Texas Tech Plague Expert to be Released from Custody

The former Texas Tech University professor who reported plague samples missing from his laboratory is expected to be released Jan. 2 from a halfway house after serving time for fraud, the Associated Press reported yesterday (see GSN, Oct. 26).

Thomas Butler, 64, is serving his remaining time at a halfway house in Lubbock after spending most of his two-year sentence at the Federal Medical Center Fort Worth.

Butler in January 2003 reported vials of plague bacteria stolen from his laboratory. Federal agents were called in to search, but stopped looking when Butler submitted a written statement in which he said he made a “misjudgment” by not telling his supervisor that the vials were “accidentally destroyed.”

U.S. President George W. Bush had been briefed on the matter because of fears that terrorist might have taken the vials. Butler, during his trial, said FBI agents forced him to issue the statement to reduce public fears, according to AP.

He was convicted in late 2003 on 47 of 69 charges stemming from a federal investigation. Most of the guilty verdicts were connected to fraud committed against Texas Tech’s health sciences center. 

Butler, who is considered an expert on the plague, wants to return to work once he is released, according to a colleague.

“Tom is not broken by the experience, but he wants to get back to his research on infectious diseases,” said Peter Agre, vice chancellor for science and technology at Duke University. “I believe that Tom remains confident that he is a decent citizen caught in a crazy situation.”

A three-judge panel from the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld Butler’s convictions in October. His attorney, Jonathan Turley, has asked for the full circuit court to review the case.

Turley said that if the circuit court backs the panel’s finding, “our current intention is to go to the (U.S.) Supreme Court” (Betsy Blaney, Associated Press/Denton Record-Chronicle, Dec. 12).

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U.N. to Get Bioterror Agent Decontamination Systems

Two $60,000 machines capable of cleansing mail of anthrax and other biological agents were completed Friday and are expected to be used at the United Nations, the Post-Standard of Syracuse, N.Y., reported (see GSN, Nov. 3).

The MailDefender system uses microwaves, heat, ultraviolet light and antimicrobial chemicals to destroy dangerous pathogens. Developer BioDefense Corp of Massachusetts is marketing it to government agencies and corporations that are concerned about keeping their mail safe.

BioDefense plans to test the first units before they are shipped to the United Nations, said company CEO Michael Lu.

Lu said that if these systems are successful, the United Nations might buy hundreds more.

BioDefense said independent tests confirm that the system, which was created after the September 2001 al-Qaeda attacks, is capable of eliminating anthrax, smallpox, ricin, HIV, influenza, botulism and the plague (Tim Knauss, Post-Standard, Dec. 12).

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Russian Prison Connections Could Lead to Nuclear Smuggling

By Joe Fiorill
Global Security Newswire

WASHINGTON — Islamist terrorists and criminal organizations operating in the former Soviet Union are forging partnerships that could be helping terrorists living in the West to acquire Russian nuclear materials, two organized-crime experts said here yesterday (see GSN, Sept. 20).

Speaking at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the two American University researchers refused to provide many sensitive details about the specific nuclear-smuggling cases they have been studying.

They spoke of “complex” links between terrorism and organized crime in the former Soviet Union, however, and stressed the importance of European prisons as a place where terrorists meet organized-crime figures and hatch cooperative plans.

“There needs to be much more understanding of what’s going on in prison,” said Louise Shelley, director of the university’s Transnational Crime and Corruption Center.

Complex networks of diverse, cooperating groups appear to be smuggling highly enriched uranium and other materials regularly out of Russia and into Western Europe, said Shelley and colleague Robert Orttung, an associate research professor at the center.

In smuggling operations that have been detected in progress, Shelley said, nuclear materials typically have been transported “thousands of miles” before detection and have been passed along via a cooperative network that makes it difficult to discern an overall organization. The materials’ movement, she said, follows established Caucasus routes for more mundane smuggling operations.

