CIA-RDP96-00788R000300020002-6

Approved For Release 2000/08/07 : CIA-RDP96-00788R000300020002-6
mats arquinr way
WP
19 Mar 80
Biological Agent Suspected
In Sickness at Soviet City
Associated Press
The State Department said yester-
day that an outbreak of disease in a
Soviet city last year "may have re-
sulted from the
exposure of large
numbers of people to son
some sort of le-
thal biological agent.'
It was the first time that the depart-
ment has commented on reports in
the Western European press that hun-
dreds of Soviet citizens died near
Sverdlovsk, in the Ural Mountains, in
April 1979.
Department officials denied that
the timing of the statement was in-
tended to persuade other nations not
to participate in the Summer Olym-
pics in Moscow.
Department spokesman David Pas-
sage said the evidence was being dis-
tussed with the Soviets in Geneva,
where a review conference on the 5-
year-old treaty banning
biological
warfare agents is under way.
Passage declined to go into detail
about the evidence the department
*** has. He would not identify the biologi-
cal agent supposedly involved or say
whether the department was certain
that deaths occurred.
Other officials, speaking privately,
pointed out that Sverdlovsk is a city
closed to Americans. They said the
United States has no firsthand, clini-
cal evidence. "But there is enough
smoke to make us curious about
whether there is a fire," one official
said.
The Soviets have consistently de-
nied the reports of accidents involving
biological weapons.
One report was published on Feb.
13 in Bildzeitung of Hamburg. It said
that more than 1,000 people had died
after an explosion spewed deadly bac-
teria into the air. The West German
newspaper said that another incident
also occurred in 1979 near Novosi
birsk.
Approved For Release 2000/08/07 : CIA-RDP96-00788R000300020002-6