable...
...That evening The American Spectator November 1995 61 Saddam changed his defense ministers, replacing his brutal cousin Ali Hassan al-Majid with a professional soldier, General Sultan Ahmed, who led the Iraqi delegation to the Gulf war ceasefire talks...
...Independent confirmation of this recently came from another defector, General Wafiq Samarrai, chief of Iraqi military intelligence during the war...
...When the Reagan administration accused the Soviets and their proxies of using this new bioweapon in Laos and Afghanistan, left-leaning scientists and their friends at the New York Times raised howls of derision...
...The Saudis and their smaller allies in the Gulf Cooperation Council have been even more outspoken...
...The U.S...
...It has to be considered a minor miracle of the Gulf war that they weren't exploded accidentally, either by local command or allied bombing...
...If the particles are too large, more than one five-thousandth of an inch, they aren't absorbed by the respiratory system and so cause little harm...
...But if Western intelligence and active teams of U.N...
...This program eventually branched out to work on aflatoxin, a mycotoxin found naturally in corn and peanuts that attacks the lungs and liver...
...The next month Iraq formally recognized Kuwait, after a massive U.S...
...They were taken to airfields on December 23...
...International monitoring and export controls would have no handle on the situation...
...A people on the verge of death can spread death to all...
...But the virus program was only one of three in Iraq's search for bioweapons...
...But the intrigues after the August defection revealed a more serious threat...
...We still don't know, of course, what Hussein had in mind...
...and the former Soviet Union imposed on their unconventional arsenals...
...He now admits to starting a crash program in 1985 to make them in /rag...
...Iraq built and tested anthrax bombs delivered by airplane...
...Isaiah 10:7 A motorcade sped all the night through the stony, silent waste of northeast Jordan in early August, bringing the West more bad news than it knows how to handle...
...In their aftermath, the U.S...
...deployment thwarted its planned invasion and Baghdad came to believe that the sanctions would ease significantly...
...The others—botulinum and anthrax, the stars of its bacterial program—worked...
...For more than a decade Hussein Kamil organized Iraq's quest for every weapon of terror known to modern warfare...
...Strong American retaliation is by no means a sure thing...
...Would Saddam use these weapons...
...The sanctions remained in place...
...Robert Kupperman, a former chief scientist at the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, estimated that a boat spraying anthrax while circling Manhattan could kill as many as 400,000 people...
...The answer is we can't...
...Even after the war, Iraq managed to conceal one of the largest biological warfare programs in the world, a massive effort that explored a far wider range of horrors, and stored up a far larger array of weapons, than anyone in the West had ever imagined...
...ambassador to the U.N., told the Senate this August,botulinum toxin is 100,000 times more toxic than sarin, the poison gas used in the Tokyo subway attack last March...
...This lends plausibility to Iraq's claim that it never took its viral research to the production stage...
...Less resolute men than they are currently in charge...
...UNSCOM doubts that the stockpile is gone, and suspects that Iraq was working on the program well after the end of the war...
...Once Iraq masters fundamental lab techniques and builds up its microbial zoo of death, it can replenish its stock largely with its own resources...
...Ekeus is the chairman of the U.N...
...UNSCOM received videotapes of the tests, in which all animals within 250 meters of ground zero were killed...
...The leader of this group of family members and aides was Hussein Kamil Hassan al-Majid, the son-in-law and cousin of Saddam Hussein...
...Ekeus was shocked by the lax controls...
...Iraq actually deployed them during the Gulf war...
...And we are not talking here about the germ and other bombs...
...The arsenal included fifty R-400 bombs and warheads for ten al-Husayn missiles filled with anthrax, and 100 R-400 bombs and fifteen warheads with botulinum...
...increased its forces in the region...
...1 raq now claims that it destroyed all its biological weapons in the summer of 1991...
...And doses of a millionth of a gram of anthrax are fatal, within five to seven days, nearly 100 percent of the time...
...Abandoning its customary blandness, the group on September 19 expressed fear that the biological weapons "can spread epidemics and seriously harm Iraq itself, and the Arab region as a whole, to such an extent that no one can foresee at the present...
