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Dec. 17, 1997 - Art Bell
02:42:39
Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell - Richard Preston - Biological Warfare
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Welcome to Art Bell, Somewhere in Time.
Tonight featuring Coast to Coast AM, from December 17th, 1997.
From the high desert and the great American southwest, I bid you all good evening or good morning in whatever time zone you reside in.
Stretching from the Cahitian and Hawaiian Islands in the west, eastward to the Caribbean and the U.S.
Virgin Islands.
Good morning in St.
Thomas, south into South America.
North all the way to the pole and worldwide on the internet this is Coast to Coast AM.
I'm Art Bell.
Good morning.
We have much to do this evening.
First comes Joyce Riley and she has a lot of information for you on the anthrax shots about to be inoculations about to be given to our military and you're not going to believe it.
Following Joyce in the next hour is Richard Preston With a terrifyingly true story.
And a national bestseller called The Hot Zone.
We've got a lot to talk to him about.
So that's happening this night.
Then tomorrow night, in the first hour, Linda Moulton Howe with a variety of items for you.
Followed by David Oates.
And reverse speech.
On Friday night, Dale Kasmirak from the Ghost Research Society near Chicago is going to be our guest.
And then, coming up on Monday, we are going to have Napoleon, I believe it's Chardinon, Dr. Napoleon Chardinon, a professor of anthropology, University of California at Santa Barbara.
He is The anthropologist that Mark Ritchie, he says as things come crashing down on him.
Mark Ritchie on Dreamland had a beef with regard to the Yanomama people.
The rainforest Yanomama people.
And so we've got a pretty full plate coming up and we will get started with Joyce Riley in a moment if something else
doesn't fall on me.
Sound of thunder You're listening to Art Bell, somewhere in time.
Tonight featuring Coast to Coast AM, from December 17th, 1997.
December 17, 1997.
Dateline, Washington.
You've all heard this by now.
Increasingly fearful of the threats posed by germ warfare, the Pentagon announced Monday it would vaccinate every member of the armed services against anthrax, one of the most deadly biological agents ever known.
While the Pentagon has vaccinated soldiers against biological and chemical agents before, including many thousands during the Persian Gulf War, it has never tried to inoculate the entire force.
Now, 1.4 million troops on active duty, and another 1 million reservists to counter a potential threat from a biological or chemical weapon.
There is no evidence that any country has ever used anthrax, Or significant amounts of any biological weapon during warfare.
But in recent years, the Pentagon has raised new alarms about the threats posed by biological and chemical weapons, warning that its forces are ill-prepared to combat attacks by an enemy nation or terrorist group.
Well, I'm reading to you from, obviously, an official Washington release, and I think I've had my fill of it.
Here is Joyce Riley, who happens to be in California.
Uh, doing some sort of television, uh, program, and, uh, she called me earlier today and said, oh, Art, you've got to hear about this Anthrax stuff.
So, let's hear about this Anthrax stuff.
Hi, Joyce.
Hi.
Good evening, Art.
Good evening.
You're going to have to get into that phone and yell at us, because it's not, the hotel phones are not, uh, famously loud.
Uh, but, uh, welcome to the program.
Thank you very much.
Yes, the issue of anthrax, I think, is a little bit more significant than just, well, we think they might use it, so therefore we're going to give it to all of our troops.
We need to look at what are they doing.
First of all, number one, we've got troops that are sick from the last war, at least 100 to 200,000 of them.
We know that they have not found the reason for that illness.
We know that those troops are still out there suffering, and yet we're getting ready to administer something that may or may not even contribute to further illness.
All right.
The story on the street, Joyce, is that the anthrax inoculation is serious, one of a half dozen, something like that?
That's correct.
That it is safe, that it has been used by veterinarians for years and years and years, or even decades, and that it's safe.
Now, why should we argue with that?
Well, because there's no evidence to prove that.
And the government is so strong on saying we've got to have evidence before we can even treat the Gulf War veterans.
Well, now let's look at what the evidence is behind the anthrax vaccine.
Alright.
Well, first of all, it is an FDA-approved vaccine that is considered safe and effective, but for individuals whose skin comes in contact with animal products, such as hides, hair, or bones.
Now, we need to understand that Yes, there is anthrax.
Yes, it is transferred from animal to man through cuts and that kind of infection.
However, what we're talking about is totally different.
It is aerosolized anthrax.
In the air?
That's correct.
The biological warfare version of anthrax?
That's correct.
Now, this type of anthrax vaccine that the Michigan Department of Health makes is recommended for veterinarians and for others that are likely to touch or come in contact with infected animals.
Okay, well an obvious question, Joyce, is anthrax is anthrax, right?
Well, no it's not.
No it's not?
Because the aerosolized version attacks a person in a different fashion.
When you breathe in anthrax, the effect of the disease is different than if you were to cut yourself and get anthrax.
So, we have a problem in that they are looking at utilizing a vaccine on our troops, willing to spend $130 million and give a questionable efficacy, questionable safety vaccine to our troops.
Now, here is the problem.
The vaccine's effectiveness against inhaled anthrax is unknown.
How do I know that?
I'm reading from their own document.
Oh, you're reading from their document?
I'm reading from their own government document.
Please precisely read it, would you, and also cite what it is.
Okay, it is Senate Report 103-97.
The date is December 8th of 1994.
This is testimony before a committee on Veterans Affairs in the U.S.
Senate.
Right.
And I will read you this paragraph.
All right.
Senate Report 103.97.
Correct.
Anthrax vaccine is an FDA-approved vaccine considered safe and effective for individuals whose skin may come in contact with animal products.
Underline skin.
It is recommended for veterinarians and others who are likely to touch infected animals.
Again, underline touch.
However, the vaccine's effectiveness against inhaled anthrax is unknown.
Oh, my God.
So, they're prepared to spend $130 million, inoculate 1.4 million members of the military with a six-series inoculation, and they have no idea whether it works?
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
Now, let me go on to read.
It says, unfortunately, when anthrax is used as a biological weapon, it is likely to be aerosolized and thus inhaled.
Therefore, The efficacy of the vaccine against biological warfare is unknown.
Oh, you've got to be kidding.
This is their own report.
Absolutely, and we're making it available to people the entire hundred pages of this.
We want people to see exactly what they're being told in the newspapers, what the Department of Defense is saying, and then what their own documents support.
Let me go on to read this.
It appears that there is only one relevant animal study Animal study which showed that anthrax vaccine apparently provided additional protection against relapse, that's getting it again, in monkeys exposed to inhalation of anthrax and treated with antibiotics.
They had to be treated with antibiotics also.
So this is a whole different situation, scenario about what we're talking about in our troops.
Although the results of this study suggest the vaccine might protect against anthrax, Who made the decision to inoculate the entire armed forces?
that anthrax vaccine is safe and effective as used in the Persian Gulf.
The vaccine should therefore be considered investigational when used as a protection
against biological warfare.
Who made the decision to inoculate the entire armed forces?
Well I'm sure it came from William Cohen, the Secretary of Defense.
The ultimate decision.
You know when I heard that and I've been watching of course the media as I do it's my job very carefully NBC has been devoting night after night to all the possibility of biological warfare and they've been making some terrifying statements and they've been talking about anthrax then the other night the news broke they were going to inoculate the entire armed forces against anthrax and I sort of pondered out loud on the air that I'm not sure whether I should be in fear of our poor military people having to undergo these inoculations, or whether I should be considering going to my local doctor and getting an anthrax series myself.
In other words, Joyce, I'm saying, and here's what I'm not saying, I'm not saying that I think the U.S.
is about to unleash upon its own people anything at all, but Joyce, I think it's overwhelmingly obvious that they know something that we don't with regard to people who have anthrax.
And I don't mean the disease, I mean the preparation.
Something's going on that we don't know about, and I'm not sure what I should be feeling about it.
All my senses, as an observer of the news, are on alert.
Every hair is standing up.
Something's about to happen.
What's going on?
Well, I don't think there's any question we're being set up for something.
All the news has been directed toward this one issue and it's been progressive news.
A little bit a day has been coming out to the point where more and more people are learning now the information that you and I have been talking about now for over a year is coming out on the news.
One thing I want to address is what happened on MSNBC last week when Andrea Mitchell said that The United States had just learned that we had unwittingly provided to Saddam Hussein weapons that could have been used as a starter kit for biological agents.
Now, you and I have been talking about the fact that there is government evidence showing that we provided Saddam Hussein with the anthrax in the first place.
Absolutely.
And that's exactly why the troops are furious.
My phone has been ringing off the hook all the way from Special Forces down to mothers of Gulf War veterans wanting to know what they can do.
Now, Andrea Mitchell was on TV, on MSNBC, stating that the United States learned that we had provided the University of Baghdad with three yeast cultures.
Well, that's true, and that's on page 275 of my document 103-900.
Now, that's true.
We knew that.
What she failed to tell you was the other five pages of class 3 pathogens that the American Type Culture Collection provided to Saddam Hussein.
And didn't bother to mention to you that there were culture after culture called bacillus anthrax that we provided to him.
So they're dribbling a little bit of the news out at a time, and they're trying to prepare us for the fact, just like Secretary of Defense William Cohen said the other day, oh my goodness, we just found out that 25 other countries have biological agents.
Yes, but I think they know something in the immediate that we don't know.
There's a reason for all this, Joyce.
guess what? Well we've known it since 1980s since we started providing it to them.
Yes, but I think they know something in the immediate. Oh absolutely. That we don't know.
Absolutely. There's a reason for all this Joyce, there's a reason. We've provided between 25 and
50 countries these biological agents.
Unstable third-world countries.
I know, but they're hearing about something that's about to happen.
What might you imagine that would be?
I think there is going to be domestic terrorism.
There's no doubt in my mind.
Especially when I saw the August 6, 1997 journal, the AMA, which was nothing but information on biological terrorism.
Joyce, the Gulf War veterans who now suffer Gulf War illness.
Syndrome, whatever it is.
Were they inoculated against anthrax?
Many of them were, yes.
They were?
The majority of them were.
Now, there's a whole lot of problems associated with the anthrax, and they have never been able to say that the anthrax did not cause the disease.
So, we need to start taking care of one problem before we create another one.
Now, in the LA Times, they made the statement that only .2% Well, take a middle figure.
reported any problems after receiving the anthrax vaccine.
Well, I have their own study right here in front of me, which I'll be glad to make available.
And it says that out of the survey that they did, and I'm talking about the Senate Veterans
Committee, they had 43 percent of the Gulf War veterans reporting immediate side effects
with anthrax.
Well, take a middle figure.
20% were affected and the number was 1.4 million.
Somebody out there can do the math.
Seems to me that would be an awful lot of sick folks.
Yeah, but they said, yeah, exactly.
Absolutely.
Now, where does one disease leave off and the other one begin?
Now, have we been able to determine what it is?
No.
But when you hear about them talking about going back over there and addressing Saddam Hussein's present issues, by the way, which are his sovereignty issues and his palace, which Or not by UN regulation that we can go in there.
That's another thing that we have decided to put on the table as well as the fact... What we're doing Joyce is we continue to move the goalposts.
Absolutely.
And I sort of have my own suspicions that he's probably at these sites hiding something.
But previously we didn't want to get into the sites.
Now it's into the sites or else.
So it's like We want to have this conflict.
We've been now disappointed two or three times when Saddam has caved in.
I am convinced we are going to find a way to say everybody out, pull the UN people out, and then of course about within a week they'll be in attack.
That's how it's going to go.
I think you're right.
Yeah.
I think we have set up a situation now which there's going to be no backing out of it because they're pushing too hard at it.
And the UN-Iraq ambassador, Nizar Hamdoun, has made it very clear that the United States keeps moving the goalpost and that we're making ourselves a target of the entire Arab world and you know we have now set ourselves up as being the king of the hill and the line leader and if we do not or if we keep pushing this issue we are going to get ourselves into a confrontation we're going to be sorry with.
Now is somebody going to utilize domestic terrorism in this country?
I think it's pretty well obvious because the paramedics that are calling me From around the country that are being trained in this, the measures that are being put before special forces now in what to do in case of a biological terrorist attack, I think is eminent.
I don't know where it's going to come from, but I think I mentioned the last time I was on your show that the CNN anti-terrorism expert has written a book that tells exactly how it's going to take place, all of the scenarios about it, and he wrote this book in 1988.
This has been long in coming.
We've been knowing this was going to happen.
Because we've been providing these agents.
But the sad part is, we were providing them through corporations such as Sigma Aldrich Corporation of St.
Louis up until 1993.
How long do we have before they begin the series of inoculations with the military?
Well, I got one phone call that the memo said that they were going to begin as early as December 12th in certain areas.
I've not been able to get a copy of that memo, so I don't know if that's true or not, but They expect to have it over with within the next about 18 months, and it takes about that long to do the six injections.
Here's what I'm hearing, Joyce.
I'm hearing from military people who are refusing to take these inoculations.
Now, I don't, I'm not sure you can do that in the military, and I don't think this is a voluntary Operation.
But I am hearing, and that's how concerned some in the military are, that they are refusing to take these.
Have you heard that?
Oh yes, and there's a mechanism they can refuse it.
There is a mechanism?
Yes.
Without being court-martialed?
No.
Well, there is a waiver system that they can become involved in.
Most of them don't know that.
No, they don't.
In fact, I didn't know that.
In fact, we'll talk about that when we come back.
Alright, it is the bottom of the hour.
Joyce Rowley is here.
Anthrax.
I'm torn.
What do you think?
Should I be getting a series myself?
Or should I be resisting it tooth and nail?
Hobbs Choice, we'll be right back.
This is Premier Networks.
That was Art Bell hosting Coast to Coast AM.
On this, Somewhere in Time.
