http://www.telegraph.co.uk/et?ac=004537728206924&rtmo=pssNpM3e&atmo=rrrrrrrq&
pg=/et/01/3/12/weap12.html
US blunder 'triggered global germ bomb race'
By Ben Fenton in Washington
AMERICA'S spies are indirectly responsible for the proliferation of chemical
and biological weapons around the world because of a 30-year-old
disinformation campaign that backfired, a former CIA officer said
yesterday.The FBI and US Army intelligence started a 10-year operation in the
mid-1960s to convince the Soviet Union that America was developing the
weapons of mass destruction. In fact, the Pentagon had already determined
that no feasible weapon could be produced and the disinformation campaign was
intended to persuade the Soviet military to waste billions of pounds on
pointless work to match Nato.Unfortunately, the plan backfired and the
Soviets succeeded where the Americans had failed in producing weapons using
drug-resistant strains of smallpox and lethal chemical agents. Raymond
Garthoff, the former CIA officer and now a historian, said yesterday: "We
cannot say for certain that these weapons would never have been developed
without the American disinformation campaign but I am sure it was the priming
element to their programmes."Mr Garthoff said there had been "a series of
negative kickbacks" from the attempt to dupe Soviet military intelligence. He
said: "One of the most significant was that as these programmes were cut back
first by Gorbachev and then Yeltsin, there were are thousands of
under-employed or unemployed experts in this field and that has greatly
increased the potential for proliferation, to say the least."The former head
of the Soviet programme has been accused in the Russian press of helping the
Syrians to develop chemical and biological weapons using materials invented
by scientists who may never have been trained in the first place without
America's intervention. Mr Garthoff added: "A number of countries have made
very serious efforts to get information and people from these programmes and
those are exactly the kind of things that the FBI and the CIA are now so
worried about today."Mr Garthoff had presented his previously unknown
material to a conference of intelligence experts and former spies at
Princeton University on Saturday. He said the disinformation campaign was
generally regarded as "not the finest hour" of American intelligence.
