Threat Assessment:  U.S. Will Probably Be Attacked Again, Officials Say

Even though there has been relative calm since the Sept. 11 attacks, there is a good chance terrorists will attack the United States again at some point, said government officials and counterterrorism experts.

“It’s going to be worse, and a lot of people are going to die,” said a U.S. counterterrorism official.  “I don’t think there’s a damn thing we’re going to be able to do about it.”

U.S. Defense Department officials said al-Qaeda operatives are still scattered throughout the world and preparing further attacks, despite the successes of the anti-terrorism war in Afghanistan.

“If you’re throwing enough darts at a board, eventually you’re going to get something through,” said a Defense Department strategist.  “That’s the way al-Qaeda looks at it.”

Al-Qaeda now is probably under the control of Abu Zubaydah, an aide to suspected terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden, said Western intelligence officials.  Previously, Zubaydah has operated terrorist training camps in Afghanistan and cells in Europe and North America, overseeing the training of 3,000 to 4,000 terrorists, according to Time.  He has instructed operatives to shave their beards and adopt Western dress to blend into their environments and to “do whatever it takes to avoid detection and see their missions through,” said a European terrorism expert (Romesh Ratnesar, Time, March 3).

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U.S. Export Controls I:  China Continues to Deny Computer Checks

By David Ruppe
Global Security Newswire

WASHINGTON — Despite past assurances to the Clinton administration, China continues to deny U.S. access to imported U.S.-made, high-performance computers to ensure they are not used for barred military purposes including the development of weapons of mass destruction.

Still, the U.S. Commerce Department has continued to license the computers for export to China.  In addition, the Bush administration is promoting legislation passed by the Senate that would do away with follow-up checks and remaining performance-based controls on computer exports to countries of proliferation concern, including China, Russia, Pakistan and India.

In March 2001, 700 high-performance computers (HPCs) remained to be checked as required by a 1997 law and a 1998 bilateral memorandum, according to congressional testimony by a U.S. General Accounting Office official Thursday.

“According to a Commerce official, these restrictions have resulted in a backlog of about 700 post-shipment visits,” said Joseph Christoff, director of the General Accounting Office international affairs and trade team, before the House Armed Services Committee.

The so-called “end-use” checks have been a major point of difference between senior U.S. and Chinese officials since the mid-1990s, when the Clinton administration first began allowing HPC exports to the country.  China is the largest importer of U.S.-made, high-performance computers — but China has allowed only a relatively small percentage to be checked.

The restrictions have continued under the Bush administration.  Commerce Undersecretary for Export Administration Kenneth Juster discussed the issues last week in Beijing.

“It's a serious issue for us.  And the Chinese need to do better,” Assistant Secretary for Export Administration James Jochum said at the House committee hearing.

Not All Refusals

Jochum said that the Commerce Department is “working through” the backlog and that China has not restricted access in all cases.

“I don't think they're [all] necessarily refusals,” he said.

Another factor may be insufficient resources devoted to the checks.  The Export Administration Act of 2001, which passed the Senate and is under consideration in the House, would provide $4.5 million to hire ten additional investigators for verifications.

Unless inspectors are given access, however, additional resources will not do them any good, said Christoff.

Chinese Resistance, U.S. Exports Continue

Militaries can use HPCs for a range of purposes, from unscrambling encrypted messages to designing stealthy aircraft, weapon-resistant bunkers, ballistic missiles and guidance systems, quieter submarines and nuclear weapons.  While such tasks might be done without HPCs, experts say, such computers can greatly reduce time and error.

In November 1997, China returned a high-performance computer to the United States after it was discovered the machine had been diverted to a research institute run by the Chinese military.

Chinese resistance to end-use inspections has continued despite a 1998 bilateral memorandum vowing to begin allowing the checks.

At the same time, the Bush administration, like the Clinton administration, has continued to allow the exports of increasingly powerful computers to civilian and military entities in China and other countries of proliferation concern without Commerce Department licensing or government scrutiny of the intended end-user.

Lobbied by U.S. manufacturers, the Bush administration announced such a relaxation in January.  According to the GAO’s Christoff, the decontrol was not adequately justified in a report to Congress as required by law.

