AMY GOODMAN: Well, as incidents of anthrax continue to spread around the country, federal officials are turning their attention from Iraq and Russia to domestic right-wing groups as possible sources of the attacks. But bioweapons experts continue to speculate that the anthrax spores causing panic around the country might have had their origin in the former Soviet Union.

Most of the Soviet Union’s complex for producing and testing bioweapons was located in Soviet Central Asia, especially in the now independent Republic of Kazakhstan. One Soviet facility at Stepnogorsk, Kazakhstan, had the capacity to produce over 300 metric tons of highly weaponized anthrax each year. Anthrax and other biological weapons were tested on an island in the Aral Sea between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, which is now by far the largest anthrax dump in the world and has been left all but unguarded.

The Bush administration recently reached agreement with the government of Uzbekistan to clean up the island, although U.S. officials have not said what they would do with the anthrax there. Meanwhile, the Bush administration continues to block an international germ warfare treaty that would make it possible to inspect places where biological weapons might be produced.

We’re joined in our firehouse studio by Geoffrey Sea. He is a writer and expert on weapons of mass destruction in Central Asia. He’s writing a book on the subject and is with us to discuss the Soviet bioweapons connection.

Welcome to The War and Peace Report, Geoff.

GEOFFREY SEA: Good morning, Amy.

AMY GOODMAN: There’s an interesting piece in Time magazine that says that federal investigators probing the anthrax postal attacks have never bothered to interview the nation’s top two experts on turning the deadly spores into weapons, and they are William Patrick III, who designed biological weapons for the United States, and Ken Alibek, a key figure in the Soviet biowarfare program until he defected in 1992. Who is this man, Ken Alibek?

GEOFFREY SEA: Well, he is a Kazakh who rose to become the deputy director, second in command, of the entire Soviet bioweapons program, which was massive, much larger than the U.S. program, which was the second largest in the world. Ken Alibek defected to the United States and became an informant for the CIA and the Defense — U.S. Defense Department, has lived in the United States ever since, wrote a book called Bioweapons in 1999 detailing what the Soviets did. Now, it has to be said that he’s something of a double agent, and people who know about biological weapons do not always place credence in what Ken Alibek says. He was clearly in charge of the Soviet bioweapons program at one time. Now, since his defection, has made kind of his living at providing U.S. agencies with information about the former Soviet complex.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, when we come back from our break, I want to ask you about Vozrozhdeniya, the site of the largest anthrax dump in the world. We’re talking to Geoffrey Sea. We’ll be back in a minute.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: “Skeletons,” Stevie Wonder, here on The War and Peace Report: Breaking the Sound Barrier. I’m Amy Goodman, as we talk about the largest anthrax dump in the world, which is in an island in the Aral Sea between Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, and it’s called Vozrozhdeniya. We’re joined by Geoffrey Sea, who is writing a book on Central Asia and weapons of mass destruction. He’s joining us in the firehouse studio. Before we talk about this island, what about the theories about where the anthraxes come from, which doesn’t tell us who is using it here?

GEOFFREY SEA: Well, there’s been a very dangerous assumption that bioweapons are like guns or missiles, that they’re made in one place and often used by the same people who make them, or sold as discrete objects. It’s a very dangerous assumption because bioweapons are very, very different. They are grown. They are cultured. They can move from one place to another. Both the United States and Soviet Union had large defensive bioweapons programs, which were integrated with their offensive bioweapons programs. That means that they stole strains of anthrax and biological agents from each other in order to develop them and develop vaccines against what their opponent was developing.

So, there are many different theories for how we could have gotten from the origin of these strains to the weaponized forms and their use. For example, there was a lot of information that came out originally that this was the Ames strain of anthrax, developed in the United States and widely distributed to laboratories. That may be true, but that does not warrant against that these strains were developed and used in the Soviet Union. The Soviets had the Ames strain, were developing vaccines and other protective devices for use against the Ames strain, and possibly genetically engineering and further developing that strain into weaponized form. So, it could have been that it originated in the United States, was taken by the Soviet Union, developed, manufactured, mass-produced at Soviet facilities, tested at Soviet facilities, dumped at Vozrozhdeniya Island in the Aral Sea, and then perhaps stolen by either Islamic terrorists — Vozrozhdeniya Island is 600 miles from Afghanistan. It’s essentially between Afghanistan and Chechnya. It has, since 1991, been essentially unguarded. It was highly the most secret installation of the entire Soviet military complex prior to 1991, but after '91, when it became this no-man's land between Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, it has been essentially unguarded.

