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Europeans Told To Jack Up Lopsided NATO Alliance
Reuters September 21, 1999
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-nato-mi.html
TORONTO (Reuters) - NATO defense ministers meet Tuesday for a look at the lessons they have learned so far from Kosovo, with the United States demanding that its partners spend more on military gear.
The well-worn transatlantic wrangle over burden-sharing was thrust to the top of the agenda by Secretary of Defense William Cohen in blunt terms as he flew to Canada for the two-day informal gathering of 19 alliance defense chiefs.
``In the lessons of Kosovo, we have our presentation made. It will point to the very deficiencies that we need to address,'' Cohen told reporters on the flight from Washington.
``My concern is that we are seeing declining budgets within our NATO allies -- they have got to reform the way in which they are doing business to make the kind of changes necessary.''
Cohen said he would urge ministers to firmly commit themselves to acquiring better mobility, computerized weapons and communications, creating an alliance less lopsidedly dependent on Washington for every military operation.
U.S. officials say they doubt very much whether the European allies can make the necessary improvements simply by shifting resources and must bite the political bullet of higher spending.
The familiar complaint drew a familiar response.
``Oh, we'd all like to have more money,'' said Canadian Defense Minister Art Eggleton, whose country like many of the European allies is short of the assets Cohen wants to see.
Washington insists it is not pushing a buy-America plan and would welcome joint defense development projects or even companies with the Europeans, provided it is satisfied that secret technology would not be compromised.
The major European allies are protective of their own defense industries -- the rival British, French and Germans each have their own main battle tank -- and in some quarters the U.S. is seen as already far too dominant.
U.S. aircraft flew two-thirds of the support missions and half the bombing strikes over Kosovo, using guided weapons many other partners do not have.
The experience threw a glaring light on the widening gap between American and European capabilities.
But ministers may also raise other lessons from Kosovo for which money or technology may not offer obvious solutions.
These include anomalies in the command structure which allowed a British commander in Kosovo to second-guess NATO Supreme Commander General Wesley Clark, as well as a targeting procedure which managed to single out the Chinese embassy in Belgrade and a barracks in friendly hands.
The NATO ministers were spared an unwelcome challenge from the headstrong Kosovo Liberation Army Monday after Clark persuaded them to quit stalling, demobilize as promised and turn themselves into a civilian ``protection'' force.
Outgoing NATO Secretary-General Javier Solana said clinching the KLA agreement was ``a milestone for peace implementation efforts'' in Kosovo.
But the Western alliance is all too aware that it has simply shelved the issue of the final status of the Serbian province, and that its ethnic Albanian majority will not settle for anything less than independence.
Diplomats say the KLA, which did not seek anyone's permission to form an underground army three years ago, might quickly revert to guerrilla tactics if that key objective appeared threatened.
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FEATURE-Israeli cancer patients fight nuclear reactor
Sep 20, 1999
By Janine Zacharia
http://www.dogpile.com - search Infoseek
JERUSALEM, Sept 21 (Reuters) - Months before retiring from work at Israel's top-secret nuclear reactor deep in the Negev desert, Aryeh Shpeeler discovered he had stomach cancer.
A Holocaust survivor who worked at the Dimona reactor for 27 years in areas he cannot discuss for security reasons, Shpeeler vividly recalls the day in early 1996 when he began feeling ill.
``I came home one day with serious vomiting. Then I started having severe constipation and pains,'' he said.
``I went for tests, pictures. The doctors understood what it was. They ended up removing most of my stomach. Now at night it's hard for me to sleep. It hurts when I lie down.''
Shpeeler is one of dozens of workers at Israel's nuclear reactor, built between 1958 and 1963 in the remote desert town of Dimona, who are seeking millions of dollars in state compensation for cancer they claim is related to their work.
Jerusalem lawyer Reuven Laster is leading their battle.
After failing for years to find a way to settle the cases out of court, Laster decided in early September to team up with a large law firm to take on Israel's Atomic Energy Commission (AEC). It oversees the reactor and has denied any negligence.
``Our counter-claims will become clear through legal proceedings. Therefore we do not intend to face off with lawyer Laster via the media,'' AEC spokesman Meir Goldberg told Reuters.
AMBIGUITY
For decades nuclear ambiguity has allowed Israel to signal to Arab states that it has a strong atomic arsenal while avoiding potentially illuminating international inspections of its core.
Israel refuses to say it has nuclear weapons, let alone confirm foreign reports that it has at least 200 warheads. It says only that it will not be the first to introduce nuclear weapons into the Middle East.
Trying such cases is difficult in a country where security is sacred. The plant's obscurity, coupled with inadequate medical records and would-be witnesses who have died, make it even harder.
Employees are sworn to secrecy about their work.
``You don't know how difficult it is for the workers to talk about what they were exposed to at the nuclear power plant,'' Laster said.
Several incidents have chipped away at the taboo.
The best known is the case of Mordechai Vanunu, a technician at the Dimona plant who disclosed nuclear secrets to Britain's Sunday Times newspaper in 1986. Israeli agents spirited him back to Israel where he was jailed for 18 years.
TRYING TO PROVE A LINK BETWEEN EXPOSURE AND ILLNESS
After settling one case a decade ago for a worker who contracted kidney cancer, U.S.-born Laster was flooded with calls from other employees or widows seeking damages.
Today, his Jerusalem office has a filing cabinet stuffed with medical records and testimony from 70 workers -- or their relatives in cases where the family member has died -- most of whom began working at the reactor in the 1960s and 1970s.
He says he has enough evidence to bring 40 cases to court. Similar cases have been tried around the world with mixed results.
``It's hard to prove cancer in any case. No one knows what causes it, only what triggers certain things. But when you have 40 cases...it's an unusual number for one workplace and it's convincing,'' Laster said.
Hebrew University environmental scientist Elihu Richter says exposure to radioactivity has been linked to cancer worldwide.
``There are suggestions from all around the world that there are adverse affects (of working in a nuclear reactor). There are increased risks of kidney and lung cancer and leukaemia, especially among people who worked in particularly high risk areas,'' he said.
Three years ago, Laster, the attorney general's office and the AEC worked out a compromise under which a highly-classified scientific panel would evaluate the cases and determine if there were connections between illness and exposure.
The mechanism would have kept the sensitive case out of the public spotlight and avoided lengthy, expensive trials. But the committee got bogged down in red tape.
In mid-August, Laster agreed to expand the size of the panel at the AEC's request, clearing the way for the committee to begin its work. But by then workers and family members said they were fed up and wanted to go to court.
``We think we have to sue the reactor to see if they are responsible for our sickness or not. There are plenty of people who can testify. We don't think we need a committee,'' said former worker Avraham Benvenisti, 62, who suffered several bouts of bladder cancer.
CRIES OF NEGLIGENCE
Laster's litany of charges against the nuclear reactor, known in Hebrew by its acronym ``kamag'' -- the Centre for Nuclear Research -- is long.
He says that in 39 of the 40 cases, workers discovered they had cancer through routine urine tests at their local physician and not at examinations at the reactor's clinic.
The reactor, he says, failed to monitor workers who were involved in chemical or radioactive accidents. Medical records he obtained from the reactor after long delays had years ``suspiciously'' deleted.
``It's like a horse that's having its teeth checked to see if he can keep on working,'' Laster said of Dimona's medical examinations.
But AEC spokesman Goldberg said that in many of the cases, workers came down with cancer ``several years after they retired.'' When an outside doctor identified the illness, it was often after Dimona's clinic referred the worker for further care, he said.
Safety at the reactor had always been high and conformed to ``the most severe international standards,'' said Goldberg. Laster rejects the assertion.
``In the nuclear power plant everybody thinks that things are so careful and they have all these great measures to protect peoples' lives. I've come to the conclusion that things were not so great in the 1960s, 70s and maybe in the 80s.''
Benvenisti for decades handled dangerous radioactive materials while cloaked in a labcoat with a patch that measured exposure. Throughout his 30 years of employment, he always received a clean bill of health from the reactor's clinic.
But on two occasions, he spotted blood in his urine. Each time -- once in 1973 and again in 1987 -- he rushed to the hospital where surgeons removed malignant tumours from his bladder. Today doctors say he is clean.
Benvenisti says his testimony, like that of many of his colleagues, will prove negligence on the part of the reactor.
``The reactor said I did not work in radioactive elements but my medical records show I had uranium in my urine,'' he said.
Aryeh Shpeeler is less willing to assign blame.
``I am not angry with the reactor. I really love it. I gave my entire life to it. And I can't say for sure if the cancer came from my work since I'm not a researcher. I only know that in areas I worked, it is logical that it would happen.''
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British Energy says bid talk is speculation
Reuters September 19
http://biz.yahoo.com/rf/990919/z.html
LONDON, Sept 19 (Reuters) - Nuclear generator British Energy Plc (quote from Yahoo! UK & Ireland: BGY.L) described a British Sunday newspaper report that it was considering a bid for Iowa-based MidAmerican as pure speculation.
``It's pure speculation and we don't comment on speculation,'' a spokesman for the company said.
The Sunday Times newspaper reported that the UK company was considering a 1.5 billion pound ($2.43 billion) bid for MidAmerican Energy Holdings Company (NYSE:MEC - news).
MidAmerican was recently bought by U.S. energy group CalEnergy which owns Britain's Northern Electric (quote from Yahoo! UK & Ireland: NTE_p.L). CalEnergy then took on MidAmerican's name.
In May this year Peter Hollins, British Energy's chief executive said the company was still looking for opportunities to expand its businesses, adding that it was keen to spread further in the North American market.
Hollins said he would take advantage of opportunities whether they be in nuclear operations or more broadly based activities.
($1 equals .6173 Pound)
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British Energy mulls 1.5 bln pound bid-paper
Reuters September 19
http://biz.yahoo.com/rf/990919/w.html
LONDON, Sept 19 (Reuters) - Nuclear generator British Energy Plc (quote from Yahoo! UK & Ireland: BGY.L) is considering a 1.5 billion pound ($2.43 billion) bid for Iowa-based MidAmerican Energy Holdings Company (NYSE:MEC - news), according to a report in the Times newspaper on Sunday.
Back in May, Peter Hollins, British Energy's chief executive, said the company was still looking for opportunities to expand its businesses, adding that it was keen to spread further in the North American market.
Hollins said he would take advantage of opportunities whether they be in nuclear operations or more broadly based activities.
No one at the company was immediately available to comment on the report that it was interested in buying MidAmerican.
MidAmerican was recently bought by U.S. energy group CalEnergy which owns Britain's Northern Electric (quote from Yahoo! UK & Ireland: NTE_p.L). CalEnergy then took on MidAmerican's name.
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HEALTH INDUSTRY NEWS DIGEST -
Reuters September 20, 1999
http://biz.yahoo.com/rf/990920/yj.html
NEW YORK, Sept 20 (Reuters) - German drug maker Schering AG (quote from Yahoo! UK & Ireland: SCHG.F) on Monday said it would buy New Hampshire biotech company Diatide Inc. (Nasdaq:DITI - news) for about $100 million, with the goal of becoming active in the radiopharmaceuticals business.
Radiopharmaceuticals are radioactive chemicals used to test the location, size or function of tissues, organs and blood vessels.
Schering said it would pay $9.50 for each of Diatide's shares and that Diatide would be merged shortly into BXA Acquisition Co., a wholly owned subsidiary of Schering Berlin Inc -- the U.S. management holding company for Schering AG.
Other top pharmaceutical and health care related stories linked here....
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The Battle Inside Headquarters
Tension Grew With Divide Over Strategy
Washington Post Tuesday, September 21, 1999
By Dana Priest
Third of three articles
http://search.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/1999-09/21/044l-092199-idx.html
In the midst of the war over Kosovo, NATO commanders at 13 bases across Europe watched with growing discomfort during daily video conferences as tensions between their chief, Gen. Wesley K. Clark, and his top Air Force officer, Lt. Gen. Michael C. Short, broke into the open.
Clark insisted that the Air Force hunt down tanks and artillery in Kosovo. Short considered such missions all but useless; he wanted to destroy "strategic" targets such as Yugoslav ministries and power plants.