“While the decisions recognized the availability of high-performance computers overseas, they did not identify the military uses for the computers or the impact on national security,” he said.

Former President Bill Clinton relaxed computer export controls five times during his administration.

Strengthening and Eliminating Controls

The administration also is backing a provision in the Export Administration Act of 2001 bill that, it says, would strengthen post-shipment checks (see related GSN story, today).

The bill would require the Commerce Department to deny further licenses on an item if a country “repeatedly” refuses such checks after it previously agreed to them.

At the House committee hearing, Representative Neil Abercrombie (D-Hawaii) expressed skepticism that the bill would be enforced.

It is “something like saying, ‘I love you.’  At what point does it actually get believed?” Abercrombie asked.

The bill also would repeal a 1997 law that requires the Commerce Department to conduct post-shipment checks on HPCs, and to restrict HPCs based on performance speeds (MTOPS) for countries of proliferation concern.

The bill passed the Senate last year, and the House Armed Services Committee is marking it up before a possible vote in the House.

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U.S. Export Controls II:  Republicans, Democrats Slam Bush-Backed Bill

By David Ruppe
Global Security Newswire

WASHINGTON — Congressional Republicans and Democrats last week fiercely attacked a Bush administration-backed plan to create new technology export controls that the legislators said would advance U.S. commercial interests at the expense of national security.

Administration officials have promoted the Export Administration Act of 2001 — passed by the Senate and amended by the House International Relations Committee — as a fair balance between the interests of national security and U.S. exporters, although they oppose some of the House committee’s changes.

They have said the legislation would enhance national security, for instance, by increasing penalties applied to U.S. companies convicted of transferring sensitive items without proper government approval and giving the Commerce Department authority to conduct undercover investigations of such activity.

The bill represents “a significant improvement over current authorities in terms of protecting national security and facilitating commerce,” said Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Export Administration James Jochum in his prepared testimony to the House Armed Services Committee last week.

Republican and Democratic committee members, however, took issue with a number of administration-backed provisions they said lean too far in favor of commercial interests and could harm national security.

“Reform is always in the eye of the beholder and the concern over this bill is that it will open the floodgates and allow some of our most sensitive technologies to flow into labs and arsenals of nations who have consistently demonstrated hostility to United States interests and could one day become military adversaries,” said committee Chairman Bob Stump (R-Ariz.), in his opening statement.

“How many more times do we have to as a nation get burned before we start looking out for national security first, instead of so somebody can make a quick buck?” said ranking Democratic member Ike Skelton of Missouri.

The committee is planning to mark up the bill this week.

Major Sticking Point

At issue are exports of “dual-use” technologies, which have commercial applications but could also be used to design weapons of mass destruction.  They include items such as high-precision electronic triggers, which are used for destroying kidney stones — but also could be used to detonate nuclear weapons — and glass and carbon fibers, which can be found in tennis rackets — but also are used to make parts for long-range missiles.

Language in the bill would determine which U.S. agencies must agree to add or remove sensitive items from an export control list.  The Senate version requires Commerce and Defense Department concurrence, while the House version requires Commerce, Defense and State agreement.

Committee members, however, took issue with the fact that each bill gives the commerce secretary sole authority to remove items from the list without either State or Defense concurrence if he determines they are available from a foreign source or are available on a mass market.

“My opinion is that this is an extremely dangerous bill,” said Representative Duncan Hunter (R-Calif.), referring to all versions of the bill, and said an Iraqi Scud missile that killed U.S. soldiers during the Gulf War contained U.S. technologies.

“We have an unfortunate history of Western companies and American companies, under our export regime, supplying, in fact, the systems to adversaries which are used and were used to kill Americans on the battlefield,” he said.

Hunter asked Jochum whether high-speed switches might be decontrolled under the mass-market provision:

“If I was a lawyer for the company that was trying to export these to Iraq, I'd say, ‘Where did I go wrong here?  They would appear to meet the level for the proposed law.  They are widely available, they are used for a lot of things, and they would appear to be subject to a mass market?  Why wouldn’t I sell these nuclear triggers to Iraq?’”

