------- Index of Articles

NUCLEAR
Iraq wants focus on Israel's nuclear weapons
U.S. sub commander expresses 'sincere regret'
Arms Control Problems
Report on Submarine
The money trail in the UK
The China and Nuclear Reunion Is Only a Motive Away
Czech Plant Resumes Operation
Depleted uranium debate heats up in Europe
Iraq Defiant as U.S. Lobbies Arabs on Shift in Sanctions
A Lot of Pluribus, Not Much Unum
Iraq nearing capability to use nuclear weapons
Defectors say Iraq tested nuclear bomb
Was this Saddam's bomb?
Learning to Fear Putin's Gaze
U.S. and Russians Meet on Defenses Against Missiles
Powell, Russian Say Arms Experts Should Meet
Russian Missile Offensive
Russia may sell China arms
Don't Let This Russia Spook You
Nat'l Guard Teams Found Unprepared
The UNPLUG Salem Campaign
Secret Nuclear Studies

MILITARY
A Chinese Connection
America Gets Candid About What Colombia Needs
Soap Opera Actor Arrested on Drug Charge
Space Cowboy
Veterans Win Medical Care

OTHER
A comprehensive look at sprawl in America
Livestock Disease Widens in Britain
Britain's New Meat Problem
More cases of foot-and-mouth disease found
Colorado
Serbia Arrests Fired Chief of Feared Secret Police Unit
Police Official Replaced
Police Use Force to Clear Holiday Crowd in Seattle
RAINBOW WARRIOR SAILS TO CONFRONT US STAR WARS PROGRAM
U.S. Charges Pose Paradox of Pious Spy for Godless Foe
Charge: Hanssen foiled '89 spy pursuit
National Guard terrorism teams found unprepared
An Absent Defendant Is Everywhere at Trial

ACTIVISTS
Oregon
Protesters Take Over Abandoned NE House
Rebels Begin Indian Rights Tour in Mexico

-
-------- NUCLEAR

Iraq wants focus on Israel's nuclear weapons

Sun, 25 Feb 2001
By Rawhi Abeidoh

BAGHDAD, Feb 25 (Reuters) - Iraq said on Sunday the U.N. Security Council should focus on Israel's nuclear capabilities, reaffirming Baghdad's position that it had fulfilled U.N. demands to eliminate its weapons of mass destruction.

"They (U.N.) have acted against Iraq, which has fulfilled its obligation...but ignored Israel, the Zionist entity, which has all sorts of weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear weapons," Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Tareq Aziz said.

Aziz refused to answer a reporter's question on German intelligence reports that Iraq may have nuclear weapons in three years and a missile capable of reaching Europe by 2005.

U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell said in Israel earlier on Sunday that the reports underlined the need to contain Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, who has survived a crushing defeat in the 1991 Gulf War and 11 years of stringent U.N. sanctions for its invasion of Kuwait.

Powell has made seeking Arab support for the containment of Iraq the prime message of his Middle East tour which has taken him to Egypt and Israel. He will also visit Jordan, Syria, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.

Aziz was speaking at Saddam International Airport after welcoming Armenian Foreign Minister Vardan Oskanyan, leading a 75-member delegation to open an Armenian embassy in Baghdad -- another sign of eroding sanctions.

"We in Armenia want to contribute in helping Iraq in its difficult situation," said the Armenian minister.

U.N. TALKS

Aziz said Iraqi Foreign Minister Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf, who will meet U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan in New York on Monday, will renew Baghdad's demands for an immediate and total lifting of the sanctions.

Sahaf will also "stress the need to implement paragraph 14 of Security Council resolution 687 that calls for ridding the (Middle East) region of all weapons of mass destruction," Aziz said.

"The focus now should be on implementing this paragraph and any attempt to wriggle out of it is an aggressive move not only against Iraq, but all countries in the region which see Israel as their biggest threat," Aziz added.

Israel has consistently refused to confirm or deny Western reports that it has at least 200 nuclear warheads and the missiles capable of delivering them -- an apparent strategy to deter possible attacks against the Jewish state.

Aziz did not say if Baghdad would be willing to discuss Security Council resolution 1284, which calls for an easing of the sanctions regime if Baghdad allows U.N. weapons inspectors back and cooperates with them to oversee the elimination of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.

Baghdad has rejected the resolution, which was adopted by the council in December 1999. The inspectors have been barred from Iraq since they left on the eve of a wave of U.S. and British bombings in December 1998.

Sahaf said before leaving Baghdad for his meeting with Annan on Monday and Tuesday that the talks would be held without any preconditions, "in particular resolution 1284."

------

U.S. sub commander expresses 'sincere regret'

02/25/2001
USA Today
http://usatoday.com/news/washdc/2001-02-25-sub.htm

TOKYO (AP) - A U.S. Navy submarine commander expressed his "most sincere regret" Sunday that his vessel struck and sunk a Japanese trawler, leaving nine people missing at sea. Cmdr. Scott Waddle's statement was sent by his lawyer to Japan's public television network, NHK, and broadcast Sunday nationwide. ''It is with a heavy heart that I express my most sincere regret'' for the accident, Waddle said.

Japanese have been demanding a public apology from Waddle, commander of the USS Greeneville, since his submarine rammed the Ehime Maru off Hawaii on Feb. 9.

Nine of the 35 people on board the Ehime Maru, a fishing vessel operated by a Japanese high school for aspiring commercial fisherman, went missing and are presumed dead.

"I know that the accident has caused unimaginable grief to the families of the Ehime Maru's missing students, instructors and crew members ... and to all of the Japanese people," Waddle was quoted as saying.

However, the statement may do little to cool the anger of the families of the missing, which has been mounting since an investigation revealed that civilian guests aboard the sub were at the controls at the time of the accident.

Shunsuke Terata, whose older brother, 17-year-old Yusuke Terata, remains missing, said in a telephone interview from his home in southwestern Japan that his family was not satisfied by Waddle's statement.

"We refuse to accept it as an apology," said Terata, 15. "It's not an apology until he says it to each one of us in person."

U.S. Navy investigators are still trying to determine whether the presence of 16 civilians on the submarine led to mistakes that caused the collision.

Waddle was quoted by NHK as saying in the statement that he wants full disclosure of the causes "so that such a disastrous accident never again occurs."

Last week, the United States decided to send a senior Navy official to Tokyo with a presidential letter and an apology for the sinking of the Ehime Maru.

Adm. William J. Fallon, the vice chief of naval operations, will arrive in Tokyo this week to hand-deliver a letter from President Bush to Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori.

---

Arms Control Problems

February 25, 2001
New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/25/opinion/L25DEF.html

To the Editor:

"The Bush Defense Agenda" (editorial, Feb. 18) rightly acknowledges that the arms control treaty process has for many years been counterproductive. It has prevented implementation of deep reductions in nuclear warheads. The nuclear treaty negotiation approach is failing and should be abandoned, to allow needed reductions to occur unilaterally.

Moreover, even the most ardent arms control proponents should recognize that the necessity to protect secret nuclear warhead design data severely limits applicable bilateral verification techniques. At best, bilateral verification of nuclear warhead reductions would be a grand exercise in pretense and public deception. Such verification could easily be fooled by systematic large-scale cheating that would not be detected or investigated.

HELEN M. HUNT Princeton, N.J., Feb. 19, 2001 The writer is a former member of the Institute of Nuclear Materials Management.

---

Report on Submarine

February 25, 2001
New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/25/weekinreview/25P2ST.html?pagewanted=all

A confidential Navy report raised new, disturbing questions about just what went into the submarine Greeneville's deadly collision with a Japanese trawler. The civilians on board disrupted crew communication and may have blocked a TV linked to the periscope, the report says, and the periscope scan was too quick to pick up a vessel as close as 2,000 yards. One officer feared the surfacing was too rapid, but with guests at his elbow, balked at challenging the captain. Hubert B. Herring

-------- britain

The money trail in the UK perhaps an appropriate time to question any investment in arms companies that deal in DU?

Sun, 25 Feb 2001
surplusvalue@ic24.net

Leukemia Research Fund 10,000 shares in BAe Systems

Mencap 58 shares in BAe Systems and 90 shares in Rolls Royce

Nacro 1,000 shares in BAe Systems

Battersea Dogs Home 29,702 shares in BAe Systems, 9,381 shares in BAES Stock, 30,355 shares in GKN

Royal National Institute for Deaf People 1,679 shares in BAe Systems, 530 shares in BAES Stock

Pension funds

Labour party 34,721 shares in BAe Systems

British Rail 24,280,210 shares in BAe Systems, 5,485,345 shares in BAES Stock, 1,226,032 shares in Rolls Royce, 8,865,700 shares in GKN, 325,500 shares in Alvis

Cornwall county council 483,693 shares in BAe Systems, 93,100 shares in GKN

Cumbria county council 419,980 shares in BAe Systems

West Sussex county council 560,176 shares in BAe Systems

Education

Balliol College, Oxford 52,745 shares in BAE Systems,10,657 shares in BAES Stock, 153,227 shares in Rolls Royce, 40,000 shares in GKN

Nuffield College, Oxford 30,015 shares in BAe Systems

University of Manchester superannuation scheme 642,000 shares in BAe Systems

University of Sussex 986 shares in BAe Systems, 311 shares in BAES Stock, 2,020 shares in GKN

East Berkshire College Trust Ltd 1,286 shares in BAe Systems, 406 shares in BAES Stock

Religious

Boys Brigade 6,624 shares in BAe Systems

Dean and Chapter of Christ Church, Oxford 64,500 shares in BAe Systems, 6,771 shares in BAES Stock, 85,400 shares in GKN

Evangelical Trust Ltd 1,384 shares in BAe Systems, 436 shares in BAES Stock

London Central Mosque Trust Ltd 5,025 shares in BAe Systems, 1,587 shares in BAES Stock.

United Reformed Church Trust 37,000 shares in GKN

Miscellaneous

Co-op Insurance Society Ltd (owned by the Co-op Group) 13,798,294 shares in BAe Systems, 2,305,102 shares in BAES Stock, 5,137,521 shares in Rolls Royce, 6,857,486 shares in GKN, 1,327,107 shares in Hunting, 837,263 shares in Cobham, 830,880 shares in Alvis

Colchester & East Essex Co-op Society pension fund 88,882 shares in BAe Systems, 55,768 shares in Rolls Royce

Amalgamated Engineering and Electrical Union general fund 34,000 shares in Rolls Royce, 13,000 shares in GKN, 15,220 shares in Cobham

TUC superannuation society 302,540 shares in BAe Systems

Unison, long term investments 88,248 shares in BAe Systems, 594,557 shares in BAES Stock, 60,500 shares in Rolls Royce, 41,820 shares in GKN

Health

Blackburn, Hyndburn and Ribble Valley Healthcare NHS Trust 3,215 shares in BAe Systems

Bolton Hospice Ltd 9,157 shares in BAe Systems, 365 shares in BAES Stock

British Medical Association staff fund 63,712 shares in BAe Systems

Cancer Research Campaign 81 shares in BAES Stock

Royal College of Pathologists: 29,502 shares in BAe Systems, 6,250 shares in GKN, 3,000 shares in Cobham

-------- china

The China and Nuclear Reunion Is Only a Motive Away

Sunday, February 25, 2001
Los Angeles Times
By DAVID E. MOSHER, LOWELL H. SCHWARTZ
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/20010225/t000016859.html

ARLINGTON, VA.--Over the past 10 years, the debate on national missile defense has concentrated mostly on emerging missile-armed states like North Korea and Iran and how it would affect the strategic relationship between the United States and Russia. But in terms of potential to respond, the country that has barely been talked about is China.

We tend to overlook China because it has opted to keep an arsenal of only about 20 single-warhead missiles that can reach the United States and because it is not a party to the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. But we ignore China at our peril: It has the resources and the technical know-how to be a much larger nuclear threat, perhaps deploying as many as 1,000 warheads on single- and multiple-warhead missiles capable of reaching the United States. What China lacks today is the strategic motivation for a large nuclear buildup. Whether its motivation will change will depend on the nature of its strategic relationship with the United States, which will be characterized by issues such as trade and Taiwan, not just missile defense.

Some analysts argue that a large build-up of Chinese nuclear forces is likely regardless of what the U.S. does. But a recent Pentagon report predicts that--absent a U.S. national missile defense--China's force is likely to continue to grow slowly, deploying only "tens of missiles capable of reaching the United States" by 2015.

The report notes, however, that the pace of China's modernization may change "as its strategic requirements evolve--particularly if the United States deploys NMD." Indeed, some intelligence reports estimate that the Chinese could increase their nuclear force to as many as 200 warheads capable of reaching the United States in response to the relatively limited defense proposed by the Clinton administration. And China's response could be much more dramatic if it is sufficiently motivated.

To gauge China's potential over the next decade or two, it is interesting to review what the Soviet Union was able to accomplish with its intercontinental ballistic missile force between 1960 and 1980. Despite the widely publicized missile gap that John F. Kennedy highlighted during the 1960 presidential campaign, the Soviet Union had only four ICBMs in 1960, all with single warheads. After being embarrassed in the Cuban missile crisis, Soviet leaders placed a heavy emphasis on expanding their nuclear forces. By 1970, the force had expanded to more than 1,200 missiles, and by 1980 its force had exploded to more than 5,000 warheads on some 1,100 missiles.

What does the Soviet experience say about China? If China chooses, could it duplicate the Soviet buildup of the 1960s and 1970s? Two factors are essential for building up a nuclear arsenal: the capacity to produce large numbers of missiles and the materials to produce the nuclear warheads.

In 1997, Defense Secretary William S. Cohen reported to Congress that China would have "the industrial capacity, though not necessarily the intent, to produce a large number, as many as a thousand, new missiles within the next decade." Most of those missiles are expected to be short- or medium-range, road-mobile, solid-fueled and armed with conventional warheads. Indeed, the Pentagon estimates China will have some 500 short-range M-11 missiles pointed at Taiwan by 2005. If China's intent changes, however--perhaps spurred by the deployment of U.S. national missile defense--it could refocus its resources on boosting production of long-range missiles. China already has demonstrated that it can build large, solid-fueled missiles and deploy more than one warhead on each missile. So producing 500 to 1,000 missiles over a decade or two is not out of the question for a motivated China.

In addition to missiles, China will need highly enriched uranium and plutonium to expand its arsenal. China reportedly stopped producing highly enriched uranium in 1987 and plutonium in 1991, so it may have to rely on its existing stocks for any warheads made over the next five to 10 years. Precise estimates of China's inventories of weapons-usable materials are difficult to make, but according to "Plutonium and Highly Enriched Uranium 1996, World Inventories, Capabilities and Policies," generally regarded as the most accurate public source on nuclear material inventories, China has enough for 1,000 to 2,500 weapons. China already has approximately 400 nuclear weapons, most of them on shorter-range platforms. That still leaves enough material to make as many as 500 to 2,000 new weapons, just from existing stocks. (This assumes that China has produced 15 to 25 metric tons of highly enriched uranium and two to six tons of weapons-grade plutonium and that it takes 20 to 30 kilograms of uranium or four kilograms of plutonium to make a single weapon.)

Whether China would actually take such aggressive measures to expand its strategic nuclear force is far from clear. It would be a sharp break from the recent past, since military modernization has been the lowest priority of Deng Xiaoping's list of Four Modernizations. Moreover, nuclear forces have long taken a back seat to conventional forces in budget allocations, a fact that the Pentagon proliferation report suggests is still true today. That pattern could continue even in the face of a limited U.S. national missile defense system. Unlike the Soviet Union with its centrally planned economy, China has strong elements of a market economy. This may make it difficult for the Chinese government to extract the necessary resources from the rest of the economy for a large defense buildup.

But a much larger strategic nuclear force cannot be ruled out if China came to believe its national security or international prestige demanded it.

The only thing that stands between China and a large strategic nuclear arsenal is motivation. And that could be deeply affected by the decisions that the United States makes about national missile defense and perhaps even theater missile defense in Asia.

Ultimately, the United States may decide that, on balance, its security would be better off with a national missile defense, even if China expands its nuclear forces significantly. But China's possible response and all of its implications must become part of the debate.

- - -

David E. Mosher, Who Spent a Decade at the Congressional Budget Office Analyzing Nuclear and Missile Defense Issues, Is a Nuclear Policy Analyst at Rand. Lowell H. Schwartz Is a Research Programmer at Rand.

-------- czech republic

Czech Plant Resumes Operation

February 25, 2001
Associated Press
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Czech-Nuclear.html

PRAGUE, Czech Republic (AP) -- A Czech nuclear plant that has prompted protests in neighboring Austria resumed operation Sunday, more than a month after it shut down because of technical problems.

Spokesman Milan Nebesar said workers at the plant in Temelin restarted the reactor at 3:20 a.m. Sunday after receiving permission from the State Office for Nuclear Safety. The output of the reactor on Sunday was one-half of a percent of the plant's capacity, he said.

The power plant was shut down on Jan. 18 because of vibrations in the main turbine generator. Previous malfunctions triggered automatic shutdowns twice in December.

The Temelin plant, located some 31 miles north of the Austrian border, is still going through testing. The project has long been a source of friction between the two countries.

When the reactor was turned on in October, it triggered protests by politicians and environmentalists in Austria, which does not use nuclear power. Austrian activists repeatedly blockaded the Czech border.

Construction of the 2,000-megawatt, Russian-designed plant was started in 1980 and upgraded by technology provided by Westinghouse in the 1990s.

The Czech Republic already operates one Soviet-designed, 1,760-megawatt plant built in the mid-1980s near Dukovany, some 125 miles east of Prague.

------- depleted uranium

Depleted uranium debate heats up in Europe as some say shelve ammunition

01/02/25
Ottawa Citizen
KEVIN WARD
http://www.southam.com/ottawacitizen/newsnow/cpfs/world/010225/w022507.html

ROME (CP) - NATO's unified defence of depleted uranium weapons developed some cracks recently with Italy's push to shelve the ammunition until more tests can prove the shells don't cause cancer.

Senior members of the Italian government, under pressure from the Green and Communist parties, have revised their thinking on the safety of depleted uranium and now believe more scientific testing needs to be done before the armour-piercing ammunition is used again.

"The issue has taken a serious turn and the alarm caused is more than legitimate," Italian Premier Giuliano Amato recently told the newspaper La Repubblica.

Despite assurances from NATO that the weapons don't cause cancer, Amato wasn't convinced.

"Now we fear things may not be so simple," he said.

Falco Accame, a former member of the Italian parliament, is among those leading the battle in Italy to ban the use of depleted weapons, fearing the toll on civilian populations and soldiers is too great.

He wonders why, if the shells are safe, soldiers have now been told to wear gloves and masks in dealing with sites that may be contaminated with depleted uranium.

"This is the main contradiction in the governments who say there is no risk," he said in an interview.

Accame, once chairman of the Italian parliament's defence committee and a former navy captain, works with soldiers and their families who believe they may have developed cancer because of their contact with depleted uranium.

In Italy, at least six soldiers have died of cancer since serving in the Balkans, five of them from leukemia. Thirty others have complained of health problems they believe are linked to their exposure.

In France, four soldiers are being treated for leukemia and a group of Belgian soldiers have announced they will sue their government because of health problems allegedly stemming from service in the Balkans.

Accame said the Italian government should have followed the U.S. and at least equipped its soldiers with proper masks, clothing and gloves when questions were first raised about the safety of the shells, favoured by military commanders because they can pierce heavy armour.

"Italy didn't give any safety precautions to military people," he said.

"At least the U.S. (in the Balkans) did something. We didn't do anything for our soldiers."

But the only solution, he said, is to ban the use of the ammunition, especially since civilian populations have no way to protect themselves.

Attempts by Italy to get a moratorium on the use of the ammunition failed at a meeting of NATO last month. The British army, meanwhile, began using the ammunition again this week at a firing range in Scotland, despite some local opposition.

The debate over the ammunition is perplexing, with a body of scientific opinion firmly stating that depleted uranium poses no risk to human health.

About 300 tonnes of depleted uranium was fired in the Persian Gulf War. Nine tonnes was used by NATO in Kosovo and three tonnes in Bosnia.

Depleted uranium is used in anti-tank munitions because it is heavy and hard, allowing it to punch through armour. No nuclear fission is involved in use of the shells, dubbed the Silver Bullet by the Pentagon in the 1990s.

But some fear the impact causes pieces of the metal to be vaporized into dust, which could be dangerous if inhaled or ingested. Scientists are split on this theory.

The British government has offered to test soldiers who fear their health has been damaged by exposure to depleted uranium, despite assurances that if the shells are handled properly, they present no danger to soldiers.

Canada's Defence Department announced recently that of the thousands of Canadians who served in the Gulf War and in the former Yugoslavia over the last decade, 104 have asked to be tested as a result of the depleted uranium scare.

A United Nations study of rounds of depleted uranium fired by NATO warplanes in Kosovo two years ago found that the ammunition contained deadly plutonium but at "very low" levels that pose no health risks.

And a King's College study of 4,000 British peacekeepers who served in Bosnia reported no difference in the health problems they experienced compared with troops who were not deployed to the Balkan country or the Gulf.

-------- iraq

Iraq Defiant as U.S. Lobbies Arabs on Shift in Sanctions

February 25, 2001
New York Times
JOHN F. BURNS
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/25/world/25IRAQ.html?pagewanted=all

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Feb. 24 - As the Bush administration tries to build international consensus around a new, perhaps less punitive sanctions regime against Iraq, the reaction in the Iraqi capital runs from the contempt of Saddam Hussein to something resembling a weary, believe-it- when-we-see-it shrug among the 23 million ordinary Iraqis who have endured a decade of incremental misery.

President Bush's meeting on Friday with Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain, which focused on the shift to so-called "smart" sanctions, was dismissed in Iraq's state-controlled newspapers today as a continuation of "Anglo-Saxon aggression." This began, in Iraq's view, when the United States and Britain led an allied military force that ousted Iraqi troops from Kuwait and won endorsement for the harshest United Nations sanctions applied against a member state.

