* Abdur Rauf’s “I have successfully achieved” letter to Ayman al-Zawahiri
Posted by Lew Weinstein on July 4, 2009
why the FBI failed to solve the 2001 anthrax case
* see CASE CLOSED VIDEO on YouTube
.
Abdur Rauf’s “I have successfully achieved” letter
to al-Qaeda #2 Ayman al-Zawahiri
The 3 page letter reproduced below was obtained from the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) by a CASE CLOSED blog participant’s FOIA request. It was part of a cache of materials recovered in Afghanistan in December 2001.
The letter includes the following quotes …
- “I successfully achieved the targets during my visit to *** REDACTED ***“
- “Then I went to *** REDACTED *** to meet with Dr. *** REDACTED *** in charge of *** REDACTED *** in order to see the fate of our demand of cultures.”
- “He also showed me the highly advanced Level-3 Pathology laboratory.”
- “Then I went to *** REDACTED *** in order to acquire the supply of different vaccines against a number of pathogens.”
- “Items from *** REDACTED *** autoclave: *** REDACTED ***“
- “Yours sincerely *** REDACTED ***
Whatever reason may have justified the original redactions, what reason can there now be for not removing them and revealing where Abdul Rauf went on his mission to acquire lethal anthrax and the means to weaponize it?
Remember this is just one letter.
- How many other Abdur Raufs were there?
- How many other labs did these al-Qaeda operatives visit?
- How many other al-Qaeda operatives are still out there?
Does anyone still believe the FBI’s contention that Dr. Bruce Ivins was the sole perpetrator of the 2001 anthrax attacks?
************
*******
DXer said
In the April 29, 2005 letter to me producing the documents, one of the grounds for redaction was Subsection (3) which applies to information specifically exempted by a statute establishing particular criteria for withholding. The applicable statute is 10 U.S.C Section 424, Section 424 – Disclosure of organizational and personnel information: exemption for Defense Intelligence Agency. That section provides that ‘(a) In General. – Notwithstanding section 552a(e)(3) of title 5, United States Code, intelligence personnel of the Department of Defense who are authorized by the Secretary of Defense to collect intelligence from human sources shall not be required, when making an initial assessment contact outside the United States, to give notice of governmental affiliation to potential sources who are United States persons.”
Does this mean that the lab director whose name redacted worked for the DIA and first made contact with Rauf abroad? Charles Bailey was an officer in the Defense Intelligence Agency — and perhaps there were other DIA personnel involved in biodefense attending the conferences attended by Rauf.
But if it was American Type Culture Collection (“ATCC”) (which shared building space with the DARPA-funded Center for Biodefense at George Mason University) — and its confidential collection of pathogens that Rauf visited and an ATCC BL-3 that it toured — that is something the public under the circumstances should know.
DXer said
I have uploaded a copy of the April 2005 letter from DIA FOIA person invoking the exemption relating to “Disclosure of organizational and personnel information: exemption for Defense Intelligence Agency.”
http://www.anthraxandalqaeda.com/
DXer said
Abdur Rauf was writing Ayman Zawahir in Fall 1999. Now what was on his computer about Rauf’s visit to a BL-3 lab with a confidential room with thousands of pathogens? Any mention of USAMRIID? Porton Down? LSU? USDA Iowa? ATCC? Bruce Ivins-supplied Ames? Inquiring minds want to know. There is a feature this week on the Life Sciences program at Dugway.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13772_3-10278844-52.html?tag=newsEditorsPicksArea.0
George Tenet, in At the Center of the Storm: My Years at the CIA, summarized:
“The most startling revelation from this intelligence success story was that the anthrax program had been developed in parallel to 9/11 planning. As best as we could determine, al-Zawahiri’s project had been wrapped up in the summer of 2001, when the al-Qaida deputy, along with Hambali, were briefed over a week by Sufaat on the progress he had made to isolate anthrax. The entire operation had been managed at the top of al-Qai’da with strict compartmentalization. Having completed this phase of his work, Sufaat fled Afghanistan in December 2001 and was captured by authorities trying to sneak back into Malaysia. Rauf Ahmad was detained by Pakistani authorities in December 2001. Our hope was that these and our many other actions had neutralized the anthrax threat, at least temporarily.”
