South Africa:  Former Weapons Scientist Offered to Sell Materials to FBI

A South African scientist last year attempted to sell the FBI samples of his country’s former biological weapons program, but the bureau ultimately turned down the offer, the Washington Post reported Sunday (see GSN, May 21, 2002).

After the fall 2001 anthrax attacks in the United States, Daan Goosen, a South African scientist who had worked in the apartheid-era Project Coast chemical and biological weapons program, contacted the U.S. Defense Department with an offer of “open cooperation” to share the project’s research on anthrax vaccines and treatments (see GSN, Oct. 23, 2002).  The Pentagon then arranged a meeting in January 2002 between Goosen and Bioport Corp., the sole U.S. producer of anthrax vaccine, the Post reported.  Bioport, however, quickly lost interest in Goosen’s offer.

After Bioport rejected Goosen’s offer, he was contacted by retired South African Maj. Gen. Tai Minnaar, who worked for the CIA during the 1970s, according to the Post.  Minnaar offered to connect Goosen with U.S. officials who would be interested in his research and who might be willing to pay for it, according to Goosen.  Minnaar then contacted Don Mayes, a former CIA operative with prior experience in purchasing foreign weapons systems for the agency.  Minnaar told Mayes in a March 2002 letter that biological materials from Project Coast, which was terminated in 1993, still existed and posed a proliferation risk, according to the Post.

“With the current situation here at present, we need to ensure that the technology as well as ‘stock in hand’ (at present stored safely in a private facility) are safeguarded from finding its way to the people on the wrong side of the fence,” Minnaar wrote in an e-mail to Mayes.  “This is a very real danger, as some of the other technology we fear has already been sold,” Minnaar added.

Within three weeks, Mayes arranged a series of meetings with CIA and FBI officials to discuss the possibility of bringing Goosen and his samples to the United States, the Post reported.  In exchange for his research, Goosen asked for $5 million and immigration permits for himself and as many as 19 associates and family members to come to the United States. 

Before the samples would be handed over to U.S. officials, however, Goosen first sent one to the FBI to verify his credibility, according to the Post.  He chose a sample of Escherichia coli, a common intestinal bacterium, that had been combined with a toxin-producing gene from Clostriduim perfringens, which can cause gas gangrene.  An associate of Mayes, former CIA official Robert Zlockie, transported the sample to the United States in May 2002 and gave it to the FBI, the Post reported.

The FBI decided to reject Goosen’s offer, however, after U.S. Army scientists analyzed the sample, the Post reported. 

“The material was just as advertised, but the hands-down reaction was, ‘So what?’” said one law enforcement official familiar with the assessment. 

The FBI was not convinced that the purchase of Goosen’s research would be useful, the law enforcement official said, noting that any of the bacteria included in the samples could easily be found in nature.  In addition, Project Coast’s genetic engineering experiments, while advanced at the time, had been outpaced by technological advancements, the official said.

“If they thought we were going to put out good money for that kind of stuff, they came to the wrong group,” said a U.S. law enforcement official who reviewed Goosen’s proposal.  “Thanks for being good citizens, but no thanks,” the official added.

U.S. officials involved in the decision to reject Goosen’s offer said there was no reason to pay him or for excluding the South African government in a plan involving biological materials in that country.  Even though Mayes warned the FBI in a note against alerting South African officials to the plan, the bureau did so in an official letter soon after Mayes’s warning, the Post reported.

“From that point on, it became a police matter for South Africa,” the law enforcement official familiar with the assessment said.

Ultimately, South African authorities twice investigated Goosen, but chose not to charge him with a crime, according to the Post.  In the past nine months, however, Goosen has been offered money by a German national and a man claiming to be an Arab sheik, but he has said he has rejected the offers.

Some disarmament experts have criticized the FBI’s decision to reject Goosen’s offer.

“Here was a guy who had worked in a former chemical and biological program and was willing to provide information and assistance to the United States,” said Jeffrey Bale of the Monterey Institute of International Studies’s Center for Nonproliferation Studies.  “That’s worth following up on.  If a person like Goosen decides to collaborate with a foreign party, it’s far better that he collaborates with us and not with rogue elements in other parts of the world,” he said (Warrick/Mintz, Washington Post, April 20).

There are also concerns that Project Coast materials or expertise could be transferred to rogue states or terrorist organizations, according to experts.  Almost a decade later, South Africa is still attempting to learn what kinds of weapons were developed in the clandestine program and what became of them, officials said.