With the 10th anniversary of the Persian Gulf war defeat of Iraq being observed in Kuwait on Monday, there is nothing here to encourage expectation that the Baghdad leadership will prove more amenable to the modified sanctions that the United States and Britain have proposed.

On the contrary, judging by the fulminations from senior aides to Saddam Hussein and from Iraqi newspaper commentaries today, Iraq believes that it can outlast the United States and Britain, using propaganda and diplomacy in the Arab world to win complete abandonment of the sanctions.

The voice of Saddam Hussein's Baghdad was as shrill as ever as Secretary of State Colin L. Powell arrived in Egypt today at the start of a six-nation Middle East tour aimed at winning support from Iraq's closest neighbors for the fresh approach. The new policy has been urged by Washington and London as a means of maintaining pressure on Iraq to stop developing nuclear, biological and chemical weapons - an effort Iraq says it has abandoned but the United States and Britain say it has not - while allaying concerns that Iraqis are being deprived of food and medicine.

"The small criminal Bush met with his British tail," the newspaper al Qadissiya, government-controlled like all others in Iraq, said on its front page today.

On the proposal for a new sanctions regime, which Iraqi newspapers have previously described as poisoned, the newspaper predicted that the Americans and British would fail in their bid to round up a new anti-Iraq consensus and thus deepen the hostility engendered by the two nations' bombing of what they said were Iraqi radar installations around Baghdad on Feb. 16.

In a similar tirade on Thursday, the official newspaper of the ruling Baath party, al Thawra, described the effort to shore up the sanctions by abandoning or scaling back those that had been blamed for malnutrition, disease and death as a last-ditch bid to rescue a failed policy. "These `smart' sanctions are nothing but a desperate and stupid attempt to exit the dead-end road reached by American and British policies against Iraq," it said.

"The `smart' sanctions focus primarily on controlling Iraq's financial resources, and restrict Iraq's diplomacy under the pretext of preventing it from arming itself," said the newspaper, which is considered a reliable indicator of the thinking of Saddam Hussein, who is leader of the Baath party as well as president and prime minister. "In other words, they aim at putting Iraq's economic, political and military potential in the hands of American and British enemies - a complete colonialist hegemony."

The Iraqi leader himself made no reported comment on the Washington meeting. But his trade minister appeared at an international technology fair in Baghdad - the first ever held here, and a fresh signal, according to Iraqi officials, of how far the old sanctions regime has eroded - and added his voice to the barrage of contempt.

"Our right is to export any commodity, whatever we can, and to buy any commodity that Iraqis require," the trade minister, Mohammed Mehdi Saleh, said at a news conference. "There cannot be walls between countries."

Judging the mood among ordinary Iraqis was more difficult, given the tight monitoring of foreign reporters and virtually all their conversations, effected through minders assigned to the reporters by the Information Ministry. But on the long overland journey from Jordan, 400 miles across the desert from Baghdad, and in the restaurants, bazaars and hospitals of the Iraqi capital, there seemed to be little enthusiasm at the news from Washington, and little hope that the everyday privations of the last decade will be eased.

How much of this dispiritedness is a result of exhaustion from the years of war and isolation - Iraq fought an eight-year war with Iran in the 1980's that severely depleted the country's resources before the Kuwait invasion - is impossible to say.

But along with the denunciations of the United States that are standard coda in any monitored conversation with an Iraqi, there were hints that many people here no longer care, if they ever did, whether their miseries are a result of the sanctions, as Mr. Hussein maintains, or the consequence of a cynical manipulation of the sanctions by the ruling elite in Baghdad, as Washington and some - but not all - United Nations sanctions reports have maintained.

Under the sanctions imposed after the gulf war, Iraq is allowed to sell a certain amount of oil, with the money going into United Nations-administered accounts that can be used for buying vital supplies like food and medicine.

Rising oil prices have increased revenue from this system sharply over the last year. Western officials also assert that Iraq is smuggling oil abroad and possibly using the revenue from those sales to rebuild its weapons program, allegations that Iraq denies.

At the al-Karam border post, at the frontier with Jordan, chaos runs through the night as traders, middle men and opportunists of every stripe elbow for the favor of Iraqi frontier officials, and the entry into Iraq that gives them access to an economy grotesquely distorted by the corruption and back-pocket dealings that have proliferated under sanctions.

One Iraqi official, momentarily out of earshot of his colleagues, sighed when asked about the possibility of sanctions being eased. "You know, mister," he said, "sanctions don't hurt governments, they hurt people. Presidents are not hurt by sanctions."

Much the same mood seemed to prevail at the Saddam Children's Hospital in Baghdad, where case- wearied doctors do rounds with reporters without, in some cases, bothering with the praise of Mr. Hussein or denunciations of the United States that have been routine for years. What matters most is that children suffering from bacterial meningitis or lymphocitic leukemia - often fatal conditions that have mushroomed in recent years, by Iraqi and United Nations counts - lack basic medicines and equipment to help keep them alive.

Whether this is because the government fails to buy medical supplies through the United Nations, as Washington contends, or because of the sanctions themselves, seemed secondary. Only after being asked several times did one mother, Suha Jassim, tending to a 6-year-old son with meningitis in the intensive care ward, say who she blamed for the situation. "America," she said, finally. And George W. Bush, the new president? "Him, too," she said. "He hates the Iraqi people, and that's why he sent his planes to bomb us."

---

A Lot of Pluribus, Not Much Unum

February 25, 2001
New York Times
By ALAN COWELL
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/25/weekinreview/25COWE.html?pagewanted=all

LONDON -- On the day allied warplanes launched their most recent strikes near Baghdad, an American-Iraqi encounter of a different kind was taking place in Washington.

Frank Ricciardone, a senior State Department official, met with representatives of Saddam Hussein's exiled opponents, carrying on a relationship that has been unfolding in various guises since the United States began cultivating the London-based exiles after the 1990-91 gulf war. Like the air strikes, economic sanctions and efforts to rid Iraq of weapons of mass destruction, the idea of cultivating President Hussein's opponents is part of the broader effort to oust him and replace him with a gentler, friendlier Iraqi leadership, however improbable that might sound.

The Clinton administration earmarked over $100 million in funding for the exiles to promote mildly subversive operations, like a newspaper and a radio station and training for President Hussein's opponents in skills ranging from computer literacy to the art of running a benevolent civilian society - unfamiliar territory given Iraq's modern history of coups, war and state violence.

But, as Secretary of State Colin L. Powell meets with Mideast leaders and the Bush administration begins to come to grips with the complexities of this unpredictable campaign, the links between Washington and the Iraqi National Congress exile movement pose two questions for President Bush: should the United States be offering political cooperation or more hard- nosed backing for armed revolt? And will the squabbling factions of the opposition ever be able to deliver?

Indeed, sensing a possible shift under a Republican administration that was quick to prove its credentials in Iraq with the bombing raids, many of the exiled factions are pressing Washington for the kind of aid that would enable them to launch an insurgency from the Kurdish-dominated strongholds of northern Iraq. But that is coupled with a demand for guarantees to come to the aid of the insurgents against a likely Iraqi counteroffensive, a step that Washington, once burned, is twice-shy to contemplate.

The burn was in 1996, when a covert American military training operation in northern Iraq ended disastrously as infighting between two groups of the regime's Kurdish opponents prompted one to invite the Iraqi Army to join the fray, with bloody and humiliating results.

The fighting has eased since then, but the fractiousness endures. The Iraqi National Congress, formally created in 1992, is an umbrella for dissident Iraqi groups of widely ranging political flavors, from constitutional monarchists to Islamists. And it is built around the same two Kurdish groups, the Kurdistan Democratic Party and the Popular Union of Kurdistan, that were at the center of the 1996 debacle.

While the Kurdish north of Iraq, protected by an allied no-fly zone, represents the only area of Iraq where opponents may operate with a modicum of autonomy, there are other groups that also claim credentials, like the Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, an Iranian-sponsored group among the Shiites of southern Iraq, and the Iraqi National Accord, which has sought to foment conspiracy among the Sunni-dominated officer class.

MODERN history offers the exiles little encouragement.

Where exiled groups like the African National Congress in South Africa have come to power, it is with some credentials as a credible alternative to an unjust regime, often reinforced by military campaigns that, if nothing else, betoken their ability to physically challenge and harass their adversaries. And those adversaries were ultimately prepared to negotiate. Very little of that applies to Iraq.

Over the years, Mr. Hussein has crushed insurgencies, used chemical weapons against his own people and bloodily repressed dissent even within his own family entourage. If he has co-opted adversaries, it has been to neutralize them.

That same catalog of horrors and inducements also explains his political longevity. The selective, exemplary and often terrible use of violence and the seductions of privilege have driven home to all Iraqis the rewards of conformity and the price of dissent, Charles Tripp, a prominent British scholar, said in a recent study.

Dictators, of course, rarely govern simply by brute force. In Iraq, said Mr. Tripp, from London's School of Oriental and African Studies, President Hussein's immediate entourage is rooted in a handful of family, clan or regional affiliates, but his largesse spreads outward to a broader community of supplicants, possibly numbering with their dependents up to 500,000 of Iraq's 20 million people. And their loyalty is based on the belief that they would lose everything if he were to be overthrown and a new dispensation of power established in Baghdad.

Indeed, as a new American administration ponders its options in Iraq, there is, perhaps, an example closer to home of the limits on Washington's success in supporting the exiled foes of a repressive regime hobbled by American sanctions - not in Iraq, but in Fidel Castro's Cuba.

So why bother to support Mr. Hussein's adversaries at all? The answer to that is the only simple factor in the entire equation. "We think that it is important not to discount people who are willing to stand up against Saddam Hussein," said an American official with long experience in the region. "It would be wrong for us to shut these people off as not worth our time."

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Iraq nearing capability to use nuclear weapons

Sunday, February 25, 2001
Philadelphia Inquirer
REUTERS
By Douglas Busvine
http://inq.philly.com/content/inquirer/2001/02/25/national/IRAQ25.htm

BERLIN - Saddam Hussein may be able to menace Iraq's neighbors with nuclear weapons in three years and fire a missile as far as Europe by 2005, according to a German intelligence assessment made public yesterday.

The Federal Intelligence Service, or BND, has gathered evidence that Baghdad is also stepping up efforts to produce chemical weapons and has increased buying abroad of the inputs needed to make biological weapons.

Details of the assessment were published in German newspapers. A spokesman at the BND's headquarters near Munich confirmed that selected correspondents had been briefed on Iraq by intelligence officials on Friday.

"It is clear that we have suspicions about Iraq," the spokesman said.

Iraq barred U.N. weapons inspectors in 1998, making it extremely difficult to keep track of what the West believes are Baghdad's efforts to menace the Middle East and beyond with atomic, biological and chemical weapons.

Based on information it has gathered, the BND has drawn the following conclusions, according to reports in the Welt and Frankfurter Allgemeine newspapers:

There is evidence that Iraq has resumed its nuclear program and may be capable of producing an atomic bomb in three years. Work has been observed at the Al Qaim site, believed to be the center of Baghdad's nuclear program.

Iraq is developing rockets that can deliver a payload 95 miles. Rockets capable of carrying a warhead 1,900 miles could be built by 2005 - putting Europe within reach. Iraq is also believed to be capable of manufacturing solid rocket fuel.

A company based in New Delhi has acted as a buyer on Iraq's behalf. The company is on a German government blacklist because of its alleged role in proliferation. Deliveries have been made via Malaysia and the United Arab Emirates, the BND says.

Since the end of U.N. weapons inspections, the number of Iraqi sites involved in chemical production has increased from 20 to 80. Of that total, the BND believes a quarter are involved in making weapons.

Widespread procurement has been observed abroad, and production of biological weapons could be resumed at short notice. The BND does not rule out the possibility that production may already have begun.

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Defectors say Iraq tested nuclear bomb

Uzi Mahnaimi and Tom Walker
February 25, 2001
London Times
http://www.sunday-times.co.uk/news/pages/sti/2001/02/25/stifgnmid03001.html

DISTURBING new evidence has emerged about Saddam Hussein's nuclear arsenal as tension rises in the Middle East over an increasingly aggressive Iraq.

According to two former senior scientists in the Iraqi nuclear programme - corroborated by a former aide to Saddam's son Uday - Iraq carried out a successful nuclear test before the Gulf war and now has a nuclear stockpile.

The scientists describe in detail Iraq's nuclear programme. They say Saddam carried out a nuclear test in September 1989 deep beneath Lake Rezzaza, southwest of Baghdad. The blast was undetected because it was relatively small - about equal to the Hiroshima bomb - and muffled.

Over the past decade, despite UN inspections, Saddam has carried out further tests and now has several bombs stored in a bunker under the Hamrin mountains north of Baghdad, they say.

Their claims, which are reported in today's News Review section of The Sunday Times, challenge the consensus among the American, British and Israeli intelligence services that Saddam does not have sufficient enriched uranium or plutonium to fulfil his ambition of developing a nuclear bomb.

Israel's prime minister-elect, Ariel Sharon, is expected to warn Colin Powell, the visiting American secretary of state, during talks today that the region may slide into war. Powell, who was in Egypt yesterday, urged Arab countries to join America in countering the threat posed by Saddam.

Israeli military sources say that Sharon has ordered Shaul Mofaz, the chief of staff, to prepare the army for a pre-emptive attack on Iraq's missile launch zone, which is close to its border with Syria.

Resurrecting and developing plans from the Gulf war, Sharon threatens to deploy tactical neutron bombs to "wipe out" the launch zone in the event that intelligence reports say a non-conventional weapons attack by Iraq is imminent, according to the sources.

Sources close to Sharon say he will tell Powell that Israel would not sit still and wait for Iraqi missiles to rain down on its towns, as it did in the 1991 Gulf war in reponse to American requests for restraint.

On Thursday Israel placed its forces on high missile alert after American intelligence warned about movements of Iraqi armoured divisions close to the border with Syria. American satellites also picked up preparations in the Iraqi long-range surface missiles brigade. Israeli air force planes took off opposite the Syrian coast.

Almost at the same time, two American Awacs, four Hawkeye spy planes and 36 assorted American and British fighter aircraft took off from the Turkish base of Incirlik and from American carriers in the region.

They ran into fierce anti- aircraft missile fire from batteries north of the Iraqi oil city of Mosul. The allied fighters blasted the Iraqi batteries in return but caused little damage.

The next day, an Arabic- language Israeli newspaper published a warning from Baghdad that "Iraq is about to hit Israel" and "will liberate the occupied territories". An Israeli general, formerly assistant to an Israeli prime minister, told The Sunday Times: "It's hard to believe that Saddam will use non-conventional weapons against Israel, but we failed to predict his moves in the past and we may fail to do so in future."

The principal source of the new evidence about Saddam's nuclear programme is a former military engineer, known as "Leone", who says he worked for a special scientific department of the Republican Palace in Baghdad, which supervised the development of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.

His claim is corroborated by a scientist from another branch of the weapons programme and by Abbas al-Janabi, a former personal assistant to Uday Hussein. "A nuclear test was carried out in 1988 or 1989 in an underground site beside Lake Rezzaza," said Janabi, who claimed to have been in the test cavern before the explosion. Satellite images from 1989 show a huge tunnel at the site.

Last month, another former engineer from the weapons programme, now in hiding, said Saddam had two "fully operational" nuclear bombs.

Western intelligence officers who have heard Leone's claims say he is well informed, but they insist there is no evidence that Iraq could obtain sufficient enriched nuclear fuel. Leone and his corroborators say that the fuel was smuggled in from South Africa via Brazil.

Gwynne Roberts, a film-maker who has investigated Leone's story, said: "Something very unusual happened on the shores of Lake Rezzaza prior to the Gulf war, which was completely missed by western intelligence agencies."

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Was this Saddam's bomb?

February 25 2001
London Times
Gwynne Roberts
http://www.sunday-times.co.uk/news/pages/sti/2001/02/25/stirevnws01015.html

The mysterious visitor emerged from the shadows outside my hotel in Kurdish controlled northern Iraq, just as a crisis between Washington and Baghdad was reaching a climax in January 1998. His appearance set alarm bells ringing. Several westerners had recently been murdered in Kurdistan, and Iraqi intelligence agents were blamed.

I was there to investigate the long-term impact of Saddam Hussein's gassing of the people of Halabja, the town he drenched in lethal chemicals in 1988. Iraq knew of the mission and my team was at risk. The visitor was visibly nervous and shivering, and the guards on the hotel steps were suspicious. Although it was bitterly cold, he was wearing a silk summer jacket.

"Are you a journalist?" he asked my cameraman, who was filming outside the hotel. He was keen to talk about the Iraqi nuclear programme, but I was suspicious. After the Kurds had identified him as a bona fide nuclear scientist, I invited him back to the hotel.

"I am in danger here in Iraq," said "Leone", as we came to know him. "I signed a document every six months agreeing not to talk to foreigners. It said I and my family would be executed if I broke the agreement. If I reveal secrets to you, my life is at risk."

Nonetheless, Leone talked on - and he told me an astonishing story. If true, it completely contradicts the western consensus about the shortcomings of Saddam's nuclear weapons programme.

Intelligence agencies, including Israel's Mossad, insist that Saddam has never had the technology or the fuel to fulfil his ambition of creating a nuclear arsenal. Yet Leone, and other defectors who have corroborated his story, insist that Saddam not only has nuclear weapons but has tested them.

SITTING in a scruffy hotel room in Sulaymaniyah, Leone explained in detail the work he said he was involved in. He described himself as a military engineer who was a member of the Iraqi Atomic Energy Commission. Simultaneously, he said, he worked for the Republican Palace in Baghdad.

"There is a special scientific department there for supervising all activities for the Iraqi mass destruction weapons, especially the missile programme. So I was in a very privileged position. I had my own bodyguards and my special status protected me. I was authorised to travel to many secret sites all over Iraq. Very few can do this."

Leone worked through the night in the hotel, drawing detailed diagrams of nuclear weapons. "This is Iraq's nuclear bomb," he said, spreading diagrams on the bed. "I saw it in the workshop in Tuwaitha many times. This is the first successful prototype. When they finished it in 1986, they took it to the president by car, but without uranium. All members of the delegation got cars as presents for their work. Between 1985 and 1989, I saw this device at least five times."

He said it worked on the principle of the Hiroshima gun-type bomb, in which high explosives drive pieces of highly enriched uranium together at high velocity. This triggers a nuclear explosion.

Leone's design was unusual. The uranium was contained in a series of finely engineered tubes, like the control rods of a nuclear reactor. It was not the type of design one might find from a search of textbooks or the internet.

He showed me a photograph of what he said was a gun assembly nuclear warhead bought off the peg from Russia. Six devices were purchased during the late 1980s, he said, all of them without fuel. Iraq managed to purchase fissile material on the black market for at least one warhead.

Leone then made the staggering claim that Iraq had conducted a nuclear test before the Gulf war.

"The test was carried out at 10.30am on September 19, 1989, at an underground site 150km southwest of Baghdad," he said. "Saddam had threatened us with the death penalty if we told anybody about it.

"The location was a militarised zone on the far shore of Lake Rezzaza, which used to be a tourist area. There is a natural tunnel there which leads to a large cavern deep under the lake. Labourers worked on it for two years, strengthening the tunnel walls.

"There was a big Republican Guard camp nearby and dirt roads leading to the site. You could see the thick high-tension cables on the ground, which disappeared into a huge shaft entrance. I saw one which must have been 20km long. The command post for the test was in a castle in the desert not far away.

"We went to a lot of trouble to conceal the test from the outside world. The Russians supplied us with a table listing US satellite movements. They were always helping us. Every six hours, trucks near the test site changed their positions. They had carried out a lot of irrigation projects in the test area during the year before as a diversion. But these weren't agricultural workers. They were nuclear engineers. It was a nice cheat.

"We had built a special platform for the bomb in the Tuwaitha workshop and this was sent to the test site. This allowed the device to be jacked up inside the cavern. Then we sealed off the cavern by blocking part of the tunnel inside with a 50-metre concrete plug and piling up sand and rocks behind that. All this was intended to muffle the explosion, and it's known as 'decoupling'.

"I saw the air-conditioned yellow truck carrying the bomb near the site at dawn a few days before the test. They always used this vehicle to transport it. On its side was a wheatsheaf symbol with 'Ministry of Trade' written below it. I saw the people in charge of the test head off in that direction as well - Dr Khalid Ibrahim Sayeed and Dr Jafaar Dhia Jafaar.

"When the test happened, there was no dust or anything. The air just vibrated. I was in my car at the time and it just shook. It reached about 2.7 on the Richter scale, and wouldn't really have been noticed by seismic stations outside Iraq."

Leone said that Hussein Kamel al-Majid, Saddam's brother-in-law, was in overall charge of the test. [Kamel defected to Jordan in 1995 and was later murdered.] "After the test, they destroyed the entrance to the tunnel. They also removed any evidence to indicate that a test had happened.

"They washed out the shaft with water to remove any radioactivity. They then filled it with cement, rocks and sand, and destroyed the entrance. They also created a long river channel near the shaft entrance to drain off contaminated ground water."

Leone showed me a letter signed by Kamel that seemed to confirm the test. Written in Arabic and dated September 19, 1989, it read: "With the help of God and the effort of the heroic freedom fighters in the military industrialisation institution and the atomic power organisation, we have successfully completed Test Number One of the Iraqi Atomic Bomb. Its strength was 10 kilotons and highly enriched uranium was used with a purity of 93% . . . With this experiment Iraq is considered the first country in the world to carry out this sort of experiment without the knowledge of the international monitoring authorities."

I still had a problem with Leone's story. Iraq did not have the industrial capacity to produce enough bomb-grade fissile material for a test. Leone said the Iraqis had bought it on the black market.

