9   Undermining the International Regime :  False Allegations of BW Use 

 

 

On January 31, 1992, the only session of the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) that was ever held at the level of Heads of State or of Government produced a declaration stating that:

 

The proliferation of all weapons of mass destruction constitutes a threat to international peace and security.  The members of the Council commit themselves to working to prevent the spread of technology related to the research for or production of such weapons, and to take appropriate actions to that end.

 

The statement was accepted by all sixteen members of the UNSC in addition to the five permanent members (P-5) – the US, UK, Russia, PRC and France – who hold veto power.

The basis of the effort to prevent the proliferation or the use of biological weapons is the international BW arms control regime:  the Geneva Protocol of 1925 and the Biological and Toxin Weapon Convention (BTWC) of 1975.  Political decisions based on narrow national considerations may be the primary determinant in decisions to violate that regime.  Nevertheless, the potential for further elaboration of offensive national BW programs, as well as the possible use of BW agents, is certainly influenced by the integrity and strength of the regime.  Strengthening the international BW treaty regime is therefore essential.  There are, however, four currently ongoing activities that undermine that regime.  The first three are discussed in this section; the fourth is discussed elsewhere in the paper:

 

1.      Non-compliance by regime participants, and without penalty or sanction;

 

  1. Inaccurate and false submissions under the CBM provisions (confidence-building measures) agreed to by member states of the BTWC;

 

  1. False allegations of BW use; and

 

  1. The active effort by three of the permanent members of the UNSC, Russia, France and China, to end the sanctions regime mandated by UNSC Resolution 687 [1991] against Iraq, despite the continuing and blatant violation of its terms by Iraq, and the consequent collapse of the sanctions.

 

1.  Non-compliance by regime participants, and without penalty or sanction

            This subject was covered in the section on proliferation in the first portion of the paper.  It was noted that several countries that are attributed to have offensive BW programs, and are therefore in contravention of the BTWC, are nevertheless signatories and have ratified the treaty.  Notably, one of these, Iran, has at the same time been one of the most disruptive of the national delegations attempting to negotiate a verification protocol to the BTWC in Geneva for the past five years.  Coincidentally, Iran is also a member of the Chemical Weapons Convention, and reported to the OPCW that it had ceased chemical weapons manufacture and had destroyed all the chemical agent stockpiles that it possessed for the past decade.  US authorities, however, have testified to Congress that Iran is still producing chemical agents, and a paper published in the OPCW journal, Synthesis, which discussed Iran’s possession of chemical weapons has just aired this discrepancy.[1]  However, Iran has never suffered any consequences, even of minor embarrassment, regarding its BW program, and other nations involved in the BTWC Verification Protocol have not troubled themselves for the past half dozen years to relate Iran’s negotiating positions with its own BW program.

 

2.      Inaccurate and false submissions under the CBM (confidence-building measures) provisions agreed to by member states at the BTWC

 

            In addition to the overlap with the subject above, one of the CBMs, submission F, requires State Parties to provide details of their currently discontinued but past offensive programs.  Both the USSR (between 1987 and 1992) and South Africa maintained that their past BW programs were purely defensive in nature.[2]  Russia modified its position in 1993, submitting a statement admitting a past offensive program, but with far less detail than the size and nature of that program required.  No State Party to the BTWC has ever raised the issue.  This certainly does not contribute to confidence in the credibility of the process and in the submissions in the very cases in which it matters most.

 

3.  False allegations of BW use

 

On July 7, 1997 the Cuban government filed an official request with the Russian government, in the latter’s role as one of the original treaty depositories of the BTWC, requesting that consultation procedures be initiated to examine Cuba’s charge that the United States had used biological weapons against it, in the form of a crop destroying insect, Thrips Palmi.  Cuba had made roughly a dozen previous charges alleging US BW use involving pathogens against man, domestic animals and crop plants since the early 1970s, and had in earlier years addressed summaries of these to the United Nations Secretary General.  This was the first occasion, however, in which Cuba requested consultation under Article V of the BTWC, and it was also the very first time that any nation had requested that the procedures appearing in Article V should be carried out.  However, Article VI of the BTWC affords the means for any state party to the BTWC to file a complaint with the UN Security Council if it believes that it is the victim of BW use, and the UN Security Council may then carry out an investigation.  On no previous occasion had Cuba ever filed a complaint with the UN Security Council under Article VI, and requested an investigation, and it did not do so in this case either.

