Isegoria

The engineered plague Annie Jacobsen posits (in Biological War) is not only to be more virulent, more transmissible, and resistant to antibiotics, but it also has a secret back door — as originally conceived by Soviet bioweapon engineers during the Cold War:

A biological weapon with “a two-strike capacity,” like a booby trap, the legendary biological warfare expert Milton Leitenberg tells us. Now in his nineties, Leitenberg learned about the Soviets’ Cold War biological weapons program directly from one of its original cofounders, a plague expert named Igor Domaradskij. “I interviewed him at my house over a period of a few days in June of 1999,” says Leitenberg, and Domaradskij shared with him his original hand-typed writings about how the Soviet program came to be—a copy of which Leitenberg shared with us, to help us understand the scientist’s mindset and the program’s foundations.

Igor Domaradskij was one of two Russian scientists who, starting in 1974, laid down the architecture for this highly classified and illegal biological weapons program. “I drafted a scheme for what were known as the ‘Five principal sectors,’ ” Domaradskij writes, meaning the five major directions in which Russian efforts to genetically modify germs would expand. One of these programs is particularly important to this scenario, a bioengineering effort to transfer the DNA from one germ into another. “The plan,” says Domaradskij, “became known as ‘Bonfire.’ ”

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But it is real: a genetically modified, two-stage killer that, developed further, became known as a chimera bioweapon, according to Sergei Popov, another one of the Soviet biological weapons engineers involved. “Imagine a new weapon which is difficult to diagnose initially, and then which is impossible to treat with conventional antibiotics,” Popov told PBS Nova producer Kirk Wolfinger in 2001. “A double agent [weapon], like plague and encephalomyelitis virus, [that] could be combined in one.”

This is only possible with recombinant DNA:

One day in 1971, inside a laboratory at Stanford University in California, an American biochemist named Paul Berg conducted an experiment that would forever change the biological sciences. He successfully spliced DNA from a monkey virus into the DNA of a second virus, known as lambda phage.

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No one outside the small Stanford lab knew anything about the experiment until the following summer. That’s when one of Berg’s graduate students, a young biochemist named Janet Metz, attended a workshop at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York and told her teacher, a virologist named Robert Pollack, that Berg had succeeded in splicing together DNA from two different viral species.

Pollack was stunned. “Pollack told [Janet] he thought that [my experiment] was the most dangerous and outrageous experiment that anybody could possibly do,” Berg later recalled. He remembered Pollack asking him, “had I realized how dangerous an experiment this would be?”

Berg’s experiment involved inserting a monkey-virus gene, called Simian Virus 40 (SV40)—known to cause cancerous tumors in laboratory animals—into a bacterial virus (lambda phage), with the plan of eventually introducing it into Escherichia coli (E. coli), a common bacterium that lives in the intestines of humans. Pollack’s outrage, Berg learned, stemmed from the opinion “that the bacteria carrying SV40 DNA might escape, and cause cancer in [everyone it] infected.”

“My first reaction,” said Berg, “was that this was absurd. I didn’t see any risk to it.”

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Guidelines for lab safety protocols were set up, according to degree of risk. The biocontainment facilities where recombinant DNA work would take place needed airflow hoods, airlocks, and security systems to ensure that deadly pathogens would not escape. But the research should continue, the scientists ultimately agreed.

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Almost immediately after signing the Biological Weapons Convention treaty, the Russians began pursuing exotic biological weapons using techniques made possible by recombinant DNA.

The program’s deputy chief, Ken Alibek, explains. “We were among the 140 signatories of the convention pledging ‘not to develop, produce, stockpile or otherwise acquire or retain’ biological agents for offensive military purposes [and yet] at the same time,” he clarifies, “through our covert program, we [developed and] stockpiled hundreds of tons of anthrax and dozens of tons of plague and smallpox… for use against the United States and its Western allies.”

Plague has been responsible for several of the most fatal pandemics in human history, Annie Jacobsen notes (in Biological War), including ones in the sixth, fourteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries:

From around 1347 to 1352, the disease killed 150 million people.

Then she explains that her nightmare scenario involves a modified plague:

This particular plague weapon has been genetically engineered to initially deliver a neurochemical high.

“When we first heard Soviet scientists were inserting the endorphin gene [for euphoria] into plague,” says Dr. Henry Heine, a former U.S. Army bacteriologist, “we were appalled. That they would purposefully engineer the Y. pestis bacteria to behave this way… to make you want to go out and socialize… this was some horrifying stuff.”