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Baby, my heart is full of love I desire for you Now come down and do what you gotta do You started this
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fire down in my soul Now can't you see it's burning out? I'm in control, oh come
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You're listening to Art Bell, somewhere in time Tonight featuring Coast to Coast AM from December 17, 1997.
Well, good morning.
My guest is Joyce Riley.
The subject is anthrax.
Did you get the inoculations or not?
That is the question.
Do we have time?
Not too much.
I don't know.
How about you?
What would you do?
If you listen to the words, it kind of fits, doesn't it?
Every time I think about it, I want to cry.
The phones and the people and the kids keep coming.
The waiting may be easy, but time to be young...
If you listen to the words, it kind of fits, doesn't it?
Anyway, back to Joyce Rowley in a moment.
Sound of a car crashing.
You're listening to Art Bell, Somewhere in Time.
tonight featuring coast-to-coast AM from December 17th 1997 by the way my website is back up and we will have a link to
Joyce Raleigh's site Presuming that it's up and we'll ask about that here in a second.
Joyce here, I've got a fax and it says for Art from Kevin in Tampa, I know you and Joyce are saying the effectiveness is unknown against inhaled anthrax.
I think if it were me, I'd just soon get the shots, hope it works, as opposed to going without.
Now that's an attitude.
What do you think?
Well, I think I can understand that from a military person, but I think we need to look at the overall picture, which is we've got 200,000 people sick.
We've got a number of people that have died since the Gulf War.
We have a disease process that they say they can't identify, and what if this was causing it?
If it isn't effective, or if we don't know if it is effective, then can we afford to go ahead and give it to our finest Specimens of health, really, which is our military.
Moreover, now that the media has announced to the entire world that we're going to inoculate against anthrax, if we do mix it up with Saddam again, inevitable as it seems, wouldn't he simply use some other pathogen?
Well, absolutely.
He'll just go to plan B now, and that just helps him rule out what he needs to use.
And I think that we need to start questioning what is going on here, because why are we making our military Issues, our military security issues, worldwide global knowledge, so that everybody in the world now knows.
I know, and that's the part I don't understand.
In other words, why not just give the shots?
The military is like that.
They don't have to ask you, for the most part, about anything at all.
They just do it.
So, if there really was a national security issue, and we thought we were going to mix it up again with Saddam, and he'd set this stuff loose, then why not inoculate them in secret?
Absolutely.
And that would seem to be of more value than telling the whole world what you plan on doing.
So I don't understand any of this.
Well, I think we're being set up for something, and that's what really concerns me, is none of this makes sense.
We have a biological warfare agent that we've been spreading all over the world, and now we need to protect our people against it.
What about the other ones that we've been provided?
There's a number of other biological agents.
And why are we focusing on this one?
There's just so many unanswered questions.
And by the way, I wanted to mention to you also that the Journal of the AMA on August 6th of 1997 said that this licensed vaccine, and I repeat, has insufficient data regarding the efficacy against inhalation anthrax in humans.
Again, that's the Journal of the American Medical Association?
That's correct.
And they too are saying that the efficacy regarding inhaled is unknown?
That's correct.
So, if they're to come out and say now, well, all of a sudden we've done a bunch of studies, the Pentagon that is, and everything is okay, it's fine to use it, well, I'm sorry.
You know, the Journal of the AMA that just came out in August says, we don't know.
There's only one study on one group of monkeys, and that does not make a safe study to utilize, that's for sure.
You know, you said I was out here in California for a TV show.
Yep.
I think there's hope.
There was this program that I was out here for called The Truth Seeker, The Truth About.
They are doing pilots to tell the real truth, and it gives me so much hope that this is actually going to come before the American public, that people will hear information like this, not just on talk radio, but really before them on television, because it is so important.
We've got lives hanging in the balance right now, and these people are not being told the truth, just like every Gulf War veteran that I know of has been denied an anthrax test.
They have gone before whatever VA or DOD and said, look, I want to be tested.
I think there was anthrax over there because we got reports from special forces that did necropsies on animals over there, pulled the lungs out, and sure enough, they said it had anthrax.
And the U.S.
government is saying there's no evidence it was ever used.
Once one has gone through the inoculations for anthrax, how then would one test for anthrax?
In other words, if you went through the inoculations, and then, say, two years later, you had a test to see if you had anthrax, how would that test come up?
Would it come up negative?
I honestly don't know, but I do know there is a test for it, and I do know that one can be checked to see if they have active anthrax.
But the Gulf War veterans were denied this test during the Gulf War.
And it was very suspicious, too, that they were denied this.
But the issue that you talked about earlier on, whether or not they want to take the shot, I can't tell you the number of people that are refusing it, that don't want to take it.
Now, I don't want to tell people to deny a direct order.
I would never do that.
But I think they need to start thinking for themselves.
And what I was advising people who are calling me, because after you had it on your program the other night, of course, the first thing I got a call at seven o'clock in the morning saying Art's going to go get an anthrax shot.
No, Art didn't say that.
Art again pondered with all the news what the wise thing to do would be, and I'm still not sure, Joyce.
I've got to be honest with you.
I think we're being set up.
I think something is going to happen.
In a lot of ways, I'm faced with the same kind of question in my mind that the military guys are right now.
Well, certainly.
And there's only one place to get anthrax immunizations, and that's by the Michigan Biologics Lab that has access to this.
There's only one place in the whole country.
But what I'm advising the military is, first of all, know your rights.
Go to the judge advocate office.
Find out about the waiver system, because there is a system in which you can deny an immunization based on, usually it is religious preference, which is what most of the states do.
Now, I do know of some people that are officers that have actually refused to take any further immunizations, especially since all of the Gulf War information has been coming out, or the Gulf War disease information with no known cause.
And so, many people have already started their investigation, but I would advise that they go to the Judge Advocate Office, find out about the waiver system in the military.
Now, this is going to cut your career short, probably, and it is not going to let you be on worldwide status.
Now, if you're a flight crew member or a pilot, you're going to have a problem with this, such as I was as a flight nurse.
I was on worldwide status.
And I think, though, it's time that we start looking into these immunizations.
Are they safe?
And do we really want to put this stuff in our bodies?
Well, let me ask you directly, Joyce.
If you were still active duty, and you were about to get shipped out to the Gulf area, And you knew that we were about to get in trouble with Saddam again.
All of this is pretty much a given.
And you had a choice of taking the anthrax series or not.
What would you do?
Absolutely not.
No, huh?
Not only would I not take that, I wouldn't take any further immunizations from the military.
Because I don't think we yet know how many experimental immunizations we've already received.
And more and more information is coming out on a daily basis About this Project Manhattan, in which we received a bunch of immunizations aimed at the immune system, which we don't know what they were for.
No, I would not take one more immunization.
I would not take a flu shot.
I would not take a vaccination.
I want an unbiased study done on immunizations and vaccinations.
I want to see us having some real evidence and information to work with, because I think we're putting ourselves In positions of opening ourselves up for too many viruses that we've never seen before or too many diseases now that we don't have any cures to.
I know.
I just think that this issue has gotten way out of hand with vaccines.
I just saw on TV they have a new vaccine now for children against diarrhea.
What?
Give me a break!
What?
Against rotovirus which causes diarrhea.
I see.
Now if we're going to vaccinate against sniffles, diarrhea, I mean, my goodness, we're going to have ourselves so full of live or dead viral agents that we are going to be sick.
And we have unexplained high cancer rates and high disease rates.
Now it's time we take a look at these things.
Alright, well I think the important part of what you've said to us tonight is to cite Senate Report 103.97 and the Journal of the American Medical Association, August 97, both of which say That there is questionable, and that's being high on efficacy, regarding any protection at all in this series for aerosol anthrax.
So I don't see, based on their own information, how they could possibly go forward with this.
I don't know, and it frightens me, but I would like to... Let me give my phone number if anyone wants to get a copy of this.
It's only $10 for the whole copy.
And a tape that explains it, and that's 1-800-201-7892, extension 40.
Wait a minute, 1-800-201... 7892, extension 40.
And ask for the Schwarzkopf testifies information, because this includes his testimony information when he didn't tell the truth.
So it's, ask for Schwarzkopf testifies, 1-800-201-7892.
201-7892, extension 40, and we'll make the full document available to people.
Can the Secretary of Defense simply make a decision like this, Joyce, with his own military, saying that it's experimental with regard to anything that would be in the air?
Can they make that kind of decision?
If it is experimental, Well, it has to be approved by the FDA, which it is.
It's licensed.
But not for the purpose... That's correct.
It needs to be licensed for that purpose.
Otherwise, it has to be listed as investigational.
If it is investigational, then the troops need to be given informed consent and information that they have to sign.
Okay, maybe then that accounts for why they're doing this as publicly as they are.
They have no choice.
Would that be true?
I can't answer that.
I don't know the answer to that.
But I think that we need to look at the disease process that's already going on with our troops, and do we want to superimpose something else on them?
Now, if there's no efficacy in this, if we don't even know the safety, and by the way, we don't even know about the safety with pregnant women, and there are women that are pregnant in the military that got the anthrax initially, there's just too many unanswered questions.
And I think before we broadly just start shooting up people with six immunizations, I think we need to look at what we're doing, and that's why people need to start asking questions, rather than just holding out their arm if they find out it's free, and saying, yeah, I'll take one.
I'm not sure what I would do.
I'm not sure at this moment what I am going to do.
I really don't know.
And I really thought this was, without question, according to the major news media, It's safe.
It's been used for decades by veterinarians.
There is nothing to worry about.
What the hell's wrong with the media that they wouldn't have read Senate Report 103.97 or read JAMA or whatever?
What's going on with the news media here that it has to be the Art Bell Program and Joyce Riley to say all of this?
You're exactly right.
Now why is it that the news media is all agendized?
I don't care if it's NBC, ABC, whatever you listen to, you're hearing the same story.
So they are either getting the same story, ripping it off the wire and reading it, or
else there is a desire to limit the amount of information going out.
I don't know which it is.
Look, at a little radio station, Joyce, you know, a little one-horse radio station in a one-horse town, that's the way it's done.
You rip from the wire and you read it, because you have no choice.
But at NBC, CBS, ABC, CNN, they've got the budgets to really examine the credibility of anything that comes zooming off the wire.
And they have, I might add, a responsibility To investigate.
And so if what you're saying is true, then they are negligent.
Oh, there's no question in my mind.
And you know, as many times as I've been on your program, with as many of the serious allegations I've made against this U.S.
government and the Department of Defense, and I have said every time, if any journalist wants to contact me, I will open up everything I've got.
Do you know that only one person From the El Paso Times has contacted me.
The El Paso Times?
That's correct.
Only one person.
And she printed the truth in the El Paso Times.
And that was the only newspaper that I know of.
So what we have now is limited information going out.
Alright, then let's try that, Avenue.
Let's say, I mean, you're being heard now in the nation's capital.
You're being heard all over this great land.
If any media out there With any Cajones of any size at all want to contact you, how would they do it?
They can contact me and get my information from 1-800-231-7631.
1-800-231-7631.
That will tell them how to contact me.
1-800-231-7631.
That will tell them how to contact me.
And I will be more than happy to open up everything I've got.
We're not even talking about the deaths of these troops, the seriousness of the consequences of the previous war.
I know, but we are facing an immediate situation.
Oh, we are!
And this is heavily in the news right now, and I would think that there would be a number of organizations that would take you up on this offer, particularly with respect to the pending, or even ongoing, who knows, inoculations.
Just the issue of the fact that we sold it to him in the first place ought to get their attention.
And that's why Gulf War veterans are so angry right now.
You know what I bet we're doing right now?
I heard the other day that we're cozying up to Iran now.
Again.
And it wouldn't surprise me that we're giving Iran something to combat Iraq with.
And God knows what.
Probably some different little horrible germ.
And Pandora's box is open and I don't know of any way of closing it.
And I'm afraid that we are going to have some type of domestic terrorism.
I think we are pushing it.
I think we are forcing the issue to where we are making ourselves a focal point, and we are only going to have ourselves to blame.
And what we are doing right now has implications of a global nature.
I mean, this is Holocaust-type stuff, because if you do unleash anthrax, and it was unleashed in one area off of Scotland, it rendered that That area, for 50 years, it could not be touched.
It could not be inhabited.
The island had to be abandoned.
Yes, and you've also got to recall that Saddam has indeed used nerve agents in his conflicts before.
So he's shown a propensity to do this.
We've even got some of the declassified documents showing that they knew that he had biological warfare of anthrax during the Gulf War.
And then after the war, we come out with this aha statement in 1996 saying, we just found out he had anthrax and botulinum.
Well, Art, let me read you just one sentence here.
And this is dated October of 1990.
It was a declassified document from the Joint Chiefs of Staff and it states, the Iraqis have two confirmed biological warfare agents, anthrax and botulinum.
Anthrax can be disseminated by aerosol generators Either as a freeze-dried powder or liquid suspension.
Now that's on an email message from the Pentagon.
And then they also state that Saddam Hussein was found and known to have 40 high-performance aerosol generators in the spring of 1990.
Ostensibly for spraying for crops with pesticides.
So now we know that he's got the equipment to deliver it.
He has weaponized the anthrax.
And now what else do we need to know?
But we went in there, put our troops in harm's way, Going full well, he's had this since... We knew he was working on it since the 1980s.
Alright, Joyce, is your website up now?
Yes, it is.
To my knowledge, the last time I checked two days ago, it was up.
Alright, then we have a link, if that is the case, to your website.
All people have to do is go to mine, go to yours.
Or, if they want the tape and the report for ten bucks, it's 1-800-2-0-1 7892 extension 40.
If you're a member of the media with any responsible bone in your body after hearing this and want the information, call Joyce at 1-800-231-7631.