"We had a purchasing department whose job was to buy highly enriched uranium. Brazil purchased highly enriched uranium from South Africa and then delivered it to Iraq. I am not talking about tons. It was between 20 and 50 kilograms. France also supplied us secretly with highly enriched uranium after the Israelis bombed the Osirak reactor in 1981."

The Rezzaza test, according to Leone, sealed the fate of the Observer journalist Farzad Bazoft, who had been investigating the cause of a huge explosion at a military complex south of Baghdad.

The Iranian-born reporter was arrested on September 15, four days before the test date, after taking soil samples near the al-Qaqa facility, about 80km from the test site. He was executed for espionage the following March.

I knew the Bazoft story well. In 1988 I had entered Iraqi Kurdistan and gathered soil samples which proved that the Iraqi regime had used chemical weapons against its own people. Bazoft had reportedly seen my film Winds of Death, which documented this horrific crime, and attempted to emulate my methods, with tragic results.

"He was accused of working for a foreign intelligence agency," said Leone. "The authorities were convinced he was trying to find out about the planned Rezzaza test. This was a state secret of the highest importance and, once they even suspected this, he was never going to be released."

In August 1990, Saddam invaded Kuwait. After his defeat in the ensuing Gulf war, UN arms inspectors discovered an Iraqi crash programme to build a nuclear bomb, known as PC3. But, according to Leone, they missed the most successful part of the programme.

"They thought they had stopped the Iraqis from building the bomb, but they overlooked the military organisation codenamed Group Four. This department is a comprehensive section that was involved in assembling the bomb from the beginning to the end. It was also involved in developing launching systems, missile programmes, preparing uranium, purchasing it on the black market, smuggling it back into Iraq."

Leone told me that Group Four successfully developed a gun-type device at the nuclear weaponisation centre at al-Atheer. Unscom, the UN inspectorate, was aware that the Iraqis were working on an implosion-type nuclear device there, but knew nothing about Group Four. All evidence of its existence had been removed before they arrived in Iraq, Leone said.

The Iraqis went to extraordinary lengths to protect their secrets. In one incident on 1991, the UN nuclear weapons inspection team managed to film sensitive documents listing names of key personnel in the nuclear programme. Leone claimed the Iraqi official who allowed access, Adel Fayed, was later murdered.

"He was killed by knives in his home," said he. "They cut off his head. Everyone knew that Saddam's cousin, Ali al-Takriti, was responsible. Nobody talked to Unscom after this assassination."

To avoid Unscom detection, scientists from the main weaponisation groups were spread throughout Iraq. Group Four was relocated in civilian aircraft factories at Taji in the north of Baghdad. Using the factories as a front, they imported "aircraft parts" from Russia and eastern Europe. These consignments often concealed components for the nuclear programme.

Group Four also bought up American and Russian designs for gun-type nuclear bombs. Leone alleged that these were acquired with help from India.

Leone said his pivotal job brought him into close contact with Khalid Ibrahim Sayeed, Group Four's leader, a military engineer whom he met regularly to discuss weapons design.

Another important bomb design organisation, Group Five, operated out of an agricultural machinery factory near Mosul in northern Iraq, said Leone. Group Five scientists worked on a thermonuclear device, he said. The components were assembled at secret locations under Mount Hemrin, 140km northeast of Baghdad.

In 1993, Saddam awarded Group Five's leader, Dr Ahmed Abdul Jabar Shansal, the Golden Sword of Mesopotamia (First Degree), the highest decoration in Iraq, for completing work on a nuclear implosion bomb, a far more complex design than the gun-type, Leone said. In 1995, Group Five was renamed the State Enterprise for Extracting Industries.

Leone's disclosures were detailed, and his knowledge of personnel in the programme was encyclopaedic. His bomb diagrams demonstrated specialist knowledge of nuclear weapons. His most stunning claim, however, was that Iraq now possessed three Hiroshima-type bombs, three implosion weapons and three thermonuclear weapons.

"I am certain about this," he said. "They are stored deep underground in a bunker in the Hemrin mountains."

Having disgorged this information, Leone disappeared into the cold streets of Sulaymaniyah. His evidence contradicted the claims of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) that Iraq's nuclear weapons programme was more or less dismantled after the Gulf war. Was he a hoaxer? I tracked down people in Kurdistan who knew him and a picture began to emerge.

Leone had defected in the mid-1990s to the safe havens of northern Iraq. Seeking sanctuary for his family, he had met officials from the West's four-nation military co-ordinating centre. They flew him to Ankara to debrief him but never gave him what he wanted: sanctuary in the West.

He tried to reach Europe through Ukraine and approached the British embassy in Kiev. Diplomats arranged for experts from the IAEA to fly in to debrief him, but Leone refused to co-operate when he realised they were unwilling to provide visas for the West.

"There was no doubt he was genuine," said Arras Habib Kareem, who debriefed him in Kurdistan for the opposition Iraqi National Congress (INC). "When other Iraqi nuclear scientists came north they recognised him within seconds. He knows a lot about the Iraqi nuclear programme. He knows about the test areas, the facilities and the equipment the Iraqis used.

"He once provided me with a list of 200 names of people working in the programme, with their rank and what each was doing - 90% of what he said was later confirmed by other Iraqi scientists who defected."

Seeking expert advice, I turned to Dr Frank Barnaby, the former nuclear weapons scientist who vouchsafed the authenticity of Mordechai Vanunu's evidence of the Israeli bomb programme in 1986. I asked him to assess Leone's drawing of the 1989 test device.

"The design is unusual, but I see no reason why it shouldn't work if it is well engineered," Barnaby said. "I find it impressive. All the nuclear physics he is talking about is reasonable. He has to be taken seriously because he is obviously competent. The very least we are dealing with here is a radiological bomb, a nuclear weapon in its own right, which Iraq was suspected of developing."

Could it be a hoax? "If it were, Leone would use a more standard design, not invent an unusual one," replied Barnaby. He described Leone's disclosures as more dramatic than Vanunu's, because they contained more detailed information about weapon design.

If Leone was telling the truth, surely the blast would have been detected by seismologists?

Officials at the International Seismic Centre near Newbury said detecting an event of this size - about 2.7 on the Richter scale - would be "extremely difficult" in this region, especially if it had been decoupled, as Leone claimed.

I visited Sulaymaniyah's local seismic station. It is 640km from the Rezzaza site, and its director confirmed that its range was limited. "Whether we would pick up an event 100 to 200km away would depend on its magnitude," he explained. "If it's really big, we would record it. If it's small, then we may miss it."

Records from 1989 showed no trace of an event on September 19, but a map of Iraq's main earthquake zones provided a potential clue. The Rezzaza region is virtually earthquake-free, but the map showed one exception - a tremor marked by a red circle on the southwestern shore of the lake, close to Leone's test site. Nobody at the seismic station knew when this tremor occurred, except that it was after 1985 and before 1991.

I needed corroboration from other defectors from Iraq's nuclear weapons programme. Most were too scared to talk. One scientist living in northern Europe, who had received a video from Baghdad of his sister being sexually abused by security agents, refused to have anything to do with me.

But I tracked down a "Dr Imad" who had worked for Group Four, and persuaded him to meet me in Denmark. The story he told, unprompted by me, fitted Leone's.

"There were two groups working on two different projects. One was the implosion bomb under Dr Jafaar and the other the gun-type device, under Dr Khalid Ibrahim Sayeed," Imad said "Dr Khalid headed Group Four."

Again echoing Leone, Imad continued: "The headquarters of both groups was at al-Atheer, the nuclear weapons design centre south of Baghdad. The UN inspectors only discovered one project there. They missed the Group Four programme, which had the same funding but was far more successful. This was Iraq's best-kept secret."

Imad was adamant that the Iraqis had conducted a nuclear test, although he did not know where. "Group Four was working specifically on a Hiroshima-type bomb. In 1986-87, they began to run computer simulation models, but I know for a fact that in 1989 they fed in real test data."

"From an actual test?" I asked.

"From an actual test. They modified the model according to the test data. They finished it."

"So does Iraq have the bomb?"

"Iraq tested the bomb and they have it," he said.

He also described how a senior Iraqi scientist had brought the fuel from Brazil in a private jet and was rewarded with money and land.

Imad's evidence meant that two former senior Iraqi scientists - one in Kurdistan and the other in Denmark - had independently confirmed that an organisation called Group Four not only existed but had successfully tested a gun-type atomic bomb. If this was true, the UN inspection teams had missed half of Iraq's nuclear programme. It was difficult to comprehend failure on such a massive scale.

Yet Unmovic, the UN agency that took over from Unscom after inspectors were barred from Iraq in 1998, was completely in the dark about Group Four. Dr Hans Blix, Unmovic's executive chairman, who also headed the IAEA for 16 years, thought a nuclear test was improbable.

I turned to Dr David Kay, a former head of the UN nuclear inspection team. He suspected that the Iraqis were working on a gun-type bomb and was not quite so adamant in refusing to believe that one had been tested.

"One thing I've learnt in Iraq is that it is unwise to totally exclude anything, because in fact the Iraqis spent a lot of money and got a lot of assistance from other people. They were always trying to do it, and they did it under totalitarian pressure. So people can occasionally do miraculous things," he said.

Kay knew of Group Four - he called it a "major weapons design group operating under the auspices of Saddam himself" - but he had discovered few details about its activities.

It was Kay who uncovered Iraq's crash programme to build an implosion device. He had been amazed at its size. "What we found was more or less an exact replica of a crash US Manhattan Project during the second world war. The facilities were large in number. I remember the initial briefing identified three or four sites. There turned out to be more than 50. We now think there were somewhere between 10,000 and 20,000 working on the programme. The best guess of costs is somewhere in the order of $10 billion."

Late last year I turned to the most important Iraqi defector to reach Europe, Abbas al-Janabi. He was personal assistant to Saddam's son, Uday, for 15 years, was imprisoned eight times by his former boss and routinely tortured. He finally fled the country with his family in 1998.

His cousin, Fadil al-Janabi, was high in the Iraqi nuclear programme and other members of his clan were highly placed within Group Four. His response to my probing was succinct. "A nuclear test was carried out - in 1988 or 1989 - in an underground site beside Lake Rezzaza," he said.

He pointed out the test site on a map of Iraq. It was close to Leone's location. "It's a military zone," he said. "I doubt whether UN inspectors ever visited it." He himself had clambered down into a vast underground cavern.

He learnt of the successful test from Uday, who, he said, was unable to conceal his jubilation. "They were talking about the test, about their ability to produce a nuclear bomb. They were talking about a new powerful Iraq," said Janabi.

Was it definitely a nuclear test? "Definitely. There is no doubt about that. It was a small nuclear test." Who had supplied the highly enriched uranium for the bomb?South Africa, he said, via South America.

He claimed to know the person who had negotiated with the South Africans. "He was talking about 50kg. Negotiations began in 1986 and the delivery was made in 1988."

In the mid-1990s, on a Channel 4 investigation, I visited Valindaba, the facility near Pretoria which produced South Africa's bomb-grade uranium. Officially, I was told the plant never achieved its design output because of technical problems. In its lifetime, it was said to have produced weapons-grade uranium for only six or seven devices. But a plant supervisor let slip that it had functioned flawlessly from 1976 until 1989. It could have produced enough for 20 simple uranium bombs.

So had South Africa sold off surplus stocks? I contacted a former intelligence official under the apartheid regime who had helped procure components for his country's nuclear weapons programme on the black market. "The story is true," he said. "About 50kg were sold to the Iraqis."

For the final stage of my investigation, I used the latest space technology. I bought pictures of Lake Rezzaza taken in July 1989 - two months before the claimed test - by a French Spot Image satellite and compared them with images from the Indian IRS1D spacecraft shot in September 2000.

Professor Bhupendra Jasani of King's College, London, analysed them. He quickly discovered the tunnel Leone and Abbas al-Janabi had told me about. It was 4km long and 400 metres wide and stretched under Lake Rezzaza. Roads led from a railway line to the shaft entrance, a huge rectangular structure. Many lorries could have driven abreast into the tunnel.

To the southwest, Jasani found more evidence of an unusually sensitive military zone - an army base with some 40 buildings, each 40 by 70 metres in size, and a massive missile base nearby.

The September 2000 image showed that 60% of these buildings had been destroyed. Jasani and I assumed this must have been in allied air attacks. When I mentioned this to Leone, however, he said the Iraqis themselves had blown them up to cover up the evidence. At the UN headquarters in New York, I showed my satellite images to UN arms inspectors who confirmed they had never visited the western shore of Lake Rezzaza.

The 2000 picture also provided a vital clue. The shaft entrance was destroyed and the tunnel blocked up, exactly as Leone had told me. I got hold of a third satellite picture from 1990, which revealed that this blocking had happened before the Gulf war in January 1991.

"If you wanted to hide something, I guess this is exactly what you would do," said Jasani.

But was it consistent with this being a nuclear test site? "The infrastructure is certainly consistent with test activity. You require storage sites, vehicle activities, communications systems like the train, railway tracks and roadworks. All of those things you can certainly see on the image," said Jasani.

The tunnel and the entrance were huge and the manpower needed to block it up massive. Leone had told me that thousands of political prisoners worked on the tunnel after a presidential amnesty.

"They were well fed and lived in comfortable caravans. In return, they worked hard. But none of them came out of it alive," he said. "Many were contaminated with radioactive waste. Friends working for Iraqi security who were guarding them said they were buried in caves nearby. The Iraqi regime hoped the secret of the Rezzaza lake test would die with them.

"Hussein Kamel gave the order to kill these people . . . I was disgusted by it and it's one of the major reasons I fled."

This grotesque story was corroborated by Imad. He said he was aware that political prisoners who worked on the Rezzaza tunnel were massacred by Iraqi security guards to conceal an unspecified secret military project. He did not know this was the nuclear test site.

Last year Leone and his family finally reached the West with the help of the UN refugee programme. Although comparatively safe, he fears reprisals. Last week his brother was arrested in Iraq after the Anglo-American air raids.

Leone no longer needs to draw attention to himself to get help, yet he continues to give more details of the bomb programme, insisting that his story is true.

Western intelligence sources, while recognising that he is well informed, continue to insist that he and the other Iraqi sources I have spoken to are wrong about the test. Personally, I think the evidence is compelling.

THE CAVERN: The device was raised on a platform inside a massively enlarged cavern deep under the lake

THE TUNNEL: Iraqi engineers enlarged a natural tunnel under Lake Rezazza, southwest of Baghdad

FORT: The test was said to have been controlled from an old fort

MISSILES: The test site was a highly militarised area with a huge storage site and a missile base

THE WARHEAD: A Hiroshima-style 10-kiloton device was exploded underground before the Gulf war, according to a former member of Saddam's secret weapons programme

CONCRETE PLUG: To avoid detection, the tunnel was plugged with concrete and filled with rubble

The evidence: a 1989 satellite photo, [below], shows the entrance to the tunnel under Lake Rezazza and the ground disturbed by underground activity. Top, Leoni's drawing of the test bomb. Above, Iraq later destroyed its military base near the test site

http://www.sunday-times.co.uk/news/pages/sti/2001/02/25/STR25map.350x247.jpg?
http://www.sunday-times.co.uk/news/pages/sti/2001/02/25/STR25iraq.200x200.gif?
http://www.sunday-times.co.uk/news/pages/sti/2001/02/25/STR25sad.350x207.jpg?

-------- missile defense

Learning to Fear Putin's Gaze

February 25, 2001
New York Times
By STEVEN ERLANGER
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/25/weekinreview/25ERLA.html?pagewanted=all

BUCHAREST, Romania -- Central and Eastern Europeans think they have a deeper understanding of Russia and the Russians than anyone else, and given their wretched history since World War II, they should. Now they are deeply concerned about Russia's president, Vladimir V. Putin, who seems not just to be talking the talk of renewed empire, but walking the walk despite his country's manifold weaknesses.

Mr. Putin has been emphasizing the defense of Russian national interests after the years of kowtowing to the West under Boris N. Yeltsin. While Mr. Yeltsin often seemed indifferent to events in the new countries of the former Soviet Union - known in Moscow as "the near abroad" - Mr. Putin insists they are part of Russia's "sphere of influence" and remain vital strategically.

That assertion is enough to upset those who used to live under Moscow's yoke, but now Mr. Putin's actions in countries like Ukraine, Georgia, Moldova and Azerbaijan are having consequences for future East- West relations, even as they create more pressure for a new round of NATO enlargement. Already, there are increasing desires in Romania and the Baltic nations to get under NATO's umbrella as fast as they can.

While Mr. Yeltsin denounced NATO's expansion in 1999, he was mollified in part because Washington kept the first round small: Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic. But then his inability to stop NATO's bombing war against Yugoslavia marked a nadir of Russian influence and set the stage for Mr. Putin to try to revive it.

"There is a new chapter; policy toward the near abroad has changed," said Istvan Gyarmati, a former diplomat who helped negotiate Hungary's entry into NATO. "Putin is a bit like Peter the Great, opening to the West for capital and technology but at the same time recentralizing Russia and reinforcing authoritarian rule, while exercising a more assertive foreign policy in the areas where he can."

Mr. Putin's national security adviser, Sergei Ivanov, recently warned the German defense minister, Rudolf Scharping, that NATO expansion "will create a fundamentally new situation in Europe that objectively infringes on Russia's political and military interests. This could lead to a serious crisis." Moscow has had similarly fierce words for European ears about President Bush's plans for national missile defense. But the harsh talk about the near abroad may be paving the way for even harder bargaining over what Mr. Putin really needs: Western capital and technology, along with an agreement from NATO to stop its expansion at the former Soviet border.

Since November, Russia has been more explicit about cutting natural gas supplies not just to collect on debts, but to influence policies in countries like Ukraine and Georgia, European and NATO officials say. Russia also has found reasons to delay or renege on political and military commitments to withdraw troops and shut bases in Moldova and Georgia. It has imposed visa requirements on Georgians and demanded use of Georgian territory to attack secessionists in Chechnya, a part of Russia itself. It has moved more rapidly toward unifying with Belarus and has discussed a similar treaty with the pro-Russian Communist Party in Moldova, which is expected to be the main part of a ruling coalition after parliamentary elections today.

RUSSIA wants badly to recreate its own early-warning radar system, which was broken by the collapse of the Soviet Union. While the Baltic countries won't play along, Moscow is pressing other nations of the near abroad to participate, including Ukraine. Moscow has also created a collective security organization with several central Asian states and has declared the Caspian Sea and its huge oil resources a Russian strategic interest.

On Jan. 18, Russia signed a military agreement with Ukraine, whose president, Leonid Kuchma, is in deep political trouble over allegations that he ordered the death of a journalist. Mr. Putin was in Kiev a week ago, emphasizing old ties and giving Mr. Kuchma a boost.

But Moscow is also pressing for a new natural gas pipeline to Europe through Poland, bypassing Ukraine - a course that could put Ukraine at odds with Poland. Mr. Putin, who visited Azerbaijan in January as Russia's Caspian fleet exercised nearby, is also pressing hard for Caspian oil to go abroad through Russian pipelines and ports. He came away with an agreement from Azerbaijan to Moscow's notion of how to divide up the Caspian Sea.

Ukraine signed military cooperation agreements with NATO in 1997 and 1998 and has formed a joint peace-keeping brigade with Poland and Lithuania. But Russia's new military agreement with Ukraine now gives Russia a role in planning foreign military exercises on Ukrainian soil. That makes planned exercises with NATO much less useful, Mr. Gyarmati says, and NATO officials agree.

The elections in Moldova are another good example of the new Putin policy. Recently, Mr. Putin met in Moscow with the leader of the unreformed Moldovan Communists, Vladimir Vorodin; he also met with the centrist prime minister, Dmitru Braghis, apparently seeking agreement to a post-election coalition with the Communists. Romania's prime minister, Adrian Nastase, is carefully watching this. "We're very much interested in not being a buffer zone in this region," he said. "We have our own security interests, which is why we want to become a member of NATO and join by the 2002 summit in Prague."

Despite all the efforts to bring Moscow into a cordial relationship with NATO and the new post-cold-war tasks in the Balkans, the alliance remains the major deterrent to any future Russian expansion. Slovakia and Slovenia are obvious candidates for a next round of NATO expansion. Romania and the Baltic states are now pressing harder, but their candidacies are more difficult. (The fall of Slobodan Milosevic in Romania's neighbor Yugoslavia has made the Balkans less dangerous, and Romania is probably still too unstable. NATO membership for Estonia, Latvia or Lithuania would cross the Soviet "red line.")

But perhaps the best example of the new Russian squeeze is in Georgia. Russian tactics there range from economic pressure, like cutting gas supplies and insisting on visas for the million or so Georgians who work in Russia, to demands that the Russians continue to use a military air base without Georgian oversight or permission, coupled with charges that Georgia is supporting the rebels in Chechnya.

"There is a definite change in attitude toward Georgia," said an official from a NATO country. He noted that Georgian officials seem frightened and unsure. "They used to talk about joining NATO as a goal," another analyst said. "Now they don't talk that way any more."

---

U.S. and Russians Meet on Defenses Against Missiles

February 25, 2001
New York Times
By JANE PERLEZ
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/25/world/25MIDE.html?pagewanted=all

JERUSALEM, Feb. 24 - On his first overseas trip as America's chief diplomat, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell plunged into talks today with the Russian foreign minister over differences on plans for a missile defense. They agreed to hold an expert-level dialogue on both offensive and defensive weapons, officials on both sides said.

The 90-minute discussion with Foreign Minister Igor S. Ivanov, who met General Powell at his initial stop in Cairo, was part of a three-day tour by General Powell of five Arab countries, the Palestinian territories and Israel. The Bush administration describes the tour as part of a reassessment of American policy in which it hopes to gain new support for sanctions against Iraq.

The meeting with Mr. Ivanov was the first encounter between the Bush administration and the Russian government of President Vladimir V. Putin. It came at the end of a week in which the Russians began floating an alternative before America's NATO allies to the more ambitious missile defense plan of the United States.

Afterward, General Powell described the talks as "very, very excellent," though Mr. Ivanov was less exuberant and officials provided few details of the discussions.

