-Caveat Lector- from: http://www.iht.com/IHT/TODAY/TUE/FPAGE/germs.html International Herald Tribune Paris, Tuesday, December 29, 1998 Post-Cold War Puzzle: Has Russia Really Given Up Germ Weapons? ----------------------------------------- By Judith Miller and William J. Broad New York Times Service NEW YORK - Just as the Soviet Union was ending its confrontation with the West in the late 1980s, the military officers who ran Moscow's secretive germ-warfare program ordered up new, much deadlier arms. At a remote laboratory complex in the then-Soviet republic of Kazakhstan, Russian scientists began animal testing of the Marburg virus, a highly contagious germ that kills by attacking every organ and tissue in the body. This secret testing, described recently by several veterans of the Soviet program, went undetected at the time by Western intelligence agencies, which knew few details of the plant's operations. Kazakhstan gave up nuclear, biological and chemical weapons soon after it became independent seven years ago, and it permitted American experts and a handful of reporters to visit the plant. From their observations, and from Soviet defectors, the West has finally learned what was unfolding there in the final years of the Cold War. The belated discovery of this exotic arms research is one of the elements of a fierce dispute in Washington over whether the Russian military is heeding President Boris Yeltsin's 1992 order to abandon germ warfare. Similar fears loom about Iraq. With the apparent end of United Nations inspections there, the West is trying to track Baghdad's germ-warfare work with satellites and, perhaps, spies - the same methods that failed to unmask the Soviet program. American officials contend that Russia no longer poses a major threat. Western experts have visited most of its key civilian laboratories, and officials disclosed that Russia had recently moved closer to allowing Western experts to visit its closed military installations, a crucial step that could dispel many of the lingering doubts about Moscow's activities. American officials also assert that much of what they now understand about the Soviet Union's germ weapons has been gleaned through Western aid programs designed to foster peaceful research projects. Those projects also pay salaries to former germ scientists, fending off what officials say is the gravest danger from the Soviet program - recruitment of scientists by rogue states or terrorists. But some U.S. officials, as well as some Republicans in Congress, assert that Russia is still secretly researching germ weapons. Congress recently cut spending on cooperative exchanges with Russian germ scientists from $14 million to $7 million, both because of persistent doubts about Russian intentions and to punish Moscow for selling nuclear and missile technology to Iran. The debate turns partly on history. After developing germ weapons for several decades, the United States and Russia signed an international treaty in 1972 banning such arms. Almost immediately, Soviet defectors say, Moscow secretly redoubled its germ research and production. Officials and lawmakers acknowledge that there is scant hard evidence to support their suspicions that Russia is cheating again, but they say Moscow's reluctance to open up its military bases is an ominous sign. That may be changing. Two weeks ago, the officials said, a small group of Pentagon experts and senior defense scientists met their Russian counterparts for the first time at a once-closed military training institute in Tambov, some 300 miles (480 kilometers) southeast of Moscow. High on the agenda were possible scientific exchanges that may provide direct Western access to Russia's biological "holy of holies," as one official put it: four military installations - Sergiyev Posad, Kirov, Yekaterinburg (Sverdlovsk) and Strizhi - none of which has been visited by the West. Officials said the military teams had agreed in principle to a series of military exchanges starting in the United States sometime next year. The breakthrough is potentially significant. Iraq's entire germ arsenal contained enough deadly poison at its peak to kill all the people on Earth many times over, according to UN weapons inspectors. But the Iraqi program was dwarfed by the amount and variety of weapons the Soviet Union had secretly amassed. Stepnogorsk, in Kazakhstan, was the only major Soviet germ installation outside the Russian heartland. Called the Scientific Experimental and Production Base, it was known only by its post office box, No. 2076. While Western intelligence analysts had deduced from the configuration of the buildings that it was designed to produce anthrax or other bacteriological agents, they never figured out precisely what kind of research was being done, what weapons the factory was making or what threat it posed. Six stories high and two football fields long, the central factory there is filled with 10 giant fermentation vats, each meant to brew 5,000 gallons (19,000 liters) of anthrax microbes. Iraq's entire germ production could have just about fit into one of these vats. And Stepnogorsk was only one of six such Soviet plants. "As you can see, we haven't made that in some time," Gennadi Lepyoshkin, the base's director, told Pentagon experts and a reporter who recently walked through the anthrax plant, which is being dismantled with Pentagon aid. "And we will never do it again." Its role in the confrontation between the superpowers remains unclear. Kanatjan Alibekov - or Ken Alibek, as he is now known - Stepnogorsk's former director who defected to the United States in 1992, says the plant was to produce as much as 330 tons of final "product" in a 200-day period if the order came to mobilize for war. To this day, Moscow says Stepnogorsk made only vaccines and other defensive germ products. But Russian scientists who worked there in Soviet days and now run the place say otherwise. Moreover, the remaining physical evidence of its real purpose is impossible to hide. Next to a concrete bunker is a machine that Mr. Alibek said was for filling and sealing bomblets. Such equipment had never been discovered at any other Russian germ installation. Moscow's lies on the issue during the Cold War, skeptics in Washington argue, make trust and cooperation impossible. Skeptics note that Mr. Yeltsin has banned Russian experts from discussing any aspect of their country's germ history and has retained several generals instrumental in the Soviet program. . DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion and informational exchange list. Proselyzting propagandic screeds are not allowed. Substance—not soapboxing! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory', with its many half-truths, misdirections and outright frauds is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRL gives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credeence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply. 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