Is that about right?
two three one seven six three one is that about right that's correct and also our website
three W dot golf war that dot com and
hit the American Veterans Justice Foundation on their link and you'll get additional information on anthrax
Joyce, thank you for being here.
Please keep me updated.
Thank you.
Alright, take care.
That's Joyce Riley.
Coming up next, and it certainly will fit, is Richard Preston, the man who wrote The Hot Zone.
He's got a new book out.
He wrote about that which comes out of Africa.
Ebola.
He wrote about a true incident in this country.
It was one of those books that there's no way anybody in their right mind put down.
You just picked it up and you read it.
So get ready for that coming up next.
Richard Preston, I'm Art Bell from the high desert.
This is Coast to Coast AM.
The trip back in time continues with Art Bell hosting Coast to Coast AM.
more somewhere in time coming up the
the the
the Premier Networks presents Art Bell, Somewhere in Time.
Tonight featuring Coast to Coast AM, from December 17th, 1997.
Coming up in a moment is... Richard Preston, author of The Hot Zone.
He's got a new one out too.
So, be prepared, and I think I will issue my standard warning.
The kind of material you're about to hear may scare the hell out of a lot of people.
If you are one of those, tune out!
You know, go listen to the typical political gibberish elsewhere.
Because what Richard Preston has to say is pretty scary, pretty relevant, pretty current.
And actually, since his writing of this book, there's been a lot that's happened, and we'll be talking about it.
Including that which is about apparently to come from Hong Kong.
So that's coming up next in a moment.
Tomorrow night, in the first hour, Linda Moulton Howe, who has a great deal of information for you.
And I mean a great deal.
So, if you've never heard her, and you may not have, she's on Dreamland every week.
She'll be here in the first hour tomorrow night.
She's a science reporter for us.
And then, David Oates, with his reverse speech, follows in the next hour.
The next night, Friday night, Saturday morning, we'll bring Dale Kaczmarek, who runs the Ghost Research Society in Chicago, or near Chicago.
That should be a very, very interesting program, Friday night, Saturday morning.
And then, coming up on Monday, coming up on Monday is going to be a very interesting program.
You may recall we had a guest who talked about the Yanomami people, The rainforest people, who have some rather savage practices.
And we had Mark Richion, who had a rainforest shaman, who's been converted to Christianity.
And it was his position, that the anthropologists were out of their minds, and that we should go down there with Bibles and convert these people.
Well, you're going to hear Monday, the other side of the coin, Dr. Napoleon Shagan.
Shagnan, I believe it is.
C-H-A-G-N-O-N.
A professor of anthropology at the University of California at Santa Barbara is going to be my guest, and he is the anthropologist who spent all the time with the Yanomamo people.
And so you're going to get the other side of the story on Monday.
So that is the agenda directly ahead.
in a moment, Richard Preston.
Tonight featuring Coast to Coast AM from December 17th, 1997.
Forgot the reason I even mentioned the quickening.
Another item sent to me confirming the story reported on CNBC tonight that The all-time record for the greatest wind speed ever recorded on the Earth's surface was broken Wednesday.
The Weather Channel's website is now reporting that the event did occur and that it indeed may be the highest wind speed ever observed on the surface of the Earth.
The following text was cut and pasted from www.weather.com.
Residents of Guam are still recovering from the ravages of Typhoon Pukka.
Over two dozen people injured.
Fortunately, nobody died during the storm.
a wind gust of 236 miles per hour was in fact measured. The issue will be subject to debate,
but if the reading is accurate, it would establish a new world wind speed record.
Great, huh?
Now, the virus kills nine out of ten of its victims so quickly, and in such a gruesome manner, that even biohazard experts are terrified.
It's airborne.
It's extremely contagious.
And it's about to burn through the suburbs of a major American city.
Is there any way to stop it?
In the winter of 1989, at an army research facility outside Washington, D.C., this doomsday scenario seemed like a real possibility.
A SWAT team of soldiers and scientists wearing biohazard spacesuits had been organized to stop the outbreak of an exotic, in quotes, hot virus.
The grim operation went on in secret for 18 days under dangerous conditions for which there was no precedent.
Richard Preston is the author of First Light, about astronomy, which won the American Institute of Physics Award, and American Steel, about the Nucor Corporation and its project to build a revolutionary steel mill.
He is a regular contributor to the New Yorker, Has won the AAAS Westinghouse Award, and the McDermott Award in the Arts from MIT, and of course is author of The Hot Zone, and now a new book.
Richard Preston, welcome to the program.
Hello, Art.
Hi there.
Good to have you.
It's great to have you.
I have been wanting to interview you for... Well, ever since the day I made a special trip into Las Vegas and plunked down $23 for The Hot Zone, which I then proceeded to go through until I was done.
It is a true story, isn't it?
Absolutely.
it's not fiction reporting all right i remember seeing a sixty minutes program
uh... in which toward the very end reporting on uh... what occurred
uh... at that monkey house at reston uh... a
didn't uh... but you know uh... geneticist i guess came on and
said you know just one little tiny change at the end of some sort of
chromosome or something and this would be there airborne
and would have uh...
a torn its way through Washington So why don't you tell the audience, if you can, what the hell did really happen back then?
Well, I found out about it when I was poking around for a good story because, after all, I am a writer.
And what happened was that there was a building outside Washington that contained about 600 monkeys.
It was a research facility.
And it was in the town of Reston, Virginia, just outside the Beltway.
Right.
Stay good and close to the phone for me.
So the monkeys began to die.
They had a virus, but the researchers at the building didn't know what it was.
They sent some samples up to the United States Army, and the Army researchers identified Ebola virus in the monkeys, which is a killer that kills nine out of ten of its human victims.
The monkeys were melting down biologically.
They were bleeding out.
They were showing incredibly gruesome symptoms.
The Army went into a state of high alert about this building.
They sent in military biohazard teams wearing spacesuits.
They sealed the building off.
And then they killed the monkeys in the building by giving them lethal injections.
The operation took 18 days.
During these 18 days, Richard, did we know about it?
Very little.
There was some reporting going on.
There was a bit in the Washington Post, but the Post basically got it wrong.
The Post did not report that these were soldiers in the operation, that they were wearing spacesuits, and that there was really tremendous concern about this Ebola virus.
How long did it take them?
They obviously, I recall, determined that it was airborne for the monkeys, because monkeys in separate rooms began to come down with it, as you pointed out, bleeding out, this horrible death.
And they determined the only way it could have been transferred was through the air ducting.
So they knew it was airborne for monkeys.
How long was it?
And when did they determine that it was not airborne for humans?
Well, there was debate all along.
From the beginning, there were some people who were saying, look, if it was airborne, a lot more people would be dead quicker.
On the other hand, they didn't know how it was traveling.
and one of the concerns was that there are a number of employees in the
building who have been face-to-face with these monkeys and then had
gone home and had been with their families their spouses and children
uh... ebola virus is known to be sexually transmitted uh... there was a lot of concern in these guys have been
you know going to pub public fast food restaurants shopping malls it was the
christmas season
and uh...
so there's a lot of concern that that this thing would begin to spread
uh... let us for a second presume the worst rather than the luckiest which is what
occurred Suppose it had been airborne.
Suppose it had been by a sneeze or inhalation transmissible from human to human.
What would have happened?
It could have been extremely bad.
It would have been a nightmare.
It would have been very difficult to control when a thing is highly contagious, when it travels through the air.
You know, doctors talk about the risk factors involved in exposure.
In this case, the major risk factor would be breathing.
If you breathe, you can get the virus.
I should add that, Art, I was going to mention to you, we were going to talk about this new book that I've written.
And so we certainly will, yes.
I wanted to mention to you that what I discovered when I was working on the new book, the title of this new book is The Cobra Event.
And it's a novel.
It's a suspense novel about biological terrorism.
And it's based on about three years worth of research that I did.
And there's quite a lot of non-fiction in the book.
There's quite a lot of reality in it.
One of the things I discovered was that one of the reasons why the United States Army was so scared about Ebola virus near Washington is that Ebola virus is now known to be what is called a strategic operational biological weapon.
It is a weapon, and it has apparently been loaded into warheads.
Now, wait a minute, Richard.
I thought that the U.S.
didn't do that kind of thing anymore.
The U.S., to my knowledge, has not done this with any biological weapons, including Ebola.
However, other countries have.
Principally, the old Soviet Union, and now modern Russia.
The army knew at the time that Ebola virus can be freeze-dried, made into a kind of powder, and then the powder can be released into the air and it is
extremely infectious in the lung Really?
Weaponized form So they, one of the reasons why they were in white knuckle
alert about this outbreak near Washington was the fear that actually this was some kind of terror
attack or an accident involving some kind of biological weapon
Huh Um, what do we know about Ebola?
Ebola comes out of Africa in a couple of different strains I seem to recall
The thing that I have never understood about Ebola is that it seems to suddenly show up, go like a brush fire, and then die away or go into hibernation only to come back again later.
Do we have any idea, any idea, of the modus operandi of this virus?
No.
The origin of Ebola is unknown.
That is to say, the natural host.
It lives in some organism, some animal, some insect, some creature in the rainforests of Central Africa.
But they don't know where the original host is, and there's been an awful lot of research.
There have been now expeditions mounted into the rainforests of Central and West Africa.
Scientists have been testing the blood of any number of species of creatures, from insects to birds to bats, and they have not yet found Ebola virus.
Living in anything other than people, naturally.
Well, you seem to know more about it than about anybody else.
Do you have any guesses?
Yes, I've got a few guesses.
Actually, I misspoke.
They have found Ebola virus in some chimpanzees, but they don't think that the chimp is the original host.
They think the chimp is getting it from something else.
One possibility is that it's another kind of monkey.
Maybe the colobus monkey.
Maybe a natural carrier.
The chimps are getting it from the colobus monkeys because chimps actually hunt and eat.
Other monkeys.
They kill monkeys and eat them.
Raw.
They're cannibalistic?
Yes.
Well, not cannibalistic, but they're just predators.
And they'll eat these other kinds of monkeys and they'll devour the blood raw.
And so they can get the Ebola that way.
Another pretty good possibility is that it may be in some type of bat that lives naturally in the tops or the crowns of trees in the rainforest.
And people don't generally come in contact with this bat because it lives in the tops of trees.
When the rainforest is being cleared, and trees are being cut down, then the loggers come in contact with these bats, because they're walking around among the crowns of trees, lying on the ground.
How many current types of Ebola are we aware of?
Currently five types.
Five?
Five major types.
What is the probability that one of these five Could become transmissible by air for human beings?
Or I guess there already is one, isn't there?
Well, that's a very good question.
Or is there?
No, there are no strains of Ebola virus that are known to be transmissible from person to person through coughing, through the air.
However, whether this could happen or not depends very much on what is going on in laboratories in places like Siberia, such as Koltsovo.
Where it is known that genetic research is being done on organisms to try to, so to speak, improve them.
Improve them?
For the use of biological weapons.
And Ebola virus has been a big focus of research in the ongoing modern Russian biological weapons program.
Would it be possible, in your opinion, to genetically modify one of these five?
Easily.
Very easily.
Easily?
Easily, yes.
And I think one of the big concerns is that this type of biology, this military biology, which is thought to be occurring in a number of different countries around the world, is really going forward into the area of biotechnology and biotech, where you can alter organisms in the laboratory to make them do what you want.
And, of course, biotechnology is used for curing diseases, but nowadays the military people are also using it to create new diseases.
Would you think that any country would create a disease or modify a disease for which they had not developed a vaccine?
Yes, and to my knowledge it's already been done.
Let me give you some examples.
This material is part of the Cobra event.
I want to just give you a little bit of a summary of the Cobra event.
Please do, yes.
The Cobra event is a suspense thriller.
And it's about a bioterror outbreak in New York City, based on a lot of interviews and research that I did with top government people.
It's about a bioterror operations team out of the FBI, out of Quantico.
You may remember Quantico from The Silence of the Lambs.
I do, yes.
There is such a team in reality.
And so I take this team, and I populate it with fictional characters, and I go through a bioterror scenario.
The book begins with a high school student, a girl, who dies in a classroom in New York City.
At first it appears that she has a common cold, but she ends up engaging in auto-cannibalism or self-cannibalism.
She chews off her own face.
There is, in fact, a natural human disease in which this occurs.
I have imagined it as a biological weapon, which is possible.
Is this some variation of the flesh-eating disease?
No, it's not.
It's a behavioral disease in which people actually devour their own flesh.
God!
Alright, Richard, hold tight for a moment.
We'll be right back.
We're going to take a break at the bottom of the hour.
Eating your own face.
I'm Art Bell and this is Coast to Coast AM with Richard Preston.
This is Premier Networks.
That was Art Bell hosting Coast to Coast AM.
On this, Somewhere in Time.
I tried to tell you but you look at me like maybe I'm an angel underneath.
Innocent and sweet.
Yesterday I cried.
You must have been relieved to see the softest side.
I can understand how you'd be so confused.
I don't envy you.
I'm a little bit of everything.
All rolled into one.
I'm a bitch.
I'm a lover.
I'm a child.
I'm a mother.
I'm a sinner.
I'm a saint.
I do not feel ashamed.
And I'm your elf.
We're singing it's last.
Walulis.
I was just feeding you once before.
Let me know when you're ready.
Walulis.
Walulis.
Now, we take you back to the past.
On Art Bell Somewhere in Time.
My guest is Richard Preston, the Hot Zone, and now, the Cobra events.
Whew!
Mr. Preston likes writing first chapters that grab you.
We'll get back to him in a moment.
Back now to Richard Preston.
Richard, do you have a website, by the way?
Yes.
Go to www.randomhouse.com.
Random House is my publisher, and that's one word, Random House.
Right.
And look for the Cobra event.
And you'll find my email address, and go ahead and send me an email.
All right.
