U.S. Bioweapons
Russia's Allegations, a Sordid History, and the Curious Case of the 2001 Anthrax Letters
Less than two weeks after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine,1 the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs announced on March 6, 2022 that the Russian military had uncovered evidence of an “emergency clean-up . . . aimed at eradicating traces of the military-biological programme, in Ukraine, financed by the [U.S. Department of Defense].”
These allegations were immediately dismissed in the West. In an article titled “Fact check: Claim of ‘US biolabs in Ukraine’ is disinformation,” USA Today asserted that the claim that “[t]here are biolabs in Ukraine funded by the U.S. government” was “false.” Relying on U.S. government sources, The New York Times, AP News, Reuters, NPR, the BBC, and other outlets all came to similar conclusions. On March 9, 2022, the State Department stated, “[t]he United States does not own or operate any chemical or biological laboratories in Ukraine,” and that “it [the U.S.] does not develop or possess such [biological] weapons anywhere.”
But is there any truth to Russia’s allegations? While they should not be taken at face value (the claims of any government should not be accepted without evidence), there is at least some publicly available evidence to support them. Indeed, it is strange that the above-mentioned press outlets reflexively rejected even the notion that the U.S. could be funding Ukrainian biolabs (put bioweapons aside for a moment, though we shall shortly return to that topic), when the U.S. Department of Defense’s own website publicly acknowledges that the United States “provides support to 46 peaceful Ukrainian laboratories” and is “proud to collaborate, cooperate, and provide assistance in support of this infrastructure.”
As Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland (who herself is something of a Zelig when it comes to U.S. intervention in Ukraine; here is the leaked transcript of her call with U.S. Ambassador Jeffrey Pyatt in 2014 in which the two handpicked the next government of Ukraine after the successful U.S.-sponsored coup in that country) admitted in testimony before the U.S. Senate on March 8, 2022 that:
Ukraine has biological research facilities which in fact we are now quite concerned Russian troops, Russian forces may be seeking to gain control of.
So, what about bioweapons? That is the Russian Foreign Ministry’s real allegation. As Vladimir Putin himself stated in April 2022, the alleged “network of Western bioweapons labs” was one of the key factors that prompted Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Could there be any truth to Russia’s claim that the U.S. was developing bioweapons there?
To try and answer that question, we will review the history of biological weapons, their use in War, and the U.S.’s role in developing and deploying such weapons in particular.
What are Bioweapons?
Both the U.S. and Russia are signatories to the 1972 Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production and Stockpiling of Bacteriological (Biological) and Toxic Weapons and on their Destruction (the “Biological Weapons Convention”).2
The Biological Weapons Convention prohibits the production or retention of “microbial or other biological agents or toxins whatever their origin or method of production, of types and in quantities that have no justification for prophylactic, protective or other peaceful purposes,” as well as “weapons, equipment, means of delivery designed to use such agents or toxins for hostile purposes or in armed conflict.”
The Biological Weapons Convention does not otherwise define “biological agents or toxins,” but a contemporaneous World Health Organization report defines “biological agents” as “those [agents] that depend for their effects on multiplication within the target organism, and are intended for use in war to cause disease or death in man, animals or plants.”
Similarly, a contemporaneous United Nations report defines “bacteriological (biological) agents of warfare” as “living organisms, whatever their nature, or infective material derived from them, which are intended to cause disease or death in man, animals or plants, and which depend for their effects on their ability to multiply in the person, animal or plant attacked.” The North Atlantic Treaty Organization has a similar definition. According to a 2003 UN report, a biological weapon is a “device or vector that delivers biological agents to target.”
The use of bioweapons in war has a long history. Holy Roman Emperor Barbarossa notoriously poisoned water wells with dead human corpses in his siege of Tortona, Italy, in 1155. In 1346, the invading Mongols reportedly catapulted plague-infected cadavers over the walls of the besieged city of Caffa in Crimea. And in 1763, the British gave blankets contaminated with smallpox to Shawnee and Lenape Indians during the French and Indian War.
The early Twentieth Century saw biological (as well as chemical) weapons employed on an industrial scale. While the use of chemical weapons in World War I is widely known (including chlorine and mustard gas), biological weapons were also used. The Germans in particular developed anthrax, glanders, cholera, and a wheat fungus, implemented a clandestine program in which spies in the U.S. infected thousands of horses slated to be shipped to the front with anthrax, and attempted to spread plague in the Russian city of St. Petersburg.
In World War II, the Japanese conducted a large-scale biowarfare program, which was implemented most severely in China. That bioweapons program reportedly “employed more than 5,000 people, and killed as many as 600 prisoners a year in human experiments,” “tested at least 25 different disease-causing agents on prisoners and unsuspecting civilians,” “poisoned more than 1,000 water wells in Chinese villages to study cholera and typhus outbreaks,” and “dropped plague-infested fleas over Chinese cities” (many Japanese bioweapons researchers were pardoned by the U.S. for war crimes “in exchange for information on their human experiments,” and some “went on to found pharmaceutical companies.”).