A senior State Department official said the talks covered "the waterfront" - from Washington's concerns about Russian abuses in its war against separatists in Chechnya to questions of press freedom in Russia. The Russians made a request to continue meetings between experts on both sides about offensive and defensive weapons, and the Americans agreed.

"We agreed it needs dialogue on all levels, including at the expert level, and we agreed that we should begin such a dialogue as soon as possible," Mr. Ivanov said through an interpreter at a separate news conference after the meeting, which took place at a motel adjacent to the Cairo airport.

Groups of experts had already been set up during the Clinton administration and used to discuss reductions in offensive weapons and ideas on defensive systems, the American official said. He said no date had been set on the first new meetings of these groups, which would be reconstituted by the Bush administration with its own officials.

On Iraq, the official said, Mr. Ivanov agreed on the American goal that the sanctions should be used to eliminate Saddam Hussein's pursuit of weapons of mass destruction.

Before traveling on to Israel, General Powell met in Egypt with President Hosni Mubarak and, the official said, Mr. Mubarak told the secretary that the sanctions against Iraq were not working in their current form and were harming the Iraqi people, and not the Iraqi leadership.

The Egyptian leader, however, also agreed that the goal of the sanctions should be to eliminate Mr. Hussein's pursuit of weapons of mass destruction. The American official said Mr. Mubarak offered no new ideas of how to reshape the sanctions - a prime goal of General Powell's trip - and said simply, "I hope you succeed."

At a news conference with the Egyptian foreign minister, Amr Moussa, Egyptian journalists were extremely critical of American policy toward Iraq, and Mr. Moussa himself said he did not believe that Iraq presented a threat to Egypt, but that he understood sentiment was different in Kuwait, which Iraq invaded a decade ago.

In Israel, General Powell was scheduled to meet tonight with the caretaker prime minister, Ehud Barak, and on Sunday with Mr. Barak's successor, Ariel Sharon. He was also scheduled to meet with the Palestinian leader, Yasir Arafat, at his West Bank headquarters in Ramallah. The meeting was originally planned for Gaza, where anti-American protests have been particularly virulent, but moved because of security concerns.

General Powell will discuss with both the Palestinian and Israeli leaders ways to reduce the months of violence between the two sides, which has left hundreds dead. But in contrast to the last years of the Clinton administration, a peace deal is not high on the agenda.

Speaking to reporters on the plane en route to Cairo, General Powell said his discussions with Mr. Ivanov were part of what he described as a long, and probably arduous, process of explaining to the Russians the Bush administration's determination to move ahead on missile defense.

His early impression of the Russian proposal on missile defense, first given to the NATO secretary general, Lord Robertson, earlier this week, was that it was quite thin in content, General Powell said.

"There isn't a lot there yet that we can get our teeth into," he told reporters on the plane.

The Russian proposal concentrates on "theater" missile defense for Europe, which the secretary described as "a different kind of system" from the more ambitious one proposed by the Bush administration.

But General Powell acknowledged that the Bush administration had not yet determined precisely what kind of missile defense it would ultimately like to build. "We're still working on our concept and program," he said.

Because of the very early stages of the administration's plans, "there's more than enough time before we have to move forward with our concept and programs to discuss this with the Russians and the Chinese," General Powell said.

Before meeting Mr. Ivanov, General Powell, who has already seen 25 foreign ministers and heads of state since taking office, set a slightly warmer tone than that of Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld.

The defense secretary caused a stir in Moscow by calling Russia "an active proliferator" of weapons technology to countries like "Iran and North Korea and India." In reply, Russian officials had said the Bush administration should stop likening Russia to the "evil empire."

En route to Cairo, General Powell recalled his "long record of interaction with Russian leaders over the years," as national security adviser and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the first Bush administration. "If one speaks openly and candidly," he said, "you can make progress as long as you don't shy away from the tough issues and as long as you don't forget that there are many areas of interest that we have in common."

He said that he did not expect the arrest this week of an F.B.I. agent, Robert Philip Hanssen, as a spy for Russia to come up in his talks with Mr. Ivanov. General Powell's trip to the Middle East coincides with the 10th anniversary of the Persian Gulf war, which drove Iraqi forces from Kuwait but left Mr. Hussein in power. Along with Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf and former President George Bush, General Powell will be among those saluted in a ceremony in Kuwait on Monday.

But the State Department emphasized that General Powell was in the region because of the urgent need to consult about Mr. Hussein and repair Washington's relations with the rest of the Arab world, not because of the pageantry on Monday.

While General Powell would like the focus of his trip to be how to retarget the sanctions against Iraq, Arab leaders are still more likely to stress the violent conflict between the Palestinians and Israel, which have produced rising anger among Arab populations.

In addition, the American and British airstrikes against Iraq eight days ago has generated varying criticism from all Arab states, something General Powell acknowledged could complicate his mission.

"To the extent that makes my job and my work a little more difficult, well, so be it," he said.

The secretary said he may not have an easy time persuading the moderate Arab states about the need to tighten some sanctions against Mr. Hussein. The leaders in Jordan, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Egypt have all complained that the economic sanctions have failed to punish Mr. Hussein, but have succeeded instead in punishing ordinary Iraqis.

General Powell acknowledged in his briefing with reporters that the United States was "taking the heat, losing the support of the Arab on the street" in its efforts to counter Mr. Hussein.

"We need to turn the debate onto his actions as opposed to our actions," General Powell said, adding that it was Mr. Hussein who was "threatening the region, not the United States."

In outlining his approach on Iraq to the reporters, General Powell described what amounted to preventing Mr. Hussein from obtaining military equipment as well as items that can be used for both civilian and military purposes.

That approach appeared to hint at a move away from the blunt tool of economic sanctions and toward more targeted military sanctions as a way of getting at the most important threat from Mr. Hussein: his programs to develop biological, chemical and nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them.

On the question of Chinese telecommunication workers helping Iraq with its defense abilities, General Powell said the Bush administration had sent the Chinese government a second démarche this week following one delivered in January. The Chinese replied that they were "looking into the matter," the secretary said.

---

Powell, Russian Say Arms Experts Should Meet

Sunday, February 25, 2001
Washington Post
By Alan Sipress
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A47603-2001Feb23?language=printer

CAIRO, Feb. 24 -- In his first foreign trip as secretary of state, Colin L. Powell agreed with Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov today that arms control experts from both countries should meet soon to discuss sharp differences in their competing missile defense plans.

In Cairo, the first stop on a four-day tour of Middle Eastern and European capitals expected to be dominated by discussions about Iraq, Powell also met with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak.

Few significant decisions were expected from Powell's talks here with Ivanov, the highest-level meeting between their two governments since the Bush administration took office.

The two men agreed they would instruct arms controls negotiators, who had been holding talks on the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and the START arms reduction treaty, to resume their work and to begin tackling the dispute over the Bush administration's determination to develop a national missile shield, according to a senior State Department official.

The agreement to jointly discuss both offensive weapons and missile defense systems came at Ivanov's urging, the official said. No date for the talks were set.

Russian officials have previously complained that the U.S. missile defense plan would violate the ABM Treaty, which prohibits any national missile defenses, and which some in the Bush administration have said is outdated and hamstrings U.S. efforts to protect against attacks from such countries as North Korea and Iraq. U.S. officials have suggested they could negotiate deep cuts in strategic nuclear weapons sought by Russia if Moscow acquiesced to the development of a U.S. missile shield.

Within the last week, Russia also has floated a proposal for a limited theater-based missile defense system for Europe, which Powell welcomed today as a recognition of the need to confront the danger posed by missiles carrying nuclear, chemical and biological weapons.

No further details of the Russian proposal were released. But Powell said it remained short of the extensive shield envisioned by the United States. "I think we had a good conversation and a candid exchange of views -- and we have much more to talk about," he said.

The meeting with Ivanov was amicable, opening with both agreeing to call each other by their first name and continuing one-on-one for 90 minutes while their advisers waited outside. At a brief news conference after the meeting, Powell repeatedly placed his right hand on the foreign minister's shoulder.

Ivanov called the meeting "a very frank, constructive dialogue." But he said disagreements remained on a number of central issues besides missile defense. "If you think that we managed to resolve all our differences after our first meeting, this certainly would be good but this exceeds our expectation," he said.

During their talks, Powell and Ivanov shared their differing views on the economic sanctions imposed on Iraq after it invaded Kuwait in 1990. Russia has long argued that the sanctions should be eased, while the United States has taken the lead in enforcing the restrictions and arguing that they be strengthened to prevent Saddam Hussein, Iraq's leader, from rebuilding his military and weapons production capabilities.

Powell also raised the issue of Russia's crackdown in Chechnya, asking for "accountability" for its actions in the separatist region, a senior State Department official said. The official added that Powell expressed U.S. support for press freedom in Russia, in particular for Media-Most, an independent media company that has been under fire from President Vladimir Putin's government. The arrest last weekend of Robert P. Hanssen, a top FBI agent accused of spying for Russia, did not come up, the official said.

Powell's meeting with Egyptian officials, the key U.S. ally in the Arab world, was less upbeat. Cairo's newspapers greeted Powell with harsh editorials condemning U.S. support for the decade-old U.N. sanctions against Iraq, and Egyptian reporters peppered him with pointed questions about U.S. policy on Iraq and the Arab-Israeli conflict during a news conference with Foreign Minister Amr Moussa.

U.S. officials are reconsidering overall policy toward Iraq, including the sanctions and whether to boost financial support for the opposition seeking to overthrow Hussein. They expect to produce a new policy by spring and said they see the discussions this week with Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Syria as an essential step in determining what measures would receive regional backing.

At the news conference, Moussa reiterated Egypt's unhappiness with the current policy toward Iraq, saying, "Sanctions so far have affected the people rather than any regime. Sanctions should be reconsidered as a weapon or one of the procedures the [U.N.] Security Council resorts to."

On the eve of his visit to Cairo, Powell said his task of rallying regional support was made more difficult by the Feb. 16 airstrikes by the United States and Britain against Iraqi radar and antiaircraft sites near Baghdad. The raids, which the Bush administration said were required to protect pilots patroling the "no-fly" zone over southern Iraq, were widely condemned in the Arab world, as well as by such U.S. allies as France and Turkey.

"It has certainly sensitized us to the need of doing a better job of making our friends aware of the kinds of plans were are executing and the kids of contingency plans we have for the no-fly zones," Powell said. The no-fly zones, which ban Iraqi airplanes from passing over broad swaths of northern and southern Iraq, were established after the Persian Gulf War to protect Kurdish and Shiite Muslim populations that had rebelled against Hussein.

From Cairo, Powell flew to Israel, where he was scheduled to meet Sunday with Prime Minister-elect Ariel Sharon before traveling to the West Bank city of Ramallah for talks with the Palestinian leader, Yasser Arafat, and then to Amman for talks with Jordan's King Abdullah.

---

Russian Missile Offensive

February 25, 2001
New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/25/weekinreview/25P2ST.html?pagewanted=all

Russia has long insisted that the West does not need new missile defenses. But now it has outlined its own plan to protect Europe from missile attack during meetings in Moscow with NATO's secretary general, Lord Robertson. The Russian system, which would comply with the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, would be able to destroy incoming short- and medium-range missiles. Skeptics say the move is nothing more than an effort to draw European support away from the grander U.S. system. But Lord Robertson saw the proposal as an indication that the Russians may be ready for serious give and take. The real test will come this year, after the Americans flesh out their plans for anti-missile systems and arms cuts. Michael R. Gordon

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Russia may sell China arms

Sunday, February 25, 2001
The Hindu
By Vladimir Radyuhin
http://www.indiaserver.com/thehindu/2001/02/25/stories/03250006.htm

MOSCOW, FEB. 24. Russia may sell strategic weapons and technologies to China if the United States goes ahead with its missile shield plan.

Commenting on this week's visit to Moscow by Mr. Zhang Wannian, deputy chairman of China's Central Military Council, the Vremya- MN daily said today that ``the two countries are ready for cooperation in strategic armaments''.

During his two-day visit to Russia, China's Number Two in the military establishment met all the top Russian leaders, including the President, Mr. Putin, and signed a defence agreement with the Russian Deputy Prime Minister, Mr. Ilya Klebanov.

Details of the accord and the talks were not revealed but the Russian Defence Minister, Marshal Igor Sergeyev said after his talks with Mr. Zhang Wannian that further arms deals could be reached during the forthcoming visit to Russia of the Chinese President, Mr. Jiang Zemin, scheduled for July. During the coming summit the two countries are also expected to sign a comprehensive friendship treaty.

Until now Russia defence supplies to China have been confined to non-strategic conventional weapons, but the American ``Star Wars'' could push Russia to beef up China's strategic potential, the Vremya-MN newspaper said.

``This will above all involve joint development and production of weapon systems capable of penetrating the American missile shield and destroy its space, air and ground-based components,'' the paper said.

The daily said the Russian President, Mr. Vladimir Putin, had given the green light for closer defence cooperation with China last year, when he signed a joint statement with the Chinese President, Mr. Jiang Zemin, in Beijing critising the U.S. missile defence plan.

``If Russia and China decide to move from words to deeds, they will give priority to joint development of various anti-satellite weapons (lasers, interception missiles), and improving the accuracy of Chinese nuclear missiles by linking them to the Russian Glonass space-based navigation system.''

The Vremya-MN also said China could get Russian nuclear submarines with long-range cruise missiles, TU-22M3 nuclear-capable bombers and MIG-31 long-range fighters. However, today's report may be part of the war of words between Moscow and Washington in the run up to their talks on the U.S. missile shield and the fate of the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty.

-------- russia

Don't Let This Russia Spook You

Sunday, February 25, 2001
Washington Post
By Robert G. Kaiser
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A49232-2001Feb23?language=printer

Last week's jaw-dropping spy story, an appalling embarrassment for the FBI, was also a powerful reminder of an unpleasant fact: Those difficult Russians are still with us, occupying their huge landmass atop most of the inhabited world, aiming their thermonuclear weapons at us, spying on us, still alienated from our world and lost in their own. Damn those nasty Russians!

But wait. There certainly are nasty Russians, but they aren't playing this game alone. The United States is still on alert, literally, ever ready to obliterate the Russians in a matter of minutes with the weapons we aim at them. Spying? We caught the FBI agent working for them because a Russian agent apparently working for us turned him in. Nearly a decade after the Soviet Union's collapse -- taking with it any plausible basis for a Russian-American war -- we're still in the grip of Cold War reflexes and assumptions. Who's to blame for this nuttiness? That's probably a futile question. This tango requires the usual number of dancers.

The latest spy story demonstrates how both countries remain on a kind of automatic pilot. Robert P. Hanssen, the FBI man arrested last week, allegedly began selling secrets to Moscow in October 1985, when the Cold War was still intense. Mikhail Gorbachev had been in power only seven months; glasnost and perestroika were still just words in the Russian dictionary. Now that Russia's military machine has crumbled and the Warsaw Pact has dissolved, the idea of a "superpower confrontation" has become ridiculous -- one could only happen now if the United States confronted itself. But Hanssen kept on peddling his wares, and the Russians kept paying for them, according to the charges. The spying game obviously has a life of its own. For the spies, so does the Russian-American rivalry.

The truth is, the old, mortal rivalry is over. We really did win.

Nevertheless, the United States has a big Russian problem. The Russians are in a mess at home, their secret policemen are in the ascendancy, and so is anti-Americanism. Russia, the biggest nation in Europe, is not integrated with its neighbors politically, nor does it participate fully in the global economy. All those nukes, all that oil and gas, all those talented people remain, at best, on the edge of the international community. The Russians are scared, and resentful. And a resentful, unsuccessful Russia can easily make life miserable for its neighbors, and for us.

The United States made the Russian problem worse during the '90s. We sometimes gave too much assistance, as when Americans helped plot the Russian government's economic reform policies. We focused most of our official attention on one man, Boris Yeltsin, and his entourage, and not on pushing Russians to work on democratic methods and institutions. We foolishly over-flattered the garrulous first president of post-communist Russia, encouraging him and his countrymen to pretend they had a much bigger place in the world than they had yet earned. We paid too little attention to corruption, and to politicians outside Yeltsin's orbit.

As the Bush administration prepared to take charge, it signaled its desire to depart from the Clinton administration's Russia policy, first by altering the bureaucratic arrangements for dealing with Russia from Washington. It has downgraded the staff position on the National Security Council that deals with Russia and it initially favored abolishing the role of special ambassador to the countries of the former Soviet Union. "They're organizing Russia down," said Arnold Horelick, an academic specialist on Russia who was the CIA's national intelligence officer for the Soviet Union in the late '70s. These changes are "bureaucratic and symbolic," Horelick added, "but they begin to matter," particularly if they make it hard to recruit strong, senior people to work on the Russian account in the new administration.

"Downgrading Russia" is part of an argument among Americans about how best to deal with Moscow. Several of President Bush's foreign policy advisers have participated in this debate, which is generally held among and for insiders. The Bush people have tended to take a more skeptical stance: Make the Russians earn their new place in the world, don't just defer to them; show them how they can become important, don't try to make them feel important; don't let them blackmail us with their weakness. But those views don't add up to a real policy toward Russia. They're posturing.

A month in office has been enough to jolt the Bush team. No decision has been made on abolishing the job of ambassador at large (the equivalent of an assistant secretary of state) for the former Soviet Union, and sources familiar with the matter said last week that Secretary of State Colin Powell had heard eloquent arguments to preserve the role, if only to handle a heavy workload more efficiently. "No one is going to marginalize Russia," Condoleezza Rice, Bush's national security adviser and a Russian-speaking expert, said in an interview (see excerpts below).

To Russian ears, the argument over downgrading Russia combines insult with condescension. Anti-Americanism has blossomed in Moscow since NATO's bombing of Kosovo nearly two years ago. Many Russians have concluded that the United States' real goal is simply to keep their country weak and insignificant. Some Russian commentators take perverse satisfaction from evidence that President Vladimir Putin has found ways to make the Americans mad. "Russia has been showing itself an ever-more active player on the world stage lately," wrote Dmitri Gornostayev in Nezavisamaya Gazeta in December. This activism, Gornostayev wrote, "is irritating U.S. policymakers. Moscow's decision to renew full-scale cooperation with Iran has dealt a serious blow to American diplomacy. And that could be only the beginning."

Happily, another Russian commentator pointed out what a silly comment this was.

Russia's weight is still felt from Western Europe to China and Japan, not least because it's so near dozens of nations, from Greenland in the West to the United States -- Alaska -- in the East. But Russia is more than a looming presence: The Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 shaped the arc of the 20th century. Russian resourcefulness and determination were critical to the defeat of Hitler, and then kept the Soviet Union competitive with the Americans to make the Cold War into a terrifying contest for transcending superiority. The country has always produced large historical figures, from Peter the Great and Catherine the Great to Khrushchev and Sakharov. Times are tough, but the Russians aren't going to slip off the edge of the world and disappear.

Finding ways to bring free, non-communist Russia into the community of nations was the biggest challenge of the 1990s, and no one -- not in the Clinton administration, not in Europe, not in Russia -- rose to it. The Russians themselves failed most dramatically.

These failures shouldn't surprise anyone. Integrating Russia into the world order is a huge task, in part because the devastation left by seven decades of communist rule can't quickly be repaired. Nikolai Shmelyov, an economist in Moscow, observed recently that a third of Russia's industrial capacity is useless, yet much of it pretends still to operate. Russia produces a steadily smaller proportion of the food it consumes. Environmental degradation is ubiquitous, and in some areas catastrophic. Russian men have a life expectancy of less than 60 years, one measure of the country's deteriorating public health.

Russia remains an unnatural country, suspended between a horrific past and an uncertain future. Because the Soviet Union disappeared without bloodshed, the old regime was never fully displaced. Russia is still ruled by members of the Communist Party nomenklatura, defended by the old Red Army, snooped upon by the old KGB (all with new names or labels). The rule of law remains largely a dream. Corruption is taken for granted -- as it deserves to be, because it is so common.

The prevailing political culture under Putin is unsavory. Putin has empowered the political police, demonstrated his discomfort with forceful opposition, revived a crude Russian nationalism, and made political hay by waging a brutal, fruitless war in Chechnya. Yet Putin, like his countrymen, craves acceptance in the West, and insists that Russia is a European nation.

Some Russian commentators have had the courage to tell their countrymen the truth. Sergei Blagovolin, a political scientist, noted recently in an interview with the Moscow newspaper Segodnya that Russia was still undergoing "the process of understanding the fact that Russia is no longer a superpower, that we lost . . . ." Asked if Russia is now moving in the right direction, he gave a poignantly candid (and accurate) reply: "It seems to me we are moving in a circle. We are painfully searching for the right path."

The words of the man who appears to be Putin's principal foreign policy aide, Sergei B. Ivanov, have a different cast. At a conference in Munich earlier this month, Ivanov harangued NATO for causing, in Kosovo, "systematic growth of violence and a political impasse threatening European and global security." A U.S. missile defense abrogating the 1972 ABM Treaty, he predicted, "will result in annihilation of the whole structure of strategic stability, and create prerequisites for a new arms race, including one in outer space."

Ivanov's bluster nicely captures the frustrations of the Russians who haven't come to terms with their country's poverty or its inability to make its voice heard. Those frustrations help explain why the Russians maintain their enormous espionage apparatus, one attribute of a superpower to which they can cling.

Not that Ivanov's rhetoric is entirely hollow. The missile defense issue is very real. That ABM treaty, an attempt to stabilize the arms race, is now useful to Russia in at least two important ways: It is evidence (when there isn't much) that they and the Americans still matter equally on a big strategic issue, and it blocks a new competition which, if it comes, would only advertise Russia's poverty and weakness.

If Congress and the Bush administration insist unilaterally on a missile defense that violates, and nullifies, the ABM Treaty, Russia will be livid (as may many other nations). It will also be furious if NATO expands to include the former Soviet republics of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, thus demonstrating Russia's helplessness and aggravating its sense of isolation.

