Conspiracy
Theories
3/7/2002
Does a rash of mysterious
deaths around the world lead to Memphis?
by Rebekah Gleaves
The Memphis Flyer
It sounds like a mystery for Mulder
and Scully. A string of scientists working on similar projects all over
the world are found dead. A mysterious Russian with ties to biological
warfare tells tales of threats that boggle the mind. A Tennessee driver-testing
center employee is burned to death after being implicated in a license-selling
scandal. And the United States government pushes states to adopt a doomsday
law that dramatically reduces civil rights.
Chock-full of conspiracy theories
and a surprising amount of verifiable data, it’s a story that’s got Web
sites and talk-radio callers churning with speculations. And the theories
stem from events right here in Memphis.
Formula For Death
Late on November 16, 2001, Dr.
Don C. Wiley, a prominent Harvard-based microbiologist, went missing in
Memphis. After attending a banquet for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital
at The Peabody hotel, Wiley -- one of the world’s top biochemists and rumored
to be headed toward a Nobel Prize -- disappeared without a trace. Four
hours after he left the Peabody, Wiley’s rented white Mitsubishi Galant
was found abandoned with a full tank of gas and the keys in the ignition,
pointed west on the Hernando DeSoto bridge into Arkansas.
A month later his body was found
snagged on a tree 320 miles downstream in a sidewater of the Mississippi
River near Vidalia, Louisiana. Bloated from the water and rendered unrecognizable
by exposure to the elements, Wiley’s body was nonetheless easy to identify
because his wallet and identification were still in his pants pocket.
Across the Atlantic in a rural
village near Wiltshire, England, a seemingly unrelated death occurred a
week after Wiley’s disappearance. Vladimir Pasechnik died of a stroke on
November 23rd in the yard behind his house. Pasechnik, a Russian who defected
to England in 1989, was once in charge of the Institute of Ultra Pure Biochemical
Preparations, first in St. Petersburg and later in Leningrad. Pasechnik
and his comrades developed and perfected potential biological weapons such
as anthrax, Ebola, Marburg virus (similar to Ebola), plague, Q fever, and
smallpox, eventually creating strains of these viruses stronger than any
scientists had ever imagined possible.
On December 10, 2001, back in
the United States, Dr. Robert M. Schwartz was found stabbed to death in
his rural Loudoun County, Virginia, home. Authorities speculated at the
time that Schwartz might have interrupted a burglary in process. However,
investigators found no signs of forced entry and nothing seemed to be missing
from the home. Schwartz, who lived alone, was a founding member of the
Virginia Biotechnology Association and executive director of research and
development at Virginia’s Center for Innovative Technology. He was extremely
well respected in the field of biophysics and considered something of an
expert on DNA sequencing.
Two days later and a few hundred
miles south, Dr. Benito Que was found comatose on a Miami street near the
University of Miami Medical School laboratory where he worked. Que died
of injuries Miami police initially suspected were the result of a mugging.
Later Que’s death was determined to be “natural”-- the result of a heart
attack. Que was a cell biologist involved in research on infectious diseases
and worked in the hematology department of the medical school.
On December 14th, two days after
Que’s death, Dr. Set Van Nguyen was found dead in Geelong, Australia.
Nguyen had worked as a scientist in the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial
Research Organization’s animal-diseases facility for 15 years. Earlier
last year two scientists at that facility were written up in the esteemed
science journal Nature for their work in genetic manipulation and DNA sequencing.
Specifically, the two had created a virulent form of mousepox.
“Australian scientists, Dr. Ron
Jackson and Dr. Ian Ramshaw, accidentally created an astonishingly virulent
strain of mousepox, a cousin of smallpox, among laboratory mice. They realised
that if similar genetic manipulation was carried out on smallpox, an unstoppable
killer could be unleashed” read the Nature article on the scientists.
According to the Victoria police
department, Nguyen died after entering a refrigerated storage facility.
“He did not know the room was full of deadly gas which had leaked from
a liquid nitrogen cooling system. Unable to breathe, Mr. Nguyen collapsed
and died” reads the official report.
Then, in January 2002, Ivan Glebov
and Alexi Brushlinski -- both members of the Russian Academy of Science
-- were killed. The Russian daily newspaper Pravda reported that Glebov
died as the result of a bandit attack and simply says that Brushlinski
was killed in Moscow.