Article V provides for “consultation and cooperation…in solving any problems which may arise in relation to the…Convention.”  A BTWC document following an initial meeting in the consultative process made explicit that the procedures were being carried out under Article V: “State Parties noted that the consultation was fully in conformity with the conclusions of the final document of the Third Review Conference relevant to the application of Article V of the Convention.”[3]  As will be noted below, the United States government did not make use of either Articles V or VI in comparable circumstances.  These proceedings took place in Geneva, in the midst of the ongoing deliberations of the Ad-Hoc Group, in which the States Parties to the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention were attempting to negotiate a Verification Protocol to the Treaty.  The consultation procedures under the BTWC in the case in question were completed on December 15, 1997, and in the opinion of this author, the manner in which they took place and in which they were concluded was not beneficial to biological weapons arms control. 

This section contains a short review of the rather extensive experience of false allegations of biological weapons use since 1945.  Other papers by the author have discussed in greater detail the BTWC review of the 1997 Cuban allegations, and the resurgence of (mostly old) false allegations of BW use in the last few years.

The subject of false allegations of BW use received virtually no attention in the biological arms control literature until quite recently, beyond a few pages in the original SIPRI volumes on Chemical and Biological warfare published in 1971.[4]  The argument presented there is that false allegations of BW use are highly detrimental to an arms control regime, and that understanding has been maintained ever since.  False allegations undermine the international legal norm against the use of biological weapons contained in the Geneva Protocol of 1925.  They do this by

 

·         alleging that a nation is using BW;

·         They therefore implicitly charge that the nation is also violating the BTWC, since it must be producing the biological agent in order to be able to use it;

 

·         They further implicitly claim that such violations of both international treaties is taking place unpunished and unnoticed by the international community;

 

·         They also implicitly claim that the alleged use of biological weapons is damaging and therefore effective, which could conceivably encourage other states to consider initiating the development of biological weapons.

 

·         They encourage other states or groups to make similar allegations, further threatening international constraints against the use of biological weapons.

 

            Nevertheless, the historical record shows that such allegations are quite common and that they are in addition not made as a result of honest misassessment, but that they are made for the crassest short-term political propaganda.  The overwhelming majority of these charges were made by the USSR and Cuba.  Only very recently did this subject receive the first systematic examination.  In 1998, Leitenberg published a review of most (but not all) of these charges, and they are therefore not enumerated again here.[5]  Some additional examples not included in that survey are, however, included in a footnote.)[6]  A much more detailed monograph on the Cuban allegations in particular was published by Raymond Zilinskas in 1999.[7] 

            Perhaps the most serious of all the post-WWII charges of biological weapons use was made by China, North Korea and the USSR against the United States during the Korean War.  Although little remembered now these charges produced enormous political repercussions at the time with extensive debate at the United Nations in New York City, and international protests against the alleged US use.  In January 1998 twelve internal documents from the archives of the Central Committee of the USSR (CPSU) were obtained which provide detailed and authoritative evidence that the Korean War BW allegations were contrived and fraudulent.[8]  One document dates from February 21, 1952, and all the others from the period of April 13 to June 2, 1953, in the four months following the death of Stalin.  It is clear that the documents obtained are only a fragment of the relevant Soviet archive, but they describe, at least in part, the way in which the allegations were contrived by North Korean and Chinese officials and Soviet advisors, and they include direct communications between the Central Committee of the CPSU to both the Chinese and North Korean leaders, Mao Tse Tung and Kim Il Sung, and replies by the latter.  One document, dating from May 1953, opens with the following lines:

 

     For Mao Zedong:  The Soviet Government and the Central Committee of the CPSU were misled.  The spread in the press of information about the use by the Americans of bacteriological weapons in Korea was based on false information.  The accusations against the Americans were fictitious.[9]

 

The recent publications based on this material were made available to the most knowledgeable living Russian specialists on the Soviet-era archival records dealing with the Korean War, who commented that the papers and its analysis were correct.

            The obviously limited selection of documents that were obtained – all the rest between late February 1952 and April 1952, which includes the peak period of the charges, being absent – portrays the events as a Chinese deception of an innocent Soviet government.  The author considers that highly unlikely, but given the absence of the full Soviet and Chinese documentary history, it is impossible to be more definitive at the present time. 

As the continuing Cuban allegations are reviewed elsewhere, another recent example is provided here, one perhaps at the outer limits of ridiculousness.  In July 1999 Iraq accused a United Nations demining specialist from New Zealand, in an area of Iraqi Kurdistan in which a second New Zealander doing the same work had been shot and killed in April by unidentified attackers, of breeding and planting locust eggs to harm Iraqi crops on behalf of the intelligence services of foreign states.  The charges are considered ridiculous and preposterous, and were denied by the United Nations officials in statements which reported that the UN employee was not even at the alleged site on the day claimed by Iraq.[10]  Locusts are of course endemic in the entire Middle East and North African area, as they have been for centuries.