In an April 1999 memorandum, Zawahiri wrote that “the destructive power of these [biological] weapons is no less than that of nuclear weapons. *** [D]espite their extreme danger, we only became aware of them when the enemy drew our attention to them by repeatedly expressing concern that they can be produced simply.” Demonstrating that Al Qaeda’s knowledge and expertise was still at a very early stage despite the grand statements and threats the earlier year, the memorandum read:
“To: Muhammed Atef
From: Ayman al-Zawahiri
Folder: Outgoing Mail
Date: April 15, 1999
I have read the majority of the book [an unnamed volume, probably on biological and chemical weapons] [It] is undoubtedly useful. It emphasizes a number of important facts, such as:
1) The enemy started thinking about these weapons before WWI. Despite their extreme danger, we only became aware of them when the enemy drew our attention to them by repeatedly expressing concerns that they can be produced simply with easily available materials.
b) The destructive power of these weapons is no less than that of nuclear weapons.
c) A germ attack is often detected days after it occurs, which raises the number of victims.
d) Defense against such weapons is very difficult, particularly if large quantities are used.”
Ayman continued: “I would like to emphasize what we previously discussed—that looking for a specialist is the fastest, safest, and cheapest way [to embark on a biological- and chemical-weapons program].”
Simultaneously, we should conduct a search on our own.*
** Along these lines, the book guided me to a number of references that I am attaching. Perhaps you can find someone to obtain them.”
The memorandum goes on to cite mid-twentieth-century articles from, among other sources, Science, The Journal of Immunology, and The New England Journal of Medicine, and lists the names of such books as Tomorrow’s Weapons (1964), Peace or Pestilence (1949), and Chemical Warfare (1921).
The April 1999 email to Atef indicated Ayman had read one USAMRIID author’s description of the secret history of anthrax reported by USAMRIID — the book was called Peace or Pestilence. That was 2 1/2 years before the Fall 2001 anthrax mailings. Post-9/11, we have had the same history avidly reported to us by critics of the biodefense industry such as forum posters Ike and Barry. Ayman, well-aware of USAMRIID’s history with anthrax, may have had an operative or some other sympathizer arrange to obtain the US Army strain that would point the public and authorities to this history — confounding true crime analysis at the same time providing moral justification for the use anthrax under the laws of jihad. His interpretation — alluded to in the repeated citation to a particular koranic verse — was that jihadists should use the weapons used by their enemies.
According to a May 7, 1999 email, the modest amount of $2,000 to $4,000 had been marked for “startup” costs of the program. A letter dated May 23, 1999 written by one of Zawahiri’s aliases mentions some “very useful ideas” that had been discussed during a visit to the training camp Abu Khabab. “It just needs some experiments to develop its practical use.” Especially promising was a home-brew nerve gas made from insecticides and a chemical additive that would help speed up penetration into the skin.
In Afghanistan, Zawahiri was assisted by Midhat Mursi (alias Abu Khabab). In his late 1940s, Mursi had graduated from the University of Alexandria in 1975. An Egyptian chemical engineer, he ran the camp named Abu Khabab. Intelligence reportedly indicates that Midhat Mursi had for some time been linked to the Kashmir-based Pakistani group Lashkar-e-Taiba. Midhat Mursi was widely reported and believed to have been killed in a January 2006 bombing raid in Pakistan — at a high-level terror summit at which Zawahiri’s son-in-law was also killed. But a year-and-a-half later, the Washington Post matter-of-factly announced: “U.S. and Pakistani officials now say that none of those al-Qaeda leaders perished in the strike and that only local villagers were killed.” Midhat Mursi later was killed in a missile strike in the summer of 2008.