“So many of the past problems occurred because there weren’t enough checks and balances in the system,” said Torie Pretorius, one of two lead prosecutors in South Africa’s case against Wouter Basson, former head of Project Coast, on murder and fraud charges, of which he was acquitted (see GSN, April 12, 2002).  “Are those checks and balances any better today?  I don’t think so,” he said.

Project Coast’s “Stealth” Anthrax

Daan Goosen’s offer was not the only experience the United States had with former South African biological weapons scientists in the last year, according to the Post, which noted that U.S. officials interviewed Basson for three days at the U.S. Embassy in Pretoria last July.

During the interviews, Basson discussed Project Coast’s creation of a “stealth” anthrax strain, which was a native South African strain of anthrax modified to be able to evade the field tests used in South Africa and neighboring countries, according to officials knowledgeable of the meeting. 

“They ended up with an organism that would confound conventional detection,” said a U.S. law enforcement official who reviewed Basson’s claim.  “That way, the spread of the disease is not stopped, and more people would become ill,” the official said, adding that U.S. tests would have been able to detect the strain.

Anthrax experts said the modified strain was possible, but probably not very effective as a weapon.  The modifications described by Basson would have reduced the strain’s virulence, said Martin Hugh-Jones of Louisiana State University.

“It might make a few goats sick but it wouldn’t do very well at killing people,” Hugh-Jones said.  “It appears he turned a pathogenic organism into a nonpathogenic one,” he added.

Basson said he had learned the techniques to create the stealth anthrax strain from Israeli government scientists, according to the Post.  While Israel has denied having biological and chemical weapons programs, many U.S. experts believe such programs do exist.  Israel is also believed to have aided apartheid-era South Africa in its nuclear weapons efforts.

“The two countries at the time shared a similar mind-set:  Both saw groups inside their own borders that threatened the country’s survival,” said a U.S. government weapons analyst with first-hand knowledge of Project Coast.  “The enemy wasn’t another nation-state but pockets of individuals within their own population,” the analyst said (Joby Warrick, Washington Post, April 21).

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U.S. Response:  Health Plans Search for Bioterror Symptoms

By Marilyn Werber Serafini

National Journal

WASHINGTON — In matters of homeland security, experts on all sides have long been saying that more cooperation is needed among various levels of government and the private sector in preventing and coping with terrorist attacks (see GSN, April 15).

It now looks as if a pilot program of teamwork between the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and some private health plans is bearing fruit.

The CDC and a handful of health plans are about a year into a collaborative project whose aim is earlier and better detection of potential bioterrorism attacks-spotting disease outbreaks before emergency rooms are suddenly flooded with victims.  In essence, the streams of data coming into health insurance plans-phone calls to nurse-help lines and doctors’ diagnoses, for example-are sifted by computer programs to look for disease and symptom patterns sorted by ZIP code.  Such a system may already be proving valuable in tracking early signs of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, or SARS, as the dreaded and sometimes-deadly illness begins creeping into the United States.

The CDC awarded a grant of $1.2 million about a year ago to Harvard Pilgrim Health Care, a large health plan that serves New England, to begin collecting and analyzing information about certain respiratory and gastrointestinal symptoms that might mark the beginning of a bioterrorism attack.  Soon, a handful of other large health plans will begin feeding their patient information to Harvard Pilgrim, which will act as the data-processing hub.  New participants will include United Healthcare, HealthPartners in Minnesota, and Kaiser Permanente in Colorado.

Even before this project began, many state-level public health agencies were upgrading their tracking techniques to monitor emergency-room visits and sales of over-the-counter drugs such as anti-diarrhea medicine.  The hope is that conducting surveillance through health plans will be quicker than tracking emergency room visits.  “A lot of people are looking at emergency rooms and hospitals, but perhaps the nurse call-in lines and primary-care physicians may be a day or two ahead in the epidemic,” said Blake Caldwell, a CDC contractor who is the senior consulting epidemiologist for this pilot project, called the National Bioterrorism Syndromic Surveillance Demonstration Program.

Karen Ignagni, president of the American Association of Health Plans, which worked with the CDC to set up the project, has been considering such collaborations since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11.  “As we began to talk about this issue with medical directors, it became clear that we had a unique set of skills and a unique set of competencies that could provide a real public health benefit,” she said.

