4 Nations Thought To Possess Smallpox

U.S. officials said the French program is believed to be defensive in nature, and some of them expressed consternation that its inclusion in the WINPAC report was disclosed to a reporter. It could not be learned whether the Bush administration has objected to, or sought information about, the French program. France is one of five members of the U.N. Security Council with a veto, and it is the linchpin of U.S. diplomatic efforts to establish a legal basis for war with Iraq.

Jacques Drucker, who stepped down recently as director of France's National Public Health Surveillance Center, said his country favors research with live smallpox that is forbidden under present conventions. France recently opened one of the world's only Biological Containment Level 4 facilities. Drucker said the Jean Merieux Laboratory in Lyon works with viruses that "could be used for bioterrorist purposes," and mentioned hemorrhagic fevers such as ebola, Marburg and lassa. The lab is "equipped for smallpox," he said, but "I would suspect that if there was variola virus left in France it would be on the military laboratory research facilities."

Some of the evidence on Iraq emerged from unpublished discoveries of the U.N. Special Commission (UNSCOM), which searched for prohibited weapons after the Persian Gulf War. In 1995, David Kelly, a British inspector, led a team to the maintenance shop of the State Establishment for Medical Appliances on the edge of Baghdad. There he found a freeze drier labeled "smallpox." Two years later, on Oct. 7, 1997, inspector Diane Seaman seized a document on the grounds of the Al Rasheed Military Hospital describing vaccines currently in use for Iraqi troops. Third on the list was smallpox. Confronted with other evidence on pox research, Iraq's chief bioweaponeer, Hazem Ali, told UNSCOM inspectors that he had considered camelpox as a weapon because Iraqis, unlike Americans, spent enough time near camels to be immune.

Richard Spertzel, UNSCOM's chief biological inspector, said that explanation was laughable. "Only one person ever died of camelpox," Spertzel said in an interview. Ali was "much too good a scientist to believe the story."

On Jan. 14, 1991, the Defense Intelligence Agency said an Iraqi agent described, in medically accurate terms, military smallpox casualties he said he saw in 1985 or 1986. Two weeks later, the Armed Forces Medical Intelligence Center reported that eight of 69 Iraqi prisoners of war whose blood was tested showed current immunity to smallpox, which had not occurred naturally in Iraq for 20 years. The same prisoners had been inoculated for anthrax, a well-established Iraqi bioweapon.

More recently, according to the WINPAC report, a former Soviet scientist told U.S. officials that his country "transferred [smallpox] technology in the early 1990s to Iraq." Northern Iraq suffered one of the last known smallpox epidemics in 1971-72. The WINPAC report assessed that Iraq "retained samples from the 1971 outbreak."

The last country on WINPAC's list is North Korea, which the authors wrote "has a longstanding and active biological weapons program." Though assessing that Pyongyang has the smallpox pathogen, WINPAC said its evidence was of "medium" quality.

On March 5, 1993, the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service reported that "North Korea is performing applied military-biological research" with "pathogens for malignant anthrax, cholera, bubonic plague and smallpox." Gordon Oehler, then head of WINPAC, told Congress that the Russian report was "not a bad summary." Much more recently, sources said, the United States has obtained reports of ongoing pox research and manufacture of vaccine.

"I've spent a lot of time trying to understand the biological weapons threat," one policymaker said in an interview, "and I have concluded on a very personal basis that there is a small chance that we will have definitive evidence, smoking gun evidence, for countries like North Korea, very closed societies."

Confidence about the smallpox evidence varies somewhat among the 14 U.S. intelligence agencies and departments.

"The assessment is, they have it," said one official, speaking as he held his own office's written summaries of evidence on North Korea and Iraq. "We don't say 70 percent certainty. We assess that they have it."

Officials who agreed that the evidence is not decisive said few differences exist in the ultimate judgment of national security and homeland defense officials. One person who has access to the compartmented intelligence on smallpox offered to "bet my next year's salary" that the four countries named in WINPAC's report have live seed cultures.