Inability to Trace Anthrax Poses Large Security Threat, Experts Say

Iraq had always said that its Al Hakam factory made pesticides out of harmless bacteria, a common process in the world of agriculture. But when Richard Spertzel visited in 1994, he decided something was not right.

Working deep in the desert, surrounded by bunkers and barbed wire, Al Hakam workers had set their machinery to turn the bacteria into tiny, gaslike particles rather than into a heavier substance that would settle easily on crops.

So Spertzel, chief of the United Nations biological inspectors who scoured Iraq after the Gulf War, ordered samples to be taken and analyzed. He suspected that Iraqi scientists were using the harmless bacteria as practice for processing a far more pernicious germ: the anthrax bacterium.

Today, U.S. officials are scrambling to find the source of the anthrax that has killed four Americans, and many weapon experts say that Iraq deserves a spot on the suspect list. But Spertzel’s samples stand as the only examples of what “weaponized” bacteria from Iraq might look like, several former U.N. inspectors say.

U.S. investigators are using microscopes and chemical tests to chart the features of the bacteria turning up in American mailboxes. But there is nothing like an international fingerprint file of biological weapons to which they can compare those features to identify a suspect.

Even the material from Iraq is meager, despite a seven-year U.N. effort to detect that nation’s biological weapons. Though it was never proved, U.N. inspectors believed that the Al Hakam samples showed Iraq’s methods for making weapons-grade anthrax, at least as of 1994. Their analysis of the bacterial particles showed them to be less than 10 microns in diameter--a tiny size far better suited to a biological weapon than to a pesticide, which would typically use particles five times bigger, Spertzel and others say.

U.S. investigators are comparing the Al Hakam samples to the mysterious U.S. anthrax in an attempt to learn whether both were produced the same way, several weapon experts said.

Now, some weapon specialists are warning that the difficulty in tracing the anthrax bacteria reveals a glaring weakness in U.S. national defenses, one that stretches far beyond the question of Iraq’s involvement in the anthrax attacks.

“If you can’t attribute [weapons] material to someone, you give the guys who make it a free pass,” said David Kay, former chief U.N. inspector of Iraqi nuclear weapon programs. “You can never convince coalition partners and maybe even your own public of who did it so that you can rally support to retaliate.”

And if the United States cannot credibly say to its enemies that it will retaliate, he said, then it will have little power to deter attacks in the first place.

Kay and others argue that federal officials must start a new Manhattan Project to find ways to fingerprint biological warfare agents from around the world. “We need to be able to say to rogue nations: ‘Use your stuff and we’ll likely figure it out before the sun rises on your capital,’ ” said Scott Layne, a physician at UCLA’s School of Public Health.

The U.S. abandoned its efforts to make offensive biological weapons in 1969, but at least 13 nations are known or suspected to have active programs. They include several nations hostile to the U.S., including Iran, Libya and North Korea.

U.S. officials say they do not know who is behind the anthrax attacks. President Bush on Saturday said that “we do not yet know who sent the anthrax--whether it was the same terrorists who committed the attacks on September the 11th, or whether it was other international or domestic terrorists.”

But Iraq has drawn a high level of suspicion, and not only because of lingering hostility to the United States from the Gulf War. Iraq is one of the few nations that has admitted stockpiling anthrax as a weapon. And Czech officials raised a range of tantalizing questions about Iraq’s role when they confirmed last month that an Iraqi intelligence official met last April in Prague with Mohamed Atta, a suspected leader of the Sept. 11 hijackings.

At the same time, Iraq stands as a case study in how hard it can be to penetrate a nation’s weapon program--even under an intense international spotlight.

After the Gulf War, Iraq agreed to a U.N. Security Council resolution that allowed inspectors to search for and destroy any chemical, biological and nuclear weapons, as well as equipment that made the weapons and missiles used to deliver them.

What followed was a seven-year cat-and-mouse game in which Iraq tried to hide evidence of its weapon programs. But it was the U.N.’s biological inspectors who faced the heaviest interference as they tried to search Iraqi factories, interview scientists and hunt for documents.

For the first four years of the U.N. program, beginning in 1991, Iraq denied that it had developed offensive biological weapons. U.N. inspectors believed otherwise, but they could not prove their case.

Iraqi officials “falsified documents. They got scientists to lie,” said Richard Butler, former chairman of the U.N. Special Commission, which ran the inspections program. “They concealed materials. They led us down blind alleys.”