Y. pestis is shorthand for Yersinia pestis, the bacterium that causes plague, and Dr. Heine is one of the world’s subject-matter experts. Starting in the late 1990s, he spent eleven years working on biological warfare countermeasures at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, in Fort Detrick, Maryland. USAMRIID, or “you-sam-rid” as it’s known, is the Defense Department’s flagship center for high-and maximum-containment infectious disease research and its only Biosafety Level 4 (BSL-4) laboratory. In the event of a biological attack against America, USAMRIID scientists will be at the fore.

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Former assistant secretary of defense Andy Weber agrees. “I grew up thinking Reagan’s phrase ‘Evil Empire’ was an exaggeration,” he tells us. “Then I learned what the Russians were doing [with biological warfare].” He pauses for effect. “It was evil.”

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“Because of the severity of the disease, the rapid onset of symptoms, sepsis, and multi-organ system failure followed by 100% mortality in untreated patients,” retired colonel Bret Purcell, the former chief of the Division of Medicine at USAMRIID, tells us, “the U.S. military recognizes Yersinia pestis [as] one of the highest bacterial threat pathogens to our military and civilian populations.”

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During Dr. Heine’s tenure at USAMRIID, he spent thousands of hours inside a laboratory studying plague. His efforts, which focused on developing therapeutics against biowarfare and bioterrorism, included work to develop a plague vaccine. It never advanced beyond animal trials. “You can’t defend against every imaginable thing,” Heine laments, citing the undeniable reality at the center of the military’s efforts to defend against biological warfare. Biological warfare is, at its core, indefensible.

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People whose lungs are infected with Yersinia pestis generally begin developing symptoms after an incubation period of between one and three days, depending on an array of factors, from the strength of their immune system, to the dosage they receive. Genetic modifications can further alter this time frame.

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Pneumonic plague is a fulminant disease, meaning it strikes fast and kills quickly.

Biological warfare is illegal, and biological weapons are illegal, Annie Jacobsen notes (in Biological War), yet biological weapons exist:

Over 100 years ago, the international community banned the use of biological weapons with the Geneva Protocol of 1925, but by World War II, various nations were developing robust biological weapons programs, including the United States, the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, and Imperial Japan.

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And then, in November 1969 and without much warning, President Richard Nixon renounced America’s biological weapons program. This led to the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention—the BWC—an international treaty prohibiting the development, production, acquisition, transfer, stockpiling, and use of biological and toxin weapons.

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The Biological Weapons Convention treaty allows for “defensive” biological weapons research, meaning scientists can conduct research involving the same pathogens that could be used for biological warfare—so long as the research warrants to be “for prophylactic, protective, or other peaceful purposes.” In other words, offensive biological weapons research can masquerade as “defensive” in scope.

“The treaty has no protocols for enforcement,” former assistant secretary of state Mallory Stewart tells us.

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In the second half of the Cold War, after signing the treaty, the Soviet Union secretly and illegally developed and stockpiled massive arsenals of biological weapons, including genetically engineered germs.

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A 2025 U.S. State Department compliance report assesses that Russia and North Korea each “maintains an offensive BW [biological weapons] program” in violation of the treaty, while China and Iran are engaged in biological research and activities that raise unresolved compliance issues.

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“The United States maintains that the Soviet program was absorbed, not dismantled, by the Russian Federation,” says the State Department’s special representative to the Biological Weapons Convention, Kenneth D. Ward, “and that program has continued and evolved in violation of Article I and Article II of the BWC.”

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A deadly germ—genetically modified to be human-to-human transmissible, hypervirulent, able to defeat countermeasures, and with no known cure—could be twenty-first-century humans’ last invention.

We may not realize until too late, Ken Alibek explains (in Biohazard), that we have become the victims of a biological attack:

It is not until days or weeks after such an attack has taken place—after the first wave of deaths—that we will most likely recognize its occurrence.

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A small amount of Marburg or Ebola released in the subway system of Washington, D.C., Boston, or New York, or in an airport, shopping mall, or financial center, could produce hundreds of thousands of victims.

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It is easier to make a biological weapon than to create an effective system of biological defense. Based on our current level of knowledge, at least seventy different types of bacteria, viruses, rickettsiae, and fungi can be weaponized. We can reliably treat no more than 20 to 30 percent of the diseases they cause.

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In a simulated attack staged in New York City in 1998, nearly all of the members of an emergency unit dispatched to the scene “died” because they were insufficiently protected. “They did all the right things,” a federal official who watched the exercise told The New York Times. “But the scenario utterly defeated them.” The emergency teams were hampered by their inability to identify which biological agents had been used.

