Black death and al-Qaeda: anatomy of a scare story

Five years on from the Hutton whitewash, the spectre of phoney stories of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) is back. Lurid claims about al-Qaeda terrorists falling victim to their own biological weapons have made headlines across the world. But those claims now look like a planted scare story that was exaggerated, at best. Who planted it? And why?

Two weeks ago the Sun newspaper gleefully claimed that "at least 40 al-Qaeda fanatics died horribly" after being struck down with the black death at a forest training camp in Algeria.
 
The paper named the terrorist group as Al-Qaeda in the Land of the Islamic Maghreb (AQLIM) led by Abdelmalek Droudkel. It said the incident came to light when security forces found a body by the roadside, but did not say how the figure of 40 deaths was arrived at. "Security sources" claimed that al-Qaeda would be "really worried" by the prospect of terrorists fleeing and either taking the disease with them or surrendering "to escape a horrible death".
 
The Sun is not where you would usually find a serious counter-terrorism story and exactly how this one got into the hands of journalist Alex West, son of security minister Lord Alan West, is not clear. Unsurprisingly, the younger West has declined to tell The First Post his sources.

Although some of its claims looked a bit far-fetched, the Sun story seemed to have a kernel of truth in it. After all, the micro-organism that causes 'black death' - or bubonic and pneumonic plague - is endemic in wild animals in Algeria.

Nor did the Sun report make any explicit mention of a possible germ warfare angle. But later that day in the US, the Washington Times came up with a different take on the tale: "An al-Qaeda affiliate in Algeria closed a base earlier this month after an experiment with unconventional weapons went awry, a senior US intelligence official said Monday".

The official quoted "spoke on the condition he not be named because of the sensitive nature of the issue". This formulation usually refers to officially sanctioned briefings, so he was deliberately putting the story into the public domain. He dismissed the idea that a naturally occurring plague was involved and said the base had been closed because an unknown chemical or biological substance had leaked. The basis for the story was said to be an intercepted communication from AQLIM to the al-Qaeda leadership in Pakistan.

Journalists are regularly fed bogus stories by intelligence sources

By the next day, the Sun had picked up the germ warfare line, proclaiming: "The al-Qaeda cell wiped out by Black Death may have infected ITSELF while developing biological weapons." It had no new detail on the incident but had dug up a former adviser to the former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, who pointed to existing claims that al-Qaeda is "known to experiment with biological weapons".

Although the two papers are not among the most credible purveyors of serious news, their claims were picked up by media outlets across the world. In Britain, the online Daily Mail and Daily Telegraph both carried versions of the Sun's story, while Rupert Murdoch's Fox News disseminated the Washington Times account. Canada's National Post claimed that this version showed that "al-Qaeda terrorists are pushing to the top of [Obama's] priority list".
 
Given that journalists are regularly fed bogus stories by intelligence sources, the lack of convincing detail in this one should have rung alarm bells.
 
It wasn't long before the germ warfare claims began to fall apart. AQLIM denied producing biological weapons, which is not surprising, and reports pointed out that its fighters were living in a state of siege in open mountainous areas, exposed to infectious diseases. On January 25, the Algerian newspaper Echorouk reported that "tens of terrorists" had died of diseases "provoked by dirtiness, cold and humidity". The paper cited "repentant terrorists" as claiming that stories about the black death had been spread by dissidents to undermine Droudkel.

There is no guarantee that this version of events is any more true than the germ warfare theory, but it suggests a relatively mundane occurrence has been spun into a much more dramatic tale.

Dr Brian Jones, a former government intelligence analyst with expertise in WMD, told The First Post: "It appears that, one way or another, a natural outbreak of disease has claimed the lives of a number of terrorists. In a remote camp with poor sanitation such an event would not be surprising."

Did security forces leak the story to exaggerate the threat?

Dr Jones added that it was possible that the deaths were from a form of plague, caused by the endemic micro-organism Yersinia pestis. But he said: "Claims of deliberate attempts to develop it for use as a biological weapon seem barely credible, given the situation and nature of the terrorists involved, and are not supported by any evidence I have seen."

Did British "security sources" give the Sun the story simply to entertain its readers or to exaggerate the al-Qaeda threat in support of attempts to tighten anti-terror laws? Dr Jones, who told the Hutton inquiry that the September 2002 Iraq WMD dossier was "over-egged", is suspicious: "Unfortunately, and not least in the UK, there has been a tendency in recent years for specific incidents to be over-hyped as having a chemical or biological element," he said.
 
"I am not sure why this has happened, but it is difficult to dissociate such things from the Government's attempts to underpin the more controversial aspects of its approach to counter-terrorism."
 
Jones thinks such moves are counter-productive: "When exaggerated threats do not materialise there is a danger that real ones will not be treated seriously enough. Lord West is reported as warning a seminar that it is a question of when, not whether, a chemical or biological attack will occur. I fear he is right, but frightening the public unnecessarily will not help in preparing them for such an eventuality."

As for the US intelligence establishment's reasons for putting out its version of the story, it is perhaps telling that the report came just hours before the inauguration of a president who has already set to work dismantling the main planks of its war on terror, to the known dismay of some in the Pentagon. ·