In 1994, the U.N. panel that oversaw the inspections program turned to Spertzel, a microbiologist and retired Army officer who had devoted his career to building U.S. defenses against biological weaponry.

A man of careful speech and a precise manner, Spertzel spent five weeks at the commission offices in New York, poring over the documents. The documents, combined with interviews of Iraqi officials, allowed the inspectors to send out a set of requests to U.N. member nations for information about materials that had been exported to Iraq.

When the reports came back, Spertzel and his colleagues were shocked to learn that Iraq had imported a huge amount of nutrients for growing bacteria--at least 40 tons, far more than it would need to diagnose diseases and for other routine health purposes.

When Iraqi officials insisted that the material was being used at hospitals and research labs, Spertzel made his own projections, drawing on data from an urban U.S. hospital about its own usage of nutrients. The Iraqi assertions, he says, “were ridiculous.” He was sure that Iraq had used the nutrients to grow biological agents and that much of it was being done at Al Hakam, a large plant in the desert that Iraqi officials said was making only animal feed and pesticides.

In time, Iraq admitted it had run a vast biological weapon program, and Al Hakam was destroyed under U.N. supervision. But when the U.N. inspectors were forced out of Iraq in 1998, they still had questions about how much of the Iraqi program had remained undetected and intact.

Iraq had acknowledged filling 25 missiles and 157 bombs with anthrax and botulism toxin, another bioweapon agent. But U.N. inspectors were unsure if those weapons were dismantled, as Iraq said, and if they were the true total of Iraq’s arsenal.

According to Spertzel, inspectors found evidence that Iraq had imported a large fermenting plant and specialized milling machinery, but they could not learn where the equipment went. Both could be used to make biological weapons.

And because inspectors could not prove it had been used to make weapons, they were unable to destroy one of Iraq’s large-volume spray dryers, which could be used to process bacteria into tiny, weapons-grade particles.

“We sent a team out to look at it and, strangely enough, after seven years of not using it and having it sit in a warehouse, the Iraqis decided they had an urgent need for it,” Spertzel said. “They tore it apart and thoroughly cleansed [it].” As a result, inspectors could not obtain DNA samples that might show whether the dryer had been used to process biowarfare agents.

Despite all the inspections, Spertzel said, the U.N. team never found any bacteria or viruses that had been processed into weapons form--the kind of material that might be helpful to U.S. investigators today. The samples that Spertzel ordered taken from Al Hakam were of bacillus thuringiensis, a harmless strain related to the anthrax bacterium.

Still, those samples represent “Iraq’s best attempt,” at least as of 1994, at making a bacterial particle that can float through the air and into victims’ lungs, said Alan Zelicoff, a physician and physicist at the government’s Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico.

The Al Hakam samples drew high interest among Western intelligence officials. The Pentagon obtained chemical studies of the Al Hakam bacteria, as well as images made by high-power microscopes, according to someone with direct knowledge of the matter.

Zelicoff and others said that investigators are surely comparing the anthrax bacteria in the current attacks to the Al Hakam samples to see if they were prepared the same way. Federal officials have said that so far, the U.S. samples do not show the hallmarks of any particular foreign weapon program.

For Kay, the fact that the anthrax investigation seems to be stalled shows a need for better fingerprinting of biological agents.

There is a chance, he says, that bacteria or viruses might pick up telltale signs from the nutrient baths in which they grow, which could help trace the bacteria to their source. Maybe scientists can learn to fingerprint and track the various additives that are sometimes added to biological agents to help the agent disperse easily through the air.

The DNA in bacteria and viruses could also yield clues to where they originated. At Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, scientists are building a database of genetic landmarks unique to the hundreds of strains of anthrax bacteria.

But Layne, of UCLA, argues that much more can be done. Thanks to the Human Genome Project and related studies, biology labs have new and speedy techniques for reading the genetic code of any organism. Layne said the government should obtain the DNA sequence of the 10 or 20 of the most likely warfare agents. The data might help track the source of any mysterious biological agent that appeared, he said.

Spertzel, on the other hand, warns that science can carry the anthrax investigation only so far.

Even in the unlikely event that investigators find a close match with material that he sampled in Iraq, “you could only say that this material is typical of what the United Nations brought back from the Al Hakam complex in 1994,” Spertzel said. “But you couldn’t say this excludes other countries, because they might have developed similar techniques.”

His recommendation: The United States must beef up its intelligence effort to develop information about foreign weapon programs. “The science can help, but it’s not going to be definitive,” he said. “I believe the connection is going to be made on intelligence as well as science.”