INTERVIEW WITH ONE THE WORLD’S FOREMOST BIOWARFARE EXPERTS Dr. Ken Alibek. From Newscientist.com

Prepare for the worst

Is the US wimpish over biological weapons? Would the world understand a more aggressive stance? Ken Alibek thinks so. He has a unique perspective. In 1992, he blew the whistle on the Soviet Union’s Biopreparat biowarfare machine. The programme was one of the great deceptions of the cold war because the Soviet Union had signed a treaty banning such work. At its height, Biopreparat employed 10,000 scientists at 40 sites. Kanatjan Alibekov (Alibek’s birth name) was second-in-command at Biopreparat so his defection made him a fabulous prize for the US. Now he’s a key researcher at a major US biodefence contractor. When Rachel Nowak caught up with him, she found a man full of contradictions-and dire warnings

Could the foot and mouth outbreak in Britain have been caused by a biological attack?

I’m 100 per cent sure that all intelligence and counterintelligence services are going to be working on this epidemic. But don’t expect to get any official response. Nobody is going to say we suspect it was a case of terrorism or a sabotage of some kind, but we have no proof. If you say this, you create panic, and you encourage other would-be terrorists. Don’t expect anything, even any information about the existence of an investigation.

You’ve accused the West of being alarmingly innocent about the potential threat of biological warfare . . .

Yes. One of the biggest problems is that we don’t know whether or not we have had such attacks. We are just ignorant. We cannot distinguish between naturally occurring epidemics and ones we create. I’m not saying that foot and mouth disease is [the result of a biological attack] because I don’t know. But if you see something this size in the 21st century, it is getting very suspicious. To imagine that we have had nothing for the past few decades and then suddenly such a huge, uncontrollable epidemic of foot and mouth disease-it raises many questions.

How has the threat of biological warfare changed since the end of the cold war?

In the 20th century, countries interested in biological weapons mostly developed them as weapons of mass destruction, a means to conduct wars. In the 21st century, we will see a significant shift. Everything is going to be done covertly. In some cases, biological weapons will be used in so-called “low intensity” military conflicts, or they will be used [for terrorism], brought to the US and used to infect people in the subway, for example. You can criticise Putin or Yeltsin, but they are not stupid. They won’t deploy biological weapons against Western countries.

So we don’t have to worry about Russia . . .

Yes, we do. Russia still retains this huge, sophisticated biological weapons capability and expertise. This is the actual threat: not from the government, but from Russians with the knowledge. Some of them want to sell their expertise and knowledge-there are many buyers. My major concern is that in the event of a bioterrorist attack with well-trained people who know how to deploy biological weapons, the number of casualties would be unbelievably huge.

How huge?

Depending on the type of agents, deployment techniques, concentration of the agent, from dozens to hundreds of thousands.

What about biological weapons that alter human behaviour rather than kill?

That is possible. We know about more than one hundred different neuropeptides-for example, beta-endorphin, encephalins and serotonin. There are many that alter our thinking processes, our emotions. You can do practically everything with neurotransmitters. You can make people depressed or overexcited. We need to keep in mind that the idea is not new. Many intelligence services in many countries, especially like the former Soviet Union, use such approaches to interrogate people. They use neurotransmitters to change people’s moods, to suppress people’s will. You can make a normal person crazy using these types of substances. We know how they work.

But how do you make them into infectious agents that are suitable for use in biological weapons?

Most neurotransmitters are peptides, each peptide can be encoded by a gene and inserted into a virus, such as an adenovirus. It is not so difficult-you can insert practically anything into a virus. I would say that this work is now well under way in Russia because it started in the 1970s. At that time, genetic engineering techniques were not sophisticated enough to develop something substantial. But it is 2001.

You trained as a doctor, and you seem like a nice person, but you spent a large part of your career developing biological weapons that can kill hundreds of thousands of people. How do you reconcile this?

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