Excerpted from: ERRI DAILY INTELLIGENCE REPORT-ERRI Risk Assessment Services-Tuesday, June 23, 1998 - Vol. 4, No. 174

LEAD FOCUS

SOME COUNTERTERRORISM EXPERTS FEAR
SMALLER GROUPS IN A BIO ATTACK 
By Steve Macko, ERRI Risk Analyst

U.S. counterterrorist experts have told the Washington Post and New York Times that they believe the greatest danger of a biological terrorist attack is posed by a small group of individuals rather than a large-scale mass terror attack by a sophisticated group. Amid warnings from policymakers and the news media that germ warfare could unleash havoc of near-biblical proportions, 29 federal agencies are gearing up for a federal effort that may spend $1.3 billion next year.

Security officials said they will concentrate less on the mass terror attacks that could be unleashed by only a few of the most sophisticated terrorists and more on smaller-scale assaults that are within the technical grasp of many terrorist and dissident groups. They said that they are worried less by the threat of an aircraft fitted with crop-dusting equipment that could theoretically wipe out cities with an aerosol of anthrax spores than by the dangers of a garden pesticide dispenser that might kill several hundred people in a subway. They see less chance of someone contaminating a city water system than of someone
bringing illness to dozens of people by spreading salmonella bacteria on a restaurant's food.

Dr. Robert Knouss, assistant surgeon general and director of the U.S. Office of Emergency Preparedness, said, "We want to help cities deal with these much more likely small events that could be launched by many more organizations. Somebody spraying salmonella on a salad bar is just a lot more likely than the guy spraying 50 kilograms of anthrax spores over Washington, D.C."

The new focus of the government effort against bioterrorism underscores the difficulties analysts face in trying to calculate risks and prepare defenses against a threat that so far has killed not a single person in the United States. Unlike other security threats, biological terrorism has almost no history in the United States, no past examples to show how it might inflict death. The only real documented bioterrorism incident in U.S. history occurred in 1984, when members of the Rajneeshee cult in Oregon sprayed salmonella bacteria on ten local salad bars in an effort to affect the outcome of a local election. The plot did cause 751 people to become ill, but no one died.

The technology of biological warfare has been steadily advancing around the globe -- especially in countries such as Iraq and Iran that cannot hope to confront the United States in conventional warfare. Biological bombs, like chemical weapons, give their users the theoretical capability to inflict the kind of casualties previously associated only with a major military attack. The potential threat clearly has caught the attention of the public.

By one count, bioterrorism is the subject of at least 17 books of fiction, including "The Cobra Event," by Richard Preston, which this past spring aroused Clinton's interest in the subject. The new X-Files movie has a biological attack theme. FBI officials, who would take the lead in law enforcement in any biological terrorist attack, say most public discussion of the subject has been shot through with exaggerations about the ease with which terrorists could bring harm.

John F. Lewis, the FBI's assistant director for national security described most media attention on the subject of biological terrorism as "a lot of hype." Reports about chemical and biological terrorism have proliferated in many of the nation's leading newspapers on radio and television, and in books.

Lewis and other experts say that they see an increasing number of threats and hoaxes involving biological weapons and a few cases where individuals or groups have gathered potentially dangerous germ cultures. In 1997, the FBI looked investigated about 100 terrorist threats, of which more than half involved the alleged use of biological materials.

Robert M. Blitzer, chief of the FBI's domestic terrorism section, said, "We've seen some people growing stuff at home and a few cases where there've been arrests." But, he added, so far the FBI has had no signs that anyone has succeeded in building any bio-dispersion device that might be able to inflict a mass-casualty attack.

[Two paragraphs voluntarily removed by ERRI analysts in the interest of U.S. National Security]

Some experts say that an anti-government group called the "Minnesota Patriots Council" is a model of the new risks. In 1992, the group reportedly plotted to kill two law enforcement officers. Members of the group planned to rub a solution of a toxin called ricin on doorknobs, expecting that it would be absorbed through victims' skin. But the group's scientific knowledge was sorely lacking. The toxin could not have been absorbed through any victim's skin in that form. In any event, members of the group did not get a chance to commit the crimes. The wife of one member, angry about a marital dispute, went to authorities and turned in the group and the 0.7 of a gram of ricin they had concealed in a baby-food jar.

W. Seth Carus, an analyst at National Defense University, said the disaffected Americans are known to have shown an interest in biological warfare generally have "not been organized enough to be much of a threat."

Gordon Adams, a senior U.S. budget official for national security until earlier this year and now deputy director of the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, said, "We can get real spun up over a terrorist event or two and make them into a major threat. In part, we do that to make the political machinery move. But it is not clear how advanced the threat is here, nor is it clear that it has the broad lethality that would justify the attention that's being given to it."

The Emergency Response & Research Institute's (the parent organization of this publication) executive director, Clark Staten, said, "I'm not sure all of my colleagues are giving our opponents their due respect...some of them are certainly as intelligent and as capable as those defending against this threat of a biological attack." "The threat is both domestic and international...there are any number of 'non-state actors' who would use Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) against the United States, if given any sort of opportunity," the veteran emergency and terrorism analyst said.

[Paragraph voluntarily removed by ERRI Analysts in the interests of U.S. National Security]

"The important domestic issue remains...are the EMS, Fire and Law Enforcement agencies in the United States at least minimally trained, equipped, and prepared to prevent, or if necessary, to respond to and manage...these potentially devastating incidents?" Staten rhetorically asked.

"We, at our institute, always plan for the worst and hope for the best...we are advocating precaution, planning, and preparedness, not peddling panic," he added. "We feel this is prudent given the potential for a number of very negative and 'cascading' events that could happen if such a terrorist incident were to actually occur in this country," Staten concluded.

ERRI - Hazardous-Materials Page

ERRI - Lessons-On-Line: Chemical/Biological Terrorist Attack

05/14/97--Biologic Terrorism; Responding to the Threat -- CDC Emerging Infectious Diseases; Vol 3, No. 2, by Dr. Philip K. Russell - Johns Hopkins University