...If only a small amount survived, Baghdad could quickly re-grow large quantities...
...King Hussein of Jordan now calls him "the most dangerous man in the Middle East...
...Even before the August defection, Iraq admitted producing more than 500,000 liters of botulinum and anthrax at its Al Hakam facility, mathematically more than enough to end human life on earth...
...This program was Iraq's real prize, and it has tried to hold on to it as long as possible, while Laurie Mylroie, a senior associate at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, has just completed a book on Saddam Hussein, tentatively titled Study of Revenge...
...Continuing to press it into a corner, a corner of hunger, disease, humiliation, and internal subversion . . . could lead it to resort to the option of bringing down the temple on everyone...
...As the Tokyo subway attack demonstrated this spring, you don't need bombs and missiles to stage a chemical or biological attack...
...Special Commission on Iraq (UNSCOM), which oversees Saddam's compliance with Security Council orders to destroy his "weapons of mass destruction...
...Iraq found its viruses disappointing, however...
...Mycotoxin authority Chester Mirocha, professor of plant pathology at the University of Minnesota, says that for Iraq to grow that quantity of aflatoxin, they must have a large-scale culturing facility...
...The administration should heed these alarms, rather than take the shortsighted view that they would insure the indefinite continuation of the sanctions against Iraq...
...The Clinton administration seemed inclined to go along, until Republican pressure forced it to announce that, for the first time, the U.S...
...I am a Baptist," Clinton said...
...I believe in death-bed conversions...
...In the case of biological agents, terrorists may even be more effective...
...Bill Richardson (D-N.M...
...But Saddam took it seriously...
...James Ring Adams is an American Spectator investigative writer...
...Although Iraq had previously revealed some of its anthrax production, and rumors had spread about the viral work, no one suspected that there was a third full-size program centered on mycotoxins...
...sacrificing its chemical warheads and ballistic missiles to the inspection teams...
...A s just one sample of Iraq's ambitions, Ekeus revealed that Saddam's scientists were trying to make a weapon using the Ebola virus or something very similar...
...Even a large-scale destruction ofthe stockpile would be next to meaningless...
...His October report is said to be a shocker...
...The most dramatic threat of all ran on October 12 in Al-Quds al-Arabi, an Arabic language paper in London funded by Baghdad: True, Iraqi forces surrendered in their thousands in the second Gulf war and did not inflict huge human losses on the coalition forces...
...Iraqi troops soon began conducting unusual exercises...
...Fear of an American nuclear retaliation may have been one factor that kept Iraq from unleashing its chemical and biological arsenals during the Gulf war...
...Saddam's neighbors certainly take the biological threat seriously...
...A terrorist team can do the job just as effectively...
...He was suspected of using Soviet-supplied mycotoxins, mixed with mustard gas to make them more deadly, against Iran in early 1984...
...Control of the warheads apparently rested in the hands of an air 60 The American Spectator November 1995 force colonel...
...Iraq might even have a shot at using genetic engineering to create the ultimate secret weapon, drug-resistant strains of disease or new diseases altogether...
...In April, the number two official in the Information Ministry said, "Iraq's abandonment of part of its weapons—the long-range missiles and chemical weapons—does not mean that it has lost everything...
...The biological stockpile could still create a disaster of biblical proportions...
...On his trip to Baghdad, Ekeus learned that Iraq had produced twenty aflatoxin bombs and deployed them, along with the anthrax and botulinum, in December 1990—the first time this substance was ever known to be used as a weapon...
...As Madeleine Albright, the U.S...
...At the same time, UNSCOM began to acquire evidence that Iraq had a significant biological weapons program it had not accounted for...
...Desert Storm may have forced Iraq to destroy its chemical weapons stockpile, routinely used in the war against Iran, and abandon its crash atomic bomb program—at least that is the conclusion of the remarkably energetic United Nations inspection effort...
...The cause of a globally publicized epidemic in Zaire earlier this year, Ebola produces a virtual meltdown of internal organs, followed by contagious bleeding from every orifice...