AMY GOODMAN: So, after the Soviet collapse, this little island between these now independent countries, who, well, nominally or formally, was in charge of it?

GEOFFREY SEA: Well, that is up for grabs. When the Soviet Union disbanded in 1991, the territory of this island, which became a peninsula and is now a peninsula because the Aral Sea is shrinking very rapidly, so it’s no longer an island — so, there’s new territory there. That territory is divided between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, but the Kazakh and Uzbek authorities were not even told of the facility’s existence and purpose until well after the breakup of the Soviet Union. Only the Russians knew what had gone on there, but it wasn’t Russian territory.

AMY GOODMAN: And if it’s a peninsula, it means human beings, animals can walk back and forth to this anthrax-laden island that’s now a peninsula.

GEOFFREY SEA: Correct. So, it wasn’t really until '92 — there was a year of total, total legal unclarity about this island. The Russians abandoned it, but the Kazakhs and Uzbeks did not go there. They didn't want to come in. They didn’t have the technical expertise to go in. They really came in in '92 and ’93. And since ’95, it's really been the United States, through secret Pentagon programs, that have been in charge of testing the soil on this island and helping the Kazakh and Uzbek authorities in terms of figuring out what to do. This is where the Soviet Union not only tested all of their biological weapons, open-air testing, but also dumped huge quantities of anthrax in 1988 to hide them from U.S. inspectors. And it’s become a massive problem.

AMY GOODMAN: What do you mean to hide them from U.S. inspectors? Where?

GEOFFREY SEA: Well, in 1972, the Soviet Union signed the Biological and Weapons Toxin Convention, which prohibited the manufacture and development of biological weapons. But they didn’t stop. They continued to develop biological weapons, including anthrax. That convention has inspection requirements, and the Soviet Union became very concerned because they were producing so much anthrax and biological weapons that they were afraid the U.S. inspectors would find out that they were violating the convention. So they shipped tons of anthrax from Sverdlovsk and a facility called Stepnogorsk in Kazakhstan to the Aral Sea and dumped them in the soil, in pits that were essentially unlined and poorly prepared to handle the material.

AMY GOODMAN: And so, those who have gone to clean the place up, you say the U.S.’s secret Pentagon program. Who are the people that go there, and who do they work with? Or could they take some of this?

GEOFFREY SEA: Well, the cleanup has not yet begun. From 1995 to present, the Pentagon has been involved in testing the soil and working with the local authorities to try to develop a plan for what to do about this material. But no actual cleanup work has begun. But there have been hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of U.S. personnel involved in there doing testing, doing ecological and health work with local authorities. We don’t — there has not been good security for who those personnel are.

AMY GOODMAN: Who has gotten to the island?

GEOFFREY SEA: Well, we don’t really know. Much of this has gone on in secret. There’s a department of the Pentagon. I was actually supposed to have a meeting with them in the Pentagon on the morning of September 11th. That was, interestingly, canceled for security reasons. There’s a department of the Pentagon called the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, the DTRA, and this is an agency that has been working with former Soviet countries to reduce these threats left over from the Soviet era.

AMY GOODMAN: The Pentagon has just announced that it’ll be developing a new weaponized strain of anthrax. Pentagon lawyers debated for weeks whether this would be illegal under the Bioweapons Convention. The Pentagon says it’s only defensive in order to create a vaccine. What are your thoughts on this, Geoffrey Sea?

GEOFFREY SEA: Well, this highlights the problem with bioweapons. The line between offensive and defensive capability is extremely unclear. The Soviets did most of their offensive biological weapons development under the guise that it was defensive for the purpose of developing vaccines and protective measures.

Ken Alibek has said that he believes the U.S. strains of anthrax that we’re now seeing in these letters sent to Washington, New York and Florida were Soviet. He says they carry the mark of the Soviet development complex. That doesn’t mean that it’s former Soviets or people connected to them who are using it. It could even conceivably be people tied to the American personnel who have, since ’91, been involved in cleaning up and investigating these various facilities spread throughout the Soviet Union.