“I don’t think we would find a mass market determination in that case. I don’t think it would reach the quantity,” Jochum said.

“Well, then you should have different words. Because the definition you have here appears to accommodate those triggers,” he said.

Commerce’s Dual Role

The Commerce Department has a dual role of promoting U.S. exports and restricting most dual-use items.  Department officials worked with the Senate to craft the initial legislation, which U.S. exporters widely favor and for which they have lobbied.

The Commerce Department during the Clinton administration had also worked with members of the Senate to promote a similar export administration law that would include the mass-market provisions.

Representative Neil Abercrombie, (D-Hawaii), said he favored giving veto power to the secretary of defense over decisions on whether to take items off the control list.

“The Defense Department ought to have a veto over any and all of this.  I particularly don’t give a damn what the State Department considerations are ... Commerce certainly, I could care less in the end about that,” he said.

“I would respectfully ask your departments [Commerce, State and Defense] to consider the idea that, particularly in the light of the particular circumstances where terrorism is concerned … that if the secretary of defense concludes that the strategic interest of the nation are in any way at risk, that the secretary should have a veto power.”

High-Performance Computers

The legislation would allow authority over missile technology exports to be returned to the Commerce Department from State. Congress in 1999 had voted to take the authority away from Commerce after it was discovered China had gained access to U.S. missile launch know-how without a required license.

The Pentagon appears to be at odds with the way the bill would decontrol high-performance computers, by eliminating a measurement upon which restrictions are based without replacing it with some new form of restriction (see related GSN story, today).

A line in the bill would remove a 1997 law that requires the Commerce Department to restrict high-performance computers based on approximated performance speeds (MTOPS) to countries of proliferation concern like China, Russia, Pakistan and India; conduct post-shipment checks to verify they are not diverted or used for unauthorized purposes; and submit reports to the Commerce Department on such exports and checks.

“We support getting rid of the MTOPS provision.  We do not, however, believe that we should decontrol high-end computers, either from a hardware perspective or a software perspective,” said Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Policy J.D. Crouch.

Following a series of MTOPS decontrols by the Clinton administration in the 1990s, and one announced in January by the Bush administration, some of the most advanced commercially-available computers are or will soon be available to such countries without a government license or government scrutiny.

Agreement on Need for a Bill

Despite disagreement at the hearing on many provisions in the bill, there was strong agreement on the need for a new export administration law.

The 1979 Export Administration Act, which most observers consider outdated and which the bill is intended to replace, has expired six times over the last 23 years, most recently last August, and the president has had to declare a national emergency to administer the relevant export controls.

Not having a law in effect has hampered enforcement efforts and the penalty levels for U.S. companies that break the export laws in the 1979 act have been substantially eroded by inflation, said Jochum.

“A coherent, modern statutory basis for U.S. export control law will enhance our ability to bring enforcement actions against alleged violators.”

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Iraq:  Tariq Aziz Says Sanctions Illegal, Baghdad Compliant

Iraq is in “100 percent” compliance with U.N. demands that it destroy all its weapons of mass destruction, and sanctions against the country are illegal, Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz said in an interview published today in Le Figaro.

Asked whether his country will have new proposals to make when it resumes dialogue with the United Nations Thursday, Aziz said discussion of Iraqi initiatives would be premature and that “it is impossible to predict what form the final accord will take.”  He added, however, that U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan “has never offered any responses to the subjects that concern Iraq,” such as alleged U.S. interference in Iraqi internal affairs, continued sanctions and the imposition of “no-fly zones,” which he called illegal.

“We always speak of what's expected of Iraq, but never the opposite,” Aziz said.

Aziz said that, despite Baghdad's “scrupulous respect for U.N. texts” governing sanctions, the United Nations “refuses us all hope for normalization.”  He said Security Council Resolution 687 demands an end to all weapons of mass destruction in the Middle East but that this provision has not been applied to Israel.

Aziz rebuffed allegations that Iraq has continually refused to comply with the council's demand for open weapons inspections.  He said the U.N. Special Commission on Iraq, charged with conducting the inspections, has repeatedly failed to find evidence of violations. 

