Copyright 1997 Pearl Publishing
The great tragedy of it, is that it didn't have to
happen. Not at all...we were warned.
And yet, still, it has come to this.
I don't know why I feel this overwhelming compulsion
to go on and on about it. I could have done something. We all
could have done something.
Perhaps the final epitaph on the gravestone of Freedom
will be,
"Why didn't somebody do something?"
That seems to be the common battle-cry of the legions
of humanity that have been sucked into the vortex of the New
World Order.
None of the imprisoned seem to know that the very phrase itself
is reflective of the source of their imprisonment...that this
desperate cry of anguish is in no way an antidote for the terrible
disease that has afflicted 'Liberty and Justice', and that
it is, rather, merely the final symptom of the cursed blight itself.
I can hear the rumbling of the trucks as they come
up the street, and soon I will be hearing the thumping of the
jackboots storming up the staircase, as I have heard them so many
times before. But I suspect that this time, the sound will be
different, that it will have an ethereal quality about it, one
which conveys greater personal meaning than it did when I heard
it on previous occasions.
This time, they are coming for me.
My only hope, is that I can find the strength of character somewhere inside myself to ask the question which lies at the heart of why there is a 'they' to come for me at all...why, in the end, it has finally come to this for me, as for countless others.
The question is, in retrospect, as simple and basic as it is essential for any who still espouse the concepts of freedom and liberty to ask themselves upon finding themselves marveling at the outrageousness being perpetrated upon their neighbors by 'them'...by 'others'...by 'Friends of the Destroyer.'
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience."
-Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'
Subject: What Will Revolution Look Like?
From: Tim May <[email protected]>
To: [email protected]
Some of the questions by Mark Rogaski and others ask about the nature of the revolution I and others are predicting and encouraging.
What will a just revolution, like those anticipated by Jefferson, Franklin, and others, look like?
The British thought the colonial rebels were "playing dirty" by shooting from behind trees instead of marching in bright uniforms with drums and bugles to herald their way.
Modern armies think freedom fighters are "terrorist scum" for not fighting honestly and fairly in their own M-1 Abrams tanks and aircraft carriers.
So, too, will revolutionaries be seen as fighting "unfairly"
and being unethical sneaks, child killers, and terrorists.
(As if children and other innocents did not die in various incidents
in past wars, on all sides.)
When Jefferson predicted that a revolution was needed every 20
years or so, he surely was not saying that throwing one party
out of leadership and putting the other party in was an example
of such a revolution, or that "campaign reform" is such
an example. Nor was he saying that the only valid revolution would
be when a bunch of citizens or states got together their own army
and marched on Washington.
(Actually, raising such an army is in violation of numerous laws
about heavy weapons, licenses to carry weapons, etc. No doubt
illegal. Ironically.)
No, the revolution, when it comes, will likely be different from anything quite like we've seen to date.
--Tim May
The Feds have shown their hand: they want a ban
on domestic cryptography
---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:----
Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money,
ComSec 3DES: 408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms,
zero
W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information
markets,
Higher Power: 2^2,976,221 | black markets, collapse of governments.
"National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information
superhighway."
Subject: Re: What Will Revolution Look Like?
From: Blanc <[email protected]>
To: [email protected]
Tim May wrote:
>No, the revolution, when it comes, will likely be different
from anything
>quite like we've seen to date.
....................................................
In the revolution against the British, the U.S. was a small colony sitting on a vast "new" land, with the Natives but a minor obstacle to expansion. Presently there is no such unoccupied place which could be claimed for the cause of liberty, and revolutionaries are sitting in the middle of the enemy camp, surrounded everywhere by people who "just want to save lives".
You could temporarily send a political message and get your names in the news, but then totally lose the war from being outnumbered and overwhelmed by non-sympathizers. A long time ago it was possible, given the distance of water and land between peoples, to make a break with them physically. The enemy could be driven out, sent "home", and the winners could develop their new living arrangements in the new setting.
