GERM WARFARE

By Bruce W. Nelan

The message greeting United Nations inspectors on their return to Iraq last week was ungrammatical but clear. Slathered in yellow paint on a wall at the Habaniya air base were the words DOWN AMERICA. The 75 inspectors--four of them Americans--may have come back, but they were still not welcome. And there was no guarantee that they would now have an easier time carrying out their mission: to search for and destroy Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction. Bill Clinton seemed skeptical of the hasty, Russian-led diplomatic initiative that had persuaded Baghdad to back down: he continued to dispatch more planes and ships to the region in case Saddam once again interfered with the U.N.'s work.

The inspectors faced an immediate question: What had Saddam done during the three weeks they had been off the job? It was obvious that the Iraqis had blinded surveillance cameras and moved equipment that had been under scrutiny for possible use in weapons programs. They may also have destroyed critical records or carted them off. They may have rehidden weapons parts they do not intend to give up. Some of the inspectors suspect the Iraqis might have used the time to produce small batches of poisons or germ weapons to add to their secret stocks.

The hunt will focus first, says Richard Butler, head of the U.N. Special Commission that runs the inspections, on what might have been hidden during the blackout period. Then his team will try again to enter suspected weapons sites from which the Iraqis, violating Security Council resolutions, have repeatedly barred inspectors. Of most concern to the specialists is the arsenal of biological weapons they are certain Saddam is still concealing. Germ weapons like anthrax and botulinum are so deadly, so easy to make and hide that the monitors are not prepared to take the Iraqis' word that they have destroyed their stocks, especially since Saddam's scientists have denied for years that they ever had any.

As the inspectors renew their search, they will tangle once again with Iraq's longtime chief of bioweapons production, a diminutive woman named Rihab Rashida Taha or, to the U.N. representatives who distrust her, "Dr. Germ." Little known until last week, when NBC Nightly News revealed her role, Taha was responsible for tests of anthrax and botulinum at Iraq's Salman Pak facility, first on rats and mice, then on rhesus monkeys, beagles and donkeys. Still unreleased videotapes seized by the U.N. two years ago show animals that had been exposed to germ agents writhing and dying in agony.

Since the Gulf War, Taha, a British-trained biologist, has made a career of thwarting U.N. officials at every turn. She is, says one of them, "a consummate liar." First she claimed that her program had been strictly defensive, and then that all Iraq's biological agents had been destroyed. When inspectors uncovered caches of germ agents, she blandly claimed that only a few small quantities had survived. "Iraq has said that it destroyed stockpiles of biological weapons after the war," says Pentagon spokesman Kenneth Bacon. "We have absolutely no confirmation that that has happened. We assume that they do have some stockpiles of biological weapons." In addition to thousands of gallons of anthrax and botulinum and smaller quantities of other poisons, some "weaponized" germs are unaccounted for: artillery shells, missile warheads and bombs filled with toxins.

"They have never told the truth," complains a senior Pentagon official. In fact, the truth about the production of biological killers is hard to come by. The techniques involved in turning out bioweapons are essentially "World War II-type science," says Raymond Zilinskas, a biologist at the University of Maryland, who participated in two U.N. inspection tours in Iraq. He says the mixing of poisons can be carried out by technicians with only modest scientific training using ordinary commercial equipment. The fermenters and centrifuges used every day in dairies, wineries and pharmaceutical houses, for example, can be quickly converted to churning out lethal weapons, and then switched back to innocent uses before inspectors show up.

The Iraqis proved how simple it was, beginning in 1989 with the production of anthrax--bacteria that cause deadly hemorrhaging in the brain and chest--at the Al Hakam Single Cell Protein Production Plant. In the mid-1980s, before the U.S. belatedly banned such dangerous exports, Iraq's Education Ministry ordered 70 packages of microbes and toxins from the American Type Culture Collection, a nonprofit outfit in Rockville, Md. Included were flasks of freeze-dried anthrax spores. Iraqi labs reconstituted the spores in soy broth and put them into a small fermenter filled with a growth medium. The medium, Zilinskas says, "was imported from Europe and had nutrients that the anthrax bacteria needed to grow."

After they multiplied--one bacterium can explode into a billion copies in 10 hours--technicians in gas masks and coveralls transferred them to a large production fermenter, where they bloomed into huge quantities. Iraq now admits to brewing more than 2,000 gal. of anthrax, but American experts think the true amount was three times that. A fatal dose is, says a U.S. Defense official, "smaller than a speck of dust, something you wouldn't even see." In a final step, the Iraqis refrigerated the muddy mixture; it could be loaded into a warhead shortly before launch.

