Here are Dr. Alibek’s published views from October 2002 compared with his views from June 2005. In 2005, he was doing research funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency relating to treating anthrax infection. After these 2005 renarks, he told me that the FBI suspected Ali al-Timimi at GMU of accessing the know-how, so the reference to one of his students is especially telling.
1. Alibek Doubts FBI Claims on Hatfill
Phil Brennan, NewsMax.com
Thursday, Oct. 3, 2002
Dr. Ken Alibek, one the world’s leading authorities on biowarfare, has cast significant doubt on the claims of the FBI that Dr. Steven Hatfill or another American may have been behind last years mail anthrax attacks.
Alibek, former head of the Soviet Union’s bioweapons program and now executive director for George Mason University’s Center for Bio-Defense and a distinguished professor at GMU, offered his candid comments about the Hatfill case on NewsMax’s exclusive “Off The Record” Club audioprogram. Click Here for more info.
Alibek, who has been consulted by the FBI on the anthrax attacks, said that an analysis of available evidence suggests that there is reason to believe that the source of the anthrax attack was foreign, not domestic, as claimed by the FBI.
Though not precluding the possibility the anthrax was from a domestic source, Alibek says on “Off the Record” that he has serious questions about this theeory.
Alibek cites, among other issues:
The hijackers were looking for crop dusters. He says it’s hard to believe that they wanted to use crop dusters for attacking the World Trade Center.
The first cases of anthrax were in Florida, near where some of these hijackers lived. Also, there were reports about a strange anthrax-type ulcer on the leg of one of the hijackers before 9/11.
The timing of the attack in conjunction with 9/11 was “sort of a simultaneous attempt” to cause a greater fear and anxiety. “Sometimes, it seems to me, that somebody actually used this atmosphere of panic, anxiety for sending anthrax in which it could be a domestic case. There are many issues and questions that we still have unanswered, but you notice I don’t answer this question to say, ‘OK, it was a domestic war’ or ‘... a foreign case.’”
In one of the letters the word “penicillin” was misspelled. Hatfill, a medical doctor, would hardly have not known how to spell the word. “It’s hard for me to believe that somebody with medical background would make such a big mistake, if it’s not done intentionally, of course.”
The FBI failed to conduct an immediate search of the places where the hijackers lived in Florida. Alibek said that “when you do any investigation you shouldn’t get rid of any possible opportunity, any possible lead. If you took a week just to reach your conclusion, saying OK, domestic case or foreign case, you can lose some very important evidence. And specifically, if, for example, you narrow down your investigation, at the earliest stage of investigation and then you follow this path, for example, and just, in about six, eight or nine months or a year, you find out it was the wrong case, of course, it’s too late to go back to seek for some other cause ... because in many cases, people have short memories.”
Alibek said he didn’t buy the claims of FBI profilers who think the anthrax attacks were orchestrated by a patriotic American who wanted to warn Americans about the danger of bioweapons. He said those who concocted the anthrax mail attacks were simply cold-blooded killers.
Noting that the FBI early on devoted most of its energies and resources to tracking a domestic perpetrator, Alibek said: “For example, if you investigate something immediately after it happened, people still have something in mind, what they saw, what they knew, and so on and so forth.
“In my opinion, in each case when you do an investigation, of course, you need to keep in mind all possible situations until you have ... very strong opinion or very strong proof that some of the leads are appropriate, I would say. In this case, you shouldn’t have done domestic investigation at early stage of this investigation.”
2. In a June 2005 interview in a Swiss (German language) weekly news magazine, Neue Zurcher Zeitung, Ken Alibek addresses the anthrax mailings:
A. “...What if I told you Swiss scientists are paid by Al Qaeda? You could believe it or not. It has become somewhat fashionable to disparage Russian scientists. Americans, Iraqis, or whoever could just as well be involved with Al Qaeda. Why doesn’t anyone speculate about that?”
Q. “But could one of your students build a biological weapon in the garage?”
A. “Let me reply philosophically: Two hundred years ago, it was unthinkable to believe that people would be using mobile telephones, wasn’t it? Everything changes. Our knowledge grows, and technology develops incredibly quickly. These days even high-school kids can breed recombinant microbial strains. I am not saying that a student is in a position to build a biological weapon all by himself. But the knowledge needed to do it is certainly there.”