“There were 400 inspections.  But following a dispute with the United Nations, Iraq refused access to four sites, and the Americans bombed us.  Ninety-nine percent cooperation was not enough.  For 1 percent disagreement, Iraq was again struck, and the Security Council never gave its authorization,” he said.

Asked about reported U.S. plans to have Iraqi President Saddam Hussein brought before an international tribunal like the one currently trying former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, Aziz denounced the Milosevic trial as illegal.  “This tribunal was created by the conquerors; it is not fair,” he said, adding that he holds personal respect for Milosevic as a patriotic Serb.

Aziz warned the United States against trying to topple the regime in Baghdad through military means, saying Washington would face another Vietnam.  “It was not the jungle but determination that allowed the Vietnamese to win.  The Iraqis will fight on every street and in every house.  Against the Americans, each village will become another Vietnamese jungle,” he said (Charles Lambroschini, Le Figaro, March 4, GSN translation).

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China:  Diplomatic Officials Plan Nonproliferation Talks

By Anne Marie Pecha
Global Security Newswire

Liu Jieyi, director general of the Chinese Foreign Affairs Ministry, and U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Nonproliferation John Wolf plan to discuss nonproliferation issues this week in Washington, State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said Thursday (see GSN, Feb. 26).  Jieyi and Wolf will attend the Fourth U.S.-China Conference on Arms Control Disarmament and Nonproliferation, beginning today in Washington and co-hosted by the Monterey Institute of International Studies and the Brookings Institution.

“While he is in town, we understand that Director General Liu will be able to meet with Assistant Secretary John Wolf, and they’ll have a chance then to discuss the nonproliferation issues,” Boucher said, adding “they’ll have more formal meetings than just sitting together at the same conference (U.S. State Department release, Feb. 28).

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U.S. Response I:  Officers Install Radiation Detectors in Washington, at U.S. Borders

Since November, the Bush administration has set up hundreds of radiation sensors on U.S. borders and around Washington in response to concerns that al-Qaeda might be close to obtaining a nuclear or radiological weapon, the Washington Post reported yesterday (see related GSN story, today).

The new sensors, called gamma ray and neutron flux detectors, have been installed in layers at some fixed locations and around “national security special events” such as the recent Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City.  Previously, the only officials that used portable radiation detectors belonged to Nuclear Emergency Search Teams (NEST), which were dispatched when extremist groups claimed to possess radioactive materials (see GSN, Dec. 19, 2001).

Because a terrorist group might give no warning before conducting an attack and because NEST scientists are unarmed, U.S. Delta Force commandos have been given the mission to kill or disable anyone with a suspected nuclear device.  The device would then be turned over to NEST scientists to be dismantled.

“Clearly … the sense of the urgency has gone up,” said a senior U.S. policymaker on WMD terrorism.

“The more you gather information, the more our concerns increased about al-Qaeda’s focus on weapons of mass destruction of all kinds,” said another high-ranking official.

The new sensors do have limitations, however, according to the Post.  Those limitations involve detecting radiation at a distance and through shielding.  The detectors might also have problems with false positives and false negatives, the Post reported.

Researchers at the Los Alamos National Laboratories in New Mexico are working to build new and improved sensors, according to the Post.  Some of the new sensor designs would use neutron generators to “interrogate” a suspected object.  Others would conduct long-range detection of alpha particles, the Post reported.

There is consensus that al-Qaeda has obtained the low-level radionuclides strontium-90 and cesium-137, of which many thefts have been reported, according to the Post (see GSN, Feb. 26).  These materials could not be used in a nuclear weapon, but they are radioactive enough to be used in a “dirty bomb,” which spreads radioactive contaminants through the use of conventional explosives.

The Pakistani nuclear weapons program might also be a source of nuclear or radiological weapons for terrorists, the Post reported.  In October, two Pakistani scientists were arrested and questioned about possible contacts with suspected terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden (see GSN, Jan. 31).

A third Pakistani scientist is believed to have attempted the sale of a nuclear weapon design to Libya, according to U.S. sources.  It is unknown what Pakistani nuclear weapon design the scientist attempted to sell, whether the sale was successful or what happened to the scientist once the attempted sale was discovered (Barton Gellman, Washington Post, March 3).

