Soviet Germ Lab Caused Epidemic in ’79 : Military: Yeltsin confirms that efforts to produce weapons were behind mystery outbreak leading to scores of deaths.

Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin has acknowledged that an epidemic of anthrax in the Ural Mountains 13 years ago was caused by military researchers trying to make a germ weapon, not by natural causes as previously claimed by senior officials of the former Soviet Union.

Yeltsin’s unusual public statement--an admission that the Soviet government hid the truth for a long time on an issue of importance to Washington--is being taken by U.S. intelligence analysts as a final vindication of the view that they first put forward in 1980. Their claim was criticized at the time by some American allies and independent U.S. experts who said it was based on thin evidence.

The mysterious outbreak of anthrax in 1979 in the city of Sverdlovsk 850 miles east of Moscow, causing scores of deaths, initially attracted only brief notice in the Soviet emigre press. But in early 1980, it was catapulted onto front pages around the world when the Carter Administration said the cause was “inadvertent exposure . . . to some sort of lethal biological agent.”

The Reagan Administration subsequently made the event the principal basis for its annual claim that Moscow was violating an international treaty barring work on germ weapons.

Yeltsin made his statement about the notorious incident in a May 27 interview with the Russian mass circulation daily Komsomolskaya Pravda that attracted little public notice. It was brought to the attention of a reporter here by a senior Russian official.

Yeltsin said in the Komsomolskaya Pravda interview that he has already revealed the secret tale of Sverdlovsk to President Bush, British Prime Minister John Major and French President Francois Mitterrand and that he has also signed a decree barring any future germ weapon activities by the Russian military.

Yeltsin, who in 1979 was the head of the Communist Party in Sverdlovsk, may have felt a personal compulsion to set the record straight in a public statement at home. In the past year, the Russian press has printed a dozen or so articles alleging a government cover-up of military involvement in the tragedy that also raised questions about what Yeltsin knew.

Yeltsin explained he had said nothing previously because “nobody has asked me about it.” He then disclosed that, even as Moscow officials were telling the world the incident was not associated with the military, the KGB had admitted privately that “our military development was the cause.”

Yeltsin said he responded by going to then-KGB chief Yuri Andropov, who in turn called Defense Minister Dmitri Ustinov “and ordered (him) to liquidate these facilities completely.” But Yeltsin said he learned later that the military’s laboratories in Sverdlovsk “had simply been moved to another region and the development of this weapon continued.”

Western suspicions about the incident were partly aroused by the fact that anthrax is highly lethal and persistent in soil, making it a top candidate for biological warfare.

But the Soviet explanation that the anthrax outbreak came from natural causes also had at least the ring of truth. Officials maintained that spores indigenous to the region’s soil were spread among cattle through ingestion of contaminated bone meal and among humans through the illegal sale of diseased cattle from private farms. Limited outbreaks of anthrax among U.S. farm animals have been caused by contaminated feed.