Richard Preston and Art Bell examine the Pentagon’s 1997 anthrax vaccination push for 2.4 million U.S. troops, despite unproven efficacy against aerosolized exposure, citing 43% Gulf War veterans reporting side effects—contradicting official claims—and declassified docs confirming Saddam Hussein’s 1980s-era anthrax stockpile. Preston details weaponizable Ebola (1989 Reston outbreak, Aum Shinrikyo’s 1995 African samples) and Russia’s super black death, a genetically engineered airborne killer, while Bell questions treaties like the 1972 Bioweapons Convention amid global proliferation. They warn of silent, engineered threats—like H5N1’s vaccine-resistant mutations—and call for transparency, forensic defenses, and criminalization of pathogen enhancement, underscoring how biowarfare could blur into natural outbreaks or state-sponsored deception. [Automatically generated summary]
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.
First comes Joyce Riley, and she has a lot of information for you on the anthrax shots, about the 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 Molten Howe with a variety of items for you, followed by David Oates and Reverse Speech.
On Friday night, Dale Kazmarak 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 Chagnan, Dr. Napoleon Shagnon, 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 with regard to the Yanamama people.
The rainforest Yanamama 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.
unidentified
Psh!
Thank you.
You're listening to Art Bell, Somewhere in Time, tonight featuring Coast to Coast AM, from December 17th, 1997.
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 doing some sort of television program, and she called me earlier today and said, oh, Art, you've got to hear about this anthrax stuff.
You're going to have to get into that phone and yell at us because the hotel phones are not famously loud.
But welcome to the program.
unidentified
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 100,000 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.
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?
unidentified
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.
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 there are, 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.
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.
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.
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?
unidentified
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.
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 anthrax and treated with antibiotics.
They had to be treated with antibiotics also.
So this is a whole different situation and scenario about what we're talking about in our troops.
Although the results of this study suggest the vaccine might protect against anthrax that has been sprayed, it is not sufficient to prove 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.
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, oh, 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.
I just, 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?
unidentified
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 of 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.
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 Andrew 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 three pathogens that the American type culture collection provided to Saddam Hussein and didn't bother to mention to you that there was 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.
And if they had an aha experience and got a fax that said, by the way, guess what?
Well, we've known it since 1980s since we started providing it to them.
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 0.2% of the people 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% of the Gulf War veterans reporting immediate side effects with anthrax.
If 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.
unidentified
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 are 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 that...
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 have 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 there'll be an attack.
That's how it's going to go.
unidentified
I think you're right.
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 Hamdun, 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 imminent.
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?
unidentified
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.
I'm hearing from military people who are refusing to take these inoculations.
Now, 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?
unidentified
Oh, yes, and there's a mechanism they can refuse it.
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 as soon get the shots, hope it works, as opposed to going without.
Now, that's an attitude.
What do you think?
unidentified
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?
unidentified
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?
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?
unidentified
Absolutely.
And that would seem to be of more value than telling the whole world what you plan on doing.
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.
And they too are saying that the efficacy regarding inhaled is unknown?
unidentified
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.
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?
unidentified
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 shots, 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 7 o'clock in the morning saying Art's going to go get an anthrax shot.
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 understand.
I think we're being set up.
I think something is going to happen.
And so in a lot of ways, I'm faced with the same kind of question in my mind that the military guys are right now.
unidentified
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?
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?
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.
And 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.
Now, if we're going to vaccinate against sniffles, diarrhea, a rash, 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.
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, 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.
unidentified
I don't know, and it frightens me, but I would like to...
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 ask for Schwarzkopf Testifies 1-800-201-7892-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?
unidentified
If it is experimental, well, it has to be approved by the FDA, which it is.
Now, Okay, maybe then that accounts for why they're doing this as publicly as they are.
They have no choice.
Would that be true?
unidentified
I can't answer that.
I don't know the answer to that.
But I think that we need to look at the disease processes 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 where 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 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?
unidentified
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.
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.
unidentified
Oh, there's no question in my mind.
And you know, as many times as I have 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?
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.
unidentified
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.
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.
unidentified
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 area for 50 years.
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.
unidentified
Well, 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 to 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, knowing full well he's had this since we knew he was working on it since the 1980s.
All right, 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 $10, it's 1-800-201-7892, 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?
unidentified
That's correct.
And also our website, 3ws.gulfwarvets.com, and hit the American Veterans Justice Foundation on their link, and you'll get additional information on anthrax.
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 Kazmarak, 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 Yanamama people, the rainforest people, who have some rather savage practices.
And we had Mark Richian, 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 Anamamo 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.
unidentified
A moment, Richard Preston.
You're listening to Art Bell Somewhere in Time.
Tonight featuring Coast to Coast AM from December 17, 1997.