Al Qaeda’s experimentation with its chemical weapons was featured on the nightly television news picturing a dog being put to death. Director of the Center for Nonproliferation Studies and former U.N. weapons inspector in Iraq, Jonathan Tucker, an expert retained by the government to determine the chemical used in the video, opined that it was hydrogen cyanide. As journalist John Berger explained of the tapes: “US intelligence said al-Qaida’s chemical weapons programme was centered in Darunta camp. The mastermind behind experiments was allegedly Egyptian Midhat Mursi, who ran a section of the camp known as Khabab, and who worked mainly with Egyptians. Experts said that all but one of the voices on the tapes shown yesterday by CNN spoke in Egyptian accents. KSM had non-pilot hijackers practice how to slit passengers’ throats by making the hijackers practice killing sheep, goats, and camels in connection with the planned “Planes Operation.” Did the Amerithrax perpetrators similarly practice killing animals?
Ahmed Ressam testified at his trial in New York that he participated in experiments using cyanide gas pumped into an office building ventilation system at a training camp run by bin Laden in Afghanistan. Abu Khabab camp was within the Darunta Camp, which also included the Assadalah Abdul Rahman camp, operated by the son of blind cleric Omar Abdel Rahman. Ayman liked the idea to make a home-brew nerve gas from insecticides and a chemical additive that would help speed penetration into the skin. In a June 1999 memo, however, he talked about building labs (with one being closed every three months so it can be moved and replaced by another), and planned to have them covered with oil paint so they might be cleaned with insecticides.
DXer said
Mole may have infiltrated Md. lab in ’80s.
Publication: Baltimore Sun (Baltimore, MD)
Publication Date: 30-JUL-06
COPYRIGHT 2006 The Baltimore Sun
Byline: Douglas Birch
Jul. 30–It could be the plot of a Cold War thriller: A Soviet mole burrows into America’s top biodefense lab and steals strains of the deadly viruses that cause Rift Valley and Lassa fevers. He ships the killer microbes back to Moscow in the bags of Aeroflot pilots, who turn them over to a super-secret arm of the KGB that plots bioterror attacks. A chilling tale of fictional intrigue? Some biowarfare experts think it actually happened at Fort Detrick in the 1980s, and they say there is evidence to support their suspicions. Alexander Y. Kouzminov, a biophysicist who says he once worked for the KGB, first made the allegation last year in a book, Biological Espionage: Special Operations of the Soviet and Russian Foreign Intelligence Services in the West. Biowarfare experts dismissed the memoir at first, largely because Kouzminov also claimed that a series of contemporary disease outbreaks resulted from the release of germ weapons. But in recent weeks, another former Soviet scientist told The Sun that his lab routinely received dangerous pathogens and other materials from Western labs through a clandestine channel like the one Kouzminov described. Also, a U.S. arms control specialist says he has independent evidence of a Soviet spy at Fort Detrick. Although not definitive, their statements buttress Kouzminov’s allegations about the Frederick military installation. Experts worry that the United States’ huge $7-billion-a-year biological defense effort will increase the odds of bioterrorism – by generating dangerous new microbes and scientific knowledge that could be diverted or stolen. The FBI declined to comment on the possibility of Soviet spying at Fort Detrick in the 1980s. However, if an agent once penetrated America’s top biodefense lab, biowarfare experts say, the incident would show how difficult preventing such losses can be. The Detrick agent, Kouzminov wrote, clandestinely “gained information” on experiments with Rift Valley and Lassa fevers, hemorrhagic diseases that can drown a victim in his own body fluid, as well as the bacterium that causes tularemia, which can cause diarrhea, vomiting and pneumonia. KGB officials also sought a sample of the U.S. smallpox vaccine, although Kouzminov does not say whether they obtained it. Soviet defectors have reported that in the 1970s and 1980s, the U.S.S.R. was trying to develop vaccine-resistant organisms capable of defeating U.S. biowarfare defenses. Serguei Popov, a scientist once based in a Soviet bioweapons lab in Obolensk, south of Moscow, said that by the early 1980s his colleagues had obtained at least two strains of anthrax commonly studied in Detrick and affiliated labs. They included the Ames strain, first identified at Detrick in the early 1980s. It became the standard used for testing U.S. military vaccines, and it was the strain contained in the 2001 