The Story (19 page)

There were rumors that the Soviets had even tested smallpox here on Voz Island.
Uzbek and Kazakh officials had often complained about having been the Soviet Union's nuclear and biological dumping ground. Voz Island's sad history was emblematic of Moscow's disdain for the citizens of the Muslim “stans.”

In the spring of 1988, as President Mikhail Gorbachev had grown ever more nervous that evidence of the illicit germ weapons program that he had approved and doubled in size might be uncovered, Russian germ scientists had been ordered to dispose of the evidence. But where could hundreds of tons of dried anthrax be buried? Moscow had selected Voz, over a thousand miles away from Sverdlovsk, where much of the anthrax had been made, and Zima, near Irkutsk, where it was stored.

Working in haste and total secrecy, scientists had transferred tons of the germs into stainless-steel canisters that were loaded onto a train two dozen cars long and sent on a long journey to Voz. At the edge of the test range, Soviet soldiers had poured bleach into the canisters to decontaminate the deadly pink powder, dug huge pits, and poured the sludge into the ground, burying the decontaminated spores, and so, Moscow hoped, a serious political embarrassment.

Andy Weber's team, which had dug up some of the anthrax and sent it back to America for testing, had discovered that some of the hardy little spores were still alive. Tests of soil samples from six of the eleven burial pits showed that although the spores had been soaked in bleach at least twice and buried for almost a decade under three to five feet of sand, some remained potentially deadly. But the tests had also shown that the anthrax vaccine being given American military personnel was effective against the strain found on Voz.

The discovery had further alarmed Kazakh and Uzbek officials. Because the Aral Sea was shrinking, officials feared that the spores might escape their sandy tomb and be carried to the mainland by lizards like the one I had seen, rodents, and birds. American officials feared that as access to the island became easier, the buried anthrax could also be dug up by terrorists. Doctors Without Borders told me that people in the Uzbek and Kazakh regions near testing areas like Voz were chronically ill. In desperation, Uzbek and Kazakh officials had turned to Weber and the Americans for help in cleaning up the biological debris.

En route back to the chopper, I stopped at the northern part of the site. Less than a mile from the lab stood the three-story barracks, homes, kindergarten, and cafeteria that Russian scientists and their families had used—about a thousand people in all. I took pictures of the children's playground with its swings and a jungle gym—an eerie reminder of those who had once called this forbidding place home. Gennady Lepyoshkin had told me that most of the children who lived here had not been vaccinated against the agents that were tested just a few miles downwind. They hadn't tested unless the wind was blowing south, away from their living quarters, he told me.

Lepyoshkin spoke almost nostalgically of his weeks here in the mid-1980s, testing Stepnogorsk's “products.” The watercolors he had painted when he was not working with deadly microbes, playing volleyball, or drinking vodka still hung on the walls of his small flat in Stepnogorsk. The island was smaller and more beautiful then, he told me. From his bedroom, you could see the sea.

As I thought about Voz Island, I concluded that Ronald Reagan had been right about at least one thing: there was only one word to describe the systematic creation of disease by the ton—
evil.

Moscow had turned science on its head. While most scientists struggled to cure the sick and defeat disease, the Soviets had secretly spent billions creating and mobilizing disease for war. The Soviets had harnessed their best brains, virtually unlimited resources, and Russian science to the mass production of epidemics.

Weber and officials like him were promoting programs to understand what Moscow had achieved. Such programs were essential to understanding the Soviet program and how to protect Americans against such pathogens, he argued persuasively, despite the risks. And America, if necessary, might be justified in using force to stop nations such as Iran and Iraq, or rogue groups like Al Qaeda, Hamas, and Hezbollah, from acquiring similar capabilities.

The United States faced new WMD-based threats, especially twenty-first-century bioweapons that most Americans knew little about. Saddam, I recalled, had continued lying about his germ weapons activities long after he had closed down his nuclear program. And as the Soviet Union was collapsing, its scientists were still struggling to weaponize Marburg and Ebola viruses—which had no proven vaccines or antidotes. Ken Alibek and other defectors had warned us that Russian scientists were still conducting secret work in labs to create new bioweapons, including new “chimera” pathogens that combined several types of microbes. Russia, for instance, had not abandoned its effort to blend the Ebola virus with smallpox, mankind's greatest scourge. If I did nothing else as a journalist, I had to write about what I had learned from the foreign scientists and officials who had helped create the germ threat and those who were committed to stopping it. If I did nothing else.

