Secrets of Biological Warfare: Despite some glaring flaws, Germs: Biological Weapons and America's Secret War is an informative introduction to the 20th-century history of biological warfare. (Book Review).

Germs: Biological Weapons and America's Secret War, by Judith Miller, Stephen Engelberg, and William Broad, New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001, 382 pages, hardback, $27.00.

For the critical reader capable of discounting the terrible policy recommendations at the end of the book, Germs serves as a helpful and well-written primer on the 20th-century history of biological weapons. The authors begin by illustrating how the study of biological weapons had remained a hidden history until isolated incidents of germ warfare thrust the topic into the spotlight. Even today few Americans probably remember when a cult founded by an Indian guru, the Rajneeshees, dumped a non-lethal strain of salmonella on salad bars in popular area restaurants in an attempt to sicken native voters enough to keep them from the polls on election day.

More than 750 residents of Wasco County, Oregon, became seriously ill from the attack and as a result most of the area restaurants were wiped out financially. Authorities struggled for more than a year to resolve what happened. "When public health officials figured out how easily the Rajneeshees had spread the disease," the authors explain, "they decided not to publish a study of the incident. No one wanted to encourage copycats." Guilty Rajneeshees who were unable to flee to India were allowed to plea bargain for lesser sentences in exchange for allowing the state to avoid high-profile public trials that could have made the attack the discussion topic at every office water cooler across the country.

Global Bio-Luddites

The authors chronicle the early post-war history of U.S. biological warfare research centered at Fort Detrick, Maryland, and the policies in Washington that have left Americans vulnerable to biological attack. The original school of thought was that bio-weapons research was necessary for offensive and defensive military purposes. Only by developing a more potent weapon could America create better protective measures against it.

This sensible view was rejected in favor of the neo-Luddite theory that a global police regime would be able to put the bio-weapons genie back in the bottle. "We have no need to rely on lethal germ weapons and would lose nothing by giving up the option," Harvard University Professor and U.S. government advisor Matthew Meselson -- a member of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) -- wrote in favor of the 1972 global Biological Weapons Convention. The authors summarize the Meselson bio-weapons doctrine: "'Our major interest is to keep other nations from acquiring them,' [Meselson] noted, since the living munitions constituted cheap atom bombs. 'Germ weapons that could threaten a large city are much simpler and cheaper to acquire than the corresponding nuclear weapons.'"

In other words, Meselson worked toward having the United States purchase more expensive nuclear weapons instead of the potentially more effective but less costly biological weapons. This he did while leading the American people to believe that other nations were also observing the terms of the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention. Not surprisingly, the Soviet-bloc nations and several Middle Eastern countries were quick to violate the Convention. Muslim states such as Iran and Iraq put tremendous resources into biological weapons programs. And the Rajneesh incident is an example of how non-state actors are increasingly capable of producing biological agents as weapons and are willing to use them.

"Most of the people I worked with," complained William Patrick of the U.S. military's bio-warfare headquarters at Fort Detrick, Maryland, "all these people thought, 'Jeez, it's going to come back to bite us.... This stuff is too d*** good to go away.'" Patrick knew that vigorous research on new defenses was needed to defeat these so-called "poor man's atom bombs." "Defense studies are so much more complicated," he explained. "It takes eighteen months to develop a weapons-grade agent and ten years to develop a good vaccine against it."

Meselson's view, however, prevailed in the Nixon administration with the adoption of the global Biological Weapons Convention. Together with Nobel Prize-winning microbiologist and Rockefeller University President Joshua Lederberg (also a CER member), Meselson became a grand defender of the Biological Weapons Convention against critics who claimed the near-cutoff of defensive research had left the nation critically undefended from biological attack. Although Lederberg remained a proponent of the Biological Weapons Convention's prohibition against developing offensive bio-weapons, he eventually sided with the Fort Detrick professionals that more defensive research was needed for the protection of troops and American citizens. This research, however, was too financially strapped to produce better defensive measures.

The authors relate that Meselson's support of the bio-weapons convention approached such a fanatical delusion that he failed to see past the Soviet line that the Red Army had no offensive biological weapons program. In 1989 Meselson told a Senate committee before an open hearing that the Soviet Union had not released anthrax at its Sverdlovsk bio-weapons plant. Instead, Meselson unquestioningly adopted the Soviet line that the outbreak of anthrax at Sverdlovsk in 1979 was due to tainted meat. "The burden of the evidence available," he told senators, "is that the anthrax outbreak was the result of a failure to keep anthrax-infected animals off the civilian meat market, as the Soviets have maintained, and not the result of an explosion at a biological weapons factory as previously asserted by the United States."

