They Are the Eggmen
It is curious how two popular threads of news stories can persist at such
great length, yet never seem to find their obvious connection, in the
public mind.
One thread is about emerging diseases- all the new ones that appeared
for the first time between the 1960s and 1980s: AIDS, ebola, hanta,
lyme disease, Legionnaire's disease, Gulf War Syndrome, mad cow,
Chronic Fatigue.
The other thread is about biological warfare and bioterrorism: how
easy it is, how inevitable it is, how dangerous it is, how little it costs,
how even small nations, cults, and individuals are capable of pursuing
it.
By what willful madness or blindness is it, that the public so little
questions the possible relationship between these two threads?
Can we really trust that our own governments have really ceased
the pursuit of biological and chemical weaponry, and that there have been
no accidents, no acts of covert aggression?
In 1972, under President Nixon, the U.S. signed the Biological and
Toxin Weapons Convention, an agreement that banned the development and
stockpiling of biological weapons. Russia also signed. Was this agreement
really observed?
We now know the truth in Russia: in 1973, just a year after the agreement,
Russia launched Biopreparat, a biowar reasearch-and-production program
that was enormous in scale [1].
But what of the U.S.? Nixon had turned Fort Detrick, the notorious biowar
research center, into a "cancer research" center. As a later outgrowth,
this
research would involve eerily AIDS-like viruses. [2]
This was "Tricky Dick" Nixon, whose staff admits to plots of political
murder [3], who plotted to have Teamster thugs beat up antiwar protestors,
who once plotted to stage a phony burglary of GOP headquarters, and
try to blame it on Democrats. One of the Watergate criminals, Gordon
Liddy, admits in his autobiography to showing a Nazi propaganda
film to his own children. The is but the smallest sample to illustrate
the flavor of the Nixon White House. Can we really trust
this man at his word?
Why was it that the Russians continued their biowar research so cynically,
barely missing a beat, lying through their teeth?
The Soviets were convinced that the U.S. had not ended its bioweapons
program,
but simply turned it into a "black" weapons program [1].
"The notion that the Americans had given up their biological weapons was
thought of as the great American lie", a British intelligence officer
recalls [1].
The American public has been conditioned to regard such beliefs
automatically
as "paranoia" or "propaganda". However, as the Aldrich Ames affair, or the
Chinese infiltration of Los Alamos might seem to remind us- the Russians
have
one advantage that the American public does not: they had well-placed spies.
They may well have been in a position to know about matters, where
own newspapers can merely guess.
Has either country *ever* given up all biowar research, even today?
In 1993, a Cambridge multi-millionaire philanthropist, who is also a
friend from my high-school and college days, gave a $10,000 award
for Moral Courage to a Vil Mirazayanov, a Russian chemist who worked
for many years at the Research Institute for Organic Chemistry, a secret
institute in Moscow. He was arrested for "revealing state secrets", which
roughly translated, means that he blew the whistle on continuing chemical
weapons development.
Dr. Frank Malinoski, who was a member of the British-American team that
inspected the Russian Biopreparat facilities, says "If the Biopreparat was
once an egg, then the weapons program was the yolk of the egg. They've
hardboiled the egg, taken out the yolk, and hidden it." It is generally
believed that the weapons program was taken over by the Russian
Ministry of Defense." [1] Meanwhile, there is strong suspicion that
even some of the more visible laboratories are conducting weapons-related
genetic engineering.
In the next few installments, we will try to break open the mysterious
eggshell
a bit further: has there been any evidence of lab accidents or covert use
of biological weapons, in the background of conventional warfare, that
might provide some context for the picture of emerging diseases?
Tom Keske
Boston, Mass.
References:
[1] The Bioweaponeers, The New Yorker, 3/98, by Richard Preston
http://www.jya.com/bioweap.htm
[2] Emerging Viruses: AIDS & Ebola, Nature Accident or Intentional,
Leonard Horowitz, Tetrahedron Publishing.
[3] "Will" - the autobiography of Gordon Liddy
