The Story (17 page)

It was a beautiful autumn day. As I chatted with the Americans, Israelis,
and Arabs who had struggled for peace for so long, several of them said it would be a day they would never forget. Students of the region and Middle Easterners themselves had cause to be skeptical, but skepticism was suspended on the lawn that day when Yasir Arafat and Prime Minister Rabin signed the accords with the fifty-cent Bic pen that Eitan Haber, Rabin's speechwriter, adviser, and my friend, had handed his boss. When President Clinton wrapped his long arms around the shoulders of Arafat and Rabin and gently pushed them together for a handshake (which Rabin clearly resisted), the audience of several thousand cheered. If these two men could shake hands and begin making a peace, anything was possible.

Six days later, I was standing on another lawn in Sag Harbor, taking my own giant leap of faith. From the White House lawn, I had called Jason. After five years of resistance, we decided to get married, immediately, while my Arab and Israeli friends were still here.

I can't quite recall whether or when Jason had finally asked me to marry him. A few months earlier, we had applied without a future commitment for a license. An older man arrived at the Southampton Town Hall about the same time. When he told us that he had come to buy a clamming permit, we let him move ahead of us in the short line. Clamming couldn't wait, Jason joked.

My long absence during the Gulf War had been a turning point in our complicated relationship. Jason, it turned out, had missed me after all. He had called me often in Riyadh to see that I was safe, only to endure long conversations with a Filipino desk clerk who reported that I was still out conducting interviews well past midnight, Saudi dinnertime. Though we had vaguely agreed to marry, we had not set a date.

I decided the time had come as I watched Clinton, Rabin, and Arafat at the White House. After the ceremony, I told Smadar Perry, an Israeli journalist and my first friend there; Marie Colvin, a friend since our correspondent days together in Paris; Fouad Ajami, the Lebanese-American intellectual; and a few others at the White House ceremony that I hoped they would travel to Long Island on Sunday for my wedding. Smadar and
Marie were stunned. How could I possibly marry someone they had never met? Both wondered whether Jason or I would show up. Several other friends seemed hesitant to change their plans for an event that seemed as unlikely as Arab-Israeli peace: Jason's marriage to an adamantly independent journalist who shared few of his many talents. I hated to cook, didn't garden, and was on the road as often as I was home.

At noon the judge that we had recruited on short notice read a statement that Jason and I had edited down to the fewest words required to make the marriage legal. The bride wore a cream-colored Armani suit with power shoulders and a flowing skirt and a cream-colored, broad-brimmed vintage hat that a fashionista friend from Sag Harbor had bought me. The groom wore a blue work shirt, khaki pants, and Top-Siders. When asked whether he would take me as his lawfully wedded wife, he replied: “I guess so.” Ten minutes after the church bells of Sag Harbor marked noon, Jason and I sealed our improbable union—with a handshake.

The Russian pilot was drunk. I could smell the vodka as he strapped me into the Mi-8 helicopter. The Soviet-era copter seemed older than its pilot, but sturdier.

It was June 1999, and I was by then an investigative reporter tracking down a sensitive story known only to the paper's senior editors.

The pilot and I were on our way to Vozrozhdeniye, an island in the Aral Sea shared by Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, independent after the Soviet Union crumbled in 1991. I had spent more than a year arranging this visit to an island that a source had first told me about in a whisper over coffee near the Pentagon. The trip had fallen through so many times that I didn't much care if the pilot was plastered. I was finally touring the place where the Soviets had secretly buried tons of the deadliest weapons-grade anthrax, a potent strain they had made years ago during the peak of their secret bioweapons effort.

I would be the first journalist but not the first American to visit this barren biological burial ground. A CIA team had been there several times starting in 1995 to collect samples of the buried anthrax. Back at the US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick, Maryland,
the army's main biodefense research facility, scientists were still analyzing the anthrax spores to discern what the Soviets had produced, whether the spores were still lethal, and if America's vaccine would destroy them.

I became obsessed with visiting “Voz,” as biowarriors called the island, after having been shown a photo that someone close to the American team had taken. Holding up an American flag, four members of the interagency group—a scientist, intelligence analyst, and two Special Forces operatives—were unrecognizable in their white, head-to-toe biocontainment suits. They looked like astronauts celebrating a lunar landing. The photo was a macabre souvenir of a top-secret mission never intended to be disclosed publicly. I was the first American reporter to learn of its existence.