America has its own truth tellers. One, former secretary of defense James Schlesinger, observed recently that there are numerous Americans "who come out of the Cold War [experience] and kind of miss the excitement." Schlesinger, quoting Churchill, said victory in the Cold War argued now for "magnanimity."

Rice is sensitive to Russian sensibilities. During last week's interview she offered no compromises on missile defense or NATO expansion, but more broadly, she said precisely what anxious Russians would most like to hear: "The people who think a weak Russia is a good thing for the United States are wrong. A weak Russia will only be a problem for the international community."

A strong Russia is still just a dream, but not an unimaginable one. Amid all the bad news there are hopeful signs: real economic growth last year, the rise of a generation of productive entrepreneurs, an artistic and cultural boom in Moscow. The 145 million citizens of Russia are members of the nation that produced Pushkin and Dostoevski, Malevich and Brodsky, Rachmaninoff and Shostakovich. One day, new Russian talents will again astound us.

Americans will advance their own interests -- and Russia's, too -- if they confront the Russian problem forcefully and magnanimously. We can try to persuade the Russians they are welcome at the high table, though only if they behave appropriately. We can show them the path to get there. This will require persistent, creative diplomacy. Neither indifference nor petty hostility will help.

Robert Kaiser, an associate editor of The Post, has written about Russia and the Soviet Union since 1971.

-------- u.s. nuc weapons

Nat'l Guard Teams Found Unprepared

February 25, 2001
Associated Press
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Guard-Terrorism.html

WASHINGTON (AP) -- After three years and $143 million, the Army National Guard has no anti-terrorism teams ready to respond to nuclear, chemical, or biological attacks because of defective safety equipment and poor training, an internal Pentagon review found.

The Pentagon inspector general report said preparedness is so bad that Guard members at one point were given mobile labs with air filters installed backward and gas masks with incompatible parts.

``The (team) commanders and personnel lack confidence in the unknown, untested and unsubstantiated reliability of the equipment that they were issued,'' investigators said.

Pentagon officials are ``moving as fast as we can'' to fix the problems, said Charles L. Cragin, who oversees the National Guard.

``All I can say is, everyone is working with great perseverance to resolve all the issues that the inspector general has identified,'' said Cragin, the acting assistant secretary of defense for reserve affairs.

Pentagon planners authorized 10 teams in 1998 with a goal that they be ready for duty in 2000. But the National Guard so badly bungled preparations that none met last year's deadline, the report said.

An additional 22 teams authorized by Congress in 1999 and 2000 are in various stages of formation.

After investigators presented their preliminary findings last fall, the Pentagon transferred management of the teams and launched an official review. Many of the problems arose because officials tried to get the teams ready very quickly, Cragin said.

The National Guard units, each with 22 full-time members, are supposed to help local authorities respond to a terrorist attack by identifying what nuclear, chemical or biological agents were used.

But Pentagon investigators concluded that defective safety equipment could put team members at risk of succumbing to the very weapons they were meant to identify.

Investigators found that air filters had been installed backward in the teams' mobile laboratories and team members were given gas masks with parts that were not designed to work together.

One team commander, referring to the gas masks, told investigators, ``It probably would work. I'm just not willing to bet my life on it.'' Cragin said that problem has been fixed.

Plans originally called for the teams to be stationed near Air National Guard bases so they could be flown to the site of a terrorist attack. A second draft of those plans, however, called for team members to drive their personal cars to attack scenes, which could be hundreds of miles away. The guidelines have not been completed.

Coinciding with the recent release of the Pentagon report, a congressional commission recommended focusing the National Guard on protecting U.S. territory from weapons of mass destruction.

President Bush last week said he would like to see the Guard and Reserve ``more involved in homeland security.''

Frank Hoffman, a researcher for the U.S. Commission on National Security, said the problems with the National Guard response teams show the Pentagon is not paying enough attention to terrorist threats.

``Everyone knows we're not prepared,'' said Hoffman, an officer in the Marine Corps reserves.

Cragin said all safety problems identified by the inspector general will be fixed before he recommends that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld certify the teams ready for duty. Cragin said he did not know when he that would be.

-------- u.s. nuc facilities

The UNPLUG Salem Campaign Contributes to New Report on Nuke Fish Slaughter; "Licensed to Kill" Released

02/25/01
Salem and Oyster Creek Nuke Reporters
by Humane Society and Energy Groups
The UNPLUG SALEM Campaign
321 Barr Ave., Linwood NJ 08221
609-601-8583/601-8537 norco@bellatlantic.net
http://www.unplugsalem.org/

A new and comprehensive report on how nuclear plants with once-through cooling systems like Salem Units 1 and 2 and the Oyster Creek Nuclear Plant slaughter billions of fish on both the Atlantic and Pacific coasts, the Great Lakes, and on rivers across America, was released Friday the Energy Communication Council (SECC), the Humane Society of the United States, the Nuclear Information and Resource Service (NIRS), and Standing for Truth About Radiation (STAR). The project was funded in part by the Grace Foundation and by the Norcross Foundation.

The UNPLUG Salem Campaign, Tony Totah, Clean Ocean Action, and the Delaware Riverkeeper Network contributed to the Salem and Oyster Creek portions of the report.

The report makes it very clear that the Salem Nukes continue to violate not only the Clean Water Act (CWA), Section 316(b), but also the Endangered Species Act, and discussed how the National Marine Fisheries Services (NMFS) allowed PSE&G to avoid taking steps that would have resulted in less sea turtles being killed. Page 85 of the report details how in 1997, when PSE&G had exceeded its "take limit" on sea turtles, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, reacting to pressure from PSE&G, asked the NMFS to delete a sea turtle monitoring program requirement. PSE&G then asked that NRC agree that another NMFS requirement, that trash rack equipment be cleaned every day, also be voided.

Pages 47-49 discuss the history of the Salem Nuke Fish Slaughter. The report noted that the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection ignored a NMFS recommendation of a monitoring program that would give good data for deciding whether or not cooling towers were really needed. This recommendation included these comments on what is now the so-called Estuary Enhancement Program: "The mitigation proposal proposed by PSE&G to offset the impact of once-through cooling...is based as much on conjecture as it is on hard scientific fact." The NJ DEP ignored these comments.

Also discussed in the report is the massive herbiciding of the Delaware Bay marshes, and, on pages 57 and 84, the slaughter of horseshoe crabs at Thompson's Beach, and the ruin of the once thriving town of Thompson's Beach.

Pages 80-83 document the killing of sea turtles by Amergen's Oyster Creek Nuclear Plant, and the lack of enforcement of the Endangered Species Act against both GPU, the former owners, and Amergen, the current owners of Oyster Creek. NMFS has not enforced Section 7 of the ESA, which requires Amergen to report to the NRC any Kemp's ridley or green turtle killed by the plant. The report questions whether GPU and Amergen are reporting accurately all of the turtles killed by the plant. The report notes that the NRC does not always post turtle kill reports on its website as it should.

The report also clearly shows that the problems at Salem and Oyster Creek, and the collusion between the NRC, the NMFS and the utilities are nationwide, that these two agencies have put the profits of the utilities first and the environment, and endangered species, last.

Commented Norm Cohen, UNPLUG Salem Coordinator, "This report confirms our testimony at the recent NJ DEP permit hearing for Salem. What is deeply alarming to us, and what should be alarming to our public officials, is that this destruction of our environment by nukes is not just a New Jersey problem, it's nationwide. I would also point out that the fact that the Humane Society of the United States was willing to put their name on this document indicates that this report is indeed legitimate and must be taken seriously by the DEP, the EPA, and our legislators. This report has clearly laid out the problem of collusion and lax enforcement of our environmental laws by the NRC and NMFS when it comes to nukes. Its time for Congress to demand that the laws Congress passed be enforced. Here in NJ, its time for the NJ DEP to enforce the Clean Water Act."

CONTACT: Norm Cohen 609-601-8583; Tony Totah: 609-729-9262; Delaware Riverkeeper: 800-8-DELAWARE

-------- washington

Secret Nuclear Studies
U.Va. physicist's work languished
Shift in research left school in the lurch

Feb 25, 2001
Richmond Times-Dispatch
BY CARLOS SANTOS
http://www.timesdispatch.com/vametro/MGB88QM5MJC.html

CHARLOTTESVILLE The details are mostly secret. The project is mostly forgotten. But for about 40 years, University of Virginia scientists tinkered with uranium up on Observatory Hill, spinning the gas form of the radioactive material at unimaginable speeds in a huge centrifuge that could shake the building.

Their mission, at the behest of the federal government in the middle of the coldest part of the Cold War, was to make enriched uranium cheaper and faster than the other guys.

Even today, some of the details are classified, though an Energy Department missive sent out last month identified hundreds of sites in the country that did nuclear weapons work during the Cold War in a step toward identifying those workers who might qualify for compensation if they were made ill by their jobs.

On the government's list was U.Va., though the school's groundbreaking work, which ended abruptly in 1985, was focused on developing enriched uranium for nuclear fuel, not for nuclear weapons, according to those involved.

"At that time, during the Cold War, nobody was going to give away ways to provide nuclear power to other countries," said Gerald Fisher, a U.Va. research scientist in charge of security for the project.

But Ralph Lowry, a retired professor in the U.Va. engineering school who ran the project for years, said the top-secret aspect of the work was required because "any enriched uranium, if enriched enough, could be used for nuclear weapons."

Few outside the engineering school knew the details of how, in the small building overlooking the campus, scientists were tinkering with separating uranium isotopes using a gas centrifuge process developed by the legendary U.Va. physicist Jesse W. Beams. Beams, who died in 1977, actually began working on the centrifuge process before World War II - even before the Manhattan project.

"It was not very open. Only a handful of people really knew" about the project, said Ralph Allen, the director of environmental health and safety at the school. "I had clearance to go up there, and I saw parts of it. But it didn't mean much to me."

Ed Spenceley worked as a machinist at the building throughout the project. "I couldn't tell anybody what we were doing," he said. "Not even my wife.'

Fisher said 24-hour-a-day security was provided at the plant and it could take up to a year to get security clearance.

Fisher said some scholarly publications on the project were published, "but with certain portions of information deleted."

During the Manhattan Project, Beams' early work on the centrifuge process was one of two methods under scrutiny to separate uranium's fissionable isotope from natural uranium.

The other method of enriching uranium was the gas diffusion process, which involved pumping uranium hexafluoride gas through thousands of membranelike barriers which trap the heavier isotopes of uranium called U-238. The lighter isotopes, called U-235, passed through. The U-235 was fissionable.

The centrifuge method essentially took uranium hexafluoride gas and spun the gas in a cylinder to bring the lighter isotopes to the top and settle heavier ones in the bottom. The centrifuge spun at incredibly high speeds.

The centrifuge method was not chosen during World War II because its technology was not well-enough developed.

After that decision, the research on the centrifuge method of enriching uranium languished until the 1950s, when U.Va., with money from the federal government, went full bore into developing the gas centrifuge method. The renewed interest came about because the gas-diffusion method, used throughout the country to make enriched uranium, was very power intensive. The development of stronger metals for the centrifuge and work at centrifuges elsewhere in the world also played a part in the project's revival at U.Va.

There was, initially, resistance at the university to the project, said Roland Krauss, who was an engineering professor at U.Va. then and worked on the project.

"The feds came in and waved the flag," he said. "But there was some concern because there would be no diffusion of knowledge."

Even one Austrian scientist who worked for the Nazis during World War II and a German machinist who was awarded the Iron Cross by Hitler worked for a time on the U.Va. project.

"As more nuclear power plants came on, the demand for enriched uranium increased," Lowry said. "We needed a better process and the gas diffusion method used so much power."

The centrifuges evolved and grew in size until one 60 feet in length and several feet in diameter was installed in the building with the help of a 27-foot pit and a raised ceiling. The centrifuge, essentially a hollow metal tube that spun at great speeds, was enclosed. High speed was one of the keys to the separation process. At times, the spinning centrifuge would simply break down, causing what Spenceley called "minor earthquakes in the building."

Lowry said only small amounts of uranium were used in the experiments and special mass spectrometers were used to measure the enrichment. "We were trying to decrease the cost and make it more competitive, to make the machines simpler and more efficient."

The heyday of the gas centrifuge project occurred in the late 1970s, when President Jimmy Carter pushed to build four gas centrifuge plants because the energy consumed would be one-tenth of that used in the gas diffusion process. But the plants never were built in part because of an oversupply of enriched uranium being produced by other countries and because the future of nuclear power plants was already dimming.

The U.Va. project was finally shut down by the federal government in June 1985. The uranium and equipment, including the huge centrifuge, were shipped to the government's nuclear research facility at Oak Ridge, Tenn.

The building is now called the Aerospace Research Lab and all that remains of the centrifuge project are several pits dug for the huge machines. There remains an underground bunker that was formerly used for testing machine guns. The building that remains is used for aerospace research.

Allen said the choice of gas diffusion over the centrifuge process was a blow to the university, which had labored secretly for so many years.

"The school could have become a major nuclear research facility," he said. "It just didn't happen."

Contact Carlos Santos at (804) 295-9542 or csantos@timesdispatch.com


-------- MILITARY

A Chinese Connection

February 25, 2001
New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/25/weekinreview/25P2ST.html?pagewanted=all

President Bush warned China that he was troubled by evidence that Chinese workers were building a fiber-optic network linked to Iraqi targets attacked by American and British warplanes on Feb. 9. The strikes, however, were launched at night on the Muslim sabbath to reduce the risk of killing civilians, including the Chinese. China responded by saying it would "remedy the situation" if the allegations were true, Mr. Bush said. Steven Lee Myers

-------- colombia

America Gets Candid About What Colombia Needs

February 25, 2001
New York Times
By CHRISTOPHER MARQUIS
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/25/weekinreview/25MARQ.html?pagewanted=all

WASHINGTON -- For nearly a year now, American officials have been trying to tell voters why they should care about Colombia. But this month, one architect of that campaign, the recently retired Gen. Barry R. McCaffrey, dramatically changed the argument. He warned that the whole of Colombia was dying. If Americans stood idle, he said, they would be like the neighbors of Kitty Genovese, the 1964 murder victim in New York whose screams went unanswered.

"This isn't North Korea, for cripe's sake," General McCaffrey said at a conference in Miami attended by dozens of current and former officials who have helped draw up Colombia policy. "We like these people. They live next door to us. And they're in trouble."

Eight months ago, when Congress approved a $1.3 billion package of mostly military aid, it was presented as another effort to stem the flow of drugs. Now, it is morphing into a rescue operation for a failing state.

American officials recognized early on that any effort to stop the drug trade in Colombia would also have to deal with the reasons drug lords there have so much power: the country's government is weak, its army has a terrible reputation for human rights abuses, leftist guerrillas who have long controlled much of the countryside have cast their lot with the drug trade in order to finance their rebellion, and right-wing militias fighting the leftists also get money from the drug trade. Still, the Clinton administration, in which General McCaffrey was drug czar, thought it could mobilize Americans around a drug-focused strategy for managing the crisis, rather than an all-encompassing approach.

Now, as President Bush prepares to meet Colombia's president, Andrés Pastrana, in Washington on Tuesday, Colombia's problems are only getting worse. So Americans can expect to hear more about how complex the problems are - about how solving Colombia's drug problem may involve rebuilding the nation.

That argument evokes a problem that has bedeviled American policy ever since the Vietnam War: How can any administration approach a difficult and potentially engulfing problem overseas in a way that gets Americans behind long-term, full-hearted support?

In this case, President Bush is trying to sell an investment that the General Accounting Office says will not show results for years. Will it also embroil American policy makers - and perhaps American advisers or combat soldiers - in a war that Mr. Pastrana now concedes is unwinnable? And, perhaps most critically, will the need to tailor such a program around American distaste for overseas involvements hamstring it from the start?

Whatever the answers to those questions, the effort is under way, and the new administration is at least being candid about the scope of the problem.

In his news conference last week, President Bush said American military support should be limited to training Colombian forces. "I share the concern of those who are worried that at some point in time the United States might become militarily engaged," he said. On the same day, American officials acknowledged that guerrillas had fired on a State Department helicopter last Sunday as it carried American contract workers trying to rescue Colombian policemen.

Secretary of State Colin L. Powell is preparing to make the case not only for a sustained project in Colombia but for vastly increasing aid to its neighbors, officials say. This is needed, the logic goes, because as military pressure builds in Colombia, the war could spill over and destabilize the region.

"This is very scary," said Max Manwaring, a professor of military strategy at the United States Army War College. "Because of our own internal political problems and fear of regenerating another Vietnam we've just concentrated on the drug thing and hoped the other problems would go away."

In fact, Colombia today is threatened not only by the many actors in its wars. Its society is also fractured by class, geography, weak civic institutions and a historic tolerance for frightening levels of violence.

The problems are interwoven, leaving strategists stumped over where to begin. Colombians can't affect the drug flow until they pacify the country. They can't get a peace deal with the guerrillas until they have a development strategy. They can't undertake public works in a war zone. Mr. Pastrana has submitted a $7.5 billion strategy to tackle it all, but resources are scant and his authority is in doubt.

All this in a country located between Venezuela's oil fields and the Panama Canal. Given those interests, almost no one argues that Americans can look away.

For years the drug war served to unite domestic concerns and foreign policy aims. But now a broader strategy is required, said Representative Mark Souder, the Indiana Republican who is chairman of the Committee on Government Reform. "Everyone realizes that the whole region is in crisis," he said. "But the best way to avoid Vietnam is to deal with it early."

As the United States moves into the breach, elemental questions remain. What is the basic plan? Is it a peace strategy with a military component? A counterinsurgency drive? A bulwark to salvage the Pastrana administration? A Marshall Plan for South America?

And what will define its success? At the recent conference in Miami, current and former American officials promoted starkly different objectives, from breaking the back of the main rebel group to merely cutting Colombia's drug exports.

The Clinton administration's salesmanship of its Colombia plan got off to a dismal start. Colombia's neighbors voiced fears of a spillover war and regional arms race; European officials resented not having been in on the planning.

Gen. Charles E. Wilhelm, the former commander of the United States Southern Command, says the Bush administration must do better. "If you lose the information struggle, how will you fare as you seek to implement a strategy that is controversial at best?" he said.

Pentagon advocates of the plan are trying first to avoid comparisons to Vietnam or El Salvador. They wince when news media discuss the tactical mix in Colombia: American advisers, well- armed guerrillas, aerial defoliants and human rights violations.

They insist they are assisting Pastrana's strategy, not imposing their own. They say no American soldiers will be in combat. They claim to have the private support of Colombia's neighbors even though leaders of such countries express public misgivings. And they are financing human rights groups in Colombia.

AT the same time, they are settling in for a long struggle. A Pentagon assessment to be issued next month urges the administration to move beyond the "U.S. fixation on narcotics trafficking" and focus on "reinforcing democratic governance and working collectively to solve subregional problems."

A bipartisan task force led by Senator Bob Graham of Florida and Brent Scowcroft, the former national security adviser, recently said the main challenge will be to help Americans see beyond drugs to Colombia's core problems. It called for long-term help in reforming the judiciary, attacking corruption and addressing poverty, education and health care.

It may be a tough sales job for an administration that took office insisting that America's military is best equipped for fighting wars - not fixing broken countries.

But Mr. Manwaring says Americans have few choices left. "We've got to go back to the term of nation building," he said. "Nobody wants to use it. Because that term is verboten. But that's what it is."

-------- drug war

Soap Opera Actor Arrested on Drug Charge

February 25, 2001
New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/25/nyregion/25RAID.html

A 56-year-old veteran actor who has appeared on the ABC soap opera "All My Children" for many years was among two dozen men and women arrested early yesterday in a drug raid at an illegal social club in the East Village, the authorities said.

The actor, Michael Nader, was arrested about 6 a.m. in the club, at 310 East Second Street, and charged with felony drug sale after detectives made undercover drug purchases there, the police said.

Mr. Nader, who has played Dimitri Marick on the soap opera since 1991, was seen selling a $20 bag of cocaine to a club patron, the police said. After his arrest, Mr. Nader said that he felt ill and was taken to Bellevue Hospital Center for observation.

Four other club patrons were also charged with felony drug sale, the police said, and 19 were charged with drug possession, a misdemeanor.

The arrest is not the first for Mr. Nader. In 1997, he was charged with drunken driving, resisting arrest and child endangerment after he was stopped for speeding on the Long Island Expressway with his 13-year-old daughter in the car.

Mr. Nader's television and movie characters have also had troubles with the law. His character on "All My Children" was arrested in an April 1997 episode, and Mr. Nader played a Cuban mob kingpin in the 1996 film "Fled" with Laurence Fishburne and Stephen Baldwin.

-------- space

Space Cowboy
My Life in Mission Control

Sunday, February 25, 2001
by James P. Pinkerton
By Chris KraftDutton
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A42565-2001Feb22?language=printer

In early 1945, 20-year-old Christopher Columbus Kraft, just graduated from Virginia Tech with a BS in aeronautical engineering, was eager to do his part in the war effort. Disqualified from military service by a childhood injury, he went to work instead for the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) at Langley Field, Va. An epoch -- the rise and fall of the space program -- lay ahead of him.

Created in 1915, NACA was a cornerstone of the military-industrial complex, employing engineers such as Kraft to keep the United States pre-eminent in the Cold War. But in 1957 the USSR launched Sputnik, and suddenly America was behind in a new competition, the space race. The following year, NACA became NASA, and Kraft moved to Houston, to be present at the creation of the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs. He gained fame as the Voice of NASA, the man who immortalized the televised countdown to liftoff. His memoir, Flight: My Life in Mission Control, details his 37-year career inside the federal air and space programs.

Now in his eighth decade, Kraft has produced an account heavy with personality and technology -- although light on broader reflections upon the events that first made astronauts so central, and then so peripheral, to American life. Kraft is an engineer, and it's understandable that he is better at describing how people make specific machines than at analyzing how polities make national decisions.