In the Oval Office on an icy day in January 1999, President Bill Clinton reached out and touched the cast on my leg. He said that he, too, had torn a ligament several years ago. He said it had hurt like hell. Was I in pain?

He won me over at hello.

Having hurt my leg snorkeling over Christmas, I had limped into the White House on crutches alongside Bill Broad to interview the president—the first interview he had given since the Monica Lewinsky scandal a year earlier. We had been trying for months to interview him about the growing threat of biological weapons. His aides had finally, if reluctantly, agreed but insisted that Clinton would address only that issue.

During our interview, Clinton's lawyers were at the Senate defending him at impeachment proceedings. But he seemed relaxed and focused on germ weapons. A fire burned softly in the Oval Office. A portrait of George Washington gazed down at his successor. The room was quiet, tranquil.

Clinton predicted, presciently, that a biological or chemical attack in America in the next few years was “highly likely.” While a chemical attack would be terrible, a germ attack would spread contagion, particularly if
the perpetrators used a pathogen that could not be quickly identified and treated. He said it would be “the gift that keeps on giving.” Bioweapons were cheap, easy to make, and left few fingerprints. They were what kept him awake at night.
¹

Clinton added that even worse would be a terrorist getting his hands on bioweapons, especially someone like Osama bin Laden, who had been accused of masterminding the bombings of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania the previous August, in which 224 people had died, 12 of them Americans. Clinton told us that terrorists were more likely than rogue states to use WMD against Americans. Rogue states were likely to hesitate for fear of retaliation. He asserted that Bin Laden had tried to make chemical weapons and “may have” tried to weaponize germs.

Bill Broad and I looked at each other. We had seen intelligence reports that Bin Laden was recruiting Pakistani scientists to develop such weapons. We would discover only after 9/11 that Al Qaeda had already opened a small lab in Kandahar, Afghanistan, to produce anthrax. Later, experts told me that Al Qaeda's scientists had failed because they had been unable to acquire appropriate “seed cultures” for
Bacillus anthracis
: the starter germs needed to make anthrax. Given more time, they probably would have succeeded.

We were impressed by how much the president knew about unconventional weapons that might fall into terrorist hands and sensed that he would do whatever he thought was necessary to prevent such an attack. Only the month before, he had ordered four days of air strikes against Iraq's missile and suspected WMD sites, Operation Desert Fox, with over a thousand air strikes on some one hundred suspected chemical, germ, and missile sites. Clinton would later write in
My Life
that his national security team was “unanimous in the belief that we should hit Saddam . . . to minimize the chances that Iraq could disperse its forces and protect its biological and chemical stocks.”
²

The political backlash against Clinton's preventive campaign was fierce. Senior Republicans insisted that Clinton had attacked to delay the House vote on impeachment: Desert Fox was
Wag the Dog
.
³
White House reporters called it “Monica's war.”

Bill and I tended to believe Clinton. We had already spent a year investigating Iraq's efforts to hide its germ weapons programs. By the time of the December attacks, Iraq had spurned many attempts by Washington and UNSCOM to close the WMD file. Washington had tried almost every foreign policy tool to counter Saddam's aggression and secrecy: engagement, diplomatic isolation, inspections, sanctions, travel bans, trade embargoes, no-fly zones. Nothing had made Saddam honor his pledges. Baghdad was still denying UNSCOM information about its WMD efforts. Saddam's thugs were also harassing and threatening the agency's inspectors. Only after the UN inspectors had caught Iraqi officials in a series of lies had Baghdad admitted to having loaded botulinum toxin into sixteen warheads, anthrax germs into five warheads, and aflatoxin (which causes liver cancer) into four warheads. Baghdad had also belatedly acknowledged having filled 157 aerial bombs with the same deadly agents and having conducted research on tricothecene mycotoxins (which cause nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea), wheat cover smut (which ruins food grains), agents that cause hemorrhagic conjunctivitis (which causes extreme pain and temporary blindness), rotavirus (which causes acute diarrhea that can lead to death), and camel pox (a version of smallpox). The UN inspectors said that Iraq, belligerent and uncooperative, had accounted for only 25 of those 157 germ bombs and offered no convincing evidence that even those 25 had been destroyed.

