Isegoria

Of all the diseases that have tormented mankind, Ken Alibek explains (in Biohazard), smallpox has left the oldest and the deepest scars:

Recorded as early as 1122 B.C. in China, it altered the course of history, ravaging eighteenth-century Europe and decimating the native populations of North America. Smallpox comes from the pox family of viruses, which assault the upper respiratory tract. Variola major, the scientific name by which the smallpox virus is known, is patient and systematic. It will begin by insinuating itself into cells close to the surface of the skin and in the neural system. The smallpox virus sheds its shell as soon as it enters a live cell, and quickly begins to multiply. Viral transcription begins almost immediately, inhibiting DNA synthesis and thereby preventing the cell from activating its defense mechanisms. Once the virus has inserted its genetic information into the host cell, proteins and enzymes are created to help it mature and develop. The progress of the virus can be mapped by the spread of tiny pink spots from the face and arms to the lower regions of the body.

Smallpox symptoms were once familiar to every doctor. After a quiet incubation period of five to ten days, the virus manifests itself suddenly. The first stage of the disease brings high fever, vomiting, headache, and a strange stiffness. This can last from two to four days. Within less than a week, small spots will begin to develop, forming a rash around the face. As the rash spreads over the following week these spots will develop into painful blisters. In the normal course of the illness, the blisters form scabs that linger for several weeks until they dry and fall off, leaving scars. More severe forms of black or red pox can lead to death within three to four days.

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On May 8, 1980, the World Health Organization announced that smallpox had been eradicated from the planet. The last naturally occurring case was reported in Somalia in 1977, and no new cases had been detected in three years. The WHO recommended the discontinuation of smallpox immunization programs, observing that there was no longer any need to subject people to even the negligible risk connected with vaccination.

The international agency simultaneously adopted a resolution restricting the world’s stocks of smallpox to four sites, where limited quantities would be available for research purposes. A few years later, the sites were narrowed down to two: the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta and the Ivanovsky Institute of Virology in Moscow.

The conquest of smallpox generated a special feeling of accomplishment in the Soviet Union: the worldwide crusade against smallpox had been a Soviet initiative. Moscow first proposed the campaign at a World Health Organization meeting in 1958, and its sponsorship of vaccination programs in the third world won it admirers everywhere. Russia had suffered its share of smallpox outbreaks over the centuries, finally managing to eliminate the disease in 1936, after a decade-long immunization program sponsored by the fledgling Bolshevik government.

Soon after the WHO announcement, smallpox was included in a list of viral and bacterial weapons targeted for improvement in the 1981–85 Five-Year-Plan.

Where other governments saw a medical victory, the Kremlin perceived a military opportunity. A world no longer protected from smallpox was a world newly vulnerable to the disease.

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In 1947, the Soviet Union established its first smallpox weapons factory just outside the ancient cathedral town of Zagorsk, forty minutes’ drive northwest of Moscow. Zagorsk (now Sergiyev Posad) is the site of the

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A few miles away, in another walled compound, Soviet army scientists at the Virological Center of the Ministry of Defense devoutly cultivated smallpox, Q fever, and Venezuelan equine encephalitis in the embryos of chicken eggs.

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Using tiny syringes, laboratory workers injected microscopic amounts of smallpox virus into eggs and sealed each egg with paraffin. The eggs were placed inside thermostatic ovens for several days while the embryo host cells stirred the virus into life. As it monopolized the cells’ normal growth mechanisms, the virus spawned successive replications of itself until the host was engulfed or destroyed. The eggs were then punctured and the liquid inside poured into special vats and mixed with stabilizing materials. The resulting weapon could remain potent in refrigerated conditions for at least a year.

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Under a state-controlled agricultural system it was easy to conceal the purpose of hijacking so many eggs from the marketplace.

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In 1959, a traveler from India infected forty-six Muscovites with smallpox before authorities realized what had happened. The traveler had been vaccinated, but smallpox vaccinations lose their effectiveness over time, and while his weakened immunity was enough to protect him from suffering the symptoms of the disease, he could still pass it on to others. The strain of Variola major in his system was so virulent that an epidemic was only narrowly averted. Partly in response to this incident, the Soviet government sent a special medical team to India to help purge the virus from the subcontinent.

KGB agents went with them.

They returned to Russia with a strain of Indian smallpox excellently suited to weapons production.