In one exchange that betrayed this deep disagreement, Short expressed satisfaction that, at last, NATO warplanes were about to strike the Serbian special police headquarters in downtown Belgrade.
"This is the jewel in the crown," Short said.
"To me, the jewel in the crown is when those B-52s rumble across Kosovo," replied Clark.
"You and I have known for weeks that we have different jewelers," said Short.
"My jeweler outranks yours," said Clark.
The video conferences were secret. But for weeks, the American people and much of the world also looked on with discomfort as NATO's limited, incremental intervention failed to stop Yugoslav forces from murdering, robbing, raping and expelling the ethnic Albanian population of Kosovo.
Outwardly, the Western alliance maintained unity and fought what Clark repeatedly described as a "step-by-step, systematic and progressive" campaign.
But the view from within was different. Among the commanders, there were sharp divisions and frustrations. Air Force officers thought of the enemy as a snake and wanted to chop off its head by bombing Belgrade. Some bristled at orders to attack what they considered the tail: individual tanks and small units of soldiers in Kosovo.
The Air Force's discontent grew partly from the chaotic, unscripted nature of the campaign during the first few weeks.
NATO's political and military leaders had expected Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic to back down after just two or three days of bombing. So by the second day, as Milosevic's forces pushed forward rather than retreated from Kosovo, Clark and his deputies began racing through their original war plan and building a more aggressive one.
This forced Clark to wage internal battles not just with the Air Force over tactical bombing missions, but also with NATO allies over permission to target sensitive sites in Serbia and to bomb relentlessly, without a single day's pause.
The result often was confusion. Fighter pilots were pulled from the tarmac, their missions scrubbed at the last minute by politicians far away. Sailors were rousted at night to fire Tomahawk missiles with little time to recheck their flight paths. Generals raced across the Potomac River with satchels of targets to get the White House to approve the next night's work.
The question of how many aircraft to send over Kosovo and how many to direct at the rest of Serbia was a constant source of friction, particularly in the first weeks of bombing. By the end of the 78-day air war, NATO had so many planes available that it could cover all the bases. But the debate continued -- and continues today -- over the best strategy for such an air campaign.
No Plan B
Planning for the campaign dated back to June 1998. By the opening night, strategists had produced 40 versions of an air war, according to Gen. John P. Jumper, commander of the U.S. Air Force in Europe. Some of these documents were highly critical of using air power alone, without troops on the ground to help flush out the enemy. But NATO ultimately settled on a three-phase air campaign.
In Phase I, NATO would strike antiaircraft defenses and command bunkers. Phase II would extend the strikes to Yugoslavia's infrastructure below the 44th parallel, well south of Belgrade. Only in Phase III would the alliance hit targets in the capital.
That was Plan A. There was no Plan B. NATO did not have a contingency blueprint for a longer campaign, officials now say, because the Clinton administration and Clark feared that if the alliance's 19 member states were asked to contemplate such a possibility, they would not agree to begin the war at all.
Short
On March 24, the opening night of the war, Lt. Gen. Short sat in a darkened room full of computer screens, the Combined Air Operations Center at Vicenza Air Base in Italy. Yellow, green and red tadpole-shaped symbols moved across large electronic maps on the walls, representing all the enemy and NATO aircraft over Yugoslavia.
As Short waited for the first missiles to strike, he clenched his jaw and kept his silence, a self-control that some subordinates noted and admired.
The three-star general with a drilling blue stare and gruff manner had argued many times to his superiors that the most effective tactic for the first night of the war would be a knockout punch to Belgrade's power stations and government ministries. Such a strike had worked in Iraq in 1991, and it was the foundation of air power theory, which advocates heavy blows to targets with high military, economic or psychological value as a way to collapse the enemy's will.
Yet on the first night he was overseeing an operation with only 53 targets. They were mostly Yugoslav air defenses and radar sites chosen to make the skies safe for allied pilots and to avoid hitting civilians.
Clark
Clark also harbored doubts about the initial plan's meager size. But after a year of coaxing the allies, he felt this was the biggest and best operation he could get NATO to approve. He also believed there was a 40 percent chance that the war would end within three days, since Milosevic might just be looking for an excuse to withdraw from Kosovo.
As early as the second day, Clark began prodding NATO diplomats and Washington officials to reassess their initial prognosis of a very short conflict, and he began talking privately about the need to plan for the worst case, a ground war. He asked the Pentagon for 48 Apache attack helicopters. He tried to steel a senior State Department official who called to suggest a bombing pause. NATO, Clark said, was ready to bomb for another "five to seven days . . . maybe more," according to notes on the conversation.
Most important, Clark asked NATO Secretary General Javier Solana to allow him to jump over Phase II and reach into Phase III targets such as key ministries in Belgrade. That disturbed some of the allies.
"From the very beginning, Clark changed the strategy," says a European diplomat in Brussels. "He quickly decided to strike on a broader geographic scale and, second, to strike a different type of target. . . . It made us worried about the political risks, the political impact."
Clark says he was acutely aware of the allies' concerns. "I was operating with the starting assumption that there was no single target that was more important, if struck, than the principle of alliance consensus and cohesion," Clark said in a postwar interview at NATO headquarters in Belgium.
"My idea was to press the envelope in terms of consensus and cohesion. I would talk to people on the telephone each day, and meet with them to expand the envelope of thinking. All of this was in the context of intensifying the air campaign," he said.
His aggressiveness bothered some people around him. "Can't you act less American?" one European diplomat demanded, believing Clark's firm, military bearing scared the Europeans.
Forceful in public, in private Clark's feelings bubbled to the surface at times when his voice would deepen and boom, and he would rise out of his seat and slap the table. "I've got to get the maximum violence out of this campaign -- now!" he said during one such conversation in late May.
While the allies were hesitating to approve strikes on Belgrade, however, Air Force commanders were unhappy about searching for tanks and troops in Kosovo.
Body Language
"There was a fundamental difference of opinion at the outset between General Clark, who was applying a ground commander's perspective . . . and General Short as to the value of going after fielded forces," says Vice Adm. Daniel J. Murphy Jr., who was commander of all naval forces aligned against Yugoslavia.
Short, a warrior's warrior who flew 276 combat missions in Vietnam and led F-15E strikes in the Persian Gulf War, seldom spoke to reporters during the Kosovo conflict. But his strongly expressed views became known through his colleagues. Topping the list was that it was a waste of time and resources to strike Milosevic's 3rd Army in Kosovo. "I never felt that the 3rd Army was a center of gravity," Short said in a rare interview published this month in Air Force magazine. "Body bags coming home from Kosovo didn't bother [Milosevic], and it didn't bother the [Yugoslav] leadership elite."
Short never disobeyed an order from Clark, but his body language -- slumped in his chair, arms folded, scowling -- sometimes reflected his discontent. "Short is a very good man," said one senior officer who witnessed such episodes, but "he was just driven to distraction" by the unorthodoxy of using million-dollar missiles to strike targets worth less than a tenth as much.
Moreover, other air force commanders shared Short's reservations about "tank plinking" in Kosovo, which they equated with the fruitless hunt for Scud missile batteries during the Persian Gulf War. And they particularly disparaged the notion that destroying a certain number of tanks would stop the rampage on the ground.
"The tank, which was an irrelevant item in the context of ethnic cleansing, became the symbol for Serb ground forces," said Air Force Gen. Joseph Ralston, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. "How many tanks did you kill today? All of a sudden this became the measure of merit that had nothing to do with reality."
In the Air Force magazine interview, Short said that Clark urged him even before the conflict started to "get down amongst" Yugoslav armored vehicles and troops in the field. Eventually, he said, "we, the airmen of the alliance, were able to convince General Clark" of a need to conduct sustained operations against "more lucrative and compelling targets . . . in Serbia proper."
No Pause
Clark says he didn't need any convincing about strategic targets, but he wanted to strike Serbian forces in Kosovo, as well. Meanwhile, he was fending off proposals from the political leaders of some NATO countries -- particularly Italy and Greece -- who wanted to suspend the bombing altogether.
Clark's frustration with the alliance's timidity was reflected in a video conference on March 27. These live, highly secure communication links replaced the crackly field telephones and urgent cables of previous wars. They were part theater, say some of the people who sat through them, with a dozen large personalities on the stage.
NATO must strike "as many targets as we can each night," said Clark, seated at the head of a classroom-style conference room, staring at a television screen hanging from the ceiling. "I don't want to let the perception get started that we're not doing much, so we can have a pause."
Clark had lived through the defining military experience of his generation -- Vietnam -- where he was shot four times on a reconnaissance patrol near Long Thanh. In addition to a Purple Heart, he earned an appreciation of how vital public support is to successful warfare.
He applied that lesson to Kosovo. "I don't want to get into something like the Rolling Thunder campaign, pecking away indefinitely," he said in the video conference, referring to the early, light U.S. bombing of North Vietnam. "We've got to steadily ratchet up the pressure. . . . We also need to become increasingly relevant to the situation on the ground. Otherwise we are at risk of being paused indefinitely. We'll lose public support."
But the Air Force complaints against Clark went beyond the debate over fielded forces. Clark also annoyed his commanders by micromanaging, dipping into every level of the execution of the war -- even choosing, at times, the type of bomb to drop on a specific target.
He particularly riled some Air Force commanders with what they called "ad hoc" targeting: demanding strikes on targets the same day they were approved by political leaders, shifting the mix of targets from week to week, assigning missions that had not yet been approved and then calling them back if approval didn't come.
"We don't like this kind of process where something could be left on by omission," Adm. James O. Ellis Jr., commander of allied forces in southern Europe, told Clark during one video conference. No mistakes of omission were made, however.
To increase the safety of pilots, the Air Force assigned half a dozen planes to fly as security guards for each pair of attacking fighters or bombers. This complicated the "air tasking order" -- the script for each night's bombing -- and prevented quick changes in missions. So Clark often turned to the Navy, whose role in the war was much greater than previously acknowledged. According to a postwar military assessment, naval missiles and planes were responsible for nearly half the damage done to Yugoslavia's electric power system, army headquarters and police buildings.
Some Air Force officers were so critical of the war's execution that they encouraged retired colleagues to speak out. The Air Force public affairs staff at the Pentagon quietly fed information to a group of retired generals, according to two spokesmen. On television and in newspaper interviews, these "senior statesmen" asserted that air power was being used improperly and might well fail.
With the ready smile of a politician, Clark is one of the rare generals who thrives at the diplomatic-military axis. He graduated first in his class at West Point, studied at Oxford University as a Rhodes scholar, and has taught both political philosophy and Army tactics and strategy -- all of which has tagged him in some military circles as too political, too intellectual, and not always in step with the organization.
Yet, in the end, Clark pushed hard for approval to go after exactly the kind of targets that the Air Force wanted. And it was then that his political acumen proved useful.
Aim Points
On March 28, Clark's black Mercedes drew up to NATO Secretary General Javier Solana's home in Brussels. In the dining room, the general gave the Spanish diplomat a detailed lesson in targeting. He explained the blast radius of various weapons. He talked about picking "aim points" -- crossbeams, keystones or baseboards that could be struck to make a building collapse inward, upon itself. NATO planners, he said, could calculate how far shattered glass would fly and whether it would simply graze or penetrate a person's skin. If they changed the warhead or angle of impact, they could determine whether concrete would be blown one block away, or three.
Clark wanted Solana to understand all of this, because he wanted approval for two particular targets.
On one side of Knez Milos Street in downtown Belgrade was the Yugoslav Interior Ministry, a massive, seven-story building of white stone. Across the way was the headquarters of the Serbian special police, an even larger complex of steel and dark brown glass. It didn't matter to Clark that they had been emptied, days earlier, of all people, computers and furniture. NATO commanders hoped that this airstrike -- the first on the Yugoslav capital -- would make a psychological point: As long as atrocities were occurring in Kosovo, Belgrade would not be safe.
On March 30, day seven of the war, the North Atlantic Council debated Clark's request but made no decision. Instead, the council left Solana with the job of interpreting its wishes. A few days later, he gave the go-ahead.
By winning approval for continuing strikes on Belgrade as well as Kosovo, Clark finally brought the allies and the Air Force together, creating the broader war that led Milosevic to capitulate. But military historians, air power strategists and budding commanders at war colleges will long debate the merits of Short's position vs. Clark's.