“There is little understanding of the actors involved or the target destinations of these [nuclear] materials,” Shelley said. “There is a market for small amounts of these materials, and different groups are seeking these.”

The destinations and quantities involved suggest the recipients are Western-based terrorists rather than “rogue states,” Shelley said. “You’re looking at a route that is going from central parts of Russia through the Caucasus and out towards a Western destination,” she said.

Asked repeatedly about the specific sources and destinations in the nuclear-smuggling incidents they studied, the researchers indicated they knew but could not reveal the information.

The researchers suggested ties made in prison between organized crime and terrorism practitioners could be a major factor behind the operations.

“The prisons in Russia, as anywhere else in the world, are a very useful meeting place for different networks,” Orttung said.

The common conception that terrorists use criminal activity to finance attacks, Shelley said, fails to convey the complexity and scope of terrorism-organized crime ties. “These links are much, much more complex,” Shelley said.

For example, she said, “Often, criminals do have a political sense. … They may have shared enemies that they share with the terrorists, and therefore they’re motivated by a shared-enemy perspective.”

Orttung described the researchers’ study of the vulnerabilities of nuclear facilities in the Ural region of Chelyabinsk, Russia, which he said demonstrate the plausibility of organized-crime involvement in terrorist nuclear smuggling. In 1998, employees of a nuclear facility in Chelyabinsk were foiled in a plot to steal weapon-usable material.

“Extremist recruiters” are at work in the Chelyabinsk population, said Orttung, and nuclear workers are drawn from the same population. Some officials in the region are corrupt, he said, and drug dealers around the nuclear sites are connected, via Tajik groups, to terrorist-tied drug sources in Afghanistan. Meanwhile, he said, the Chelyabinsk population includes ex-convicts who have forged ties with terrorists while in prison.

The researchers said the United States should take regional crime groups into consideration when working on nuclear-security and nonproliferation projects in Russia. Shelley said Washington invests heavily in security technology in such operations but has no “consistent analysis” of the “crime and terrorism challenge to nuclear materials” — failing, for example, to screen subcontractors on U.S.-funded Russian nuclear projects.

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ElBaradei Urges U.S. Security Guarantees for Iran

International Atomic Energy Agency Director General Mohamed ElBaradei yesterday called on the United States to pledge that it would not attack Iran, as an incentive for a negotiated solution to Tehran’s nuclear standoff with the West, Agence France-Presse reported (see GSN, Dec. 9).

“I see security assurances provided by the U.S. as part of the solution,” ElBaradei said.

“I hope that as the negotiations with the European Union will resume that the U.S. at some point will be more engaged,” he said (Agence France-Presse/Yahoo!News, Dec. 12).

State Department spokesman Adam Ereli said yesterday that for the Bush administration to consider granting security guarantees to Iran, Tehran must first stop violating its international agreements, the Associated Press reported.

“That would represent a sea change in its behavior,” Ereli said. “Then maybe other kinds of notions might be more palatable.”

“But right now, I don’t think people should be asking the United States, ‘Why don’t you do this or why don’t you do that?’” he said (Barry Schweid, Associated Press/Yahoo!News, Dec. 12).

Top Iranian nuclear negotiator Ali Larijani yesterday dismissed the idea of security assurances from the United States, Deutsche Presse-Agentur reported.

“Iran needs no such generous guarantees and is quite capable of taking care of itself,” he said (Deutsche Presse-Agentur, Dec. 13).

Meanwhile, a senior State Department official in Vienna on Monday disputed Iran’s claims that it has a right to enrich uranium, AFP reported.

“The whole premise of the question is that Iran has this right to enrich. Iran does not.  No non-nuclear-weapons state party to the [Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty] has the right to enrich if the purpose of that enrichment is for a weapons program,” said the official.

“The red line of enrichment is just that, it is a bright red line and if Iran crosses it, I think the issue ought to go immediately to the [U.N.] Security Council,” he added (Agence France-Presse/SpaceWar.com, Dec. 12).