Members often report symptoms to their health plan first, Ignagni said-sometimes more than a week before they might go to an emergency room.

The symptoms of most communicable diseases that could indicate a coming epidemic begin slowly and quietly, she explained; they are not major life-interrupting events, such as heart attacks, that can collapse a patient in short order.  Some of the symptoms associated with the most-feared potential biological weapons, such as smallpox and anthrax, may resemble the flu for days before more-telling signs set in.

“When you first start having symptoms, they’re not serious enough to drive to the emergency room,” Ignagni said.  “But you have symptoms, and you feel strange and you don’t understand why they’re occurring, so you want to talk to somebody.”  More often than heading for the emergency room, people visit their doctor or seek advice from the nurse call-in lines that many insurance plans make available to their members as a kind of first-line triage.

Early evidence shows that the project is working to spot spikes in the rates of natural disease in Massachusetts, said Richard Platt, principal investigator, and professor of the Ambulatory Care and Prevention Department at Harvard Pilgrim.  According to Platt, Harvard Pilgrim has already anticipated increases in hospitalizations for respiratory infection.  During this winter’s flu season, he said, his system was able to predict an upswing in respiratory infections about two weeks before hospital admissions started to rise.

The idea behind the CDC/Harvard Pilgrim demonstration is to collect information in a variety of ways and then merge it all to reveal trends.  A participating doctor’s practice, for example, installs sophisticated computer technology that essentially scans the diagnoses that doctors assign to the patients they see in any given day, looking for symptoms associated with commonly suspected bioterrorism agents.

With more doctors keeping patient information electronically, such reporting and collecting should be able to grow quickly, according to Ignagni.  Currently, only those physicians who store patient medical records electronically can participate.  However, Caldwell said she hopes that the program will soon expand to include physicians who file insurance claims electronically.

Here’s how the system works: At the end of each day, the computer at the doctor’s office, clinic, or nurse call-in line automatically checks the day’s records for specified symptoms.  The findings from each office are transmitted-without any names or identifying information-to Harvard Pilgrim, which combines all the data.  Harvard Pilgrim sorts the final data by ZIP code and compares it to epidemiological norms for the region and the time of year.

Caldwell noted that health plans and patients should not be concerned about confidentiality.  The health plans initially report only the number of people in a particular ZIP code with either respiratory or gastrointestinal trouble.  If a worrisome number of people within a particular ZIP code report similar symptoms, Harvard Pilgrim and public health officials can go back to the health plan and ask for more information.  The health plan can then look at the individual patient records in question and determine if there is a reasonable explanation for the illness, or whether the patients can be linked in some alarming way.

If there is reason to fear an outbreak, the local public health agency then has the right to ask for the identities of the affected patients.

So far, about once a month, Harvard Pilgrim has notified public health officials about spikes in respiratory or gastrointestinal symptoms.  In the end, none of those spikes has turned out to be related to bioterrorism.

The beauty of the effort is that collecting and sorting the information is mostly automatic, Platt said.  “There’s no active human involvement in this.  The computer program runs every night and extracts the information that’s needed ... It’s not asking any of the clinical providers to collect any additional information or to record additional information or to take steps to notify anybody.  This information is collected in the course of routine health care delivery,” he said.  “This is important, because we need a system that is sustainable.”

This month, United Healthcare will join the project, gathering information from its nurse call-in line, called Optum.  Bob Harmon, vice president and national medical director of Optum, said he’s sure his system can help.  He cited a study of a 1993 outbreak in Wisconsin of cryptosporidium, a waterborne parasite that comes from animal waste.  That outbreak sent 4,400 people to the hospital, killed 50, and sickened hundreds of thousands in Milwaukee.  At the time, patients began contacting nurse call-in lines several days before the emergency rooms started to report victims.

“This was the kind of thing that led to this particular project, realizing that this could be valuable for a bioterrorism event, and also for a public health outbreak,” Harmon said.

Optum is the largest company offering nurse telephone triage in the United States; it serves more than 23 million people through six call centers.

About 400 nurses are on hand to talk to health plan members about symptoms and concerns.  Of course, not all 23 million members call the nurse line for help.  According to Harmon, up to 10 percent place a call in any given year.  But that’s more than enough calls to detect a problem, said Reed Tuckson, the senior vice president for consumer health and medical care advancement at United Healthcare.  “If there were to be an increasing incidence of disease that was occurring, we are in a position ... from people’s use of our service, to be able to detect some of that,” Tuckson said.