On February 9th, Pravda reported
the death of Victor Korshunov, head of the microbiology sub-faculty of
the Russian State Medical University. Korshunov died of massive head trauma.
His body was found February 8th at the entrance of his Moscow house.
Less than a week later, on February
12th, the body of Ian Langford, a senior fellow at the University of East
Anglia’s Center for Social and Economic Research, was found in his blood-spattered
and ransacked Norwich, England, home. The Times of London reported the
following day that police and emergency technicians discovered Langford
naked from the waist down and partly wedged under a chair. Coroners were
unable to determine the exact cause of Langford’s death. Langford was described
by The Times as being one of Europe’s leading experts on the links between
human health and environmental risk.
In less than four months, then,
nine of the world’s top microbiologists were dead. All had been doing research
that had connections with the creation and prevention of biological warfare.
But there is more to the story.
On October 4, 2001, a Siberian
Airlines flight from Tel Aviv, Israel, to Novosibirsk, Siberia, was shot
down over the Black Sea by an “errant” Ukrainian surface-to-air missile,
killing everyone on board. The highly publicized crash rattled the 9/11-shaken
nerves of people everywhere, but, according to conspiracy theorists, none
were rattled more than the Israeli science community. Many in Israel
believe the flight carried four or five microbiologists headed to work
in one of the 50-plus scientific laboratories in Novosibirsk.
Just before the Black Sea crash,
Israeli journalists were claiming that two Israeli microbiologists had
been murdered by terrorists. After the crash, these same journalists claimed
that Avishai Berkman, Amiramp Eldor, and Yaacov Matzner -- flight manifests
confirm they were on the plane -- were top microbiologists in Israel. These
journalists say that the men were the head of hematology at a major hospital,
the director of Tel Aviv’s public-health department, and the director of
the Hebrew University’s school of medicine, respectively. However,
the names and the titles don’t match.
Then on November 24, 2001, a Swissair
flight from Berlin to Zurich crashed during its landing approach.
Twenty-four of the 33 people on board were killed, including the head of
the hematology department at Israel’s Ichilov Hospital and directors of
the Tel Aviv public-health department and the Hebrew University school
of medicine.
Meanwhile, back in Memphis, on
February 10th the burned-beyond-recognition corpse of Katherine Smith,
a driver-testing center employee, was found in her car on U.S. 72 near
Fayette County. Smith was scheduled to testify before a federal magistrate
the following day against five Middle Eastern men who allegedly paid her
$1,000 each for fraudulently issued Tennessee driver’s licenses.
What does it all mean? Is it a
worldwide conspiracy? It sounds like a plotline from The X-Files, but these
are the facts, and they’ve got conspiracy theorists all over the globe
buzzing.
Terror Talk
“As a talk-radio host you get
these conspiracy types all the time. I like to say to them, ‘Sir, you are
being misled,’” says Lowell Ponte, host of radio’s The Lowell Ponte Show
(www.talkamerica.com/lowell/) and a frequent contributor to FrontPage Magazine
(www.frontpagemag.com), a news site edited by controversial writer David
Horowitz.
But when he heard about the dead
scientists and the driver’s-license scheme, Ponte says he realized that
maybe the conspiracy theorists were onto something this time. So he read
up on the issues and penned a column titled “Terror in Tennessee: The Middle
East echoes in America’s Heartland.” In the column, Ponte discusses the
mysterious deaths of Wiley and Smith and speculates on the possible links
to global terrorism. Ponte ends the column by writing, “Reasonable
people would say that any prudent look at such fatal coincidences should
lead us to support President George W. Bush’s life-and-death, open-and-clandestine
war against terrorism. Those with a more ‘liberal’ imagination prefer to
believe that Denial really is just a river flowing past Memphis, Tennessee.”
Ponte told the Flyer that he wrote
that column after reading about the Katherine Smith case in several national
newspapers and reading about the dead microbiologists on some Web sites
devoted to traditional news and some devoted to conspiracy theories.
“When you have two people -- both
of whom are involved in activities that are significant to terrorists --
who die in the same community during a short period of time, you have to
at least entertain the idea that the [events] are related,” said Ponte.
London-based author Ian Gurney
also became interested in the scientists’ deaths while doing research for
his next book. The book is about biological warfare and is tentatively
titled The Spawn of the Devil.