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In the 1970s, smallpox was considered so important to our biological arsenal that the Soviet military command issued an order to maintain an annual stockpile of twenty tons. The weapons were stored at army facilities in Zagorsk. Annual quotas of smallpox were required as it decayed over time.

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The smallpox virus is so hardy that it can remain infectious for long periods, even in the soiled linen of those who have been infected. Smallpox victims are infectious from the moment of their first symptoms until the healing of the last scar, two to three weeks later, and they can transmit the disease to others with as little as a cough.

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Humans are the virus’s only natural hosts. There is no way, therefore, for the disease to propagate in nature.

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There are no therapeutic measures currently available to treat smallpox once symptoms develop.

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Smallpox kills between 30 and 50 percent of unvaccinated victims, a low mortality rate, but its morbidity rate ranges from 60 to 90 percent. For many people, contracting smallpox amounts to a life sentence. Some victims are permanently blinded. Others will bear scars as long as they live.

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Schoolchildren in the United States, Russia, and elsewhere around the world are not vaccinated against the disease, and international travelers are no longer required to show proof of smallpox immunity.

Today there are twelve million doses of smallpox vaccine on hand in the United States—of which only seven million are fully reliable, according to the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta—a portion of the roughly two hundred million doses available in the world. This sounds like a comfortable amount to meet an emergency, until you consider the damage a smallpox attack would do in a densely populated commuter city like New York.

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During World War II the Western allies explored the possibility of weaponizing several viral diseases, including Venezuelan equine encephalitis and smallpox. American, Canadian, and British scientists found to their frustration that viruses were far more difficult to manipulate than bacteria.

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Aerosols were still in the early stages of development in the 1940s, and most of the approaches considered by the Allies for weaponizing smallpox seem strange today. One method involved grinding an Asian strain of smallpox into a fine powder to dust over letters. By the time the war ended, the Allies had largely given up on weaponizing viruses.

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Fewer than five viral particles of smallpox were sufficient to infect 50 percent of the animals exposed to aerosols in our testing labs. To infect the same percentage of humans with anthrax would require ten thousand to twenty thousand spores. For plague, the comparable figure is fifteen hundred cells. The differences in quantity are too minute to be discernible to the naked eye, but they are significant if you are planning attacks on a large scale. Smallpox requires almost no concentration process.

While we had clung to our egg-and-conveyor-belt method of making smallpox, Western pharmaceutical labs were manufacturing vaccines in special reactors from cultures grown in tissue cells obtained from animals or humans. This technique required expertise.

The word virus, Ken Alibek explains (in Biohazard), comes from the Latin term for poison:

Viruses are invisible under most microscopes and hundreds of thousands of times smaller than a grain of sand. Their existence was unsuspected until Dmitry Ivanovsky, a Russian microbiologist, discovered them in the late nineteenth century while investigating an outbreak of mosaic disease in tobacco plants. Ivanovsky found that the mysterious agent responsible for this disease was able to pass through filters that otherwise blocked bacteria. Over half a century would pass before the first virus was seen and identified under an electron microscope, but Ivanovsky’s discovery launched a new field of research into infectious diseases.

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The immune system works on many levels at once, like an army with scouts and infantrymen, naval and air power, a sophisticated information network, and a carefully delineated command structure. Some cells are responsible for surveillance, others for coordinating information; some focus on local maneuvers while still others direct more general attacks. Immunologists distinguish between specific and nonspecific immunological reactions. Specific or acquired immune responses depend on memory cells, which store information about previous invaders and thus play a significant role in conferring immunity.

Among the most important agents in the immune system are T cells. They act as scouts, circulating through the bloodstream and moving into lymph nodes, on the lookout for foreign substances. As soon as a virus enters the bloodstream and infects its first cell, it will be recognized by T cells, which immediately activate, replicating themselves and sending out signals, calling for the formation of antibodies and attracting them to the site of infection. Antibodies are like ground troops. They are particularly effective at attacking viruses and bacteria that are still coursing through the system, before they have infiltrated target cells.

Within seconds of infection, defensive proteins and inflammatory agents are released, which activate natural killer cells and lead them to the site of infection. Interferon, one of the most powerful antiviral agents, degrades viral RNA, slows down protein synthesis, and inhibits viral reproduction in infected cells.