My webmaster, I'm sure, is listening, so he will get the specific address for the Cobra event.
And also go to Amazon.com, where you can find a lot about the Cobra event.
OK.
But Random House has a specific area for the Cobra event.
Yes.
All right.
Now, a schoolgirl looks like she's got a cold and ends up eating her face.
Yes, indeed.
And investigators go in.
The hero of the book is a doctor from the CDC, Alice Austin.
And she begins to trace it out, and pretty soon it turns out that this is biological terrorism.
Somebody has released a military virus into the population of New York City.
It's not clear why, and the virus is worming its way around like a common cold.
The bioterror operations team, which is called Reach Deep, goes in and they have to try to find out who's doing this, and they use advanced forensic science to do it, to track down who's doing But I don't want to give away the ending.
No, of course not.
The story is based on what the experts, especially the top government people, are really telling me what bioterror would be like.
What they're saying is that it might very well be invisible, that you just wouldn't see it.
No one would recognize it as such, and they even speculate that there may have been bioterror events in the past where people have died or where infectious diseases have gone around, but it was never recognized as such.
Well, they're listening in New York City right now.
There was a report out just a few days ago that said that if somebody with, I forget, 2 pounds or 20 pounds of anthrax were to go down the middle of New York City, spraying it as they went, there would be something like 1.5 million deaths, some horrendous, horrendous figure.
And I've been talking to a lot of people about this, Richard.
NBC News, night after night, all the other news organizations are suddenly out with lead stories, first one on the news, about biological terrorism and the fact that it's probably imminent.
And I'm beginning to ask myself, to be honest with you, what they know that we don't.
Well, what they know is that the FBI, what I found out, is that the FBI now is talking About how many people are trying to do it.
The FBI has about 50 open cases currently involving biological or chemical weapons and terrorism.
These are people who store it in their basements.
They try to use it, but maybe it doesn't work very well.
People who seem to have a plan in mind.
They're amateurs or they're militia groups.
It's not clear exactly what the agenda is for many of these people.
But what it is very clear about is that Sooner or later it looks like somebody is going to come along with scientific training and they're going to get it right and a lot of people are going to die.
I can tell you what a kind of typical scenario might be like.
First of all, I don't believe that millions would die in a bioterror event.
I think that's a bit of an exaggeration.
I think more likely you would get something like the equivalent of dozens and dozens of Oklahoma City bombings going on day after day.
It would be terror in slow motion because the disease might spread and people would be dying over time.
Let's take anthrax as a simple example.
Right.
Everybody has heard the word anthrax, but very few people, even doctors, actually know what it is and what it looks like.
Yeah, let's talk about that.
They just announced they're going to inoculate the entire armed forces, 1.4 million people, at $130 million against anthrax.
So what is anthrax?
Well, anthrax is an organism.
It's a bacterial organism that you can get into your lungs.
If you get a few particles in your lungs, you can disperse it into the air with a device that's about the size of a hairspray bottle.
And the particles, spores of anthrax, will plume out into the air and can drift for 20 to 30 miles in a plume downwind from the point source, from the point of release.
People who have been in the plume will be exposed to anthrax.
Not everyone will develop anthrax, but some or many will.
Now, it comes on like the common cold.
That's why I was so intrigued by this in the Cobra event.
It's very hard to diagnose.
You get a tightness in the chest.
You may get a little bit of a cough, a runny nose.
You don't feel too well.
This goes on for a couple of days.
So that a city that had been exposed to a bioterror attack, people would be going around saying, oh gee, there's some kind of a bug going around.
It's another cold or something.
Sure.
On day three, you begin to feel better if you have become infected with anthrax.
The symptoms lift.
This is known as the anthrax eclipse.
Then, shortly thereafter, you die of anthrax pneumonia.
Now, anthrax pneumonia, your lungs fill up with a glue-like sputum, which has been compared to blood mixed with whipped cream.
The organism creates a toxin, a number of different toxins, but the lethal factor is a toxin that actually causes your breathing to stop all of a sudden.
In Russia, where there was an accident with a biological weapon, anthrax, watched people die.
They said that the doctors would be talking to a patient lying in bed, the patient would be describing his symptoms, and he would die in mid-sentence.
Oh my gosh!
He would just die all of a sudden.
If anthrax had been released into a city, these people would be streaming into the emergency rooms complaining that their colds had gotten worse, and then they would be suddenly dropping dead.
A little bump in the pneumonia rate?
idea what killed them it would take days and days to identify this is anthrax
and if it worked you know if the casualties were in the hundreds or in the
dozens that have been about
uh... it might not even be picked up at all people would just
the doctors would say oh there's been a little bit of a bump in the pneumonia
rate that he's a little bump in the pneumonia rate
yeah uh...
uh... a little bump in the pneumonia rate. In other words, they actually wouldn't
diagnose that properly initially no
uh... the thing is that most physicians and most first responders have never
seen a biological weapon in a human being and wouldn't know it if they saw it
Basically, with all due respect to physicians, they're not trained in this and they wouldn't know anthrax if it slapped them upside the head, much less Ebola or genetically engineered smallpox.
What happened with Ebola in Africa?
We heard sort of scattered reports, 200 and some odd dead, and I remember the military cordoned off a whole area there.
They weren't letting people out, but people were breaking out.
It was horrible.
What happened there?
Well, this is the 1995 outbreak in Zaire.
And it affected a larger number of towns and cities than initially was reported.
I think at least 30 towns and cities developed Ebola outbreaks.
It was a much bigger outbreak than originally was supposed.
And it is smoldering now at some lower level in Africa.
Ebola has never gone away.
It just tends to worm its way around in the human population.
Now, the natural Ebola that I'm talking about, as opposed to the weaponized Ebola, natural Ebola is a kind of feeder at the margins of the human species.
It has the potential to move decisively into the human species and become a major human pathogen, but it has not yet done that.
And then, of course, the other potential that it has is that in the hands of terrorists or military people, Ebola could suddenly make a huge appearance in the human species, but in a different form.
Well, I said this during the last Ebola outbreak, that if I were a terrorist, I would be dispatching some of my suicidal types down to the Ebola outbreak area, trying to get blood samples so I could bring them back and culture them.
Man, you are right on target, because that is actually what happened.
Do you remember the Japanese sect, the Aum Shinrikyo group?
Of course.
Well, they did exactly what you've just suggested.
They sent teams to Zaire.
They collected human blood, they got Ebola virus samples, and they brought them back to their laboratory, their bio-laboratory, which is building 6 at that compound at the foot of Mount Fuji.
That compound, that bio-compound, has never been entered by the Tokyo police.
Here it is, 1998 now.
It's three years after that attack on the Tokyo subway.
Tokyo police have not yet dared to enter the biological lab that the sect had.
Why not?
The Tokyo police don't have biohazard capability.
They can't go into the rooms.
And there's been a big, quiet, what shall I say, diplomatic brawl involving the US government and the Tokyo police.
The U.S.
government has the capability to go into that room and find out what that sect had.
And they don't want us to.
and there's a matter of pride here how careful
do you have to be when you're handling the ball of our side I know there are labs in this country that handle it.
How careful do you have to be?
Well, it's like any other pathogen.
If it's a level 4 hot agent, and there are a number of them, You need to be wearing a full biohazard suit.
That means a pressurized spacesuit, gloves, a mask, or actually a helmet that surrounds you completely.
You have to be cocooned in an independent air supply to work with a virus like this.
That is not always the case, of course.
When Ebola broke out in Africa, the local doctors on the ground were working with Ebola patients And they were wearing nothing but cotton gowns, and sometimes they didn't even have rubber gloves.
And they were being splashed with blood, diarrhea, and vomit that was absolutely loaded with Ebola virus.
And doctors and nurses died in the outbreak as a result of exposure.
With Ebola, I recall from your book, it's horrible to contemplate, but I'm afraid it's true, you literally Internally dissolved, what is the mechanism in Ebola that can accomplish that?
How does that work?
No one knows.
There are something like seven major proteins in the Ebola virus.
And one or more of them seem to have the effect of destroying the human immune system and chewing up tissue.
They cause what amounts to a biological meltdown in a human being.
The virus invades just about every tissue in the body.
And you begin to have incredible symptoms.
You develop bruising all over the body.
Hemorrhages occur.
Toward the end of the infection, you can get what the experts call a crash and bleed out, where you go into irreversible shock.
And then you begin to hemorrhage from any or all of the orifices of the body.
And during the course of this, the intestines can fill up with blood, and the lining of the intestines can come off.
And then everything comes out the anus.
My God.
Here's something else I thought about.
You said there are countries that have viruses loaded in warheads, anthrax, whatever.
It occurred to me years ago that an even more efficient manner of delivery and quicker would be to load some virus on a satellite.
Now, if you had an orbiting satellite with a virus that you could release on re-entry, you'd really have something.
Sure, or actually the way the technology now is done is they have these things known as fletners.
A bio-warhead can be put into a missile, say, and the missile splits apart upon re-entry, and these devices called fletners come out.
Well, if you had it in a satellite, then you wouldn't have to launch anything.
It would have already been launched.
And as they spin, they dispense bioparticles into the air.
Particles then can drift downwind for 40, 50, 60 miles until they hit a human lung.
Well, if you had it in a satellite, then you wouldn't have to launch anything.
It would have already been launched.
It would simply be circling the globe, and you could bring it back.
As you know, they can do that very, very accurately.
You could bring it back and down wherever you wanted it to come down, so there wouldn't even be the warning time of a launch.
Sure, and sure, and then the flatteners would fly out when the thing came down.
There are other ways to do it.
One of the best, and I think this is a technique that Saddam Hussein would know about, is to leave a suitcase with a little sprayer in it in the Washington subway.
Huh.
And you would have massive casualties, and depending on what the virus was and how it's released, you can just imagine the scenario.
One of the worst is actually smallpox virus.
People think of smallpox as being something like chickenpox, and it's not.
In extreme cases of smallpox, what happens is that the lining of the mouth turns black, and the blistering effect, which people think is kind of like smallpox, actually occurs on the inside of the body.
And the stomach and the intestines fill up with blood blisters, and then the lower part of the intestine actually turns inside out and protrudes completely from the body.
This type of smallpox is invariably fatal, and it's the type of smallpox that I think we can assume that military biologists are working with.
This is madness.
Absolute madness.
And I suppose, even though the Cold War is over, They're working on it.
The Russians, I'm sure.
You said so already.
Not just the Russians.
Chinese, let's see, India, Pakistan.
The so-called Club Mad countries of the Middle East are heavily into this.
That would be Syria, Iran, Iraq, Libya, and possibly Israel.
Why would anybody create something That they had no inoculation for it, that they could not protect themselves against.
Well, let me just point out that smallpox is one of the worst, but there is a vaccine for it.
And the Iraqis have a huge smallpox vaccine plant.
They have the ability to inoculate their people overnight, practically, for smallpox.
That should tell you something about Iraqi intentions in this area.
Uh, if you go in with airstrikes, uh, you'll recall Camasilla, where we blew everything up.
And now there's a big controversy about the Gulf War Syndrome and all the rest of that.
People exposed when we blew that series of plants, and boy oh boy, there was a lot they blew up there.
If we were to go in with airstrikes, and it looks like we're, you know, moving the goalposts and we want a confrontation with Iraq, it's obvious to me we want one, and we're going to get it one way or the other.
Maybe it'll be over inspection of the private presidential areas, whatever it is, we're going to get our conflict.
If we go in and we bomb these places, Do we burn up whatever it is, or does it get dispersed into the air?
What are the scenarios?
Well, first of all, we have to hit the place.
In the Cobra event, I have a description of a bioweapons plant in Iraq.
This is based on my conversations with weapons inspectors, United Nations guys.
I hate to talk about the plot, but toward the beginning of the book, one of the heroes He's a FBI guy and he's actually in Iraq working as an inspector and he finds a bioweapons plant inside a truck.
The bioreactor that's used to manufacture military quantities of things like smallpox and Ebola is a device about the size of a liter soda bottle.
And you get a half dozen or a dozen of them in a small room such as inside a truck and you've got yourself a national biological weapons facility.
So there's a real question.
as to whether we can hit a production facility.
If we did manage to find out where one was and hit it, depending on what the organism was, some things would be killed by the blast and other things could go into the air.
I think one of the worst could be anthrax because it's so tough.
The anthrax organism can just survive a lot and it could be blown into the air and then you'd get a plume.
You'd get a plume of material going downwind.
As I mentioned earlier, we're about to inoculate the entire Armed Forces against anthrax, and yet there are, Richard, a couple of reports, Armed Forces Senate reports, indicating that this inoculation, said to be absolutely safe and used by veterinarians for a very long time, has been questioned with regard to its efficacy if the anthrax is airborne.
Right.
Versus touching an animal.
Right, exactly.
For a soldier in ground zero during an anthrax attack, what would happen is that the military people just lay that anthrax into the air in huge quantities.
The adversary would do that and it would overwhelm the vaccine.
The vaccine would not protect people who are on ground zero if they breathe a lot of it, but it might protect people who are on the edge of the attack, who've got a lot less anthrax in their lungs.
Right.
It might also, it's very useful for actually treating people who have already been exposed to low levels of anthrax.
The vaccine works really well after you've been exposed.
It helps you boost your immunity.
Now I think one thing that's going on here is the government would like to have large production capacity for anthrax vaccine.
Partly so that if there is a bioterror attack in a city in the United States, all of a sudden you're going to have a million or two million people who have all been exposed to anthrax.
Some of them are going to be incubating anthrax and are going to die of it if they can't get that vaccine into them fast.
This is a situation where the US government will want to have the production capacity.
To move the vaccine into the population quickly.
All right.
Anthrax cannot be passed as a flu or a cold from person to person, can it?
Right.
That's one of the good things about anthrax.