Thank you for your additions to this conversation. Timimi was no longer at Mason when I arrived on scene but I know everyone else you mentioned as I used to work with them and was a student of and assistant to Dr. Alibek. There are two points I wish to address:
1. Re: The limitations on technical education and training that were imposed without being communicated. There were no such limitations imposed. Students could do research alongside the Molecular and Microbiology Faculty at the Center if they had the appropriate biology backgrounds (many didn’t but I did) and they could take advantage of internships and other employment opportunities offsite. Additionally, Dr. Alibek worked hard to provide his students with a variety of important opportunities both inside the laboratory and outside the laboratory. Though he did these types of things for many students, I’ll give you just a few personal examples to illustrate then get back on point: He offered me and other students challenging jobs within his company; He used his contacts to help others find jobs in other companies; He took half a day to meet with an associate of his to try and help me get a position in his associate’s organization; He arranged for me to help him teach biodefense courses (he declined most of the compensation and arranged for it to be given to me instead); He has asked me to stand in for him at some professional events; He introduced me as an expert at a national conference and gave me his speaking time so that I could present my work and establish my career; He arranged for me to provide the background material and to be interviewed for a Discovery Channel special on biological weapons; He arranged for me and some other students to jointly write a series of books for publication (he declined all compensation); When I ran out of money, he offered me a summertime position in his company (I declined because the wages were too high for the amount of work...he knew I was in financial trouble); And the new animal research facility to be built was intended to be staffed by students and graduates of the biodefense program.
From personal experience and knowledge from working both at the Center in the labs and from working for Dr. Alibek, there were no limitations on technical knowledge and training imposed upon the biodefense students who had backgrounds appropriate to the type of work you describe. It is absolutely vital to remember that laboratory based science is but a small (yet critical) part of the eclectic science of biodefense but many opportunities were definitely available to the students. It is also important to mention that the Center did not have highly pathogenic agents nor did we have access to them through ATCC, a secure facility.
2. Re: Capability of his students to build a biological weapon in the garage. Dr. Alibek is an extremely educated and experienced individual with an extraordinarily high degree of expertise in medicine, biotechnology, microbiology, and immunology as well as other areas less pertinent to this discussion (his knowledge of history is amazing). While he is sufficiently skilled to produce anti-cancer and cardiovascular disease drugs without any effort, his students lack such capability.
He did provide his students with the very sophisticated knowledge required to understand biological weapons (much more complex than biological agents) however he withheld a sufficient amount of information to make it extremely difficult for us to “build biological weapons in our garages”. When he says the information is available, he means that the information is available to all members of the public willing to sift through a large number of publications to assemble a variety of details important to the process. Once all of the details are collected, the interested parties would still have to devote all of the time required to assemble what can be a very complicated puzzle depending upon the type of weapon and attack they had in mind. It could take many, many years of trial and error for a group to develop an effective biological weapon useful for a sophisticated, mass casualty attack or it could take a few weeks to months to develop a biological dispersion device capable of achieving fewer casualties but still terrorizing the public.
Dr. Alibek trained us to understand and defend against biological weapons, not to build them. As probably one of the most educated of his students, having helped him with his courses on numerous occasions and having helped him teach some of his courses elsewhere, even I lack sufficient capability, not to mention I completely lack the motivation, to build a sophisticated biological weapon. But I do understand them and the threat exceptionally well thanks to amazing mentors (Ken Alibek and Peter Leitner) who worked tirelessly to raise awareness and to prepare a generation of defense experts trained to understand the differences between biological agents and biological weapons, the threats posed by biological weapons, and how to mount a comprehensive and multi-layered defense against them.
Now graduated and working in national security, seeing first hand what little knowledge about biological weapons (again, more complex than biological agents) remains in the community and how this dilemma is driving misplanning, I can promise you that loss of the unique education program Ken Alibek and Peter Leitner developed at Mason isn’t helpful (to put it mildly). In order to fix the problem, I need the assistance of other people who have been trained by these experts in a program that was dovetailed to provide comprehensive knowledge yet there are only a handful of graduates. It is a tremendous amount of work for so few people, even with the crucial cooperation of the many fine experts in microbiology, medicine, public health, etc. The situation is in serious and immediate need of resolution.