By the end of the first week or the beginning of the second, the body will in many cases have developed virus-specific antibodies, which sometimes seek to neutralize the virus by binding to its surface and preventing it from penetrating into new cells. But viruses are adept and mutate quickly. Countless are now capable of inhibiting and neutralizing the body’s natural defenses, rendering their resistance ineffective.

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More than one hundred different viruses have been identified as causes of the common cold.

By 1986, Ken Alibek explains (in Biohazard), they had over 900 people at the bioweapons plant, and more were coming every month:

There were one or two accidents every week.

Once Gennady Lepyoshkin, the chief of our biosafety directorate, reported that a technician had been infected with anthrax in a lab that was supposed to be sterile. He had an abrasion on his neck, one of the most dangerous places in the body through which to contract cutaneous anthrax. When the neck swells, it interferes with breathing.

At first we treated him with streptomycin and penicillin, the most effective antibiotics for use against cutaneous anthrax, but a painful swelling erupted on his chest and spread over his body, making it increasingly difficult for him to breathe. Within three days, death seemed inevitable. A gloomy message was being prepared for Moscow when, in a final attempt to save his life, we gave him an abnormally high dose of anthrax antiserum. The shock dose worked: he began to recover.

The technician’s narrow escape drove home the potency of our new weapon. Our powdered and liquid formulations of anthrax were three times as strong as the weapons that had been manufactured at Sverdlovsk. It would take only five kilograms of the Anthrax 836 developed at the Kazakhstan base to infect half the people living in a square kilometer of territory; the Sverdlovsk weapon needed at least fifteen kilograms to achieve the same impact.

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Our factory could turn out two tons of anthrax a day in a process as reliable and efficient as producing tanks, trucks, cars, or Coca-Cola.

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.

Ken Alibek describes (in Biohazard) a time he was called into the lab to handle a problem:

I stripped my clothes off and stuffed them into one of the lockers lining the walls. Then I walked into a second room, where a young nurse sat behind a desk. I had a nodding acquaintance with her outside the lab, having seen her walking her large dog, and was embarrassed at first to appear before her naked. But she always maintained a businesslike air as she wordlessly stuck a thermometer under my armpit and examined every inch of my body, including my teeth and gums. Any sign of bleeding from a cut or bruise, even from a nick while shaving, was grounds for barring further entry.

The buzz of the ventilators grew louder as I passed through the next rooms, picking up the separate items of my anti-plague suit: white socks and long johns, hood and cotton smock, respirator, goggles, boots, and gloves. The entire procedure was reversed on the way out, although the gloves were always the last to come off. Even with long practice, I never managed to complete the process in under fifteen minutes. That night, I was faster than usual.

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The air pressure in the pipeline feeding one of the tularemia rooms had begun to drop precipitously. A technician had been working there an hour or so before, but she had gone home. She may have forgotten to reset the valves.

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I opened the door and took a few steps inside. It was pitch black. I reached back, groping in the darkness for the light switch. When I finally hit the switch and looked down, I found I was standing in a puddle of liquid tularemia.

It was milky brown—the highest possible concentration. The puddle at my feet was only a few centimeters deep, but there was enough tularemia on the floor to infect the entire population of the Soviet Union.

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I was only two feet or so from the doorway, but I was trapped. If I tried to back out I would bring the disease with me into the corridor—and, potentially, into the rest of the zone.

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I poured the solution over my boots. He handed me more bottles as I moved backward, tiny step by tiny step, pouring all the time.

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The change in air pressure must have caused the culture to escape through the filter system.

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I tried to imagine what might have happened if I had lost my footing on the slippery floor.

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When we regrouped in Zone One, I advised Nazil and the others to take the antibiotics we had on hand for emergencies.

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It didn’t occur to me that such a minor mishap would need to be relayed up the chain of command, but the KGB chief in Kirov had called his bosses in Moscow, who called Kalinin early that morning.

By then, the story had become hopelessly mangled.

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I had told Nazil and the others to take antibiotics, but for some inexplicable reason I hadn’t taken any myself.

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By the time I’d left Building 107 that night, I had been completely disinfected. I must have caught the disease in a matter of seconds, between leaving the sanitary passageway and entering the shower. But how? Then it came to me. I must have brushed my face while taking off my mask and hood. A hundred cells, an amount smaller than a speck of dust, would have been enough to infect me through an imperceptible cut or scratch.

