The Experience of the Use of Biological Weapons by Non-State Groups

6 The Experience of the Use of Biological Weapons by Non-State Groups

A The Historical Record Regarding the Potential for State-Supported Terrorism with Biological Weapons

For over twenty years since its first appearance in 1979, the United States government has released an annual list of “State Sponsors of International Terrorism.” This means that such states provide either some or all of the following to the very many groups that they support: training, sanctuary, documents, funding, explosives, or weapons. Of those states that have appeared on this list virtually year after year, no less than five also appear on the list of states that the US government charges have offensive biological weapons programs: Iraq, Iran, Libya, North Korea, and Syria.

This issue is germane because even those who admit that producing biological weapons might not be so simple a task for an isolated, non-national or terrorist group, the possibility is immediately raised that such a group could in theory obtain assistance, either in the form of training, technical assistance, or by direct transfer of a usable agent, from a state which does have a biological weapons capability. Nevertheless, there is no known evidence to date that such an event has ever happened, despite an extensive, decades-long record of very substantial assistance to literally dozens of different groups. Most government authorities, both US and other, tend to believe that if a state with biological weapons capability did want to make use of such weapons covertly, it but would use its own and presumably better trained personnel to carry out the task and would not do so by transferring them to an external ad-hoc group. In 1996, the US Defense Intelligence Agency stated that: “Most of the state sponsors have chemical or biological or radioactive material in their stockpiles and therefore have the ability to provide such weapons to terrorists if they wish. However, we have no conclusive information that any sponsor has the intention to provide these weapons to terrorists.”[1]

B. The Experience of the Use of Biological Weapons by Non-State Groups

This section is comprised of two parts, continuing the essentially historical record of the material provided above, and forming a transition to current assessments. The three sections are:

1) Databases on biological (and chemical) terrorism

2) A brief description of the efforts of the Aum Shinrikyo group in Japan to produce biological agents.

3) The potential of terrorist use of biological weapons in the United States.

1) Databases

Five extensive databases have now been developed and published since 1993. They were prepared by:

Harvey McGeorge, in a DOD-contracted study, covering the years 1945 to 1994.[2]
Ron Purver, at the Canadian Intelligence Service, covering the years 1945 to 1995.[3]
Bruce Hoffman, at the RAND Corporation, covering the years 1900 to 1998.[4]
Seth Carus, prepared for the National Defense University (US DOD), covering the years 1900 to 1999.[5]

Amy Sands, at the Monterey Institute, Center for Non-Proliferation Studies, covering the years 1900 to 1999.[6]

All five are global surveys. Cumulatively, these databases contain nearly a thousand events in the twentieth century in a wide array of categories, extending from hoaxes, threats, consideration or discussion of use, purchase of materials, attacks on facilities, attempts to use, product tamperings, and actual use. They are summarized in Table 4. All demonstrate the same result:

C There is an extremely low incidence of real biological (or chemical) events, in contrast to the number of recent hoaxes, the latter spawned by administration and media hype since 1996 concerning the prospective likelihood and dangers of such events.

C Those events that were real, and were actual examples of use, were overwhelmingly chemical, and even in that category, involved the use of easily available, off-the shelf, non-synthesized industrial products. Many of these were instances of personal murder, and not attempts at mass casualty use. The Sands/Monterey compilation indicated that exactly one person had been killed in the United States in the 100 years between 1900 and 2000 as a result of an act of biological or chemical terrorism.

C Excluding the preparation of ricin, a plant toxin that is relatively easy to prepare, there are only a few recorded instances in the years 1900 to 2000 of the preparation of biological pathogens in a private laboratory by a non-state actor.

Further, the 1999 publication of the book Toxic Terror, which contains a detailed examination of a dozen of the most

well-known putative cases of the involvement of terrorist groups with chemical and biological agents demonstrated that exactly half of these were apocryphal.[7] This includes the notorious alleged German Red Army Faction “incident” which for years authors such as Kupperman, Douglas, and others had referred to, allegedly relying on classified US government intelligence. The German security services (BND) had always claimed that the “case” was spurious, but its quiet suggestions to this effect had been disregarded.

It would be useful before going on to examine the case of the Aum group in Japan to look for a moment at the single instance of a mass casualty event that did take place in the United States using a biological agent. This was the use of Salmonella, placed on food in salad bars, by the Rajneesh group in The Dalles, Oregon, in 1984. This resulted in 751 recorded instances of illness, with no mortality. The group had discussed using a more serious pathogen, but decided against the risk of producing mortality, as their purpose was to incapacitate a large portion of the local population on the day of an election. The Salmonella was obtained from a type-culture collection, and the culturing work was carried out by a trained technician who belonged to the group. Given the calculated success of this event, and that its cause as an intentional act was not identified until long after the occurrence, it is nevertheless useful to compare the degree of deliberate injury that was caused by this act to the incidence of similar intestinal infections contracted by US tourists traveling in Mexico, the Middle East, Africa, and the Indian subcontinent annually since 1945. The rate must unquestionably be in the millions per year.

2) The Effort of the Aum Shinrikyo group in Japan to Produce Biological Weapons Agents

In March 1995, members of a Japanese religious cult, the Aum Shinrikyo, were responsible for releasing the chemical agent Sarin in the Tokyo subway. They had produced the Sarin themselves, and their act killed thirteen people and injured several hundred (not 5,500, which was the number of people that arrived at hospitals.) They had also used Sarin undetected in June 1994 in another Japanese city, in an incident that produced seven deaths and injured 200. It was subsequently discovered that the group had attempted to produce biological agents between 1990 and 1994 and to disperse what they had produced on nine occasions in Tokyo and other nearby areas, to no effect.