It was later revealed that the accident occurred during a shift change when a filter that was removed was not replaced before restarting a production line, and a huge quantity of weaponized anthrax spores were released into the atmosphere.

The Biological Weapons Convention remained a success, Meselson asserted, because "today, to the best of my knowledge, no nation possesses a stockpile of biological or toxin weapons." But Meselson was wrong. And not just regarding the Soviet Union. Iraq also had its own bio-weapons program by the late 1980s.

When a Soviet germ warfare expert defected a few months after Meselson's statement, U.S. intelligence officials were astounded by what the defector divulged. The authors explained that "what they found seemed to go beyond the most hawkish views of the bugs-and-gas experts." Soviet defectors soon outlined how the Marxist state had produced thousands of metric tons of genetically engineered bubonic plague and antibiotic-resistant anthrax, in addition to hundreds of tons of smallpox, encephalitis, and the Marburg virus.

For years afterwards, "Meselson said what had caused the outbreak was still unclear" even after a pathologist on his own investigation team had documented from autopsy slides that victims of the Sverdlovsk outbreak had died from inhalation anthrax and not by consuming tainted meat. It was not until 1994 -- three years after Boris Yeltsin had basically admitted the accident -- that Meselson could bring himself to admit that the Soviets were producing military-grade bio-weapons. Even then, "the Meselson team's estimate left open the possibility that the lab had been doing defensive research that went awry."

"Cooperative" Russian Bio-warriors

Lederberg took the lead in advocating the financing of "cooperative" projects with former Soviet bio-weapons scientists. The idea was that the fall of the Soviet Union left the old Communist Party biological weapons factories (Biopreparat) in disarray, and if the United States hired them to work on innocuous research, they would not be recruited by Iraq, Iran, or some other terrorist regime. The foreign aid subsidy program became official policy and was led by people such as Clinton administration State Department officer Andy Weber.

But many experts condemned the program as being either a waste of time or possibly even a help to the Russian bio-weapons program. The authors recorded the view of one official: "Weber and his colleagues were well-intentioned fools, a former intelligence officer complained. The Russians were taking the American handouts and 'laughing all the way to their secret labs.'"

Poor Diagnosis

The authors should be given credit for almost anticipating the post-September 11th terrorist world; their book was on the bookstore shelves before the World Trade Center disaster and the first anthrax letters were mailed. Moreover, they called attention to the fact that non-state terrorists -- mentioning Osama bin Laden by name -- were now acquiring bio-weaponry. But in drawing conclusions and making policy recommendations, Germs falls short.

The authors support the "cooperative" aid programs to former Soviet germ scientists and claim that the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention was a "useful step." This endorsement is a glaring gap in reasoning because they acknowledge that the convention has no enforcement mechanism and has been routinely ignored by the nations and non-state groups that are most likely to use them. Meanwhile, the authors themselves explain how the Convention has hampered America's defensive research against such weapons. The authors' solution to this obvious contradiction is more world government: "In recent years, the world's nations have created tribunals to prosecute war crimes. We believe the weight of international law should be brought to bear on those who traffic in biological weapons, as Matthew Meselson and others have suggested."

These poor conclusions should perhaps be expected from a book produced by three New York Times writers, especially when the primary author (Judith Miller) retains membership in the Council on Foreign Relations. The CFR figured heavily in the book, though the authors fail to take notice of it. Many of the officials most responsible for the poor policy decisions the book outlines are CFR members. Even the Iraqi weapons inspections were frustrated by CFR member Robert Gallucci, a U.S. State Department officer, who denied a request by a British UNSCOM official to investigate the Al Hakim bio-weapons plant in Iraq. Like Meselson and Lederberg, Gallucci's membership in the premier U.S. establishment organization was omitted from the text of the book. Germs would have been a more useful work if it had explained the role of the CFR in forming the biological weapons policies of the last 30 years. Despite the omission and the glaringly bad policy recommendations, the book otherwise remains a helpful summary for the ci tizen reader of the important subject of biological warfare.