Ken Alibek explains (in Biohazard) the Sverdlovsk anthrax leak of 1979:
The story went public a few months later—in a way. In November 1979, a Russian magazine published by anti-Soviet émigrés in what was then West Germany reported that an explosion in a military facility in the southwest section of Sverdlovsk had released a cloud of deadly bacteria the previous April. It claimed that as many as a thousand people had died. Western news agencies picked up the story, quoting U.S. intelligence officials who claimed that the accident was clear evidence of Soviet violation of the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention.
Moscow denied the reports. On June 12, 1980, a statement published by the official Soviet news agency TASS declared that there had only been a “natural outbreak of anthrax among domestic animals” in the Sverdlovsk region.
“Cases of skin and intestinal forms of anthrax were reported in people, because dressing of animals was sometimes conducted without observing rules established by veterinary inspections,” the statement said, adding that all of the patients had been treated successfully in local hospitals.
This was a lie, of course.
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I learned the truth by talking to people who had been at the plant when the accident happened, and to army officers who had been in charge of the cleanup.
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As I rose higher in The System, I applied some of the lessons of Sverdlovsk to the plants under my control.
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On the last Friday of March 1979, a technician in the anthrax drying plant at Compound 19, the biological arms production facility in Sverdlovsk, scribbled a quick note for his supervisor before going home. “Filter clogged so I’ve removed it. Replacement necessary,” the note said.
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The fermented anthrax cultures had to be separated from their liquid base and dried before they could be ground into a fine powder for use in an aerosol form, and there were always spores floating in the air. Workers were given regular vaccinations, but the large filters clamped over the exhaust pipes were all that stood between the anthrax dust and the outside world.
After each shift, the big drying machines were shut down briefly for maintenance checks. A clogged air filter was not an unusual occurrence, but it had to be replaced immediately.
Lieutenant Colonel Nikolai Chernyshov, supervisor of the afternoon shift that day, was in as much of a hurry to get home as his workers. Under the army’s rules, he should have recorded the information about the defective filter in the logbook for the next shift, but perhaps the importance of the technician’s note didn’t register in his mind, or perhaps he was simply overtired.
When the night shift manager came on duty, he scanned the logbook. Finding nothing unusual, he gave the command to start the machines up again. A fine dust containing anthrax spores and chemical additives swept through the exhaust pipes into the night air.
Several hours passed before a worker noticed that the filter was missing. The shift supervisor shut the machines down at once and ordered a new filter installed. Several senior officers were informed, but no one alerted city officials or Ministry of Defense headquarters in Moscow.
In the next few days, all the workers on the night shift of a ceramic-making plant across the street from the facility fell ill. The plant had been directly in the path of the wind that night. Within a week, nearly all of them were dead.
By then hospitals were admitting dozens of patients from other areas of town who had worked in the plant’s vicinity. Curiously, there were few women or children among the victims. Years later, some Western analysts wondered if the Soviets had developed a “gender weapon” capable of attacking only adult males. But women seldom worked night shifts in production plants, and few children would have been playing in the streets late on a Friday night.
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That it happened on a Friday night helps explain why the workers were so anxious to get home and why so many people had passed by that evening, heading for a drink at a nearby bar.
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The Soviet Union later claimed that 96 people were stricken with the disease and 66 died. The scientist who was working in the Sverdlovsk facility at the time told me the death toll was 105, but we will probably never know for sure.
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Sverdlovsk residents were informed that the deaths were caused by a truckload of contaminated meat sold on the black market. Printed fliers advised people to stay away from “unofficial” food vendors. More than one hundred stray dogs were rounded up and killed, on the grounds that they represented a danger to public health after having been seen scavenging near markets where the meat was sold. Meanwhile, military sentries were posted in the immediate neighborhood of the plant to keep intruders away, and KGB officers pretending to be doctors visited the homes of victims’ families with falsified death certificates.
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A Northwestern University physics professor named Donald E. Ellis, who was in Sverdlovsk at the time on an exchange program, reported that he noticed nothing unusual in the city. “I don’t exclude the possibility that something may have occurred,” he told The New York Times years later, “but I think either I or my wife would have sensed some effort to protect us from it. We … were not aware of any restrictions.”
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“We couldn’t understand why people continued to die,” a general who was there told me much later. “We assumed that this was a quick, one-time exposure and that our mopping-up would be completed in a few days, but there were deaths for a month and a half after the release.”
