Amerithrax (40 page)

He induced them to swallow a bitter solution in teacups. Within minutes, ten were dead and four others were writhing on the floor. The “medicine” was actually deadly potassium cyanide and the “doctor” a poisoner making his third attempt at bank robbery. Seven months after the poisonings, police arrested an artist, Sadamichi Hirasawa, for the murders.

Inside the Aum building was a modern biolab—flasks, test tubes, beakers, glass evaporators, Bunsen burners, dig- ital equipment, glass tubing, ceramic grinding bowls. Mi- croscopes stood on the counters, flanked by refrigerator units and incubators. Stacked against the back wall were cans of peptone, a protein used for culturing bacteria. Aum, with a treasury of more than $300 million, had invested lavishly in gear for its six labs. The cult’s experienced biologists had taken graduate courses in modern universities and obtained seed stocks from rogue governments in Aum Shinrikyo’s worldwide quest for chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction.

The cult tried to culture botulinum organisms from nat- urally contaminated soil obtained in the wild. In April 1990, Aum had sent three trucks with compressors, vents, and spe- cial spraying devices to disseminate unseen clouds of bot- ulinum toxin at Japan’s biggest airport, Narita, and at U.S. naval bases at Yokohama and Yokosuka. Possibly, the wind dispersed the toxin. Or the strain was not sufficiently viru- lent. The attacks produced no casualties and thus U.S. in- telligence remained unaware of them.

On June 9, Asahara found himself unable to obtain the laser gun he needed to vaporize the Japanese Parliament. Instead he sent his trucks to pipe clouds of botulinum toxin around the Imperial wedding of Japan’s Crown Prince Na-

ruhito to Masako Owada. He intended to disrupt the mar- riage and capture the government during the panic. Asahara had gone along on the mission, but, halfway through, pan- icked. He feared toxin was seeping into the car. Command- ing the driver to halt, he jumped out. The startled cultists continued on the mission. In a last-minute change of plan, they sprayed downtown Tokyo with botulinum instead. No- body got sick. The cult hadn’t gotten a virulent strain.

Aum was desperately trying to develop anthrax weapons, but was having difficulty getting beyond practice runs with a nonlethal strain.

Bacteria such as anthrax, when fed little more than yeast extract, proliferate in a lab dish. Experts advised that “grow- ing
anthracis
is hardly more difficult than growing sour- dough starter, but turning bacteria into spores, hardy, dominant spores that keep for years, the only form hard and stable enough to be spread, requires several tricky steps.”

Asahara’s experts had to be able to shock the bacteria with heat or chemicals and still not kill them in the process. The group also had trouble finding a virulent strain of
Ba- cillus anthracis
starter germs from which to make a biolog- ical weapon. Both the Iraqis and the Rajneeshees of Oregon had obtained some of their most lethal strains of anthrax from the ATCC, the American germ bank’s huge library of microorganisms. Asahara ordered pathogens from ATCC for thirty-five dollars, the same amount Iraq had paid for their germs. Aum additionally picked up strains of tularemia and Venezuelan equine encephalitis once targeted for weaponi- zation at nearby Fort Detrick.

Asahara’s main lab emptied into a hermetically sealed preparation room that in turn opened onto the roof over- looking the neighborhood. On the rooftop was what ap- peared to be a gigantic cooling tower. Actually, it was an industrial sprayer, fitted with a powerful fan. Aum’s chemical-suited scientists revved up a steam generator and poured in their solution of anthrax spores. To mount a germ or chemical assault, the terrorists needed to culture the path- ogens in vast quantities and “weaponize” them, and this was the most difficult part.

There was never any indication that Aum scientists man-

aged to produce the dried anthrax spores favored for effi- cient distribution, growing germs and refining them into a slurry that could be sprayed as an aerosol. Because they had only scraped anthrax off their culture dishes and sprayed it, they were using only “harmless glop.” Nevertheless, the cult moved heavily into the production of anthrax spores and botulinum toxins, even conducting experiments with aerosol devices and radio-controlled drone aircraft for spraying tar- gets as Iraq had done before the Gulf War.

And so one morning in June 1993, Asahara’s men turned on the sprayer fan and waited expectantly. It was their fourth attempt in as many days. Within moments, toxic steam be- gan billowing from the rooftop tower. Attempting their an- thrax attacks from the rooftop during the day guaranteed that sunlight would kill off many of the pathogens. Ultraviolet light in sunshine degrades anthrax spores within minutes.