In those early days, he and his colleagues had a general mandate to surpass the Soviets, but it was up to them to sweat the details. So they did, though not without conflict. A key early issue was who would control the mission: the astronaut atop the rocket taking off from Cape Canaveral or the flight controllers at the Manned Space Center in Houston. Wernher von Braun got into that argument. He lost at the time -- and he gets it in the neck here 40 years later.

Von Braun was a Nazi rocket scientist who transferred his allegiance and his expertise to the United States in 1945. A former pilot himself, he didn't think a mission could be controlled from the ground, a view naturally putting him at odds with ground-controller Kraft. Recalling their first meeting, Kraft writes, "This may be the famous Wernher von Braun, I thought angrily, but he doesn't know what the hell he's talking about." The two men remained co-workers for 20 years, although one would hardly know from Kraft's telling that von Braun ever did anything right; yet others plainly thought so, leading President Gerald Ford to award him the National Medal of Science in 1977.

Another of Kraft's villains is John Glenn. The author dredges up their first meeting, in the early '50s, when he was still working at NACA. As a young engineer armed with data, Kraft took his concerns about the safety of the F8U fighter to Glenn, a onetime Marine pilot in Korea who was then flying a desk. Kraft was told bluntly: You don't know what you're talking about. In his view, Glenn was blinded by his allegiance to Chance Vought, the manufacturer of the F8U. But Kraft persisted, going over Glenn's head, and eventually the plane was grounded. A decade later, when they were both at NASA, Kraft's opinion of Glenn had not improved; unlike many other newly minted astronauts, the Marine seemed uninterested in the nitty-gritty of putting a man in space. Instead, writes Kraft, "Glenn's goal was to cozy up to our top management and thus improve his chances of getting one of the early Mercury flights."

Yet if Kraft had enemies, he also had friends -- lots of them. And he seems determined now to give them all an honorable mention, from professors in college to mentors at NACA to subordinates at NASA. This Rolodex-dump sometimes slows down the story -- and it also leaves the reader unprepared for the occasional calamity, as when a launchpad fire killed three Apollo astronauts in 1967. "They were dead and we knew it was our fault," Kraft writes, although the narrative up to that point provides little context for such self-laceration.

But context is not Kraft's strength. His is a detailed chronicle of the years in which the space program evolved from its origins in the military-industrial complex into an idealistic Kennedyesque expression of American greatness. Yet the author has little to say about why that idealism wilted so quickly in the years since Apollo 11. And today, as the military roots of the space program sprout afresh, in the form of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's plans for both missile defense and anti-satellite offense, a full appreciation of the peaceful potential of space is more important than ever. Flight is not that book, but it is still a rewarding look at the brief, shining moment when space pathfinders held sway over space warriors. •

James P. Pinkerton, former White House aide to Presidents Reagan and George H.W. Bush, is an adjunct fellow at the New America Foundation in Washington, D.C.

-------- u.s.

Veterans Win Medical Care

February 25, 2001
New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/25/weekinreview/25P2ST.html?pagewanted=all

When the government needed men for World War II, it promised them free lifetime medical care if they stayed in the service and retired after 20 years. But in 1956, Congress cut back coverage, and in 1966, military retirees were told to rely on Medicare. A Federal Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the government had broken a contractual obligation to the retirees. The government, it said, can change benefits for future retirees but cannot unilaterally amend contracts it entered into decades ago. The ruling applies to two men, but could help many more if the case is certified as a class action. Robert Pear

-------- OTHER

-------- environment

A comprehensive look at sprawl in America

01/02/25
USA Today
By Haya El Nasser and Paul Overberg
http://usatoday.com/news/sprawl/main.htm

Los Angeles, whose legendary traffic congestion and spread-out development have epitomized suburban sprawl for decades, isn't so sprawling after all.

In fact, Portland, Ore., the metropolitan area that has enacted the nation's toughest anti-growth laws, sprawls more.

Worse than either of them is Nashville, which is the nation's most sprawling metro of 1 million people or more.

Those are some of the findings of a USA TODAY study that analyzes population trends over the past decade in the nation's 271 metropolitan areas.

Across the country, people are debating the issue of sprawl as governments try to reconcile growing needs for new housing and commercial development with demands to protect open space. The newspaper's study shows why: 83% of metro areas are more sprawling now than in 1990.

To quantify sprawl, USA TODAY developed an index that analyzes how densely developed a metro is today and how that changed during the '90s. The result is the USA TODAY Sprawl Index.

Some findings from the analysis defy conventional wisdom. The index shows that:

• A boom in population doesn't necessarily trigger sprawl. In fact, sprawl can occur when the population in a metropolitan area is shrinking.

• A number of small metropolitan areas (pop. 250,000 or fewer) in some of the more pastoral corners of the country sprawl more than large metro areas. In fact, most of the nation's major metro areas (pop. 1 million or more) are experiencing the least sprawl.

Other key findings:

• The availability of water is a major factor in limiting or allowing sprawl. For example, in a booming desert city such as Las Vegas, the scarcity of water forces development to stay close to the city's edge - and its municipal water lines - and not leapfrog open space.

• Geography is another major factor limiting or allowing sprawl. Oceans, mountains and other barriers can force a metro to grow compactly while flat land can allow development of any kind.

The ocean and mountains encircling Los Angeles are powerful anti-sprawl forces today. This once-sprawling city is running out of room and turning inward to grow. But in the Southeast, few natural barriers limit growth. Unrelenting sprawl along Interstates 85 and 20 is creating a "string city" that stretches 600 miles between Raleigh, N.C., and Birmingham, Ala.

The forces of water and geography are evident in the sprawl index. Sixteen of the most sprawling big metros are east of the Mississippi. Four of the top five are in the Southeast: Nashville; Charlotte; Greensboro, N.C.; and Atlanta.

• A lack of regional government planning can foster sprawl. In metros in the Northeast and Midwest, dozens of local governments regulate development. The result is fragmented planning. Efforts by local and state governments to restrict sprawl are growing but have had limited impact.

Measuring sprawl

The USA TODAY Sprawl Index is based on a simple, measurable definition of sprawl: population density. Each metropolitan's index score is based on two density measurements:

• Population density today. Density is the percentage of a metro area's population that lives in "urbanized areas." The Census Bureau defines urbanized areas as those parts of a metro with 1,000 or more residents per square mile.

• Change in population density during the 1990s. The second component of the index measures how much a metro's percentage in urbanized areas increased or decreased from 1990 to 1999.

The metropolitan areas were ranked 1 through 271 on each measurement (lower numbers represent less sprawl). The two rankings were added to produce each metro area's sprawl index score. The highest possible score is 542; the lowest is 2.

For example, in the Louisville metro area, 76% of the population lived in urbanized areas in 1999. That gave Louisville a rank of 85 among the 271 metros. In 1990, 79.6% lived in urbanized areas. Louisville's 4.5% drop during the '90s gave it a rank of 221. Adding those two rankings of 85 and 221 produced a sprawl index score of 306. Of the 271 metros, 108 have higher numbers than Louisville, which means they sprawl more, and 162 have lower numbers and sprawl less.

More space than necessary?

Because sprawl occurs in different ways and at different rates across the country, it's difficult for people and governments to agree on how to deal with it. When the non-profit Pew Center for Civic Journalism asked voters to name the most important problem in their community, sprawl and traffic tied for first with crime and violence. Each was cited by 18% of those surveyed. Issues such as education and health and medicine trailed far behind.

Experts say that finding a common definition of whether a metro area is sprawling - or not - is a necessary first step toward helping people understand how to deal with it. Webster's New World College Dictionary defines sprawl as spreading out in an awkward way "so as to take up more space than is necessary." As with most discussions involving sprawl, though, the meaning of "more space than is necessary" is debatable.

Robert Lang, director of urban and metropolitan research at the Fannie Mae Foundation, says, "There's a big public policy imperative to do something about what people call sprawl. It would be nice to have a definition."

By using population density as the definition of sprawl, the USA TODAY index is able to rank a metropolitan area's sprawl whether its population is increasing or decreasing. And comparing population density in 1990 and 1999 shows how metro areas are growing. Armed with that knowledge, government officials, developers and residents can debate what measures - if any - they should take.

A love-hate relationship

Across the country, the desire for new, affordable housing and commercial space creates sprawl. Cheap land outside urbanized areas allows people to buy their own homes. It also provides an escape for people who perceive only downsides to life in the city - from crime and low-quality public education to high housing costs.

At the same time, people want more parks and wildlife preserves. They want more green space, farms and unbroken natural scenery. As development pushes ever farther from the urbanized areas of many metropolitans, residents are becoming increasingly fed up with traffic jams and strip malls that result. Many are calling on the government to stop the sprawl that their very move to the suburbs helped create.

Since 1997, 22 states have enacted some type of land-use law designed to rein in sprawl. In 1999 alone, lawmakers introduced 1,000 bills in state legislatures, and they passed more than 200. In fast-growing counties, people are electing "smart-growth" candidates to public office who advocate restricting development.

Americans are even willing to spend their money to protect green space. In the summer of 1999, eight homeowners in Warren Township, N.J., spent $125,000 to buy seven acres near their homes to keep the land wooded. Around the same time, about 400 families in the affluent Cleveland suburbs of Chagrin Falls and Bentleyville contributed $300,000 to preserve 62 acres.

The debate over how to control sprawl often pits the public good against self-interest. Most people agree that protecting natural resources and open space is important, but few are willing to give up the right to do what they want with their own land.

Some free-market thinkers say the sprawl debate is much ado about nothing. The country has plenty of space, says Sam Staley, director of the Urban Futures Program for Reason Public Policy Institute in Los Angeles. The 80% of Americans who live in metro areas should have the right to choose between a condo in the city and a home on a big lot in the suburbs.

"Quality of life. It starts with that," Staley says. "Then the question becomes, 'Does sprawl compromise quality of life?' I don't think it does because people are choosing to move to these communities all the time. There are alternatives to sprawl in every major city in the United States, but people are choosing not to return to those neighborhoods."

As a result, sprawl remains a national dilemma. People are fed up with it, yet they like what it provides. And they don't like the alternative to sprawl: Living in a more crowded urban environment.

As communities debate what to do about it, they can't agree on what sprawl is, or even whether it's good or bad. Sprawl is blamed for social isolation and obesity (people driving everywhere), asthma and global warming (auto emissions), flooding and erosion (too much pavement), the demise of small farms (developers buying their land) and the extinction of wildlife (natural areas being overrun by development).

At the same time, it is credited with creating safe neighborhoods, affordable housing and good schools. In short, a chance to live the American dream.

Natural barriers

A key finding of the sprawl index is the impact of geography and water. Mountains and other natural barriers and limited supplies of water have prevented many Western cities from sprawling; flat land and plentiful water have allowed most Eastern cities to grow as they please. As a result, most Western metro areas have fairly low sprawl index scores and many Eastern cities have high scores.

In the West, a metro area's water often comes from one source. New growth tends to occur right at the edge of existing development so that it can tap into the municipal water supply. In the East, a developer can put a subdivision miles beyond the end of a municipal water line and drill wells and install septic tanks. This ability to leapfrog open spaces leads to sprawl.

Mountains, oceans and other natural barriers also prevent development from spreading. Once a metro area butts up against them, its population can increase only if development becomes denser. Single-family lots become smaller, and condominium and apartment buildings go up.

The Los Angeles metropolitan area has a population of 16 million and seems sprawling to many. But if the Atlanta metro area (pop. 3.8 million) had as many people as Los Angeles and the same population density Atlanta has now, it would occupy many more square miles than Los Angeles does.

That point is reflected in the sprawl index scores for the two metros. Los Angeles has a score of 78, which is even lower than metropolitan New York's (82), which is known for its skyscraper-studded downtown. Atlanta has a sprawl index score of 392.

In the Atlanta metro region, 72.9% lived in urbanized areas in 1990, and by 1999, that figure had dropped to 67.4%. Throughout the '90s, Atlanta continued to sprawl as people moving to Atlanta chose less-populated parts of the metropolitan area.

In Los Angeles, 94.9% lived in urbanized areas in 1990. By 1999, that percentage had dropped slightly, to 94.3%.

In the West, growth occurs in an orderly fashion because it's tethered to those water lines. In the East, especially the Southeast, growth can be disorderly. Developers can buy cheap rural land and build on it because they don't have to worry about public water and sewer facilities. This leapfrog development consumes vast amounts of land and traps green space - pastures, cropland and woods - between developments. A population that occupies 1,000 square miles in a metro area constrained by natural forces can occupy many times that in another.

This untamed ability to sprawl has produced rapidly merging metropolitan areas along I-85 and I-20 between Raleigh, N.C. (index score: 271), and Birmingham, Ala. (323). Development there has unfurled from big urban centers such as Charlotte, N.C., and Atlanta to the rural towns in between.

Call them "countrified cities," Lang says. "It's easy when you just develop across a series of off-ramps to never develop any cohesion."

The sprawl index list of big metros (pop. 1 million or more) especially shows how the availability of land and water has affected growth in the Southeast. Nashville (index score: 478) is No. 1 on the list. Charlotte (454); Greensboro, N.C., (437); and Atlanta (392) are in the top five. Four others are in the top 15: Memphis (329); Orlando (290); Raleigh (271); and Washington (261).

Miami-Fort Lauderdale (69) is a big metro in the region that is not high on the sprawl index. Miami shares the fate of cities in the West. Geography pins it into a 25-mile wide area between the Atlantic Ocean and the Everglades. It ranks on the sprawl index right above San Diego (66), which is confined to 30 miles between ocean and mountains.

The availability of cheap land in the Southeast and the Midwest also has turned many small metros (pop. 250,000 or fewer) into major engines of sprawl. These communities appeal to companies and individuals that want cheap land and want to escape the congestion of big metros. They're also close to major urban centers - and their jobs, services and entertainment. Examples include Janesville, Wis. (263), west of Milwaukee, and St. Cloud, Minn. (231), which is just outside Minneapolis.

Man-made barriers

The effect of politics and government on sprawl can be seen best in metropolitan Portland, Ore. For years, Portland has fought to prevent the sprawl it saw shape Los Angeles. In 1973, Portland established an urban growth boundary to stop development and preserve open space beyond a certain line. The boundary encouraged denser development inside it.

However, Portland's sprawl index score of 221 puts in roughly in the middle of the list of big metros. One reason: Growth is escaping the control of the Portland Metropolitan Council, a regional board of three counties and 24 cities that set up the boundary. Developers are jumping over land that is under the council's jurisdiction and building on land beyond it. Growth is occurring to the south in Salem, Ore., and to the north across the state line in Vancouver, Wash. Both cities are part of the Portland metropolitan area, as defined by the Census Bureau, and are within easy commuting distance of Portland.

Las Vegas (159) is an example of the impact of both natural forces and government restraints. The nation's gambling capital is gaining people at a faster pace than Atlanta. Unlike Atlanta, Las Vegas is not sprawling across miles and miles of open land. That's because the metro area is in a desert and has limited water. It's also hemmed in by mountains and vast amounts of federally owned land, including Nellis Air Force Base and Lake Mead National Recreation Area.

"Las Vegas has an urban growth boundary. It's called federal land," says Bill Fulton of Solimar Research Group, an urban research and planning firm in Ventura, Calif.

Las Vegas' population has grown 60% in the past decade to 1.4 million, but more than three-quarters of those new residents moved into urbanized areas. Las Vegas has experienced orderly growth. New development has occurred at the edge of old, rather than leapfrogging open space, as in Atlanta.

Powerful cultural forces

Racial tensions and urban decay fueled much of the flight to the suburbs in metro areas in the Midwest and Northeast. Today, those metros rank high on the USA TODAY Sprawl Index. On the list of big metros, Grand Rapids, Mich. (357); Indianapolis (299); and Cincinnati (292) rank among the top 15. They're all highly segregated areas, according to several studies of Census data from 1990.

"By many measures, the Midwest has both the highest racial segregation and the most-concentrated poverty at the cores," says George Galster, an urban planning professor at Wayne State University in Detroit. "That centrifugal push makes it possible for developers to offer ever-more distant alternatives to 'urban problems.'."

Local politics also contributes to sprawl in these regions. In the Northeast, metros are made up of many municipalities, which makes it harder to develop a regional growth plan. The same is true in the Midwest, a region settled by Northeasterners who brought with them a tradition of town meetings and local control. Metro Detroit has 280 local governments; metropolitan New York has more than 560.

"Each of them can adopt their separate zoning and housing and land-use codes," Galster says.

These disparate interests work against regional planning and promote sprawl. One municipality can restrict growth, but if a neighboring town welcomes it, sprawl continues.

Deceptive nature of sprawl

Often, the debate over sprawl and what to do - if anything - to control it comes down to perception. If you look out on Charlotte from a downtown high-rise, trees dominate the land outside the tight downtown skyline. But the forest is just an illusion because development is hidden beneath the foliage.

That's true of many places on the East Coast, where flat land and dense trees mask sprawl. Lang points to metropolitan Boston (205), which ranks with Minneapolis (203) and Detroit (208) as average among big metros on the sprawl index.

"People say, 'Boston is the densest place I know,' but you don't see the two-acre and three-acre lots out in the suburbs because of the trees," he says. "In Los Angeles, they see everything because there are no trees."

Of course there are trees, but in a semiarid climate like Southern California's, vegetation is not as naturally lush. In the West, any development on treeless hillsides is in plain view. Many Western cities also appear sprawling because of the way they are designed. Los Angeles has single-family homes stretching for miles. Away from downtown, few high-rises break up the monotony. "For some people, that's sprawl," says Rolf Pendall, a planning professor at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y.

But population density is the key determinant of sprawl. Those single-family homes in Los Angeles are on very small lots. In the East, older metropolitans appear to sprawl less because their packed, 19th-century cores and tall buildings form an image of density. But sprawl still exists. It's just occurring miles from downtown.

"Sprawl is so multifaceted and takes on so many different forms across the country that it's probably going to require different solutions," Lang says.

Struggle for solutions

Everyone is pushing for "smart" growth, but no one can agree on what "dumb" growth is.

Some planners call for more roads as a way to ease traffic congestion. Others say building or widening roads creates a bigger traffic mess and encourages even more development. Some advocate single-family houses on big lots. Others insist the solution is more apartments and small homes to accommodate more people on less land.

Some say housing should be built close to mass transit and within walking distance of stores, schools and other services to get cars off the road. Others argue that Americans don't want to live in a more crowded urban setting or give up their cars.

Some want strict growth boundaries. Others say that limiting development pushes up housing prices and reduces the stock of affordable housing.

They agree on one thing, though: Municipalities must plan better.

Faced with mounting pressure from residents, environmentalists and other interest groups and local officials, eight states have approved comprehensive, growth-management plans that require local governments to prevent development where roads and sewers don't exist. In 1998, Tennessee required municipalities to set up urban-growth boundaries. In 1999, Georgia set up a regional transportation authority that has veto power over major construction in a 13-county area in and around Atlanta.

But most other states that have been dragged into a problem that's usually left to local government are sticking to laws that get little resistance. They're setting aside funds to buy open space, farmland or forests. Some are creating tax incentives for landowners to donate development rights to the state or conservationists.

Even as planners and elected officials grapple with sprawl, individual choices and lifestyles ultimately shape development in this country.

Latanya Wells, 37, grew up in inner-city Detroit and never thought of leaving.

"It was clean. You felt safe. People were neighborly," she says. But over the years, her neighborhood steadily changed for the worse. By the time she finally left in 1997, "you barely knew your neighbors or spoke to your neighbors. There were bars on the windows."

Wells, her sister and brother - all teachers in Detroit public schools - did what millions of Americans have done for decades: They moved to the suburbs. They briefly considered, but rejected, housing going up in some of the most distressed neighborhoods downtown, part of the city's effort to bring people back to the city. "We looked around the neighborhood and thought: We're going to be scared to go to our cars," she says. "It's still rough down there."

They chose Southfield, 13 miles from their jobs in the city. An older suburb packed with strip malls and lookalike homes, Southfield is a sprawling eyesore to some. But not to Wells.

"It's a matter of perception,'' she says. "I like it."

---

Livestock Disease Widens in Britain

February 25, 2001
Associated Press
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Britain-Livestock-Disease.html

LONDON (AP) -- British agricultural authorities on Sunday confirmed new cases of foot-and-mouth disease at a cattle and sheep farm in southwest England, amid rising fears of a wider outbreak.

Officials in northern England began the grim task of burning the carcasses of hundreds of animals slaughtered in an effort to contain the highly infectious livestock ailment.

More than 800 pigs -- doused in oil and placed on pyres of coal, straw and rail ties -- were set on fire in Northumberland, in the outbreak's first mass incineration.

Britain has been scrambling since Feb. 19 to contain the outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease, its first in two decades. Exports of meat, milk and live animals have been banned, and inspectors have been quarantining farms and slaughterhouses suspected of harboring the disease.

The latest confirmed cases, reported by the agriculture ministry, were found in Devon, at a sheep and cattle farm that is part of a 14-farm chain. The 13 other farms are now being inspected as well.

The new cases brought the number of sites where the disease has been confirmed to seven. Agriculture officials would not specify how many suspect cases were being checked, but said it was a large number.

``Our hopes that the disease could be contained ... have been horribly shattered,'' said Ben Gill, president of the National Farmers' Union. ``We are now more determined than ever to maintain our vigilance and beat this disease.''

Authorities also confirmed that prior to last week's export ban, sheep from the Devon farm had been sent to buyers in Europe. Agriculture Minister Nick Brown acknowledged there was thus a risk that infected sheep could have been exported before the outbreak was discovered.

Veterinary officials cannot say precisely when the British outbreak began, but some have speculated the disease could have been present for as long as three weeks before being discovered.

So far, more than 2,000 animals have been slaughtered. In 1967, a disastrous foot-and-mouth epidemic continued for months and forced the slaughter of nearly half a million animals in Britain.

