ALLEGATIONS OF PINOCHET BIOLOGICAL WEAPONS (BW) PROGRAM UNDERSCORE CHALLENGES OF BW CONTROL

Evidence presented in May 2006 in a Chilean judicial proceeding alleges that the government of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet developed a secret biological weapons (BW) program. The evidence also alleges that a Chilean secret police operative used an unspecified lethal bacterial agent produced in that program to assassinate former Chilean president Eduardo Frei in January 1982 while he was in the hospital recovering from a hernia operation. Allegedly, the head of the Chilean BW program was later murdered to ensure that the assassination of Frei would remain secret.

This story was reported in the Guardian of London May 18, 2006. [1] The article states that evidence on the matter was presented by a number of retired “army generals and aides,” who stated that the biological weapons program was run by General Pinochet’s secret police. The former military figures had requested the opportunity to present testimony regarding the “disappearance” of Eugenio Berrios, the designer of the secret BW weapons program. The program, the article continued, produced anthrax and botulinum toxin, and also had a chemical weapon component that produced the nerve gas sarin. Berrios is also suspected of developing the bacterial agent that killed Frei.

A lawyer for the Frei family is reported as calling the evidence “ ‘precise, clear and concrete’ in proving that General Pinochet announced the order to have Berrios kidnapped and killed.” Berrios was found on a beach in Montevideo in 1995, having been shot twice in the head. On May 5, 2006, Uruguay extradited three former Uruguayan army officers to Chile, where they are accused of conspiring in Berrios’s murder. [2]

In part on the basis of their testimony, on May 12, the judge-prosecutor investigating Berrios’s death filed charges against Pinochet for having a role in Berrios’s death. [3] According to what the Guardian termed “leaked testimony” in the Berrios investigation, Pinochet wanted Berrios dead because the latter had evidence that Pinochet had ordered Frei’s assassination. The judge-prosecutor overseeing the case stated that his investigation of Pinochet was based on “direct proof, not as head of the chain of command.” Prior allegations by Frei’s relatives claimed that he was murdered while in the hospital with sarin gas. In March of 2005, the FBI tested Frei’s exhumed body but found no traces of toxic chemicals; it is not known whether it was also investigated for the presence of biological agents. [4] On March 14, 2006, the Chile’s State Defense Council (responsible for prosecuting major crimes) announced that it would participate in the investigation of Frei’s death. [5]

These allegations raise a range of questions concerning international efforts to control the spread of biological weapons.

Cynical Ratification

First, and most importantly, the allegations, if substantiated, challenge the effectiveness of the Biological Weapons Convention, whose core objective is to prohibit the development, production, stockpiling, and transfer of biological weapons. General Pinochet led Chile from 1973 to 1990. Chile signed the Biological Weapons Convention on April 10, 1972, and ratified the pact on April 22, 1980, roughly in the middle of Pinochet’s tenure. The allegations presented in the Chilean court suggest that when Chile ratified the treaty and pledged to renounce biological arms, it was, in fact, pursuing an active BW program. This would indicate that, in this case, the treaty was ineffective as a nonproliferation measure.

This would be the second known case of a state joining the treaty while simultaneously pursuing an active BW program. The previously disclosed instance was that of the Soviet Union, which ratified the Biological Weapons Convention on March 26, 1975, shortly before the treaty entered into force. During this time, Moscow’s BW program underwent a major expansion that would make it by far the world’s largest. [6]

(As noted, the Guardian article also makes reference to the nerve agent sarin, a chemical weapon. If stocks of this agent still exist, they should have been declared and destroyed under the 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention, which Chile ratified on July 12, 1996.)

Undetected Program

The allegations in the Chilean court proceedings are the first time that the existence of the Chilean BW program has been identified; Chile, for example, has never been listed as a state pursuing such capabilities, even at the level of research and development. The current status of the alleged Chilean BW program is unclear, although it was presumably dismantled at the end of the Pinochet era.

A recognized weakness of the Biological Weapons Convention is that it has no verification provisions, and it has been feared that state parties might be able to pursue clandestine BW programs without detection. If its existence is confirmed, the Chilean program would be a case in point, demonstrating the severe limitations of the Convention in this regard. (A major component of the Soviet BW program, it may be added, was concealed inside an ostensibly civilian pharmaceutical research and production complex called Biopreparat, which escaped detection for nearly two decades after Moscow joined the treaty and was revealed only in 1989 when a defector to the West disclosed its existence.)

Multilateral negotiations to develop a verification protocol to the Biological Weapons Convention began in early 1995 and collapsed in 2001, when the United States withdrew from the talks. It is not clear whether proposals under consideration at the time, had they been adopted, would have been able to detect BW programs like that allegedly pursued by Chile, which appears to have been conducted on a small scale.

Small-Scale Offensive Capability Prohibited?

As noted, it is not yet known how extensive the Chilean BW program may have been. Possibly, it was pursued solely to be used against individuals, rather than as a military capability against large concentrations of troops or against population centers -- although the development of potent BW agents for assassination purposes could have provided the basis for acquiring a larger scale BW capability for military use.

The key prohibition of the Biological Weapons Convention is contained in Article I which states:

Each State Party to this Convention undertakes never in any circumstances to develop, produce, stockpile or otherwise acquire or retain:

(1) Microbial or other biological agents, or toxins whatever their origin or method of production, of types and in quantities that have no justification for prophylactic, protective or other peaceful purposes…

The Chilean case thus raises an additional question concerning the Biological Weapons Convention: whether the treaty’s core proscription prohibits the development of BW agents in small quantities suitable for assassination. Arguably, the development and possession of small quantities of lethal BW agents is allowable for “protective” purposes – i.e., for the study of agents that might be used against a state by foreign powers and for the development of counter-measures – but agents in these laboratory-scale quantities could also be used for small-scale offensive attacks against domestic dissidents or adversary leadership targets. Because microbial pathogens have useful applications in biomedical research and therapeutics, they cannot simply be banned by the Biological Weapons Convention, but their use is restricted to peaceful or defensive purposes. The fact that the prohibitions of the treaty are based largely on intent complicates efforts to verify compliance, particularly when small quantities of agent are involved.