As the helicopter flew toward the island, signs of life rapidly vanished. Because of foolhardy Soviet irrigation, the Aral Sea surrounding this island was shrinking. The former seabed was cracked and dry. As we prepared to land, I put on a biological mask and rubber gloves.

Voz Island was the culmination of nearly two years of reporting on biological weapons that
Times
science reporter Bill Broad and I had done. Bio was WMD's neglected stepchild. Many of the intelligence analysts who studied it were women. Men worried about nukes; “bio” was for girls. Never mind that a gallon of anthrax in tiny doses could theoretically kill every man, woman, and child on the planet, or that a thimble of smallpox could spread across the earth in weeks. Unlike anthrax, smallpox is highly contagious and kills a third of unvaccinated victims. Smallpox epidemics had already killed a half billion people before 1980 when it was officially declared eradicated, more than all the world's wars combined.

Bioweapons, the oldest and most conventional of unconventional weapons, received a fraction of the resources allocated to nuclear and other WMD threats. President Nixon had ended America's germ warfare program in 1969 and, along with the British and Soviets, drafted a treaty banning such weapons. By 1975, when the treaty came into force, over a hundred countries had ratified it, Washington and Moscow first among them. So why worry?

My interest in this seemingly arcane corner of national security was triggered, yet again, by Iraq. In December 1997, six years after the Gulf War had ended, the Pentagon announced it would start vaccinating 2.4 million soldiers and reservists against anthrax. Steve Engelberg, the investigations editor with an incomparable nose for news, found the terse announcement intriguing. Saddam's covert germ weapons program had been disclosed more than two years earlier. What had changed? Why had the Pentagon decided to give American soldiers a six-shot vaccination and a yearly booster—a time-consuming, expensive task? Was there new intelligence about the Iraqi program or some other country's germ weapons? Steve asked me to work with Bill on a story about what had motivated the decision, which led to a book that the three of us wrote called
Germs: Biological Weapons and America's Secret War
.

While Bill and I were trying to learn what had happened to Iraq's anthrax program, I watched Diane Sawyer, then at ABC's
Primetime Live
, broadcast an astonishing interview with a Soviet scientist who had defected to the United States in 1992. Kanatjan Alibekov, a Kazakh, had worked for seventeen years inside the Soviet biological weapons program and had risen to become the number two at Biopreparat, the biological war machine that American intelligence agencies had been trying to track for years.

Alibekov, who had Anglicized his name to Ken Alibek, told Diane that the Soviets had repeatedly violated the germ weapons treaty by putting germs that cause anthrax, smallpox, tularemia, and plague into warheads that until recently had been aimed at US cities. He said that the Russians were still developing such weapons at secret lab sites. Diane had broadcast part of her report from Stepnogorsk, a gigantic factory in Kazakhstan that Alibek had once headed. But the plant, which she alleged had been among the largest Soviet anthrax production facilities, would not let her in.

Surprised that her broadcast scoop seemed to have interested so few others, we tracked down an address for Alibek and went to Washington to meet the man the CIA was finally permitting to talk to journalists. Stocky, with a thick Russian accent, Alibek told us about illicit programs he had never discussed in detail with reporters before. Sawyer's report had only scratched the surface, he said. Before the Soviet collapse, scientists had
weaponized at least a dozen lethal agents and genetically altered pathogens and viruses to make them deadlier and sturdier so they could be stored for years. Some had been altered to overwhelm American vaccines and antibiotics. These invisible weapons were relatively cheap and easy to make: they left no fingerprints and could not be traced. This was the Soviet Union's Manhattan Project. Almost every Soviet ministry and important institution had been involved in the program, he told us. Even the KGB had its own germ centers to develop better pathogens for assassination. The Soviets had sold equipment to Cuba, India, Libya, Iran, and Iraq, and helped them develop similar programs, he suspected. He told us that Iraq had never abandoned its germ weapons program. It was just a matter of time before such technology spread to rogue regimes and terrorist groups. He was writing a book, he told us.
¹

On the shuttle back to New York, Bill and I discussed the implications. We knew that relying on defectors was tricky, given their obvious interest in playing to the gallery, but if half of what Alibek alleged was true, we could be writing a series on the growing threat posed by germ weapons; perhaps even a book, I suggested.