The coverup was responsible for turning what began as a medical emergency into a small epidemic.
The local Communist Party boss, who was apparently told that there had been a leak of hazardous material from the plant, ordered city workers to scrub and trim trees, spray roads, and hose down roofs. This spread the spores further through “secondary aerosols”—spores that had settled after the initial release and were stirred up again by the cleanup blitz. Anthrax dust drifted through the city, and new victims arrived at the hospitals with black ulcerous swellings on their skin.
The cutaneous form of anthrax, contracted when spores enter the body through a cut or abrasion on the surface of the skin, occurs naturally in rural areas around the world, especially those with large herds of domestic cattle, sheep, and goats. It is the most common form of anthrax and is rarely lethal when treated with antibiotics such as penicillin. Russians refer to it as the “Siberian ulcer,” as it manifests itself through the formation of small and localized lesions on the surface of the skin. An outbreak of cutaneous anthrax in the region was credible, but it wouldn’t explain why so many factory workers, who could have had no contact with animals, were suddenly sick, or why so many died.
Anthrax spores can survive for years—even decades—in a dormant state. Animals will become infected while foraging for food. The spores germinate in a matter of hours and multiply in their hosts, returning to spore form when they die or on contact with oxygen. Men and women who work with infected animals—butchers, tanners, farmers, and workers in textile mills—become infected in turn through abrasions, by inhaling spores or drinking contaminated water, or, in rare cases, by eating contaminated meat.
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Inhalational anthrax was first identified in the early nineteenth century when workers in a textile mill were exposed to spores released into the air by the new industrial processes developed to make wool. It is often called wool sorters’ disease.
As soon as an anthrax spore enters the body it germinates and begins to multiply. A few days will pass before the anthrax bacteria produce toxins which, in the simplest terms, bind to the protective membranes of target cells and cripple the ability of white blood cells to fight off disease. It is the toxin, and not the bacterium itself, that ravages the body and is responsible for death. If an anthrax victim is treated with high doses of penicillin injected into the bloodstream at short intervals for a week to ten days before the first toxins are released, chances of survival are almost 100 percent. But antibiotics can do little to fight the anthrax toxin. Combinations of penicillin and streptomycin have been used at this stage, but the prognosis is grim.
The headlong trajectory of pulmonary anthrax can be blocked if penicillin is administered before the first symptoms appear. I was told that thousands of Sverdlovsk residents were given antibiotics and vaccinated immediately after the first cases were reported, but it was too late to save the victims who had already begun to suffer from the fever, shortness of breath, and distinctive dark swellings along their chest and neck that mark the onset of pulmonary anthrax.
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I was told by army personnel involved in the cleanup that the corpses of the victims were bathed in chemical disinfectants and that much of the documentary evidence, including hospital records and pathologists’ reports, was destroyed. To add verisimilitude to the cover story, several black-market vendors in Sverdlovsk were imprisoned on charges of selling contaminated meat.
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The Communist Party chairman of Sverdlovsk at the time of the accident was Boris Yeltsin, the first leader of post-Soviet Russia.
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In 1981, Brezhnev signed a secret decree ordering the relocation of all biological weapons-making equipment and materials from Sverdlovsk to Stepnogorsk, a small biological research facility operated by Biopreparat in the remote deserts of northern Kazakhstan.
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For the good of our biological warfare program, Chernyshov’s mistake had to be kept quiet. A thorough investigation of what had happened in Compound 19 would raise too many awkward questions even inside our own government about our activities. This was further proof that secrecy was valued above all else in our system—even if it endangered our own safety. In the West, an accident of such magnitude would have been investigated ad nauseam and its lessons distributed, however quietly, to those working in similar areas. Our coverup virtually guaranteed further disasters.
A few months later I ran into another veteran of Sverdlovsk, Lieutenant Colonel Boris Kozhevnikov. In the year following the accident, he told me, a work crew was ordered to take a boxload of 250-liter containers filled with dried anthrax to storage bunkers inside Compound 19. Kozhevnikov had been assigned to escort the workers as they rolled the containers on carts toward the bunker a few hundred feet away. One cart hit a bump, and a container fell open. I was aghast.
“What did you do?” I asked him.
“I just closed it.” He shrugged.
Hastily, he added that he had ordered disinfectant poured everywhere. No one had fallen sick. And, of course, his superiors were not informed.