Last week, Clark released some long-awaited figures on the Kosovo campaign: Allied warplanes destroyed or damaged 93 tanks, 153 armored personnel carriers, 339 military vehicles and 389 artillery pieces and mortars. Those numbers represent only about one-third of all the weaponry and vehicles that the Yugoslav army had in Kosovo; two-thirds survived intact.
To those in Short's camp, this is strong evidence that the war was won by strategic bombing of Serbia proper, where NATO damaged or destroyed 24 bridges, 12 railway stations, 36 factories, seven airports, 16 fuel plants and storage depots, 17 television transmitters and several electrical facilities, according to a Yugoslav government report.
Clark is not swayed. He argues that Yugoslavia was defeated by steady losses both in Kosovo and in the rest of Serbia, combined with diplomatic pressure and the threat of an allied invasion.
The air campaign "was an effort to coerce, not to seize," said Clark. "It only made good sense that at some point, if [Milosevic] continued to lose and we didn't, that he would throw in the towel. But we could never predict how long he would hold on because it wasn't a function of any specific set of losses. It was a function of variables that were beyond our predictions -- ultimately, his state of mind."
Staff researcher Robert Thomason contributed to this series.
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U.N. Chief Wants Faster Action to Halt Civil Wars and Killings
September 21, 1999
By BARBARA CROSSETTE
http://www.nytimes.com/library/world/global/092199un-assembly.html
Related Article U.N. Oratory: Pleas for Help, Pride in Democracy
UNITED NATIONS -- Secretary-General Kofi Annan sounded a warning Monday to a frequently paralyzed Security Council, urging it to act faster and more effectively to meet the challenge of a world engulfed in civil wars that quickly descend into the slaughter of helpless civilian populations.
In an address to world leaders at the opening day of debate in the General Assembly, Annan also said that countries which have resisted international intervention will no longer be able to hide behind protestations of national sovereignty when they flagrantly violate the rights of citizens.
"Nothing in the charter precludes a recognition that there are rights beyond borders," he said, on the day an Australian-led force landed in East Timor to help complete its separation from Indonesia. A Western diplomat called the speech "courageous and very important."
Annan did not single out the United States, the Security Council's most powerful member, or any other major nation, but his unusually strong criticism of the Security Council's initial failures to deal with genocide in Rwanda in 1994 and to agree on responding to Serbian atrocities in Kosovo over the last year pointed obliquely at American policy decisions.
President Clinton, who would normally speak on the first day of the general debate in the assembly, postponed his appearance until Tuesday out of respect for Yom Kippur, the holiest day in Judaism.
Annan spoke Monday as officials of the council's five permanent members, who have veto power -- Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States -- were preparing to meet again to try to end another Security Council deadlock, this one over Iraq.
For nearly a year, since the American bombing of Baghdad in December, there have been no arms inspections in Iraq, which must be certified as disarmed before 9-year-old sanctions can be lifted. The council is sharply divided on how to devise a new monitoring system, while Iraq has used the time to harden its position against any kind of renewed inspection program.
In Rwanda, the United States blocked council action while tens of thousands of Tutsi and their moderate Hutu neighbors were massacred. Annan, who was then in charge of U.N. peacekeeping, has borne a lot of criticism for what was essentially a political decision made in Washington, where memories of American soldiers killed in Somalia in 1993 were still fresh. The secretary-general has called for an investigation in response to charges that the United Nations knew about the imminent genocide but did nothing.
In Kosovo, the Clinton administration, fearing a veto of military action from Russia or China, circumvented the United Nations and went directly to NATO.
"While the genocide in Rwanda will define for our generation the consequences of inaction in the face of mass murder," Annan said, "the more recent conflict in Kosovo has prompted important questions about the consequences of action in the absence of complete unity on the part of the international community."
To those who hailed the NATO bombing of Kosovo as a new era of quicker action outside the United Nations, Annan asked two questions that reflect the concerns of many nations uneasy with the prospect of unbridled American power.
"Is there not a danger of such interventions undermining the imperfect, yet resilient, security system created after the second World War, and of setting dangerous precedents for future interventions without a clear criterion to decide who might invoke these precedents and in what circumstances?"
But the secretary-general had no consolations for the countries, particularly in the Third World, that argue that the United Nations has no right to overstep national borders. That case was presented Monday by President Abdelaziz Bouteflika of Algeria who said in his speech that "interference can only occur with the consent of the state concerned."
Algeria, where violence by Islamic militants and government forces has left thousands dead in recent years, has refused to allow international human rights monitoring.
"We do not deny the right of northern hemisphere public opinion to denounce the breaches of human rights where they occur," said Bouteflika, who is also chairman of the Organization of African Unity and spoke on its behalf.
"Furthermore, we do not deny that the United Nations has the right and the duty to help suffering humanity. But we remain extremely sensitive to any undermining of our sovereignty, not only because sovereignty is our last defense against the rules of an unequal world but because we are not taking part in the decision-making process of the Security Council."
The United States has also been ambivalent about the trend toward intervention by international organizations into a country's affairs. Although the Clinton administration proposed a series of international war crimes tribunals, it has stopped short of backing a permanent international criminal court because of Pentagon objections. It has also failed to ratify a number of international treaties including a convention banning land mines.
The composition of the council, with its five most powerful members unchanged since the end of World War II, rankles many nations.
Although the Security Council acted with relative speed in the case of East Timor last week, as the secretary-general pointed out Monday, the council did wait for an Indonesian invitation. The council had not been prepared to take preventive action, although there were numerous reports reaching the United Nations and government capitals about threats from the quasi-official militias opposed to independence for the territory, threats that turned to carnage after the East Timorese overwhelmingly rejected continued association with Indonesia.
Nevertheless several leaders mentioned that the action on East Timor by the council set an example of strong international support for people who have made an important choice in a free vote and paid a terrible price.
"Whoever saw the images of the Timorese on voting day," said President Jorge Sampaio of Portugal, the former colonial power in East Timor, "clutching their registration cards, waiting in orderly lines for the long-awaited moment to express freely their will, must have reacted with strong emotion, and surely perceived in those faces and gestures, the universal appeal of democracy, freedom and justice."
Half a century after the founding of the United Nations as a club of countries whose national interests often overrode those of their own populations or people in trouble in other nations, Annan said unambiguously that countries can no longer cite sovereign rights when it is clear to the world that they are committing abuses against their citizens.
"This developing international norm in favor of intervention to protect civilians from wholesale slaughter will no doubt continue to pose profound challenges to the international community," he said. He told the audience of world leaders that the U.N. charter should not be misread.
"In response to this turbulent era of crises and interventions, there are those who have suggested that the charter itself -- with its roots in the aftermath of global interstate war -- is ill-suited to guide us in a world of ethnic wars and intrastate violence," Annan said. "I believe they are wrong."
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U.N. Oratory: Pleas for Help, Pride in Democracy
New York Times September 21, 1999
http://www.nytimes.com/library/world/global/092199un-assembly-text.html
UNITED NATIONS -- Following are excerpts from five of the addresses given Monday at the General Assembly:
Luiz Felipe Lampreia Foreign Minister of Brazil
Whenever an unfolding crisis and its human tragedy breaks through international indifference and becomes newsworthy, it is to the United Nations that the public opinion of our countries looks for meaningful answers.
Unfortunately, however, the international community only feels compelled to act in a coordinated fashion, mobilizing the necessary resources and political will, when long-festering problems threaten to get out of hand, making a satisfactory solution all the more difficult.
The upshot is a sense of frustration and impatience toward the United Nations, either because the necessary initiatives were in the end adopted outside the U.N. framework, as was the case in Kosovo; or because the measures agreed were not up the concrete needs, as we have seen in East Timor, or even because the United Nations finds itself once again confronted, as in Angola, with well known conflicts of catastrophic proportions that the international community has failed to address in a timely manner.
Why is it that certain predicaments generate intense mobilization of ways and means, but not others? Why does human suffering in some parts of the globe fuel greater indignation than when it takes place elsewhere? . . .
Mr. President, over the past decade Latin America, long judged a land of backwardness and dictatorships, has fashioned a new international image for itself out of the transformations it has undergone.
The return to democracy of our countries has had a decisive role in this, as did our important achievements in fostering respect for human rights -- although much remains to be done. . . .
Democracy has made it possible for the countries of Latin America to provide mutual assistance -- without undue and unsolicited foreign interference, but in a spirit of collaboration. . . .
Robin Cook Foreign Secretary of Britain
I want to focus my remarks today on what we must do if we are to replace failure to halt war with success in preventing conflict. The harrowing scenes we have witnessed this past year from Kosovo, from Sierre Leone, from East Timor and too many other places underline the urgency of improving our performance in preventing conflicts and in stopping them when they have started.
I propose five priority areas for action:
First, we must tackle the root causes of conflicts, starting with the poverty that breeds it. War is becoming a poor man's burden. In the modern world, wealthy nations no longer experience the trauma of conflict on their soil. The soundest base for peace is prosperity and the best way we can prevent conflict is to promote sustainable development. . . .
Secondly, we must promote human rights. . . .
Third, we must curb the supply of weapons that fuel conflict. For decades the U.N., rightly, has focused on halting the spread of weapons of mass destruction. Yet in the same decades, the weapons that have killed masses in conflicts have been the most common small arms. . . .
Fourthly, we must stop the illegal trade in diamonds and other precious commodities, which pay for the small arms -- and all too often the mercenaries -- which sustain conflicts. . . .
Lastly, we must counter the culture of impunity. Those who break international humanitarian law, from Kosovo to East Timor, must know they will be held to account. The international criminal tribunals have shown what can be done. We must build on their work by getting a permanent International Criminal Court up and running with all speed.
Thabo Mbeki President of South Africa
The cold war has come to an end. There is no sign anywhere of an ideology-driven contest among superpowers which dictates that each should seek to destroy the other in order to protect itself.
It is true that a number of countries still possess weapons of mass destruction, especially nuclear weapons, which constitute a threat. The only logical way to address this is vigorously to sue for universal disarmament and the destruction of such weapons.
Secondly, I believe it would be correct to say that the overwhelming majority of countries in the world have opted for democratic forms of government. Having learnt from their own experiences, the nations have turned their backs on dictatorship.
We cannot say that such dictatorships do not exist or that no attempt will be made in future to establish them. But we can make bold to say that these exceptions prove the rule rather than disprove the proposition we are trying to advance.
The combination of these factors should lead to three conclusions, at least:
The first is that there should be no need on the part of any country to seek to establish spheres of influence as a supposed necessary condition for the advancement of its national interests.
Secondly, the very sustenance of democracy across the globe requires that in every democratic country, the ordinary people should feel that they actually do enjoy the right to determine their destiny. . . .
Thirdly, these circumstances create the possibility for a more democratic system of international governance, as would be reflected by a correct restructuring of this very organization.
In any case, the process of globalization necessarily redefines the concept and practice of national sovereignty. . . .
As this happens, inevitably, so does it become necessary that a compensatory movement takes place, toward the reinforcement of the impact of these countries on the system of global governance, through the democratization of the system of international relations. . . .
Hun Sen Prime Minister of Cambodia
Just in the past year, Cambodia has finally turned a corner of history, putting firmly behind the darkness of its recent past history, and emerging into a new dawn of its future. Cambodia is now a fully integrated country, without rebels or separatists and without internal strife or conflict for the first time in many decades.
The black chapter of strife, violence, turbulence and turmoil is finally closed. We held open and free general elections on our own last year, assisted and witnessed closely by the international community, which pronounced it fully free and fair. After considerable discussions among the main elected parties and on a common platform to serve the cause of the country and its people, a new coalition government is in place.
The last remnants of the genocidal Khmer Rouge have either surrendered or been captured and are in custody, pending their trial for the crimes of genocide. We are firmly resolved to do whatever is needed to provide an open trial of those responsible for genocidal crimes in the country in the past.
In holding this trial we will carefully balance, on the one hand, the need for providing justice to our people who were victims of this genocidal regime and to finally put behind us the dark chapter of our national history with, on the other hand, the paramount need for continued national reconciliations and the safeguard of the hard-gained peace, as well as national independence and sovereignty, which we value the most.