But it was not just the Japanese who developed bioweapons. During World War II, “USA, Russia, the UK, Canada, France, Italy, Germany, [] and Hungary” also “tried to acquire a BW [bioweapon] capability” (see here). The U.S., the UK, and Canada jointly developed a program that “focused on anthrax as an antipersonnel weapon.” We will discuss anthrax, in particular, later in this post.
The U.S. Bioweapons Program
Officially, the U.S. bioweapons program began in 1943 and ended in 1969. Research and development for the program began at Fort Detrick, Maryland (more on Fort Detrick soon). After World War II, the U.S. built up immense stockpiles of biological agents and weapons, including botulism, tularemia, brucellosis, and anthrax, among others.
Korea
The first widespread use of bioweapons by the U.S. occurred during the Korean War. It is undisputed that the U.S. dropped “hundreds of thousands of tons of ordnance, much of it napalm,” which “wiped out nearly every city in North Korea, contributing to well over a million civilian deaths.” However, the U.S. has long denied (as China, the U.S.S.R., and North Korea alleged) that it used biological weapons in that War. Whether the U.S. did so has for decades been considered unsettled, with scholars “split about the truth of the claims” (see here).
As researcher Jeffrey Kaye writes, multiple American prisoners of war confessed to participating in biological warfare, and a long-suppressed report by the International Scientific Commission (comprised of scientist from various Western or non-aligned countries) showed that the U.S. had indeed used biological weapons on military targets and the civilian population in North Korea, including “anthrax, plague, and cholera, disseminated by over a dozen of different devices or methods, including spraying, porcelain bombs, self-destroying paper containers with a paper parachute, and leaflet bombs, among others.”
The ISC report was dismissed for decades as a “hoax,” but was finally corroborated in February 2013, when the CIA declassified a trove of top-secret communications intelligence (“COMINT”) reports on the 60th anniversary of the start of the Korean War. As Jeffrey Kaye describes in great detail, these declassified COMINT reports (available here) reveal that the U.S. had succeeded in “intercepting and decrypting” North Korean and Chinese messages, and as a result was able to monitor North Korea and China’s internal encrypted military communications concerning U.S. biological weapons attacks in real time. These top secret COMINT reports include the CIA’s own internal evaluation of these intercepted communiqués – which were not meant for dissemination outside of the North Korean and Chinese military and as such were not designed for propaganda purposes. Below is a small sample of these top-secret CIA COMINT reports from 1952, each with a link to the CIA’s own virtual “reading room” where these declassified documents are stored:
A February 29 report notes that “A North Korean battalion commander was ordered on 27 February to take special precautions to avoid contamination of his unit’s food and water because ‘the enemy dropped bacteria’ in central Korea. Covering wells and disinfecting United Nations leaflets were additional recommendations.”
A March 3 report notes that a “North Korean coastal security unit in eastern Korea reported on 3 March that UN bacteriological warfare agents in the surrounding area had prevented the movement of transportation since 21 February. Later in the day the unit reported to Pyongyang that ‘Pupyong (just southwest of Hamhung) . . . is the contaminated area . . . If you do not act quickly, the 12th and 13th guard stations will have fallen into starvation conditions.’”
That same report separately notes that “A North Korean unit on coastal security in eastern Korea reported to Naval Defense Headquarters near Wonsan on 2 March that although on the 28th insects were again dropped at Paekyang, Sinpung, and Innam, ‘no one has been infected yet.’”
A March 4 report notes that “[t]he seriousness with which the enemy is treating the charges of BW is evident in a series of 28 and 29 February North Korean messages which contain such instructions as ‘the contaminated area must be covered with snow and spray . . . do not go near the actual place’ and which ordered that ‘injections with number nine (unidentified) vaccine will be made.’ Another message stated that ‘the surgical institute members left here to investigate the bacteria bombs dropped on the 29th.’”
A March 6 report notes that “[a]n unidentified Chinese Communist unit on 26 February reported that ‘yesterday it was discovered that in our bivouac area there was a real flood of bacteria and germs scattered from a plane by the enemy. Please supply us immediately with an issue of DDT that we may combat this menace, stop the spread of this plague, and eliminate all bacteria.’”
A March 17 report notes that “[a] considerable portion of Chinese and Korean communications still are concerned with reports of BW, with preventive measures, and with incidence of disease. Two coastal security stations in northeastern Korea reported on 11 March that ‘the bacteria bomb classified as mosquito, fly and flea were dispersed’ and ‘an enemy plane dropped ants, fleas, mosquitoes, flies and crickets.’”
That same report notes that “[a] Chinese Communist unit commander in western Korea demonstrates his conviction that BW is being employed against him in his order to a subordinate unit who captured some UN soldiers. The subordinate unit is instructed to ask the prisoners what ‘type of immunization shots were administered recently . . . . in preparation for defense against what disease,’ and ‘what type of common literature (was) made available regarding disease immunization and prevention.’”