...If the Iraqi regime realizes that the United States is after its head, there is nothing strange about its using all the weapons in its possession—banned or unbanned—to defend itself and inflict the heaviest losses on its enemy...
...But the press campaigns suggest that he may have been thinking the unthinkable—the use of biological weapons...
...Since they are transmitted through the exchange of bodily fluids and not through the air, they proved difficult to turn into a biological warfare agent...
...army tested the possibility decades ago, delivering mock agents in New York's subways and by boat off the California coast...
...But General Samurai, the former military intelligence chief, said Saddam "definitely" would have used them if he had thought his regime was about to collapse...
...inspectors failed to detect these programs until told about them, how can we believe it now...
...the impact of missiles risk destroying the toxins and microbes...
...In his memoirs, Colin Powell records his own hand-wringing before the Gulf war when Defense Secretary Dick Cheney asked him for nuclear strike options against Iraqi forces...
...He brought confirmation that the U.S...
...However, it does not mean that the same thing would happen again...
...General Samarrai, who knows Saddam far better, warns, "Allies must eliminate Iraq's biological weapons before Saddam has a chance to use them...
...Such warningsappeared almost daily from September 27 on...
...That wasn't the only horrifying virus in the program...
...One chemical weapon fired in a moment of despair could cause the death of hundreds of thousands...
...Iraq, it editorialized, "still has options—destructive options...
...During the Gulf war, one Soviet official suggested that Baghdad had a "stock of agents for extremely rare African and Asian diseases that are usually untreatable and lead to death...
...These are poisons produced by microscopic fungi, which became notorious in the early 1980s in the controversy over "Yellow Rain...
...They don't require large-scale imports of precursor chemicals or sophisticated electronics...
...As Iraq grew disappointed, the Baghdad press began to echo its previous threats...
...The caravan of official cars from Baghdad carried the most important defector ever to flee from Saddam Hussein's regime...
...Only once before has Saddam had as his defense minister a competent soldier unrelated to him—from December 1990 to April 1991, the months of Desert Storm...
...monitor, Rolf Ekeus, to Baghdad and gave him truckloads of documents on its top-secret work with the deadliest agents of the microbial world...
...sanctions continued...
...Saddam massed conventional forces near Kuwait, as Iraq's government-controlled press hinted at possible biological attack: "Does America realize that every Iraqi is a missile that can cross to countries and cities...
...If Saddam is trapped and weak, as some policy-makers suggest, his massive biological stockpile still makes him truly dangerous...
...Last fall, a clearly orchestrated Iraqi press campaign threatened just that sort of retaliation if U.N...
...would use its Security Council veto to block any proposal to lift sanctions...
...There were none of the dual key or voice check release mechanisms that both the U.S...
...The properties of the aflatoxin weapon remain unknown, but anthrax can remain potent for twenty-five years...
...Shortly before taking office, the president claimed he was not "obsessed" with Saddam...
...This is the stockpile that worries UNSCOM...
...It concluded that such an attack was feasible and that the casualties could be enormous...
...This man, he says, is a "destroyer...
...In an attempt to blunt the impact of Hussein Kamil's revelations, Saddam's regime summoned its chief U.N...
...and gauge American opinion...
...Biological weapons have a marked advantage over the more attention-grabbing chemical and nuclear programs...
...and our allies still face a final threat from Saddam...
...All previous factors have changed...
...Ekeus learned that Baghdad filled bombs and ballistic missile warheads with biological agents and stationed them at two of its airbases in December 1990...
...The release of two American prisoners on July 16 gave him a chance to meet personally with Rep...
...This Christian charity misreads the Iraqi tyrant's ability to wreak an apocalyptic revenge...
...To be lethal, anthrax should be airborne and absorbed by breathing...
...Not only did Baghdad grow the poison, it learned how to deliver it...
...In mid-June, Al-Quds al-Arabi returned to the theme...
...Saddam soon began to take steps suggesting preparation for military confrontation...
...Then came the August 8 defections...
Vol. 28 • November 1995 • No. 11