A day later, Iraq followed these charges with a radio address by Saddam Hussein charging the US with Abiological warfare,@ and with Aspreading new diseases@ and introducing Aviruses and germs to Iraq to harm the Iraqis:@

 

The enemies even exploited the United Nations as a tool to disseminate diseases among people in Iraq.  They buried the locusts= eggs so that they will later become fully-grown locusts that would eat people=s food.  People would then be deprived of food and consequently die in this beleaguered state.  What kind of germ is this that worked under the UN guise?Y.

This is not the work of the individual, but the work of a state and its intelligence services.  What is strange is that the United Nations does not try to defend itself.  The entire world said that there are spies who worked under the cover of the United Nations for the United StatesY.

The shameful behavior of the UN employee means biological war in every sense of the word.  They are falsely bearing the banner of fighting against biological warYwhile they themselves launched a biological war on Iraq, spreading new diseases that never existed in Iraq before the war.  There are those who bury locust eggs to harm agricultural fields, or transport viruses and germs to Iraq to harm the Iraqis.  Why do they do that, and to whose benefit?  Do they want food shortages and illnesses to spread? I apologize, comrades, for drifting to these sad topics.[11]

 

What Has the Impact of False Allegations Been?

 

There was an outbreak of false allegations of BW use in 1998-1999.[12]  It is impossible to say to what degree or not this might have been attributable to the weak treatment of Cuba=s Thrips Palmi allegation under the BTWC Aconsultation@ mechanism in 1997.  There is no way of knowing whether those responsible for producing this sudden burst of repeated old BW allegations or making new ones are even cognizant of what took place in Geneva, or if they are, whether it at all weighs in their calculations to renew propagandistic disinformation.  It is therefore difficult to say that the first consultation process held under the BTWC mechanisms in Geneva, which ended on an ambiguous and inconclusive note, contributed to these subsequent events.  They may all be a matter of isolated coincidence, and there certainly is a very greatly increased atmosphere of discussion of biological weapons and warfare in general in recent years, most particularly in the United States and by US officials.  However, if there had been a quite aggressive investigation of the 1997 Cuban charges, and a definitive and noticeable report at the end stating that the charges were unsupportable and concocted, that would most certainly have served to impede further politicized allegations every time a natural disease outbreak occurs in a country in which there is an ongoing conflict, or in which local political elites think that there is some domestic political gain to be obtained by making charges of biological weapons use by an external actor.

 

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ENDNOTES

[1]   Gerald M. Steinberg, “Israeli Policy on the CWC,” Synthesis  [OPCW], November 2000, pp. 29-31; Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, Statement by Director-General of the OPCW,” December 8, 2000; Gerald M. Steinberg, “Exchange of Letters and Statements on Questions of Iranian Compliance With the CWC, and the Publication in Synthesis, (November 2000),” January 3, 2000.  For US government testimony on Iran’s current possession of chemical weapons, see Einhorn [reference to be inserted]. 

 

[2]   In regard to South Africa, see Chandré Gould and Peter I. Folb, “The South African Chemical and Biological Weapon Program:  An Overview,” The NonProliferation Review (Fall-Winter 2000):10-23.

 

[3] See note #13 (August 27, 1999) below.  A US press guidance of August 25, 1997 tied the consultative process even more strongly to documents relating to the BTWC Review Conference, rather than to specific articles of the BTWC itself: “The formal consultation is a mechanism agreed to at the Second and Third Review Conferences of the BWC to address ambiguities related to the objective and purposes of the convention.  NO decisions regarding BWC compliance can be made.”

[4]  The Problem of Chemical and Biological Warfare: vol. 5: The Prevention of CBW, pp.58-61, pp. 220-225; and The Problem of Chemical and Biological Warfare: vol. 1: The Rise of CB Weapons (Stockholm: Almqvist and Wiksell, and SIPRI, 1971), pp. 223-230.

[5]  Milton Leitenberg, “Biological Weapons, International Sanctions, and Proliferation,” Asian Perspective, 21:3, (Winter, 1997) 7-39; in particular the section “The Problem of False Allegations of Biological Use; Arms Control Implications,” pages 22-31.

[6]  Some additional allegations of biological weapons use not recorded in earlier publications (SIPRI, 1971 and Leitenberg, 1998) are included below, but these too are only a selection:

 

C                      As early as 1949 and 1950, the USSR (Tass and Pravda) claimed that the US was testing biological weapons, specifically plague, on the Eskimo population of Northern Canada, and had precipitated a plague epidemic as a result (“Pravda Lays Plague Blame to American,” Reuter, June 11, 1950)

C                      In 1952, the USSR (Tass) suggested that an outbreak of foot and mouth disease of cattle, in Canada, was due to the production of the agent by the US, the UK and Canada.  The report also stated that the US was experimenting with locusts in Saudi Arabia and throughout the Middle East.  This coincided with the wide incidence of locusts in the area. (Memorandum, US Department of State, OIR/CPI, March 20, 1952).

