[Peace-discuss] Fwd: USA/Africa: Anthrax, History and Security

[Al Kagan]

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>Date: Thu, 25 Jul 2002 17:08:49 -0500
>Subject: USA/Africa: Anthrax, History and Security
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>USA/Africa: Anthrax, History and Security
>Date distributed (ymd): 020725
>Document reposted by Africa Action
>
>Africa Policy Electronic Distribution List: an information
>service provided by AFRICA ACTION (incorporating the Africa
>Policy Information Center, The Africa Fund, and the American
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>
>+++++++++++++++++++++Document Profile+++++++++++++++++++++
>
>Region: Continent-Wide
>Issue Areas: +security/peace+ +US policy focus+ +health+
>
>SUMMARY CONTENTS:
>
>In the New York Times of July 2, columnist Nicholas Kristof
>attacked FBI foot dragging in the investigation of last year's
>anthrax attacks. In particular, Kristof pointed to the failure of
>the FBI to fully investigate "Mr. Z," rumored within the biodefense
>community to be a prime suspect. "If Mr Z. were an Arab national,
>he would have been imprisoned long ago," Kristof commented. "Mr.
>Z" is identified elsewhere in news stories and on the internet as
>Steven J. Hatfill, an American bioterrorism specialist who is
>reported to have served in the Rhodesian military in the 1970s.
>
>This posting contains excerpts from two articles relevant to this
>case and links to additional sources, preceded by a brief
>background note and questions.
>
>+++++++++++++++++end profile++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
>
>Summary Background Note
>
>* The world's largest outbreak of human anthrax occurred in rural
>Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) from 1978-80 where 10,738 cases
>were recorded and 182 people died. There is significant evidence
>that this outbreak was the result of covert action by Rhodesian
>security forces, with the assistance of South African specialists
>in biological warfare.
>
>* Dr. Wouter Basson, the man who headed South Africa's biological
>warfare program, refused to testify before South Africa's Truth and
>Reconciliation Commission, and was acquitted by a South African
>judge in April 2002 on criminal charges of murder, conspiracy,
>fraud, and drug possession, despite evidence presented by witnesses
>in a trial which lasted more than two years. As a result, many
>details of the South African and Rhodesia covert operations in this
>period still remain obscure.
>
>* Steven J. Hatfill, a biodefense specialist who was employed at
>the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Disease at
>Fort Detrick, Maryland from 1997 to 1999, and continues to work in
>the biodefense field, has been among those questioned by the FBI in
>connection with the anthrax attacks of 2001.  However, critics say
>the investigation has been lethargic.  Hatfill, born in St. Louis
>in 1953, reportedly served with the Rhodesian Special Air Squadron
>(SAS) and Selous Scouts in the late 1970s, and attended medical
>school and worked in Rhodesia and South Africa, returning to the
>U.S. only in 1995. On July 1, Hatfill took up a new job as
>associate director of Louisiana State University's National Center
>for Biomedical Research and Training, and the Baltimore Sun
>reported on July 18 that the FBI says he is not a suspect.
>
>Whether or not Hatfill is fully cleared or does prove to be
>implicated in the 2001 attacks, one must question both the previous
>lack of U.S. government curiosity about his background and the
>failure of the U.S. media to highlight the 1978-80 anthrax attacks
>in Rhodesia as a precedent to current events. This history also
>raises other specific questions. Among them:
>
>(1) Has the FBI investigated whether Hatfill had any connection to
>the 1978-80 anthrax outbreak in eastern Zimbabwe?
>
>(2) What do other agencies of the U.S. government know about this
>outbreak and related incidents in the counter-insurgency wars waged
>by the white minority regimes in Southern Africa in the 1970s and
>1980s?  What did they know at the time?
>
>(3) Who has moral and legal liability for the human damage caused
>by these programs?
>
>(4) Given the failure to date to expose this history to full
>scrutiny, are there additional legal or official actions that could
>be taken to facilitate the efforts of investigative journalists and
>scholars?
>
>Other sources available on-line, in additional to those excerpted
>below, include:
>
>David Martin, "Human Anthrax Scares were a Major Reality in
>Southern Africa"
>Southern Africa News Features
>http://www.sardc.net/editorial/sanf/2001/iss21/specialreport.html
>  [note: headline on article in web version is incorrect]
>
>Chapter 22, "Rhodesia, 1978" in
>Tom Mangold and Jeff Goldberg, Plague Wars. Macmillan, 2000.