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Most methods involve the exposure of vials or petri dishes containing laboratory-grown cultures to air samples from a suspected target area. This can be a laborious process. A field monitoring device used during the Gulf War took between thirteen and twenty-four hours to make a positive identification. For botulinum toxin, one of the staples of Iraq’s arsenal, this would already be too late.

Technology has improved since then. The Biological Integrated Detection System (BIDS) cut the time to only thirty minutes, but it can so far only determine the presence of anthrax, plague, botulinum toxin, and staphylococcus enterotoxin B.

In September 1998, he explains, Clinton and Yeltsin agreed in Moscow on a program of “accelerated negotiations” to strengthen the Biological Weapons Convention:

In America, the loudest protests have come from commercial biotechnology companies, who argue that open-ended inspections of their labs and production facilities will leave them vulnerable to industrial espionage. Biotechnology is a multi-million-dollar industry. Between 1989 and 1996 the number of firms in the United States developing new-generation drugs soared from 45 to 113.

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Nothing prevents a state from concealing a weapons program under the guise of protecting commercial secrets.

Arms treaties are important. They set standards of international behavior regarding the acquisition and use of weapons of mass destruction. But they are almost invariably ignored when countries believe their national security is at stake.

The American plan to stockpile and develop vaccines against known agents is the most comprehensive of its kind in the world, Alibek notes, but, as parts of that plan have been implemented, its limitations have become clear:

Mandatory immunization of troops has been official Pentagon policy since 1993. All 2.3 million American soldiers have begun to receive shots against anthrax, currently regarded as the principal threat because of its documented presence in Saddam Hussein’s arsenal. But no vaccines are contemplated against other agents believed to be in that arsenal, such as aflatoxin, botulinum, and smallpox. The extra cost would be enormous (the six-year anthrax vaccine program alone will cost the military an estimated $ 130 million) and vaccines are not without side effects. Injecting soldiers against dozens of diseases would not protect them from the agents we don’t know about, or from those for which there are no known vaccines.

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Vaccines made of live but weakened microorganisms are generally more effective than those made of nonliving cellular or subcellular components. Both types are usually benign, but in rare cases they can trigger significant changes in the blood and endocrine systems. Some have been known to affect the functioning of the heart, lungs, kidneys, and other organs. It is not medically advisable to combine too many different courses of vaccination.

There are currently no known vaccines for brucellosis, glanders, and melioidosis or for many viral diseases, such as Ebola and Marburg. The plague vaccine was found to be ineffective against aerosol dissemination in animal studies. The tularemia vaccine is difficult to culture and potentially dangerous. Of the four possible strains available for viral encephalitis, the first and most potent (a live vaccine) produces adverse reactions in 20 percent of all cases and is ineffective in 20 percent. The second is of restricted effectiveness (it only works against three subtypes of the disease), and the third and fourth are poorly immunogenic and require multiple immunizations. The smallpox vaccine, only available in the United States to lab workers and military personnel, can be administered either before or after infection. It requires periodic boosters and wears out after ten years, though revaccination is required after three years in case of infection. Skin testing is recommended for Q fever and botulinum toxin.

The anthrax vaccine used in the United States has to be administered six times before it becomes effective (three times in two-week intervals and three times in six-month intervals) with annual boosters thereafter.

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American experts maintain that annual boosters are safe—the live vaccine we used in Russia was associated with some risks—but scientists generally agree that excessive vaccination can create complications in the immune system, leading in rare cases to the formation of tumors.

Repeated vaccinations has been known to trigger or aggravate allergies. Thirty minutes after I received my last vaccination against anthrax in 1987, my face became swollen, and I developed a rash and had trouble breathing. I took Dimidrol, a powerful anti-allergy medication available in Russia (though not in the United States) and felt better again in a few hours. For the next ten days I received intravenous preparations at a hospital—a form of allergy treatment we called desensibilization therapy. Several colleagues had been forbidden from anthrax work after similar reactions.

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I received my first anthrax vaccination in 1979 and began a course of annual vaccinations in 1982. I was also vaccinated against smallpox once, twice against tularemia, and four times against plague. The chronic allergies I have suffered throughout my adult life are a direct consequence of repeated exposure to live vaccines, and to other biological substances I worked with.

Vaccines provide excellent protection against specific diseases, but the characteristic that makes them so effective—that specificity—is also the source of their limitations.

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Despite American efforts and expenditures, vaccines have limited value for the protection of civilians.

