"American leaders have declared war on Mr. bin Laden and his brand of terrorism, a rhetorical flourish that leaves unanswered how the West intends to combat a millennial movement that flouts the rules of conventional warfare and has no evident state sponsor."

- Stephen Engelberg, excerpt from a New York Times article published September 12, 1998

Stephen Engelberg with co-authors Judy Miller and William Broad (counter-clockwise)

In the past decade, the government has quietly concluded that the United States is all but defenseless against the rising threat of attack with germ weapons. The stunning advances in biotechnology, the increasing audacity of global terrorists, and fears that rogue scientists are hawking their skills to the highest bidders have thrown America on the defensive. In GERMS: Biological Weapons and America¹s Secret War (Simon & Schuster), former New York Times investigative journalist Stephen Engelberg, along with his colleagues and co-authors Judy Miller and William Broad, reveal the existence of secret, government-funded research that in recent years has taken the United States to the limits, if not beyond, what is allowed by the global treaty banning germ arms.

Drawing on hundreds of interviews with scientists, intelligence officers, and senior government officials as well as declassified documents, GERMS takes readers into a hidden world in which the  bio-defenders,¹¹ as they call themselves, are struggling to fend off weapons capable of igniting global epidemics. The authors trace a half century of failed attempts to contain the danger, notably the international treaty that was blatantly violated by Moscow, Baghdad and others.

Among the revelations chronicled in GERMS are:

• Secret U.S. experiments in which scientists replicated a Soviet-designed biological bomb, built a working germ factory and began to genetically engineer a new form of anthrax-- a superbug that might defeat America¹s only vaccine against the disease.
  
  
• How gloomy warnings from a Nobel Laureate and the spine-tingling plot of a best-selling novel helped persuade President Clinton to embark on a multi-billion dollar program of civil defense to protect Americans that many critics see as wasteful and uncoordinated.
  
  
• Previously undisclosed efforts by a handful of government officials to penetrate the closed laboratories where Soviet germ warriors used the wonders of gene splicing for evil, creating new, more lethal forms of ancient killers like plague or smallpox.
  
  
• The panic as American military officers realized, on the eve of the Gulf War, that decades of neglect of bio-defenses had left them vulnerable to Iraq, a nation armed with enough germs to kill everyone on earth several times over.
  
  
• Plans by the American military in the 1960¹s to attack Cuba with a cocktail of debilitating germs intended to sicken millions of civilians and soldiers.

The authors tell the story through the eyes of the men and women who designed germ weapons and defenses. Readers meet an American scientist who devoted his life to perfecting the mass production of hideous germs in the decades before the United States renunciation of biological arms in 1969. They follow the dogged efforts of a young Pentagon official as he traipses across the former Soviet Union just ahead of Iranian recruiters offering cash and other blandishments. And they are introduced to a former Soviet germ warrior who worked on a new kind of weapon that could cause the human body to destroy itself.

Written in a riveting, accessible style, GERMS offers a glimpse at the dark side of the astounding advances in biotechnology that dominate the headlines. The authors describe America¹s vulnerability to attack in chilling detail. "If we as a nation believe that the germ threat is a hoax, we are spending too much money on it," they write. "But if the danger is real, as we conclude it is, then the investment is much too haphazard and defuse. We are woefully unprepared for a calamity that would be unlike any this country has ever experienced."

About Stephen Engelberg
Stephen Engelberg, the Pulitzer-Prize winning co-author of the best-selling Germs: Biological Weapons and America's Secret War, is currently the managing editor/enterprise for the Oregonian in Portland, Oregon. He worked previously as an editor and reporter at The New York Times where he was an integral part of almost every major national story over the past two decades. Engelberg was a reporter in The Times Washington bureau where he covered the spate of espionage cases in 1985 that became known as the "The Year of the Spy.'' Soon after, he was The Times lead reporter on the Iran-Contra Affair. Beginning in 1990, he became the Times bureau chief in Warsaw, Poland, reporting on the outbreak of war war in Yugoslavia and the region's shaky transition to democracy.

After returning to Washington for a three-year stint as investigative reporter that included major projects on Saudi Arabia, the failings of the INS, and President Clinton's Whitewater land dealings, he moved to New York as an editor where he led teams of reporters that won three Pulitizer Prizes. The topics covered a broad range, from Mexican drug corruption to U.S. high technology transfers to China to the rise of Osama Bin Laden's Al Qaeda network. The articles on terrorism were part of a five-year effort directed by Engelberg to track and understand the origins of the Islamic terrorism which is now the leading national security threat confronting the United States. Just as the book "Germs'' was appearing in the stores, Engelberg and his co-authors Judith Miller and William Broad led The Times coverage of the anthrax letters and its aftermath.

A graduate of Princeton University, Engelberg lives in Portland, Oregon with his three daughters.