An August 21 report, in a section titled “North Koreans expect use of BW by United Nations,” notes that “[o]n 17 August the North Korean 21st Brigade notified a battalion commander of a Chinese Communist intelligence report that on 13 August the US Army shipped ‘creatures for experiment’ from a Seoul suburb to Taegu. On the same day, the Chinese report continued, another American Army unit transported five tons of ‘experimental material,’ probably dead rats, from Taegu to an unspecified air base. The sender cautions that all units should be on the watch for the ‘anticipated’ enemy use of bacteriological warfare.”
Finally, a March 27 report, in a section titled, “North Korean Army unit disproves police report of BW incident,” notes that “[t]wo messages from a North Korean battalion in the Hamhung area reported on 25 March that a civilian police officer had discovered an American bacteria bomb. The policeman’s findings apparently were based on the coincidence of a UN bombing attack and the appearance of ‘flies’ in the area. A North Korean military sanitation officer, sent to affirm this incident, reported that the policeman’s report was false and that the flies ‘were not caused from the bacterial weapon but from the fertilizer on the place.’” This report is notable in that it documents an instance in which North Korean military officials refuted a reported biological weapons attack, strongly suggesting that these internal reports are genuine, and not contrived for propaganda purposes.
Indeed, it is difficult to imagine that the above examples of internal North Korean and Chinese communications are “hoaxes.” It is not plausible that the North Koreans or Chinese would divert scarce resources - in an extreme period of total war - to generate false encrypted internal communications about biological attacks (interspersed with incidents where initially presumed biological attacks were disproven) knowing that they would be intercepted and decrypted by American intelligence officials, only to be kept secret and not declassified until sixty years later. This was either the most sophisticated propaganda operation in history, or, more likely, these communications simply reflected the reality of the biological War on the ground.
Subsequent Testing and Development
While the Korean War was ongoing, the U.S. military began testing biological weapons on civilian populations at home as well as abroad. For example:
In 1950, the U.S. Navy “spent six days spraying [the bacteria] Serratia marcescens into the air about two miles off the northern California coast” (see here) in a project aptly titled Operation Seaspray. The purpose of the project was to “determine how vulnerable a city like San Francisco may be to a bioweapon attack.” Apparently, it was very vulnerable, as the U.S. Army, which had set up monitoring equipment at 43 locations around the city, determined that:
Nearly all of San Francisco received 500 particle minutes per liter. In other words, nearly every one of the 800,000 people in San Francisco exposed to the cloud at normal breathing rate (10 liters per minute) inhaled 5000 or more particles per minute during the several hours that they remained airborne.
At least one man exposed to the bacteria died, and at least 10 patients were hospitalized. The public was not informed of the operation until 1977.
In 1954, in a project called “Big Itch,” the U.S. military loaded hundreds of thousands of fleas into cluster bombs and other munitions and dropped them over the Dugway Proving Ground in Utah. These tests were apparently designed “to determine coverage patterns and survivability of the tropical rat flea (Xdnopsylla cheopis) for use in biological warfare as [a] disease vector,” and were considered “a success.” Similar entomological biowarfare tests were conducted with mosquitos in Georgia in 1955 (Operation Big Buzz) and 1956 (Operation Drop Kick and Operation May Day).
From 1962 to 1974, the Department of Defense conducted a classified chemical and biological warfare test program called Project 112, in which it exposed thousands of U.S. military personnel to chemical and biological agents without their knowledge or consent, including sarin, VX, and tear gas, as well as Francisella tularenis, Serratia marcescens, Escherichia coli, Bacillus globii (an anthrax simulant), and staphylococcal enterotoxins. According to a U.S. General Accounting Office (“GAO”) report submitted to the Senate and House Committees on Armed Services in 2004, the Department of Defense conducted 50 tests exposing over 5,842 service members to various biological and chemical agents under Project 112. One of these tests involved “spraying several U.S. ships with various biological and chemical warfare agents, while thousands of U.S. military personnel were aboard the ships. The personnel were not notified of the tests, and were not given any protective clothing.”
Though the GAO report was limited to Project 112, it additionally noted that:
We learned during this review that hundreds of chemical and biological tests similar to those conducted under Project 112 were conducted during the same time period. A former Desert Test Center scientist estimated that the number of chemical and biological tests conducted at just one location – a Dugway Proving Ground, Utah – was over 100, or more than double the number of tests conducted under Project 112 during the same time period.
According to an Army study, some of these tests reflected the same objectives as Project 112. This study listed 31 biological field tests performed at various military installations including Dugway Proving Ground, Utah; Ft. Bragg, North Carolina; Fort Detrick, Maryland; and Edwards Air Force Base, California. The study did not quantify the number of test participants nor did it identify them.