Coast AM Forgot the reason I even mentioned the cricketing.
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 Paka.
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 New Corps 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.
I remember seeing a 60-minutes program in which, toward the very end, reporting on what occurred at that monkey house at Reston, a 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 have been airborne and would have torn its way through Washington.
So why don't you tell the audience, if you can, what the hell did really happen back then?
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.
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?
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 were a number of employees in the building who had been face to face with these monkeys and then had gone home and had been with their families, their spouses and children.
Ebola virus is known to be sexually transmitted.
There was a lot of concern.
And these guys had been going to public fast food restaurants, shopping malls.
It was the Christmas season.
And so there was a lot of concern that this thing would begin to spread.
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 nonfiction 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.
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 lungs in weaponized form.
So 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.
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 operundi of this virus?
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, 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.
But 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.
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 Kolsovo, where it is known that genetic research is being done on organisms to try to, so to speak, 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.
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.
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.
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, two 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.
Everybody has heard the word anthrax, but very few people, even doctors, actually know what it is or what It looks like.
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, the 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, you know, 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.
Oh, 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.
And scientists in Russia, where there was an accident with a biological weapon, anthrax, watched people die.
And they said that the doctors would be talking to a patient lying in bed.
And so 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.
And doctors would have no idea what had killed them.
It would take days and days to identify this as anthrax.
And if it weren't, you know, if the casualties were in the hundreds or in the dozens instead of in the thousands, 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 this season.
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, you know, 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.
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.
Ebola, 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.
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.
If it's a level 4 hot agent, and there are a number of them, you need to be wearing 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.
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.
And then the Flettners 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.
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 mouth, 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 a type of smallpox that I think we can assume that military biologists are working with.
If you go in with airstrikes, you'll recall Camasia, 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 are 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?
And 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.
And I sort of hate to talk about the plot, but toward the beginning of the book, one of the heroes, he's an 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 could 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.
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 versus touching an animal.
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.
So 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 have got a lot less anthrax in their lungs.
And it might also, it's very useful for actually treating people who have already been exposed to low levels of anthrax.
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.
And 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 going to be a situation where the U.S. government will want to have the production capacity to move the vaccine into the population quickly.
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 in a moment.
The following just in from the Electronic Telegraph, the headline is, New Anthrax Threatens Armageddon by Nanette Vanderlan 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 Janes.
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.
Hi, that's very interesting, Art, and it's also true.
I have it from my sources that indeed this multi-drug-resistant anthrax was created in a laboratory called Obolensk, which is about 75 miles south of Moscow.
He's a medical doctor, and he's also a general in the Soviet Army.
Dr. General N. N. Yurikov is his name.
He's the head of the institute at Obolensk.
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.
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.
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 a full atomic exchange of some sort or another.
Let's try something from something you didn't write.
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 a 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.
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.
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?
That's right, because that's absolutely a good point.
One of the scary things about this flu is that 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, full court press, to try to develop a vaccine quickly that 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.
We've got hysteria, 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-tailed animals in the Antarctic now.
They're just showing actual genetic change.
This whole controversy about frogs and all the extra limbs and all the rest of that baloney has 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?
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.
And 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 and becomes 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 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?
I think that the idea 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, then 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 to 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.
listening to Art Bell somewhere in time tonight featuring coast to coast a.m. from December 17th 1997 now once again here is 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.
Quote, 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.
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 President Trump, and President Trump, and President Trump, 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.
And I thank you so very, very much for having Richard Preston on the program.
I really congratulate you.
I couldn't possibly imagine a more appropriate guest out of 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 I've made.
First of all, there's a group up in Washington State, which I won't name on the air, but perhaps your guest knows, who's developed a very appropriate kind of antigen response device, which allows an 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 a question really, almost to the same extent that the previous question was just 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?
And B, could a 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, I'm not even sure treaty is the right word, but some kind of awareness so that this could be seen as not a fictional, but rather a factual realm that people could try to respond to and create some kind of a focus towards.
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.
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 aloud 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?
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?
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 biowarfare 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 on 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.
What they said to me was, there are a couple of things.
When I started describing some of the facilities in Russia that have been discovered and analyzed now and that people have seen, I was told on a couple of occasions, really, if you describe this building, Corpus Zero, if you describe 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.
I'll tell you this on air because I'm not afraid to say it anymore.
In the Cobra event, one of the characters talks about his experiences as a weapons inspector in Russia.
And he went to a place called Kolsovo, which is in Siberia, and it's one of the major biowarfare labs.
And specifically, my source, who was telling me about this place, said to me, you know, 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 Kolsovo.
So I said, well, you know, well, we all know.
And then I gave the guy the real name of the building.
And by the way, the real name of the building is Building Corpus 6A.
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.
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.
I think we're just going into this global warming treaty.
