ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book grew out of a film we made for the BBC television program Panorama, and we would like to thank Roger Bolton, Panorama's editor, for the encouragement and advice he gave us at that time, and for the understanding that he, and others at the BBC, have shown since.

Thanks are due to so many people who helped in the actual research of this book that we cannot list all of them here. Considerations of space aside, many felt free to talk only with a promise of anonymity.

Among those who can be mentioned, however, we must record our gratitude to the staff of the Public Record Office, the Imperial War Museum, Churchill College, Cambridge, the U.S. Army Public Affairs Department, Edgewood Arsenal, all of whom assisted with documents and advice. The Church of Scientology also made available to us documents they had unearthed in their campaign against chemical warfare. [. . . ]

Robert Harris wrote chapters one through five of this book; Jeremy Paxman wrote chapters six through ten. The authors collaborated on chapter eleven.

INTRODUCTION

A Higher Form of Killing was the first book either of us ever wrote. It was published in 1982, fared reasonably well, was translated into German, and duly passed into honorable obscurity about a decade ago. We never expected to return to the subject.

But chemical and biological weapons have assumed a horrible importance again. Indeed, they are probably more of a threat to the security of the world now than they were twenty years ago, when America's decision to develop a new generation of "binary" chemical weapons first prompted our interest in their history. Astonishingly, it seems likely that more people were killed by poison gas in the 1980s than in any decade since the First World War--as many as 20,000 in the Iran-Iraq War alone. A type of weapons which most military experts thought to be obsolete, and which three generations of arms negotiators have sought to outlaw, has made a comeback--and with a vengeance.

Chemical and biological weapons (CBW)--frequently, and not inaccurately, described as "the poor man's atomic bomb"--are instruments of mass destruction that were once within the reach only of the world's most sophisticated nations. But the proliferation of technology has now made them readily available to such secondary powers as Iraq, Iran, Syria, Libya, and North Korea. Indeed, Japanese terrorists have managed to manufacture one of the most deadly of all the nerve agents--sarin--in their own private facility. After the attacks on America of September 11, 2001, President George W. Bush declared that the world was "at war with terrorism." It is, regrettably, fairly likely that at some point in the course of this "war," the terrorists will try to strike back with at least one of the weapons described in this book. Five people have already died from weapons-grade anthrax poisoning in the United States. It is not, at the time of writing, clear where that anthrax came from, or who used it. But there are worryingly large quantities of weaponized anthrax in existence. The collapse of the Soviet Union, for example, has finally revealed the full extent of the Kremlin's CBW arsenal. It must be regarded as a serious possibility that some of this material has found its way into new hands. [. . . ]

Ever since the first gas attack during the First World War, man has attempted to come to terms with the impulse that led him to develop these weapons. The provisions of the Biological Warfare Convention of 1972, and, most recently, of the Chemical Warfare Convention of 1997, have done much to outlaw gas and germ warfare. Yet the specter, somehow, has never entirely gone away. Why this should be so is one of the recurrent themes of this book.

We have not rewritten or revised the ten chapters that form the bulk of A Higher Form of Killing. No doubt if we were embarking on it today, we would approach the subject differently. Here and there, new facts have come to light--for example about the extent of testing on human volunteers at Porton Down in the 1950s--but these have not substantially altered the story as we originally told it. And we would probably not have been quite so naive. Looking back, there is an occasional tone of astonished outrage in these pages which seems to belong to another era. This is no doubt partly because we were younger, but partly, also, because we assumed we were writing about weapons that were on their way to becoming obsolete. It never occurred to use that less than two years after this book appeared, Saddam Hussein would be using mustard gas to turn back waves of Iranian infantry, let alone that Iraq would end up filling Scud missiles with anthrax to fire at Israeli civilians.

Therefore, the brief eleventh chapter we have added, to sketch in the principal events of the past two decades, we have called "Full Circle." The world, it turns out, has not heard the last of those terrible weapons, which first made their appearance on a warm spring afternoon in France nearly ninety years ago.

Robert Harris,
Jeremy Paxman
December 2001

[. . . ]

ELEVEN
Full Circle

In the end, as the twentieth century drew to a close, it was not a new generation of weapons that the world had to worry about; it was the old.