The Tokyo subway event led to the US Senate Hearings in October 1995 held by the Committee on Government Operations, under Senators Roth and Nunn, which in turn catalyzed the train of decisions, programs and funding to counter the potential use of weapons of mass destruction in the United States. The public discussion in the United States for the past four years has, however, been overwhelmingly relegated to biological weapons, and “bioterrorism.” The experience of the Aum group in its efforts to produce biological agents is particularly important for several reasons, but it has been continually misinterpreted and misrepresented to mean precisely the opposite of what the experience demonstrated.[8]

First, as to what the group’ capabilities were and what they did do:

C They had virtually unlimited funds to procure appropriate equipment, which they did through front companies they had established.

C They had adequate facilities, and four years in which to work undisturbed.

C They had about a dozen people with graduate training, not all in the appropriate disciplines, but with the kind of academic training which in theory should lead one to understand how to go about learning what one needs to know.

C They had attempted to buy assistance and technology in the USSR to aid their efforts to produce both chemical and biological weapons, and despite the expenditure of several million dollars, they appear to have come away empty-handed, certainly insofar as obtaining information concerning biological weapons. This last point is particularly important as one real-world reference point relating to the frequently expressed fear of the likely ease of procuring such information from unemployed or poorly-salaried former Soviet experts. (It can also be noted that there have been other even more striking failures in efforts to buy information from former Soviet BW scientists.)

Second, concerning what the Aum group was able to achieve or not achieve:

C They attempted to produce two biological agents, Clostridium botulinum, to obtain Botulinum toxin, and anthrax, both of which are constantly referred to as organisms that should be relatively simple to work with. They failed to produce either, and so of course their efforts to “disperse” these also failed. In fact, they could not have produced any infective anthrax since they had obtained a culture of a non-virulent, denatured vaccine strain of the organism.

C They did not have any Q-fever cultures, and therefore they were not “working with” that organism (contrary to various reports). They had attempted to purchase a Q-fever culture from a Japanese academic researcher, but were rebuffed, which is again of particular significance.

C They did not have samples of the Ebola virus, contrary to various reports, though it does appear that they had hoped to obtain them.

C Finally, they did not do any “genetic engineering,” also contrary to some further misreporting.

There are two important points to be made. First, the Aum experience was a real, serious example, not the constant hypothetical evocations of unqualified, untrained “terrorists” being able to produce biological agents in “kitchens,” “garages,” “bathtubs,” and “home beer brewery kits.” Despite the expenditure of substantial time, effort, money and some requisite talent, their efforts totally failed. Second, it is my understanding that classified US government evaluations of the efforts of the Aum group to produce biological agents are the same as the information provided above. Despite this, no member of any agency of the US government has seen fit to provide a more proper public assessment of the lessons of this experience.[9]

3) Official Concern in the United States Regarding the Potential of Terrorist Use of Biological Weapons

The discussion of this subject in the United States, beginning around 1996 following the disclosure of the 1990 to 1994 efforts by the Japanese Aum group to produce BW agents, and its use of the chemical agent Sarin in 1995, has been characterized by gross exaggeration, hype, misinformation, and, at times, even simple ignorance. It was overwhelmingly dominated by two clichés which were repeated ad infinitum: “It is not a matter of whether, just when,” and “The nation will face within five years....” Five years have in fact now passed. Brian Jenkins (whose consulting group apparently staffed the July 2000 Report of the National Commission on Terrorism) characterized the discussion that ensued as “fact free analysis,” and that in the absence of a validated threat, anxieties had been converted into conclusions. At a conference held by the Chemical and Biological Arms Control Institute on April 29-30, 1999 (the first of two two-day meetings under the rubric of “Bioterrorism in the United States: Calibrating the Threat”), Jenkins pointed out that when terrorist acts which could be relatively easily achieved, such as aircraft hijackings or product tamperings first appeared as means used by terrorists, the rate of these events increased sharply year by year within five years. But the Aum experience has so far proved to be a single data point, and not the beginning of a trend.

Instead, what we have seen are many hundreds of hoaxes. Hoaxes are not BW; they are not “anthrax;” they are not “BW events;” and they are not “biological agents.” Nor do they constitute terrorist consideration of the use of BW (or, as phrased in the Defense Science Board Summer Study of 1997, demonstrations of “...the breadth of weaponry available” to terrorist groups), and they should not be counted in statistical compendia as such, as has widely occurred. A hoax is a hoax, and nothing else.

Two brief, but more expert assessments were provided to Congress early in 1999. John Lauder, Special Assistant to the Director of Central Intelligence for Proliferation, told the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence on March 3, 1999, that “...the preparation and effective use of BW by both potentially hostile states and by non-state actors, including terrorists, is harder than some popular literature seems to suggest.” One should note that the statement included even “potentially hostile states,” which would certainly make it even more difficult for “non-state actors.” And Col. David Franz, then the Deputy Commander of the US Army’s Medical Research and Materiel Command told the Senate Intelligence Committee that BW terrorism is difficult to carry out, and that it would require a “...large well-funded terrorist program or state sponsorship.”

Back to Contents Forward to Section 7