Clouded By A Fear Of Bioterrorism

Experts say a chemical attack in the U.S. is a matter of "not if but when." After a series of hoaxes, some ask: How real is the threat?

by Steve Goldstein, Inquirer Washington Bureau

Philadelphia Inquirer

November 14, 1999

WASHINGTON - Nearly five years ago, the apocalyptic cult Aum Shinrikyo released sarin gas into the Tokyo subway system, killing a dozen people and sickening hundreds.

Aum also released something else, with far greater impact - the specter of terrorists using chemical or biological weapons to murder thousands of people.

Since the Tokyo crisis, there have been no mass attacks using unconventional weapons in the United States or against Americans abroad. Nevertheless, there has been a mushrooming of concern about bioterrorism in government circles - complete with commissions, congressional hearings, and a thriving herd of consultants and defense contractors grazing on an expanding antiterrorism budget.

Terrorism is now a growth industry. The possibility of a chemical or bioterrorism attack is increasingly defined as "not if but when."

As threat fever has soared, so has the number of consultants, experts, institutes and defense contractors involved in chemical- and biological-warfare issues. Defense Week magazine staged a two-day conference-cum-trade show called "WMD [Weapons of Mass Destruction] and Domestic Preparedness III" last week in Washington. The registration fee was $895 for the more than 150 attendees.

The number of agents that the FBI assigns to counterterrorism has nearly tripled from 550 in 1993 to almost 1,400 today. President Clinton submitted a budget of $10 billion for 2000 to fight terrorism; that's up from $6.5 billion in 1998. About $5 billion of that is to go to agencies dealing directly with national security.

A recent General Accounting Office report noted that all of this is happening even though the government has not issued a single assessment of the actual threat to the nation.

The so-called Deutch Commission (named for a former CIA director) tried to unravel the Gordian knot of more than 90 agencies that can claim some jurisdiction over the threat. None of its recommendations, delivered in July, has been acted upon.

The deadly scenarios seem endless. Most recently, when the cause of a deadly mosquito-borne encephalitis was laid to the West Nile virus in crows, a national magazine reported that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein may have been looking for ways to use the virus as a weapon.

Hoaxes involving hard-to-see biological agents are increasing exponentially. The FBI has investigated nearly 150 threats involving anthrax this year alone from among more than 247 cases involving biological, chemical or nuclear weapons. As recently as 1996, the FBI investigated 37 such cases.

Lisa Gordon-Hagerty, director of weapons of mass destruction preparedness for the National Security Council, espouses the ounce-of-prevention, pound-of-cure theory, arguing that because of a real threat of attack, federal and local governments must take defensive and remedial action.

Brad Roberts of the Institute for Defense Analyses, who consults with military and civilian agencies on chem-bio warfare, is also bullish on the threat. Yet he concedes that "there's some overcompensation going on now."

Said Jeff Simon, head of Political Risk Assessment, a security-consulting firm: "When there's so much money being poured around, every entity wants a piece of it, every government agency, every business, every consultant. It's almost like a runaway train - with no clear direction."

"The hype, I think, was necessary to get our attention," said David R. Franz, former head of the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases. "But we have to be careful to deal with facts rather than hype, or we will be expending unnecessary resources."

The facts suggest that attacks are not imminent, but many studies of terrorist activities have stressed how vulnerable America is and how much damage could be inflicted - rather than the actual likelihood of an attack.

"The level of uncertainty is so extraordinarily high that the so-called experts are being called upon to exercise powers of prophecy," said Brian M. Jenkins of the Rand Corp., who has studied terrorism for nearly 30 years.

"Anything beyond five to 10 years is beyond analysis; you're in the realm of speculation and entertainment."

Some attempts are being made to slow the train.

At a recent hearing of a House national security subcommittee, a senior official of the watchdog General Accounting Office said terrorists in most cases "would have to overcome significant technical and operational challenges" to use chemical and biological agents to kill or injure large numbers of people - without substantial assistance from a rogue state.

"I don't know if [the hype] has gotten out of control, but the agencies until now have been tasked to look at consequences rather than risk," said Milton Leitenberg of the Center for International and Security Studies at the University of Maryland.

Leitenberg has tried for years to temper fears of large-scale chemical and biological attacks. He has publicly taken Defense Secretary William S. Cohen to task for predicting the use of weapons of mass destruction by nations or terrorist groups.

Leitenberg and other critics were particularly appalled by Cohen's appearance on a Sunday talk show in 1997, when he held up a five-pound bag of sugar and said that a similar amount of anthrax released in the air over the nation's capital would kill half the city's population, about 300,000 people. A few months later, four government anthrax experts said Cohen had exaggerated the fatality rate by 100 times.

In an extraordinary five-part series called "Biowar" aired in early October on ABC's Nightline, "terrorists" smashed glass bottles containing anthrax spores in a city subway. While illustrating the susceptibility of the U.S. health-care infrastructure to such an attack, the series was otherwise riddled with "misleading scenes" showing efforts to contain the attack, said bioterrorism expert Donald A. Henderson of the Johns Hopkins Center for Civilian Biodefense Studies.

Henderson called for "careful media coverage of this easily sensationalized topic."

Sensational presentations of the subject may be at least partly responsible for an epidemic of hoaxes.

Anthrax in powdered form looks benign and is highly fatal, and unlike a chemical agent, its effects are not immediately apparent - so the target does not know that it is a fake. Authorities have no choice but to respond with significant costs in time and money.

"We were poised to believe that this is terrorism; we're on a hair trigger," Bruce Hoffman of the Rand Corp. said of anthrax hoaxes.

He has concluded that the vast majority of terrorists still prefer the relatively "modest success" of using conventional weapons.

"People see you can make these threats and they are hard to track down," said John Parachini of the Monterey Institute of International Studies in California.

Only the Aum attack involved weapons of mass destruction. The lone bacterial attack in America was in 1984, when the Rajneesh cult used salmonella, a nonlethal bacterial agent, to poison a salad bar in The Dalles, Ore., sickening 700 people.

Most experts say terrorists still prefer guns and bombs.

"The thing we need to fear most in the near term is a truck bomb," said Robert Blitzer, who until last year headed the FBI's counterterrorism unit.

A Rand Corp. terrorism database details about 10,000 incidents in the last 30 years, but only a small percentage involved such unconventional weapons as biological and chemical agents.

"We haven't gotten to the point where we are panicking where there is no threat, but we have a political environment where we are trying to address the threat and people are exploiting this climate," Blitzer said.

Most of those who have studied the uses of such weapons say more caution is needed in developing a comprehensive national strategy.

"The more government money that is poured into this area, the more difficult it is to have interagency cooperation and planning," Franz said.

At bio-chem terrorism conferences, Jenkins said, "it is not accepted to be agnostic; you have to be on board, be a believer."

Leitenberg - who says he has been contacted by TV journalists to talk about the subject only to have his appearances canceled once it becomes obvious that he is not hyping the threat - says the unqualified predictions of many so-called experts are "a stimulant" to possible terrorism.

"These false and hysterical arguments will bring it quicker," he said. "They are telling people how easy it is, and then they say how terrible it will be and how much we fear it.

"They are sucking it out of the woodwork," he said, grimly.