On October 5, 1992, an El Al cargo jet had plunged into an apartment block near Amsterdam’s Schipol Airport, killing forty-three persons and injuring dozens. Since then hundreds of people living in the area had fallen ill. Despite a relentless campaign to conceal that the aircraft had been carrying lethal chemicals—including the components to produce Sarin, the deadly nerve agent—the facts had emerged, drawing unwelcome attention to a secret research center in the suburbs of Tel Aviv where scientists had, among much else, produced a range of chemical and biological weapons for Mossad’s kidon unit.
Twelve miles southeast of downtown Tel Aviv is the Institute for Biological Research. The plant is at the cutting edge of Israel’s multilayered defense system. Within its laboratories and workshops are manufactured a wide range of chemical and biological weapons. The Institute’s chemists—some of whom once worked for the Soviet KGB or East German Stasi intelligence service—created the poison used to try and kill Khaled Meshal, the leader of the Hamas Islamic fundamentalist group.
The Institute’s current research programs include developing a range of pathogens which would be, according to a secret CIA report for William Cohen, U.S. defense secretary, “ethnic-specific.” The CIA report claims that Israeli scientists are “trying to exploit medical advances by identifying distinctive genes carried by some Arabs to create a genetically modified bacterium or virus.”
The report concludes that, “still at the early stages, the intention is to exploit the way viruses and certain bacteria can alter the DNA inside their host’s living cells.” The Institute research mimics work conducted by South African scientists during the apartheid era to create a “pigmentation weapon that will target only black people.”
The research was abandoned when Nelson Mandela came to power but at least two of the scientists who worked in the program in South Africa later moved to Israel.
The idea of the Jewish State conducting such research has triggered alarm bells—not least because of the disturbing parallel with genetic experiments conducted by the Nazis. Dedi Zucker, a member of the Israeli Parliament, the Knesset, is on record as saying, “We cannot be allowed to create such weapons.”
It was the raw materials for such weapons that the El Al jet was carrying on that October night in 1992 in its 114 tons of cargo that also included Sidewinder missiles and electronics. Most lethal of all were twelve barrels of DMMP, a component of Sarin gas. The chemicals had been bought from Solkatronic, the New Jersey-based chemical manufacturer. The company has steadfastly insisted that it had been told by Israel that the chemicals were “to be used for testing gas masks.” No such testing is carried out at the Institute for Biological Research.
Founded in 1952 in a small concrete bunker, today the Institute sprawls over ten acres. The fruit trees have long gone, replaced by a high concrete wall topped with sensors. Armed guards patrol the perimeter. Long ago the Institute disappeared from public scrutiny. Its exact address in the suburbs of Nes Ziona has been removed from the Tel Aviv telephone book. Its location is erased from all maps of the area. No aircraft is allowed to overfly the area.
Only Dimona in the Negev Desert is surrounded by more secrecy. In the classified directory of the Israeli Defense Force, the Institute is only listed as “providing services to the defense Ministry.” Like Dimona, many of the Institute’s research and development laboratories are concealed deep underground. Housed there are the biochemists and genetic scientists with their bottled agents of death: toxins that can create crippling food poisoning and lead to death; the even more virulent Venezuelan equine encephalomyelitis and anthrax.
In other laboratories, reached through air locks, scientists work with a variety of nerve agents: choking agents, blood agents, blister agents. These include Tabun, virtually odorless and invisible when dispensed in aerosol or vapor form. Soman, the last of the Nazi nerve gases to be discovered, is also invisible in vapor form but has a slightly fruity odor. The range of blister agents include chlorine, phosgene, and diphosgene which smells of new-mown grass. The blood agents include those with a cyanide base. The blister agents are based upon those first used in World War I.
Outwardly featureless, with few windows in its dun-colored concrete walls, the Institute’s interior has state-of-the-art security. Code words and visual identification control access to each area. Guards patrol the corridors. Bombproof sliding doors can only be opened by swipe-cards whose codes are changed every day.
All employees undergo health checks every month. All have been subject to intense screening. Their families have also undergone similar checks.
