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Smallpox: France Denies Smallpox Charge; Top U.S. Official Also Surprised By David McGlinchey A classified CIA report labels France, North Korea, Iraq and Russia as countries that probably hold undisclosed stocks of smallpox, the Washington Post reported yesterday. “France scrupulously respects its international engagements,” said French Foreign Ministry spokesman Bernard Valero. “Therefore, France does not possess any stocks of smallpox in its laboratories, either civilian or military,” he said. French researchers use only “authorized animal samples, which are not dangerous to man,” Valero said, refuting a U.S. official’s charge that France kept small amounts of the smallpox virus to research and defend against an outbreak. In Washington, Jean-Francois Daguzan, a senior research fellow at the Foundation for Strategic Research in Paris said France has cooperated closely with the United States on defense issues, and claims of undisclosed smallpox stocks are “absolutely untrue.” “I don’t know what happened with this paper, maybe there was confusion,” Daguzan said. France “is a small country. It is very controlled. It is very strict,” he added. France “abides strictly” to the Biological Weapons Convention and had, in fact, supported treaty verification protocols that the United States rejected, Daguzan said (see GSN, Oct. 1). “This agency should concentrate on real threats and not this kind of allegation,” Daguzan said. Leading Bush administration biological terrorism expert D.A. Henderson said that before yesterday he had not been aware of the allegations in the report, which supposedly had been circulated to top U.S. policy-makers. It is not clear how the CIA reached its conclusion, Henderson said during a seminar hosted by the Chemical and Biological Arms Control Institute. France declared in the 1970s that it had no smallpox, he said. “This allegation regarding the French, I have no idea where that came from,” Henderson said of the report. “I have no idea what the basis for this is.” While Henderson said he is surprised by the claims, he added that it is unrealistic to absolutely ensure that every country has eliminated all stocks of smallpox. “We saw no way in the world that we were going to verify — by going through all the deep freezers in the world — whether there was smallpox virus there,” he said. “The only way one could determine this, was simply it had to be good faith.”
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