In addition, we reported in 1993 and 1994 that hundreds of radiological, chemical, and biological tests were conducted in which hundreds of thousands of people were used as test subjects. We also reported that the Army Chemical Corps conducted a classified medical research program for developing incapacitating agents. This program involved testing nerve agents, nerve agent antidotes, psycho chemicals, and irritants. The chemicals were given to volunteer service members at Edgewood Arsenal, Maryland; Dugway Proving Ground, Utah; and Forts Benning, Bragg, and McClellan. In total, Army documents identified 7,120 Army and Air Force personnel who participated in these tests. Further, GAO concluded that precise information on the scope and the magnitude of tests involving human subjects was not available, and the exact number of human subjects might never be known.
Perhaps most famously, in 1966, a group of U.S. Army scientists released the bacteria Bacillus globigii into the New York City Subway system during peak hours as part of a study titled, “A Study of the Vulnerability of Subway Passengers in New York City to Covert Attack with Biological Agents.”
Radiation
In this same period, the U.S. military was irradiating vast swaths of American citizens with nuclear and other radiation tests. Between 1951 and 1992, the U.S. conducted more than 900 nuclear tests in Nevada, Utah, Colorado, Alaska, Mississippi, and the Pacific Islands. A study published in 1990 found that children who lived in southwestern Utah during the period of aboveground nuclear testing were nearly eight times more likely than other children to develop leukemia. A National Cancer Institute study published in 1999 found that aboveground testing in Nevada contributed to approximately 212,000 excess lifetime cases of thyroid cancer. And a CDC study published in 2005 concluded that “[a]ll people who were born since 1951 have received some exposure to radiation from weapons testing-related fallout.”3
Of course, some people were (deliberately) exposed to much more radiation than others. The U.S. tested its most powerful hydrogen bombs in the Marshall Islands. Prior to one test in 1954, many of the residents of the test site had been relocated to other atolls, including to Rongelap Atoll near Bikini Island. After the test, Rongelap was “blanketed” in radioactive debris. “Then radiation sickness set in: People began vomiting, blistering, and losing hair.” Many Marshallese were subsequently evacuated from Rongelap to receive medical treatment, and were allowed to return in 1957. However, “unanticipated medical problems began to surface,” including “cancers, leukemias, still births, thyroid tumors, and ‘jellyfish babies’ – infants born without bones and with transparent skin, who usually died within a day or two.”
And it was not just nuclear tests. As reported by the Washington Post, in 1993, Energy Secretary Hazel O’Leary “acknowledged that federal researchers deliberately exposed up to 800 people [a significant undercount] to radiation in Cold War-era experiments.” In one ten-year experiment, “more than 30 mentally retarded teenagers in Massachusetts were fed radiation-enriched cereal and other foods”; “dozens of people, including prisoners, mental patients and pregnant women, were injected with radiation-rich plutonium in government-backed tests”; and one government memo from 1950 acknowledged that the medical experiments “might have ‘a little of the Buchenwald effect.’”
As Wayne D. LaBaron details in his book, America’s Nuclear Legacy, “the Department of Defense underwrote research that applied whole-body radiation to uninformed terminal cancer patients at the University of Cincinnati General Hospital . . . The ‘treatments’ were administered to mostly poor, black cancer patients between 1960 and 1971. The experiments involved at least 88 cancer patients, and were funded, in part, by the Pentagon . . . to help the government gauge how soldiers would respond to high doses of radiation on the nuclear battlefield.” One doctor involved in the program purposefully referred to his patients only by their initials, so that “‘there will be no means by which the patients can ever connect themselves up with the report.’ That, he said, would avoid ‘either adverse publicity or litigation’ – a major government concern then.”
In 1961 and 1962, prisoners at Utah State Prison were offered “$10, good behavior time and allowed daily visitors” if they submitted to experimental radiation testing. In the 1950s, U.S. Air Force officials administered pills containing radioactive iodine “to over 100 Alaska Eskimos and Indians” in an experiment designed to determine its effect on their thyroid glands in order to “provide some clue as to how Alaska natives could survive so well during intensely cold artic winters.” These human guinea pigs were never informed that the pills they had taken were radioactive (and, unsurprisingly, the Air Force study ultimately showed “that the thyroid gland does not play a key role in adjusting to arctic conditions”).
Bioweapons in the Twenty First Century
But all that was in the past, you might say. The Cold War is over. Surely, the U.S. does not conduct unethical biological weapons research now.
Unfortunately, it does. Despite the “official” shutdown of its bioweapons program in 1969 and the signing the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention, the U.S. has in fact maintained an illegal biological warfare research program for decades. Though officially denied by the government, the existence of this program was acknowledged by The New York Times on September 4, 2001, exactly one week before 9/11, exactly two weeks before the anthrax attacks (discussed below), and nearly three months after Operation Dark Winter, the tabletop bio-terror training exercise that simulated a smallpox attack against the American people conducted at Andrews Air Force Base in June 2001.4 Coincidentally, September 4, 2001 – one week before 9/11 – was also the same day that a full-scale plan to invade Afghanistan was presented to President Bush.