It's not contagious from human to human.
Well, good to hear there's one good thing about anthrax.
All right, Richard, relax.
We're going to take a break here at the top of the hour.
My guest is Richard Preston, author of The Hot Zone, a national bestseller, one I bought the first day it was out, and now his new book, The Cobra.
Events.
It seems to fit right in with the news of the day, which is not good, and we're going to cover more of that, including what's going on, unfortunately, in Hong Kong, coming up.
The trip back in time continues, with Art Bell hosting Coast to Coast AM.
More, somewhere in time, coming up.
A new era of the new generation.
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Watching in slow motion as you turn around to say Say my prayers are away
Say my prayers are away You're listening to Art Bell, Somewhere in Time.
Tonight featuring Coast to Coast AM from December 17th, 1997.
Richard Preston, the Hot Zones' Richard Preston is my guest and we are talking about all kinds of little things.
The little things.
we'll get back to that moment the following just in from the electronic telegraph uh...
the headline is new anthrax threatens armageddon
by Nanette Vanderlaan in Moscow.
Russia has developed a new variant of the anthrax toxin that is, listen now, totally resistant to antibiotics and could cause a catastrophe, according to the defense publication Jane's.
The well-respected Jane's Land-Based Air Defense 7798 edition, published on Thursday, said the Russian military had developed the toxin, as well as three new nerve agents.
It gave warning of the dangers, should the toxin fall into the wrong hands, saying, quote, an Armageddon situation could occur, whereby the only reliable retribution may well be overpowering nuclear response, end quote.
Richard, welcome back.
Hi, that's very interesting, Art, and it's also true.
I have it from my sources that, indeed, this multidrug-resistant anthrax was created in a laboratory called Obolensk, which is about 75 miles south of Moscow.
Great.
Just great.
I can tell you the name of the chief scientist there.
Go right ahead.
He's a medical doctor, and he's also a general in the Soviet Army.
Dr. General N.N.
Yurakov is his name.
He's the head of the Institute at Obelensk.
It's a facility known as Corpus One, and they also developed, as well as the super anthrax, they also developed a super black death.
This is the bubonic plague, which has been genetically engineered to be absolutely incurable with modern medicine and highly contagious in the air through coughing.
Again, I don't understand the psychology of creating a world ending anything.
That you don't have some sort of protection for yourself.
What psychology can you imagine that would be behind that?
Well, you know, it's fascinating.
These people are scientists, after all, and some of them are quite good.
Look at the feelings that the scientists experienced who built the first atomic bomb.
This was a dreadful, terrible weapon.
But at the same time, there was enormous excitement, real thrills, when that first test went off at Trinity in New Mexico.
They saw what they had done.
They were both appalled and also amazed at the power of the weapon itself.
There is absolutely nothing like the heart-pounding excitement of a new scientific discovery, even if it means in weapons.
I interview frequently Dr. Michio Kaku.
I don't know if you know of him or not.
He is a physicist at New York City University and kind of like a Carl Sagan.
And he has a hypothesis, Richard, that there are various types of civilizations, no doubt others way out there, and there's a type 0, a type 1, a type 2, a type 3.
Oh yes, right.
Yes, and we are a type 0, and the chances of our making it to a type 1 are slim and none.
In other words, It is most likely we will, one way or another, destroy ourselves.
And I'm beginning to think it's more likely we will do it with something small than something large like an atomic, a full atomic exchange of some sort or another.
Let's try something from something you didn't write.
You may recall the movie Outbreak.
Yes.
Now, in that, it got loose.
It was airborne.
It was deadly, and the solution to it was a fuel-air explosive that would actually have killed many, many American citizens.
That's not really such a far-out scenario, is it?
Well, you know, I have a somewhat different view.
I tend to be a little bit more optimistic about the human species.
I think that we are Quite unlikely to destroy ourselves with our own weapons, but I think that there will be occasional disasters that cause large mortality.
If you look at the spread of a major new virus in a human population, I think you can see that what happens is that a lot of people can die, but not everyone does die.
The research that was done, especially by the American bioweapons experts in the 1960s, showed that It's ridiculously easy to kill off half of a human population, but it's very, very difficult to zero it out, to kill everybody.
Everybody.
I know, but for all intents and purposes, anything above 50% is a pretty rough road now.
There are people, it is said, even in Africa, women, prostitutes, that are, it seems, immune to the AIDS virus.
Well, exactly.
There will always be survivors, even with the worst biological weapons, even these superbugs that are coming out of the Russian labs.
Yes, there will always be survivors, but I think we have to be very concerned about the prospects of a major biological accident originating in one of these labs, or indeed, Terrorists getting a hold of a military virus developed in a military program.
Well, there's something I'm missing here.
The Russians are hot at it.
The Chinese, I think we are too.
I think everybody is developing all of these horrid little bugs.
I thought that we were safe.
The Cold War was over.
And now it seems the danger is greater than during those standoff years.
No, these biological weapons, these living organisms, are the weapons of the future.
The interesting thing about a biological weapon now is that it's a living organism.
It's alive.
It knows how to get in your body, and then it knows how to replicate and to spread from one person to another.
Thus, bioweapons are the only weapons that can amplify themselves in a human population.
I've got another fact here.
Art, when I visit the cemeteries here in Central Texas to pay respect to deceased relatives, I've always noticed the large percentage of tombstones that are inscribed with the final date of 1918.
I'm told these deaths were due to a horrible pandemic of influenza that killed millions in 1918.
Could this sort of thing occur today, particularly with regard to today's news about the bird flu that currently is underway in Hong Kong?
The bird flu is a pretty scary thing.
What do we know?
In the beginning, Richard, they said the bird flu.
The bird flu.
Well, not to worry because we can clearly see now it is not transmissible from one human to another.
What is the bird flu?
Well, it's also technically known as the H5N1 flu.
It comes out of birds, chickens.
And it's a mutant.
It's a new one.
It is contagious in humans.
Absolutely is.
But there's a big question as to just how contagious it really is, how easily it can spread.
There have been a number of deaths now in Hong Kong, human deaths, because people have been catching it from birds.
And what about the health care workers?
Exactly.
It's spread in hospitals to health care workers who have treated some of these children.
Apparently it really hits children hard.
Mortality rate is very high.
I don't know, one third or something of the kids who get it end up dying.
That's the equivalent of, that's a medieval death rate is what that is.
Now, if it were really highly contagious in humans, I think you probably would have seen a larger number of cases by now.
I think it would be spreading like wildfire.
A virus like that is 24 hours from every other city on earth because of plane flights.
People carry the virus very quickly around the world.
So it would be very, very difficult to control.
But I think fortunately, so far...
It doesn't seem as though the thing is going off like a bonfire.
It's more like a smoldering fire.
Yes, but I saw a report earlier today on CNN that indicated, don't ask me why, but they are concerned about two possibilities.
One, that it will become more deadly, and two, that it could quickly change to become very easily transmissible from human to human.
That's right, because that's absolutely a good point.
One of the scary things about this flu is But now that it's gotten into the human population, as it's moving from human to human, it's doing what's known as serial passage in humans, it's adjusting itself to human beings.
And it may change.
Could it become more infectious from person to person?
Well, perhaps it could.
In that case, there would be a need to do a crash vaccine.
There would be a real rush on, a full court press to try to develop a vaccine quickly.
It would work against this strain of flu.
And I think there may be a question, Art, as to whether or not such a vaccine could be made quickly enough.
Do you have an overall view?
We've got Fisteria, which apparently came out of the North Carolina estuaries and has now been found as far north as the North Sea, which puts these bloody lesions on fish and now it's being transmitted to human beings.
There are simple-celled animals in the Antarctic now that are showing actual genetic change.
This whole controversy about frogs and all the extra limbs and all the rest of that baloney is now been proven to be ultraviolet light.
They've proven that conclusively now by duplicating it in the field.
And there's just an awful lot going on.
New emerging viruses And it's coming awfully quickly now.
Do you have an overall view of what's going on aside from what we may do to ourselves?
Sure.
I talked about this in the hot zone as well.
What's going on is that the world of nature itself is one huge laboratory in which millions of experiments are taking place constantly.
There's a lot of genetic reshuffling and change going on constantly in nature as the world of ecosystems reacts to changes.
The biggest change on the planet Earth right now is the presence of the human species.
We're doing all kinds of things, and all kinds of ecological habitats and systems are undergoing rapid change and undergoing high selective pressure, where some species are dying out, others are increasing their range, and people are coming into the rainforest.
People are moving into areas where there weren't very many people, and the human population is now biologically interconnected through airline routes.
So we're a global village in a biological sense as well as in an electronic sense.
And so when new diseases enter the human population, they can spread much more rapidly.
And new diseases can come along at a higher rate because of all these changes that are taking place in the natural world.
In the hot zone, I've termed this the revenge of the rainforest.
That when a population, and this would include humans, burgeons very large, densely crowded, and when it begins to tax its
own natural resources, typically what happens in nature is that a virus will break out, and
the population then will be thinned by the virus.
Viruses are Mother Nature's natural population control.
Again, if, let's just for a second suggest that in some American town somewhere there
would be an airborne, very infectious form of Ebola, and that we would cordon off this
area.
Now, if you were on a board, on a board of decision, very much like there was in an outbreak,
And you had to decide.
I mean, you had real airborne Ebola.
And you had to decide whether to kill American citizens or to take your chances at trying to keep it isolated.
What kind of choice would you make?
Well, let me tell you that the U.S.
government actually does have contingency plans.
I can imagine.
And let me tell you what they are.
Please.
I think that the idea that That the armed forces or anybody would bomb an American town is inconceivable.
I don't think that's the way it would play out in reality.
Instead, I think what would happen is that you would have heroic doctors would show up, and they would come out of the U.S.
military, and they also would be just practicing physicians who have a mission, and they would go into the hot zone.
They would go into the town.
The town would be quarantined.
Nobody would be allowed to leave.
But medical professionals would stream into the town and they would do what they could to get the situation under control.
There might be huge casualties if the thing was highly contagious, if a lot of people were infected.
I mean, what we're talking about is the response to either a natural outbreak or a terror event.
It could be either way.
And these contingency plans are basically to send in the medical people if there's a large number of casualties.
It might be necessary to set up military field hospitals in which something known as reverse biocontainment is practiced, whereby the people who are sick and infected are put into tents or put into these military field hospitals.
And the doctors and nurses would be wearing protective gear, would be wearing spacesuits or breathing filter masks while they were treating patients.
So they would, in effect, they would biocontain themselves away from the patients.
And I think what would happen is that eventually, if the quarantine worked, that would be a good thing.
It might not work.
But remember that back in the 19th century, when there was no such thing as an antibiotic, the only thing that did work was quarantine.
In those days, the United States Public Health Service was actually a branch of the U.S.
military, as it is today.
And the U.S.
Public Health Service had tremendous powers.
Go in there, these officers in white uniforms would come in and they would literally quarantine a community.
They would literally shut things down until the disease had passed.
Alright.
Richard, hold on.
We're at the bottom of the hour.
We'll be right back and the phone lines will shortly be opened.
You're listening to Art Bell, Somewhere in Time.
Tonight, featuring Coast to Coast AM, from December 17th, 1997.
17 1997.
I see them blue for me and you and I think to myself what a wonderful world.
I see sky some blue and clouds of white the bright blessed day
the dark sacred night and I think to myself what a wonderful
world.
The.
you The colors of the rainbow, so pretty in the sky
Are also on the faces of people going...
Ah...
Premier Networks presents Art Bell, Somewhere in Time Tonight featuring Coast to Coast AM, from December 17th, 1997.
1997. Good morning, Richard Preston wrote the hot zone and now has a new book, the cobra event.
Same subject, more or less is my guest and we're about to get to phones.
You're listening to Art Bell, somewhere in time.
tonight featuring coast to coast a.m. from december seventeenth nineteen
ninety seven now once again here is uh... richard preston and this from
the associated press richard just out
A new strain of influenza that comes from chickens may mutate into a bug that can be spread from person to person, a change, they say, that could lead to a worldwide epidemic.
There is no evidence yet of human-to-human transmission, but the very nature of this virus means that it will acquire, that it, repeating, will acquire that property, said Robert G. Webster, a member of the World Health Organization's influenza team.
Again, a quote, it's only a matter of time, end quote.
That sounds pretty serious.
Sounds like we need a vaccine.
Yes, it does.
And I guess they're working on that very quickly.
What are the odds they will find it?
Pretty good?
Well, they've got a little problem.
You know, influenza vaccines are developed in eggs.
You grow them up in live, fertilized chicken eggs.
But since this is a bird virus, this is a chicken virus, it kills the egg.
So it's very difficult to get a vaccine in an egg that dies.
You need those eggs to survive long enough to create enough virus to be able to make a vaccine.
I never thought of that.
It came from chickens.
Yep.
And so they're going to have some problems.
I believe they're already trying to do this.
They're trying to grow the virus in eggs, and they're finding that the eggs die too quickly.
Here is, I think, a good question, then we'll go to the phones.
Art, what is it that you and your guests possibly hope to accomplish by discussing this kind of material?
Do you and or your guests truly believe This kind of information will enable the population to effectively protest biological warfare.
What do you and your guests suggest we, the public, could possibly do about it?
Yes, indeed, that's a great question.
And the answer is yes.
The people as a whole need to get in touch with their leadership and say that they need to be told the truth about biological weapons.
Bill Clinton, President Clinton and the White House staff know a great deal about biological weapons, about who's got what.
They knew all along about these things, these super bugs such as super black death and super anthrax developed in Russia.
This information has been classified for a long time and has not been told to the American people.
The American people need to know this kind of thing because after all, we will be the losers.
In any biological terror attack or military accident.
Indeed.
All right, let's try the phones.
Wild Card Line, you're on the air with Richard Preston.