In the spring of 1984, a familiar and terrible type of fatality began to reappear in the casualty lists of the latest Middle East war. A United Nations report described one typical victim, an Iranian soldier: "Sourab Norooz, age 24, exposed in [March 1984]* at Majnoon . . .* crepitation [a grating, crackling sound]* due to gas in the chest wall, probably resulting from gas gangrene . . .* The patient died that night." The symptomatology might have come straight from an autopsy report written by a surgeon of the Royal Army Medical Corps on the western front in 1917. Sourab Norooz's death was one of the first pieces of evidence from the Iran-Iraq War proving that Saddam Hussein was using mustard gas.

For twenty years, Iraq, under Saddam's leadership, has held up Caliban's mirror to the West. Almost every major chemical and biological weapon devised by the British, Germans, and Americans since the First World War has been tested, manufactured, and, in many cases, used, by a power that, in the 1970s, was regarded as no particular military threat to anyone. Every warning about the ease with which chemical and biological warfare (CBW) weapons could proliferate has been proved true by Saddam. Not only was the original technology he exploited Western; so were the ingredients he used. Through a network of front companies acting on behalf of the Iraqi State Enterprise for the Production of Pesticides (SEPP), the Iraqis bought all the plant, equipment, and chemicals they needed on the world market. An American company provided the blueprints for Iraq's first poison gas plant in 1978. By 1979, the factory--near Akashat, in the northwest of the country--had a production capacity of 2,000 tons a year. The protective suits used by its employees came from Britain. German and French companies were in the forefront of supplying the sophisticated equipment needed for three other factories: Salman Pak, Al Fallujah, and Samarra. One relatively small Dutch company, Melchamie, exported literally thousands of tons of precursor chemicals to SEPP. Sometimes the firms involved knew what was going on and turned a blind eye; often they were ignorant. As Richard Butler, subsequently the head of the U.N. Special Commission on Disarmanent [sic] (UNSCOM), explained, "the same fermenter used to make anthrax could be rinsed out and used to make beer, and the same equipment used to make the nerve agents sarin and tabun could be used to make aspirin tablets." By the time Western intelligence woke up to what was happening, in early 1984, it was already too late. Samarra alone, which covered a site of some twenty-five square kilometers, had become the largest chemical weapons facility in the world.

Iraq's use of chemical warfare (CW) was initially defensive and followed a classic tactical pattern. Facing superior numbers of Iranian infantry, advancing in waves, the Iraqi air force dropped airburst bombs, each containing 64 liters of mustard gas, to contaminate the maximum area of ground. Two separate Iranian offensives, in August and in November 1983, were dealt with by the use of mustard, killing or wounding more than 3,000 of the attacking troops. A further 2,500 were contaminated the following spring.

Mustard gas, however, was merely the beginning. On March 17, 1984, at Basra, Saddam achieved the dubious distinction, avoided even by Adolf Hitler, of becoming the first national leader in history to authorize the use of nerve gas on the battlefield. The agent used was, appropriately, the original Nazi discovery: tabun (GA). Major General Maher Abdul Rashid, commander of the Iraqi Third Corps near Basra, was unabashed about its employment: "If you gave me a pesticide to throw at these worms of insects [the Iranians]* to make them breathe and become exterminated, I'd use it." The Iraqis also made extensive use of sarin (GB) and, in May 1985, began a successful program to develop the heavy contaminant, VX. With its CW factories now beginning full-scale production, Iraq went on the offensive. The results were devastating. According to the U.S. State Department, "20,000 Iranian soldiers were killed in Iraqi chemical attacks from 1983-1988." In addition, an untold number of civilians--certainly hundreds, probably thousands--were gassed in an attack on the Kurdish village of Halabja in March 1988, during which the Iraqi air force dropped 100-liter canister bombs containing a "cocktail" of agents--mustard, sarin, tabun, VX--"clearly intended to complicate the task of treating the Halabja victims," according to one Western doctor who studied the atrocity.

