Isegoria

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.

Ken Alibek explains (in Biohazard) what happened when a Soviet bio-weapons researcher did not return from a trip abroad:

“Who gave him permission to go?”

“I did,” I said. “But I told you about it.”

Shortly after Pasechnik’s initial request, I had informed Kalinin of the invitation from the French company. I had full authority to grant permission for such trips, but Kalinin had told me to keep him abreast of staff movements.

“I don’t remember that,” Kalinin shot back, glancing at Bykov. “You didn’t tell me a thing!”

I felt an involuntary shudder. Kalinin was making it perfectly clear that I was on my own. He looked uncomfortable nonetheless.

Bykov seemed suddenly to enjoy the awkward position in which his rival had been placed. A veteran of Kremlin power struggles, he knew how to take advantage of such situations.

Skipping ahead:

“Well, we think we know where he is.”

“How did you find him?”

“We used a psychic,” Yermoshin explained.

“We showed him a photo of Pasechnik, and he stared at it for a long time until he told us that your man was on some sort of island, a big island, very close to the sea.”

“An island?” I said, puzzled.

“Yes of course,” Yermoshin went on.

“And he said there was a large old building, with two or three men working with him.”

I started to smile. I had never dreamed the KGB was interested in extrasensory perception.

Skipping way, way ahead:

In January 1995, long after I had defected, I was invited by the British government to discuss biodefense issues. During a break, several British officers came up to me and we began to talk through an interpreter about Pasechnik, whom I had not seen since 1989. The mood was light, and I casually told them the story of the KGB and its psychic. They didn’t laugh.

“But that’s exactly where we had him,” one of the officers said. “We wanted to keep him secure, so we brought him to an old house on the coast.”

The KGB psychic was either remarkably talented or he had remarkably good contacts. Even at the time, I suspected that Yermoshin had been ordered to let me in on the psychic’s “secret” to check my reaction. Bykov or Kalinin must have been determined to catch me up. If I had not shown surprise at the news about the island, it would have been proof of guilt. I was angry with Yermoshin for agreeing to be part of such a clumsy trick.

Their reaction:

A consensus was reached quickly. Everything relating to secret defense work at Pasechnik’s facility would have to be destroyed. The Institute of Ultra-Pure Biopreparations would become civilian in fact as well as in name. This would leave a major hole in our program, but there was no alternative.

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“There’s only one thing to do. He has to be killed.”

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One of the KGB colonels spoke up. “I’d like to stop this discussion,” he said softly.

“Nobody is going to say anything about killing here.”

A chill came over the room. I think we all got the message: if an assassination was required, the KGB needed no advice from amateurs.

The Institute of Ultra-Pure Biopreparations, Ken Alibek explains (in Biohazard), provided many of the Soviet Union’s breakthroughs in bio-weapons production:

One of its most notable contributions was a milling machine that used a powerful blast of air to turn bacterial and viral mixtures into a fine powder. Nothing like this “jet-stream” machine had ever been built before, at least so far as we knew. It was intended to replace the heavy ball-bearing mills used for decades by the Ministry of Defense and to become a standard fixture at all of our production plants.

Work was also done on new approaches to drying and microencapsulation—the process of covering agents in polymer capsules to preserve and protect them from ultraviolet light. Highly pathogenic agents were forbidden inside the city limits, so the focus of the institute was on developing new processes and equipment.

One of Pasechnik’s most important projects was the modification of cruise missiles for the delivery of biological agents. The Leningrad scientists were asked to analyze the efficiency of aerosol clouds sprayed from a “fast-flying, low-altitude moving object” containing one or more twenty-liter canisters of liquid or dry agent. They designed a moving platform to release canisters as the missile passed over successive targets. The canisters would break apart on impact with the air.