“I was doing research for my book
and it seemed like every week I would receive a news alert about another
microbiologist dying,” Gurney told the Flyer. “The story was all over the
place but no one had really connected the deaths yet.”
So Gurney began researching the
various deaths himself and saw a common theme -- all were working on projects
related to biological warfare. Considering the post-9/11 climate worldwide,
he thought these links were more than just coincidental.
“I don’t believe that much in
coincidence,” said Gurney. “Most people in America, like most people
in my country, tend to only scan the news for about 30 minutes. That’s
all we can take before we have to go make a cup of tea. We don’t
usually get into the stories behind the stories. The news doesn’t
usually get in depth.”
Gurney took it upon himself to
visit the Web sites of major newspapers all over the world. Reading articles
and obituaries, he pieced together a web of deaths -- some natural, some
violent -- that he believes are related to current advancements in biological
weapons. Gurney began publishing articles on the connections on his Web
site (www.caspro.com), and his stories were soon picked up or modified
by other sites like FrontPage Magazine and the conspiracy-theory-heavy
site Rense.com (www.rense.com) run by talk-radio host Jeff Rense.
“The news doesn’t really go in
depth,” said Gurney. “The majority of people in your country and in mine
are being treated like mushrooms. We’re being kept in the dark and having
bullshit heaped over us. If there is a conspiracy and we don’t pay attention
to the signs, they’re going to get away with it.”
Dr. Death
Conspiracy theory or not, there
is an unmistakable and frightening connection between one of the dead scientists
and a man referred to by London newspaper News of the World as “The Third
Horseman of the Apocalypse.”
Vladimir Pasechnik, the Soviet
scientist who died in England last fall, and Dr. Ken Alibek, the scientist
formerly known as Kanatjan Alibekov, worked together at Biopreparat --
the Soviet germ-warfare laboratory. Alibekov defected to the United
States in 1992, changed his name, and made the talk-show circuit. After
September 11th, many Americans saw Alibek sharing his views on cable and
network news. His life begun anew, Alibek now spends his days in a tiny
office at George Mason University, near Washington, D.C., trying to undo
the horrors he spent the first part of his scientific career creating.
In the 1970s and 1980s, Pasechnik
and Alibekov were the top two scientists at Biopreparat, but they were
hardly the only scientists there. According to U.S. Senator Sam Nunn, at
its height Biopreparat employed as many as 70,000 scientists and technicians
-- many of whom worked solely on creating biological weapons of mass destruction.
“Through our program, we stockpiled
hundreds of tons of anthrax, plague, and smallpox for our use against the
West,” Alibek told News of the World in October. “What went on in our labs
was one of the most closely guarded secrets of the Cold War.”
But when the Soviet Union collapsed,
funding for Biopreparat disappeared with it, and the previously employed
scientists began selling their services to the highest bidders. According
to Alibek: “Many went to Europe and Asia or have simply dropped out of
sight. I’ve heard that several went to Iraq and North Korea.”
Of Pasechnik, Alibek says this:
“He was behind some of our best work, devising a machine that turns viruses
into a fine powder. It had been a huge breakthrough because it complemented
another project, using cruise missiles to fly low over enemy territory,
spraying out clouds of disease.”
Originally trained as a doctor,
Alibek says he is holding himself accountable to the Hippocratic oath he
ignored for so long. In July 2001, well before the September attacks, Alibek
told New Scientist magazine that he was devoting his time to enhancing
“innate immunity” in the respiratory tract.
“Our objective is to develop an
inhaler containing micro-encapsulated cytokines to prevent degradation
and toxicity. The inhaler could be used to treat people before a biological
weapons attack and after they are exposed,” Alibek told New Scientist.
In a Frontline interview that
aired October 13, 1998, on PBS, Alibek said that scientists at Biopreparat
had specifically selected smallpox as a biological weapon because it was
highly contagious and because it was a “dead” virus -- meaning in the future
most people would not be vaccinated against it. When asked if the Russians
would have vaccinated their citizens against smallpox before unleashing
it, Alibek was grim.
“In my opinion,” he told Frontline,
“nobody cared what would happen to the Russians because this weapon would
be used just in case of a total war.”