anthrax letters that killed five people and infected 23 in the U.S. Popov, now at the National Center for Biodefense and Infectious Disease at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va., said Obolensk researchers could easily obtain organisms mentioned in Western research papers. “If you wanted ’special materials,’ you had to fill out a request,” he said. “And, essentially, those materials were provided. How and by whom, I can’t say.” One colleague, Popov said, used this “special materials” program to obtain a strain of Yersinia pestis, a plague bacterium being studied in a Western lab. But he didn’t know whether that particular germ came from Detrick. There has never been any doubt about Detrick’s key role in the history of U.S. biowarfare. Once a sleepy military airfield, the facility was turned into a center for top-secret research into biological weapons in the waning days of World War II. It remained so until 1969, when President Richard M. Nixon ended development of new U.S. bioweapons, and the military study of lethal organisms shifted to the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, or USAMRIID. That agency was founded at Fort Detrick in the late 1960s to conduct defensive biological research. Its scientists developed new vaccines and drugs to treat natural and manmade outbreaks. Given that change in mission, former Detrick scientists and arms control experts agree that there were no secret, offensive programs at Detrick in the 1980s. In fact, they say there wasn’t much secret work at all.But Kouzminov says the KGB still wanted specific items from Western labs – including Detrick – that were closely held or at least not widely available. Those included samples of specific disease strains, the growth media used to raise microbes, and vaccines the labs developed. The Soviets also wanted the aerosol powders U.S. scientists used to infect animals with bioagents during drug and vaccine tests. At least three KGB spies targeted U.S. biodefense efforts in the 1980s, Kouzminov said. But the biophysicist, who worked primarily in Western Europe, offers no details about what the other two did. He wrote that his superiors called “our man at Detrick” their key biological agent.
Kouzminov and the biological moles worked in the KGB’s Department 12 of Directorate S, housed in a high-rise building in a forested patch of southern Moscow. The group’s mission, he said, was to develop germ weapons and poisons, to steal biodefense secrets and to plot biochemical terror attacks to be launched in the event of war. The description of Department 12 in Biological Espionage squares with those of other defectors, said Oleg D. Kalugin, a retired KGB major general now living in the U.S. Raymond Zilinskas, a bioweapons expert with the Monterey Institute of International Studies, and two colleagues wrote a scathing review of Biological Espionage in Nature, a British scientific journal.
***
“It was clear there was somebody at Fort Detrick” who worked for Soviet intelligence, Zilinskas says. According to Kouzminov’s account, the KGB delivered biological materials to Moscow through what was called the VOLNA channel. Aeroflot pilots who were also KGB officers carried these sometimes-lethal microbes to Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport in their personal luggage. By the late 1980s, Department 12 was receiving about 20 parcels a year through VOLNA from agents in its American section, which included North, Central and South America. In an e-mail, Kouzminov said he didn’t know the identity of the Detrick spy or other details of the USAMRIID espionage. Such knowledge was closely guarded, even within the KGB. Careless comments by his bosses, though, suggested that the agent was a devout Catholic whose work frequently took him to Latin America. … But William C. Patrick III, a retired Detrick biologist and veteran bioweapons expert, said he has long suspected penetration by Soviet agents. His suspicions cropped up in the early 1990s, when he debriefed Ken Alibek, who as Kanatjan Alibekov served as the deputy chief of Biopreparat, the leading Soviet bioweapons research agency. Alibek emigrated to the U.S. less than a year after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in December 1991.
As he and Alibek traded stories, Patrick said, both realized that the Soviet and American programs had moved in a curious lock step during the 1950s and ’60s. “Anything we discovered of any import, they would have discovered and would have in their program in six months,” Patrick said. He doesn’t doubt that the Soviets kept spying beyond the end of the U.S. offensive program. After his conversations with Alibek, he recalled, “For the next two weeks I tried to think, ‘Who the hell are the spies at Detrick?’”