Russian President Boris Yeltsin has admitted that an epidemic of anthrax 12 years ago was caused by Soviet researchers trying to make germ weapons, not by natural causes.

That admission in Russian newspapers, and reported by the Washington Post as Yeltsin and President Bush met in a summit in Washington, backs up the once heavily doubted Reagan administration claims of such an accident.Reagan used the anthrax outbreak at the city of Sverlovsk as justification to beef up U.S. programs to defend against germ attack, including proposing a controversial lab at Utah's Dugway Proving Ground to experiment with germs that cause diseases without cure.

After public uproar, the Army scaled back the scope of that lab to only deal with germs that cause diseases for which cures or vaccines are available.

Part of the uproar came because many scientists said they only saw scant evidence that the Sverdlovsk anthrax could have come from weapons testing, and worried the U.S. military was using it as an excuse for exotic germ weapons testing of its own.

The Washington Post reported that Yeltsin recently told the newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda that while the former Soviet government told the world the anthrax came from natural causes, the KGB told him privately that "our military development was the cause."

Yeltsin, who in 1979 was the head of the Communist Party in Sverdlovsk, said he responded by going to KGB chief Yuri Andropov, who in turn called Defense Minister Dmitri Ustinov "and ordered (him) to liquidate these facilities immediately."

But Yeltsin said he learned later that the military's labs at Sverdlovsk "had simply been moved to another region and the development of this weapon continued."

Anthrax historically has been a disease of choice for germ weapons because it is highly lethal and is persistent in soil.

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The Soviets had told the world that the Sverdlovsk outbreak was caused by spores indigenous to the region's soil being spread among cattle through contaminated meal and among humans through the illegal sale of diseased cattle, which scientists said sounded more plausible than a weapons accident.

The Post said that last November, the Komsomolskaya Pravda reported that people living near a military research center in Sverdlovsk remembered seeing "a discharge in the form of a pink cloud that rose behind the high fence."

Izvestia, another newspaper, subsequently reported damning allegations from a retired Soviet general, A. Mironyuk, who said he learned from the KGB that "someone from the laboratory arrived early in the morning and began to work without turning on safety filters and other protective mechanisms."

The discharge rapidly claimed scores of deaths downwind. Mironyuk said, "Only after they were pinned to the wall did the specialists confess. It was then that an entire program to disinform the public in the country and the world was developed."

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