That September 4, 2001 New York Times article, which was titled “U.S. Germ Warfare Research Pushes Treaty Limits,” reported that “[o]ver the past several years, the United States has embarked on a program of secret research on biological weapons that, some officials say, tests the limits of the global treaty banning such weapons.”
The article goes on to say (emphasis added below):
The projects, which have not been previously disclosed, were begun under President Clinton and have been embraced by the Bush administration, which intends to expand them.
Earlier this year, administration officials said, the Pentagon drew up plans to engineer genetically a potentially more potent variant of the bacterium that causes anthrax, a deadly disease ideal for germ warfare.
. . .
Two other projects completed during the Clinton administration focused on the mechanics of making germ weapons. In a program code-named Clear Vision, the Central Intelligence Agency built and tested a model of a Soviet-designed germ bomb that agency officials feared was being sold on the international market . . . At about the same time, Pentagon experts assembled a germ factory in the Nevada desert.
. . .
Some Clinton administration officials worried, however, that the project violated the pact. And others expressed concern that the experiments, if disclosed, might be misunderstood as a clandestine effort to resume work on a class of weapons that President Nixon had relinquished in 1969.
Simultaneous experiments involving a model of a germ bomb, a factory to make biological agents and the developoment [sic] of more potent anthrax, these officials said, would draw vociferous protests from Washington if conducted by a country the United States viewed as suspect.
You don’t say. The New York Times went on to describe this blatantly illegal biowarfare program as “foolish, but not illegal.” Seven days later, 9/11 happened. Seven days after that, the first of a series of anthrax letters was sent to select media outlets and two U.S. Senators.
The Curious Case of the 2001 Anthrax Letters
While 9/11 defined the next two decades of U.S. foreign policy, resulting in trillions of dollars of military expenditure, multiple protracted and bloody wars, and the deaths of millions of people, the 2001 anthrax attacks have largely been forgotten.
At the time, however, they were extensively covered by the media (see here, here, and here), who, citing claims by Bush administration officials, attempted to link the attacks to the alleged 9/11 hijackers and to Iraq.
This fascinating but forgotten story goes like this:5
A first batch of letters, postmarked September 18, 2001, were sent to NBC News, the New York Post, CBS News, ABC News, and the Sun.
The first person to be diagnosed with anthrax was a man named Robert Stevens, a photojournalist for the Sun, based out of Boca Raton, Florida. He was diagnosed on October 3, and died on October 5. Ultimately, 22 people were infected (mostly postal workers), and five people died. Several people received “hoax” letters that contained harmless white powder instead of anthrax, including disgraced New York Times journalist Judith Miller (who was later fired for making up fake stories about Iraqi WMDs and who, coincidentally, participated in Operation Dark Winter and co-wrote the September 4, 2001 New York Times article described above).
Between October 6 and October 9, letters containing a more highly refined preparation of anthrax were sent to Democratic Senators Tom Daschle and Patrick Leahy. These letters are particularly interesting, given that they coincided with Congressional deliberations on the PATRIOT Act.
On September 17, Attorney General John Ashcroft first announced that he would be sending an “antiterrorism” bill to Congress (this bill would ultimately be passed as the USA PATRIOT Act on October 26, 2001). By September 22, reports of potential biological terrorism had begun to emerge in the media (see also here), as well as suggestions that al Qaeda might conduct attacks with crop-dusting planes (see also here). On September 30, Bush administration officials warned that “there will likely be more terrorist strikes in the United States, possibly including chemical and biological warfare, and they urged Congress to expand police powers by Friday [October 5] to counter the threat.”
Tom Daschle was the Senate Majority Leader at the time, and Patrick Leahy was the Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. As reported in an October 3, 2001 Washington Post article titled “Anti-Terrorism Bill Hits Snag on the Hill,” Leahy objected to a proposed provision regarding wiretapping and the “overly broad” language regarding the definition of a terrorist crime, emphasizing “the need to safeguard civil liberties.” Daschle was also quoted in support of Leahy. The article quoted Ashcroft’s statements that the Senate “was not moving with sufficient speed,” and that “talk won’t prevent terrorism.” Leahy and Daschle were the only Democratic Senators mentioned in the article.
After the October 5 deadline passed with no action on the bill, letters containing anthrax spores were mailed to Leahy and Daschle. The envelopes were dated October 9. On October 15, an intern for Daschle opened a letter addressed to the Senator which contained two grams of spores along with the date “09-11-01” prominently displayed and the ridiculously on-the-nose text, “YOU CAN NOT STOP US. WE HAVE THIS ANTHRAX. YOU DIE NOW. ARE YOU AFRAID? DEATH TO AMERICA. DEATH TO ISRAEL. ALLAH IS GREAT.”6
As Tom Daschle later wrote in his memoires, “the first thought most people had was that the letters were somehow connected to the September 11 attacks, that they were the work of a terrorist group such as al-Qaeda.”