The United States would not participate in nuclear reactor construction in Iran, as suggested this week by Iran’s Foreign Ministry, ITAR-Tass reported.

“Nobody should be talking about U.S. participation in any Iranian nuclear program. That’s the biggest pipedream I’ve ever heard of. So if anybody wants to put it forward, great, but they might as well as be living in Alice in Wonderland,” he said (Alexander Pakhomov, ITAR-Tass, Dec. 13).

Iran’s insistence on domestic uranium enrichment may undermine planned European Union talks this month, diplomats said Monday.

“It’s hard to see the point now. If we agreed to Iran’s agenda, we’d have to abandon our whole historical approach to its dossier,” a diplomat from one of the European powers told Reuters.

The European Union was also considering delaying the resumption of talks in response to inflammatory anti-Israel remarks by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, he said (Mark Heinrich, Reuters, Dec. 12).

Elsewhere, Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki is scheduled to visit Pakistan this week, AFP reported today.

“We will discuss bilateral issues, we will discuss regional and international issues and [the nuclear issue] will probably figure in the meetings,” said Pakistani Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Tasnim Aslam (Agence France-Presse/Yahoo!News, Dec. 13).

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South Korea Tries to Woo North Back to Nuke Talks

South Korea is expected to push for resuming multilateral talks on North Korea’s nuclear effort as officials from the two countries meet this week on the southern resort island of Jeju, the Associated Press reported today (see GSN, Dec. 8).

South Korean Unification Minister Chung Dong-young is scheduled to travel Sunday to Washington after the meeting concludes to attempt to mediate the latest U.S. dispute with Pyongyang, a ministry official told AP (Bo-Mi Lim, Associated Press, Dec. 13).

North Korea today again pushed for a resolution of the dispute over U.S. financial sanctions against eight of its firms, AP reported.

“The U.S. should show sincerity in resolving this issue at a time when the U.S. financial sanctions stand in the way of progress of six-way nuclear talks,” the official Minju Joson newspaper said in a commentary.

“Frankly, it is our position that we cannot discuss the nuclear issue with the U.S. under sanctions,” the commentary adds (Kwang-Tae Kim, Associated Press/Pravda, Dec. 12).

State Department spokesman Adam Ereli said yesterday that the United States looks forward to the disarmament talks “resuming as soon as possible” (Associated Press, Dec. 12).

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Changes Made to Reduce Pine Bluff Fires

Since chemical weapons disposal began at the end of March, officials at the Pine Bluff Arsenal in Arkansas have made improvements to limit flare-ups and better share information publicly about the munitions destruction process, the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette reported yesterday (see GSN, Dec. 2).

Arsenal spokeswoman Raini Wright said that sprays that cool rockets during the cutting process are used more often and stay on for longer periods of time to prevent fires. Residue is also cleaned more regularly in the area.

Fires at the facility have occurred in a room with 2-feet-thick steel and concrete walls designed to contain a blaze.

“They’re [the rockets] designed to ignite or explode; we definitely expect more of these,” Wright said of the fires. “These munitions are over 60 years old. They are aging.  They were never designed to be stored that long.”

Work at the facility is on track, with 30,000 sarin-filled M55 rockets destroyed along with 300,000 pounds of the nerve agent. In total, 13 igloos of weapons have been processed. Wright said work is expected to be done at the facility in 2010 and that it would take two years to close and dismantle the site (Katherine Marks, Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, Dec. 12).

Between Dec. 1 and Dec. 7, workers at the Umatilla Chemical Agent Disposal Facility in Oregon destroyed 1,938 sarin-filled rockets and 15,475 pounds of agent. To date, the facility has processed 44,857 weapons and 492,624 pounds of agent, or 3.6 percent of the total stockpile at Umatilla.

Between Dec. 2 and Dec. 6, the Anniston Chemical Agent Disposal Facility in Alabama eliminated 2,191 sarin-filled 105 mm projectiles and 336 gallons of nerve agent. About 18 percent of the facility’s stockpile — 109,556 chemical weapons and 83,936 gallons of nerve agent — have been destroyed to date, according to the Anniston Star.