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U.S. Response II:  Nuclear Strike May Have Threatened New York in October

The Bush administration received information in October that terrorists were planning to detonate a 10-kiloton nuclear weapon in New York City, a senior administration official confirmed yesterday (Robert McFadden, New York Times, March 4).

Time magazine reported the threat this week, adding that the detonation of such a weapon in lower Manhattan could kill up to 100,000 people, poison another 700,000 with radiation and destroy everything within a half-mile radius of the blast (Romesh Ratnesar, Time, March 3).

The administration official confirmed the Time report but added that the information had come from a questionable intelligence source and eventually proved false (see GSN, Feb. 26).  Even though the source’s reliability was doubtful, the information — which suggested that the bomb had originated in Russia — coincided with reports that a 10-kiloton nuclear bomb had been stolen from Russia in the mid-1990s, according to Time (see GSN, Feb. 22).

“During the immediate post-Sept. 11 period and continuing on today there are large numbers of reports,” the official said.  “This was one of them and it was dealt with appropriately.”

The information was released to a limited number of intelligence agencies and senior officials in order not to generate panic in New York, according to Time.  Former New York Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik criticized the decision to keep the report secret from New York officials.

“If they had information like that, that’s appalling,” Kerik said.  “I was never told.  I was concerned we weren’t being fed all the information” (McFadden, New York Times, March 4).

Over the last few months, federal officials have increased measures to detect and prevent any terrorist attack using nuclear weapons or radioactive materials, according to the New York Daily News (see related GSN story, today).

The Secret Service has dispatched a vehicle equipped with radiation-detecting equipment to New York, and during New Year’s Eve celebrations in Times Square the U.S. Customs Service equipped the New York Police Department with hand-held radiation sensors, the Daily News reported.  New York Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly has said he wants to buy a bomb-detecting vehicle for New York (Derek Rose, New York Daily News. March 4).

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United States:  Nixon Considered Nuclear Weapons in Vietnam

Former U.S. President Richard Nixon suggested dropping a nuclear bomb on North Vietnam in 1972, an idea rejected by then-National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger, the Associated Press reported Friday.

Nixon made the suggestion while discussing ideas with Kissinger to expand the war effort against North Vietnam.  Kissinger had suggested such options as attacking North Vietnamese power plants and docks, according to tapes of the conversation released Thursday at the National Archives.

“I’d rather use the nuclear bomb,” Nixon said, in response to Kissinger’s suggestions.

“That, I think, would just be too much,” Kissinger said.

“The nuclear bomb.  Does that bother you?” Nixon asked.  “I just want you to think big.”

In May, a month after the conversation, Nixon ordered the largest escalation of the Vietnam War since 1968, according to the AP.

During an interview with Time in 1985, Nixon said he had considered but rejected using nuclear weapons against North Vietnam, saying, “I rejected the bombing of the dikes, which would have drowned 1 million people, for the same reason that I rejected the nuclear option,” Nixon told Time.  “Because the targets presented were not military targets.”

In a recorded June 1972 conversation with domestic advisor Charles Colson, however, Nixon said, “We want to decimate that goddamned place,” in reference to North Vietnam.

“North Vietnam is going to get reordered,” Nixon told Colson.  “It’s about time, it’s what should have been done long ago” (Associated Press/Baltimore Sun, March 1).

In a recorded May 1972 conversation with Kissinger, Nixon said civilian casualties are a result of all wars.

“The only place where you and I disagree … is with regard to the bombing,” Nixon said.  “You’re so goddamned concerned about the civilians and I don’t give a damn.  I don’t care.”

“I’m concerned about the civilians because I don’t want the world to be mobilized against you as a butcher,” Kissinger said.

Nixon’s suggestion to use nuclear weapons against North Vietnam could have been only a reflection of his frustration with the war, said Vietnam historian Stanley Karnow.

“It was politically unacceptable,” Karnow said.  “Just because he said it doesn’t mean it was really an option” (Deb Richmann, Associated Press/Philadelphia Inquirer, March 1).