Given that by 1988, Iraq had achieved roughly the level of technical sophistication in CW that the major powers had attained in the 1940s, it was perhaps not surprising that Saddam Hussein next embarked on a biological weapons program of a similar vintage. Like the British in the Second World War, the Iraqis were attracted by the possibilities of anthrax and botulinus toxin. Tests began in March 1988 using rockets and bombs against live animals--sheep, monkeys, and donkeys. These were successful and biological agents duly began to be manufactured on a large scale. At Salman Pak, equipment acquired from German companies was used to produce anthrax. Iraq has also admitted to producing 190 liters of concentrated ricin solution at the same facility. Botulinus toxin was produced at the al-Taji complex just north of Baghdad. An incapacitating agent called aflatoxin, which causes vomiting and internal bleeding, was manufactured at Baghdad's Agricultural and Water Research Center. But by far the largest biological warfare (BW) factory was at al-Hakam in the western desert. Here, between 1989 and 1990, half a million liters of BW agents were produced.

As with the Iraqi chemical weapons program, Western intelligence was slow to realize the scale of the threat posed. It was not until two months after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, in October 1990, that the Pentagon was warned that the Iraqi BW stockpile consisted of "at least one metric ton of dried anthrax and up to 15 kgs of botulinum toxin" (both huge underestimates, the former by a factor of 8, the latter by a factor of 1,000). On December 1, 1990, less than two months before the start of the Persian Gulf War, Iraq began arming its biological weapons in preparation for the coming struggle. This arsenal, by Iraq's subsequent admission, consisted of 166 aircraft bombs (50 loaded with anthrax, 100 with botulinus toxin, and 16 with aflatoxin) and 25 Scud B missile warheads (10 loaded with anthrax, 13 with botulinus toxin, and two with aflatoxin). On December 23, the weapons were dispersed to five different sites and held ready for use. Around this time, the Iraqis also experimented with spray tanks capable of releasing up to 2,000 liters of anthrax over a target area.

The Western response was immediate, and betrayed the coalition's rising anxiety. Four days after the Iraqi deployment, the United States announced that it would begin vaccinating all its troops in Saudi Arabia. The following day, Britain followed suit. On January 9, the U.S. secretary of state, James Baker, met the Iraqi foreign minister, Tariq Aziz, and handed him a letter warning that "if the conflict involves your use of chemical or biological weapons against our forces, the American people will demand vengeance. We have the means to exact it." Baker subsequently explained that he "purposely left the impression that the use of chemical or biological agents by Iraq would invite nuclear retaliation."

Just as Hitler's failure to use chemical weapons in the Second World War is to some extent a mystery, so we still cannot be sure why Saddam Hussein decided against using his CBW arsenal in the Gulf conflict. That he had the munitions prepared is beyond dispute. Apart from the Scuds loaded with biological warheads, Iraq is known to have had another thirty Scuds chemically armed, principally with sarin. After the war, the United Nations destroyed a total of 38,000 munitions either loaded with, or capable of being loaded with, CW agents. Had Saddam authorized the use of biologically armed Scuds against Israel, the effects upon a densely populated area would have been appalling. According to a Pentagon report, given "ideal weather conditions and an effective dispersal mechanism," a single Scud warhead leaded with botulinus could theoretically contaminate an area of 3,700 square kilometers. To put that figure in proportion, the "primary lethal area" of a Hiroshima-sized atom bomb is ten square kilometers. Even if the agent had not been properly dispersed--indeed, even if it had not been dispersed at all--the psychological impact would still have been immense.

The best guess must be that Saddam did, indeed, fear nuclear retaliation, either from the United States, or--more likely--from Israel. But deterrence cuts both ways. The strategic analyst Avigdor Haselkorn has made a compelling argument that the real reason the United States failed to pursue its advantage at the end of the Gulf War and advance on Baghdad was its fear that Saddam, if cornered, would have had nothing to lose by reaching for a weapon of last resort. He might have used CBW against coalition forces. More likely, he would have made a chemical or biological missile strike against Israel, courting a nuclear response that, even if it destroyed him, would at least have given him the satisfaction of knowing that the whole of the Middle East was his funeral pyre.

