Gordon Thomas - Gideon's Spies

Mossad analysts believed the documents were authored by Ayman al-Zawahiri, al-Qaeda’s leading strategist. His psychoprofile in the Mossad archives included the observation that his few pleasures included watching videos of the attacks of 9/11. Since then he was reported to have made several visits to Latin America.

Manuel was eager to know if Mexico’s Center for Investigation and National Security, CISEN, could provide further evidence of this. He would be unlucky. Its director, Eduardo Medina, insisted his service had no reason to believe al-Qaeda had any presence in Mexico. “Purely media speculation,” he had said.

Next day Manuel caught a plane back to Florida. He had found no one in Mexican intelligence he would recommend should be invited to Israel. When he had made his report, he would then fly to Washington on a very different assignment.

At 10:00 a.m. EST, on a biting cold winter day, January 14, 2005, a war game chaired by POTUS—White House speak for the president of the United States—stand-in Madeleine Albright entered a hotel ballroom in midtown Washington, D.C., to preside over a summit of world leader stand-ins. They had convened in the expectation that they would discuss how best to handle the greatest natural disaster in modern history, the Indian Ocean tsunami, the death toll of which had climbed to over one hundred thousand and would eventually reach beyond three hundred thousand.

Instead, Manuel was among a select number of official observers invited to see how another and even more dangerous crisis would be handled. It posed a threat that successive Mossad directors, like intelligence chiefs everywhere, feared more than any other attack. What was about to be unveiled in the ballroom was a threat virtually impossible to detect in its creation or launch.

The CIA had learned that a breakaway faction of al-Qaeda had stolen a small quantity of smallpox virus from a biocontainment laboratory in Siberia. The lab was one of two places in the world where the virola was contained under stringent World Health Organization (WHO) protocols. The other was the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) in Atlanta, Georgia. The Siberian facility had a security system built by the Bechtel Group and paid for by the U.S. government to protect freezers containing 120 different smallpox samples. The CIA had still not established how the theft had happened or where the virus had been taken.

The president had been briefed that the virus was one of the most deadly diseases on earth; in the twentieth century alone it had killed 300 million people. It was not until 1980 that WHO announced smallpox had been eradicated. Now on that January morning, POTUS had summoned her fellow leaders to tell them it was once more a threat.

They sat in a U-shaped area of desks on which were phones, computers, and TV screens. Each desk bore a name: Prime Minister of United Kingdom; President of France; Chancellor of Federal Republic of Germany; Prime Minister of Canada; Prime Minister of Poland; President of European Commission; Prime Minister of Sweden; Director General of World Health Organization.

POTUS took a seat in their midst and began to outline the theft from the Siberia laboratory. She was still speaking when the television screens on the desks came alive. A masked man said he represented New Jihad, a group affiliated to al-Qaeda, and claimed responsibility for the theft of the virus. It would be used against the enemies of Islam.

The screens went blank and the stunned listeners looked at each other in disbelief. The ringing of their telephones broke the silence. The calls brought news that the first cases of smallpox had already been reported in the Netherlands; in Rotterdam over eight hundred people had become infected with the virola, which had been spread through the air ducts in the city’s subways. Some victims were already displaying rashlike spots on their skin and lesions in their mouths, a sign victims were at their most infectious. Similar cases were being reported in Istanbul. Turkish doctors saw that papules, the rashlike dots of the disease, had begun to turn into pustules. This usually occurs on the fifth or sixth day. A few infected saliva droplets on the breath would bring a victim close to death.

The next report came from Frankfurt International Airport, where passengers were showing difficulty in eating and swallowing. Some of the travelers had flown in from Munich from where the first reports of the presence of smallpox in Germany had come: a family had manifested the symptoms after arriving from Turkey. By noon, two hours after the first telephone calls, the number of cases had risen to 3,320. Most were in Europe, but in the early afternoon reports came of infected passengers from Mexico arriving at Los Angeles International Airport.

Meantime, anti-Muslim riots had broken out in Rotterdam, and panic-driven Poles along their country’s border with Germany had fought with border patrols trying to stop them entering the Federal Republic. Poland’s stockpile of smallpox vaccine was able to protect only some 5 percent of its population. The Federal Republic was only one of a handful of countries with sufficient stocks to vaccinate its entire population. The others were the United States, Great Britain, France, and Holland. The U.S. government had stopped mass vaccination of its population twenty years previously, when it was decided the risk of side effects from the vaccine outweighed the possibility of catching the disease. The death from side effects was calculated at 100 per 100 million vaccinated.

Five hours into the outbreak, just as in the wake of 9/11, the United States closed its borders. But it was too late. On Wall Street trading came to a halt, as it did in London, Tokyo, Frankfurt, and all the other financial centers around the world. It was the onset of global economic collapse.

As the crisis unfolded, so did the decisions. An appeal from Turkey—a NATO ally and a moderate Muslim country—for the United States to provide vaccine was rejected.

“The United States feels unappreciated now because of world condemnation of our position in Iraq. A lot of Americans are asking why should we help countries who do not support us,” said POTUS.

The British prime minister reminded his fellow leaders that “the harsh economic climate following the collapse of the Soviet Union led to a brain drain of former laboratory scientists who had worked in the country’s bioweapons programs. Leaving in droves, some made their way to Syria, Iran, and North Korea. The result is what we’re confronting here.”

By early afternoon, POTUS and the other world leaders had received projections on how the smallpox would spread. Within a month, there would be hundreds of thousands of deaths. Within a year the global number would have reached tens of millions. The computer projection showed that neither the medieval Black Death, the bubonic plague that had come close to destroying Europe, nor the influenza pandemic of 1918 would match the pandemic created by the smallpox disaster of 2005.

It was only then that POTUS looked around to her fellow leaders and spoke. “Gentlemen, we all know now what we face. We should all thank God this has not happened.” There were murmurs of agreement from those present.

The events unfolded in that Washington ballroom, titled “Atlantic Storm,” were designed by the world’s leading experts on bioterrorism. Former prime ministers and senior diplomats represented other countries. For five intense hours they had tried to cope with one emergency report after the other. Increasingly, their efforts to stop the spread of smallpox had faltered. Albright told her fellow “world leaders” that “the crisis we have failed to successfully cope with will face us, if not tomorrow then the day after tomorrow. But it will come…”