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Tularemia can be inhaled or ingested or contracted through bites or scratches. It rarely passes directly from person to person, but it can be carried by fleas, ticks, rats, and other rodents and can enter the bloodstream through minor abrasions. The disease is marked by a sudden onset of fever and chills, often followed by an incapacitating headache. As soon as it enters the body, the bacteria will begin to multiply locally, gradually spreading to lymph nodes and distant organs, including the liver and spleen.

Even after successful antibiotics were developed in the 1940s, tularemia was considered an ideal weapon for the battlefield due to the speed with which it could overwhelm an opponent’s medical resources, leaving hospitals and physicians unable to cope with a flood of patients in need of constant treatment.

If taken immediately, antibiotics can contain the spread of the disease and kill invading bacteria in a matter of days. The later the drugs are administered, the longer a victim will suffer. Particularly acute cases have been known to linger for months.

Tetracycline was thought to be the best antidote for tularemia, but I had no way of knowing how well it would work against the strain we had produced in our lab. In exceptional cases, certain highly virulent strains are capable of overcoming ordinary antibiotic treatment and can be fatal.

I called a friend’s wife, a physician at the local hospital, and told her I needed tetracycline urgently. Under normal circumstances I would have required a prescription, but in a small town it was easy to cut corners.

“How much?” she asked, without registering the least surprise.

Calculating quickly, I asked for three times the customary dose. There were advantages to Soviet secrecy. I would have had a hard time getting that amount of tetracycline in the United States without a good explanation. I told her not to tell anyone.

I wanted a high-impact, crash dose. If it didn’t work, I’d have to check myself into the hospital. Self-treatment had its limitations.

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By the end of the day, my fever had begun to drop. I stayed home the next day, after calling in with a cold. By Wednesday or Thursday, three days after my exposure, I was better, although I continued to take high doses of tetracycline for the next ten days. I was able to return to work the following Monday.

Ken Alibek describes (in Biohazard) the spotless gray three-story structure at Omutninsk that had been designated as the pilot plant for tularemia:

Building 107 was structured according to the box-within-a-box principle, to keep the deadliest organisms out of the surrounding countryside. If you could lift the roof, it would resemble a Russian matryoshka doll.

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The outer shell of Building 107 was Zone One. It housed the offices of administrative and security personnel and laboratories used for noninfectious organisms. Workers dressed in plain white lab coats and white pants milled in the corridors. Daylight poured through the windows, and the walls were plastered with resolutely upbeat Party banners: “Fulfill our Five-Year Plan in four years!” “Long Live the Communist Party of the Soviet Union!” It was possible to spend an entire day in Zone One without being aware of what was happening deeper inside the building.

Zone Two contained “hot” laboratories for work with pathogenic materials, storage vaults, animal cages, and giant sixteen-ton and twenty-ton fermenters, which soared to the upper levels of the building.

Zone Three, nestled inside Zone Two, displayed the fruits of our engineering efforts since 1973: rows of gleaming steel centrifuges and drying and milling machines.

Both inner zones had their own air supply system. Noisy generators pumped air through an overhead latticework of exposed pipes, keeping the atmosphere inside at pressures slightly lower than normal to prevent contaminated air from seeping into Zone One. Hydrogen peroxide was sprayed into the air from nozzles in the ceiling. The distinctive smell of that particular disinfectant will stay with me forever. It wasn’t just its smell that made an impression: for the dozen or so years I worked inside the labs, my black hair was bleached a dirty blond.

In the early days of the Cold War, Ken Alibek explains (in Biohazard), when the USSR appeared to be leading the world in space and nuclear weapons technology, Soviet biology was paralyzed:

We had gone from being one of the world’s powerhouses of immunological and epidemiological research to a backwater of demoralized and discredited scientists. The cause was one man—a Russian agronomist named Trofim Lysenko.

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Lysenko, who once bragged that he never reported the results of an experiment that contradicted his theories, claimed his work proved that environment was more important than heredity in the evolution of plants and animals. Calling genetics a bourgeois discipline that insulted the proletariat, he emerged as a paragon of the “new” Soviet science based on Marxist materialism.

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Soviet biologists knew about the work in the West thanks to smuggled journals and reports, but research conducted in Russian labs was heavily restricted. The influence of Lysenko—who lived until 1976—was too powerful.

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Only one scientist had the clout, and the courage, to speak up. His name was Yury Ovchinnikov, vice president of the Soviet Academy of Sciences and a renowned molecular biologist.

