14 January 2002
Declassified U.S. Germ Warfare 'Cookbooks' Have Many Worried
New York Times

For years, experts have called such documents cookbooks for terrorists and condemned their public release. Now, with new urgency, scientists and military specialists are campaigning to have the weapon reports locked away from public access. The Bush administration is considering such restrictions, said John Marburger 3d, the White House science adviser. Specialists warn that the documents, even though decades old, contain information that could help produce the kind of sophisticated anthrax powder that killed five people and traumatized America last fall.

"It's pretty scary stuff," said Raymond Zilinskas, a senior scientist at the Monterey Institute of International Studies, a private group that studies germ defenses. "There's a whole bunch of literature out there that's really cookbook." One report obtained by Mr. Zilinskas from the government is "Development of 'N' for Offensive Use in Biological Warfare." 'N' was the code letter for bacillus anthracis, the germ that causes anthrax. Another is "The Stability of Botulinum Toxin in Common Beverages." The germ- derived substance is the most poisonous known.

Such documents were written from 1943 to 1969 when the United States employed an army of scientists and engineers to research, develop and build a stockpile of biological weapons. Although Washington renounced germ warfare in 1969 and dismantled its arsenal, the government preserved the studies, recipes and blueprints on which the arms were based. Hundreds of the documents have been declassified as part of an effort to make public the inner workings of government. Today, federal agencies routinely sell the documents to historians and other researchers, mostly over the Internet and telephone. More sensitive but still unclassified reports are made available by mail after requests under the Freedom of Information Act. (..)

"We can't get it back," Mr. Zilinskas said of papers already released. "But we can prevent further leakage of this material to the general public." (..) With new resolve since the anthrax attacks, that work has now shifted into reverse. In an interview, the military specialist evaluating 3,500 documents at Fort Detrick said he had become alarmed at those already available and was calling for new barriers.

"The problem is not declassification - it's reclassification," said the official, Harry Dangerfield, an army medical doctor at Fort Detrick during the germ weapons program. He now works for Science Applications International, a military contractor conducting the Fort Detrick study. "My major concern is the number of unclassified documents that need to be protected against FOIA requests," Dr. Dangerfield said, referring to the Freedom of Information Act.

Dr. Dangerfield, who is preparing a report on the topic for the Fort Detrick commander, said in an interview that the report would call for the reclassification of more than 200 reports. His first examination of the reports, he said, "raised the hair on the back of my neck." (..)

Today, the germ reports declassified by military officials are made available to the public by the Defense Technical Information Center, at Fort Belvoir, Virginia. The center, the Pentagon's main repository of scientific and technical data, has a comprehensive Web site that helps identify old documents. The military center provides many of its reports to an arm of the Commerce Department known as the National Technical Information Service in Springfield, Virginia. From its Web site, the service sells the pilot-factory document and many others to the public. For example, "Screening Studies With Variola Virus," dated 1958, describes army studies to explore the weapon potential of smallpox. (..)

Steven Garfinkel, former director of the government's Information Security Oversight Office, said the Bush administration was considering an executive order that would allow reclassification, which the government permitted from 1982 to 1995, but which is barred under the Clinton order. Mr. Marburger, the White House science adviser, said the issue was under high-level review. He said he was personally concerned that terrorists might obtain potentially deadly information from the government but urged a cautious approach. "I'm not in favor of wholesale reclassification of documents, in general," he said. Mr. Garfinkel said that for documents already made public, reclassification might do more harm than good. "It could give visibility to information that would have been less noticed if left alone," he said.