To be sure, this isn’t the only surveillance effort under way.  The CDC is still encouraging local authorities to monitor emergency room visits and sales of over-the-counter medications, for example.  “The theory now at CDC is to let a thousand flowers bloom,” Ignagni said.

“Encourage a variety of systems to develop so that they can have the best of those systems, and see what they want to keep over time and what they want to discard over time.”

But Ignagni believes that private health plans can provide one of the earliest warning signs in detecting a possible biological attack.  Indeed, as the pilot project begins its second year, AAHP is asking for a larger federal grant, and more health plans want to participate.  Kaiser Permanente in California is ready to go, and Caldwell is asking CDC for the funding to get Golden State participants in the system.  Several other large health insurers, including Aetna, are considering participating in the project.

Caldwell cautions that this is still a localized demonstration project.

But, she said, “I’d like to think that this will grow tremendously.  We just have to prove that the system works.”

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Syria:  Damascus Says No to Weapons Inspectors

Damascus announced yesterday that it will not allow weapons inspectors into Syria, but it plans to push for a broad plan that would eliminate weapons of mass destruction from the Middle East (see GSN, April 17).

Speaking in Cairo, Syrian Foreign Minister Farouk al-Sharaa said Syria would not allow inspectors, but he did not clarify if he was negating earlier official statements that Syria would only allow inspectors if they were deployed to countries across the Middle East, including Israel.

“Syria won’t allow any inspection.  It will only participate with its (Arab) brothers and all of the states of the world in turning the Middle East into an area free of weapons of mass destruction,” al-Sharaa said.

Recent U.S. allegations of Syrian chemical weapons development were made at Israel’s behest, al-Sharaa said.

Al-Sharaa also welcomed the prospect of a visit by U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell, “because we believe dialogue between the two countries is important” (Reuters/Washington Post, April 18).

Pushing its plan for a WMD-free Middle East, Syria introduced a draft resolution Wednesday to the U.N. Security Council.  Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Maher said Cairo would support the effort (United Press International, April 17).

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Russia:  Italy Expands Aid to Weapons Destruction Effort

Russia and Italy yesterday signed an additional protocol to their agreement on the destruction of Russia’s chemical weapons stockpiles (see GSN, Jan. 14).  Under the new protocol, Italy will assist in the construction of a gas pipeline to provide energy to a chemical weapons disposal facility near the Russian city of Shchuchye that is currently under construction (ITAR-Tass, April 18).

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Smallpox:  U.S. Immunizes More Than 32,000 Volunteers

U.S. health officials had vaccinated 32,644 civilian volunteers as of April 13, an increase of only 1,400 over the previous week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported today (see GSN, April 10).

The CDC has recorded 10 cases of myopericarditis — swelling in or around the heart — since the program began, according to the CDC.  Three new cases were registered in the week preceding April 13.

The U.S. military has reported about 20 cases of heart inflammation in the course of its immunization program, in which more than 350,000 personnel have received the vaccine.

Between April 5 and April 13, health officials recorded at least nine serious adverse reactions to the vaccine and seven cases of the vaccine spreading beyond the immunization site.  Officials also reported 77 mild adverse effects in that week, according to the CDC (CDC release, April 17)

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U.S. Response:  Officials Working to Create Animal Disease Surveillance Systems

U.S. officials are working to create national, state and local disease surveillance systems to detect suspicious outbreaks of animal diseases that could indicate a biological weapons attack or agricultural terrorism, the Associated Press reported today (see GSN, Feb. 3).

For example, suspiciously high numbers of cases of bovine anthrax, or an outbreak of anthrax in a region of the country where the disease is rare, could be indications of bioterrorism, said Radford Davis, assistant director of Iowa State University’s Center for Food Security and Public Health.

“Or a cat diagnosed with plague in Florida and the cat never left Florida.  That’s news because plague is limited to the Southwest,” Davis said.

Veterinarians will play an important role in the planned surveillance systems, officials said.  The U.S. Agriculture Department has requested an additional $47 million this to year to enhance a network to respond to biological terrorism and an additional $23 million for the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, which trains veterinarians to respond to foreign animal disease outbreaks.

“The sooner we can detect a foreign animal disease, quarantine it and shut down the movement of livestock, the sooner we will be able to contain it,” said Bobby Acord, administrator of the inspection service (Michael Rubinkam, Associated Press/Yahoo.com, April 15).

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