Posted on 02/11/2005 8:11:49 PM PST by aculeus
Britain and America's most guarded germ warfare secrets have been known to the Russians for decades and spies continue to operate at the heart of the West's biotechnology industry, a former KGB spymaster says today.
Alexander Kouzminov also discloses that covert Soviet sabotage agents prepared secret sites where phials of lethal bacteria would be left, ready to poison western military establishments, civilian settlements and even assassinate political leaders in the event of war with the Soviet Union.
The scientist, once a senior member of the KGB unit responsible for biological espionage, says that the secrets of Porton Down and the Pentagon's equivalent, Fort Detrick in Maryland, were discovered through the work of deep-cover Russian espionage agents.
Dr Kouzminov's unit was Department 12 of Directorate S, the part of the KGB that ran its "illegals", or deep-cover spies, around the world.
The department concentrated on biological warfare and was so secret that even the defectors Oleg Gordievsky and Vasiliy Mitrokhin did not know what it did.
Before the publication today of Dr Kouzminov's book, Biological Espionage, nobody in the West had any real idea of Department's 12's role in penetrating biological research programmes around the world and stealing secrets of research that could be used for the benefit of the Soviet, and later Russian, state.
Nigel West, the author and espionage expert, said: "None of this material has ever been disclosed before and we have never had a defector from this unit, which is obviously of huge significance. I found it all pretty damn surprising because we just didn't know any of this.''
Dr Kouzminov, who has lived and worked in New Zealand since leaving Russia with his wife in 1994, having left the KGB two years before, said yesterday in an interview that he was certain that the KGB's activities were still being carried out by its successor, the SVR.
"Can you imagine such power being abandoned just because of detente and democratisation?" he said.
"Would all the efforts and money expended in training and developing our people be forgotten?
"Would all our agents be stood down and the 'illegals' recalled just because Russia was taking part in the next round of biological weapons talks in Geneva? I wouldn't bet on it."
He said he was sure that Fort Detrick was penetrated and said that a long-term agent codenamed Rosa had reached the inner sanctum of Britain's biological weapons programme, which is centred on Porton Down.
Another highly-placed Department 12 source, who Dr Kouzminov believed was British or based in Britain, reached high levels in Nato's headquarters at Mons in Belgium.
Another agent ran a spy ring inside the World Health Organisation.
His disclosures about the use of "dead drops" to hide biological weapons of mass destruction in the event of a global war will send shudders down the spine of the western defence community.
"I was asked to carry out analysis of the suitability and effectiveness of the places selected for the potential clandestine storage of containers with dangerous biological materials and toxins so that when needed they could be used to disable or destroy objectives.
"I remember one of the operational files given to me for analysis – five pages of typed text with attached diagrams and clandestine photos of places selected for dead drops close to a naval base in Australia, which was used by the US navy.
"I had to evaluate whether the places selected were suitable for infecting or poisoning the naval garrison through, for example, a local water supply system, or by using transport entering the base, or through the dispersal of bacteria near air-conditioning and ventilation systems."
Although Dr Kouzminov would not identify the base, it is almost certainly Townsville, the Queensland naval port much used by the United States navy.
He believes that as many as 60 agents were operating against western biological programmes at any one time and that at least one "package" of live biological samples was being sent to Moscow from Britain or Germany every month.
Dr Kouzminov said that in the early 1990s at least two of his colleagues who regularly handled these packages died suddenly and in mysterious circumstances, presumably from leakages of the deadly contents.
He added that one of the great discoveries of his department was that any exchange of biological weapons during the last stages of the Cold War would have been one-sided because the West had no plans for such a strike.
Information appearing on telegraph.co.uk is the copyright of Telegraph Group Limited and must not be reproduced in any medium without licence.
I know it's the fleas. Sorry you had to post all of that.
That said...Hantavirus Pulmonary Syndrome (HPS)
No explanation to offer. Dealing with the development of weaponised bioagents MIGHT be the cause, wups, punctured the hazmat suit, that sort of thing.
If one is perhaps a bit paranoid, or otherwise doesn't trust gov't, one might alternatively take the view that discovering something useful in CW or BW is itself a ticket to an early demise.
I haven't any dog in this fight. However, there once was a weapons expert -- arguably THE expert in the design of artillery -- named Gerry Bull. The date of his assassination is a matter of historical fact; he was working for the ''wrong'' guys.
You tell me, and we'll both know, ok?
FReegards!
Ping
It's the internal bioprocess that's interesting, in my view, along with Y. pestis' selection of its habitat. How come -- just as a curious side Q -- Y. pestis doesn't live in the intestinal tracts of mammals? Or fish? Or reptiles, or birds? It's obviously adaptable, and it clearly has no reluctance to migrate, right?.
All right, you argue, ''Well, it's native to fleas''...then why not gnats, Diptera (flies, generally), mosquitoes, and so forth? LOTS of Qs yet to be answered, eh? (w!)
FReegards!
Ping
Next time you quote an author's OWN dustjacket to him ... DO try to quote it accurately.
You missed out, through either negligence or incompetence, THE most important word in the quote you mis-cited.
Nonetheless, FReegards to you.
Forget to take your lithium tonight?
You're bragging about a BA degree from Yale?
Why do nuts who write rambling, incomprehensible Letters to the Editor and post on FR always capitalize words like "the", "own" and "do"? You know, many of us born after 1910 have learned a little HTML by now.
The vast majority of weapons research is done at our universities and that is where the commies are most thickly concentrated. Heck, even way back during the Manhattan Project we were throughly infiltrated by the academic spies.
Makes you wonder about the Anthrax allegedly traced back to Ft. Detrick.
LOL !!
If you like threads with a sinister "Berlin coffee house circa 1956" theme this is for you.
A little off the subject of sleeper agents with bio-weapons but didn't the Russians have a huge outbreak of some kind at one of their remote Asian bio-weapon research facilities back in the 70s or 80s?
The only thing I'll ''brag'' about in this context was having written the first-ever programming algorithm to generate complete proofs in propositional calculus (aka sentence logic). Nice little effort, and very non-trivial, esp given the programming tools of the day.
Try it yourself, sometime.
Ta-ta.
Additionally, when the audience is one who either cannot be bothered or is incompetent to quote accurately a simple sentence from a dustjacket, there is no logical reason to assume said audience's competence in HTML either.
DO have a nice day, won't you?
You make wild presumptions about other FReepers, many of whom are more highly educated and accomplished than you. (And know how to write straightforward, non-idiosyncratic sentences absent blather).
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