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Film sheds light on shadowy world of germ warfare
'There were an alarming number of scientists who were working withgerm weapons who were turning up dead in sort of mysteriouscircumstances.'
— Bob Coen
Bob Coen talks about Anthrax War, his new documentary onbiological weapons
A scientist works at a containment lab where germs and viruses are tested andmanipulated. Filmmaker Bob Coen found that a growing number of such labs, publicand private, now deal with biological weapons research. (Transformer Films)
http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2009/03/27/f-tech-090327-anthrax-war.html
In 2001, an attack involving several letters laced with deadly anthraxbacteria killed five people in the U.S.
The incident prompted filmmaker Bob Coen to undertake an investigation of the
shadowy world of biological weapons, their deadly history and their role today aspart of a growing and profitable industry.Coen spoke to CBCNews.ca about the resulting documentary,
Anthrax War
. The film,which he directed and co-wrote, will have its world premier on CBC Newsworld's
ThePassionate Eye
on Sunday, March 29.
It was the anthrax attacks after 9/11 that first got you interested in thistopic?
It actually goes back earlier than that. I grew up in Zimbabwe when it was stillcolonial Rhodesia, and I came of age at the height of that war. Years later, I wasworking as a journalist correspondent at CNN International … [I] got involved incovering the wars in Mozambique, Angola, the struggle against apartheid in SouthAfrica, and in my research, I uncovered that biological weapons had been used in theRhodesian War. And, in fact, the largest outbreak of anthrax in modern history tookplace in Rhodesia at the height of the war … Between 1978 and 1980, there were10,000 cases of human anthrax in the country and more than 180 deaths.…So that's where my interest began … I was aware of this clandestine use of biologicalweapons, …and when the anthrax attacks happened [in the U.S.], I was very curiousthat perhaps there was some kind of connection.…That was what got me started on all this. It's been seven years in the making. It'staken me on a fairly convoluted trail, trying to make sense of this all and trying toget into this secret world of biological weapons research and development,something that's been going on for about 60 years now.
What has made anthrax such a popular biological weapon all this time?
Well, it's a very hardy bacterium. It has a spore so … the bacterium's encased in thisshell, and it can actually survive in the environment for more than 50 years in theright conditions. And it is pretty immune to ultraviolet light because of that coating …Anthrax occurs naturally. It's endemic in many parts of the world, including Africa,Russia and even parts of the United States, but the naturally occurring anthrax andthe weaponized form of the bacteria are very different. When it's weaponized, it'sactually milled into this very refined powder and aerosolized so that it can be inhaledinto the lungs. Once it gets into the lungs, and into the bloodstream … it's invariablyfatal.…
'In the past seven years alone, the United States government has budgetedmore than $50 billion on biodefence and a lot of that money is now going toprivate companies.'
— Bob Coen
The [anthrax in the] two letters that went to the U.S. senators was highly refined. Infact, investigators and scientists … when they examined this letter … in a high-containment lab, it floated off the slide, into the air … It had been treated, refinednot only [to] small particle size but treated with additives that gave it thisdispersability, also [an] electrostatic charge. So, [a] very, very sophisticated powder,and one that would require a sophisticated team of people and sophisticatedequipment. It's not something that could be made in your basement.…Bruce Ivins, whom the FBI have pinned as being the culprit, the sole person behindthe anthrax attacks, was working in an army lab on vaccines. Apparently, they [theFBI] claim that he made this powder at his lab after-hours using fairly rudimentaryequipment. And many scientists, experts really, said that's impossible. You couldnever make that sophisticated kind of anthrax with equipment that was availablethen.
That was probably one of your more striking findings. But there were otherthings you found over the course of the film that were a cause for worry.
One of the things that I found out was that this world of biological weapons researchwas really shrouded in secrecy, and there's all these skeletons in the closet that goback decades — human experimentation, secret programs, illicit programs. And it'snot just in the United States — the U.K., Russia, my home continent of Africa —Zimbabwe, South Africa.
'One of the scary things about biological weapons is that even if you're working on biodefence, you still have to create the actualweapon to know how to defend against it.'
— Bob Coen
South Africa had a very small but very sophisticated and really quite horrific programthat worked on developing a vaccine that would basically sterilize the blackpopulation without them knowing ...The other thing I discovered was that it's actually quite a small world of scientists ...Until fairly recently, until really the [2001] anthrax attacks, there were not a lot of them, and they were all sort of connected and all had relations with each other …Even enemies and former enemies all had links and would share science. Forinstance, some of these former scientists from the Soviet Union, that had probablythe biggest biological programs in the 70s and 80s, went on to work with the Britishprograms….
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