But there is no new setting to go to, there is nowhere to send the infidels. The life of a new libertarian "society" would have to be created as a virtual one, existing among or in-between the others. Of course the basis of the original setup is still mentioned every once in a while, and so it is still in the minds of everyone, even if only as a dim reference, so it could be said that the most a current revolution could accomplish would be the return of the original ideal to the minds of the population. But I think that it would take much more than a few skirmishes to accomplish that, as it doesn't appear that it carries all that much support. It would be like getting a kid to take down some medicine; many don't really want to live so independently, nor feel the need to identify what kind of life would be the more ideal (i.e. they don't identify precisely the difference between a socialist atmosphere and a libertarian one, nor concern themselves with why they should spend any time worrying about the difference it makes.)
An intentional revolution, I fear, would just look like an attempt to make people think. And therefore not taken too seriously. (And if the revolutionaries lose? tough luck. Oh, well. )
..
Blanc
Subject: Re: What Will Revolution Look Like?
From: Adam Shostack <[email protected]>
To: [email protected] (Tim May)
CC: [email protected]
The distinction between civilians and soldiers, which came about in the 17th and 18th centuries, is close to meaningless in the context of a modern revolution. However, this distinction, and the Clausewitzian claim that war is the continuation of politics by other means, underlay the 'law of war.'
War as the continuation of politics implies that the State sends soldiers to war against other soldiers to fight for policy rights. War to gain territory, war over insults or honor, religious war, is seen as a thing of the past. Barbaric. Modern warriors can not understand people who play by other rules. To some extent, this has been good for us civilians. The firebombing of German cities were an exception, not the rule.
However, as the anti-colonial movement demonstrated, a people can effectively fight a modern army, and win. They are marked as terrorists, defamed for their capitalist activities such as drug smuggling to finance the struggle, and hanged when caught.
A modern revolution, as Mao taught, is based on forcing people to decide if they are with you or against you. There are no neutrals who simply want the status quo to continue, because once the revolutionaries have started to do their job, the state lashes out, passing fascist new laws (see Northern Ireland, Peru, the United States). The status quo disappears, and the revolutionaries are committed. It is only by making starkly clear who stands where that enough people to fuel the revolution can have the manpower to succeed. The alternative to the revolution becomes living under the government that killed your family members. In Algeria, once the first few thousands of martyrs died, every additional person the French killed was a new reason to fight. Surrender, to the Algerians, became inconceivable. Life as French was not worth living. So they fought.
When the revolution comes to the United States, it will not be a pretty thing. Our best hope is for a rapid surrender of the current government, which is not likely. By deploying now the tools of communication (remailers, strong encryption, directions for building bombs and traps, cheap radio transmitters), as well as the tools for deception (how hard is it to build a fake GPS transmitter?), and the understanding that the US government has grown cancerous, we bring closer the beginning and the end of the revolution.
We bring its start closer by forcing the Government to show its true colors, turning more people against it. We bring its finish closer by having ready the tools to render ineffective the large fighting machines we have paid for, by making it clear that the government does not have the support of the people, and by making it clear that once committed, we will have to fight.
So, Tim, we disagree that it will be like nothing seen before. It will be like many modern revolutions, because we can't force the government to fight on our terms today.
20 years later, we will look back, and realize that governments have murdered most of the innocents they will ever kill, because will can deploy technology to make government voluntary. But we're not there, and getting there may be bloody.
There is, of course, Duncan's Berlin Wall theory, but I fear things will have to get worse before they get better.
Adam
--
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once."
-Hume
Subject: Re: What Will Revolution Look Like?
From: John Young <[email protected]>
To: [email protected]
Warmaking is ever changing in response to the last wins and losses. However, winners are less likely to change than losers, for why change a successful formula, publish it, or a well-spun dissimulation.
As ever, unknown forms of war are in gestation, being tested and debriefed, in military institutions and wargames, in business, in education, in the amorphous culture at large through legal competition and crime and their variable gray areas where fair and unfair, civilized rules and their breaking, are ever in grim and vicious dispute.