International Response

The world condemnation of the United States for using a nuclear weapon against North Vietnam could have led to an earlier U.S. withdrawal and a faster North Vietnamese victory, said Bui Quang Than, the North Vietnamese solider who raised the North Vietnamese flag over South Vietnam’s presidential palace in 1975.

“It’s difficult to know, but peace-loving people around the world would have opposed the use of nuclear bombs, so maybe the war would have ended sooner,” Than said.

The use of nuclear weapons during the Vietnam War “could have escalated the conflict and touched off another world war,” said Seo Byung-chul, president of the Korea Institute of National Unification.

“Nuclear weapons are a tool to prevent war, not a tool to start or escalate a war,” Seo said.

If the United States had used nuclear weapons, it would have angered Japan into re-examining its military alliance with the United States, which allowed U.S. forces to use Okinawa Island as a staging ground, said Makoto Saito of Tokyo University.

“Japan has firsthand experience with the effects of an atomic bomb, so the reaction from the Japanese people would have been severe,” Saito said (David Thurber, Associated Press/Yahoo.com March 1).

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Pakistan:  Former Nuclear Scientist Still Under Suspicion

After four months of investigation, U.S. and Pakistani authorities remain uncertain whether Pakistani nuclear scientist Sultan Bashiru-din Mehmood aided suspected terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden’s efforts to obtain a nuclear weapon, the Washington Post reported yesterday (see GSN, Jan. 31).

Regardless of what discussions Mehmood had with bin Laden, the scientist did not have the knowledge to build a nuclear weapon alone, said Pakistani authorities, who decided in January not to prosecute him (see GSN, Jan. 30).

U.S. officials, however, are still suspicious of Mehmood, according to the Post.  He is still on the U.S. list of known terrorists, his assets are still frozen and he remains under house arrest with a 24-hour guard in Pakistan.  U.S. officials also claim Mehmood failed six lie detector tests administered during questioning.

Although there is no evidence bin Laden has obtained nuclear weapons, diplomats and intelligence officials believe he made every effort to do so (see related GSN story, today).

“They were knocking on every door.  They were trying every avenue,” said an Arab diplomat who monitored al-Qaeda activities from Pakistan.  “This was for them the future.  Why not?  It’s a weapon of mass destruction, so why not try to get hold of it?”

Mehmood could have been one possible source, according to the Post.  His work did not involve actual nuclear weapons construction, but he did help to build a plant near Islamabad that produced enriched uranium for use in nuclear bombs, the Post reported.  Before Mehmood retired from Pakistan’s nuclear program, he headed the Khosab reactor in the Punjab region that produced weapon-grade plutonium.

Bin Laden might have attempted to use Mehmood to find other scientists who would help him use nuclear materials to build a nuclear or radiological weapon, according to investigators.  Mehmood advocated the development of weapon-grade material to help arm other Islamic countries with nuclear weapons, Pakistani officials said.

“Mehmood was one of the nuclear hawks,” said Rifaat Hussain, head of the Defense and Strategic Studies Department at Quad-I-Azam University in Islamabad.  “People say he was a very capable scientist and very capable engineer but he had this totally crazy mind-set.”

Asim Mehmood, Mehmood’s son, said his father had met twice with bin Laden and that bin Laden had asked him for information on how to construct a nuclear weapon.  Mehmood said that his father had only asked bin Laden for help in establishing a charity in Afghanistan and had refused to divulge nuclear secrets.

“My father never went along,” Asim Mehmood said.  Bin Laden “asked him about how to make a bomb and things like that.  But my father wouldn’t help him.  He told him, ‘It’s not so easy.  You can’t just build a bomb.  You can’t just do it with a few thousand (Pakistani) rupees.  You need a big institution.  You should forget it’” (Peter Baker, Washington Post, March 3).

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Anthrax:  Watching the Detectives

By William Powers

National Journal

The second tier of the news, that spot just under Topic A where stories vie to be the next obsession, is unusually crowded these days.  Excellent prospects include the pedophile priests, a Boston story quietly spreading to other cities; the former NBA star charged in the killing of a chauffeur; two or three teetering companies that could be The Next Enron; and the coming shoot-out between the General Accounting Office and the vice president.