If this analysis is correct, then Saddam Hussein's current determination to preserve his arsenal of poisons becomes much more understandable. CBW may already have saved his regime twice--first, in the 1980s, in his war against the numerically superior Iranians; second, in the 1990s, in his war against the numerically superior Western coalition. Why not a third time? The unsettling truth is that much of Iraq's CBW arsenal remains intact. "In Desert Storm," according to General Charles Horner, U.S. air commander during the Gulf War, "Saddam Hussein had more chemical weapons than I could bomb. . . .* I could not have begun to take out all of his chemical storage--there are just not enough sorties in the day." Not one of Iraq's chemical and biological missile warheads was destroyed by coalition bombing. After the war, the U.N. weapons inspectors' attempts even to locate, let alone eradicate, Saddam's stockpiles of gas and germs, were consistently frustrated, and finally ended in August 1998 when Iraq withdrew all cooperation from the U.N. team. Since then, it may be regarded as almost certain that Iraq has continued to develop CBW, possibly even to the extent of experimenting on prisoners held at the Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad. According to Richard Butler:

Iraqi defectors we'd interviewed told us that Iraq tested biological agents on Iranian soldiers taken prisoner during the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, as well as on the Abu Ghraib inmates during 1994 and 1995. To this day, the full facts are obscure. But when we sent an inspection team early in 1998 to the prison to search for the documentary evidence, all the inmate files were there except those covering the two crucial years. And when Iraq realized what we were looking for, it abruptly terminated the whole inspection.

This is Saddam Hussein's regime: cruel, lying, intimidating, and determined to retain weapons of mass destruction--weapons capable of killing thousands, even millions, at a single blow.

In Butler's view, "it would be foolish in the extreme" not to assume that Saddam has spent the past three and a half years "adding to the chemical and biological warfare weapons he concealed during the UNSCOM inspection period."

Nineteen ninety-one was an annus horribilis for Western intelligence with regard to biological weapons. They were forced to accept that they had been caught completely by surprise by the scale of the Iraqi BW effort--a program on which Saddam is estimated to have spent $100 million. [. . . ]

There is no doubting the seriousness of the South African effort. Team members have testified that they were given carte blanche by the government to examine all types of unconventional weapons of mass destruction. Front companies had been set up to acquire scientific information from around the world. South Africans were said to have visited Saddam Hussein's mustard gas factory. Fortunately, much of the evidence that emerged about Project Coast demonstrated that its sinister intent was allied to dramatic incompetence. Nevertheless, British and American intelligence agencies were sufficiently alarmed about the knowledge carried in the head of the project's leader that they achieved the astonishing feat of persuading President Mandela to keep him on the government payroll. Both London and Washington had discovered that this individual was making visits to Libya, which was believed to be trying to develop its own biological warfare program.

The image of a footloose, amoral scientist, skilled in developing weapons of mass destruction and prepared to sell himself to the highest bidder, is usually the stuff of airport thrillers. But in this case, reality has kept pace with fiction. The collapse of the Soviet Union left hundreds of scientists involved in its biological weapons program surplus to requirements. Some were re-employed in legitimate civilian industries. Some were paid a pension by the Americans in return for their discretion. But as the plants at which they worked rusted away, others found that curious visitors began calling. American diplomats were warned in 1997 that Iranian delegations had offered biologists new careers developing a biological warfare capability in the Islamic republic. Most seem to have declined the invitations. Others, whose salaries had not been paid for months, apparently found the lure of a steady income irresistible. The Soviet defector Ken Alibek believes that mercenary biologists could have taken smallpox to Iran, Iraq, Libya, Syria, North Korea, India, Israel, or Pakistan.

The last twenty years have not been an entirely gloomy story. In 1997, the Chemical Weapons convention (CWC) finally came into force--the latest and by far the most determined attempt in history to stamp out poison gas. To date, 174 nations, including the United States, Britain, Russia, and China, have undertaken "never under any circumstances to develop, produce, otherwise acquire, stockpile or retain chemical weapons," and never to use them. The CWC has 200 inspectors charged with verifying that the rules are being observed.