While there are piles of studies on organized and guerrilla wars of the past, the most provocative are those that attempt to describe what's coming, how to recognize its early warnings and what can be done to head it off or, more likely, advance it.
The highest warmaking art is winning without physical fighting, to outfox the enemy by demoralizing, by demonstrating that attack is futile, that there is no chance of defeating a superior force. That's why military exhibitionism and psy war is reputed among military and political leaders to be as vital as that of brute force, as best exemplified by the Cold War 50-year stalemate and psychological "win-win" to a status of Cool War.
To get a handle on what's in store, imagine that completely unbelievable methods of warfare, overt and covert, are being concocted now, composed of strategies, tactics, warfighters and armaments never before used -- and will not be revealed and understood until too late for defense.
Try to forget everything you know about warfighting, crime fighting, conflict resolution, rules of engagement, black operations, guerrilla tactics, hiding among the people. Assume the enemy knows everything you know and more, is better armed and smarter than you, has more spies among your supporters and in your most intimate circle.
Imagine that your toilet, your bed, your fridge, your car, your is triggered to explode by radio or your computer by your password.
Consider that there will be no time to reflect and reconsider when things go catastrophically wrong and the enemy is unrelenting attacking with inhuman viciousness, when you're defenses are crumbling and weapons failing, when mates are squealing, dead or run away, when you can't stop shitting yourself, when your legs are buckling, when your minds racing out of control, when you're begging god and mom for mercy and the upraised ax is descending, the barrel back of head is firing.
Remember that who the enemy is no secret to either side, on whichever side you're on, and presume that the emery is more ready and able to cook your goose than you are theirs.
What actual war carnage teaches, what the current civil war in the US is showing, is what the TV-sofa war does not: nobody wins, ever, except the mindfuckers who've never gone berserk in combat or in the jobplace, killed friend and foe to save own asses.
You only win wars by never having to fight them, those started by weakling cowards unable to steal, cheat and lie well enough to satisfy their demonic lusts.
Best to outsmart the enemy in war, work and love, so that what you're up to is revealed only years later if ever. For the best won wars are never known at the time, no parades, no medals, no glory, no war stories, no memorial cemeteries and monuments, no veteran hospitals filled with carrion, just peace and tranquillity shooting deer, harpooning dolphins, rip-tearing the landscape for profligate cowboy wargames riding homicidal freeways.
We're all gonna lose our civil war in market place killings and road rage, thanks to today's warfighting lesson in free fire criminal enterprise by those who've never been shot and shot and shot, and lost for good -- the vainglorious winners, the losers desperate to regain glory days.
Subject: Re: Bell sentencing timed to coincide with raids
on militia members?
From: "Brian B. Riley" <[email protected]>
To: "Tim May" <[email protected]>, "CypherPunks
List" <[email protected]>
On 10/31/97 3:01 PM, Tim May ([email protected]) passed this wisdom:
>Get ready, folks. By the way, I'll be at the gun show at
the Cow Palace in
>San Francisco on the weekend of November 8-9, probably Saturday,
the 8th.
>Seems I'm running low on certain types of ammo, and I may
want to pick up a
>couple more assault rifles before Swinestein succeeds in completely
banning
>them.
I used to think that way ... but then I thought, why pay all that money and walk the line of whatever Swinestein et al come up with. Instead I have my deer rifles and a shotgun or two and ammo for both. The way this all is working now, I have more combat experience than 90% of the active duty military and most cops, and every day goes by more and more are retiring. If it ever comes down to that, I'll take down one or two of them with my deer rifle and help myself to their weapons and ammo ... also kind of makes sure I haven't set myself up to depend on an obsolete caliber ... if I am not good enough to take some of them down and take their weapons, no 300 nor 30,000 rounds for my very own Armalite is going to make any difference.