AMY GOODMAN: Let’s not forget Timothy McVeigh did fight in the Persian Gulf War. He was a U.S. veteran, came back to this country. But it just shows all the different links. This was before he bombed the Oklahoma Federal Building. And also let’s not forget that the U.S. government is talking about now putting a focus on right-wing militia groups in this country as a possible source for the anthrax. Where they got it from is unknown. So, you have this island, Vozrozhdeniya, which is not very well guarded and is the largest site of an anthrax dump. How does the anthrax — what is — it’s just in the soil? It’s in these unlined — 

GEOFFREY SEA: Well, it was transported to the Aral Sea in steel canisters, and then the steel canisters were simply dumped. Hundreds of steel canisters were dumped in unlined pits with chlorine. But in 1995, the Pentagon began testing the soil and found live anthrax spores in the soil of the Aral Sea region.

AMY GOODMAN: You also mentioned that there are many bioweapons there, that open-air germ warfare tests were going on. Did people in the surrounding area get sick? And what were these tests? What other germs were being experimented with?

GEOFFREY SEA: The Soviet program for developing bioweapons included research on hundreds of agents. At Vozrozhdeniya Island, they tested — did open-air testing of anthrax, tularemia, brucellosis, plague, typhus, Q fever, smallpox, botulinum toxin and Venezuelan equine encephalitis, among others.

There have been many reports of epidemiological outbreaks of epidemics in the local population among humans and animals all around the Aral Sea region. The Aral Sea region is a disaster zone because it’s drying up. It used to be the fourth-largest body of water in the world. It’s now something like the 30th-largest body of fresh water in the world. Most of the sea is gone. As the sea dries up, it leaves behind exposed toxins in newly exposed surface soil that are blowing in the wind and infecting local population. And the water that was diverted from the Aral Sea, that’s the reason why the sea is drying up, was diverted using nuclear weapons. So, it was a nuclear proving ground, as well as biological and chemical weapons proving ground.

And it must be said also that there is in the region — this is, after all, an Islamic region generally. There is tremendous resentment in the region among Islamic fundamentalists, but also among nationalists, pan-Turkic elements, pan-Islamic elements. There is tremendous resentment about the history of the Soviet use of this whole region as a proving ground for nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, and the tremendous health and environmental devastation that these weapons have left in the area. So, what we could be seeing is a kind of retribution by various national or Islamic groups in this region against both Soviet and American technological systems that are seen as having devastated this area.

AMY GOODMAN: I don’t know about that, but we do know that in response to what’s happened September 11th, that Putin, the Soviet president, is, to a lot of people’s surprise, being one of the most cooperative with the United States, willing to gut the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, accepting the gutting of it by President Bush. You mentioned nuclear weapons and nuclear power in Kazakhstan. There was a major movement in the early '90s to deal with the nuclear threat in Kazakhstan, and the people ultimately won. Is that right? Why didn't they take on the issue of biological weapons, as well?

GEOFFREY SEA: Well, for the simple fact that biological weapons were kept entirely secret until after Kazakhstan was independent. The existence of the Soviet Union’s primary nuclear test site at Semipalatinsk in northern Kazakhstan, where the Soviets detonated — well, both in Semipalatinsk and in the surrounding area — over 500 atomic and hydrogen bombs, starting in 1940, that could hardly be kept secret. These were detonations that often happened next to villages, and so there were many eyewitnesses who saw the mushroom clouds. So, the existence of the nuclear test site was fairly well known, if not the extent of the damage. And by 1989, there was a movement that had arisen in Kazakhstan to close the test site and eject the military and exert Kazakhstan’s sovereignty over the test site. And that movement was essentially the main impetus behind the movement for political independence in Kazakhstan, which happened in '91. And the very first act of Kazakhstan's president was to shut the test site permanently and to reclaim — initiate a program to reclaim the land of the test site.

AMY GOODMAN: Now, with Bush trying to get the support of Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, and also, I assume, Kazakhstan, in the alliance against Afghanistan, what does it mean for the open air or the whole island in the region we’re talking about where biological weapons were tested?

GEOFFREY SEA: Well, I think, clearly, there will be much more international attention to providing security there. During the Soviet times, before '91, there were speedboats with very, very intimidating weapons that circled the islands to ward off any potential terrorists or thieves or doers of no good. Now there's no — there’s essentially no one there providing protection. But there clearly will be. There’s a lot of international interest in this issue now.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, I want to thank you very much for being with us, Geoffrey Sea, writing a book on Central Asia, talking about this area between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan in the Aral Sea where the largest anthrax dump exists. You’re listening to Democracy Now! in Exile. When we come back, an African perspective on the bombing of Afghanistan. Stay with us.