Peace, so elusive in the past many decades, now finally prevails all over the country. Cambodia has joined the important regional group, Asean, and is determined to play its responsible role in the regional and international affairs.
Jorge Sampaio President of Portugal
I address this Assembly still under the impact of the wave of emotion, indignation and revulsion that swept the entire world as a result of the tragedy that befell the people of East Timor after the announcement of the results of the popular consultation on the future of that territory, which was organized in an exemplary manner by the United Nations on Aug. 30.
Whoever saw the images of the Timorese on voting day, clutching their registration cards, waiting in orderly lines for the long-awaited moment to express freely their will, must have reacted with strong emotion and surely perceived, on those faces and gestures, the universal appeal of democracy, freedom and justice.
The striking contrast between the example of silent courage and civic sense given by the Timorese when massively participating in the ballot and the barbaric acts of revenge that followed clearly reveals what was at stake in this process. . . .
By their courage, determination and willingness to fight and suffer, the people of East Timor have earned the right to become an independent nation. . . .
The events of the last few weeks in East Timor have rocked the conscience of the international community and force us to reflect on the responsibility of the United Nations, as the representative organism of that community, for the construction of a more just and humane international society.
As a universal awareness of the inalienable value of the dignity of the human being takes hold at this end of the century, an increasingly heavy responsibility falls upon the members of the international community to articulate principles and interests in the knowledge that for interests to be legitimate, principles must be upheld.
That awareness demands, from all those holding public office, prompt and firm responses to moral and juridically unacceptable political behavior, as well as to the humanitarian tragedies and cycles of regional instability that these provoke. . . .
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Iraq Rejects Several Proposals for New Weapon Inspections
New York Times September 21, 1999
By DOUGLAS JEHL
http://www.nytimes.com/yr/mo/day/news/world/iraq-weapons.html
BAGHDAD, Iraq -- Iraq dealt a fresh blow on Monday to the prospect of any swift return of U.N. weapons inspectors to its soil. In a statement and in remarks by a senior official, the government of Saddam Hussein indicated it was unwilling to go along with even the most generous of several proposals aimed at establishing a new inspection system.
The tough stance complicated efforts of the U.N. Security Council's five permanent members to agree on a plan to entice Iraq to allow renewed inspections of its weapons programs.
Speaking on Monday night more than 10 months after the last weapons inspectors left Iraq, Tariq Aziz, Iraq's deputy prime minister, warned that any plan that might emerge from the ongoing discussions might at best subject Iraq to "bad compromises."
"What we need is a serious easing of sanctions or a complete lifting of sanctions, and this has not been done," Aziz told foreign reporters. He said he believed that not even proposals being floated by France and Russia, Iraq's closest friends on the Security Council, could satisfy that Iraqi demand.
Iraq has not yet played a part in the discussions, which began last week in London and are expected to continue in New York this week around the opening session of the U.N. General Assembly.
Even so, the message from the Iraqi government on Monday suggested that Iraq may see itself in a position of strength as American concerns about Baghdad's weapons programs are being overshadowed by weariness elsewhere over nine years of economic sanctions against Iraq.
A statement issued after a meeting of the Revolutionary Command Council, which is chaired by Saddam, warned that any proposal that did not grant Iraq its demands would "definitely be rejected."
At least according to published reports, the plans offered by France and Russia would go a long way toward satisfying Iraqi concerns. In return for Baghdad's agreement to new inspections, those reports have said, France and Russia have proposed that most or all sanctions against Iraq be lifted immediately.
Those sanctions, which include a strict economic embargo, were imposed after Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in 1990, and have been kept in place ever since, despite protests from the Baghdad government that they should have been lifted long ago.
But, without offering a clear explanation, Aziz said on Monday night that he feared that even the French and Russian proposals might prove to be nothing more than "sugar-coated."
He dismissed as "hostile to Iraq" a plan backed by Britain, with apparent support of the United States. That plan would offer Iraq limited relief from sanctions as a reward agreeing to allow entry to weapons inspections teams. Any easing would come only over time, after a test period intended to gauge Iraq's cooperation.
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Iraq Says Air Defenses Intact Despite Raids
Reuters September 21, 1999
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-iraq-zo.html
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Iraq's defense minister was quoted Tuesday as saying that Iraqi air defenses were intact despite frequent raids by U.S. and British planes patrolling two no-fly zones over the country.
General Sultan Hashim Ahmed told the government newspaper Al-Qadissiya that his forces would continue to defy the air exclusion zones over northern and southern Iraq and confront U.S. and British aircraft.
``Despite the advanced technologies of the American planes and their reconnaissance and aerial photography equipment, they remain incapable of confronting our air defenses,'' Ahmed said.
``Their bombing from long distances proves their weakness and their cowardice. All their technology does not affect the defense capability and high morale of our heroic fighters.''
The air exclusion zones were imposed by the West after the 1991 Gulf War to protect opponents of President Saddam Hussein.
Iraq stepped up its defiance of the zones after the United States and Britain conducted their ``Desert Fox'' bombing campaign last December to punish Baghdad for its obstruction of U.N. arms inspectors.
The United States and Britain say their aircraft fire smart missiles at Iraqi air defense units only when they threaten them. Iraq's air force commander said last week the planes had launched 186 raids since late December, killing 187 civilians.
Ahmed said the planes sometimes target civilian areas in a deliberate attempt to weaken the morale of the Iraqi people and armed forces. He said Iraq's defiance of the zones was its legitimate right.
``When our fighters confront the evil crows breaching our airspace, it is called violation (of no-fly zones), is this possible? Are our planes and defenses confronting aggressive aircraft over American cities?'' Ahmed said.
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N.Korea Urges U.S. To Ease Sanctions Further
Reuters September 21, 1999
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-korea-u.html
TOKYO (Reuters) - North Korea Tuesday welcomed a landmark U.S. decision to ease sanctions against it, but urged Washington to go even further to improve ties.
``It is a good development, though it is not comprehensive and came belatedly,'' the official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) said.
``The United States should show good faith by lifting the remaining sanctions against the DPRK (North Korea) so as to make it a comprehensive and substantial measure,'' KCNA said.
Washington eased long-standing economic sanctions against North Korea last Friday, freeing up trade in most consumer goods, commercial transport of cargo and passengers, and fund transfers between individuals in North Korea and the United States.
U.S. sanctions, imposed under Washington's Trading with the Enemy Act, have barred trade with North Korea for nearly half a century.
U.S. officials said the action was a first step toward more normal relations with the Stalinist state, a top U.S. security concern for more than four decades after the 1950-53 Korean War ended in an armed truce rather than a peace agreement.
But other strict sanctions based on the U.S. designation of North Korea as a ``terrorist state'' and on its exports of missile technology will remain in place, officials said.
These prohibit U.S. sales to North Korea of weapons or goods that also could be used in weapons manufacturing, support for international loans, and financial transactions between U.S. individuals and the North Korean government.
Pyongyang Tuesday urged Washington to lift those remaining sanctions as well as withdraw its forces from South Korea and sign a peace treaty in order to improve relations.
``Furthermore, if the U.S. is truly willing to totally drop its hostile policy toward the DPRK and improve relations with the DPRK, it should withdraw its forces from South Korea, sign a peace agreement with the DPRK and thus root out the military threat to the DPRK,'' KCNA said.
The United States, which has 35,000 troops stationed on the territory of its ally South Korea, has rejected such demands from the North, saying a peace treaty should be first signed between the two Koreas.
``The DPRK will watch how the United States will practically implement the measure for lifting a series of sanctions announced by it this time,'' KCNA said.
North Korea's response comes ahead of a planned visit by former Defense Secretary William Perry to South Korea and Japan this week, where he is expected to exchange views on recent developments on Washington's relations with Pyongyang.
Perry recently completed a review of U.S. policy toward North Korea that laid the groundwork for the relaxing in sanctions.
Communist-ruled North Korea pledged during talks with the United States in Berlin in early September not to test long-range missiles. North Korea's weapons program has been a prime concern of Washington, which had detected signs that Pyongyang was planning another test following one in August 1998.
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Administration Plans to Use Plum Island to Combat Terrorism
New York Times September 21, 1999
By JUDITH MILLER
http://www.nytimes.com/library/world/global/092199sci-plum-island.html
PLUM ISLAND, N.Y. -- If the Agriculture Department has its way, Government scientists will soon be conducting experiments on some of the most virulent microbes known to man or beast at a laboratory just a few miles from the Hamptons.
The Agriculture Department already operates a laboratory here at Plum Island, across the Peconic Bay from the summer haunt of financiers, movie stars, private jets and Perrier.
But the department is now seeking money to turn the Plum Island Animal Disease Center into the sort of heavily protected laboratory at which the most dangerous animal diseases are studied. Officials say this is part of a new effort by the Clinton Administration to deter terrorists who might spread germs to destroy American crops or livestock.
Most of the Administration's efforts were once aimed at protecting people against terrorists wielding germ, chemical, nuclear and other unconventional weapons. But scientists, defense analysts and senior Government officials say the Administration is now persuaded that the United States is equally, if not more, vulnerable to germ assaults against livestock and agriculture -- agro-terrorism, as it is called.
"Given the contribution of crop and animal exports to the nation's prosperity, we must do far more to protect our plant and animal resources," said Senator Richard G. Lugar, the Indiana Republican and co-author of legislation in 1991 and 1996 that provided money to bolster defenses against unconventional terrorism and stop the proliferation of such weapons.
"This is not about food per se; Americans would not go hungry if we were attacked," said Floyd P. Horn, the administrator of the Agricultural Research Service, who helped persuade the Administration to include his agency in January in its counter-terrorism plans and programs. "But such an attack, or event a credible threat, would severely disrupt America's economic and social infrastructure for weeks, if not months or years."
Plum Island, which was once operated by the United States Army Chemical Corps, was designated as an animal-disease research center in 1948 and transferred to the Agriculture Department in the early 1950's. It is already what scientists call an agricultural "bio-safety level three" center, which means that its containment areas, which hold germs dangerous primarily to animals, and sometimes to humans, have filtered air, sealed doors and negative air pressure that forces any leaked germs back into the labs. Liquid waste is decontaminated.
All who enter the labs wear white lab coats and slippers. After leaving the containment areas, they must shower, shampoo their hair, scrub their nails and rinse their mouths, since lethal germs can live in human throats and infect animals up to two days later. To stop viruses or microbes from "hitching a ride to the mainland," no clothing or articles, even eyeglasses, are permitted to leave the labs without being soaked in disinfectant, said Dr. Alfonso Torres, the deputy administrator of the Agriculture Department's Veterinary Services Division and former director of the center.
Visitors agree to have no contact with domestic or wild animals for the next five days..
The building's perimeter is also tightly guarded. While Dr. Torres declined to discuss specific security measures, the shores of this pork-chop-shaped, 840-acre island are said to be monitored by electronic sensors and patrolled by boats and helicopters. Once a year, deer that have swum across to the island are killed in what island officials call a "controlled hunt."
Despite an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease on the island in 1978, which led Plum scientists to abandon their holding areas for large animals, "there has never been a leak of a dangerous pathogens from Plum Island," said Dr. Torres, the animal kingdom's Surgeon-General.
Moving to the next level of bio-safety would require that scientists working with dangerous pathogens wear the protective decontamination suits portrayed in movies like "Outbreak," and breathe only filtered air pumped into their hoods. Such precautions would allow scientists to work with even more dangerous animal pathogens that can affect humans, like the Hendra virus that afflicts horses and the Nipah virus, named for the Malaysian village in which it was first isolated this year. The virus has already killed more than 100 people, most of whom worked with pigs.
"We intend to work closely with local officials and community groups to allay any concerns about safety," said Dr. Horn, who knows that Plum Island has long been shrouded in mystery and plagued by what he and Dr. Torres call unfounded rumors and fears.
The extent of the threat posed by agro-terrorism remains in dispute, even within the Clinton Administration. Some scientists and analysts argue that there is little reason to believe that terrorists would home in on American agriculture or livestock, since germs that cause such diseases have been around for centuries.