The cultists, however, managed to slightly sicken some neighbors in close proximity to the cult’s eight-story build- ing. While crop dusters and helicopters weren’t the only way to spread anthrax, a rooftop was not a particularly good substitute. Despite local complaints in the neighborhood, no reported cases of anthrax developed. However, while Tokyo doctors might have misdiagnosed the less deadly, skin-borne cutaneous version of the disease, it was unlikely they would have missed the swelling and high death rate that accom- panies inhalational anthrax. Aum also may not have properly incubated the spores prior to release. This meant that, some- where in that neighborhood, anthrax spores might still be out there waiting for the right conditions to become active and infect again.

While biological weapons are relatively easy to produce, the successful dispersion of such weapons depends on a se- ries of physical and atmospheric conditions that are beyond the biowarrior’s control—calculating optimal wind direction and then waiting for it, properly rigging spraying devices, and the risk of contamination and death from one’s own weapon. The very unpredictability of biological weapons make them not particularly expedient to terrorists.

Agents such as anthrax can be mass produced, but have to be dispersed over the targeted area at the proper altitude.

Winds have to be blowing in the right direction. The vari- ables involved in such an attack make a predictable outcome less likely for a terrorist. Asahara had vast talent at his dis- posal, yet couldn’t produce a terror weapon from pathogens. His failure demonstrated that making weaponized anthrax work as a biological weapon of mass destruction was harder than experts had claimed. Aum’s nine failures in nine at- tempts demonstrated the difficulty of actually deploying bi- ological weapons to cause mass casualties.

The fact that weaponizing anthrax was rarely successful made Amerithrax’s accomplishment all the more amazing.

Earlier, Aum Shinrikyo had approached a Connecticut manufacturer to buy an interferometer, a device used to make very accurate measurements of small objects. Since it could be used in the manufacture of nuclear bombs, the export of such equipment was restricted. The manufacturer notified the U.S. Customs Service and foiled the plot. Asa- hara also had sent his zealots to Zaire’s “hot zone” the pre- vious year to acquire Ebola virus and failed at that. The cult’s repeated attempts to carry out biological attacks had yet to be successful.

The promise of apocalypse, though, resounded with post– Cold War Russians, who had endured so long with nuclear threats. Asahara bought a Moscow radio station and at- tracted ten thousand Russians into Aum Shinrikyo. He forged relationships with the KGB and Russian military. Aum’s training grounds ranged from Germany to Australia to the former Yugoslavia and Taiwan.

In July 1993, Asahara’s agents drove to the Japanese Diet and Imperial Palace to emit a colorless vapor filled with neurotoxin from a van. The Sterne strain they used was a weakened form of anthrax used to make animal vaccines. It was impossible to turn such anthrax germs into a biological weapon. They could have gotten better strains from more than fifteen hundred microbe banks around the world.

The greatest obstacle to bioterrorism is disseminating the pathogen. In spite of their education, Asahara’s scientists did not understand the basics of germ dissemination. Powders are hard to work with. Pumps with powders are even harder. Nozzles clog, jam, and backfire, and crop-dusting pilots

know this very well. Aerosolizing germs and spraying pow- der “through a tiny nozzle poses severe engineering prob- lems,” said Col. David Franz, former commander of the Institute.

And so they failed.

In 1994, a sarin gas attack in the provincial city of Mat- sumoto killed seven. Dozens were injured. The deaths were blamed on a local resident who had supposedly produced sarin while trying to make home-brewed pesticides. But pro- ducing sarin is an exacting process and can’t be done ac- cidentally. Sarin, a nerve agent developed during World War II by the Nazis, is odorless, colorless, and deadly like an- thrax; and like inhalational anthrax, it causes respiratory fail- ure. The local man was arrested, though the attack, a dry run, was later linked to Aum. A success of sorts.

Eight months later, during the rush hour, an Aum cultist descended into Kasumigaseki Station, a major hub for the nine million that traveled Tokyo’s nearly four-hundred-mile- long subway system. He left behind three briefcases con- taining battery-driven dispensers connected to vinyl tubes. They were to be activated by a passing subway train and disperse a fine mist of home-brewed sarin. Among the thousands of commuters were those who worked at the nearby government ministries and Tokyo police headquar- ters. Asahara failed once more.

