U.S. Reputation Undermines BW Nonproliferation Agenda, Official Says

By David Ruppe, Global Security Newswire

PRINCETON, N.J. — U.S. biological defense strategies and the Bush administration’s successful effort to kill negotiations on a verification protocol for the Biological Weapons Convention have hampered U.S. attempts to push its biological weapons nonproliferation agenda on the world stage, a senior administration official said last month (see GSN, Nov. 10).

“Are we causing more problems for us on the outside?  The answer is yes.  And the reason for that is that we have created an image that we are cowboying around,”  Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Threat Reduction, Export Controls and Negotiations Donald Mahley said at a Princeton University event. 

“Now, whether or not that has anything to do with other policies of the administration in general, I will leave to the viewer to decide,” he added.

“Cowboys” within the U.S. government before Sept. 11, 2001, built offensive biological weapons delivery systems to see whether it was possible for others to build them, Mahley said.  That work could have been perceived by other countries as violating the Biological Weapons Convention.

Mahley described his general response after learning of the work:  “Why are you doing that, we don’t have a biological weapons program.”

Better to simply assume that others can build such weapons, he said. 

“Don’t build them to test, because then if you do and you get caught at it, then [other nations are likely to believe] we’re building offensive biological weapons delivery systems.  How does that look?  We’re violating the convention, stupid,” he said.

Mahley has been the U.S. delegation head for Biological Weapons Convention activities since 1999, and he is expected to serve that role again at the sixth review conference of the treaty scheduled to begin next week in Geneva.

Mahley declined to identify the project he discussed in general terms at Princeton, saying by e-mail that his account “speaks for itself in principle” and that the work “was controlled satisfactorily in the end.”

University of Maryland biological weapons expert Milton Leitenberg said this week that Mahley might have been talking about the CIA-funded Clear Vision project.  First made public in a Sept. 4, 2001, New York Times article, Clear Vision beginning in 1997 had reportedly involved fabrication and testing of a model of a Soviet biological weapons bomblet.  Officials in Washington were concerned such weapons were being sold on the black market.  An unidentified senior administration official said the agency believed the project did not violate the treaty as its intent was purely defensive.

Article 1 of the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention prohibits countries from developing, producing or stockpiling biological weapons delivery systems “designed to use such agents or toxins for hostile purposes or in armed conflict.”

Some experts dispute that the treaty permits production of biological weapons delivery devices for defensive purposes, saying defensive intent could be used to justify any project with potential offensive uses. 

“Because, who knows what the intent is?” said Ambassador James Leonard, who was the principal U.S. negotiator on the Biological Weapons Convention.

Mahley said it is difficult to determine the intent of biological work that could be used for offensive or defensive purposes.  He said he believed there was nothing wrong in concept with building delivery systems for defensive purposes.  However, it should be credibly demonstrable to other governments that the work is meant solely for biological defense, he said, such as through close State Department oversight of sensitive materials and items used in the program.

An advisory committee in late 1999 or early 2000 informed the CIA that Clear Vision raised treaty compliance issues and could lead observers to conclude the United States was operating an offensive biological weapons program, Leitenberg wrote in an article published last year.  The project was ultimately reviewed by the National Security Council and approved over objections of the State Department’s legal adviser, he wrote.

Leitenberg said that there were probably many other, nonpublicized CIA projects designed to assess what sort of weapons terrorists might acquire.  That being the case, “one still can’t be certain” which project Mahley was discussing at Princeton, he said.

The U.S. Homeland Security Department in 2004 acknowledged plans to research and test biological weapons delivery systems to assess potential terrorist capabilities (see GSN, June 30, 2004)

The Bush administration since 2002 has focused much of its efforts at Biological Weapons Convention meetings on preventing terrorists or other nonstate actors from acquiring biological weapons, rather than discouraging governments from developing such armaments.

Mahley said that increased secrecy in the U.S. biological defense program and the Bush administration’s move in 2001 to abandon eight years of negotiations toward a Biological Weapons Convention inspections protocol have stressed U.S. efforts to promote its biological weapons nonproliferation agenda.

Mahley offered one example.  A Western country, which he did not identify, decided to put out a paper calling for the treaty review conference to convene an international meeting at which countries would attempt to draw a precise line between what is and is not allowable biological defense work.  He said Washington told the country it would file a protest with its ambassador if the idea was pursued.

U.S. officials have argued that treaty inspections would be ineffective at uncovering state biological weapons programs but could expose secret U.S. biological defense activities.  Mahley said the United States would have been better served ending the negotiations in 1998, but that, despite opposition throughout the government, the Clinton White House favored continuing the effort.

On increased secrecy, he said the Army for years broadcast that its biological defense program was completely unclassified.   The belief was that the work was fairly predictable and that any competent foreign intelligence agency could have figured out what it involved.

Many programs today are classified, Mahley said, to prevent terrorists from understanding U.S. biological defense vulnerabilities or receiving ideas about promising research.  That decreased transparency also has led some to conclude that the United States might be doing things it should not be doing, he said.

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