GAO warns US aid risks 'sustaining' Russian chem-bio weapons programs
Insight
Posted: Monday, January 29, 2001
The revelation comes as President-elect George W. Bush builds his new administration to take over a national-security apparatus reeling from espionage and security scandals.
Before the Clinton/Gore administration was elected in 1992, Congress passed the Cooperative Threat Reduction (CTR) Act - known as the Nunn-Lugar program after its Senate cosponsors, Sam Nunn, D-Ga., and Richard Lugar, R-Ind. - to help Russia and other former Soviet states dismantle their programs for producing weapons of mass destruction; prevent proliferation of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons; and find profitable civilian work for the large numbers of scientists and engineers formerly involved in weapons work. Clinton and Gore implemented the program in 1993 with strong bipartisan support.
However, CTR came under immediate criticism from the General Accounting Office (GAO), the congressional auditing agency, due to poor executive oversight and a lack of strategic planning. And, inside the federal bureaucracy, concerned officials raised early warnings that some of the U.S. aid was being diverted to subsidize the continued development of advanced classes of Russian nuclear, chemical and biological weapons (see "Loving the Russian Bomb," Dec. 6, 1999).
The GAO reported in May 2000 that poor oversight of the CTR program and lax attitudes toward security allowed Moscow to divert aid directly to Russia's ongoing germ-warfare program - a program that is illegal under the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention. The Clinton/Gore administration spent $20 million on biological-research projects in Russia between fiscal 1994 and 1999 and planned to expand it elevenfold to $220 million between fiscal 2000 and 2004.
And that, Russia-watchers say, is an area the new Bush national-security team should take extra care to uproot.
Insight has learned that the United States was warned as early as 1996 that its biological-research aid to Russia was being diverted, but that administration officials chose to do nothing. Two U.S. officials tell Insight that in 1996 and 1997 Nikolai A. Plate of the Russian Academy of Sciences, then the Russian government's senior scientist in charge of nonproliferation matters, warned the United States of the diversion. But his admonitions were ignored.
According to an unpublished 1997 House Commerce Committee study, obtained by Insight, on the adequacy of security and nonproliferation programs at the Department of Energy (DOE), "On several occasions, Dr. Plate is reported to have stated that he is appalled by ISTC's [International Science and Technology Center's] support for work being carried out to develop a biological weapon in the form of a mutated measles pathogen that will exhibit fast-acting AIDS-like characteristics."
A U.S. health official was shocked to learn of the State Department-funded effort. "Upon hearing about the measles-pathogen program, a representative of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention [CDC] expressed extreme concern about this work because pathogens almost are impossible to cure and therefore constitute a frighteningly potent biological weapon," according to the congressional report. "The representative from CDC went on to remark that there would be a massive outcry if the American public knew that the ISTC was using taxpayers money to fund this sort of biological work."
Plate could not be reached for comment.
Russia-watchers have expressed concern about the potential problem for years. The American Foreign Policy Council, a nonprofit educational organization, first raised concerns publicly in early 1995, and the GAO has issued semiannual reports documenting similar abuses since that time. A May 1995 GAO report (GAO/ NSIAD/95-7) warned that U.S. nonproliferation and defense-conversion programs risked helping Russia modernize new classes of weaponry unless the United States imposed safeguards. Those safeguards never were imposed adequately, according to subsequent GAO reports.
The GAO repeatedly singled out the State Department-funded ISTC program in Russia as a main culprit that paid the salaries of Russian biological-, chemical- and nuclear-weapons scientists as they continued to work on weapons-modernization programs. In a 1995 interview with Insight, the State Department's Kim Savit acknowledged the issue but said that ISTC's goal is to prevent proliferation, not modernization of weapons of mass destruction that would remain in Russia's arsenal.
For years the State Department, in charge of coordinating aid to Russia among various federal agencies, tried to shut down an Initiatives for Proliferation Prevention (IPP) program run by the DOE due to what a DOE general-counsel official called personality clashes and interagency rivalries. At the same time, the State Department and the Pentagon failed to develop a strategy for combating the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction from Russia. A draft DOE working paper for a 1996 NATO conference commented, "DOD has no overarching strategy for the long-term solution to CW/BW proliferation concerns. Without an overarching USG [U.S. government] strategy, IPP will have difficulty identifying the most effective way to engage in this area."
So poor were communications that the deputy chief of mission at the U.S. Embassy in Ukraine "appeared to be unaware of the nonproliferation objectives" of the IPP program. Several documents show that State instructed DOE not to speak about "proliferation" problems - or solutions to them - in the former Soviet Union. The State Department's understanding of IPP apparently was so poor that DOE had to explain itself in early 1997. Kenneth E. Baker, then acting director of the Office of Nonproliferation and National Security at DOE, explained to Ambassador Richard Morningstar, who coordinated U.S. aid to the former Soviet Union, that IPP and a related DOE project "are national-security, not economic growth/transition, programs."