The best known case of the use of a BW agent for assassination purposes was the 1978 murder of Bulgarian dissident Georgi Markov with a tiny pellet containing the toxin agent ricin that was fired from an air-gun concealed inside an umbrella – an assassination widely presumed to have been carried out by the Bulgarian government with assistance from the Soviet KGB.

The alleged use of a BW agent to kill Eduardo Frei in a hospital setting following a routine surgical procedure would represent the second known incident of assassination with a BW agent. (Another attempted use of BW against an “enemy” leader was the 1864 “Yellow Fever Plot” to assassinate President Abraham Lincoln using gift dress shirts supposedly contaminated with yellow fever. The plot failed because the perpetrators were unaware that the disease is spread by mosquitoes, not by the effusions of infected persons.) [7]

The Apartheid regime in South Africa is also accused of using small-scale BW attacks against guerrilla training camps of the South West Africa People’s Organization (SWAPO) in Namibia. [8]

Enduring Concealment, Uncertain Legacy

Pinochet left office in 1990. The process of reconciliation in Chile has since begun to reveal many of the excesses of his regime. Nonetheless, it appears that any Chilean BW program remained concealed and that but for the alleged murder of the program’s leader, its existence might never have come to light. Many questions remain to be answered regarding the BW program, including what happened to it after Pinochet left office. Was it dismantled or did it continue within the Chilean military or internal security agencies, which remained largely beyond civilian control for several years? The disposition of any stocks of lethal pathogens and of any research on BW that the program compiled is also unknown, as is the status of the scientists who contributed to this work.

The sustained concealment of a BW program in Chile would be reminiscent of developments in South Africa. During the tenure of President F.W. de Klerk from 1989 to 1994, South Africa openly disclosed and, under international supervision, dismantled its nuclear weapons program, but never publicly revealed the country’s BW program, which was launched in the early 1980s. Indeed, that program’s existence was not disclosed until 1998, during a hearing of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Particularly disturbing as a precedent was that after the advent of majority rule under President Nelson Mandela, at least one scientist from the Apartheid BW program, Wouter Basson, was accused of offering BW equipment and know-how to Libya and possibly other parties. [9] Another South African former weapons scientist retained collections of deadly pathogens from the program and offered to sell them to the FBI for a large sum of money. [10]

The Soviet BW program was acknowledged by President Boris Yeltsin in 2001, but Russia, the inheritor of the vast majority of its data, scientific expertise, and physical plant, has never disclosed the details of the research and development effort, leaving many unanswered questions about that program as well.

Leonard S. Spector – Monterey Institute Center for Nonproliferation Studies

SOURCES AND NOTES

[1] Jonathan Franklin, “Pinochet Accused Over Murder of Ex-President,” Guardian, May 18, 2006, http://www.guardian.co.uk/chile/story/0,,1777125,00.html; [View Article] see also Stella Calloni, “Nueva esperanza en Argentina para solucionar casos de la Operación Cóndor,” [New Hope in Argentina for Solving Operation Condor Cases], La Jornada, April 17, 2006, (indicating Berrios was responsible for developing sarin gas for the Chilean secret service, known by its Spanish acronym DINA and that the gas was used in the assassination of Spanish diplomat Carmelo Soria).

[2] Pablo Long, “Justice: Better Late than Never,” Latin American Press, May 4, 2006, http://www.latinamericapress.org/Article.asp?lanCode=1&artCode=4668. [View Article]

[3] “Pinochet Charged in Chile for Murder of Secret Police Chemist Eugenio Berrios,” Santiago Times, May 12, 2006, http://www.tcgnews.com/santiagotimes/index.php?nav=story&story_id=11286&topic_id=1. [View Article]

[4] “Chile’s State Defense Council to Help to Investigate Frei Death,” Santiago Times, March 16, 2006, [http://www.tcgnews.com/santiagotimes/index.php?nav=story&story_id=10881&topic_id=1].

[5] Ibid.

[6] “Former Soviet Biological Weapons Facilities in Kazakhstan: Past, Present, and Future,” CNS Occasional Paper, Center for Nonproliferation Studies, http://cns.miis.edu/pubs/opapers/op1/op1.htm. [View Article]

[7] Edward Steers, Jr., Blood on the Moon: The Assassination of Abraham Lincoln (Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky, 2001).

[8] Chandre Gould and Peter Fold, “The South African Chemical and Biological Warfare Program: An Overview,” Nonproliferation Review (Fall-Winter 2000), p. 10, http://cns.miis.edu/pubs/npr/vol07/73/73gould.pdf.

[View Article]

[9] Jean Pascal Zanders, John Hart, and Frida Kuhlau, “Chemical and Biological Weapon Developments and Arms Control,” SIPRI Yearbook 2002: Armaments, Disarmament and International Security (Oxford, UK: Oxford UP, 2002), pp. 706-707; Joby Warrick, “Biotoxins Fall into Private Hands,” Washington Post, April 21, 2003, http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A64518-2003Apr20?language=printer. [View Article]

[10] Joby Warrick and John Mintz, “Lethal Legacy: Bioweapons for Sale,” Washington Post, April 20, 2003.

Source: http://wmdinsights.org/I6/I6_LA1_AllegationsOfPinochet.htm (June 16, 2006)