Brian B. Riley --> http://www.macconnect.com/~brianbr
For PGP Keys <mailto:[email protected]?subject=Get%20PGP%20Key>
"Everyone who lives dies; but not everyone who dies has
lived"
-- No Fear
Subject: Re: What Will Revolution Look Like?
From: Jim Burnes <[email protected]>
To: John Young <[email protected]>
CC: [email protected]
"To preserve [the] independence [of the people,] we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. We must make our election between economy and liberty, or profusion and servitude. If we run into such debts as that we must be taxed in our meat and in our drink, in our necessaries and our comforts, in our labors and our amusements, for our callings and our creeds, as the people of England are, our people, like them, must come to labor sixteen hours in the twenty-four, give the earnings of fifteen of these to the government for their debts and daily expenses, and the sixteenth being insufficient to afford us bread, we must live, as they now do, on oatmeal and potatoes, have no time to think, no means of calling the mismanagers to account, but be glad to obtain subsistence by hiring ourselves to rivet their chains on the necks of our fellow-sufferers."
--Thomas Jefferson to Samuel Kercheval, 1816.
jim
Subject: Re: FEMA site using cookies
From: Crisavec <[email protected]>
To: [email protected]
Attila T. Hun typethed the following...
>> The USMC 29 Palms Combat Arms Survey:
>>"The U.S. government declares a ban on the possession,
sale,
>>transportation, and transfer of all non-sporting firearms
>>...consider the following statement:
>>> I would fire upon U.S. citizens who refuse or
>>> resist confiscation of firearms banned by the
>>> U.S. government..."
>
> they were looking for a yes/no answer --no maybes. if anybody
thinks
>this is a joke --it was not; it was given to most units at
29 Palms,
>Pendleton, LeJuene, and Paris Island. the percentage responses
were
>interesting: men with less than 5 years service were 90% "yes"
--grizzled
>old NCOMs with 15 or more years were less than 15% "yes."
shows what the
>federal government educational system is capable of conditioning
with a
>little help from movies and television. subliminally, was
has been
>glorified by the merchants of death: arms manufacturers and
power hungry
>politicians. --
This doesn't surprise me at all Attila. They don't teach the constitution
in
High School anymore. That accounts for the lower ranks. The NCOM's
answers
are to be expected, They STRESS Posse Commitais<sp?> and
the constitution
for ALL noncom's. It's part of the testing for promotion to E-5
and up.
Most of the noncom's have been in long enough to be thoroughly
disillusioned
by the military in general. The only thing keeping a lot of them
in is
inertia...
--Dave
Any neural system sufficiently complex to generate the axioms
of arithmetic is too complex to be understood by itself.
Kaekel's Conjecture
Subject: Fwd: psychoceramics: Fighting back against the Government
From: Alan Olsen <[email protected]>
To: [email protected]
This is an interesting spin doctoring of Jim Bell's situation. I picked this up off the psychoceramics list. Why it was there is unclear...
Terrorism's next wave -- Nerve gas and germs are the new weapons
of choice
BY DAVID E. KAPLAN
Jeff Gordon thought he had seen it all. A veteran IRS investigator,
Gordon's job since 1988 had been to probe threats and assaults
against his fellow agents. There was no shortage in recent years--stabbings,
fires, mortar attacks, and big unexploded bombs outside IRS offices
in Los Angeles and Reno, Nevada. But in the first months of this
year, Gordon found himself working on the strangest case of his
career. From an informant, he had learned of a Portland, Ore.,
man named James Dalton Bell.
Bell owed some $30,000 in back taxes and served as a juror in
a local "common law court." Dozens of these self-appointed
tribunals have issued "fines" and even death sentences
against public officials. Bell was also active in antigovernment
forums on the Internet, where he had posted a dark scheme threatening
murder of troublesome federal agents. Participants could send
encrypted messages to each other, Bell proposed, offering donations
to whoever "predicted" how long a targeted official
would live. The winner, presumably the assassin, would be rewarded
with electronic fund transfers from anonymous donors, he suggested.