The Washington Post summed up the chaos caused by the Daschle and Leahy letters as follows:
Anthrax caused the House of Representatives to flee town; it closed Senate office buildings: unprecedented actions. Contamination fears created an uncertainty that immobilized businesses and mailrooms. Anthrax has also done what the Cold War, Watergate, urban riots, a presidential impeachment and a slew of natural disasters never did to this city: It severed a bond that links us together and ties us to our government.
On October 26, 2001, President Bush signed the PATRIOT Act into law. Among other things, he cited the anthrax attacks as justification (emphasis added below):
The changes, effective today, will help counter a threat like no other nation has ever faced. We’ve seen the enemy, and the murder of thousands of innocent, unsuspecting people. They recognize no barrier of morality. They have no conscience. The terrorists cannot be reasoned with. Witness the recent anthrax attacks throughout our Postal Service.
Secretary of State Colin Powell would later hold up a vial of simulated anthrax when lying to the UN about nonexistent Iraqi WMDs and chemical weapons on February 5, 2003.
So, who was behind the anthrax letters? We’ll get to that soon, but first it is worth noting that U.S. officials and the media initially pinned the blame on the 19 alleged 9/11 hijackers and their alleged state sponsor, Iraq.
For instance, former CIA Director, James Woolsey (another Dark Winter participant), falsely claimed in October that Iraq “provided fake passports for all the 19 US hijackers,” and was “behind” the anthrax attacks. On October 17, Robert Kagan (leading neo-conservative, Iraq War intellectual architect, and husband to Victoria Nuland, the previously mentioned neocon bureaucrat at the heart of the current Ukraine-Russia disaster) speculated “whether anthrax spores spreading around the country were developed in one of Saddam’s laboratories.” The UK outlet the Guardian noted that “American investigators probing anthrax outbreaks in Florida and New York believe they have all the hallmarks of a terrorist attack – and have named Iraq as a prime suspect . . . possibly indirectly, with the September 11 hijackers.”
That Guardian also quoted an anonymous CIA source as saying:
[T]hey aren’t making this stuff in caves in Afghanistan . . . This is prima facie evidence of the involvement of a state intelligence agency. Maybe Iran has the capability. But it doesn’t look like that politically. That leaves Iraq.
The Wall Street Journal similarly reported on October 15 that “Bin Laden couldn’t be doing all this in Afghan caves. The leading supplier suspect has to be Iraq.” In a similar vein, ABC News journalist Brian Ross reported that the anthrax letters sent to Senator Daschle were laced with bentonite, a chemical “known to have been used by only one country in producing biochemical weapons – Iraq.” Ross’s reporting was allegedly based on four inside government sources. Ultimately, this story turned out to be completely false.
Our old friend Judith Miller had something to say about the bogus Iraq connection as well. In her book, Germs: Biological Weapons and America’s Secret War, published on October 2, 2001 (one day before the first anthrax diagnosis – that of Robert Stevens), she evaluated the U.S.’s ability to deter a future bio-attack, including anthrax and a potential attack from Iraq.
The alleged 9/11 hijackers themselves also appeared determined to link themselves to the anthrax attacks. Recall that Robert Stevens, the Sun journalist, was the first American to die from the anthrax attacks on October 5, 2001. In what the FBI described as “just a coincidence,” “the wife of the [Sun’s] editor helped two of the Sept. 11 hijackers find rental apartments” in Florida. As described in a Washington Post article titled “Sun Editor’s Wife Found Rentals for 2 Hijackers,” her husband, Mike Irish, “work[ed] in the American Media Inc. building, which has been the focus of an intensive investigation since anthrax was discovered in the facility.” In another coincidence, Gloria Irish had also helped the late Robert Stevens find a house.
In addition to sharing a real estate agent with the first anthrax victim, the 9/11 hijackers established other links to the anthrax letters.
One hijacker reportedly sought treatment for subcutaneous anthrax prior to 9/11, and between February and September 2001, groups of “Middle Eastern men” visited an airport in Belle Glade, Florida, to inquire about crop dusters. According to a September 24, 2001 Washington Post article, the men asked “[h]ow many gallons of chemicals” could the planes hold, and “how much poison they can carry.” The “group’s leader” was identified by an airport official as “Mohamed Atta,” the alleged ringleader of the 9/11 attacks.
On September 25, 2001, the Washington Post further reported that Mohamed Atta had “walked into a U.S. Department of Agriculture office in Florida last year and asked about a loan to buy a crop-duster plane.” In an interview with Brian Ross of ABC News, the Department of Agriculture official who interviewed Atta, Johnelle Bryant, stated that after rejecting his request for a “$650,000 in cash” loan, Atta “asked me what would prevent him . . . from going behind my desk and cutting my throat,” offered to purchase a picture of Washington, D.C., hanging on the wall above her desk, mentioned “his admiration for Osama bin Laden,” specifically referenced “al Qaeda,” and made sure that Johnelle Bryant could accurately spell his name (“No, A-T-T-A, as in Atta boy!”).