Hello.
Hello, yes, my name is Charles.
I'm calling from Berkeley, California.
Yes, Charles.
And I thank you so very, very much for having Richard Preston on the program, Art.
I really congratulate you.
I couldn't possibly imagine a more appropriate guest to have at this time.
I say this because I myself work in a field which is somewhat tangentially related.
so-called nanotechnology, although I specialize in what's called nanobiology.
And I bring this up because DARPA, as I'm sure you all know, has been extremely interested in not only developing their own flavor of bugs, but more appropriately, their own response systems.
And a couple of questions I might want to toss out to your guests, if I may.
First of all, there's a group up in Washington State, which I won't name on the air, but perhaps your guests know, who's developed a very appropriate kind of Antigen response device, which allows a aerosol dispersant microbe to be detected in a fairly short amount of time.
This allows the foot soldier or whoever in the field to know that, you know, antigen or I'm sorry, biological entity X has been measured and is there in some form.
And B, I would like to toss out or at least suggest to your guest that the arena of being able to mechanically manipulate The molecular constructs of different kinds of microbes, both viruses and bacteria and so forth, has gone far beyond just a kind of experimental stage, and more into a, this is almost a rote at this point.
And so I kind of posed the question, really, almost to the same extent as the previous question was asked, as you've read in the air.
A, do you think that this could be protested in public, and should people want to know about this?
Sure, these are great questions.
policy be implemented politically or otherwise that would at least drive this to the public arena so that
there could be some kind of global
uh... manager tree is very worried that some kind of awareness so that this
could be seen as not a fictional but rather a
factual uh... realm that people could try to respond to and create
some kind of uh...
focused work so that sure these are great questions
first of all yet but i do know about the darpa work Indeed, I described some of it in the COBRA event.
The Bioterror Investigation Squad, the team, uses some of these new devices to detect a biological weapon in human blood or in samples of material.
One of the sensors that I talk about is what I call the BOINC biosensor.
It's a little handheld device that looks like a TV remote control that can detect up to 25 bioweapons.
There are also devices now that can sample the air and can detect particles in the air, weaponized bioparticles that may be drifting in the air invisibly.
biosensor and one of the people in the story uses it quite effectively.
There are also devices now that can sample the air and can find, detect particles in
the air, bioparticles, weaponized bioparticles that may be drifting in the air invisibly.
And these could be very useful in a battlefield scenario or indeed even in a city where there
would be a threat of terrorism, something in the air.
So this is very real stuff and it's part of a package of kind of countermeasures that
we need to take to get ourselves fully prepared to deal with the coming world.
The world of advanced biology.
How come all of a sudden, though?
I mean, for years and years and years, we've sort of all known this stuff was out there, but it's like suddenly there's a national awareness that something is about to happen.
Well, I think that there is, and I think part of it really may very well be coming from the government itself.
Actually, journalists tend to react to what they're hearing from their government sources.
And, you know, I know what I'm hearing from my sources, and what I'm hearing is that there may be specific intelligence information out there that groups may be actually acquiring things like smallpox or super anthrax or super black death.
The true right-wing wackos say out loud that they believe that our own government will be spraying our streets and our cities However, they are the very same groups, are they not, who are the ones most likely trying to construct some of this stuff in basements around the country?
Well, yeah, or acquire it.
I don't know why anybody would want to use it as a terror weapon, but then I don't understand terrorism very well.
It's very hard to understand.
It is to instill terror, whether or not it's used.
If you know someone has it and has a will or intent to use it, then you are terrorized.
Right.
East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Richard Preston.
Hi.
Hi, Art.
How are you doing this morning?
Fine.
Where are you?
This is Marty.
I'm calling from Oakland, New Jersey.
You're banging in here five by five on WPHT 1210 Philadelphia.
Yes, sir.
Two quick questions for your guest.
Number one, Concerning chemical and biological weapons, if these satellites are even half as sophisticated as we have been told they are, why the need to even have human inspectors on the ground in Iraq, or any place else for that matter?
And number two, we keep hearing how intelligent these viruses are, and something that has always baffled me How is it possibly in the interest of the virus to attack and kill the very host that is keeping the virus alive?
Both good questions.
All right.
The inspectors on the ground.
Is that a worthy endeavor?
And if they want to hide these things, are they going to be able to do it successfully?
Oh, you better believe it.
Well, first of all, the only way to find a bioweapons plant is having inspectors on the ground.
You can't see anything from the air.
The National Security Agency found that out when they began photographing these bio-warfare labs in Russia.
And after later, when the American inspection teams went in there, this is all described in the COBRA event, they found that the intelligence analysts had put all the circles and arrows on the wrong places in the photographs, and that the really scary equipment, the really scary facilities, were not even identified by the photo analysts.
So you need people on the ground.
The problem is that a bioreactor, which grows virus, you can photograph the thing from the outside, but you don't know what's growing inside it.
And what was the other question, then?
You know what?
I'm sorry, I blew it myself, and it was a good one, too.
We'll get it, I'm sure.
There are people, Richard, who have accused you of being part of the The sort of dissemination of information that's got this whole ball rolling.
I'm used to it.
People have been calling me for years, and they ask me if I'm CIA, and I just, I finally get fed up.
I said, yep, I'm CIA.
CFR too, and whatever else you might imagine.
So how do you handle those kinds of accusations?
I'm a normal guy.
You know, I'm just a writer.
And in fact, I don't, you know, I don't know much about the CIA.
What I know is that occasionally I would be told by somebody, you know, you're getting into classified material here for the Cobra event.
Oh, they did tell you that?
Oh, yeah.
They said, what they said to me was, you know, there are a couple of things.
When I started describing some of the facilities in Russia that have been discovered, you know, and analyzed now, and the people have seen, I was told on a couple of occasions, you know, really, if you describe this building, Corpus Zero, if you described Corpus Zero too closely here, the CIA has no sense of humor.
This is classified stuff.
So occasionally I would have to blur a little bit, but man, I am no tool of the CIA, I'll tell you that.
So then you really know a lot more than you were able to write about.
Well, I'll tell you.
I'll tell you this on air because I'm not afraid to say it anymore.
In the Cobra event, one of the characters, He talks about his experiences as a weapons inspector in Russia.
He went to a place called Koltsovo, which is in Siberia, and it's one of the major biowarfare labs.
Specifically, my source who was telling me about this place said to me, you can't give the name of the building where they have these huge explosion test chambers where they're testing weapons made of Ebola and smallpox.
You can't give the exact name of the thing, and you can't tell exactly where it's located on the campus at Koltsovo.
So I said, well, you know, what we all know.
And then I gave the guy the real name of the building.
By the way, the real name of the building is building Corpus 6A.
Okay?
And Corpus 6A is the Ebola smallpox air test facility.
And he said, you know, you don't want to say Corpus 6A.
You want to say, you know, give it another name.
So in the book I called it Corpus Zero, which I thought was a nice poetic name anyway.
But the real name of the building, you know, we now know is Corpus 6A.
Well, if you know that, then other people know that, and now a lot of people know that.
The thing is that everybody knows it.
It's known to world leaders who are being briefed about this stuff.
This biowarfare stuff is a dirty secret known to a number of world leaders, but being concealed from the general public.
Because world leaders don't know how to talk about it, and they don't want to have to tell their people about these kinds of things.
Well, we're great on treaties.
I think we're just going into this global warming treaty.
Now, treaties would seem appropriate for biological warfare development, but they're, in fact, they are totally useless, aren't they?
In other words, we would gladly sign on the dotted line because it would look politically horribly, just horrible not to, but then we would go right on ahead and develop anyway.
Well, the treaties are useful, like the 1972 Bioweapons Treaty.
It's useful because it sets the standard.
It defines what a violation is.
It defines what biowarfare is.
So it says, here's the line, here's the line in the sand, and the country that's gone over this line is in violation of the treaty.
Of course, a lot of people cheat on the treaty.
There's major cheating going on.
So then it's not better than really defining what it is?
all the cheating so that is not better than really defining what it is nothing
but in one thing i've heard which is refers back to all your first caller there is what
what should people actually do about that and i think really and truly uh... first of all you can
actually send email to the white house demanding you know
that the president get up and tell the american people the truth
and secondly com it might be quite useful for there to be uh...
international criminal in the area of development of bio weapons
with their laws that they you know you can't take
ebola virus smallpox virus and mix them together in a test tube and create a
That's a violation of, you know, ethics and international law, and you will be an international criminal if you do it.
Well, that would be an approach.
West of the Rockies, you're on the air with Richard Preston.
Hello.
Good morning, Mark.
Good morning, Richard.
Where are you, sir?
This is Jerry calling from Santa Cruz, listening to KSCO.
Yes, sir.
And I have two questions for Richard.
The first one is, don't you believe our greatest concern for problems with these biological weapons of mass destruction would come from either perhaps an accident like a biological Chernobyl, perhaps even from an eco-terrorist group Who doesn't believe that man is treating the earth properly and so let's just get rid of as many of us as possible.
Sort of a 12 monkeys scenario.
Yeah.
Let me just say that you should go ahead and read The Cobra Event because that's what it's about.
Okay.
I'm excited about both your books.
I'm going to go down tomorrow and see if I can find them.
Specifically The Cobra.
I really don't want to talk too much about the plot.
I don't want to give it away, but go read The Cobra Event.
Readers who have read the book are telling me that it's keeping them up for two nights in a row.
The first night you read the book and you can't stop reading it, and then the second night you're awake thinking about what you read.
My next question has to do with what I call the aftermath scenario.
Civilizations rise and fall, and I don't think we're going to be an exception.
Don't you think we have any responsibility towards future civilizations?
Somehow, warning them, like the pyramid for instance.
What if the pyramid was actually a containment for something that was deadly to humankind?
We've encased Chernobyl in a mass of concrete and we have these hidden biological weapons
rooms.
A thousand, two thousand years from now, we're so nosy, you think we should have some responsibility
towards warning future generations of the dangers of these?
Well, it's an interesting question.
Bioweapons, the living organisms, don't last too long unless they're kept in special freezers.
But I know that the Russians and other groups have been very interested in probing the permafrost to try to find old graves, places where people have died in unusual strains of smallpox and plague.
Wonderful to bring it back!
And in fact, this research into the bodies out of the permafrost is apparently one small element of the Russian biowarfare program.
You know, biowarfare programs involve a lot of sampling of nature.
You have people going out there in the field and people in emergency rooms taking blood samples and trying to find out, you know, what's out there in nature.
What's good?
And what could we use to make into a weapon here?
AIDS, Richard, what is your take on AIDS?
In other words, a lot of people think and have made accusation that it was an engineered As a matter of fact, there was congressional testimony, I'm sure you're well aware, questioning scientists and whether they could actually develop something that would destroy the human immune system.
Now, you think it could have been made?
Yeah, this is a very interesting question.
If you would have asked me a year ago, three years ago, when I finished The Hot Zone, if you would have asked me, is AIDS a weapon?
I would have said no, absolutely not.
The evidence shows that it's an emerging natural virus from the rainforests of Central Africa.
That's the consensus view.
But now, knowing what I know now about the kinds of research that is going on in various places around the world, I have to kind of wonder.
There's a little bit of doubt in the back of my mind.
The origin of AIDS is unknown.
Most likely, it's natural.
But since the origin is unknown, the possibility that it's something that leaked out of a laboratory cannot be ruled out.
For example, I don't think that AIDS is probably genetically engineered.
I don't think it's an artificial virus, but I think that it could be something that a military program was working with.
There was an awful lot of research going on in the 50s, 60s and 70s in these military
labs and one of the focuses was trying to find agents that will crush the human immune
system.
Maybe, you know, they were growing up, maybe the Russians or somebody were growing up the
AIDS virus and testing it out in humans and they found, hey, it doesn't work very well
because it doesn't kill you, it just kind of depresses your immune system.
But they failed to recognize the fact that it kills you ten years later and then it got
out into the human population.
That's one possible scenario.
That's highly speculative.
That's only a hypothesis.
But since the origin of AIDS is unknown, we can't rule these kinds of things out.
And that's what the caller said, that there would be a sort of a biological Chernobyl.
Yeah.
And maybe AIDS was.
Right.
In the Cobra event, I talk about this and about how there was a biological Chernobyl.
It occurred on April 10th, 1979, in the city of Yekaterinburg in Russia, also known as Sverdlovsk.
Really?
When anthrax blew into the air, a machine blew up.
Really?
Yeah, and I've heard it was a bioreactor that imploded, and I've also heard that it was a dust grinder machine that the filters failed on.
And a plume of anthrax crossed the city, and afterwards people began to die.
This is what is known about the effect of anthrax on humans.
The death toll reached about 66 or so.
It wasn't a major thing, but there was a lot of death in the city.
Richard, I have one more hour.
Can you hold on?
All right, we'll go for it.
All right, hang in there.
We'll be right back.
Richard Preston is my guest.
The Hot Zone.
And now, he's got a brand new one, the Cobra.
You bet.
We'll be right back.
Stay right there.
You're listening to Art Bell, Somewhere in Time.
Tonight, featuring Coast to Coast AM, from December 17th, 1997.
When he came across this young man sawin' on a fiddle and playin' it hot.
And the devil jumped up on a hickory stump and said, boy, let me tell you what.
I guess you didn't know it, but I'm a fiddle player too.
And if you care to take a dare, I'll make a bet with you.
Now you played pretty good fiddle, boy, but give the devil his due.
Oh, and it's all right, and it's coming home, we're gonna get right back to where we started from. Love is good.
Love is good.
Love can be strong.
We've got to get right back to where we started from.
Do you remember that day?
Surely you did.
When you first came my way.
I said no one could take your place.
And if you get hurt, if you get hurt by the little things that we do,
I can put that smile back on your face.