Unfortunately, the CWC has not been signed by a number of those countries--Iraq, Syria, Libya, North Korea--that give the world community the most cause for concern. And one state that has signed--Iran--nevertheless continues to develop a chemical warfare capability.

Proliferation of chemical and biological weapons is now perhaps the most urgent problem facing Western military planners. Apart from Iraq--which stands in an appalling category of its own as far as CBW is concerned--the quartet of Iran, Syria, Libya, and North Korea now appear to be cooperating in what Avigdor Haselkorn calls a Club MAD for the development of weapons of mass destruction. Iranian oil wealth has helped enable North Korea to develop a sophisticated long-range missile program. Tehran has also provided Syria with financial assistance to enable it to threaten Israel by buying North Korean Scuds. Libya has expressed a desire to buy North Korean missiles with a range of 1,000 kilometers. All four countries have CBW programs in various stages of development. North Korea is believed to have a stockpile of 300 to 1,000 tons of CW agents, including nerve gases, and also to be experimenting with anthrax, cholera, bubonic plague, and smallpox. Syria is producing chemical weapons at three sites, has employed cyanide against a rebellion by Sunni Muslims in 1982 (according to Amnesty International) and is "pursuing the development" of biological weapons. Iran--which made limited use of mustard and cyanide gases in its war with Iraq--has continued to develop chemical weapons, has a BW manufacturing capability, and is alleged to have stocks of anthrax and botulinus. Libya used chemical weapons against troops from Chad in 1987, has an underground CW production facility, and appears to be trying to acquire the means to manufacture biological agents.

All four countries have a reputation for sponsoring terrorism, and it is this that is now most exercising governments around the world. [. . . ]

The most frightening aspect of all these attacks--apart from the sheer malice and contempt for human life that inspired them--is the relative ease with which they were mounted. And yet the perpetrators, essentially, were amateurs. If professionally trained terrorists, backed by the resources of a CBW-capable state, were to mount similar attacks, the results could be devastating. "We don't consider it a crime if we tried to have nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons," declared Osama bin Laden in 1999, and there have been intelligence reports that the Al-Qaeda organization has acquired botulinus toxin from a laboratory in the Czech Republic, paying $7,500 a vial. Anthrax "in some form" is also said to have been obtained from an Indonesian pharmaceutical company. One of the hijackers who helped carry out the suicide attacks of September 11 is known to have inquired about purchasing a cropdusting aircraft--a perfect means of dispersing chemical and biological agents over a target population. A terrorist who was infected with smallpox, and who sought contact with as many people as possible before succumbing to the disease, would be the ultimate walking suicide bomb. In one simulated exercise, undertaken by officials in Washington in 1999, the progress of smallpox was tracked as it spread through an unvaccinated American population. Within two months, 15,000 people were dead; within a year, the figure was 80 million.

In the autumn of 2001, delegates gathered in Geneva to try once again to wrestle with the problem of how to control biological weapons. The Biological Warfare Convention (BWC) of 1972, which had been intended to ban biological warfare, is now thirty years old. Unlike the agreements designed to control chemical weapons, the BWC contains no provisions for outside inspections to check that countries are complying. That it does not is largely the fault of the United States. As late as July 2001, long after United Nations inspectors has uncovered the full scale of Iraqi biological warfare capacity and less than three months before the outbreak of anthrax terrorism, America was arguing that to insist upon verification arrangements would be to expose it unfairly to prying foreigners.

The picture in 2002 is in some respects more worrying than it was in 1972. [. . . ]

As for the traditional problem with biological weapons--how to deliver them--there are signs that that, too, may be nearer a solution. The Soviet Union considered the delivery problem nearly solved, with intercontinental missiles capable of scattering independently targetable biowarheads over numerous cities. Saddam Hussein developed--but mercifully never used--his "great equalizer" of biological missile warheads. The British Defense Ministry concluded at the start of the twenty-first century that well within thirty years rogue states would have missiles capable of reaching the United Kingdom carrying chemical or biological--or nuclear--warheads. In the end, the protection against biological weapons remains much what it has always been. Generals don't like them. Their effects are generally highly unpredictable. And--at least until a new, discriminating superbug is developed--the threat of nuclear retaliation must be supposed to be sufficiently awesome to deter most potential aggressors.