But intelligence reports increasingly conclude that several countries, including Iraq, have attacked the food supplies of their adversaries. And senior American officials now believe that an outbreak of screw worm, a disease that afflicts animals and people, was spread deliberately 14 years ago less than 50 miles from the Texas border by Mexican workers who were employed in an eradication program and feared the loss of their jobs.
Although no one was ever arrested or charged in the incident, John Wyss, an Agriculture Department veteran of 25 years who supervised the project from Washington, said that the agency's investigations showed that the outbreak, given its nature and location, had to have been deliberate.
In recent interviews in Russia and Kazakhstan, former Soviet scientists also disclosed that they had developed weapons specifically aimed at crops and livestock. Sadigappar Mamadaliyev, the director of the Scientific Agricultural Research Institute, now in the Republic of Kazakhstan, said that in Soviet times, his was one of three centers dedicated to developing lethal germs as weapons against foreign crops and animals.
"The Soviets here concentrated on cow and sheep pox and blue tongue," he said. "We also cooperated closely with the All-Russian Institute of Animal Health in Vladimir, Russia, which worked on foot-and-mouth disease, and with the Pokrov Institute of Veterinary Virology, which specialized in African swine and horse fevers."
Dr. Mamadaliyev said he had more than 200 strains of dangerous animal pathogens at his institute, whose former scientific staff of 150 has shrunk by half from budget cuts and which is struggling to survive.
There were more than 10,000 Russians working on plant and animal pathogens in the former Soviet germ warfare program -- one third of the "civilian" part of the effort -- said Ken Alibek, a senior germ researcher who defected to the United States in 1992 and who recently wrote a book "BioHazard," in which he describes the vast scale and depth of the Soviet Union's illegal germ offensive warfare program. Many of those scientists are now without jobs.
Several Russian scientists said that Iranians had recently visited their institutes, some offering huge salaries to work in Teheran and specifically expressing interest in research on animal and plant microbes.
Fueled by growing concern about the proliferation of such expertise and of such dangerous germs, President Clinton ordered the Government last year to prepare defenses against germ and other unconventional attacks on the nation's plants and animals. In January, Dr. Horn recruited four former Pentagon intelligence analysts and terrorism experts to form the Agricultural Research Services' first unit to evaluate such threats. In April, the White House formally included the Agriculture Department in the group of agencies that meet regularly under National Security Council aegis to weigh plans to deter or respond to unconventional terrorism, a $2.8 billion effort.
At a public meeting last week in Washington, he discussed his concern about the nation's growing vulnerability to agro-terrorism, mentioning his desire to upgrade Plum Island to an institution with a bio-safety level of four and to make it a centerpiece of the Government's effort to protect the nation's food supply. While Dr. Horn declined to discuss budget figures, other officials said that the agency had White House support for a request to Congress for $75 million next year, and as much as $140 million over the next two years.
Plum Island has 300 employees, 60 of whom are scientists, 70 buildings, many of them closed or deteriorating, independent power and water treatment plants, and a fleet of four boats. Dr. Torres calls the $14.5 million that the Government spends a year on Plum Island a "small investment" in the nation's food security given the $140 billion earned from agricultural exports.
As disease after disease has been eradicated, Dr. Torres said, Washington has reduced the budget for veterinary services, which now stands at $116 million a year. Yet demand keeps growing. Agriculture scientists now conduct about 500 investigations of foreign animal diseases a year, more than half of them in birds brought back to the country by the millions of American travelers each year. "Our emergency response systems are becoming very, very thin," Dr. Torres said.
David R. Franz, a vice president of the Southern Research Institute and former director of the Army's Medical Research into Infectious Diseases, argues that recent changes in the structure of American agriculture have heightened vulnerability. Increased trade and international travel, global warming, reduced genetic diversity in farm animals and the high concentration of animals in mass pens and yards have increased the risk of the emergence and spread of highly infectious diseases, "be they naturally, or deliberately introduced, " Dr. Franz said.
The changing nature of terrorism also heightens the threat of an animal disease outbreak, argues Thomas W. Frazier, president of a consortium of private companies called GenCon, who helped organize a conference on the topic last fall in Washington.
"There are now hundreds of attacks a year on agricultural targets in the United States, Canada, and Britain as a form of violent protest by extremist environmental protection or animal rights groups," he said. Plus, the nation's intelligence analysts expect increased assaults by state-sponsored bioterrorists, militant religious cults and other extremist groups on such targets as food and agriculture.
"Those who cannot defeat America with nuclear or conventional weapons may well see this assymetrical terrorism, especially if it leaves no fingerprints, as irresistible," Frazier said.
Another source of concern is economically inspired bio-terrorism aimed at American food and livestock. Dr. Corrie Brown, the head of the department of pathology at the University of Georgia's College of Veterinary Medicine, worries about the prospect of terrorism for financial gain, including efforts to spark food shortages to inflate prices on the nation's volatile commodity exchanges. "The presence of classical swine fever in American hogs would certainly increase the value of European or South American pork," Dr. Brown wrote in a recent article.
While citizens may most dread animal diseases, primarily those that affect people, veterinarians are most terrified of a re-emergence of two foreign animal diseases in which Plum Island has specialized: foot-and-mouth disease , a highly contagious virus that affects such domestic animals as cattle, pigs and sheep; and African swine fever, a contagious, tick-borne swine disease whose mortality approaches 100 percent and for which no vaccine exists.
Scientists and Government officials cringe at the potential cost of an assault with a virus that has not been seen for decades on American soil. The largest animal disease outbreak in America in recent history, wrote Dr. Brown, was one caused by avian influenza that erupted in Pennsylvania and neighboring states about 15 years ago. A deadly viral variant spread quickly, prompting Agriculture officials to kill all exposed chickens at a cost of $63 million to the Federal Government. Economists estimated that had the "depopulation," as Dr. Brown called it, not been carried out, the cost to United States agriculture would have been as high as $5.6 billion. As a result of the six-month outbreak, Dr. Brown concluded, "poultry prices increased by $349 million."
Related Article
At Bleak Asian Site, Killer Germs Survive (June 2, 1999)
http://www.nytimes.com/library/world/global/060299anthrax-island.html
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For the Clintons: Toxic Reports and T-Shirts
New York Times September 21, 1999
By MIKE ALLEN
http://www.nytimes.com/yr/mo/day/news/national/regional/ny-clintons-welcome.html
CHAPPAQUA, N.Y. -- The welcome-to-the-neighborhood gifts for the President and Hillary Rodham Clinton include a handsome 76-page report listing the toxic spills and other environmental hazards within one mile of their dream house.
The report, prepared by a publicity-attuned environmental consultant, is part of the first wave of sideshows that are sure to accompany the move by the Clintons to Westchester County in preparation for Mrs. Clinton's likely Senate race.
Just this weekend, a parents' group at the local high school started selling T-shirts featuring the Presidential seal and emblazoned "Secret Service Chappaqua Bureau."
The Horace Greeley Education Fund, which raises money for scholarships for graduates of Chappaqua's high school, sold all 132 of the $15 T-shirts in three hours at the Community Day held today in the train station parking lot. A waiting list quickly sprouted 120 names.
"It's just the fun of the Clintons coming to town," said Robby Bernstein, 50, a promotional-printing salesman who is the fund's president. "When I tell people I'm from Chappaqua, now they don't confuse it with Chappaquiddick."
Residents of Chappaqua -- who according to a recent study have a median household income of $135,495 -- have greeted the Clintons' choice with some trepidation about traffic and gawkers, but also with a fair measure of excitement.
"We're all going to buy black Suburbans and wear dark glasses," said Stosh Wegrzyn, the owner of Town Deli. "We'll blend right in."
Dr. Produce, an upscale catering store on South Greeley Avenue, plans to add several Clintonian menu items in the next week.
The manager, Everette M. Mapp, said he might offer a Bill's Barbecue sandwich and a Clinton's Coleslaw, along with soup and wrap specials with names evoking the first couple.
Using a phrase that a political couple can appreciate, Mr. Mapp said the Clinton specials would be "permanent for a while."
Maria Roussos, the owner of William Weber Inc., a florist, has a smiley-face sign outside that says, "Welcome Bill & Hillary." (This weekend it also had a snorkel, announcing that the shop was closed because of flood damage.)
Mrs. Roussos said she had already sent a letter to the White House telling the Clintons they would enjoy Chappaqua.
"I was soliciting them," she confided cheerily. She said she had not heard back -- "yet."
The environmental report includes a bull's-eye map reminiscent of the old nuclear fallout risk charts, enabling the First Lady to spot at a glance the sites of 47 "known or potential toxic sites," including polluted wells, cracked and leaky underground tanks, and spills of gasoline and fuel oil.
The report was prepared by Toxics Targeting, an environmental research company in Ithaca, N.Y. The company's president, Walter L. T. Hang, sent the report to the White House by Federal Express this weekend, and included a letter giving a helpful history of the spills of methyl tertiary butyl ether, a gasoline additive, in Westchester County. It also details the removal of two tons of toxic soil from a nearby property.
"Best of luck with your new home," the letter concludes.
In fact, Mr. Hang said in an interview that the environmental risks around Old House Lane were about average for downstate New York. "It doesn't have giant landfills, but there are a lot of leaking oil tanks," he said.
The report does show the past carelessness that is hidden in some of New York's most gracious suburbs.
"People think of us as all pristine and pretty, but actually we're pretty dirty up here," said Marian H. Rose, a Westchester County resident who is the conservation chairman of the Sierra Club's Atlantic Chapter.
The report drew a blasé reaction at Chappaqua's Community Day, where residents were buzzing about the new bulk trash collection schedule. Elizabeth R. Wofsey, 47, said the Clintons' worst environmental woe will be "people taking pebbles out of their driveway to pass on to their children."
Jim Kennedy, a spokesman for the White House Counsel's Office, said the Clintons were "not aware of any specific environmental concerns regarding this home."
"The Clintons are moving ahead with the purchase," he said.
Mr. Kennedy had more to say about the T-shirts. Groups that use the Presidential seal usually get a cease-and-desist letter. "We certainly have nothing against raising money for education," he said. "There are, nonetheless, strict rules and regulations governing the use of the Presidential seal."
The T-shirts, each sold at an $8 profit, promise to be the biggest fund-raising event ever for the scholarship fund, eclipsing an antique car show two years ago. Mr. Bernstein, the scholarship fund's president, said he was not worried about White House reaction to the use of the seal.
"It's our understanding it's in the public domain," he said. "I'm sure they'll take it in fun. Maybe Clinton'll buy a shirt."
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Security at Energy Labs Rated
Compiled from reports by Knight Ridder, Reuters and the Associated Press Tuesday, September 21, 1999
http://search.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/1999-09/21/043l-092199-idx.html
Two U.S. nuclear weapons laboratories have been found to have "marginal" safety measures to protect sensitive material, according to an independent review released by the Energy Department.
Weapons research facilities have been the focus of security concerns after a congressional report accused China of stealing U.S. secrets for seven nuclear warheads and the neutron bomb over 20 years of espionage. China has denied the allegations.
The annual review by the Energy Department's Office of Independent Oversight rated Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Sandia National Laboratories as having "marginal" security safeguards. Last year, both facilities were also rated as having marginal security.
The Los Alamos National Laboratory, which was linked to the Chinese spying scandal, was ranked as having "satisfactory" security, the review said. That marked an improvement from its marginal rating last year.
The independent investigators rated the laboratories satisfactory, marginal or unsatisfactory after reviewing computer security, material control and accountability. Within the last 15 years, no national nuclear laboratory has been rated unsatisfactory overall by the department's independent investigators. If a facility ever did get that rating, it would be immediately shut down, an Energy official said.
The Senate is scheduled to vote Wednesday on reorganization of the Energy Department--including its oversight of the nuclear labs.
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Rushed Job on Nuclear Security
New York Times September 21, 1999
Editorials
http://www.nytimes.com/yr/mo/day/editorial/21tue4.html
Congress wants to reorganize the Department of Energy in order to increase security at the nuclear weapons laboratories and production plants that the department oversees. Such a step is clearly needed to end the loose handling of classified material that was discovered in the wake of allegations that the Chinese Government stole nuclear secrets from the labs. These concerns remain despite the slight improvement in security procedures claimed by the Energy Department yesterday.