When it's all right and it's coming on, we gotta get right back to where we started from.
Somewhere in Time with Art Bell continues, courtesy of Premier Networks.
Here I am and my guest is Richard Preston and we have pressed him for one more hour.
Hey, listen, if you'll go to my website right now, which is up, you will find, if you scroll down to Richard Preston's name, a link that will take you directly over to a page showing you An explosive and terrifying new story from the best-selling author of The Hot Zone, Richard Preston.
And you will see the Cobra events.
So if you want to know more, head up to my website.
Here once again is Richard Preston.
Richard, is your book now available generally nationwide?
Yes.
The Cobra Vent is available in all bookstores.
All bookstores.
Wow.
All right.
The missing question from last hour was, if the virus is so intelligent, why would it seek out and kill its own host?
Well, Often enough, viruses don't do that.
They make an accommodation with their host and they survive in the host.
It's generally in the best interest of a virus not to kill its host because then the virus dies in that host.
However, if a virus can spread rapidly enough from host to host, then in a sense it doesn't care whether the host survives or not.
It propagates.
It propagates.
And the point of all life is to make more copies of itself.
Alright, here is a... I'm near Las Vegas, not far from Las Vegas, so this is a touchy question by facts for me, but here it is anyway.
Question for Richard.
A quarantine may be effective in most towns.
What, though, would be the effect of a biological Well, this is a pretty bad scenario here.
like Las Vegas where you'd have potentially thousands, tens of thousands of visitors who
have already been exposed and then promptly carry this biological event to thousands of
different places all over the U.S. and the world before being discovered.
Well, this is a pretty bad scenario here.
The problem nowadays is that people travel a lot.
And they travel on airlines.
They can spread something very rapidly through airline routes so that a clever terrorist or an insidious terrorist would probably get a bigger effect if he did the release in an airport.
Not necessarily in a city like Las Vegas, but in an airport.
for it.
Sure.
I do a lot of air travel.
I have been to Europe any number of times, to Asia any number of times, down in the Caribbean, South America.
I've been all over the place.
You know, 15-hour plane flights.
And I have yet, despite all my precautions, I have yet to be able to survive one of these flights without coming down with something awful.
I mean, every single time without fail.
Same deal on cruise ships.
There's just, there's almost no way It seems like to avoid it and
They will let anybody on an airplane.
I mean, on the last trip I made to Europe, Richard, there was this woman and man about two seats in front of us, and she was just... I mean, they obviously had the flu.
She was... It was horrible.
It's gross to talk about, but she was covered in snot.
Her husband... I mean, it was just spraying everywhere.
Her husband had a fever, was burning up next to her.
Why did they let people like this on airplanes, and That's the minor question compared to somebody, say, getting on an airplane somewhere in Africa and landing in New York.
Well, precisely.
And indeed, it happens all the time.
The airlines do serve as an amplifier of outbreaks nowadays.
And outbreaks can occur, and then all of a sudden they'll pop up in another city because someone came along on an airline.
That's the way it works.
All right.
Back to the lines.
Lots of people.
First time caller line.
You're on the air with Richard Preston.
Where are you, please?
I'm in Santa Cruz, California.
All right.
My name is Tony.
You mentioned about the theory about AIDS being started by the government.
Back in the early 60s up until about 1978, I worked as a school teacher in Liberia, West Africa.
I was up in the interior.
It was at a leprosarium, actually.
We taught the children of the people who had the leprosy.
I can remember going to the clinic one day on the way home from school, and a doctor came twice a month, and there was this boy who was dying.
He was about 14 years old, and I waited until the boy passed, and the doctor turned and said to me, you know, brother, I don't understand what these people are dying from.
He said, some of these people have no immune systems when they die.
And that was when?
That was about 1963.
Sixty-three.
Sixty-three?
Sixty-three.
And about a week later I was in the clinic again and you know when they brought lepers to the hospital the people just used to drop them and run.
And I found this man under a bunch of burlap sacks.
And he didn't look like a leper to me, but he was very, very sick.
And I took care of him for about two days, and when he died, he had terrible lesions all over his body.
And no one knew what he died from.
And the doctor kept saying he wasn't a leper.
Then I never heard about it again.
I came back to the States in the late 70s.
I went home to Key West, Florida, and I started hearing it there in the 80s.
Is it possible, obviously what he's saying is... That's a great story.
I like to hear that.
That's very, very interesting.
You could conceivably have been seeing AIDS cases.
I think that doctors don't have enough blood samples frozen left over from that time period to be able to find good evidence of the AIDS virus in a population in West Africa.
But that would be absolutely believable.
One can very well imagine that the AIDS virus was present in human populations for quite some time before it was discovered.
Well, I know they exhumed some bodies and I vaguely recall a news story about the fact that they believe they found the AIDS virus many years before we officially detected it.
Right, they've done that now.
I think, and this is one reason why I tend to think that maybe the AIDS virus is natural because They've got some isolations of the virus from samples of people who died in the late 1950s.
And that was really before the time period when military labs had the capability to deal, to create, or to work with viruses like the AIDS virus.
So that would tend to suggest that the thing came out of nature.
All right.
Wild Card Line, you're on the air with Richard Preston.
Good morning.
Good evening.
Or morning, I guess.
Morning, probably.
Where are you?
I'm Dustin in Omaha, Nebraska.
I've got your book and it's kind of like a finger of light stabbing through the midst of uncertainty as far as I'm concerned.
My question is, is it possible that the government is using, or they're just claiming the vaccines to be anthrax, but is it possible that they're piggybacking it with other vaccines against other agents?
No, that's a good question.
I think that they would have to disclose that to service people.
I think troops would have to be told what vaccine they're actually getting.
I think that's a requirement.
But I think, you know, if they can start vaccinating for anthrax, I know they would probably like to develop more vaccines and give more and different kinds of vaccines to people in military service.
All right, that does it.
All right, thank you very much.
You like the Cobra event, huh?
Are you still there?
Yeah.
You like that?
Did you get his new book?
Are you referring to the Cobra event?
No, I'm talking about yours, Art.
Oh, my books!
Hey, all right!
I'm not quite done yet, but so far it's been fairly good.
Some of that stuff, I mean, it's just scary.
What I did, Richard, I'm sure you may not be aware of it.
I've got a book called The Quickening.
A lot of your material or material that you've written about is in that book, but it basically contends that in nearly every aspect of human endeavor right now from the environment to our economy To our social behavior, to... on and on and on.
Events seem to be moving faster and faster and faster towards some sort of... Now, I am not a prophet, and I don't know what it is.
I'm just an observer.
I've been doing talk radio all my adult life, and I have seen these events beginning to quicken, just as we're getting all these new viruses now.
And I was challenged by my audience who would say, no, no, no, no.
We're just hearing about it more because we have mass communications, and when there's bird flu in Hong Kong, we hear about it immediately.
And I wanted to prove that that was not so, that in fact, events were quickening, and so I wrote that book, and that's what he was referring to.
That's neat, and I like the title, too.
Good title.
The quickening, I think, traditionally would be defined as the first movement of a child in a mother's womb.
So it could be a beginning, it could be an end.
I really don't know.
I'm not a prophet, but I can see what's going on.
East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Richard Preston.
Hello.
Yes, this is Jeff from Penson.
Before I get to my comment, I'd like to make... Jeff, hold on.
Penson?
You can't just say that.
Where is Penson?
Penson, Alabama.
Okay.
I'm sorry.
First, I'd like to make just a very brief suggestion.
There's a book out called Diseases from Space.
It's by Fred Hoyle and Chandra Rikramasinghe.
And with the release of information that Dr. Louis Frank has about the comets hitting Earth, and knowing that these things do have hydrocarbon compounds, it might be worth a look.
On to my comment now.
I'm not particularly scared of Ebola.
As you know, Dr. McCormick was in a hut full of this stuff.
He didn't get it.
He and his wife bought Lassa using ribavirin.
They didn't get it.
They didn't have to wear a lot of this spacesuit type stuff every step of the way.
What I'm worried about is technophobia.
I know of two bugs right now that have killed more people than Ebola.
And anthrax combined.
It's called diarrhea and measles.
In other countries, these things are on a rampage, and we think they're a joke, because we live in a country with business and industry and science and technology.
And people on the right want to talk about this Gulf War lore nonsense.
They want to talk about all this chlorinated water.
It's a communist plot.
Don't take any of these vaccines.
Take this colloidal silver.
And people on the left think that if we would just cut off our opposable thumbs, And give ourselves a collective lobotomy and go back into the caves along with Jeremy Riskin and Theodore Kavinsky, or back up to the trees with Tarzan and Cheetah, everything would be just fine.
I think it's just fear.
That's what's going to kill us in the end.
Alright, technophobia.
What about that, Richard?
Well, I'm no technophobe.
I'm just the opposite.
I'm a supporter of technology.
And what's going to get us out of our problems with biological weapons is good defenses.
It's going to mean things like biosensor machines, good detection capability, very smart forensics.
Forensic science is what the Cobra event is all about.
It's about using forensic science to try to look at this trace evidence to find out who's really doing it and why.
We can't cut our thumbs off and we're not going to do that.
We have to move forward with technology and make it work right for us.
That's my belief about technology.
And the other really good point you made was about what the major killers are.
The biggest killer in the world today in terms of infectious disease is the old one, malaria.
Malaria kills millions of children every year.
The death toll from malaria is far higher than from Ebola virus.
People don't take malaria seriously in this country because we don't have malaria, but it's a very big problem in other countries and there is right now a desperate need for a vaccine for malaria.
Well, I thought his characterization of the far right and the far left was pretty much right on the money.
All right, West of the Rockies, you're on the air with Richard Preston.
Hello.
Hi.
Hi, where are you?
I'm in Tucson right now.
Tucson, all right.
And I wanted to know if...
Mr. Preston actually really thought that we were not still conducting offensive research in CBW and chemical biological weaponry.
I think that's a good question.
Richard, you seem to indicate that you thought we were not.
Well, it's a good question, all right, and I think there are actually two answers to the question.
I haven't found any evidence that we're actively engaged now in offensive biowarfare research.
On the other hand, you probably wouldn't find it, though, would you?
A program could be hidden.
Exactly.
It could be hidden away and it might be very hard to see it and to identify it as such.
The other real part of the answer is that if the United States wanted to have such a program, the U.S.
could have it very quickly because we have the very best biotechnology industry in the world.
And I would suggest that you could find What would amount to secret military development of these biological weapons?
Maybe not in military labs, but maybe in some little private lab somewhere in New Jersey.
Even the military, Richard.
If we have an active defense underway right now, in other words, if we are doing research in the defense area of biological weapons, it's a very, very narrow jump To, in other words, to defend against something, to develop vaccines and so forth and so on, whatever it is they're doing in labs, they've got to have the agent that they're trying to develop a vaccine against, don't they?
Right.
They have to have these agents anyway, even to do the defense.
So, the line can be crossed between defensive research and offensive research, figuring out a way to make the bug better as a killer.
And then also loading it into a deployment system, figuring out ways to To get it into the air and to put it into these flatteners that I was talking about and things like that.
Just to give you an example, I'm talking to one of my sources and I just heard that a Russian group, a biowarfare group, developed a so-called recombinant virus.
This is a virus that's made of mixing the parts of two different viruses together.
And the virus that was created was a combination of A brain virus called VEE and a smallpox-like virus called Vaccinia.
They took these two totally different viruses and they mixed them up and they made it work.
They got a new life form out of it which is called a Chimera.
The Chimera in Greek mythology you may remember was a monster with the head of a goat.
No, the head of a lion and the body of a goat and the tail of a dragon.
A mixture of parts.
Now this Chimera The Russians made this mixed virus.
They claimed that they were doing it for peaceful purposes.
I'm not sure why they would want to do it.
But it seems pretty obvious to me that if you can make a chimera out of a brain virus plus a smallpox-like virus, you can do exactly the same thing with real smallpox and a brain virus.
And you've got a super bug.
You've got a laboratory bug that could be an absolute killer that creates what amounts to smallpox inside the human brain.
Oh my God.
Which would do what to your brain?
Well, no one has been infected with this that I know of.
Curiously enough, in the Cobra event, the girl that dies at the beginning who is chewing her face off, What she indeed has is a recombinant virus made from smallpox and a brain virus.
Well, don't give it all away.
I'm leaking this book out.
I don't want to give any more away here.
Alright, well then don't.
We've got a half hour to go.
go stay right where you are.
And we will be right back.
Oh This is Coast to Coast AM.
This is Premier Networks.
That was Art Bell hosting Coast to Coast AM.
On this, Somewhere in Time.
I've got to tell you I've been racking my brain Hoping to find a way out I've had enough of this continual rain Changes are coming, no doubt.
It's been a too long time with no peace of mind.
And I'm ready for the times to get bad.
You seem to want from me what I cannot give All of times have come
Here but now they're gone Seasons don't feel the reaper
Not till the wind and the sun and the rain Leave me like they are
Come on baby Don't feel the reaper
Baby take my hand Don't feel the reaper
We'll be able to fly Don't feel the reaper
Baby I'm your man La la la la la
You're listening to Art Bell, somewhere in time.
Tonight, featuring Coast to Coast AM, from December 17th, 1997.
Good morning, my guest is Richard Preston, and we're going into this stretch run.
The Cobra event is Richard Preston's latest book.
It's in the stores now.
It's like the Hot Zone.
If you read the Hot Zone, it's one of those you cannot put down.
And as I said, I ran, you know, now that I think about it, now that I've got Richard here.
Richard, are you there?
Yes.
You know, I've been signing books for, zillions of books for people, and I rarely ask, but I would, I would give my Some sort of right appendage to have an autographed copy of the Cobra Event.
You've got one, Art.
Really?
I'll tell you what you can do is you can send me an email.