But deterrence rests upon rationality, and a lunatic may not care about the consequences of his actions. In the end, the only way to ensure disarmament is somehow to enforce it. That demands, first, a proper arms control regime, with provisions to allow international inspectors to call, unannounced, at any time. The United States's record in obstructing attempts to create such a system--born of rivalry between government departments, commercial pressure, and political arrogance--has not served it well. Enforcement also means, secondly, that those states that won't comply must somehow be placed in quarantine, must be constantly monitored, and prevented, as far as possible, from developing these terrible weapons of mass destruction.

Stating the aim is easy enough. But how is it to be achieved? By diplomacy? By sanctions? By military force? These promise to be the dominating questions in world politics over the coming months and years, as the international community continues its long struggle to eradicate what Fritz Haber called "a higher form of killing."

In the past our politicians offered us dreams of a better world. Now they promise to protect us from nightmares.

The most frightening of these is the threat of an international terror network. But just as the dreams were not true, neither are these nightmares.

In a new series, the Power of Nightmares explores how the idea that we are threatened by a hidden and organised terrorist network is an illusion.

It is a myth that has spread unquestioned through politics, the security services and the international media.

Since about that time, war had been literally continuous, though strictly speaking it had not always been the same war. For several months during his childhood there had been confused street fighting in London itself, some of which he remembered vividly. But to trace out the history of the whole period, to say who was fighting whom at any given moment, would have been utterly impossible, since no written record, and no spoken word, ever made mention of any other alignment than the existing one. At this moment, for example, in 1984 (if it was 1984), Oceania was at war with Eurasia and in alliance with Eastasia. In no public or private utterance was it ever admitted that the three powers had at any time been grouped along different lines. Actually, as Winston well knew, it was only four years since Oceania had been at war with Eastasia and in alliance with Eurasia. But that was merely a piece of furtive knowledge which he happened to possess because his memory was not satisfactorily under control. Officially the change of partners had never happened. Oceania was at war with Eurasia: therefore Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia. The enemy of the moment always represented absolute evil, and it followed that any past or future agreement with him was impossible.

The frightening thing, he reflected for the ten thousandth time as he forced his shoulders painfully backward (with hands on hips, they were gyrating their bodies from the waist, an exercise that was supposed to be good for the back muscles) -- the frightening thing was that it might all be true. If the Party could thrust its hand into the past and say of this or that event, it never happened -- that, surely, was more terrifying than mere torture and death?

The Party said that Oceania had never been in alliance with Eurasia. He, Winston Smith, knew that Oceania had been in alliance with Eurasia as short a time as four years ago. But where did that knowledge exist? Only in his own consciousness, which in any case must soon be annihilated. And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed -if all records told the same tale -- then the lie passed into history and became truth. 'Who controls the past,' ran the Party slogan, 'controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.' And yet the past, though of its nature alterable, never had been altered. Whatever was true now was true from everlasting to everlasting. It was quite simple. All that was needed was an unending series of victories over your own memory. 'Reality control', they called it: in Newspeak, 'doublethink'[.]

Orwell began supporting himself by writing book reviews for the New English Weekly until 1940. During World War II he was a member of the Home Guard and in 1941 began work for the BBC Eastern Service, mostly working on programmes to gain Indian and East Asian support for Britain's war efforts. He was well aware that he was shaping propaganda, and wrote that he felt like "an orange that's been trodden on by a very dirty boot".

Very shortly thereafter, the disease which we now refer to as AIDS began to surface in the U.S. The populations focused upon as being infected with the AIDS virus were first the white male homosexuals and subsequently Black and Hispanic people. More specifically, the projected source of the virus was/is said to be African people who had been bitten by the African Green Monkey or the Vervet Monkey.