In the Netherlands, more than 3,000 sheep, cattle, pigs and deer were slaughtered as a preventive measure, all from farms that had imported animals from Britain, officials said Sunday. No foot-and-mouth cases have been detected.

Belgium imposed a ban Saturday on all transport of sheep and goats.

Foot-and-mouth disease spreads very easily. The virus can be airborne, spread from one animal to another, transmitted through contaminated feed, or carried by humans on boots and clothing.

The outbreak has raised questions about modern farming methods, and whether mass production, transport and slaughter have made animals more vulnerable to disease.

Officials have not announced the number of confirmed infections, only places where the disease has been detected. It is presumed that wherever the disease is found, it will spread. So all animals at risk -- to date, more than 2,000 -- are being slaughtered.

Human cases of foot-and-mouth disease are extremely rare. It affects animals with cloven feet, causing blisters around the hooves and mouth, loss of appetite, fever and listlessness.

Vaccines exist, but are quickly rendered ineffective by the development of new strains of the virus, so wholesale slaughter is used to contain the disease.

Britain is expected to come under tough questioning about the outbreak at a monthly meeting of the Council of European Agriculture Minister. The talks are scheduled to begin Monday in Brussels.

---

Britain's New Meat Problem

February 25, 2001
New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/25/weekinreview/25P2ST.html?pagewanted=all

Anxiety over the health of Britain's animal herds, heightened because of the battle with mad cow disease, surfaced anew when an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease spread from the utheast to the north, prompting bans on meat exports and on the transportation of livestock to markets. The authorities also urged Britain's ramblers and country-lovers to stay in town for fear they might inadvertently spread the viral disease, which can be fatal to animals but rarely affects humans. Hunting was also suspended. The outbreak came as a crushing financial blow to farmers and deepened the nation's malaise over meat products once seen as staples. Alan Cowell

---

More cases of foot-and-mouth disease found

02/25/2001
USA Today
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2001-02-25-britian-outbreak.htm

LONDON (AP) - British agricultural authorities on Sunday confirmed new cases of foot-and-mouth disease at a cattle and sheep farm in southwest England, amid rising fears of a wider outbreak.

Officials in northern England began the grim task of burning the carcasses of hundreds of animals slaughtered in an effort to contain the highly infectious livestock ailment.

More than 800 pigs - doused in oil and placed on pyres of coal, straw and rail ties - were set on fire in Northumberland, in the outbreak's first mass incineration.

Britain has been scrambling since Feb. 19 to contain the outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease, its first in two decades. Exports of meat, milk and live animals have been banned, and inspectors have been quarantining farms and slaughterhouses suspected of harboring the disease.

The latest confirmed cases, reported by the agriculture ministry, were found in Devon, at a sheep and cattle farm that is part of a 14-farm chain. The 13 other farms are now being inspected as well.

The new cases brought the number of sites where the disease has been confirmed to seven. Agriculture officials would not specify how many suspect cases were being checked, but said it was a large number.

"Our hopes that the disease could be contained ... have been horribly shattered," said Ben Gill, president of the National Farmers' Union. "We are now more determined than ever to maintain our vigilance and beat this disease."

Authorities also confirmed that prior to last week's export ban, sheep from the Devon farm had been sent to buyers in Europe. Agriculture Minister Nick Brown acknowledged there was thus a risk that infected sheep could have been exported before the outbreak was discovered.

Veterinary officials cannot say precisely when the British outbreak began, but some have speculated the disease could have been present for as long as three weeks before being discovered.

So far, more than 2,000 animals have been slaughtered. In 1967, a disastrous foot-and-mouth epidemic continued for months and forced the slaughter of nearly half a million animals in Britain.

In the Netherlands, more than 3,000 sheep, cattle, pigs and deer were slaughtered as a preventive measure, all from farms that had imported animals from Britain, officials said Sunday. No foot-and-mouth cases have been detected.

Belgium imposed a ban Saturday on all transport of sheep and goats.

Foot-and-mouth disease spreads very easily. The virus can be airborne, spread from one animal to another, transmitted through contaminated feed, or carried by humans on boots and clothing.

The outbreak has raised questions about modern farming methods, and whether mass production, transport and slaughter have made animals more vulnerable to disease.

Officials have not announced the number of confirmed infections, only places where the disease has been detected. It is presumed that wherever the disease is found, it will spread. So all animals at risk - to date, more than 2,000 - are being slaughtered.

Human cases of foot-and-mouth disease are extremely rare. It affects animals with cloven feet, causing blisters around the hooves and mouth, loss of appetite, fever and listlessness.

Vaccines exist, but are quickly rendered ineffective by the development of new strains of the virus, so wholesale slaughter is used to contain the disease.

Britain is expected to come under tough questioning about the outbreak at a monthly meeting of the Council of European Agriculture Minister. The talks are scheduled to begin Monday in Brussels.

---

Colorado

01/02/25
USA Today
http://www.usatoday.com/news/states/all50.htm

Ouray - Frank Baumgartner's plan to use cyanide for the mining of gold and silver has infuriated environmentalists. Baumgartner said he will mine an alpine tract on Red Mountain using cyanide leaching, which extracts flakes of gold while other metals leach out. Scientists cite the potentially harmful results of metal contamination, but Baumgartner said the process is much safer under new mining laws.

Kentucky

Lexington - Brain worms have killed about 20 yearling elk in eastern Kentucky, officials said. The elk indirectly catch the parasitic worm from white-tailed deer, which aren't affected. Wildlife official Jon Gassett denied that the elk are dying from ailments related to "mad cow" disease.

Michigan

Detroit - For a fourth year, volunteers will steal Canada goose eggs and replace them with fake ones in an effort to reduce the bird's population in southeastern Michigan. Property owners who want to participate must obtain a permit from the state Department of Natural Resources, said Humane Society officials. Canada geese are protected as migratory game birds. Nearly 8,000 eggs have been removed from nests since the program began.

New York

Albany - The Department of Environmental Conservation fined the Niagara Mohawk Power Corp. $900,000 for allowing excessive smoke emissions from four upstate power plants the utility used to own. It was the agency's largest air pollution fine. Two of the plants burn coal while two others burn natural gas or coal.

North Dakota

Grafton - Walsh County officials are considering a proposal that would turn 550 acres of land along the Red River into a wildlife refuge. The American Foundation for Wildlife wants to buy the farm land, turn some of it into a wetland, plant the rest in native grasses then turn it over to the state. County officials have heard no opposition to the plan, but will meet before recommending it to Gov. Hoeven.

-------- police

Serbia Arrests Fired Chief of Feared Secret Police Unit

February 25, 2001
New York Times
By CARLOTTA GALL
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/25/world/25SERB.html

BELGRADE, Serbia, Feb. 24 - Signaling that Slobodan Milosevic and other members of his circle may be detained soon, Serbia's new government announced tonight that the police had arrested the former president's feared secret police chief, Rade Markovic, on suspicion of murder.

A former police chief of Belgrade and two other men were also arrested today, Serbia's justice minister, Vladan Batic, said at a news conference. He stressed that the government was determined to arrest all criminals, hinting that others might be detained soon.

Prosecutors ordered Mr. Markovic detained for his suspected involvement in an assassination attempt on the opposition leader Vuk Draskovic and associates, Mr. Batic said. He said there was enough evidence to connect Mr. Markovic to an apparently orchestrated car crash in October 1999 in which Mr. Draskovic's brother-in-law and three bodyguards were killed.

The four men were traveling in Mr. Draskovic's motorcade and died instantly when a truck careered across a country road into their car. Mr. Draskovic, who escaped with minor injuries, has long accused Mr. Milosevic and his senior henchman, Mr. Markovic, of trying to kill him. Mr. Markovic had denied that any state agencies were connected with the crash.

The justice minister said Mr. Markovic, who was fired last month on the day the new Serbian government took office, was under investigation for other crimes, although he did not specify which ones.

The secret police under Mr. Markovic's command are thought to have been involved in the fatal shooting of a prominent independent newspaper editor, Slavko Curuvija, during the 1999 war over Kosovo and in the disappearance of Ivan Stambolic, a former president of Serbia and onetime patron of Mr. Milosevic who vanished last August and may have been killed.

Mr. Markovic, in his 50's, was appointed head of Serbia's State Security in the fall of 1998. Somewhat controversially, the new Yugoslav president, Vojislav Kostunica, allowed Mr. Markovic to remain in office after Mr. Milosevic was ousted by a popular revolt on Oct. 5.

Mr. Draskovic welcomed the news of arrests tonight. "That's good," he said, speaking by telephone from his Belgrade home and describing Mr. Markovic as the "chief of Milosevic's killers."

But Mr. Draskovic, who has been relegated to a minor role in Serbian politics since his party failed to join the 18-party coalition that eventually ousted Mr. Milosevic, said Mr. Markovic would have been able to destroy incriminating evidence during the three months he remained at his post.

He voiced hope that Mr. Markovic's arrest would lead swiftly to the detention of Mr. Milosevic, who is under 24-hour police surveillance but remains head of the Socialist Party, the largest opposition group in Serbia's parliament.

"All the others who were involved in this crime and others, including that against Slavko Curuvija and the kidnapping and probable death of Ivan Stambolic, must be arrested and prosecuted," Mr. Draskovic said. "Not only they but also the main chief who commanded them and is also guilty of committing those crimes. Mr. Markovic knows who issued orders to him."

Mr. Markovic lived in an elaborate mansion in Belgrade close to where Mr. Milosevic resides. The weekly magazine Vreme recently carried a picture of the mansion, which it said was rapidly finished in the last three months. It described the house as a fortress, with steel gates and security cameras, and said Mr. Markovic had not left it since losing his job.

---

Police Official Replaced

February 25, 2001
New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/25/nyregion/25COP.html

Police Commissioner Bernard B. Kerik has replaced the official who oversees the Police Department's anti-narcotics efforts, which the commissioner has often called crucial to reducing incidents of reported crime, officials said yesterday.

Mr. Kerik transferred the commander of the department's Narcotics Division, Assistant Chief Charles Kammerdener, to the number-two post in the Housing Bureau late Friday and replaced him with a highly respected veteran detective commander, Assistant Chief William Taylor.

Since his appointment as the city's 40th police commissioner in August, Mr. Kerik, who served as a narcotics detective for four years, has focused attention and energy on the department's anti-drug efforts. In his first month, he undertook a detailed review of narcotics arrests and overtime while questioning whether undercover narcotics officers could be used more effectively than for making low-level arrests.

---

Police Use Force to Clear Holiday Crowd in Seattle

February 25, 2001
New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/25/national/25NATI.html

SEATTLE, Feb. 24 (AP) - Police officers in riot gear used pepper spray and rubber bullets to break up a Mardi Gras crowd early today.

Six officers suffered minor injuries and two people were arrested, the police said.

Police officials said they ordered about 2,000 people to disperse after bars closed at 2 a.m. Many in the crowd were drinking, removing their clothes or climbing on cars and light posts, a police spokeswoman, Pam McCammon, said.

Some people threw rocks and bottles at officers and businesses, tore down traffic lights and stop signs and knocked over newspaper boxes, the authorities said.

The police "asked people to disperse over and over again," Tina Bueche, co-owner of a nightclub, said.

"They showed great restraint," Ms. Bueche said.

Some in the crowd agreed, but others said the police had gone too far. "The more police aggressed toward the crowd, the more the crowd started vandalizing," one reveler, Douglas Benedetti, told KIRO-TV.

-------- spying

RAINBOW WARRIOR SAILS TO CONFRONT US STAR WARS PROGRAM

25 February 2001
Greenpeace Activist News
messages@dynamic.greenpeace.org

Incoming US President George W. Bush is moving rapidly ahead with a "Star Wars" program to spend billions of dollars building a system to shoot down missiles with yet more missiles. If this program continues, it will violate the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and may start a new nuclear arms race.

On 13 February, the Rainbow Warrior set sail for the remote Pacific atoll of Kwajalein in the Marshall Islands where, in March, we will confront the US military and oppose a scheduled Star Wars test.

We need your help. Please visit our Cyberactivist Centre at http://cybercentre.greenpeace.org/t/s/983102960

and send letters to US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, UK Prime Minister Tony Blair and Danish Prime Minister Poul Nyrup Rasmussen.

ACTION GROUPS STARTING UP

Greenpeace is starting an experiment in setting up international action groups of cyberactivists who want to work together on a common campaign or to share information in a common language or about a common country or region. If you want to get involved or find out more, visit our Cyberactivist Centre at http://cybercentre.greenpeace.org/t/s/983037999

Coalition for Peace and Justice and the UNPLUG Salem Campaign; 321 Barr Ave., Linwood, NJ 08221; 609-601-8537 or 609-601-8583 (8583: fax, answer machine); norco@bellatlantic.net; UNPLUG SALEM WEBSITE: http://www.unplugsalem.org/ COALITION FOR PEACE AND JUSTICE WEBSITE: http:/www.coalitionforpeaceandjustice.org The Coalition for Peace and Justice is a chapter of Peace Action.

"First they ignore you; Then they laugh at you; Then they fight you; Then you win. (Gandhi) "Why walk when you can fly?" (Mary Chapin Carpenter)

---

U.S. Charges Pose Paradox of Pious Spy for Godless Foe

February 25, 2001
New York Times
By PHILIP SHENON
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/25/national/25SPY.html?pagewanted=all

WASHINGTON, Feb. 24 - For a man accused of betraying his country to the godless leadership of the Soviet Communist Party, Robert Philip Hanssen could not have seemed a more devout follower of the Roman Catholic Church - or a more committed anti-Communist.

He often told his friends in the counterintelligence division of the F.B.I., where he worked for most of his 25-year career with the bureau, that he loathed Communism and that the teachings of Lenin were incompatible with those of Jesus Christ.

"Bob would walk into my office and tell me that without religion, man is lost," said his former F.B.I. supervisor, David Major, "and that the Soviet Union would ultimately fail because it was run by the godless Communists. And I believe he was sincere."

The bureau's former chief China analyst, Paul D. Moore, recalled that when F.B.I. agents held going-away parties at strip clubs near the bureau's headquarters in Washington, Mr. Hanssen refused to attend, saying his faith would not permit it.

"He said, you shouldn't do that because it's an occasion of sin," said Mr. Moore, who used to car-pool to work with Mr. Hanssen, a friend of 20 years.

He recalled Mr. Hanssen's snapping off the car radio one day during a talk-show conversation about morality - and whether morality was based on social contracts.

"He leaned over and turned off the radio and said, `That's enough of that,' " Mr. Moore said. "He said the foundation for morality is not an implied social contract; it's God's law."

If Mr. Hanssen's piety and staunch anti-Communism were simply a front for his treachery, if they were a cover for a long career in espionage, they were remarkably convincing to the professional spy catchers who worked day in and day out with the shy, socially awkward, highly intelligent agent.

Mr. Hanssen, who could face the death penalty, was arrested last Sunday on charges of spying since 1985, initially for the Soviet Union and then, after its collapse, for Russia. He was apprehended after he supposedly dropped off secret documents at a park near his home in Vienna, Va.

The case is described by officials as potentially the worst intelligence breach in the bureau's history, given Mr. Hanssen's access to some of the most highly classified information in the computer banks of the F.B.I. The bureau has said that at least two Russian double agents who were executed may have been exposed because of his disclosures.

In his quarter-century at the F.B.I. - at the time of his arrest, he was only a few months from retirement - Mr. Hanssen gave every appearance of living the life of a God-fearing Christian.

When he worked in the fourth-floor offices of the counterintelligence division at F.B.I. headquarters in the 1980's, colleagues remembered that he would sometimes leave his cubicle for an hour to attend Mass at a downtown church.

Every Sunday for years, Mr. Hanssen and his wife, Bonnie, a teacher, were found in the same left-side pew near the altar of St. Catherine of Siena Catholic Church in Great Falls, Va.

The Hanssens told friends they had selected the church because it was one of the few in the region that still conducted a Latin Mass, and they preferred a traditional service. Among the church's other regular parishioners: Louis J. Freeh, the director of the F.B.I., and Justice Antonin Scalia of the Supreme Court. (Mr. Freeh said through a spokesman that he had known the Hanssens through a handful of contacts at the church but was never a "social friend" of the couple's.)

The Hanssens were adherents of Opus Dei, an elite conservative Catholic order. Opus Dei urges its members to attend daily Mass, and Mr. Hanssen also regularly appeared for evening prayer-and-confession sessions known as recollections.

While the Hanssens lived in a suburb of Washington known for the quality of its public schools, they chose instead to send their six children - three boys and three girls - to expensive private schools affiliated with Opus Dei.

Former colleagues said they would be shocked if Mr. Hanssen turned out to have spent the money he is accused of having received from his handlers in Moscow - at least $600,000 in cash, the F.B.I. says - on alcohol or fancy automobiles or women. Instead, they suspect, he probably used much of the proceeds from his spying to pay tuition at his children's schools.

The Heights School of Potomac, Md., which his youngest son, a junior, attends, charges annual tuition and fees of nearly $11,000, which alone would make a large dent in Mr. Hanssen's F.B.I. salary of about $100,000 a year. His older sons also graduated from the school, which will not say if any of the boys received financial aid. Calls for comment to his daughters' school, Oakcrest, in McLean, Va., were not returned.

In interviews since his arrest, many of Mr. Hanssen's closest friends and colleagues, dumbfounded by the spying accusations, have said they can only offer a guess as to why a man so committed to his faith might have volunteered for espionage on behalf of the political system that was long considered organized religion's greatest enemy.

Several suggest that Mr. Hanssen must have been able to completely compartmentalize his life, deluding himself into thinking that espionage was simply an exciting intellectual challenge that had nothing to do with leading a good, moral Christian life.

"I think Bob was able to bifurcate his life," said Mr. Major, his former supervisor. "He somehow made the intellectual leap, which I just cannot rationalize, that the compromise of information was somehow O.K., and that it was just a game. It's too simple to say thrill, but I do believe that he was in for the game, not the gain."

Rusty Capps, a retired counterintelligence agent who worked with Mr. Hanssen at F.B.I. headquarters in the early 1990's, agreed that Mr. Hanssen was a "brilliant guy" who may have needed "the thrill - this is a guy who needs stimulation, who liked to walk on the razor's edge."

"I probably recruited 50 or 60 people over the years to provide information to the United States, and the vast majority of them did it because their lives weren't all that exciting," Mr. Capps said. "Certainly money is always there, revenge, disgruntlement, ego gratification. But it's also excitement."

The theory is supported by F.B.I. documents showing that Mr. Hanssen insisted on several so-called dead drops in the Washington area - risky secret exchanges of packages with his Moscow handlers - at short intervals. Common espionage doctrine holds that it is far less dangerous to exchange more material at fewer dead drops.

F.B.I. officials say that Mr. Hanssen's career stalled years ago, and that resentment over his failure to rise higher in management despite his obvious intelligence could be a factor in his decision to spy.

But many who know Mr. Hanssen say it was clearly not the full explanation, and that he complained far less than other agents about troubles with his career.

"I never had the impression that he felt that he was thwarted," said John J. Gaskill, a retired agent who considered Mr. Hanssen a friend. "There's a very high percentage of special agents who are not necessarily looking to climb the ladder."

Evidence released by the F.B.I. seems to suggest that greed would not have been the sole motivation, either.

In one letter supposedly written by Mr. Hanssen to his Soviet handlers in November 1985, the letter writer, known to the Russians by the code name B, asked them to stop sending money beyond an initial $100,000.

"I have little need or utility for more," the letter said. "It merely provides a difficulty since I cannot spend it, store it or invest it easily."

Neighbors who live near the Hanssens' brick and wood home in Vienna remember a quiet, reclusive man who seemed little interested in money or material goods, apart from computers, which were a passion.

F.B.I. colleagues say that he did not drink or swear, certainly never in their presence. He made clear that clothes were not important to him. He wore dark, fraying, unstylish business suits, often the same one for two or three days in a row. His wardrobe and timid, dour personality earned him nicknames among colleagues like Dr. Death, the Mortician and Digger, short for gravedigger.

Richard McPherson, a fellow member of Opus Dei and the headmaster of the Heights School, said he continued to believe that Mr. Hanssen's shows of piety and his lack of interest in material goods "were not some sort of cover." He remembered Mr. Hanssen's devotion to his children, and how he volunteered for school dances, where he served as a chaperon, and attended his sons' sporting events.

"I thought he was a great father, a good husband and a good professional," Mr. McPherson said. "Of course, if he did what he is purported to have done, then he was living a lie as a Christian and a citizen. But I'm still hoping there's an explanation."

The roots of Mr. Hanssen's commitment to the church and to law enforcement are found in Chicago, where he was born in April 1944 to a Catholic family.

"When people from Chicago meet, they ask what parish are you from," said Mr. Moore, who also grew up in the city.

Mr. Hanssen's father was a Navy petty officer who later joined the Chicago Police Department. Robert graduated with a degree in chemistry from Knox College, outside Chicago, in 1966. His F.B.I. records show he also studied Russian there.

F.B.I. investigators are trying to determine whether Mr. Hanssen developed another interest - espionage - in his youth in Chicago. The bureau said in its court papers this week that Mr. Hanssen wrote to his Russian handlers last year to say that "I decided on this course when I was 14 years old - I'd read Philby's book." The reference was to Kim Philby, the dashing British traitor who defected to Moscow in 1963, when his involvement in a Soviet spy ring was about to be revealed. (F.B.I. colleagues point out that Mr. Philby's memoirs were not published until the late 1960's, when Mr. Hanssen was well into his 20's, not 14, and that the statement was probably a lie meant to win over his Russian counterparts.)

Mr. Hanssen had trouble settling on a career after college. He dropped out of Northwestern University's dental school after two years to enter its business school, where he received an M.B.A. In 1972, he followed his father into the Chicago Police Department, where he was quickly assigned to undercover work.

He arrived at the F.B.I. in 1976, hired to work initially on a white- collar crime squad in Gary, Ind.