Five days later, on March 20, 1995, five members of the Aum Shinrikyo cult entered the Tokyo subway system dur- ing the Monday morning crush. All five clutched sharp- tipped umbrellas. Each concealed a vinyl bag. At 7:45 a.m. they boarded five high-speed trains at different ends of the underground. At 8:15 a.m. the five trains converged upon the city center of Kasumigaseki. On board, the cultists punc- tured their plastic bags with their umbrellas and exited the subway platforms at Kasumigaseki. Each bag was filled with a chemical solution of 30 percent sarin. Within seconds, sarin can destroy the nervous system of any living being within a hundred feet. A dozen people were suddenly dead. As the invisible gas drifted through the five trains, 5,500 commuters began rolling in agony and clutching their throats.

Asahara, who must have seen too many James Bond films, fled to his elaborate hideout inside an extinct volcano. He was arrested at his Mount Fuji enclave, cowering behind steel doors, on May 16.

The U.S. officials had been in the dark about all of Asa- hara’s terrorist ambitions. John O’Neill, the FBI’s chief counterterrorism official, said, “We received no information [before the subway attack] from the Japanese National Po- lice.” Gordon C. Oehler, chief of the CIA’s Nonproliferation Center, said it was up to local authorities to detect cults like Aum. “The world is full of very crazy organizations that have designs against the U.S.,” he said. “You are certainly welcome to argue that, quite frankly, we have not followed religious cults around the world and we do not have right now the resources to be able to do that.”

“If biological weapons are as likely to be chaotic and catastrophic as some people think, why have they been so infrequently used?” asked political scientist Leonard A. Cole of Rutgers University. Cole had written extensively about terrorist threats by biological, chemical, and nuclear means. “On a theoretical level, one could create a scenario that would be horrible,” he said, “but it is far less predictable that all the factors will produce the terrorist’s desired effect.”

Yet throughout the U.S. there was a significant fear about all parameters converging to produce a devastatingly deadly biological attack.

On June 21, 1995, President Bill Clinton signed a secret directive on counterterrorism. This was the fruit of an in- tensive two-year review begun after the WTC bombing. Presidential Decision Directive 39 delineated the agencies that were to play the lead roles in handling terrorist inci- dents: the State Department overseas and the FBI inside the United States. Clinton ordered the Federal Emergency Man- agement Agency to update its planning for “terrorism in- volving weapons of mass destruction... The United States shall give highest priority to developing effective capabili- ties to detect, prevent, defeat and manage the consequences of a nuclear, biological or chemical materials or weapons use by terrorists.”

President Clinton had warned at the end of 1994 that the

potential use of biological weapons by terrorist groups or rogue states represented “an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security, foreign policy, and economy of the United States.” His Executive Order 12938 made it illegal for Americans “to help any country or entity to ac- quire, design, produce, or stockpile chemical or biological weapons and place the country in a state of emergency.” The order was amended in 1998 to include penalties for “trafficking in equipment that could indirectly contribute to a foreign germ warfare program.”

BUT
how could the nation protect itself from a threat that was tasteless, odorless, and often invisible? Bioterror was no longer a hypothetical threat, but a real one as dangerous as nuclear war. The Amerithrax case had become as much a detective story as a warning of future danger. The FBI profilers assembled the usual motives—Amerithrax, like the Unabomber, might be seeking revenge against those who had somehow passed him by. His motive might be envy, profit, revenge, love, or advancement. It could be a story of a man who used tragedy to further his own career. Experts recalled the analogy of the fireman starting fires in order to put them out and be a hero. Was some anthrax expert doing something similar? With so many thousands of scientists who had anthrax knowledge or so few who knew how to weaponize it, the search now focused on the source of Amerithrax’s equipment.

Dr. Craig Smith, an infectious disease specialist at Phoebe Putnam Memorial Hospital in Georgia, told
News- week
of the difficulty of connecting and even finding Amer- ithrax’s equipment. “So many of these machines are dual-use,” he said. “The same small, sealed milling unit used for producing pharmaceuticals can be used to weaponize anthrax. Fermenters can produce antibiotics as well as bio- weapons. Culture media can grow bacteria for vaccines as well as weapons.” The FBI’s wisdom was that Amerithrax didn’t use an everyday lab where he was employed. It would be too dangerous to produce it there.