The inspectors came from many different countries, not all of them friendly to the United States. If Saddam wasn't protecting WMD stockpiles or ongoing programs, why would he reject full inspections?

As Desert Fox got under way in December 1998, Bill and I wrote an article that, in effect, defended Clinton by explaining why most arms control experts doubted Baghdad's claims. Our story quoted anonymous UN inspectors who told us they suspected that Saddam might be hiding two to five times more deadly germ agents than Iraq had admitting making, plus the warheads to deliver them.
⁴
In his speech to the nation, Clinton said that he had ordered the raids solely “to help contain Saddam's WMD.” While he had not been “eager” to use force, he asserted, he would not hesitate to do so to protect America's “vital interests.”

Clinton's December strike was the second time in a year that he had acted against what he believed to be a WMD threat. On August 20, 1998, thirteen days after Al Qaeda destroyed American embassies in Africa, he authorized cruise missile strikes not only against Bin Laden's camps in Afghanistan but also against the Al Shifa pharmaceutical company in Khartoum. The plant was run by a government entity in which Bin Laden had invested. Based on information that the intelligence agencies had gleaned from highly sensitive sources and methods—both human and electronic, I was told, but asked initially not to print—administration officials believed that the plant was trying to make ingredients of VX, the deadly nerve agent, for Al Qaeda. Critics pounded Clinton for the Sudan strike—arguing that the evidence of illicit chemical weapons activity at that particular plant was contradictory. Having interviewed Sudan's militant Islamist ruler Omar al-Bashir, who boasted about his warm ties to Bin Laden, whom he was hosting, I believed Clinton and my sources on his National Security Council. Soon after the strike, I coauthored a front-page story reporting that intelligence officials had concluded that senior Iraqi scientists were helping the Sudanese try to produce VX ingredients at the plant.
⁵
But the controversy over the accuracy of the intelligence and Clinton's motives persisted.

After Clinton's 1998 missile strikes, Russia, China, and France, all of which did considerable business with Iraq, succeeded in disbanding UNSCOM and replacing it with a weaker UN inspection agency
⁶
known as UNMOVIC (United Nations Monitoring, Verification, and Inspection Commission). Sensing that the Lewinsky scandal had weakened Clinton at home, Saddam turned what should have been a military defeat into a political victory. “What is an intern?” Tariq Aziz, Saddam's foreign minister, asked Charles Duelfer, UNSCOM's deputy director, during a visit to Baghdad in early 1998 as the scandal was unfolding, incredulous that a president's dalliances with a young woman could have so disrupted American foreign policy.

By 1999, national security officials in Washington recognized the threat from Osama bin Laden. But that was not true three years earlier when I returned
to the
Times
from an eighteen-month leave of absence to write
God Has Ninety-nine Names
, a report of the growth of militant Islamist movements. Published in early 1996, the book contained a single paragraph about the young Saudi who had financed the Afghan rebels and other radical Islamist causes. A 1997 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on terrorism, the last of the intelligence community's secret and most authoritative assessments of the terror threat distributed before 9/11, mentioned Bin Laden only briefly.

Joe Lelyveld, the paper's executive editor, had assigned me to unpromising investigative work on the culture desk in 1996 after my book leave. This was not my first or even second choice. In a memo to Lelyveld and Dean Baquet, then the national editor and now the paper's executive editor, I had proposed creating a beat to cover what I called the “new national security threats” which defied the paper's traditional beats and postings—cyberterrorism, bioengineering, the theft of American intellectual property, assaults on “critical infrastructure,” and the proliferation of “weapons of mass destruction.” “While we have reporters who cover the State Department, the Pentagon, or the FBI, and the CDC in Atlanta,” I wrote, no one was responsible for systematically covering such technologically based unconventional threats to national security “not from a particular building or place but as a theme.” Nor had we written consistently about “the civil liberties challenges inherent in many of the new projects aimed at protecting Americans from such threats.” I never heard from either senior editor. Steve Engelberg, who had recently been appointed investigations editor, knew that I missed covering national security and was irrepressibly competitive. He was helping supervise a team of reporters who were tracking the explosion and crash of TWA Flight 800 off the coast of Long Island in which 230 people died. Many reporters and even senior editors believed that terrorism was to blame. Steve persuaded Joe to let me help Jeff Gerth, who was still in the Washington bureau, write a broader story on terrorism.