But most promising of all is a dark horse that's been plodding along for months: the anthrax mystery.  The government's search for the perpetrator had long been a B story, oddly so, given the enormity of the crime and its obvious whodunit interest. Until this week, when The Washington Times ran a front-pager that began, “The FBI’s search for the person who mailed anthrax-laced letters that killed five persons has focused on a former U.S. scientist who worked at a government laboratory where he learned how to make a weapons-grade strain of the deadly bacteria.”

Anyone who's followed this story knew this wasn’t necessarily news.  Countless outlets have run stories and columns floating the theory that the anthrax terrorist was a government scientist with some connection to an Army facility at Fort Detrick, Md., that has done a great deal of anthrax research.  Almost all of these stories have cited the same source, a State University of New York (Purchase) microbiologist named Barbara Hatch Rosenberg who, since not long after the attacks, has been aggressively promoting her own profile of the criminal.

For instance, Time magazine drew on Rosenberg for a story in its February 4 issue:  “She thinks the killer is a middle-aged American who works for a CIA contractor in the Washington area but has had access in the past to the labs at Fort Detrick.  She believes he or she has been vaccinated against anthrax and knows how to conceal forensic evidence.  Says Rosenberg: ‘It’s highly probable that the perpetrator is someone who was known in the lab, someone who was thought to be O.K.’”

The Hartford Courant of Connecticut has done the most impressive investigative work on the Fort Detrick scenario.  The paper reported, for example, that in the 1990s, the biowarfare lab was a “bizarre” and “toxic” workplace, rife with strange doings that might be related to the anthrax attack.  An Egyptian-born scientist named Ayaad Assaad, who once worked there, has alleged in a discrimination lawsuit that he was cruelly harassed for his ethnic background.  Shortly before the anthrax attacks last year, the FBI was given an anonymous letter fingering him as a possible bioterrorist.  While the bureau has cleared Assaad, it’s possible the anthrax terrorist is a former colleague who wrote the letter to frame him.

Last week, The Times of Trenton, N.J., reported a new wrinkle.  Speaking to an audience at Princeton University, Rosenberg suggested that the FBI had a specific suspect, but it had delayed arresting that person because of concerns about government secrets.  “We know that the FBI is looking at this person, and it’s likely that he participated in the past in secret activities that the government would not like to see disclosed,” Rosenberg said, according to the Trenton paper.  Note that the “he or she” of the Time account has now become a definite “he.”

The Trenton paper’s story was picked up here and there, but didn’t make a huge splash.  Then, this week, came the Washington Times story, with a somewhat ambiguous lead phrase — “focused on a former U.S. scientist” — that could be read to mean either a general profile or a specific person.  A little further down in the story, however, it became clear that reporter Jerry Seper, citing unnamed sources, was talking about an individual:  “The government’s chief suspect, the sources said, is believed to have worked at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick, Md., which has maintained stores of weapons-grade anthrax.... The sources said the former scientist is now employed as a contractor in the Washington area.  The unidentified scientist, according to the sources, was twice fired from government jobs and, after the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon that killed more than 3,000 people, reportedly made a threat to use anthrax.  He has been interviewed by FBI agents on several occasions, according to the sources, and his house has been searched.”

Hot stuff.  So hot that within hours, White House spokesman Ari Fleischer was fielding questions about the story, and knocking it down:  “Unfortunately, there still are several suspects; it’s not as if there's only one.... That story, I think, was a little over-reaching in saying there's just one. The FBI has not narrowed it down to just one; they are continuing their investigation.”

Gleeful wire stories went out, and the next day’s papers had gloating headlines such as USA Today’s “FBI:  Report of prime anthrax suspect false.”  The New York Times reported that, rather than a “chief suspect,” the FBI has a “short list” of 18 to 20 people.  That story ran on the front page, above the fold, signaling that the flagship of print media was alive to this story's new energy.  Seper, the Washington Times reporter, told me in an interview that he's not backing down:  “I stand by the fact that they have a particular guy that they have focused their investigation on.”

But what really matters, from a news consumer’s point of view, isn’t how many suspects there are.  It’s that this story has long legs, and one of these days, it’s going to run.