>Full text of chapter available on line at:
>http://www.panmacmillan.com/PlagueWars           
>
>Additional related news stories can be located by searching under
>"Steven Hatfill" at http://www.google.com 
>
>*******************************************************
>
>Who is Steven Hatfill? The FBI has searched a U.S. bio-warfare
>scientist's apartment as part of its anthrax investigation.
>
>Laura Rozen
>
>American Prospect
>Web Exclusive 6/27/2002
>
>[brief excerpts only; full text at:
>http://www.prospect.org/webfeatures/2002/06/rozen-l-06-27.html]
>
>FBI agents investigating last fall's anthrax attacks searched the
>Frederick, Maryland, apartment of Steven J. Hatfill, a former U.S.
>government bio-defense scientist, this past Tuesday. Hatfill is not
>a suspect in the anthrax case, the FBI says. Rather,
>law-enforcement officials have told The Associated Press that
>Hatfill consented to the search in order to clear his name, which
>The New York Times reports has been much mentioned on Web sites
>frequented by scientists, journalists, and others who've taken an
>interest in the anthrax investigation.
>
>Tuesday's search of Hatfill's home by the FBI was reportedly not
>the first time the bureau has had contact with him in the course of
>its ongoing investigation. Sources close to the investigation say
>that he had been questioned on four previous occasions by FBI
>investigators, and that he'd been given, and passed, a polygraph
>exam. These sources also say that Hatfill has always been very
>cooperative with the bureau.
>
>Who is Steven Hatfill? The Prospect has spoken with dozens of
>biowarfare scientists, other government contractors who work in
>bio-defense, former medical school associates and colleagues, and
>sources close to the FBI investigation to get a clearer picture of
>the Maryland scientist. Hatfill belongs to a small pool of people
>who have access to and detailed knowledge of how to grow and
>weaponize the highly lethal, concentrated dry powder spores of
>anthrax that were sent in letters to media personalities and
>members of Congress last October. Specifically, by virtue of his
>government contracts, Hatfill had access to the U.S. Army Medical
>Research Institute for Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) in Frederick,
>Maryland, up until early March. As one of a handful of places in
>the country where scientists grow the most lethal germs in order to
>develop vaccines to defend against them, USAMRIID and its Utah
>cousin, Dugway Proving Grounds, have been at the center of the
>eight-month-old FBI investigation. Last month, genetic analysis of
>the letter-anthrax suggested that it was indistinguishable from a
>strain developed at USAMRIID.
>
>Hatfill, who was employed as an Ebola researcher at USAMRIID from
>1997 to 1999, has since worked as a government contractor who
>specializes in training U.S. Special Forces, embassy employees,
>emergency workers, and other government officials to respond to
>biological attacks. Today, Hatfill continues to perform bio-defense
>training work, to which his colleagues say he is passionately
>devoted.
>
>Hatfill's longer biography is riddled with gaps where classified
>projects presumably belong. The son of a thoroughbred horse
>breeder, Hatfill was born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1953, then
>raised in Illinois. He studied biology at small Southwestern
>College in Kansas, taking a year off midway through to work with a
>Methodist doctor in Zaire. He graduated in 1975, married in 1976,
>had a daughter, and got divorced in 1978. From 1975 to 1978, he
>served with the U.S. Army Institute for Military Assistance, based
>at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, while simultaneously, his resume
>says, serving in the Special Air Squadron (SAS) of the white
>supremacist regime in Rhodesia. He attended medical school in
>Rhodesia from 1978 to 1984, and then moved to South Africa, where
>he completed various military-medical assignments while obtaining
>three master's degrees, studying for a doctoral degree, and
>practicing in a South African clinic.
>
>"After graduating from Southwestern College," he wrote his alumni
>newsletter, "Hatfill received a medical degree from the Godfrey
>Huggins School of Medicine in Rhodesia, with board certification in
>hematological pathology from South Africa. The South African
>government recruited him to be a medical officer on a one-year tour
>of duty in Antarctica, and he completed a post-doctoral fellowship
>at Oxford University in England. His military background includes
>the United States Army's Institute for Military Assistance, the
>Rhodesian SAS, and Selous Scouts [Rhodesian counterinsurgency
>forces]."
>
>There is something curious about Hatfill's claim, on his resume, to
>have worked concurrently with the U.S. Army Institute for Military
>Assistance in Fort Bragg and with the Rhodesian Special Air
>Squadron. Indeed, several of his associates have told the Prospect
>that Hatfill bragged of having been a double agent in South Africa
>-- which raises some intriguing questions. Was the U.S. military
>biowarfare program willing to hire and give sensitive security
>clearances to someone who had served in the apartheid-era South
>African military medical corps, and with white-led Rhodesian
>paramilitary units in Zimbabwe's civil war two decades earlier? Or
>did Hatfill serve in the Rhodesian SAS, and later in the South
>African military medical corps, at the behest of the U.S.