Gordon checked further. Bell, it turned out, was an electronics
engineer
at a nearby circuit board manufacturer. He was also an MIT-educated
chemist who had been arrested eight years earlier for making
methamphetamine,
but pleaded guilty to a lesser charge. According to
court records, Bell had once told a friend: "The first thing
to remember
is: Never make a chemist angry at you."
In February, the IRS docked Bell's wages and seized his 10-year-old
car. Inside the vehicle, Gordon found instructions for making bombs and molotov cocktails.
There was also far-right literature, a printout listing large
amounts of cyanide, and detailed information on fertilizer, a
key ingredient in the Oklahoma City bomb. But with no evidence
that Bell had hurt anyone, Gordon could not move. A burning stench.
Four weeks later, on a Monday morning in March, IRS officials
encountered a terrible nose-burning stench as they arrived at
their building in Vancouver, the Portland suburb where Bell lived.
Investigators traced the smell to a welcome mat dosed with propanethiol.
The chemical is used by utilities in minuscule concentrations
to give natural gas its noticeable smell. "It's Bell,"
Gordon told his boss. "I'm sure of it." Bell had attempted
twice to buy propanethiol from a chemical-supply company in Milwaukee,
Gordon then learned. Worried that the stink bomb was a trial run
for something much worse, on April 1, authorities raided Bell's
home. They seized five computers and three semiautomatic assault
rifles, then opened his garage door. Before them stood dozens
of containers filled with chemicals. There were volatile solvents,
explosives ingredients, sodium cyanide, nitric acid, and diisopropyl
fluorophosphate--one of several ingredients that, if properly
mixed, form nerve gas--all in a residential neighborhood. "The
level and type of chemicals were extremely unusual," said
Leroy Loiselle, who managed the cleanup for the Environmental
Protection Agency. "You don't need nitric acid to keep aphids
off your flowers." On Bell's computers, Gordon found two
other items: the names and home addresses of over 100 public officials--IRS
employees, FBI agents, local police officers--and a 169-page document,
The Terrorist's Handbook, with detailed instructions for making
chemical weapons and high explosives. Bell's friends told investigators
that he had tried using green beans to make botulin toxin, which
causes botulism, and that he claimed to have successfully made
sarin, the nerve gas used by Japanese cultists in their 1995 attack
on the Tokyo subway.
Bell was arrested. In July he pleaded guilty to charges of obstruction
of IRS agents and use of a false Social Security number, and also
admitted to the stink bomb attack and the cyberassassination scheme.
He faces up to eight years in prison and $500,000 in fines. Bell
declined to comment, but he contended earlier that he is merely
"a chemical hobbyist" and the assassination scheme only
an abstract proposal. "I'm a talker, not a doer," he
said. The IRS's Jeff Gordon remains wary. According to court records,
after his arrest Bell boasted to a friend that police never found
his most dangerous chemical weapons. Gordon believes they could
include a secret stockpile of sarin.
New generation. Characters like James Dalton Bell are giving federal officials fits these days. Bell, they believe, is one of a new generation of tinkerers and technicians, of college-educated extremists threatening to use biological, chemical, or radiological weapons to achieve their goals. Since the Aum cult's Tokyo nerve gas attack, FBI officials say the number of credible threats to use these weapons has jumped from a handful in 1995, to 20 last year, to twice that number this year. Among the incidents was the 1995 mailing of a videotape to Disneyland, showing two hands mixing chemicals and a note threatening an attack on the theme park. Despite a major investigation, the sender was never caught. Just last April someone sent a petri dish labeled anthrax, an animal disease deadly to humans, to the B'nai B'rith headquarters in Washington, D.C. That proved to be a hoax.
