One of the revelations that came out after the end of the Cold War was that the Soviet Union had pretty much ignored a treaty with the United States that banned bioweapons research. Scientists who ran the program said they were certain that the United States was violating the treaty as well, and were surprised that they could find no serious violations when they conducted inspections required under the treaty. Where did they get the idea that the United States was actively engaged in developing germ warfare? From the Central Intelligence Agency.
Apparently by the time the United States signed the bioweapons treaty the Pentagon had already concluded that germ warfare research was likely a dead-end alley. Although occasionally there are media-driven stories about the horrific possibilities of germ warfare, designing an effective bioweapon turns out to be a lot more difficult than first imagined.
Convinced the Soviet Union would never be able to develop such weapons, former CIA officer and historian Raymond Garthoff contends that the in the 1960s the Central Intelligence Agency engaged in a disinformation campaign to convince the USSR that the United States was in fact spending billions of dollars to develop biological weapons.
The goal was to force the Soviets to waste billions of dollars on an ineffective biological weapons program. The Soviet military bought the disinformation campaign wholeheartedly and energetically pursued a bioweapons program. Unfortunately they made far better progress than the CIA and Pentagon imagined was possible.
According to Garthoff, the United States had failed in its attempts to create a drug-resistant strain of smallpox and concluded it was impossible. Spurred on by the CIA’s disinformation campaign, the Soviets succeeded in creating such a virus. “We cannot say for certain that these weapons would never have been developed without the American disinformation campaign,” Garthoff told The Daily Telegraph, “but I am sure it was the priming element to their programmes.”
The Soviet development of drug-resistant smallpox is bad enough, but at least the dynamics of the Cold War made it extremely unlikely that such an agent would ever be used (though, the risk of accidental release is always a real possibility). The collapse of the Soviet Union exacerbated the situation since now there are hundreds of unemployed former-Soviet scientists who are experts in germ warfare.
There have been reports in the Russian press that former Soviet scientists have been aiding Syria in its efforts to acquire biological and chemical weapons — scientists who might not have been engaged in developing germ warfare were it not for the CIA’s disinformation campaign. “A number of countries have made very serious efforts to get information and people from these programmes and those are exactly the kind of things that the FBI and the CIA are now so worried about today,” Garthoff said.
Source:
US blunder ‘trigger global germ bomb race.’ Ben Fenton, The Daily Telegraph (London), March 12, 2001.