Dark Winter
That’s just what U.S. government
officials feared early last summer when representatives from several major
departments met to stage a mini-war. Alibek was not the only person in
the United States to realize that we need to develop a defense against
biological weapons and these officials wanted a test to see if the U.S.
could withstand a major biological attack.
They called their fake war “Dark
Winter.” In the exercise, smallpox is discovered in Oklahoma and Georgia.
State governments had to try and consolidate efforts with the federal government
to ensure that the disease was not spread. The participants hoped to determine
how each department would respond in a crisis situation. The results were
grim.
“We, all in the room, were humbled
by what we did not know and could not do and were convinced of the urgent
need to better prepare our nation against this gruesome threat,” Margaret
Hamburg, M.D., said in her July 23, 2001, testimony before the House Committee
on Government Reform, following the Dark Winter exercise.
Hamburg participated in the exercise
as the secretary of health and human services. Many Americans may be familiar
with her name because, like Alibek, she appeared on many cable and network
news shows following the September 11th and anthrax attacks last fall.
Hamburg had previously been the New York City health commissioner when
the World Trade Center was bombed in 1993 and also was an assistant secretary
in the federal department of health and human services.
Hamburg also told the committee,
“People should not be exchanging business cards on the first day of a crisis.”
Frank Keating, the current governor
of Oklahoma, played himself in the exercise. Keating was also governor
of Oklahoma in April 1995 when the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building was
bombed. Emergency response groups now look to Oklahoma’s response as the
model of governmental efficiency during a crisis situation.
In his testimony before the House
committee, Keating placed particular emphasis on the need to be open with
the public and media and encouraged the committee to “resist the urge to
federalize everything.”
Likewise, Senator Sam Nunn, who
played the role of U.S. president, realized that both the nation as a whole
and the individual states were ill-prepared to cope with biological warfare.
“In the evolution of warfare,”
said Nunn, “arrows were countered with shields; swords with armor; guns
with tanks; and now biological weapons must be countered with medicines,
vaccines, and surveillance systems.”
All of the participants testified
that the U.S. would have a long way to go before it would be ready to handle
a biological attack. They all also testified that several legal hurdles
currently stand in the way of officials, hurdles they believe need to be
removed in advance.
Legislative Action
After the results of Dark Winter,
and particularly after the September 11th attacks, federal policymakers
decided that it was time to overcome these legal hurdles. A panel composed
of law professors from Georgetown University and medical professors from
Johns Hopkins University worked together to create a law to address the
problems. After only 18 days of discussion, the Model Emergency Health
Powers Act (MEHPA) was finished.
The act has since been introduced
in every state legislature, where “Model” is replaced with the state’s
name. In Tennessee, TEHPA (House Bill 2271/Senate Bill 2392) is currently
being reviewed in committee.
However, nationwide left- and
right-wingers alike are sounding off on MEHPA-based laws in Web chat rooms
and bulletin boards. At issue are the vast and truly frightening powers
the laws bestow upon state governors and their appointees.
Under MEHPA, and Tennessee’s TEHPA,
a governor or his appointee, after declaring a “public health emergency,”
has the power to take a number of actions. In the event of such an
emergency, MEHPA allows each state to transform into something that would
shock even George Orwell. The Model Emergency Health Powers Act allows
officials to require an individual to be vaccinated. Anyone who refuses
vaccination could be charged with a felony and forcibly quarantined. Likewise,
it allows officials to require individuals to receive specific medical
treatment or also be charged with a felony and quarantined. The state would
also be allowed to seize any property, including real estate, deemed necessary
to handle the emergency, and the property could be destroyed or retained
without any compensation for the owner.
During a “public health emergency,”
officials would be able to draft a person or business into state service
and to impose rationing, price controls, quotas, and transportation controls.
Any preexisting law thought to interfere with handling the emergency would
be suspended. State governments would also be able to control the availability
and distribution of medicines and vaccines and would be permitted to collect
specimens from and perform tests on living persons.
Regardless of whether or not a
connection exists between the dead microbiologists, between Don Wiley’s
and Katherine Smith’s deaths, or between the events of September 11th and
the anthrax attacks, the federal and state governments seem now at least
to be aware of the threat of biological attack. What remains to be seen
is how Americans will respond. And the links -- real or imagined -- between
the rash of mysterious deaths? That’s a mystery even Mulder and Scully
couldn’t solve. |