But other threats appear to be quite real. Four militia members in Minnesota were convicted recently of planning to assassinate federal agents with a biological toxin. In Ohio in 1995, a white supremacist pleaded guilty to wire fraud in illegally obtaining three vials of bubonic plague bacteria. Investigators have found biochemical agents in the hands of political extremists, extortionists, murderers, and the mentally ill. U.S. News has learned that the FBI has 50 current investigations of individuals suspected of using or planning to use radiological, biological, or chemical agents. Bureau officials say a major attack in the United States no longer seems unlikely. "The consensus of people in the law enforcement and intelligence communities is that it's not a matter of if it's going to happen, it's when," warns Robert Blitzer, head of the FBI's terrorism section. "We are very concerned."
To prepare, federal agencies have scrambled to set up new counterterrorism strike forces (story, Page 32). Behind all this is the very real fear that the world has entered a new stage in terrorism. Widespread technical education and high-tech communications have vastly increased the number of people with knowledge of how to synthesize chemicals and culture bacteria. Books and videos on creating these substances--and turning them into weapons--are now available on the Internet, at gun shows and survivalist fairs, and through the mail.
While its effects would be the most destructive, a nuclear incident is actually the least likely scenario, according to security experts. More likely, they say, would be a biological weapon attack; a chemical attack is the next likely possibility. The impact could range from the poisoning of an individual to sophisticated attempts at mass murder. So far, the majority have been limited efforts by loners or small groups. Most worrisome to officials is the possible involvement of more established, state-sponsored terrorist organizations--such as Hezbollah--with international reach.
While the number of terrorist attacks, both in the United States and abroad, has gone down since the end of the cold war, there is a flip side. Individual acts themselves have grown more deadly, as illustrated by the Oklahoma City and World Trade Center bombings. In its annual terrorism report issued last April, the State Department sees a trend "toward more ruthless attacks on mass civilian targets" and the use of more powerful weapons.
Threshold crossed. Until this decade, biological and chemical weapons were the province of superpowers or renegade states like Iraq and North Korea. But all that changed with Aum Supreme Truth, an obscure sect of New Age fanatics based at the foot of Mount Fuji, 70 miles outside Tokyo. Recent court testimony from sect members shows how the cult's young scientists produced not only anthrax and botulin toxin but also various nerve agents, including the sarin used on Tokyo's subway. Later attacks were planned for New York and Washington, D.C.
Still, it is one thing to produce deadly agents and another to use them effectively. Aum's attack killed only 12 people of the thousands in the subway system, and on seven other occasions, attempted Aum attacks were dogged by equipment failures and human error. "Trying to produce 100,000 casualties is much more difficult than is often stated," observes Jonathan Tucker of the Monterey Institute of International Studies. Tucker notes that problems abound with delivery systems, meteorological conditions, and the agents themselves. Still, he warns that even crude weapons can easily cause mass disruption. Aum's nerve gas, for example, was full of impurities, yet it sent thousands to the hospital.
What worries police is growing evidence that others share similar ambitions. In 1993, two years before the Aum attack, Canadian border agents stopped an American electrician named Thomas Lavy and searched his car. They found four guns, 20,000 rounds of ammunition, 13 pounds of gunpowder, neo-Nazi literature, and $80,000 in cash. Lavy also had recipes for biological and chemical weapons and a plastic bag filled with white powder. Had the agents opened the bag, they likely would have died of respiratory failure and paralysis. Tests showed the substance to be ricin, a lethal toxin extracted from the castor bean plant. (Ricin, dabbed on a tiny pellet fired from an umbrella-gun, was used by Soviet agents to murder a Bulgarian in London in 1978.) The poison is 6,000 times more toxic than cyanide, and there is no antidote. Lavy had a quarter pound of the stuff.
In 1995, a man named Larry Wayne Harris was arrested after he obtained vials of the bacteria that cause bubonic plague (Page 28). Harris is an Ohio microbiologist and recent member of the white supremacist Aryan Nations. He says his friends will strike at government officials with biochemical weapons, if provoked. "If they arrest a bunch of our guys, they get a test tube in the mail," he told U.S. News. And, he says, far worse could come. "How many cities are you willing to lose before you back off?" he asks. "At what point do you say: `If these guys want to go off to the Northwest and have five states declared to be their own free and independent country, let them do it'?" Authorities take Harris's comments seriously.