>government? ...
>
>Indeed, Hatfill has been offering the press warnings about
>bioterror-attack scenarios for several years. [see article
>on web for details]
>
>In all his appearances in The Washington Times, Insight, and other
>print sources, Hatfill stressed a single, consistent message: The
>United States is woefully under-prepared for an inevitable
>biological terrorism scenario. It's a sentiment shared by many of
>Hatfill's colleagues in the U.S. bio-defense community -- in
>particular, William C. Patrick, one of the founders of the U.S.
>biological weapons program. ...
>
>In January 1999, Hatfill went to work for Scientific Applications
>International Corporation (SAIC), a large defense contractor. As a
>specialist in biological defenses working on contract for various
>government agencies, Hatfill continued to have access to the Fort
>Detrick lab; the Army's chemical weapons defense testing facility
>in Edgewood, Maryland; Dugway Proving Grounds in Utah; and other
>government labs and military facilities depending on his
>assignments.
>
>... Why did he lose his clearance [in August 2001]? One military
>official recounts the story he says Hatfill told him. In this
>telling, the difficulties began last summer, when Hatfill allegedly
>applied for a Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmentalized Information
>(TS/SCI) security clearance in order to bid for a top-secret
>contract with a government agency, perhaps the CIA.
>
>To qualify for this clearance, he was reportedly required to take
>a polygraph test. Hatfill allegedly told the military official that
>he failed the polygraph on questions concerning his activities in
>Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). The people conducting the polygraph were
>amateurs, Hatfill allegedly complained to his interlocutor; they
>couldn't understand what Cold Warriors like himself had to do in
>Rhodesia. The military official recalls Hatfill as saying that his
>father-in-law had been killed by rebels in Rhodesia, and that he
>had consequently undertaken some actions that caused concern when
>he was given his polygraph test.
>
>Hatfill has appealed the loss of his security clearance in a
>process that is pending. ...
>
>************************************************************
>
>Anthrax Epizootic in Zimbabwe, 1978-1980: Due to Deliberate Spread?
>
>Meryl Nass, M.D.*
>
>* Dr. Nass, at the time of publication, was affiliated with Wing
>Memorial Hospital, Palmer, Massachusetts and the Department of
>Internal Medicine, University of Massachusetts Medical School,
>Worcester, MA USA. Her continued work on anthrax is available at
>her web site http://www.anthraxvaccine.org
>
>Physicians for Social Responsibility Quarterly 1992: 2-198-209
>
>[Brief excerpts only in this posting. Full version, with footnotes,
>available at http://www.anthraxvaccine.org/zimbabwe.html]
>
>The largest recorded outbreak of anthrax among humans, and possibly
>the largest among animals, occurred over a decade ago in Zimbabwe,
>formerly Rhodesia, during the time of its civil war [1]. The
>outbreak was reported in a series of articles by J. C. A. Davies
>and others [from 1980-1985] in the Central African Journal of
>Medicine [2-8]. Little was written about it outside of Africa. Over
>10,000 human cases and 182 human deaths were documented [9]. Human
>cases were secondary to an unprecedented outbreak in cattle [5,10].
>
>Unusual Features of the Epizootic
>
>There were a number of surprising aspects of this epizootic. First,
>the large number of cases was unusual. Ten thousand seven hundred
>thirty-eight human cases were documented in Zimbabwe from January
>1979 through December 1980 [9]. According to Mandell's Principles
>and Practice of Infectious Disease, published in 1979, "about 7,000
>cases are reported in the world annually" [11].The large number of
>human cases was particularly unusual in light of the historically
>low prevalence of anthrax in Zimbabwe [5]. In the 29-year period
>preceding the epidemic (1950-1978), the period for which records
>are available, a total of 334 human cases were reported in
>Zimbabwe. By comparison, during the same period (1950-1978) in the
>United States, 459 human cases were reported [12]. Clearly, anthrax
>was a rare disease in both countries. ... Yet during the war,
>anthrax became one of the country's major causes of hospital
>admissions.
>
>Second, the geographic scope of this outbreak was highly unusual
>for anthrax. Most outbreaks are characterized by a high degree of
>focality [11]. Cases occur in limited areas only. Yet in Zimbabwe
>from 1978 to 1980, the disease spread from area to area, until six
>of the eight provinces were affected [13]. ...
>
>Humans generally acquire the infection by handling meat or other
>products from infected animals. Butchering, preparing, and eating
>meat from an animal infected with anthrax are frequent causes of
>the disease in humans and accounted for many cases in Zimbabwe. ...