C                      In March 1957, Algerian independence groups reported that French authorities had injected a captive with typhus so as to initiate an epidemic, and that France was thereby “A...waging bacteriological warfare.”

C                      In 1963, North Vietnam charged that between March 1 and 18 South Vietnamese aircraft (identified as “US-Diem” aircraft) had “sprayedYgerms which after hatching, gave birth to many unknown varieties of caterpillars with great destructive power” (“New War Crime in South Vietnam; Spraying by U.S. Planes of Toxic Chemicals,” Hanoi, 1963, page 25).

C                      In 1972, the Provisional Revolutionary Government of the Republic of South Vietnam again charged that the United States was “spraying larvae to destroy crops in Quang Ngai Province” (“U.S.-Puppets Drop Larvae on Quang Ngai Province,” September 29, 1972; 1972-376 A GPA)

C                      In August 1987 the US government obtained the agreement of Soviet authorities that they would stop releasing reports that the US was responsible for the purposeful spread of AIDs in Africa.  Nevertheless, in January 1988 there was again a report by Tass that the US was developing “ethnic” weapons.  David Ottaway, “U.S. Links Soviets to Disinformation,” Washington Post, January 17, 1988). In November 1988 the US government again obtained Soviet agreement to end these misinformation campaigns (Constance Holden, ”Curbing Soviet Disinformation,” Science, 242 (November 4, 1998)

C                      On September 2, 1995 the Iraqi mission to the United Nations charged that “The Allies used an extremely advanced chemical and biological compound named ‘tricoticine’ which has long-term effects on human beings, animals, and even on plants,” (FBIS-TAC-95-006, December 6, 1995, page 69)  The allegation obviously refers to tricothecene mycotoxins.

C                      The outbreak of plague in Surat, India, in September 1994 resulted in a whispering campaign by Indian authorities that the plague strain was “a genetically engineered microbe intended for biological warfare,” and the suggestion in the Indian media was that the US was responsible. (R. Prasannan, “Military Microbe,” The Week, July 23, 1995, pages 30-37; See also The Week, (October 16, 1994); Lancet, 345 (June 24, 1995) 1626, and Lancet, 345 (1995) pg. 443).

C                      

[7] Raymond Zilinskas, “Cuban Allegations of Biological Warfare By the United States: Assessing the Evidence,” Critical Reviews in Microbiology, 25:3 (1999):173-228.

 

[8] This record was published in a monograph and two journal publications:

C                      Milton Leitenberg, The Korean War Biological Warfare Allegations Resolved, Occasional Paper 36, Center for Pacific Asia Studies, Stockholm University, May 1998.

C                      Milton Leitenberg, “Resolution of the Korean War Biological Warfare Allegations,” Critical Reviews in Microbiology, 24:3 (Fall 1998) 169-194.

C                      Milton Leitenberg, “New Russian Evidence on the Korean War Biological Warfare Allegations: Background and Analysis,” Cold War International History Project Bulletin, Issue 11, Winter 1998, pages 185-200, and pages 180-185 for the documents in full. (English translation).

A subsequent paper was published in 2000. See, Milton Leitenberg, “The Korean War Weapon Allegations:  Additional Information and Disclosures,” Asian Perspectives 24:3 (2000):159-172.

 

[9]   May 1953, Resolution of the Presidium of the Council of Ministers of the USSR about letters to the Ambassador of the USSR in the PRC, V.V. Kuznetsov, and to the Chargé d’Affaires of the USSR in the DPRK, S.P. Suzdalev.

 

[10] Colum Lynch, “U.N. Employee Planned Locust Plague, Iraq Says,” Washington Post, July 7, 1999;  Judith Miller, “U.N. Backs Mine Expert Expelled by Iraq,” New York Times, July 9, 1999; “Mine Expert Expelled by Iraq,” New York Times, July 9, 1999.

 

[11] “Saddam Accuses U.N./U.S. of Germ Warfare,” Baghdad, Republic of Iraq Radio Network, in Arabic, 1800 GMT, July 8, 1999;  “Saddam: U.N. Waging Germ Warfare,” Associated Press, July 9, 1999.

 

[12]   Milton Leitenberg, “The Efficacy of the Mechanisms for Assessing Allegations of Biological Weapons Use in the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention, and the Resurgence of False Allegations of BW Use in 1998-1999,” Pugwash Conference paper, November 1999.