The recipes for such poison cocktails are available from underground publishers and on the Internet. One popularizer is an Arkansan named Kurt Saxon. Through books and videotapes, Saxon has been putting out ricin recipes for at least nine years. Convinced that the U.S. will be invaded and that the federal government can't be trusted to defend the country, he has fashioned various homemade explosives and poisons, including cyanide grenades and ricin applicators. In one segment of a $19.95 video, Saxon performs like a sinister Julia Child, blending salt water and solvents with castor beans. ("Pour in about 4 ounces of acetone," he says, "and shake it up nice.") "Uncle Fester," another near-legendary figure in the chem-bio underground, has authored such family classics as Silent Death, Improvised Explosives, and a guide to methamphetamine and LSD manufacture. Fester claims degrees in chemistry and biology, and his Silent Death describes how to produce poison gas, botulin and shellfish toxins, and ricin.
Similarly, entire manuals for making homemade explosives--TNT, plastic, napalm--can be downloaded from the Net, as well as plans for building triggers, fuses, and timers. At least 11 online vendors offer books with recipes on biological or chemical weapons, including Silent Death and Kurt Saxon's The Poor Man's James Bond. All are based in the United States. Adding to the problem, many of the chemicals used to make nerve gas and other agents have perfectly legitimate uses and are readily available. "The genie has always been out of the bottle," says one intelligence analyst. "People are just discovering it."
The genie is also loose in the Middle East. According to intelligence sources, notebooks and computer files recently seized from Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed Islamic militia, contain information on how to produce chemical agents. Hezbollah has also taken delivery of protective gear, including gas masks and bodysuits, and obtained Katyusha rockets able to deliver chemical warheads to Israel from their base in Lebanon. Hezbollah's interests are shared by at least one other Islamic terrorist, Ramzi Yusef, a trained engineer and reputed mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Yusef's organization researched making sarin and reportedly planned to assassinate President Clinton in the Philippines with phosgene gas. The trade center bombers also packed cyanide into the charge that rocked the building; the chemical apparently evaporated in the explosion.
Some analysts believe there have been other, unnoticed, attacks in the United States. "It's almost certain there have been uses of biological agents that have gone undetected," says Seth Carus, a proliferation expert at the National Defense University. "Most cases are known because they came to the attention of law enforcement through informants, not because of medical authorities." Health officials, for example, were mystified by a mass outbreak of salmonella poisoning in Oregon in 1984. The cause--an attack by a nearby religious sect--went undetected until the cult's demise a year later.
Exotic poisons are attracting not only terrorists but also murderers and extortionists. Several recent trials have featured ricin as a murder weapon. Product tamperers, too, are increasingly turning to biological agents. Says Lori Ericson of Kroll Information Services: "We're seeing E. coli, cholera, salmonella, HIV." In one British case, microbiologist Michael Just threatened to contaminate the products of five food companies with dysentery-causing bacteria. To make his point, he sent the firms test tubes filled with the pathogen.
Society can likely tolerate the occasional murderer or extortionist wielding biological or chemical weapons. The greater challenge undoubtedly will come from those with broader grievances, from terrorists steeped in extremism and political hatred. Perhaps scariest of all are the criminally insane, who may bring technical ability, but little judgment, to their homemade laboratories. Last April, authorities raided the house of one Thomas Leahy in Janesville, Wis. Leahy, who takes medication for schizophrenia, was obsessed with creating "killer viruses" to stop his enemies, both real and imagined, according to police. He pleaded guilty to possessing ricin, but a search of his home also found animal viruses and vaccines, staph bacteria culture, fungicides, insecticides, hypodermic needles, and gas masks. As Leahy reportedly told his wife, you can "never have too many poisons." With Douglas Pasternak and Gordon Witkin
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