This page initially favored removing the nuclear weapons programs from the Energy Department entirely, given its long history of mismanagement, and placing them instead in a fully independent agency reporting directly to the White House. That was one of the options recommended by the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. But Congress has chosen to follow the alternative route, also recommended by the board, of creating a semi-independent agency within the Energy Department. In doing so, it must be careful that its cure does not create other problems of its own.
A sound approach was taken by the Senate, which in July approved formation of an agency to be run by an undersecretary of energy who would have broad management powers, but would report to the Energy Secretary. That left sufficient oversight in the secretary's office to win the acquiescence of Secretary Bill Richardson. But a reorganization plan approved by the House last week, as part of the defense authorization bill, would create an agency that could largely escape departmental oversight even in critical areas like environment, health and safety that are unrelated to security.
The National Governors' Association, 46 state attorneys general and the National Conference of State Legislatures have also expressed fear that the new legislation would lessen their ability to enforce state environmental regulations in the cleanup of Federal nuclear facilities. The Senate should reject the proposed measure, which has not been subject to any hearings or public scrutiny, and insist that the legislation be clarified to insure that states' regulatory powers will not be weakened, and that the new agency will be subject to meaningful oversight by the Energy Department in environmental and safety matters. These concerns are too important to let slip in a hastily drafted reorganization.
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Security at Los Alamos Has Improved, Review Finds
New York Times September 21, 1999
By JAMES RISEN
http://www.nytimes.com/yr/mo/day/news/washpol/nuke-lab-security.html
WASHINGTON -- The Energy Department said Monday that a new review had found that security at Los Alamos National Laboratory had improved in recent months, but that security procedures at the nation's two other weapons laboratories still lagged.
Officials credited reforms implemented at Los Alamos in the wake of accusations that China stole nuclear secrets from the laboratory.
The Energy Department review gave Los Alamos a "satisfactory" rating, up from a "marginal" rating just one year ago. The government's two other nuclear weapons laboratories, Lawrence Livermore and Sandia, were given marginal ratings in the new review.
Energy Secretary Bill Richardson said the higher marks at Los Alamos proved that stricter security standards he had imposed on the laboratories this year were "beginning to work." He said that "people are getting the message that we're serious about protecting our nation's secrets."
An Energy Department official involved in the security review said that the higher rating reflected a "change in attitude" about security at Los Alamos.
The government's weapons laboratories came under fire for lax security procedures earlier this year in the wake of accusations that China had stolen secret design information related to America's most advanced nuclear warhead, the W-88. A Los Alamos scientist, the subject of a 3-year FBI investigation into the theft, was dismissed for security violations in March, but has not been arrested or charged with a crime.
Some critics now contend that the FBI and the Energy Department prematurely focused their espionage investigation on Los Alamos and the scientist, Wen Ho Lee. But the government's counterintelligence experts had concerns about security and counterintelligence procedures at the laboratories long before the latest case.
Entrenched bureaucratic interests at the laboratories, the Energy Department and elsewhere in the government have prevented serious changes in the past, a presidential review board found in a study this summer.
The espionage case, however, has given laboratory security prominence, and legislation intended to restructure the government's nuclear weapons programs is now moving quickly through Congress. The House passed legislation last week to create a new, semiautonomous agency within the Energy Department to run the laboratories and weapons programs, and the Senate is expected to vote on the measure this week.
But Richardson has said he will most likely recommend to President Clinton that he veto the proposal, arguing that it would blur the lines of authority and accountability.
Computer security at Los Alamos has been a particularly sore topic, since officials say that Lee transferred huge computer files containing nuclear secrets from the laboratory's classified computer system into an unsecure system. Lee has said that he transferred the codes as a routine part of his job, but the Justice Department is now considering prosecuting Lee for mishandling classified information.
The new review, by 25 security experts from the Energy Department's Office of Independent Oversight, found that cybersecurity at Los Alamos had improved.
Officials said that experts were unable to break into the laboratory's classified computer network used for nuclear weapon design.
The review team's hackers, working remotely over the Internet, also failed to break into the unclassified system at Los Alamos, but did succeed in penetrating the unclassified networks at Lawrence Livermore and Sandia. That enabled them to tap into "sensitive" information, like personnel files, officials said.
At Los Alamos, the review team was able to penetrate the unclassified system only while they were actually at the laboratory.
After the investigators uncovered evidence of Lee's unauthorized transfers of computer codes in the spring, Richardson ordered a shutdown of the classified computer systems at the weapons laboratories and mandatory security training for employees. Now, procedures are being put in place to prevent classified data at Los Alamos from being moved into the unsecure system from the classified system.
Related Article
Spies Versus Sweat: The Debate Over China's Nuclear Advance (Sept. 7, 1999)
http://www.nytimes.com/library/world/asia/090799china-nuke.html
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Russian Spies on Rise Here
Administration Worried About 'Aggressive' Economic Espionage
Washington Post Tuesday, September 21, 1999
By Walter Pincus
http://search.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/1999-09/21/039l-092199-idx.html
Three years ago, there was an unexplained increase in the number of Russian intelligence officers operating in this country, according to administration and congressional sources.
The increase, which has not abated, reversed the almost 30 percent decline in the number of Russian operatives in the United States that had taken place after the 1991 breakup of the Soviet Union, the sources said. Much of the increase appears to be among Russian military intelligence officers who are engaged in economic espionage.
The number of Russian spies in the United States is speculative and closely guarded within the FBI. But sources said recently that when the Cold War ended there were roughly 140 officers of the Soviet KGB (the predecessor agency to Russia's SVR) and GRU (military intelligence) operating primarily out of the Soviet Embassy and military attache offices in Washington, Moscow's consulate in San Francisco, the Russian mission at the United Nations in New York, the U.N. staff and various trade missions.
That number dropped to roughly 120, sources said, when the Soviet Union broke up in 1991 and by 1995 was below 100, a counterintelligence source said recently.
During 1993 and 1994 the FBI shifted some of its personnel from covering Russian operatives to other targets, according to a government source. "It was the bureau's peace dividend," the source said. "Then the number started moving up again."
When the number of Russian spies began to increase three years ago, the CIA and FBI had talks with their Russian counterparts--a method of dealing with problems that has been employed quietly for years, and often with success.
But by 1997, when the so-called service-to-service talks showed no results, the Clinton administration began using diplomatic channels as well to persuade Russia to reduce its spies.
Russia's intelligence agencies traditionally have operated outside the purview of Moscow's diplomats and frequently without informing even top officials who work for the country's leaders. By questioning the increase in intelligence operations during high-level, bilateral diplomatic discussions, "we are demanding that the issue be looked at by people outside the Russian intelligence community. . . . We are telling them this has implications for our relationship," said an official involved in the process.
During arms control talks in the 1970s, Soviet foreign ministry negotiators, ignorant of what their military was doing in nuclear weapons, learned from the U.S. team about their own country's armament. U.S. officials again are trying to educate Russian diplomats and political leaders about the activities of their intelligence services, which normally operate without external oversight.
That was why Vice President Gore raised the issue last July when he met with then-Russian Prime Minister Sergei Stepashin in Washington.
At a news conference, Gore was asked about a report in the Washington Times that the United States was demanding a reduction in Russian spies. He responded: "We don't have to answer all the questions."
But Stepashin, who had helped direct the Russian equivalent of the FBI, then said there was "an agreement between the special services of Russia and the United States" to work "properly and adequately" on "a number of positions"--a reference to collaborations in the fields of terrorism, drug interdiction and organized crime.
Stepashin also made clear that the intelligence services would not be allowed to "hinder" relations between the two countries.
Gore added that although the Cold War had ended, tensions remained because "old attitudes in both countries fade away slowly." Without being specific, Gore said "sometimes agencies want to use old attitudes as an excuse for old budgets and old personnel rosters. And then the other side has to spend the same amount."
What has concerned U.S. officials is that much of the increased spying activity comes from officers of the GRU.
"They are more aggressive," said one experienced former counterintelligence official, "and have shifted into economic espionage, particularly in the civilian research and development area." Another intelligence specialist said the military attaches assigned here are the GRU's "best men because being here is better than being at home" in Russia.
Identifying Russian intelligence officers among that country's personnel here "is not a hard thing," said one former senior CIA official. Names come from Russian defectors who are always asked to identify intelligence officers with whom they have worked or trained and are asked to pick intelligence officers from rosters of personnel at the Russian Embassy and other Russian agencies in this country.
U.S. spies in Russia and the former Warsaw Pact countries also pick out Russian spies here.In addition, there are certain Russian Embassy and U.N. slots that traditionally are held by intelligence personnel.
After the breakup of the Soviet Union, the new Russian government said it would reduce officers from the GRU and the SVR. That same message was passed through the increasingly open back channel that ran between Russian and U.S. intelligence agencies and has existed in secrecy for 20 years.
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Back Channels: The Intelligence Community
Is There Any 'Cover' in Undercover?
Washington Post Tuesday, September 21, 1999
By Vernon Loeb
http://search.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/1999-09/21/032l-092199-idx.html
As soon as U.S. counterintelligence officials finish their security fix at the nation's nuclear weapons laboratories, they should do the same at CIA stations overseas, where agency case officers often stand out like sore thumbs and are easily followed by foreign counterintelligence operatives.
So says Brian P. Fairchild, a former case officer in the CIA's Directorate of Operations (DO), who has been sounding the alarm for years about lax counterintelligence and operational security at the agency's embassy-based foreign posts.
It doesn't take foreign intelligence operatives long, Fairchild says, to figure out which "third secretaries" in the State Department's political section are actually CIA case officers.
And if it doesn't take them long to figure out who the CIA officers are, he says, it doesn't take them long to figure out which foreign officials the CIA is trying to recruit, making it easy to warn them, move them to new posts or turn them into double agents.
Fairchild, who retired in 1995 after numerous overseas postings, including a stint as a so-called non-official cover (NOC) officer, first warned Congress of this danger a year and a half ago. "In two large, important stations to which I was assigned, one in Asia and the other in Europe, the local counterintelligence service made it known to the station that it was aware, almost to a man, of the number of DO undercover officers in the embassy," Fairchild told Congress's Joint Economic Committee.
"Because the recruitment of sources is emphasized over the defensive aspects of the job, the DO's 'tradecraft,' that is, the development and use of techniques to avoid detection by enemy forces, is poorly developed."
Fairchild repeated his concerns last week after reading claims by the CIA's new deputy director for operations, James L. Pavitt, that the directorate is on the mend two years into an ambitious rebuilding campaign.
The DO's counterintelligence and operational security problems are so deep, Fairchild says, that they will take far longer than two years to fix. "I believe in the agency, I want the agency to succeed," says Fairchild, who now works as director of investigations for an international security management firm in Virginia. "But if you made a movie of the real aspects of the job, it would be a comedy, not a spy thriller."
COMPANY OF SPIES: A new DO leadership team has come together under Pavitt, 53, a former operations officer and National Security Council official, and his new deputy, Associate Deputy Director for Operations Hugh Turner, 56, a legendary DO operator who won the Silver Star, Bronze Star and Purple Heart as a Green Beret in Vietnam.
Directly below Turner in the clandestine service's chain of command are Barry G. Royden, 61, associate deputy director in charge of counterintelligence, and John F. Nelson, 47, associate deputy director for resources, plans and policy.
Royden assumed the CIA's top counterintelligence post after serving as chief of the Latin America Division. Nelson filled a newly created associate deputy director's post after serving as CIA Director George J. Tenet's chief of staff, chief financial officer at the National Reconnaissance Office and a budget analyst on the staff of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.
Replacing Turner as director of the technology management group within the directorate is Stephen W. Richter, 57, former chief of the Near East Division.
While Pavitt, Turner, Nelson and Royden have all spent their careers mostly in the shadows, the preferred state for directorate officials, Richter last year earned the wrath of Richard Perle, an assistant secretary of defense during the Reagan administration, who publicly demanded Richter's ouster for allegedly botching a series of covert actions aimed at toppling Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.
"Stephen Richter has an unbroken record of failure," Perle said in a speech last October at the American Enterprise Institute. "The head of the Near East division at the CIA . . . should be removed on grounds of incompetence and a lack of the fundamental qualifications to hold that position."