Colleagues say that from the earliest days of his career at the bureau, Mr. Hanssen impressed everyone with his intelligence; some called him brilliant.

Mr. Hanssen distinguished himself early in his career for his mastery of computer technology, which he helped introduce to the counterintelligence division - a fact that alarms F.B.I. investigators who are now trying to figure out what damage he may have done.

"He was always on the leading edge of computers," Mr. Gaskill said. "He had access to pretty much anything that we were involved in."

But while his superiors were excited about his technical skills, they were put off by his awkwardness in social settings, his indifference to his wardrobe, his slouching posture. A tall man, he always seemed to be hunched over, his head perched on his neck at an odd, birdlike angle, colleagues said.

In an organization that had always prided itself on a military-style esprit de corps and tended to prefer managers with booming voices who looked good on camera, friends in the bureau say that Mr. Hanssen should have known he was never going to rise very far in the F.B.I.

Mr. Capps, the retired counterintelligence agent, recalled organizing a seminar in the early 1990's at which Mr. Hanssen was asked to lecture on counterintelligence techniques. "And people would stop listening to him after one or two sentences," he said. "He had no ability to modulate his voice, no ability to entertain. It was just awful."

"`There is a full package of talents necessary to convince management that you could handle yourself at the next level," Mr. Capps said. "He didn't possess that package."

---

Charge: Hanssen foiled '89 spy pursuit

02/26/2001
USA Today
By Richard Willing
http://usatoday.com/news/washdc/2001-02-25-spypursuit.htm

WASHINGTON - CIA officers were prepared to capture American diplomat and suspected spy Felix Bloch with potentially incriminating evidence as he walked down a Paris street in 1989 but were stopped by cautious FBI colleagues, CIA sources say. Shortly afterward, Bloch, the head of the State Department's European section, was tipped off to the investigation by FBI counterintelligence specialist Robert Hanssen, the FBI says in an affidavit it filed last week.

Hanssen was arrested Feb. 18 and charged with spying for the Soviet Union and then Russia for 15 years. Bloch was fired by the State Department in 1990 but was never charged.

The new disclosures might solve the mystery of the Bloch case, one of the last cloak-and-dagger episodes of the Cold War. But they also focus renewed attention on the ongoing rivalry between the FBI and CIA, America's lead intelligence agencies, which compete and sometimes clash in the business of rooting out spies.

The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence will put the CIA-FBI relationship under a microscope Wednesday when CIA Director George Tenet and FBI Director Louis Freeh appear in a closed session. Committee Chairman Richard Shelby, R-Ala., promises a "clean scrub" of the Hanssen case, including a review of practices used by the CIA and FBI to detect traitors in their midst.

The Bloch case, says former CIA counterterrorism chief Vincent Cannistraro, still "rankles" CIA officers who worked on it.

"We always thought somebody tipped him off," says Cannistraro, who retired from the CIA about a year after the Bloch investigation. "To see that (Hanssen) thought we could have had (Bloch), too, is a little hard to take."

According to the affidavit and interviews with intelligence sources, the investigation of Bloch began in late April 1989 after he was detected on a wiretap talking to Reino Gikman, an undercover agent for the Soviet KGB who operated in Western Europe. At the time, Bloch worked at the State Department in Washington.

In mid-May, French intelligence officers photographed Bloch as he met with Gikman in Paris. Bloch passed him a bag thought to contain secret documents.

The CIA, working with the French, proposed that Bloch be nabbed en route to the Paris meeting or during a second meeting scheduled with Gikman for Brussels later in May. A team was assembled and a plan was developed to grab Bloch off the street and confront him with evidence.

But the FBI overruled that. The bureau insisted that Bloch be allowed to return to Washington, where, the FBI argued, he would be easier to take into custody than in a foreign country. Because it has arrest powers that the CIA does not have, the FBI had overall responsibility in the case.

The FBI also hoped to develop more evidence against the suave, multilingual career diplomat.

A still-valid executive order from the Carter administration prevents the CIA from spying on American citizens outside the USA.

On May 22, 1989, the FBI affidavit says, Hanssen disclosed the Bloch investigation to his KGB handlers in a package he left in a park in suburban Washington. In early June, Gikman was recalled to Moscow. On June 22, Bloch got a call in his Washington apartment telling him that a friend had become "sick" and a "contagious disease is suspected."

During an interview with FBI agents the next day, Bloch insisted that the package he passed Gikman in Paris contained collectible stamps.

Agents, themselves followed by television news cameras, placed Bloch under very public surveillance that summer. But he refused to answer the FBI's questions, and the investigation was dropped before he was fired.

In a letter the FBI says Hanssen sent the Russians in November 2000, he ridiculed the bureau's handling of the Bloch matter and said the FBI leader who decided to postpone Bloch's capture was paralyzed by fear.

"He'd never made a decision before, why start then?" Hanssen allegedly wrote. "If our guy sent to Paris had (courage) or brains both (Bloch and Gikman) would have been dead meat."

After Bloch was fired, his $56,000-a-year pension was canceled. Four years ago, he was reported to be living in a furnished room in Chapel Hill, N.C., and driving a bus for a living. Efforts to reach him by telephone were unsuccessful.

Contributing: Kevin Johnson

-------- terrorism

National Guard terrorism teams found unprepared

02/25/2001
New York Times
http://usatoday.com/news/washdc/2001-02-25-guard.htm

WASHINGTON (AP) - After three years and $143 million, the Army National Guard has no anti-terrorism teams ready to respond to nuclear, chemical or biological attacks because of defective safety equipment and poor training, an internal Pentagon review found.

The Pentagon inspector general report said preparedness is so bad that Guard members at one point were given mobile labs with air filters installed backward and gas masks with incompatible parts.

"The (team) commanders and personnel lack confidence in the unknown, untested and unsubstantiated reliability of the equipment that they were issued," investigators said.

Pentagon officials are "moving as fast as we can" to fix the problems, said Charles L. Cragin, who oversees the National Guard.

"All I can say is, everyone is working with great perseverance to resolve all the issues that the inspector general has identified," said Cragin, the acting assistant secretary of defense for reserve affairs.

Pentagon planners authorized 10 teams in 1998 with a goal that they be ready for duty in 2000. But the National Guard so badly bungled preparations that none met last year's deadline, the report said.

An additional 22 teams authorized by Congress in 1999 and 2000 are in various stages of formation.

After investigators presented their preliminary findings last fall, the Pentagon transferred management of the teams and launched an official review. Many of the problems arose because officials tried to get the teams ready very quickly, Cragin said.

The National Guard units, each with 22 full-time members, are supposed to help local authorities respond to a terrorist attack by identifying what nuclear, chemical or biological agents were used.

But Pentagon investigators concluded that defective safety equipment could put team members at risk of succumbing to the very weapons they were meant to identify.

Investigators found that air filters had been installed backward in the teams' mobile laboratories and team members were given gas masks with parts that were not designed to work together.

One team commander, referring to the gas masks, told investigators, "It probably would work. I'm just not willing to bet my life on it." Cragin said that problem has been fixed.

Plans originally called for the teams to be stationed near Air National Guard bases so they could be flown to the site of a terrorist attack. A second draft of those plans, however, called for team members to drive their personal cars to attack scenes, which could be hundreds of miles away. The guidelines have not been completed.

Coinciding with the recent release of the Pentagon report, a congressional commission recommended focusing the National Guard on protecting U.S. territory from weapons of mass destruction.

President Bush last week said he would like to see the Guard and Reserve "more involved in homeland security."

Frank Hoffman, a researcher for the U.S. Commission on National Security, said the problems with the National Guard response teams show the Pentagon is not paying enough attention to terrorist threats.

"Everyone knows we're not prepared," said Hoffman, an officer in the Marine Corps reserves.

Cragin said all safety problems identified by the inspector general will be fixed before he recommends that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld certify the teams ready for duty. Cragin said he did not know when he that would be.

---

An Absent Defendant Is Everywhere at Trial

February 25, 2001
New York Times
By ALAN FEUER
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/25/world/25TERR.html?pagewanted=all

What if you held a terrorism trial and the main defendant never showed up?

That, in essence, is what is happening at the embassy bombings trial that is now being heard in Federal District Court in Manhattan.

Although four of the defendants named in the government's enormous indictment - Wadih El-Hage, Khalfan Khamis Mohamed, Mohammed Saddiq Odeh and Mohamed Rashed Daoud al-'Owhali - are in custody and appear in court each day, the testimony and exhibits presented so far have focused on a man who is nowhere to be found: Osama bin Laden.

Mr. bin Laden, the wealthy Saudi exile accused of leading the terrorist plot that led to bombings at two American Embassies in Africa in 1998, is believed to be hiding in a remote corner of Afghanistan. But he has still cast a ghostly presence over Courtroom 318 on Centre Street. His name has been invoked perhaps more often than anyone else's. His voice has been heard on videotape. He has managed to be both present and absent at the same time.

On Wednesday, Mr. bin Laden's face actually appeared in court for about 30 minutes. It led to a bizarre moment for the four accused.

The prosecution was playing a videotape of an interview that Mr. bin Laden gave to CNN in 1997, and there were the defendants, staring into their digital monitors at the image of Mr. bin Laden as he promised to wage holy war against the United States. Their legs were shackled beneath the defense table, as they are every morning by federal guards. Mr. bin Laden, however, could be seen on screen, fulminating against the West with a serene look in his eyes and a cup of hot tea in his hand.

In many ways, the prosecutors have chosen to marshal their heavy artillery in the case against Mr. bin Laden. They have asked witnesses to lay out the internal structure of his group, Al Qaeda, and they have elicited testimony about his international business holdings.

They have also read to the jury one of his fatwas, or decrees, in its 52-page entirety. The fatwa, titled "Declaration of Holy War Against the Americans Who Are Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Places," provided an illuminating glimpse into Mr. bin Laden's mind.

An excerpt: "The cause of the disease and its tribulation is the occupying American enemy, so all effort must be directed at this enemy; kill it, fight it, destroy it, break it down, plot against it, ambush it and, God the almighty willing, until it is gone."

Like Members of the Family

They say the Mafia is dead, but don't believe it.

Despite references to camels, Islamic law and Afghan freedom fighters, the terrorism trial has somehow managed to sound a good deal like your average Brooklyn mob trial. There have been so many uncanny similarities, in fact, that some have quipped that Martin Scorsese has already been hired to direct the film.

For example, Al Qaeda could easily have borrowed its internal structure from La Cosa Nostra. Atop the pyramid sits the leader, Mr. bin Laden, who is sometimes called "the Big Boss." Under him is the Shura Council, a panel of trusted captains, who report to Mr. bin Laden and manage various crews.

According to a pair of witnesses who have testified so far, a devotee to Al Qaeda must swear the oath of bayat, a pledge to sacrifice one's life for the group. To become an official wise guy requires something similar - swearing to omertà, or the Mafia code of silence.

Mobsters often have nicknames based on a striking part of their anatomy: Fat Tony, for example, or Jackie the Nose. Things are slightly different in Al Qaeda. Aliases are formed by combining Abu, Arabic for "father of," with the nation of one's birth. This leads to names like Abu Hajer al Iraqi and Abu Bakr al Sudani. The terrorism trial has even produced that most shopworn of gangland clichés: the disgruntled snitch. His name in this case is Jamal Ahmed Al-Fadl, and until 1996 he served as one of Mr. bin Laden's closest aides.

Mr. Al-Fadl is no Salvatore Gravano, the hitman-turned-informant better known as Sammy the Bull. After all, Mr. Gravano admitted to murdering 19 men; Mr. Al-Fadl simply confessed to stealing $110,000 from his boss.

Still, Mr. Al-Fadl did admit under cross-examination last week that he once came up with a plan to have Mr. bin Laden "liquidated." Perhaps if he had known the word, he would have said "whacked."

Consideration for the Jury

For security reasons, the jury of six men, six women and six alternates is being kept anonymous. And it is not known after the first three weeks of testimony how much they know about one another.

But a few eyebrows were raised shortly before lunch on Thursday when the judge, Leonard B. Sand, hinted that there were some difficulties among some of the jurors.

As court opened on Thursday, the judge - who has reassured the jury that he will do all he can to ensure that their time is not wasted - told them he sympathized with recent complaints about the overcrowded jury room.

"I know that some of you are unhappy," he said. "I am very much aware of the fact that jury duty involves some conditions that are less desirable than one would like." Asking for some patience, he added that the court was "making efforts to make your jury service as pleasant and as comfortable as possible."

"I won't tell you," he added with a smile, "how much time and effort it took to make additional restrooms available."

Later that morning, the jury was sent out for a brief recess, and some lawyers asked for a slight delay in order to work out details of a piece of evidence they wanted to offer in the case.

The judge, apparently worried a delay could drag on longer than expected, mulled over the request. The jurors' lunch had been ordered, he said, and he wanted to be "very pragmatic." The question was whether to send them home for the day or hold them for a while.

"I am just trying not to have a jury which is having problems in their personal relationships," just sitting together "in the jury room with nothing to do," he said.

The judge did not elaborate, but the jurors were to be sent home. As they filed back into the courtroom and took their seats, he said, "Ladies and gentlemen, we are going to call it a day."

Lunch was on its way, he added, and the jurors were welcome to stay and eat, but they could also leave, "in which case your lunches will be consumed by other people."

The judge added, "Some of the marshals are a little heavier than others."

Jurors and others in the courtroom burst out laughing, easing, at least for a moment, whatever tensions did exist. Benjamin Weiser

-------- activists

Oregon

01/02/25
USA Today
http://www.usatoday.com/news/states/all50.htm

Salem - A House subcommittee moved forward with proposed legal penalties for "eco-terrorists." A proposed bill would add several crimes to Oregon's anti-racketeering law, which allows prosecutors to go after individuals or organizations engaged in a pattern of crimes. Backers want to add tree spiking, interference with agricultural operations, animal research, livestock production or agricultural research.

---

Protesters Take Over Abandoned NE House

Sunday, February 25, 2001
Washington Post
By Darryl Fears
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A51768-2001Feb24.html

Chanting "Whose house? Our house!" a group of young advocates marched down Massachusetts Avenue NE near Union Station yesterday to bring attention to their crusade to take over an abandoned house for a homeless family. They succeeded in turning heads, but most of those belonged to D.C. police.

By the time the members and supporters of Homes Not Jails reached the house at 304 K St. NE about noon, two police cruisers were shadowing them. Sgt. C.E. Burch stopped his cruiser and told officers in the second car to "get out and secure that building."

Thus began a long, chilly standoff that produced a succession of small dramas highlighting the issue of homelessness. Onlookers on the sidewalk started debating the issue. Gawkers driving slowly past delayed traffic. An Advisory Neighborhood Commission member railed against the protesters and criticized them for not informing his group of what, to him, was an embarrassing act.

As night fell, police left, said advocates, who then moved in and started renovations.

The spectacle unfolded in a city where five homeless people froze to death this winter and where a skyrocketing housing market is threatening to force thousands of low-income tenants out of their homes and onto the streets, where the Community Partnership for the Prevention of Homelessness estimates that 12,700 people already live.

Blanca Aquino and her 6-year-old son, Jose, are two such people. They were the central characters yesterday. Aquino said they were locked out of her Columbia Heights apartment after a Jan. 15 fire that displaced 27 others in the building, and they had gone to the homes of friends and relatives seeking shelter.

"They were going to fix the apartment but nothing has been done," Aquino, a native of El Salvador, said yesterday through her friend and interpreter, Teresa Lopez. "She paid the rent for January," Lopez said of Aquino. "She's always been a responsible woman. She wants her own home."

Near her wit's end last week, Aquino said, she spotted a Homes Not Jails flier on a tree and decided to attend a meeting. She apparently found more than a few sympathizers at the meeting Thursday. They vowed to secure the target house for her, and she agreed to live there, even though it lacked sewerage and water.

The advocacy group has taken over two other District houses in the past year. The first house, at 2809 Sherman Ave. NW in Columbia Heights, ended in the arrests of three members. The second, at 1959 H St. NE in the Kingman Park neighborhood, has been successful so far, members said. The group is negotiating with the owner to secure the house and keep a homeless family inside.

Yesterday, they used the same methods they had tried before. A smaller group occupied the home before the larger group of protesters arrived. The occupants caught food and drinks that were tossed up to the second floor.

Iris Arafa watched it all. She had been asked to attend the march days before, but had been reluctant until a friend persuaded her to go. Arafa, an activist, doesn't like the methods of Homes Not Jails.

She said the group blusters into black and Latino neighborhoods to take over crumbling houses, but has not done the same in mostly white neighborhoods. Her complaint had a ring to it. Black residents who live near the Sherman Avenue property said pretty much the same thing.

In a surprise yesterday, Arafa suddenly turned against Homes Not Jails when the group reached the targeted house, standing near police officers and shouting, "I do not support this action."

"I've been out here too long to accept peanuts," she said. "This house isn't up to code. I don't want any part of this house. If you're going to [take over a house], give me something that's worth at least as much as the panda bears got." She meant the $1.8 million pavilion at the National Zoo.

Luke Kuhn, of Homes Not Jails, was disgusted. "This smacks of a setup," he said. "The police couldn't do anything more effective themselves. The pandas have more expensive housing than most yuppies, and it's a prison."

Tom Earing, who said he owns several properties near the commotion, called the action a disgrace. "I don't want miscreants living around here," he said.

David Hill, who lives in one of Earing's properties, said, "What they don't talk about are the Section 8 tenants who get into these buildings and tear them up."

"Yeah, tear them the hell up," Earing said. "You give people something for nothing, and they treat it like nothing."

Ricardo Black, who said he has lived in a rooming house on the verge of homelessness for years, told both men to back up a second. "I think this is a good idea," he said. "You have to do something." Black said he wants to find a job, but can't.

Homes Not Jails had not told anyone where the house was, afraid that someone might tip off police. In the end, its members tipped off officers themselves.

"Este es loco," said Blanca Aquino, watching it unfold and stating what some might say was obvious: "This is crazy." Standing in the cold, with her hands shoved into the pockets of her coat, it looked as though there was little chance of her getting into the house.

Jose, her son, was confused. He had made a pretend house out of dirt and three red bricks as he played in the yard. But when police cleared the area to push back protesters, the boy was forced away.

At that moment, he looked pouty and sad, asking protesters why he couldn't keep playing. He appeared to be another child in the District who couldn't even pretend to have a home.

---

Rebels Begin Indian Rights Tour in Mexico

February 25, 2001
New York Times
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/world/mexico-chiapas-march.html

TUXTLA GUTIERREZ, Mexico, Feb 25 (Reuters) - Zapatista Subcommander Marcos, the rebel leader who champions indigenous rights in Mexico, began a two-week march on Sunday in a huge caravan of trucks, accompanied by helicopters and police.

In a tour through 12 states to the doors of parliament in Mexico City, the masked rebel leaders will seek to rally grass-roots support and pile pressure on the government to accept their conditions for peace in war-torn Chiapas state.

After an early departure from the colonial city of San Cristobal de las Casas, the rebel convoy's first stop was Tuxtla Gutierrez, the capital of Chiapas, where Marcos was received like a rock star amid cheers and shouts.

``This state is not going to continue to be the garbage can of this country,'' the masked rebel leader said from a stage to loud applause from the thousands gathered to greet him.

Marcos took a few shots at local businessmen and leaders of President Vicente Fox's conservative National Action Party.

Fox has made concessions to the rebels but has not yet succeeded in drawing them back to peace talks.

While Fox on Friday welcomed the march as ``a bridge for peace,'' Zapatistas in recent days have charged him with seeking a ``semblance of peace'' solely for political gain.

In response to shouts from the crowd saying ``you're not alone,'' Marcos said: ``We were never alone but we didn't know that until Jan. 1, 1994.''

On New Year's Day, 1994, the Zapatista rebels took up arms against the government in a surprise uprising in the name of Indian rights that shocked the nation and catapulted Marcos onto the world stage.

Dolores Calderon, a spry 85 year-old Tuxtla inhabitant, yelled: ``(Mexican revolutionary hero) Zapata lives! The fight goes on!'' She supported what the Zapatistas were trying to do for poor, marginalized Indian communities, she told Reuters.

Marcos threw flowers into the crowd and waved goodbye before he and 23 rebel commanders, including four women, climbed back aboard their tour bus. They will head next to Juchitan, in southern Oaxaca state.

Another 30 buses of rebel sympathizers plus some 20 or so more trucks, a police patrol car, three trucks of federal police with riot gear and two helicopters made up the caravan along the winding Chiapas roads. The rebels are traveling unarmed.

Chiapas state officials have pledged some 1,600 security troops to protect them on their journey through the state.

Participants in the so-called Zapatour have had to pay $100 for the trip.

DEATH THREATS TO MARCOS

Marcos emerged from his jungle hideout in La Realidad on the eve of the march and told supporters massed in San Christobal: ``We are indigenous and we are Mexicans.''

Marcos spoke near midnight, several hours later than planned, after the Catholic diocese revealed it had received a telegram with a death threat against him.

An estimated 10,000 people or more packed into San Cristobal's historic church plaza which overflowed with rebel sympathizers in ski masks, bandannas and traditional dress. They crowded together with journalists, tourists and foreign workers who showed up in solidarity with their cause.

Marcos took a few calculated swipes at Fox, calling him ``the one who talks much and hears little, the one who governs.''

``We'll have to make lots and lots of noise so he will hear us,'' he said.

The guerrillas' spectacular emergence into public came on Mexican Flag Day, a symbol that Marcos used to drive home his message that inequality and racism persist in a nation where one in 10 inhabitants is indigenous.

``Today we march, people the color of earth, in search of a place in that flag,'' he said.

The so-called ``Zapatour'' ends in Mexico City on March 11. The rebel leaders plan to lobby lawmakers for passage of indigenous rights legislation proposed by Fox in an effort to meet Zapatista conditions for reviving peace talks, which stalled in 1996.

------- Onelist (submissions from subscribers)