In 1969, a book entitled A Survey of Chemical and Biological Warfare, by John Cookson and Judith Nottingham, was published by the Monthly Review Press. The book is described on its cover as follows: "Derived from a three year study conducted by a British biochemist and geneticist and a British political scientist, the text affords a comprehensive review of materials used, and policies adopted by authorities in the U.S., Canada, Great Britain and West Germany." It also states that it "...provides one of the most comprehensive views on the subject of chemical and biological warfare written for the layman. The authors, who are well qualified, produced a vast amount of documentation of the use and research on these types of weapons." On p. 32 at the bottom of the page, the authors state,

The question of whether new diseases could be used is of considerable interest. Vervet monkey disease (African Green Monkey Disease) may well be an example of a whole new class of disease-causing organisms. Handling of blood and tissue without precaution causes infection. It is unaffected by any antibiotic substance so far tried and is unrelated to any other organism. It causes fatality in some cases and can be venereally transmitted in man. In the words of Dr. C.E. Gordon Smith, 'It has possible potential as an infectious disease of man. It presumably is also of BW (biological warfare) interest. New diseases are continually appearing (chikungunya and o'nyong-nyong fever for example). In addition to these there are the possibilities of virus and bacteria being genetically manipulated to produce 'new' organism. [sic]

On p. 110 in the same book (bottom of page), they state,

Just recently a great deal of useful work has been done on the Vervet Monkey Disease (African Green Monkey Disease) which caused seven deaths in Germany. Reports of progress were: 'sent to 40 laboratories all over the world; 9 of these have been supplied with infective material and/or antisera [vaccine]: 4 in the USA and one each in Germany, Panama, South Africa, Uganda and the USSR. A non-infective complement fixing antigen has been prepared to the WHO (World Health organization) reference laboratories.' --Hansard, May 1968

In another book, A Higher Form of Killing (The Secret Story of Chemical and Biological Warfare) by Robert Harris and Jeremy Paxman, published by Hill and Wang (1982), on p. 219, the authors state:

The claims continued. In January 1978, a correspondent with Reuters news agency reported from NATO headquarters that 'scientific experts' had informed him that the Russians were developing 'three horrific new diseases for warfare...Lassa Fever, which according to the sources, kills 35 out of every 100 people it strikes, Ebola fever, which kills 70 out of every 100, and the deadly Marburg fever (Green Monkey Disease).

Over and over again the name "African Green Monkey" shows up. This is not a "monkey" biting Africans and causing disease, but a weapon of biological warfare developed in laboratories by people who classify themselves as white. This charge, however, is denied, and blame is projected on to African (Black) people.

Adolph Hitler propagated his "Big Lie" against the Semites of the Jewish religion, which became his pretext for the planned slaughter of 11 million. He actually succeeded in killing six million, all in the name of white supremacy (racism/anti-Semitism) for the express purpose of white genetic survival.

In the late 1980s, there has been grave concern throughout the world that the white birthrate is declining as the birthrates of all non-white people continue to increase. It is at this time that we witness the sudden appearance of AIDS, primarily effecting Black people in Africa and Haiti.

As truth always surfaces, in time we will know the full details of the massive deception of the AIDS holocaust, when the current "Big Lie" is unveiled.

South Africa was another country that had its biological weapons program exposed by the collapse of its old regime. The release of Nelson Mandela and the end of the apartheid system shone a harsh light upon perhaps the most secret military program of the years of white supremacist rule: Project Coast, described by Archbishop Desmond Tutu, of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, as "the most diabolical aspect of apartheid."

One of the research tasks of the project was an attempt to develop a vaccine to block human fertility. This would then be selectively administered to black South Africans, disguised as a vaccine to protect against yellow fever. Other Project Coast scientists researched the possible uses of such traditional biological agents as anthrax and botulinus, together with more exotic diseases: the Ebola, marburg, and Rift Valley hemorrhagic-fever viruses. It is unclear how close the scientists came to turning any of these into weapons that could be used effectively on a large scale. But evidence presented to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission did establish that a number of agents had been drawn from stocks, presumably for use as weapons, during a single seven-month period in 1989. These included twenty-two bottles of cholera, fourteen batches of chocolate spiked with anthrax or botulinus, cigarettes laced with anthrax, beer bottles contaminated with thallium and botulinus, anthrax spores sprinkled on the gum of envelopes, and more. If intended for use, they can only have been for assassination attempts, rather than battlefield operations. Project Coast scientists are also said to have been instructed to investigate the possibility of developing a bacterial device that would affect only specific races.