A similar process produced the even deadlier toxin of botulinum bacteria, but because oxygen kills these germs, they were grown in a fermenter infused with nitrogen. Botulism is a severe kind of food poisoning that causes paralysis and death. The Iraqis also used the castor-bean plant, widely grown in the country, to produce the poison ricin, which kills by altering the body's use of proteins and causing circulatory collapse and heart failure.

One truth about bioweapons, says a Pentagon official, is that they can be produced using a recipe found on the Internet, a beer fermenter, a culture and a gas mask, with a total investment of about $10,000. "If you buy commercial equipment," he says, "and put it in a very small room, you can be producing kilogram quantities of anthrax within a month." And each kilo "has millions and millions of potential deaths in it." A study by the U.S. Office of Technology Assessment estimated that 100 kilos of anthrax spread by a crop duster over Washington could cause 2 million deaths.

Of course, getting 100 kilos of anthrax and a crop duster over Washington would not be easy. "Dispersal is the real challenge," says Zilinskas. "You've got to get these bugs to the people." But if Iraq shipped toxins out by diplomatic pouch and handed them over to some cooperative terrorists, it might not be impossible. Iraq has also been tinkering with other methods. Before the Gulf War it had several hundred Italian-made pesticide dispensers fitted with spray nozzles for spitting out bioweapons in droplet size. In 1990 the Iraqis flight-tested a remote-controlled MiG-21 fighter mounted with a 2,200-liter belly tank and sprayer.

If bioweapons can be hidden almost anywhere and scientific amateurs can turn them out in a small room in a country the size of California, how can U.N. inspectors hope to find them? No matter what deal Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz may have struck with Russian Foreign Minister Yevgeni Primakov, the Iraqis are unlikely to be any more cooperative than they were before. That is, not at all. Since March 1996, the inspectors have headed for 63 sites where they suspected the Iraqis were hiding weapons, banned equipment or secret records. The U.N. teams were physically turned away from 14 of them and were held up at the front doors before being let into 38 others. In some cases of delay, U-2 reconnaissance planes working for the U.N. spotted cavalcades of trucks hauling material out the back doors. From March to October this year, Iraq blocked or interfered with 25 inspection efforts.

The latest flap over the nationalities of inspectors could have been trumped up, Zilinskas believes, because they were getting close to evidence that directly linked Saddam with the germ-weapons program. The inspectors are particularly interested in locating 25 warheads filled with poisons that have been shuttled around the country since the Gulf War. They are big--about 10 ft. long and 3 ft. wide--and could be fired atop Al-Hussein missiles with a 400-mile range.

Iraq's overall concealment efforts are highly organized and involve thousands of people, according to Charles Duelfer, the American who is deputy chief weapons inspector of the Special Commission. He says they are operated by the national intelligence service, Mukhabarat; the Amn al-Khass, a security unit dedicated to hiding information; and the Special Republican Guards, troops responsible for the security of Saddam, his offices and palaces. Iraq routinely bars the U.N. from what it calls "presidential-residential" buildings, saying they are out of bounds. When Iraqi officials talk up the need for the inspectors to respect "the sovereignty of Iraq," they mean: Stay out of secret military and intelligence bases and presidential offices. These are precisely where inspectors believe some of the missing arsenals are hidden. Zilinskas thinks Saddam may be hiding other "unsavory materials," such as videos showing germ experiments on Iranian prisoners of war during the 1980s.

If it is back to business as usual for the inspectors, it is probably back to blockage as usual for the Iraqis. What, exactly, will the Security Council do the next time Iraq bars the door of a barracks or a palace that the inspectors want to investigate? Past performance is not encouraging: after 25 cases of interference earlier this year, the Security Council could not even agree to increase travel restrictions on senior Iraqi officials. With Primakov having brokered a deal with Iraq to push for an end to sanctions, Moscow may be planning to veto any effort to increase the punishment.

President Clinton says it should be different this time. The inspectors, he said last week, "must be able to proceed with their work without interference, to find, to destroy, to prevent Iraq from rebuilding nuclear, chemical and biological weapons." But that is what Saddam agreed to after his defeat in 1991, so no one can assume he means it this time. The U.S. does have the muscle in place in the gulf to hit Saddam with bombs and missiles if he does not comply with U.N. orders. Washington says it will wait and see. But is Clinton ready to bomb Saddam and his people in the face of opposition from Russia, France and the Arab world, including Kuwait? And since biological weapons can be hidden anywhere, no amount of bombing can ensure that Saddam's brews are destroyed.

--Reported by Mark Thompson/Washington and Barry Hillenbrand/London

With reporting by MARK THOMPSON/WASHINGTON AND BARRY HILLENBRAND/LONDON