The New York Times reported in January 2000 that careless U.S. officials allowed aid to be diverted to Russia's biological-weapons program. According to the report, the Biopreparat - the secretive, now "private," organization that was at the heart of the Soviet germ-warfare program - skimmed off U.S. aid intended to promote space cooperation. Also a commission led by Vice President Al Gore approved a questionable grant that might have funded Russia's ongoing illegal biological-weapons work.
Biopreparat Director Yuri T. Kalinin, a Soviet general who has headed the organization since it was created in 1973, "shifted at least 10 percent of several NASA grants intended for biological research in space to his organization," New York Times correspondent Judith Miller reported. "The Americans are concerned because of [Biopreparat's] continuing secrecy and because it is led by the same military and intelligence officers who spearheaded and concealed the Soviet Union's biological-weapons programs during the Cold War," according to the report. "Separately, Clinton administration officials acknowledged that the United States had been less than meticulous in the mid-1990s in enforcing its ban on aid to Biopreparat."
Former Biopreparat first deputy director Ken Alibek tells Insight that the organization continues to develop advanced anthrax, plague and smallpox weapons.
U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) officials, according to the New York Times, "said they had not been aware of Biopreparat's history and should have checked with national-security officials before approving aid to a joint venture that involved the organization."
But according to DOE documents from 1995 which Insight has obtained, USAID and the State Department, into which USAID later was merged, conspired to deny DOE security officials access to disarmament and nonproliferation programs that involved weapons of mass destruction. Dozens of these DOE documents show how State Department aid officials denied DOE officials clearances to travel to Russia, forbade them to speak about nonproliferation issues at NATO conferences and isolated them from interagency meetings on how best to deliver nonproliferation aid to the former Soviet Union.
In 1996 Morningstar and the senior Pentagon official responsible for disarmament aid to Russia, then-assistant secretary of Defense Ashton Carter, disputed and attacked this reporter's contention that U.S. aid was being diverted for clandestine military development in Russia.
Yet a classified 1995 annual report obtained by Insight shows that the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (ACDA), which Undersecretary of State John D. Holum headed at the time, found that Moscow continued its covert biological-weapons program. ACDA omitted that finding in the declassified version. Holum denied it was "suppressed."
In one memorandum, IPP Director John Hnatio cited concerns about "the pathogen work allegedly being conducted under the auspices of ISTC." DOE general-counsel official Joe Mahaley referred to a separate memorandum to Morningstar and the National Security Council (NSC) "regarding the concerns about the alleged ISTC-sponsored pathogens research."
Other DOE memoranda indicate that IPP officials tried to raise the matter with National Security Adviser Sandy Berger, but that other NSC officials blocked them. A Jan. 17, 1997, DOE internal communication expressed frustration that the NSC, "at the urging of the State Department," restricted DOE officials who had raised security concerns. A May 1997 DOE memorandum stated, "In view of Ambassador Morningstar's statement that he intends to ignore these problems, it is important to assure that Mr. Berger be made aware of what is going on."
Hnatio sent a memorandum to Berger, through the DOE/NSC chain of command, explaining "serious programmatic and national-security issues that have resulted from the State Department actions." Sources say the memorandum never reached Berger's desk.
In a May 2000 audit, the GAO expressed heightened concerns that Russian military scientists receiving U.S. aid continue to work on germ weapons. The GAO criticized Moscow for keeping Soviet-era developers of biological weapons in senior positions of the germ-warfare complex, including Biopreparat chief Kalinin. House Armed Services Committee Chairman Floyd D. Spence, R-S.C., said the GAO report "reinforces my concern that the administration's plans to increase assistance to Russia could exacerbate the risk of a renewed Russian offensive-biological-weapons effort."
But those concerns have gone on for years and Congress has taken no substantive action beyond commissioning GAO audits. Indeed, Congress continued funding the programs under the Clinton administration's new Nunn-Lugar-funded Expanded Threat Reduction Initiative.
In releasing the May 2000 GAO report Biological Weapons: Effort to Reduce Former Soviet Threat Offers Benefits, Poses New Risks, Spence said the U.S.-funded biological-research programs with Russia may "exacerbate or create risks" to the United States. "The CTR program was intended to reduce the threat posed by Russia's weapons of mass destruction, including biological weapons, not increase it," said Spence. "Congress must carefully evaluate the risks and benefits of this program to ensure that it does not have unintended consequences that could jeopardize the national security of the United States."
According to the GAO, the program presents "key risks" to the United States that include "sustaining Russia's existing biological-weapons infrastructure, maintaining or advancing Russian scientists' skills to develop offensive biological weapons and the potential misuse of U.S. assistance to fund offensive research."