Weird, huh? It appears both the media and the hijackers (or their handlers) were involved, wittingly or not, in laying down a trail connecting the anthrax attacks to 9/11 and, by implication, to Iraq. Atta was clearly trying to make himself unforgettable. And the quote from the anonymous CIA source above – “they’re not making this stuff in caves” – together with multiple explicit allegations and false reports against Iraq, appears to be an orchestrated attempt to tie the anthrax attacks to the Bush administration’s preferred state sponsor.
But wait a second. We all know that Iraq had no WMDs and that it had nothing to do with 9/11. Our friend Judith Miller was fired for making up stories like that. So why did the 2001 anthrax attacks disappear so quickly from the national spotlight?
The reason is, quite simply, that the whole story fell apart. Early on in the investigation, it became apparent that the strain of anthrax used in the letters was the Ames strain. The FBI put together a list of all known laboratories around the world that were known to possess the Ames strain, and Iraq, unfortunately, did not make the list.7
By the end of 2001, the FBI had quietly refocused its investigation away from foreign Muslim scapegoats, and instead began to pursue the theory that the perpetrator was a domestic “lone wolf.” Initially, U.S. law enforcement officials named scientist Steven Hatfill as a “person of interest” (he ultimately sued the Department of Justice for libel and harassment and received $5.8 million in compensation), but later decided in 2008 that the real “lone wolf” killer was Dr. Bruce Ivins, a scientist and anthrax vaccine researcher at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (“USAMRIID”) at Fort Detrick, Maryland. Dr. Ivins was never charged with any crime (he committed suicide before charges could be brought), and in 2010, the Department of Justice formally closed the case.
The case against Ivins was absurd from the start, though two developments after his death conclusively show his innocence.
First, at the request of FBI Director Robert Mueller (after he was subjected to uncharacteristically tough questioning before Congress expressing doubt about the FBI’s evidence and methods used in the investigation), the National Academy of Sciences (“NAS”) carried out an independent investigation in which they refuted one of the FBI’s key allegations against Ivins, namely, that the anthrax contained in the letters was genetically derived from the anthrax contained in Bruce Ivin’s lab. The NAS report found that “[t]he scientific link between the letter material and [Bruce Ivin’s] flask number RMR-1029 is not as conclusive as stated in the DOJ Investigative Summary,” and that “the [genetic] analyses did not definitively demonstrate” a relationship between “the spores in the attack letters” and “RMR-1029.” In other words, the FBI had no evidence that the anthrax used in the attacks came from Bruce Ivin’s lab.
Second, in 2011 and 2012, studies published in the Journal of Bioterrorism & Biodefense discussed the presence of tin in the anthrax spores, which the FBI’s investigation had not explained or pursued. According to the authors, “the spore coats were silicone-coated using a tin catalyst,” which required “highly esoteric processes that could not possibly have been carried out by a single individual. They would require a laboratory with specialized capabilities and expertise not found at USAMRIID.” (Emphasis added).
The researchers suggested Dugway Proving Ground (the U.S. army testing facility in Utah, previously mentioned in connection with U.S. biological and nuclear weapons tests in the 1950s and 1960s) and Battelle (a U.S. national security contractor and Department of Homeland Security and Department of Energy laboratory operator) as likely sources (notably, in 2006, Battelle was awarded a $250 million contract to run the National Biodefense Analysis and Countermeasures Center, where it would operate “biosafety level 2, 3 and 4 laborator[ies]” for “biological threat characterizations and bio-forensics analyses”). The researchers noted that “[c]rucial evidence that would prove or disprove these points either has not been pursued or has not been released by the FBI.”
Is it plausible that Bruce Ivins was really the lone wolf mastermind of the 2001 anthrax attacks? If so, what explains the apparent connections between the attacks and the 9/11 hijackers? Is it just a coincidence that his first victim happened to share a real estate agent with two of the hijackers, that one of the hijackers sought treatment for an anthrax infection, and that the alleged 9/11 ringleader sought a $650,000 small business loan to buy a crop-duster? Why did Bruce Ivins want to scare Senators Daschle and Leahy into supporting the PATRIOT Act? What possible motive could he have had to send weaponized anthrax through the mails in an attempt to frame Muslims for the attacks?
The short answer is no, nothing, no, he didn’t, and none. I don’t know who perpetrated the 2001 anthrax attacks, but it sure as hell wasn’t Bruce Ivins, it sure as hell wasn’t the alleged hijackers or Iraq, and it sure as hell wasn’t one “lone wolf” acting alone.
It was probably Vladimir Putin.
Now, back to Ukraine.
Back to Ukraine
In light of the history we just reviewed, could there be any truth to Russia’s allegations that the U.S. is engaged in a covert bioweapons program in Ukraine?
Maybe. Maybe not. It is probably too early to tell.