Weapons processing was expected to resume last weekend following facility maintenance, the Star reported.

The Newport Chemical Agent Disposal Facility in Indiana, between Nov. 29 and Dec. 6, destroyed 3,007 pounds of VX nerve agent. This brings the total amount processed to 71,906 pounds, or 3 percent of the total stockpile at the site.

Work at the Tooele Chemical Agent Disposal Facility in Utah is set to resume next year after the facility is reconfigured so that it can process mustard gas, according to the Star (Brian Lyman, Anniston Star, Dec. 11).

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U.S. Army Searches for Old CW Dumps

The U.S. Army hopes to conclude by the end of March a search of old records to find any information on the location chemical weapons dumped in the oceans before the 1970s, the Newport News, Va., Daily Press reported Saturday (see GSN, Nov. 2).

The Army is trying to locate the sites and to determine whether they pose any danger to the environment or fishing crews.

“What we're conducting right now is probably the most comprehensive search on records ... that has ever been done,” said Army Assistant Secretary Addison Davis. “Our goal is to compile the best, most comprehensive, up-to-date information possible.”

The document review is focusing on the time period from World War I until the 1970s. Military officials are trying to determine how many and what type of weapons were dumped in order to make a risk assessment.

Dumpsites, created after World War II when the Army dropped its weapons overboard, are located off the coasts of 11 states and 16 foreign countries. The locations of half of the domestic dumpsites are not known because of poor record keeping.

More dumpsites are likely to be discovered now that the Army is reviewing World War I-era dumping practices. 

Ship manifests, historical nautical charts and chemical weapons shipment forms are being reviewed to determine locations of the sites. Accounts of individuals who reported negative health effects in connection with dumping are also being reviewed.

Once the sites are identified, the Army faces the difficult task of dealing with the weapons. Most are in deep water and some may be leaking. Others are too unstable for the Army to extract from the ocean floor, according to the Daily Press.

Scientists have warned that the weapons must be dealt with to prevent leaking.

“We believe it is highly unlikely any of this stuff is in danger of washing up on shore. But we're putting a full-court press on this issue,” Davis said (John Bull, Daily Press, Dec. 10).

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Senate Gives Green Light for Pueblo Road

A U.S. Senate subcommittee has approved a Defense Department request to divert $18.6 million to a road project for the planned chemical weapons disposal plant in Pueblo, Colo., the Pueblo Chieftain reported today (see GSN, Dec. 9).

Most of the Defense Access Road already exists, and the bulk of the funds will be spent widening and improving two component routes. Construction crews and other workers will have better access to the facility within the Pueblo Chemical Depot once the $23 road million project is completed, the Chieftain reported.

“This road project is a crucial element needed to better support the pilot chemical-agent destruction project at the depot,” said Senator Wayne Allard (R-Colo.), a member of the Senate Appropriations Military Construction and Veterans Affairs Subcommittee. “To me, the department’s request was another sign of its intention to move forward with the destruction of these chemical weapons” (John Norton, Pueblo Chieftain, Dec. 13)

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Airborne Laser Ground Tests Successful

A recent series of Airborne Laser tests were successfully completed, SPX reported yesterday (see GSN, Dec. 1).

Tests of the U.S. missile defense project at Edwards Air Force Base in California demonstrated lasing duration and power sufficient to destroy multiple classes of ballistic missiles, according to a Boeing release.

“This is a major technological achievement for the Airborne Laser program,” said Pat Shanahan, vice president and general manager of Boeing Missile Defense Systems, the primary contractor on the project. “Proving the capability of this laser to operate at lethal levels of power and duration moves the system a major step closer to becoming a vital component of the nation’s boost-phase defense against a ballistic missile threat” (Boeing release/SpaceWar.com, Dec. 12)

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