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SECRETS OF 'DR. GERM'
New York Post ^ | 10/22/01 | BILL HOFFMANN

Posted on 10/22/2001 2:49 AM CDT by kattracks

October 22, 2001 -- A cunning woman scientist who heads Saddam Hussein's bio-terrorism team may be the mastermind behind the world's anthrax scare, a leading American germ warfare expert says.
Rihab Taha, 45, is so notorious that United Nations weapons inspectors have nicknamed her "Dr. Germ" for deadly experiments she conducted.

"There is no question in my mind these anthrax attacks in Florida, New York and Washington involve international terrorists," said Richard Spertzel, the expert who headed the U.N. team that exposed Taha.

"And Iraq is the prime suspect as the supplier."

And Spertzel, now deputy director of a bio-weapons research plant at Fort Derek, Md., believes Taha could be the grande dame behind what's going on now.

The British-trained Taha gained a biology degree at the University of East Anglia after arriving in 1979 to study crop diseases.

But when she returned to Iraq, Taha led a team that made germs causing victims' eyes to bleed and produced a bacteria that gave babies a deadly diarrhea.

U.N. inspectors believe Taha, who has a 5-year- old daughter, tests her poisons on human guinea pigs.

In 1995, she admitted that a secret germ factory she set up near Baghdad had made thousands of gallons of anthrax and botulism - enough to kill millions.

Military officials in Washington recently identified Taha as "the leading official in charge of Iraq's biological weapons program."

She is also politically well-connected. Her husband is Iraqi oil minister Amir Rashid Ubaydi, who helps direct the country's relations with the U.N. weapons-inspection teams.

Dr. John Turner, who once taught Taha biology, told London's Sunday Mirror: "It's a great shock, like finding your daughter has gone and done something dreadful."

Saddam has already relocated his chemical weapons factories in anticipation of a possible bombardment by U.S. and British forces.

A senior Western intelligence official said there has been a "mass movement of weapons" to protected "no-go" areas in northern and western Iraq.

"The entire contents of their chemical weapons factories around Baghdad have been moved through the night to specially built bunkers," the official told the Sunday Telegraph.

Saddam's troops dug six 60-foot-deep holes to bury chemical and biological cargo arriving from the capital, he said.

Meanwhile, Iraqi factories that produce missiles and chemical weapons have been relocated to the areas of Baiji and al Safar in the northwest.

"These are heavily protected no-go areas with massive infrastructure. They have everything - bunkers, sophisticated communications systems and living quarters for the military and senior intelligence officers," a source said.

Over the years, Iraq has produced great quantities of liquid anthrax for deployment in missile warheads, U.N. inspectors say, and Iraqi agents are known to meet periodically with bin Laden operatives.

Investigators have been looking with renewed interest at two reported meetings last summer between Mohamed Atta, the suspected mastermind of the Sept. 11 hijackings, and an Iraqi intelligence agent in Prague.