At the very least, there is evidence suggesting the U.S. has engaged and continues to engage in dangerous biological research around the world, including in Eastern Europe. As journalist Dilyana Gaytandzhieva revealed in an investigative piece in 2018, the U.S. Department of Defense controls a vast network of bio-laboratories funded by the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (“DTRA”) located “in former Soviet Union countries such as Georgia and Ukraine, the Middle East, South East Asia and Africa.”
I have been unable to independently confirm some of Gaytandzhieva’s more controversial findings, but several of her key allegations do have independent support, including that these DTRA labs are managed by private contractors, including the aforementioned Battelle (one potential source for the weaponized anthrax used in the 2001 attacks) as well as a company called Metabiota.
Based on publicly available contracting databases and other public websites, I have also been able to confirm that these contractors conduct potentially dangerous research projects, including:
“[S]train characterization of pathogens” including “anthrax, brucellosis, and tularemia” in Tbilisi, Georgia;
“Ebola virus outbreak survivor sampling” in Sierra Leone;
General anthrax research; and
“[G]ene editing” programs designed to “develop[] means to switch on and off genome editing in bacteria, mammals, and insects,” “pursue modular ‘daisy drive’ platforms with the potential to safely, efficiently, and reversibly edit local sub-populations of organisms within a geographic region of interest,” and “develop robust and reversible gene drive systems for control of Aedes aegypti mosquito populations, to be tested in contained, simulated natural environments.”
As discussed above, it is also confirmed that the DTRA is active in Ukraine. According to the DTRA’s website, it provides assistance to “consolidate and secure pathogens” and “fund[] security upgrades at Ukrainian biological laboratories where collections of pathogens are kept.”
The U.S. government denies that it engages in “gain of function research or ‘human experimentation’” in Ukraine. (Recall, too, that the government also stated that “[t]he United States does not own or operate any chemical or biological laboratories in Ukraine,” which is demonstrably false). Russia, of course, alleges otherwise. I have not seen any conclusive evidence one way or another.
In light of the U.S.’s past conduct, Russia’s allegations cannot simply be dismissed. It is unfortunate that those allegations are plausible. For that, the United States has only itself to blame.
Russia’s February 24, 2022 invasion of Ukraine, while likely a violation of international law, was uniformly described as “unprovoked” by the Western media. This is false. As will be discussed in future posts, the current hostilities are a direct result of U.S. intervention in the region, including the expansion of NATO eastward and the installation of NATO dual-use nuclear weapons systems on Russia’s borders, as well as U.S. sponsorship of multiple coups d’état in Ukraine and other Eastern European countries, including the 2004 Orange Revolution and the 2014 Maidan Coup.
The U.S. and Russia are also parties to the 1925 League of Nations Protocol for the Prohibition of the Use in War of Asphyxiating, Poisonous or Other Gases, and of Bacteriological Methods of Warfare (the “Geneva Gas Protocol”), which expressly prohibits “bacteriological methods of warfare.”
In 2001, workers clearing out an old bunker at Washington University, St. Louis, discovered a bizarre remnant of the Cold War nuclear testing era. Contained in a cache of small envelopes was a collection of 85,000 human baby teeth that had been gathered as part of a government-funded study to examine radiation levels in children’s bones. As Devin Thomas O’Shea describes in an article for Protean Magazine titled “Pruitt-Igoe: A Black Community Under the ‘Atomic Cloud,’” the study was looking for the presence of Strontium 90. This radioactive material “‘was ending up in pastures and fields, in grass consumed by goats and cows. It worked its way up the food chain into children’s milk. And because the chemistry of Strontium 90 is similar to calcium, it was taken up by bones and teeth.’ Decades down the line, fallout from nuclear tests in Nevada . . . was poisoning American youth . . . The study found that children who grew up at the height of the Cold War in 1963 had 50 times as much Strontium 90 in their teeth as children born in 1950.”
The Dark Winter simulation, conducted at Andrews Air Force base in June 2001, was eerily similar to the anthrax attacks in a number of ways. According to the published script of the simulation, Dark Winter involved, among other things: (i) anonymous letters sent to the mainstream media; (ii) Osama Bin Laden as the prime suspect; (iii) suggestions that the attack “was conducted by either a state or a state-sponsored international terrorist organization”; and (iv) Iraq as a suspected state sponsor.
Graeme MacQueen’s book, The 2001 Anthrax Deception – The Case for a Domestic Conspiracy, is essential reading on this topic. Much of the following material is discussed in that book, though I have included citations to the original source material, not the book, in this post.
This language is obviously a crude attempt to frame Muslims for the anthrax attacks. It is obviously racist and insulting (both to Muslims in general and to anyone who the perpetrators expected would believe this obvious frame-up). The language used in the anthrax letters is akin to someone trying to frame the Chinese government by saying, “Me Chinese, me play joke, me put anthrax in your coke.”
The FBI concluded that “[o]nly 15 U.S. and three foreign laboratories were known to possess the Ames strain of anthrax prior to the attacks.” The three foreign laboratories referenced in the FBI report were all in Russia.