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United States:  Interceptor Test Rigged, Report Says

A report from a scientific research group says the test of a ship-based system to shoot down ballistic missiles conducted Jan. 25 used an oversized target, the Washington Post reported Saturday (see GSN, Jan. 28).

In the test, a missile interceptor launched from a U.S. Navy cruiser shot down an Aries target missile.  A report by the Union of Concerned Scientists said the Aries target missile was five times longer and one-third wider than warheads used on the North Korean Nodong missile, the Chinese M-9 missile and any other medium-range missile the system is designed to attack.  The target’s larger size made it easier to hit, the report said.

Based on pictures of the target shortly before the interceptor hit, analysts concluded that the missile interceptor hit the Aries target in the middle, rather than at the warhead.

“So that it would not have destroyed the warhead had it been a real interception,” the report said.

“This raises the issue of what the tests tell you about capability in real-world scenarios,” said David Wright, who wrote the report.

The ship-based system test was not meant to score an intercept but to show the interceptor’s guidance and navigational capabilities,” said Lt.-Col. Rick Lehner, spokesman for the Missile Defense Agency.

The UCS report applied “test criteria well above what is prudently possible at this stage of the development program,” Lehner said (Bradley Graham, Washington Post, March 2).

GAO Finds Flaws in Sensor Prototype

A U.S. congressional report into allegations of corporate fraud has found numerous technical flaws in the prototype of an anti-missile sensor that would be used to track enemy warheads, the New York Times reported today.

The General Accounting Office report, expected to be released today, details the technical problems in the sensor prototype developed by defense contractors TRW and Boeing.  The flaws found include cooling and calibration problems, detection of targets in space where there were none and difficulties in recognizing mock warheads from decoys, among others.  The GAO also criticizes TRW and Boeing’s claims that the sensor’s overall performance is excellent, according to the Times.

Boeing and TRW were forthcoming about the flaws in the sensor prototype during discussions between August 1997 and April 1998, the GAO said.  It did not say, however, whether Boeing and TRW described the flaws in response to allegations of fraud by Nira Schwartz, a former TRW senior engineer.  In 1996, Schwartz had accused TRW of faking work on the sensor prototype.

Schwartz’s allegations “appear to have sparked changes and improvements in a program that’s vital to national security,” said Charles Grassley (R-Iowa), who requested the GAO inquiry (William Broad, New York Times, March 4).

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Israel:  Officials Plan Joint Missile Defense With Turkey

High-level Turkish and Israeli officials agreed last month to set up a plan to build a joint missile defense system, the Jerusalem Post reported Thursday.  The system would protect against missiles from nearby countries such as Iran, which is expected to have nuclear weapons by 2005, according to the Post.

Israeli officials plan to travel soon to Turkey to begin periodic talks on the joint system, according to the Post.

Officials reached the missile defense agreement in Tel Aviv at a regular meeting called “Biannual Strategic Talks and Military Dialogue.”  U.S. officials also attended the meeting, giving the go-ahead to include Turkey in a project to produce the Arrow 2 missile (see GSN, Feb. 1), the Post reported (Metehan Demir, Jersusalem Post, Feb. 28).

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U.S. Plans:  Contractors Bid for Kwajalein Missile Range

Three U.S. defense contractors have entered bids for a contract to run the U.S. missile testing range on the Kwajalein atoll in the Pacific, Agence France-Presse reported today (see GSN, Dec. 3, 2001).

The current contract at the Kwajalein missile range expires at the end of this year, said Kwajalein commander Col. Curtis Wrenn.  A decision on a new contractor may be made by June, Wrenn said.

The defense contractor Northrop Grumman and a joint venture between Bechtel and Lockheed Martin are challenging the current contractor, Raytheon, for the contract to manage the Kwajalein missile range’s logistics and technical operations (see GSN, Feb. 12).  No company has ever won a re-bid at Kwajalein, according to AFP.

The Kwajalein base is a $4 billion missile testing range that operates a combination of U.S. missile tracking equipment, interceptor launch areas and command facilities.  It has been the main testing range for both U.S national and theater missile defense systems.  The Kwajalein contract is estimated to be worth $200 million per year (Giff Johnson, Agence France-Presse, March 4).

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