>
>Many of the Zimbabwe cases occurred in areas where anthrax had not
>been recorded before. Yet in the rest of the world, epizootics
>generally occur in areas that are known to have produced anthrax
>outbreaks in the past, where there is assumed to be low-density
>contamination of the soil. ...
>
>Fourth, the epizootic was almost entirely confined to the Tribal
>Trust Lands. These were areas that had been assigned to Zimbabwe's
>blacks when the country was divided into distinct areas for black
>and white habitation by the Land Apportionment Act of 1930. ... By
>the end of 1979, one-third of Tribal Trust Lands were affected with
>anthrax, approximately 17% of the land area of the country [10].
>Davies noted that "the commercial (white-owned) farming areas
>appear to have been almost completely spared" [5]. ...
>
>Fifth, the timing of the epizootic coincided with the final months
>of a long and particularly brutal guerrilla war. Some guerrilla
>activity had begun in the late 1960s, but the war did not escalate
>significantly until the mid 1970s. The war ended in late February
>1980, when elections were held, and ZANU and ZAPU, the parties
>affiliated with the two guerrilla armies, won an overwhelming
>victory. ...
>                                        
>Human anthrax case reports by month are available for the provinces
>of Matabeleland, Midlands, and Mashonaland [5]. In Matabeleland and
>Midlands, cases peaked in November and December 1979, respectively,
>and decreased thereafter. In Mashonaland, there were two peaks, the
>first in February 1980 and a second in December 1980. After the war
>ended in late February 1980, only sporadic cases were seen in
>previously unaffected areas, and there appeared to be no further
>geographic spread of the epizootic. However, anthrax has remained
>enzootic in Zimbabwe since the war ended, a not surprising finding,
>given the persistence of the spores in nature.
>
>...
>
>Weighing all available evidence, it is suggested here that a
>plausible explanation for the sudden peak of anthrax in the Tribal
>Trust Lands beginning in November, 1978, is that one or more units
>attached to the Rhodesian military may have air dropped anthrax
>spores in these territories. This action would expose cattle to the
>disease through ingestion or inhalation (or both) of anthrax
>spores. Humans would have acquired the disease from meat or meat
>products.
>
>...
>
>Chemical and Poison Weapons
>
>Was there a parallel, well-documented use of other weapons
>considered abhorrent during the conflict and a willingness to
>overlook civilian casualties? In his memoirs, Flower admits to the
>deliberate distribution of poisoned clothing, which killed hundreds
>of black guerrillas [68]. Yet clothing can be worn by anyone.
>Organophosphate poisoning from tainted clothing affected civilians
>as well, and poisoning by this means became documented in the
>Zimbabwe medical literature [69,70].
>
>Dr. Paul Epstein, an American physician practicing in Mozambique
>for the Ministry of Health, with support from the American Friends
>Service Committee in 1978, treated large numbers of Zimbabweans,
>who had arrived from ZANLA training camps, for a bleeding disorder.
>Initially a viral hemorrhagic fever was suspected. But there were
>many deaths despite treatment. Eventually a fat biopsy was obtained
>and sent for toxin analysis; this analysis revealed the presence of
>warfarin [71]. Thus another unconventional mode of warfare,
>warfarin poisoning, may have been employed by some within the
>Rhodesian military. ...
>
>Conclusions
>
>A case has been made for the possible deliberate use of anthrax as
>an agent of biological warfare, directed at African-owned cattle,
>in the final months of the Zimbabwe civil conflict.
>
>The characteristics of Zimbabwe's anthrax epizootic are unusual.
>Outside Zimbabwe, outbreaks of animal anthrax have remained
>confined to enzootic areas or could be traced to contaminated
>animal products and have been generally self-limited. Zimbabwe's
>epizootic did not conform to this expected behavior, and the
>arguments put forward to explain it are unconvincing.
>
>A military role for anthrax can be postulated, given the strategic
>control of food and other resources that existed at the time.
>Deliberate impoverishment of rural blacks may conceivably have been
>a strategy as well. Desperate tactics appear to have been used by
>the Rhodesian military elsewhere as the war drew to a close.
>Finally, there have been recent reports attributed to confidential
>eyewitnesses that support the theory of the deliberate spread of
>anthrax.
>
>************************************************************
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-- 


Al Kagan
African Studies Bibliographer and Professor of Library Administration
Africana Unit, Room 328
University of Illinois Library
1408 W. Gregory Drive
Urbana, IL 61801, USA

tel. 217-333-6519
fax. 217-333-2214
e-mail. akagan at uiuc.edu