A CIA official responded that, far from removing Richter, the agency awarded him its Distinguished Intelligence Medal just last week. In five years running the Near East Division, the official said, Richter sharpened "its focus on key issues, was a forceful advocate for more resources, and put unprecedented emphasis on language training."
Vernon Loeb's e-mail address is loebv@washpost.com
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20 Years of Back Channels Between Intelligence Agencies
Washington Post Tuesday, September 21, 1999
By Walter Pincus
http://search.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/1999-09/21/040l-092199-idx.html
For more than 20 years, the CIA and Russian intelligence agencies have had a back-channel relationship, much like the one U.S. officials are now using to reduce the number of Russian agents in this country.
The secret meetings were held when one side feared the other had wandered "out of bounds" in its clandestine activities, according to a former intelligence official.
For example, CIA Director William E. Colby in 1976 directed CIA officials to meet with the KGB to determine whether the Soviet spy agency had any role in the 1975 assassination of Richard Welch, the CIA station chief in Athens. At the session in Vienna, the CIA officers present "made it clear we [the agency] won't stand for it," one source said of the session. The senior KGB officer was angered, but the Soviet intelligence service "remembered the representation," the source said. The killing was done by a Cypriot terrorist group.
After the 1984 kidnapping of William Buckley, the CIA station chief in Beirut, then-CIA Director William J. Casey ordered a session with the KGB to see whether the Soviets could help uncover what had happened. "There was no evidence they were involved in the case," a source said of the Vienna meeting.
Thereafter, the channel was used when one side or the other had a problem. The Soviets "persuaded themselves we were drugging and kidnapping their officers," a retired senior CIA official said. One had been killed in Peru "and they thought we had been too aggressive," he added.
In December 1987, when Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev visited President Ronald Reagan in Washington, then-acting CIA Director Robert M. Gates had dinner with his opposite number in the KGB, Vladimir A. Kryuchkov.
By 1989, with the Iron Curtain collapsing, a more formal channel opened, managed by Milton A. Bearden, then chief of the Soviet Division within CIA's clandestine Directorate of Operations. It became so formal that a secure phone line was established between CIA headquarters in Virginia and KGB headquarters in Moscow.
During the Persian Gulf War buildup in 1990, discussions between the intelligence services expanded to include cooperation against Iraq and talk of reducing operations against each other, one source said.
On the eve of German unification in October 1990, Bearden met in East Berlin with his Soviet counterpart and listened to concerns about KGB officers defecting to the West. Bearden's critics within the agency say he began reducing the number of defectors the CIA would support. One turned away for lack of agency interest was former KGB archivist Vasili Mitrokhin Vasili, whose book on the KGB, "The Sword and the Shield," was just published.
In July 1991, Bearden brought a CIA delegation to Moscow to discuss arms proliferation, chemical and biological weapons, and drugs. Eventually there was public cooperation on drugs, terrorism and nonproliferation because of the nuclear weapons in the old Soviet Union. "They learned that narcotics were not just a U.S. problem," one former official said.
Gates said he met secretly again with Kryuchkov in 1991, when he accompanied then-Secretary of State James A. Baker III to Moscow. Gates said he tried, unsuccessfully, to get Moscow to release the wife and family of Oleg Gordievsky, the London KGB chief who had been recruited as a spy by the British and was spirited out of Moscow in 1985 by MI6.
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The CIA Goes Hollywood
THE RELIABLE SOURCE
Washington Post Tuesday, September 21, 1999
By Lloyd Grove With Beth Berselli
http://search.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/1999-09/21/091l-092199-idx.html
Is nothing secret? We were astonished yesterday to receive an invitation to Central Intelligence Agency headquarters in Langley for the Oct. 13 premiere and post-screening reception celebrating "In the Company of Spies," a two-hour Showtime drama that will air Oct. 24. "You will need to provide full name and place of birth, and social security number," the invitation instructs, while noting the need for a photo ID and advising that we "allow 15 minutes for security access to the CIA Headquarters compound."
"Pretty cool, huh? And bizarre," star Tom Berenger told us yesterday--and we can't disagree. Berenger plays a disgruntled ex-CIA operative in the movie, and Ron Silver portrays a CIA director who enlists Berenger to stop the proliferation of rogue nuclear weapons in North Korea. Aside from the unprecedented act of hosting a Hollywood screening in the Agency Auditorium, CIA Director George Tenet gave Berenger, Silver and director Tim Matheson surprising access and cooperation, even allowing CIA employees and his wife, Stephanie, to appear as extras during a day of filming last year on the super-secret premises.
"I ran up to Washington, met Chase Brandon in the public affairs office and did a tour of the agency for a couple of days and went through stuff," Berenger recounted. Went through stuff? "Let me put it this way: They showed me a lot of things and I don't feel like I can tell you exactly what they were. But I am an American. I am not a Communist."
CIA Public Affairs Director Bill Harlow, Brandon's boss, said that the agency blessed the project after reading the Roger Towne screenplay, not because co-producer Robert Cort is ex-CIA--he was a top aide in the 1970s to then-director William Colby--but because "they came to the project with an open mind, and could accept the fact that we might be the good guys in the movie, which is a pleasant change." Tenet added in a statement: "Most of the CIA's real-life successes must remain in the shadows. But working with Hollywood on projects like this allows us to spotlight the outstanding work of our men and women without spilling secrets."
We have every intention of attending the screening--assuming we pass the background check.
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Radiation Risks Long Concealed
Paducah Plant Memos Show Fear Of Public Outcry
Washington Post Tuesday, September 21, 1999
By Joby Warrick
http://search.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/1999-09/21/055l-092199-idx.html
Managers of the government's Paducah, Ky., uranium plant knew for decades of unusual radiation hazards inside the complex but failed to warn workers because of fears of a public outcry, according to documents to be released by a congressional panel this week.
Faded memos unearthed by workers and federal investigators shed new light on what early plant officials knew about the presence of plutonium and other highly radioactive metals in the plant -- knowledge that was kept from the workers for nearly four decades.
In one 1960 document, a government physician wrote that hundreds of workers should be screened for exposure to "transuranics" -- radioactive metals such as plutonium and neptunium -- but he said plant officials feared such a move would cause alarm and lead to higher labor costs.
"They hesitate to proceed to intensive studies because of the union's use of this for hazard pay," says the memo, discovered by Energy Department officials investigating the plant.
The documents from government archives have been turned over to a House Commerce Committee panel, which is holding hearings Wednesday into allegations of unsafe conditions at the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant. The Washington Post obtained advance copies of the documents and prepared testimony of some current and former plant officials.
Accounts of plutonium contamination and illegal waste dumping at the facility have triggered an Energy Department investigation and a class action suit by employees who believe the plant put them at risk.
Energy Secretary Bill Richardson toured the plant on Friday and formally apologized to workers for the government's failure to fully inform them about the risks. He pledged millions of dollars in new spending to compensate ailing workers and to accelerate the cleanup of the plant. And he presented an award to the family of the late Joe Harding, an employee who had tried vainly for years to convince Energy officials that hazards in the plant had caused his fatal illness.
"On behalf of the government I'm here to say I'm sorry," Richardson said. "The men and women who have worked in this facility helped the United States win the Cold War and now help us keep the peace. We recognize and won't forget our obligation to them."
Plant officials, while acknowledging the presence of plutonium at Paducah, have said the amounts were small and were likely of little threat to workers.
Government contractors who ran the plant over the last 47 years have declined to comment because of pending litigation. A Union Carbide Corp. spokesman, in a statement last month, said the alleged acts at Paducah occurred long ago, and none of the current managers had any detailed knowledge of what had happened. Union Carbide operated the plant from 1952 to 1983.
The documents and testimony to be presented at the congressional hearing suggest that the federal government and private contractors running the plant ignored decades of warnings to protect workers from plutonium, a man-made metal that can cause cancer if inhaled in amounts as small as a millionth of an ounce.
"What is clear is that the [government] contractors knew of the need to protect workers from plutonium and other transuranics . . . as early as 1952," Jim H. Key, the ranking environmental and safety official for the plant's unionized employees, states in prepared testimony to be delivered Wednesday.
Key, who has not yet spoken publicly about the allegations of workers' exposure, alleges "widespread, systematic and documented failures" by the government and its contractors to control the spread of radioactive hazards. He describes smoky, radioactive fires inside the plant and thick clouds of radioactive uranium dust -- workplace hazards for which workers were neither trained nor equipped.
Former workers also have come forward with evidence suggesting that past managers viewed the contamination as a practical and economic problem. John Tillson, a hydrologist who analyzed early operations at the plant while working for a cleanup contractor, said Paducah managers tried to recover the transuranics from the plant's waste stream in the 1950s and 1960s, when the metals were in high demand for nuclear materials research.
By 1970 the prices had dropped, and the recovery programs were halted, he said.
Plant officials even began processing sewage sludge from the plant after it was found to contain high levels of uranium. Harold Hargan, a 37-year employee who was detailed to the recovery program, said the uranium in sludge came exclusively from the plant's sanitary system, which included lavatories, wash rooms and laundry facilities. "All that uranium was either on workers' clothes or bodies -- or inside their bodies," he said.
Although no formal epidemiological study has been completed for Paducah, some workers have long raised questions about what they believe are unusual rates and types of cancers in their communities. Those fears have risen sharply in the wake of reports that plutonium and other highly radioactive metals were also present in the workplace, Key, the union safety officer, says in his statement.
"The majority of current and former workers are afraid that they may have been exposed to substances like plutonium without proper protection and that they will, as a result, be stricken with a fatal disease," Key wrote. "I myself have this fear from my 25 years at Paducah."
Hired by the plant's original contractor, Union Carbide, in 1974, Key said he began witnessing safety problems almost immediately. During his first year on the job, he was engulfed in radioactive smoke after helping dump drumloads of highly flammable uranium metal into an open pit on the plant's grounds.
"The uranium spontaneously ignited . . . and a pungent and irritating smoke enveloped us," said Key, an hourly worker and officer in the local chapter of the Paper, Allied-Industrial, Chemical and Energy Workers International Union. "To my knowledge this dumping ground has never been characterized."
Workers inside the building where powdered uranium was processed were not required to wear respirators, even though the dust at times was so thick it was difficult to see, Key said.
"I recall having to hold my breath to get through clouds of unknown fumes," he said.
In the 1970s, Key would observe workers cleaning up spills of "black powder," which he later learned consisted of recycled uranium from the government's plutonium production facilities. Not until 1990 did plant officials tell the union that the powder contained small amounts of "transuranics" -- a class of highly radioactive metals that includes neptunium and plutonium. Plutonium is 100,000 times more radioactive per gram than uranium.
Key cited a 1952 Union Carbide memo that suggests the need for special labeling of "plutonium contaminated locations."
Years later, in a 1985 memo, Energy officials advised Paducah's managers to test workers who handled the recycled uranium for exposure to transuranics. Key notes, "We have no evidence that these recommendations were acted upon or communicated to the workforce."
In 1991, Martin Marietta Energy Systems, which was now operating the plant, began a voluntary program to test workers for exposure. Thirty workers participated, but the test results were "invalidated" due to what the company termed "concerns and discrepancies" regarding the testing lab, Key said.
He said the company refused to release the results to the union, explaining in a memo that "management is reluctant to release this information due to concerns about how it would be used."
Concerns about public reaction were echoed in the 1960 memo from H .D. Bruner, a physician, to Union Carbide and Atomic Energy Commission medical officials. He expressed concerns about relatively large amounts of neptunium in recycled uranium delivered to the Paducah plant. "But I am afraid the policy of the plant is to be wary of the unions and any unfavorable public relations," the memo states.
Although workers in some buildings were furnished with gas masks, Bruner said the respirators were not used and did not appear to be effective against the tiny uranium particles in the air.
"The human factor in handling [the recycled material] should be considered a source of potential exposure," he wrote.
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Hearings On Paducah Nuclear Plant
Yahoo News Kentucky Headlines September 20, 1999,
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/headlines/local/state/kentucky/story.html?s=v/rs/19990920/ky/index_2.html#1
(WASHINGTON, DC) -- Hearings are being held to discuss the safety of employees at the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant. Secretary of Energy Bill Richardson has pledged 20-Million-dollars to help workers at the plant. Since Congress lets out at the end of October, there is not much time for approval of the payments.