Our next stop was to meet Bill Patrick, the man who had debriefed Alibek for the CIA to assess his information and his veracity. After attending one of his lectures at a biodefense conference, Bill and I wrangled an invitation to Patrick's home atop a wooded hill in Frederick, Maryland. The modest house was not far from Fort Detrick, where he had worked for over thirty-five years, first making bioweapons, and then, after Nixon banned them, defending against them. He led us downstairs to his basement office to give us a tutorial on how germ weapons were made, stored, and distributed. Near the end, he held a garden sprayer and pumped it several times, producing a cloud of fine particles that hung in the air like fog. If these were anthrax spores, he told us, we would all soon be dead. He then put a vial of simulated anthrax in my purse and scribbled his home number on the stationery of his one-man consulting firm, Biothreats Assessment. It was topped with an image of the Grim Reaper. A skull and crossbones were engraved on his business card. Call anytime, he said merrily.

He had issued the same invitation to Alibek after debriefing him for
the CIA in 1992. The American germ warrior and his former nemesis had become unlikely friends—fellow bioweaponeers turned biodefenders. I would see the pattern often: American germ warriors bonding with their former Soviet rivals. It made sense. Relatively few people could understand their work or the secret lives they had led. The same characters would turn up in story after story.

Bill Patrick, for example, was part of our initial story on Iraq's bioweapons programs. The United Nations Special Commission, UNSCOM, had recruited him to help conduct inspections at suspect biofacilities around Baghdad. A mix of diplomats, scientists, and former military and intelligence officers, many of them former Cold War adversaries, UNSCOM was responsible for verifying Iraq's progress on its postwar pledge in 1991 to destroy its WMD and dismantle related programs. In 1992 Patrick visited Al Hakam, Iraq's main germ production facility about thirty miles southwest of Baghdad. Iraq insisted that the gigantic plant had produced only animal feed and biopesticides. But Patrick warned fellow inspectors that Al Hakam's fermenters, given their design and configuration, had probably produced something far more sinister.

Patrick had no proof, but his instinct was right. In July 1995, Iraqi scientists were finally forced to acknowledge not only that they had produced thousands of gallons of anthrax and botulinum at Al Hakam but also that they had made enough deadly microbes at some thirty facilities to wipe out much of the planet's people under the proper conditions.

Patrick had worked closely with UNSCOM inspectors who had long been convinced that Iraq was lying about its WMD programs, its bio effort in particular: Richard Spertzel, who, like Patrick, had worked as a top germ specialist at Fort Detrick; David Kelly, a British microbiologist and Britain's top germ weapons expert; and their boss, deputy UNSCOM commissioner Charles Duelfer, an American intelligence analyst with extensive knowledge of Iraq and unconventional weapons. All of them would play key roles in our germ series for the
Times
and my future WMD reporting.

While most accounts of Iraq's belated disclosure of its covert germ weapons programs attributed Iraq's sudden candor to the defection to Jordan of Lt. Gen. Hussein Kamel, Saddam's son-in-law, who had managed
its germ and other WMD efforts, Bill and I reported in February 1998 that UNSCOM's inspectors had forced Iraq's hand even before Kamel's defection.
²
The inspectors' repeated visits to Iraqi facilities and persistent inquiries had gradually demolished Iraq's cover stories.

In our first, 4,700-word chronicle of the seven-year hunt for Iraq's secret germ arsenal, we described how the inspectors' patient probing had proven that Iraq had lied consistently about having destroyed its germ weapons and other aspects of its biowarfare activities. Our “special report”—lengthy even by the paper's standards at the time—opened with Rod Barton, an Australian scientist and bioweapons expert, confronting Rihab Taha, or “Dr. Germ,” as she would later be known, with two pieces of paper that Israel had given UNSCOM. The sales slips showed that in 1988 Iraq had bought twenty-nine tons of media (microbial food used to grow germs), and, in the years leading up to the 1991 Gulf War, ten more tons of the material from a British company. But Iraq could show that it had used only two hundred kilograms of the media in its hospitals and civilian programs. What had happened to the rest?