Anybody can send me an email.
Right.
What is your email address?
It's Richard Preston.
That's one word.
Right.
At Malexcite.com.
M-A-L-E-X-C-I-T-E.
Malexcite.com.
Consider it to be on the way.
Richard Preston, right?
At mailexcite.com.
Right.
Alright, it'll be on the way.
I try to reply to all of my emails.
It's hard, I know.
And you just wait until tomorrow.
Alright, here's a question for you and then back to the phones.
How long after a person dies would they be able to infect another person with the Ebola virus?
Well, the Ebola virus can live Experimenters in the U.S.
Army, a guy that I was talking to, said that he took Ebola virus, he put it in clean water at room temperature, and he left it on a tabletop for about 10 days.
At the end of that time period, he took it and he was able to infect cells with it.
It was alive and well after sitting in water for 10 days.
These were little tiny Ebola virus particles just floating around in the water.
Most viruses would die under such conditions.
Ebola virus is a very tough, hardy virus, and so you can catch Ebola virus from a dead body.
That's easy.
Okay.
First time caller on the line, you're on the air with Richard Preston.
Hello.
Hi.
I'm calling from Granford Prairie, Alberta, Canada.
All right.
And I'm catching your program on skip, and it's rather interesting.
I read the hot zone.
I've got a question for Richard, if you'd like to just discuss it a bit.
Go ahead.
There's a part in his book about the Ebola being affected in lab monkeys in the states.
I believe it was Washington.
I can't remember exactly the year that he said that it happened.
And I'm curious to know what kind of response they had to the cleanup and how they contained it.
Well, the year was 1989 and the United States Army moved in with actually a military team.
And they sealed the building off and they went inside with spacesuits.
And they killed the monkeys by giving them lethal injections one by one.
Finally, they cleaned the building.
They washed it thoroughly with chemicals to the point where they actually took the paint right off the walls in some places.
Then they filled the building with gases and left it filled with gas for three days.
And at the end of the time period, they went back in and they tested and they found that the building had essentially been sterilized, that there was no life left in the building.
Then finally, they also traced all of the humans who had come in contact with the monkeys because any of those humans could be potentially carrying the virus to infect other humans.
I seem to recall that there was an incident where one individual was feeling sick and it scared the hell out of him during that thing and he went outside on the lawn and threw up or something.
Right, and they rushed him to the hospital.
It turned out, in the end, that he didn't have Ebola virus.
He just had common flu.
But?
But, when they tested the blood of the monkey workers, they found that five of them had actually been infected with the Ebola Reston strain of virus.
The virus had gotten into their bloodstream and had multiplied there.
It had been processed in their bodies, but it did not give them any overt symptoms of Ebola.
They had had silent Ebola infections.
The Ebola then cleared out of their bodies and they had no ill effects afterwards.
This strain of Ebola, the Ebola Restless Strain, is the only one known that apparently doesn't make humans sick, although it's absolutely deadly in monkeys.
Why it seems to lack that human lethality factor is a very big mystery.
It was that close though?
Yep.
Alright, West of the Rockies, you're on the air with Richard Preston.
Hello.
Hello, my name is Ken from Hawaii.
Where are you in Hawaii?
Hobby, Hawaii.
Okay.
Where's that?
Which island?
Island, Hawaii.
Oh, the Big Island.
Oh, the Big Island.
Yes.
That's a great place.
I was there about a year ago.
Yeah, it is.
I have a two-part question.
One is, are both of you aware that there was a Strep A virus, flesh-eating virus, on Kauai?
Yes, I've heard it's just about everywhere, the Strep A bug.
This is the one that melts flesh.
Yes.
One person has died and there's about 30 or 40 people who got it.
No, I was not aware it was on Kauai.
And my basic feeling is it's probably coming out of Asia because of the immigration that we still have in the state.
No one seems to know where it comes from.
It's been found everywhere.
I mean, it's been found in Connecticut.
It was found in England.
It's something that pops up here and there in communities.
Someone, they really don't know.
Actually, how it's transmitted or where it comes from, it's some kind of strep.
It's probably latent in the human population.
There are probably many human silent carriers of this type of strep, where it just doesn't make them sick.
But then every now and then it erupts and just melts a human being.
It's one of those very odd bugs that I think not a whole lot is known about it.
Except that there seems to be a lot more of it in the last two or three years.
Or there's more mass communication.
Well, yeah.
I don't know which.
Yeah, maybe this is a quickening.
There's been a lot of talk about whether Strep A is having sort of a quickening in the human population, whether there's more of it around or whether we're just noticing it because of the media reports.
Exactly.
East of the Rockies, you're on there with Richard Preston.
Hello.
Good morning, Art.
Good morning, Mr. Preston.
Where are you, sir?
Tampa, Florida.
Okay.
But I have to listen to you through the blowtorch here out of Charlotte.
Charlotte, all right.
Yeah, they blow in here.
Yeah, you know, several years ago, Art, you've probably seen the movie Bloodsport.
The subject of that movie was a fellow by the name of Frank Dukes.
He's a real walking, talking, living being.
He was William Casey's right hand man.
In his book, The Secret Man, which was supposed to be true to life, he talks about his exploits of kind of tracing the Russian Mafia going through uh... the soviet union looking for a uh...
super secret strain of anthrax uh... yes i don't
but i was wondering if uh...
you know if uh...
you know anything about that well we know something about a super secret
strain of anthrax that's for sure yeah i don't know about that specific thing but what i do
know is that uh... apparently
the russians themselves what we know about the russian program is largely on
the basis of remarks dropped by russian scientists to american visitors
saying well yeah we know we do have this anthrax It's multi-drug resistant.
It's a super anthrax.
They kind of guardedly confess to what they've done.
Part of it is just a matter of pride.
These guys are scientists.
Even if we think that what they did is extremely ugly, they're kind of proud of it in a way.
Even though they know that it's ugly, they also want the world to know that they did good science.
There's a lot of pride there.
Yeah, pride.
Wild Card Line, you're on the air with Richard Preston.
Hello.
Yes, hello.
Where are you?
I'm in Sacramento.
Okay.
And I was wondering what he would do to guard himself against catching anything.
In other words, are most of these airborne?
And as I saw in a movie once, a lot of people in Japan were wearing masks.
I guess there's, you know, is that what we're coming to?
Where we wear masks so we don't breathe the air?
But you know, how can you go around in your daily life wearing a mask?
Right.
I don't want to do that.
So what do you do?
Well, I take something of a fatalistic idea about this that, you know, it's sort of like whether there's going to be a big earthquake or whether a terrible hurricane is going to hit.
You know, whether a nuclear war will happen next week.
You have to kind of get on with your normal life.
The one thing that I do is that I really would like to see our government pay attention to this problem and take kind of common simple steps to prepare for an emergency should it be needed.
Things like stockpiling medicines, having an emergency response system in place so that emergency medical teams could be flown into a city if there was a desperate sudden need.
If people were suddenly dropping from anthrax or from some other thing like smallpox, stockpiles of vaccines that could be used in an emergency.
These are things that our government could do.
They're rather simple.
They're not terribly complicated or expensive.
And they could save many, many lives in a biological emergency.
Finally, I'd like to see our government just get honest with us and tell us what it knows.
Well, that was where my question was going.
If there was an outbreak somewhere, and the government threw up a cordon, which they no doubt would, around the outbreak area of whatever it was, in your honest opinion, would they tell us?
Well, from real life experience, especially from reporting on the events that occurred with the hot zones, Also, my sources in the FBI and the Cobra event are telling me that in a low-grade kind of invisible bio-terror event, if there was a release of a military virus into a human population or something like anthrax, the initial knee-jerk reaction would be to say, holy moly, we better not tell anybody about this because it's just going to start a panic and more people are going to die.
So there would be, and this is the basic scenario of the Cobra event, that this secret bioterror unit, which really exists at Quantico, would be brought in and these people would go to work with their forensic tools and their little machines and everything, studying the cases, kind of like, it's a little bit like the X-Files, I guess, to try to figure out quickly what the source of this outbreak is, to try to stop it quietly.
Before the entire public finds out, it has a massive freak out.
Exactly.
First Time Caller Line, you're on air with Richard Preston.
Where are you, please?
This is Dan.
I'm in Virginia, not too far from Ruston.
I know the labs that you're talking about.
The thing I wanted to bring up is that there's a possibility that you can use essential oils to help protect against viruses and things.
If you go back and look in the Bible, when the plague happened, they used lamb's blood, but there was essential oils mixed in with it, like frankincense and myrrh.
And then there's a reference to it when the plague happened, there were the grave robbers who actually robbed the bodies, but they never caught the plague.
And the reason why is they were using essential oils.
You know, to put on their body to protect them.
Well, I'm willing to try anything, but what I would try first would be antibiotics and vaccines.
Yeah.
Does that sound more like a myth to you than it does reality?
Essential oils?
I don't know what they are.
Well, they're not tested.
They haven't been subjected to any kind of, you know, any kind of scientific testing.
So I guess we don't know.
But my inclination would be to say that viruses are Very clever little creatures.
They're very good.
Extremely good at evading the human immune system.
And if they work at that level, I'm not sure that any oil could work on them.
Rare could work.
The only thing that's really bugging me, Richard, is it's bad enough how they're emerging on their own right now.
And here we have labs helping them out, turning them into more efficient, transmissible human-to-human bugs.
That really gets to me.
Well, it gets to me.
It outrages me in a moral sense.
How these people could do this is beyond me.
That's why I do believe that there ought to be some kind of international standard with a sense, a kind of declaration, an international declaration that people who do this are committing a crime against humanity.
I mean, when you develop these superbugs that are infectious and can explode through a human population, can run out of control, You're not really developing a weapon that you can use.
You're really just developing something that can scare the daylights out of people, and maybe, you know, create a hell of a lot of havoc somewhere.
All right.
Wildcard Line, you're on the air with Richard Preston.
Hello.
Hello.
Hi there.
Where are you?
I'm in Dandridge, Tennessee.
All right.
I was curious about a couple of scenarios you put together, a couple of movies.
Yes.
An old movie, I believe it was called The Andromeda Strain.
Of course, one of the first.
Okay, um, most of the lab stuff they showed in there, what they were getting down to was basically designed for biological warfare.
But with somebody's classified satellites we've been sending up?
Yes.
Couldn't they be basically doing the same thing right now?
Yes.
I mean, we don't know that.
There's no way we can know that for a fact, of course, but the answer has to be yes, of course they could do it.
The Andromeda Strain, was that one of the very first, I believe it was, wasn't it, Richard?
Yeah, that was the Michael Crichton novel that later became a film about a bug from outer space that was handled with extreme measures of biocontainment.
And finally, in the end of the book, the thing mutated and the world was saved because the thing mutated into something different.
I'm trying to remember.
I think it might have been rain.
Something like that.
Well, it went off back into space and began eating rubber, as I remember.
He's to the Rockies.
You're on there with Richard Treston.
Hello.
Hello.
I think there's a lot of misdirection and blame-shifting and psychological warfare going on by this kind of a program, I think.
Well, where are you, sir?
I'm in Cleveland, Ohio.
And what are you going to do from Cleveland?
Well, the point I'm making is that I think that the history, always denied but later proven, of U.S.
involvement in chemical and biological warfare going back to the 40s through the 50s through the 60s, they've always lied about this, that their production of, Dietrich production of anthrax, the fact that they were spraying Over Minneapolis, St.
Louis, other cities, various biological warfare experiments on people.
Some of those people died.
The fact that, for instance, when the United States claimed that they would destroy stockpiles of biological agents back in 1970, they lied because the CIA was still storing those supplies.
That's the truth.
And then Congressional hearings after they said they had destroyed those, they moved them into private storage.
I'm reading an article in The Nation where this kind of hypocrisy that we're using to strangle and crush a bloody Iraq on the basis of him not allowing these weapons inspections.
We, in our own protocol, are even more extreme in allowing less inspections according to the Chemical Inspection Treaty.
And the fact that Robert Gell and others have said, even according to George Riley, who you had on your program, was working for a chemical, a military biological weapons contractor.
Look, you can stop right there.
I couldn't agree more with you.
We lie.
We've been lying.
The U.S.
government has a terrible track record in this area.
And the gentleman is right.
The U.S.
government was testing stuff on the American population.
The CIA had stocks of biological weapons long after the United States had said that they were supposed to be destroyed.
What I think is going on right now is I think that the situation is somewhat better.
I think there's more transparency.
I have not myself seen evidence of any contemporary bio-weapons research program going on.
I'm talking about offensive bio-weapons.
But my feeling is that it could happen quickly.
And if it did happen, it might very well be invisible at first.
One would hope.
You know, we live in a democracy in which, you know, even civil servants who work for the federal government can become whistleblowers.
And my sense of it is that if we did have a major bioweapons program, the news of it would get out.
People would talk about it and you'd find out about it in the news media, eventually.
Well, one of the things that's going on in Russia is that they just don't have a strong news media and they don't have a strong democracy.
And so there's absolutely no public protest.
There's nothing to check the military people when they go ahead and develop this stuff.
Well, Richard, they always say you just couldn't keep a secret like that.
But we haven't known about Tuskegee that long.
We haven't known about the revelations that Hazel O'Leary laid on us about all the children and pregnant mothers that were fed plutonium and that sort of thing.
Yeah, it's a good point, Art.
It is.
Listen, we're at the end of it.
You're going to get a lot of email.
It's Richard Preston at mailexcite.com.
And your new book, The Cobra Event, available in all stores everywhere.
Richard, thank you.
That Cobra Event's a page-turner.
It will keep you up two nights in a row, as I said.
Guaranteed, huh?
First night reading it, and the second night thinking about it.
Thank you, my friend.
Good night, and sleep well.
From the high deserts,
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