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Uranium Workers Detail Safety Flaws
Associated Press September 21
By JAMES PRICHARD
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/ap/19990921/us/paducah_plant_3.html
PADUCAH, Ky. (AP) - At times, it sounded as if Stephen King had written some of the testimony during a U.S. Senate field hearing into allegations of wrongdoing at a federally owned uranium-processing plant.
Tales of radioactive salt on lunch tables, burying truckloads of uranium shavings as they ignited and burned and tossing contaminated barrels into ponds emerged from the hearing Monday.
``Time after time, we were put at risk, lied to and made to feel that we were safe,'' Phillip Foley, a 24-year worker at the plant, told the subcommittee of the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources.
Foley testified during the first of several planned hearings into the operation of the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant. The plant uses gaseous diffusion to enrich uranium for use as fuel in nuclear reactors.
The U.S. Department of Energy owns the plant and oversees a costly environmental cleanup of the site. The agency is investigating why workers were unwittingly exposed to plutonium and other highly toxic and radioactive substances and whether contractors who operated the plant covered it up.
The Washington Post reported today that managers at the Paducah plant for decades knew of the radiation hazards inside the complex, but failed to warn workers for fear of a public outcry.
The newspaper cited old memos from the 1960s found in government archives. The documents had been turned over to a House Commerce subcommittee that is holding a hearing Wednesday on working conditions at the Paducah plant during the Cold War years.
In one 1960 memo, a government physician wrote that hundreds of workers should be screened for exposure to radiation from plutonium and neptunium, but the warning was ignored, the Post said.
Foley, who is now an electrician, said when he first started working at the plant, he would dispose of contaminated barrels by tossing them into ponds that are scattered throughout the 3,600-acre site.
He also testified that retirees often told him of wiping ``green salt'' off the lunch tables in two buildings. The substance actually was depleted uranium hexafluoride, a radioactive byproduct of the enrichment process.
``I think probably the most overpowering feeling my fellow workers and retirees share is uncertainty and apprehension about how they might be affected by chemical and radiation exposures at the plant,'' he said.
``I hear stories and fears about everything from cataracts to cancers to heart disease and emphysema.''
Chris Naas, a heavy equipment operator who has worked at the plant for 25 years, said he used to bury truckloads of uranium chips and shavings.
When his co-workers dumped the uranium for him to cover with earth, the material would spark and burn because it spontaneously ignites when exposed to air.
Naas also remembered being taken off a job in 1974 because he was told he was ``hot.'' Hourly workers assumed it meant they had been exposed to a certain level of radiation, but management never explained what it meant.
Naas said his father turned up ``hot'' on several occasions during the 20 years he worked at the plant.
``Today he has a form of terminal cancer - lymphoma. We will never know what was the cause,'' Naas said. ``My question is: Will I turn up the same, and what recourse will I have at that point in time?''
Energy Secretary Bill Richardson announced last week that he will ask Congress to expand the pilot medical-monitoring program for former plant workers. Richardson wants 600 more ex-workers in the program, bringing the total to 1,000, and to add 900 current workers.
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Gephardt to fight for Ohio's uranium-enrichment workers
The government must take care of all those possibly exposed to plutonium, he says.
Columbus Dispatch Sunday, September 19, 1999
By Darrel Rowland Public Affairs Editor
http://www.dispatch.com/pan/localarchive/gebharnws.html
The top Democrat in the U.S. House says he'll fight to make sure that uranium-enrichment workers at a southern Ohio plant are treated the same as employees at a Kentucky facility who might get government compensation for medical problems.
"What's fair is fair,'' said House Minority Leader Dick Gephardt. "You just can't take care of one group of people and not others.''
Gephardt was in Columbus last night as the keynote speaker for the Ohio Democratic Party's annual state dinner at the Athenaeum. The event, attended by about 1,000, was expected to generate more than $200,000 for the state party.
Earlier in the day he attended a $15-per-person fund-raiser for Rep. Ted Strickland, whose district contains the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant in Piketon.
Gephardt praised Strickland for standing up for workers at the sprawling facility, which formerly supplied material for nuclear weapons but now provides fuel for nuclear reactors.
The Dispatch revealed last week that Piketon workers apparently handled highly radioactive plutonium during the Cold War era, a revelation that had been denied by the federal government. Minute amounts of plutonium can cause cancer.
Similar revelations surfaced earlier this summer at Piketon's sister plant in Paducah, Ky. Energy Secretary Bill Richardson went to Paducah last week to apologize on behalf of the federal government and to outline a pilot program to test Paducah workers -- many of whom reportedly have developed cancer -- and possibly compensate them if their ailments can be linked to work.
But Piketon and a now-closed uranium enrichment facility in Oak Ridge, Tenn., were left out of the pilot program, a move that immediately was protested by Strickland and, a day later, by both Ohio senators, Republicans Mike DeWine and George V. Voinovich.
Richardson has expressed assurance that Piketon and Oak Ridge workers will be covered as well.
Gephardt said to do otherwise wouldn't pass muster in Congress, which must approve funding.
He brushed aside concerns, reportedly voiced within the Clinton administration, that helping uranium-enrichment workers might obligate the government to aid employees at all defense and energy plants across the country that handle radioactive material. If those workers have been adversely affected by the job, they should be helped too, Gephardt said.
On other topics, the 23-year congressional veteran said he wasn't surprised fellow Missouri native Bill Bradley is doing well in several opinion polls in matchups with Vice President Al Gore in the Democratic presidential race.
Gephardt said the campaign will be "long and tough'' but that Gore is the better candidate and will prevail.
The minority leader said congressional Democratic lawmakers are willing to compromise with Republicans on a proposed tax cut, but said the GOP plan gives too much to affluent taxpayers. Gephardt called the 2000 elections, in which Democrats are given decent odds of recapturing control of the House, crucial.
"We're at a crossroads in this country,'' he said.
If Democrats regain control, they will address a patients bill of rights guaranteeing that doctors -- not health-care corporations -- make treatment decisions; laws to help family farmers; universal health care; and education, such as President Clinton's proposals to add teachers and computers in classrooms, Gephardt said.
He said Democrats deserve to control the House of Representatives because the party is representative of America. A Democratic majority would mean the first black chairman of the powerful Ways and Means Committee in U.S. history.
"We're the party of diversity,'' he said. "We're the party that best represents the American people.''
Honored at the Ohio Democrats' annual fete were Supreme Court Justice Alice Robie Resnick, winner of the Gertrude W. Donahey Award, named after the first woman elected to statewide executive office in Ohio; Sen. C.J. Prentiss of Cleveland, the Myrl Shoemaker Award for outstanding service as a legislator; Christopher Wager, a junior at Upper Arlington High School, the party's volunteer of the year; and Timothy Barnhart, chairman of the Ross County Democratic Party, as Ohio Democrat of the year.
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Labor Holding Back on Backing Gore
Administration's Free Trade Policies Present Stumbling Block for Vice President
Washington Post Tuesday, September 21, 1999
By Thomas B. Edsall
http://search.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/1999-09/21/038l-092199-idx.html
... The unions most reluctant to endorse Gore include the Teamsters, the United Autoworkers, the Painters, and the Paper, Chemical and Energy Workers (PACE).
The Teamsters are worried that the administration-backed NAFTA treaty will open the Mexican border next year to low-wage truckers who will be allowed to compete for business that had been the province of U.S. truckers. The UAW has consistently opposed the administration over trade policy.
PACE officials are angry over what they view as anti-union privatization at government nuclear facilities in Tennessee, Kentucky and Ohio, along with Gore's disagreements with the forest products industry, which makes paper, over environmental issues.
"It's the industrial sector of the United States, period, that this administration has been totally unresponsive to," declared Kip Phillips, international vice president and director of government affairs for PACE. Richard Miller, a PACE policy analyst, was more outspoken, saying, "We've got huge problems with Gore because he has sanctioned union busting."
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Federal Commission Predicts Increasing Threat of Terrorism
September 21, 1999
By STEVEN LEE MYERS
http://www.nytimes.com/library/world/global/092199security-threat.html
WASHINGTON -- The United States faces increasing threats from terrorism in the next 25 years and is likely to be compelled to intervene in other conflicts like Kosovo and East Timor even as its military shrinks, a federal advisory commission warned in a report released on Monday.
The report makes grim predictions about crises and threats at home and abroad. The commission, headed by former Sens. Gary Hart and Warren B. Rudman, warns in the 143-page report that the country "will be vulnerable to an increasing range of threats against American forces and citizens overseas, as well as at home," from terrorists or rogue states.
"While conventional conflicts will still be possible, the most serious threat to our security may consist of unannounced attacks on American cities" by terrorist groups using germ warfare, said a summary of the report. "Another may be well-planned cyber-attack on the air traffic control system on the East Coast of the United States as some 200 commercial aircraft are trying to land safely in a morning's rain and fog."
The commission predicted that the American military will increasingly be called upon to conduct humanitarian missions and what the Pentagon calls "operations other than war" in trouble spots around the world. But its status and influence will fuel resentment toward the United States, making it a target for attacks at home and abroad. In one of its grimmest predictions, the report added, "Americans will likely die on American soil, possibly in large numbers."
The commission said the United States is not prepared to defend itself against terrorist threats at home. That, its report concluded, will lead to more pressure on the military to expand its scope into domestic law enforcement as the lines between foreign and domestic threats is blurred.
The commission's effort is the latest in a series of reviews undertaken inside and outside the government over the last few years to try to assess threats to the United States in the post-Cold War era. Many of its findings echo those made by the Pentagon's own Quadrennial Defense Review in 1997 and a Congressional group, the National Defense Panel, which issued a report a year later.
Still, the commission is expected to influence the debate over funding for the Pentagon and its programs for dealing with new threats, including a stronger focus on chemical and biological weapons and a missile defense system.
At a news conference last week previewing the report, Rudman said he hoped the commission's work would ultimately lead to a rethinking of the organization of the nation's national security agencies -- the way similar reviews after the end of World War II led to the creation of the Air Force, the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Council. "We believe that with the world changing as it has, the essential force structure of the United States defense establishment, although it has changed in many ways, structurally has remained very much like it was intended to be" after World War II, Rudman said.
The commission stopped short of offering prescriptions, saying it would offer those in its subsequent reports.
In surveying the possibilities for the future, the commission said that, while Russia and China are likely to be competitors to the United States in global influence -- with China's economy likely to surpass the United States' by 2020 -- it is also possible that Russia and China could disintegrate.
In looking ahead, the commission was not entirely gloomy. The spread of democracy, advances in medicine and technology and new economic opportunities raise the prospect of increased stability and security around the world, it said.
But some of the same trends have less benign consequences. The increasing integration of the world's economy will mean that economic crises that were once local might spread, while scientific advances could hasten the spread of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, as well as missiles to fire them.
The reliance on computers and other technologies will also create new vulnerabilities to attack from those unable to take on the American military directly, the commission said. The United States, like other advanced countries, could also face serious security threats from economic crises that touch off social unrest or conflicts. The report noted that the Asian economic crisis in 1997 and 1998 was soon followed by the political upheaval in Indonesia and the fall of President Suharto's government.
"For most advanced states," the report said, "major threats to national security will broaden beyond the purely military."
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Debate on Navy Bombing Intensifies
Associated Press September 21, 1999
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/w/AP-Puerto-Rico-Navy.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- A Navy battle group headed for the Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf will arrive in ``a significantly reduced state of readiness'' if its crews can't undergo live-fire training on Puerto Rico's Vieques Island, the Navy says.
In a statement announcing departure of the aircraft carrier USS Dwight D. Eisenhower and accompanying ships from Norfolk, Va., on Monday, the Navy said suspension of key training on Vieques would leave the ship's crews uncertified to support Marines ashore with their big guns.
Live-fire training has been canceled for the first round of training in the Puerto Rico area, the Navy said. If it cannot be conducted in the second round in December, officials said, the ships will deploy unready to the Mediterranean and the Gulf in February. <