I don’t recall ever hearing the name tularemia growing up, but I’m pretty sure I was vaguely aware of something called rabbit fever — if only because I’d seen the warning against rabbititis in Hare Tonic:
Tularemia is a debilitating illness, Ken Alibek explains (in Biohazard), rife among wild animals and common in the Rocky Mountains, California, Oklahoma, parts of eastern Europe, and Siberia:
It is a hardy organism, capable of surviving for weeks, sometimes months, in decaying animal corpses. Tularemia is primarily transmitted to humans by ticks, mosquitoes, and wild rabbits, though squirrels, sheep, cats, and dogs have also been identified as carriers. While highly infectious, it almost never spreads directly from one person to another.
Victims can be laid up for weeks with chills, nausea, headaches, and fever. If left untreated, symptoms usually last two to four weeks, but they can continue for months. Francisella tularensis is lethal in 30 percent of untreated cases.
After World War II, scientists in the United States, Britain, and Canada developed tularemia for use on the battlefield, where it could immobilize an entire division through the intensive medical care required for each stricken soldier.
Soviet commanders considered tularemia an unpredictable weapon for close-quarter tactical maneuvers. The risk of infecting one’s own troops was high. But we had obtained, from a leading international research institute in Europe, a strain capable of overcoming immunity in vaccinated monkeys.
Our civilian credentials ensured that no questions were asked when we requested it. As far as we knew, there had never been an attempt anywhere in the world to weaponize a vaccine-resistant strain of tularemia. For Kalinin, the project represented a chance to prove what Biopreparat could do.
Five hundred monkeys were ordered from Africa for tularemia tests on Rebirth Island, he explains:
Importing that many animals at one time without arousing suspicion was not as difficult as it sounds. The arrangements were made well in advance by clandestine overseas trading associations run by the Soviet Ministry of External Trade, which also supplied us with the cages and other special equipment.
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Since we were testing a vaccine-resistant weapon, all of the monkeys had to be immunized before they were exposed.
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There was no telephone at the test center, and the only communication with Aralsk was through cryptograms on the army’s closed-circuit communications network.
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Nearly all the immunized monkeys died.
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The next year we conducted new tests with an even more efficient dry variant of tularemia, following all the procedures meticulously, and the new version of weaponized tularemia entered the Soviet arsenal.
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Meanwhile, at Rebirth Island, everything connected to the tularemia test, from research notes to blood samples to the monkeys’ corpses, had to be incinerated.
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Open-air testing at Rebirth Island stopped in 1992. Records of what happened there no longer exist.