There is no doubting the seriousness of the South African effort. Team members have testified that they were given carte blanche by the government to examine all types of unconventional weapons of mass destruction. Front companies had been set up to acquire scientific information from around the world. South Africans were said to have visited Saddam Hussein's mustard gas factory. Fortunately, much of the evidence that emerged about Project Coast demonstrated that its sinister intent was allied to dramatic incompetence. Nevertheless, British and American intelligence agencies were sufficiently alarmed about the knowledge carried in the head of the project's leader that they achieved the astonishing feat of persuading President Mandela to keep him on the government payroll. Both London and Washington had discovered that this individual was making visits to Libya, which was believed to be trying to develop its own biological warfare program.

The image of a footloose, amoral scientist, skilled in developing weapons of mass destruction and prepared to sell himself to the highest bidder, is usually the stuff of airport thrillers. But in this case, reality has kept pace with fiction. [. . . ]

Getting out the vote

Bush people

The Amish love the president; will they vote for him?

The Amish tend to shun newfangled things--electricity, cars, modern clothes, presidential politics. Only about one in ten vote. But their conservative Christian values and suspicion of big government make them natural adherents of the right. As the Amish put it, "We don't vote, but we pray Republican."

Republicans have been courting the Amish in the battleground states of Pennsylvania (where there are 50,000 of them) and Ohio (54,000). The election boards in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, and Holmes County, Ohio, have seen a surge in Amish names among those registering to vote. If even a few thousand of them were to horse-and-buggy it to the polls in either state on election day, it could make all the difference to George Bush in a neck-and-neck race.

The president met privately with a small group of Amish in Lancaster County in July. Ever since, the local party faithful have been chasing the Amish vote, even offering to drive them to the polls. A handful of Amish themselves have jumped on board: Aaron Beiler, who runs a farm market, has distributed hundreds of voter-registration forms to Amish farms and businesses. Informal voter-drives are under way in Holmes County, too.

The Amish seem to feel that one of their own is in the White House. "He comes from the old school," one says. Mr Bush's foreign wars do not accord with Amish pacifism, but his religious conviction and his stance on social issues have got their hearts aflutter. They see gay marriage as an affront to their way of life; the president's opposition to abortion "puts warm circles around our hearts". Even Mr Bush's wild past resonates: Amish teenagers are known to sow their oats before returning to the church.

Some church leaders are still cautioning against voting. But ultimately the church leaves voting up to the individual. An Amish historian in Lancaster says that his people used to vote in greater numbers: they came out to defeat the Unitarian Adlai Stevenson, when he ran against the more godly Dwight Eisenhower in 1952, and in 1960 they voted against the Catholic John Kennedy, because his church oppressed their European forebears. John Kerry is seen as so liberal that his Catholicism is the least of his problems.

The Republicans have to push softly. Already, Mr Kerry's supporters have accused them of trying to exploit the Amish. Others have wondered why the Amish, who have been conscientious objectors in past struggles, should support a warmongering president. One danger for the Amish of entering politics is that they may draw criticism for the privileges they have won to maintain their way of life--such as exemption from Social Security taxes--or simply draw attention to themselves.

As with many other Americans, voting is not always a priority. November is the Amish wedding season, and election day falls on a popular day to get married. "If I hitch my horse there at the wedding," one man complains, "there's no way I'm going to make it all the way back to vote."

Major raps Hain over terror comment

Labour was accused of "playing politics with terror" after Commons leader Peter Hain said the nation would be safer under Labour.

Former Conservative Prime John Major made a rare intervention to round on Mr Hain[ . . .]

But Mr Major hit back: "It seems to be rather a desperate comment that the nation is safer under any one political party. To make that point is very silly."

Mr Major, Prime Minister during the first Gulf War in 1991 when Iraq was ejected from Kuwait, went on: "If Peter Hain is saying people are safer under a Labour government, let me just make this point.

"Did people feel safer after Gulf War One when we had a Conservative government or after Gulf War Two when we had a Labour government?"