Great Britain and Canada began investigating biological agents and delivery systems in 1940, Ken Alibek explains (in Biohazard), but President Franklin D. Roosevelt didn’t establish a program until fifteen months after the United States entered World War II, in March 1943:

Based on what Patrick told me of the early history of their program, Americans knew nothing of the ambitious weapons-making drive we [the USSR] had launched in the 1920s.

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The Americans were not fully persuaded until their British and Canadian allies noted that the Germans were suspected of having used glanders against Romanian cavalry during World War I and seemed to be amassing a larger bacteriological arsenal. The Canadians had converted an agricultural experiment station in Suffield, Alberta, into a testing area for anthrax. In southern England, an old chemical warfare proving ground at Porton Down was adapted for the same purpose.

In America, a secret biological warfare unit called the War Research Service was created to work with its British and Canadian counterparts. George W. Merck, president of Merck & Co. Inc., a leading U.S. pharmaceutical firm, was the unit’s first director.

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They settled on four principal sites: a 2,000-acre tract on Horn Island near Pascagoula, Mississippi; the Dugway chemical warfare testing facility in the Utah desert; a 6,100-acre munitions manufacturing complex at Terre Haute, Indiana; and the old National Guard installation at Frederick, Maryland.

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More than seventeen hundred people worked at Camp Detrick during the war years, investigating glanders, brucellosis, cholera, dysentery, plague, and typhus.

Anthrax was the largest project. Scientists built a pilot plant capable of producing anthrax in ten-thousand-gallon tanks. They were so successful that Britain placed an order for five hundred thousand anthrax bombs from the facility in September 1944.

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Fears that the Germans would use biological munitions in their unmanned “buzz bomb” raids over English cities, or to repel the D-Day force, never materialized.

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Some facilities were phased out, but revelations about Japan’s Unit 731 forestalled any serious discussion about ending the American program.

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Camp Detrick sent scientists to Japan to interrogate the commanders of Unit 731, who gave details of their program in return for avoiding prosecution for war crimes. Their reports convinced Washington that biological weapons could be developed in greater quantities and with far greater effectiveness than anyone had suspected. The British came to a similar conclusion and decided to upgrade their testing and research unit at Porton Down and at a test site on the Scottish island of Gruinard.

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Beginning in 1951, agricultural agents were developed at Camp Detrick and other facilities to attack the Soviet wheat crop and the rice paddies of Communist China. The pathogens were stored at Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland, as well as at Rocky Mountain Arsenal near Denver, which also manufactured plutonium for nuclear weapons.

U.S. bioweaponeers went on to explore antipersonnel agents such as tularemia, Venezuelan equine encephalitis, and staphylococcal enterotoxin B. Aerosols were tested on animals at Deseret Island in the Pacific Ocean and at Dugway Proving Ground in Utah. They conducted experiments with simulated weapons, as we did, in urban areas.

Human tests took place in 1955 on a group of young Seventh Day Adventists who volunteered as an alternative to military service. The volunteers were exposed to Q fever, which is not lethal and can be treated with antibiotics, in a program called Project Whitecoat, or Operation CD-22.

By the late 1960s, twenty-two microorganisms were under study, and there were plans to weaponize hemorrhagic fevers such as the Machupo virus and Rift Valley fever.

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Nixon, convinced by his advisers that biological warfare was impractical, signed an executive order on November 25, 1969, renouncing the use of lethal biological agents and weapons and promising to confine American biological research to “defensive measures” such as immunization and bio-safety.

We didn’t believe a word of Nixon’s announcement. Even though the massive U.S. biological munitions stockpile was ordered to be destroyed, and some twenty-two hundred researchers and technicians lost their jobs, we thought the Americans were only wrapping a thicker cloak around their activities.

Nixon turned most of Camp Detrick’s buildings over to the National Cancer Institute and assigned to the complex the task of finding a cure for cancer.

When Ken Alibek collaborated on a secret history of the Soviet and American programs after his defection, as he explains in Biohazard, he was amazed to discover how closely the research efforts of both countries dovetailed between 1945 and 1969:

The same agents, even the same types of aerosols, were used in experiments occurring sometimes less than a year apart.

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The uncanny similarity between our programs may have been more than a coincidence. Pavel Sudoplatov, a former general of the NKVD (the precursor of the KGB), provided an unwitting clue in his memoirs, published in 1996. Sudoplatov reported almost offhandedly that classified U.S. material on bacteriological weapons research had been transmitted on a regular basis to Moscow during the 1940s and 1950s.

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There had to be at least one informer, if not several, in the American program.