Germ warfare
Confronting a real and present danger
Bruce Emond, Jakarta, The Jakarta Post
Germs: Biological Weapons and America's Secret War, By Judith Miller, Stephen Engleberg and William Broad Simon & Schuster, New York 2001, 382 pp, Rp 324,000
It's publication is a perfect coincidence, but this book would have been a riveting read even without the escalation of recent events. Meticulously researched over three years by a trio of respected journalists, it is fast-paced, intriguing and layman friendly, putting in plain and simple terms the threat -- now a sobering reality -- of bioterrorism.
There is an almost novelistic feel to the story even though it is pure nonfiction. It is blessed with an engaging cast of characters, from dedicated scientists, toiling away in remote laboratories of the United States and the then Soviet Union to cook up the next powerful cocktail of germs, to the bioterrorism sleuths trying to piece together the puzzle of which rogue states and crackpot groups are bent on sowing death and destruction.
Of course, the Sept. 11 attacks and now the anthrax cases in the United States put the work in an entirely new and even more frightening light. There is an inexorable, sobering foreboding, tinged with a growing realization that a global giant has been caught napping, as the story of germ warfare unfolds.
Miller, a correspondent for the New York Times for the past 25 years, sticks to the basic tenet of good journalism in getting the reader hooked from the opening sentences. She could not have wished for a juicier villain than Ma Anand Puja, real name Diane Ivonne Onang, a Filipino-American nurse who headed the "medical" program for Rajneeshees, a bizarre cult which had established a huge base in a corner of rural Oregon.
The Rajneeshees, headed by Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, wanted things their way when they moved to the U.S. state in the early 1980s, building a "Buddhafield" where "they could celebrate their 'enlightened master's' credo of beauty, love and guiltless sex". When the locals did not take too kindly to the often aggressive behavior of the new residents, Ma/Diane set to work.
She brought in homeless people from other areas to pad up voter numbers (she kept the mentally ill on a course of sedatives to keep them pliant) and then devised a plan to poison the local community. It was staggering in both its simplicity and ingenuity. In the compound's sophisticated laboratories, she developed a particularly nasty strain of salmonella, which the followers then spread around town by putting it into buffet salad dressings and creamer shakers.
More than 700 locals became violently ill although, fortunately, no one died before the scheme was exposed a year later by the Bhagwan Shree. Yet, the act of bioterrorism, considered probably the largest in U.S. history, caused a much greater toll in the paranoia which overtook the community. Frightened people attacked doctors and medical staff in their frustration at not knowing what was ailing them, and nearly all of the restaurants in town were shut down for good.
The U.S. authorities, fearful of copycat crime, hushed up the incident and it was not written about in a public journal until the mid-1990s. But putting blinkers on and hoping against hope that the worst will not happen is no strategy in dealing with germ warfare.
It has been around for centuries, from British soldiers giving hostile Native American tribes blankets sown with smallpox during the French and Indian War in the 18th century.
Although the U.S. biological weapon program began in the early part of World War II, it was never used in the conflict, with the reliance on bombs and bullets holding out. But Miller writes that the U.S. military was "fascinated" by the Japanese Army's carefully detailed records of germ warfare during the war, including spreading anthrax, typhoid and plague in Manchurian towns and cities, infecting healthy prisoners of war with pathogens and dissecting them alive.
The Americans realized biological warfare provided "a weapon of mass destruction whose costs were so low compared with those for chemical arms and the atom bomb, recently invented". As the Cold War began and intensified in the 1950s, the search for new, more virulent strains of bacteria and viruses, from anthrax to smallpox to rare denizens of the tropics, also began in earnest.
Washington considered using germ warfare at least twice during the 1960s, Miller writes, once against Fidel Castro's Cuba (a trio of debilitating agents) and during the Vietnam War (smallpox). Both plans were shelved, the latter because of the potential danger to U.S. troops and Vietnamese civilians.
Even after the signing of the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention, which declared germ warfare "repugnant to the conscience of mankind", the experiments continued in both the U.S. and the Soviet Union, based on a loophole for "preventive" tests.
Still, Miller notes, many in the upper echelons of the U.S. military did not take the threat seriously, despite warning signs of a real and present danger emerging in the 1980s and 1990s.
The crumbling of the Soviet bloc exposed its huge arsenal of germ weapons; one facility had produced enough anthrax to kill the entire U.S. population and Soviet scientists had developed a hardier form of plague. The U.S. was caught off guard once again with the Gulf War amid fears (later confirmed by UN inspectors) that Baghdad had developed biological weapons, including anthrax and the botulinum toxin. The inadequate U.S. stock of anthrax vaccine, with dubious soundness, was supplied by a dilapidated facility and the botulinum antitoxin, made from the blood of horses, was left up to one lone animal in the U.S. Army.
The Oklahoma bombing and the Aum Shinrikyo sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway highlighted the vulnerability of countries to terrorist acts launched by extremist groups. They also showed that the groups were attuned to the potential of bioterrorism, with Aum having tried unsuccessfully to develop biological weapons.
The lobby for more attention, including funding for research, to the issue gained an ally in Bill Clinton, who was fascinated by the possibility of a bilogical attack. However, it continued to meet resistance from the military's old guard and there was the unsettling question of the mysterious "Gulf War Syndrome", which some felt might be tied to the use of the anthrax vaccine during the conflict.
In a conclusion which now reads like an ominous forewarning, Miller says the threat of germ weapons is both real and exaggerated, and that some senior officials "overstated the danger of biological attack, harming their cause with hyperbole". Still, the danger is "real and rising", not least because thousands of scientists from the former Soviet Union and those who were involved in South Africa's staggering Project Coast, in which chocolates were laced with anthrax and beer with botulinum to attack apartheid foes, are left unemployed.
Miller notes that a warning about the need to prepare for germ attacks made by then U.S. first secretary of defense James Forrestal in 1949 still rings true more than a half century later. "We remain woefully unprepared for a calamity that would be unlike any this country has ever experienced," is the author's final message. Unfortunately, the dire prophecy may be coming true sooner than expected.