Now, treaties would seem appropriate for biological warfare development, but 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.
But one thing I've heard, which this refers back to your first caller there, is what should people actually do about this?
And I think really and truly, first of all, you can actually send email to the White House demanding that the President get up and tell the American people the truth.
And secondly, it might be quite useful for there to be international criminal law in the area of development of bioweapons, where there are laws that say you can't take Ebola virus and smallpox virus and mix them together in a test tube and create a monster.
That's a violation of ethics and international law, and you will be an international criminal if you do it.
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, or perhaps even from an ecoterrorist 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.
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.
unidentified
And then 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 about somehow warning them of, 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.
1,000, 2,000 years from now, we're so nosy, do you think we shouldn't have some responsibility towards warning future generations of the dangers of these?
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 of places where people who died of unusual strains of smallpox and plague on Earth.
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?
In other words, a lot of people think and have made accusation that it was an engineered virus.
As a matter of fact, there was congressional testimony, I'm sure you're well aware, questioning scientists in whether they could actually develop something that would destroy the human immune system.
If you had asked me a year ago, three years ago when I finished the hot zone, if you had 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 rainforest 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 things, 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, you know, it doesn't kill you.
It just kind of depresses your immune system.
But they failed to recognize the fact that it kills you 10 years later.
And then it got out into the human population.
And 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.
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 incidentally.
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 news 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.
and the point of all life to make more copies of it all right here is a Question for Richard.
A quarantine may be effective in most towns.
What, though, would be the effect of a biological event on a place 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.
The problem nowadays is that people travel a lot, and they travel on airlines.
They can spread something very rapidly through airborne routes, I mean 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.
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.
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.
And I just, I've got your book, and it's kind of like a finger of light stabbing through the mist of uncertainty as far as I'm concerned.
And 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?
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 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.
What I did, Richard, I'm sure you may not be aware of it.
I've got a book called The Quickening, and 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...
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.
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 Rick Rymasing.
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 suggestion or to my comment now.
You know, 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 fought Lysa 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.
When I am deathly scared, 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 lore nonsense.
They want to talk about all this, all this fluorinated water.
It's a communist plot.
And don't take any of these vaccines and take this colloidal silver.
And people on the left think 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.
And what's going to get us out of our problems with biological weapons is good defenses.
And it's going to mean things like biosensor machines, good detection capability, very smart forensics.
Forensic science is what the Cobra Event's 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.
These are the, you know, technology, 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.
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.
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.
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?
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 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, okay, 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 that 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 superbug.
You've got a laboratory bug that could be an absolute killer that creates what amounts to smallpox inside the human 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.
My guest is Richard Preston, and we're going into this stretch run.
The End 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 give my some sort of right appendage to have an autographed copy of the Cobra event.
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 space suits, 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.
It turned out in the end that he didn't have Ebola virus.
He just had common flu.
But when they tested the blood of the monkey workers, they found that five of them had actually been infected with the Ebola restin strain, a 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 resin 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.
There's been a lot of talk about whether STREPA 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 report.
Yeah, you know, several years ago, Art, you've probably seen the movie Blood Sport.
The subject of that movie was a fellow by the name of Frank Dukes.
And he's a real walking, talking, living being.
He was William Casey's right-hand man.
And 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 the Soviet Union looking for a super-secret strain of anthrax.
Ha.
But I was wondering if you knew anything about that.
Yeah, I don't know about that specific thing, but what I do know is that 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 do have this anthrax.
Yeah, it's multi-drug resistant.
It's a super anthrax.
And they kind of guardedly confess to what they've done.
Part of it is just a matter of pride.
These guys are scientists.
And even if we think that what they did is extremely ugly, they're kind of proud of it in a way.
And even though they know that it's ugly, they also want the world to know that they did good science.
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.
Richard, finally, I'd like to see our government just get honest with us and tell us what it knows.
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 zone, and also my sources in the FBI and the COBRA event, are telling me that in a low-grade kind of invisible bioterror 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 Quantica, would be brought in.
And these people would go to work with their forensic tools and their little machines and everything, studying the cases.
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.
First time caller line, you're on air with Richard Preston.
Where are you, please?
unidentified
This is Dan.
I'm in Virginia, not too far from Ruston.
And 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 to put on their body to protect them.
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 can maybe, you know, create a hell of a lot of havoc somewhere.
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 uh...
in the end of the book uh...
the thing mutated and with the world with a because the thing you can't I think it might have been rain or something like that.
Well, it went off back into space and began eating rubber, as I remember.
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 at their production of Dietrich production of anthrax, the fact that they were a spring 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.
Yeah, the standard is right.
That's the truth.
That's the truth.
And then congressional hearings after they said they got 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 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 Joyce Riley, who you've had on your program, was working for a military biological weapons contractor.
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 stuff.