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He decided to resolve the crisis in Russian biology by appealing to the self-interest of the masters of our militarized economy. In 1972, he asked the Ministry of Defense to support a genetics program devoted to developing new agents for biological warfare.

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Ovchinnikov found an influential ally in Leonid Brezhnev. The one-time metallurgical engineer who led the Soviet Union for eighteen years until his death in 1982 regarded the magisterial akademiks of the Soviet scientific establishment with a respect bordering on awe. Ovchinnikov was soon giving private lectures on genetics to Brezhnev and his aides.

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Launched by a secret Brezhnev decree in 1973, the program aimed to modernize existing biological weapons and to develop genetically altered pathogens, resistant to antibiotics and vaccines, which could be turned into powerful weapons for use in intercontinental warfare. The program was called Enzyme.

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The Enzyme project focused on tularemia, plague, anthrax, and glanders—all diseases that had been successfully weaponized by our military scientists but whose effects had been undermined by the development of antibiotics. But there were many other agents under review, including viral agents such as smallpox, Marburg, Ebola, Machupo, Junin, and VEE.

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Over the next decade, dozens of biological warfare installations disguised as centers of pharmaceutical or medical research were built throughout the country. In Leningrad, the Institute of Ultra-Pure Biopreparations was created to develop new techniques and equipment for cultivating pathogenic agents. At Omutninsk, in the pine forests near Kirov, a bacteriological research and weapons production facility was constructed alongside an old munitions plant operated by the Ministry of Defense. An entire “research city” for genetic engineering went up at Obolensk, just south of Moscow, and the Lyubuchany Institute of Immunology was established in Chekhov, also in the Moscow region, to investigate antibiotic-resistant disease strains. For work on viruses, the enormous Vector research and testing compound was built near the Siberian city of Novosibirsk.

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Between 1979 and 1989, the Soviet Union conducted large-scale tests of an aerosol containing Bacillus thuringiensis—a harmless simulant—over the Novosibirsk region, using a plane with civilian markings. Similar experiments were run at a military proving ground near the city of Nukus in the Kara Kalpak Republic, and in the Caucasus. Another harmless agent, Serratia marcescens, was used in several tests conducted by the Institute of Biological Machinery inside the Moscow Metro system during the 1980s. Ballistic missiles containing simulants of biological agents were fired in tests over the Pacific Ocean between 1960 and 1980.

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When our biological warfare program was operating at its peak level, in the late 1980s, more than sixty thousand people were engaged in research, testing, production, and equipment design throughout the country. This included some thirty thousand Biopreparat employees.

Money was never a problem. As late as 1990, when Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev was promising the world major cutbacks in our arsenals, I was authorized to spend the equivalent of $ 200 million, including $ 70 million for new buildings. The total figure spent that year on biological weapons development was close to a billion dollars.

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In April 1975, two months before I graduated from the Tomsk Medical Institute, a polite white-haired man in civilian clothes came from Moscow to the drab industrial town in Siberia where I had spent the previous two years in graduate study.

He wanted to meet several of the students who had specialized in epidemiology and infectious diseases. By then, I was one of them. In the intervening years, I had attended lectures on all forms of weapons of mass destruction and learned methods of protecting troops against nuclear, biological, and chemical attacks. No one ever suggested that we had a biological weapons program of our own. Instead, we were warned that as our enemies had them, it was vital for us to understand how they worked.

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I also assumed he was not telling the entire truth when he spoke of biological defense. A special knowledge comes with growing up in a state like the Soviet Union. You were constantly alert to the probability that what you were being told had little relation to the message that was being conveyed.

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“One more thing,” he called out. “Don’t tell your friends or teachers about this conversation. Not even your parents.”

One of the Soviets’ most successful biological warfare programs, Ken Alibek explains (in Biohazard), was created by the Ministry of Agriculture:

A special division was established to research and manufacture anti-livestock and anti-crop weapons. The division was given the uninspired title of Main Directorate for Scientific and Production Enterprises. The biowarfare program was code-named “Ecology.”

Scientists at the agriculture ministry developed variants of foot-and-mouth disease and rinderpest for use against cows, African swine fever for pigs, and ornithosis and psittacosis to strike down chickens. Like anti-personnel biological weapons, these agents were designed to be sprayed from tanks attached to Ilyushin bombers and flown low over a target area along a straight line for hundreds of miles.

This “line source” method of dissemination could cover large stretches of farmland. Even if only a few animals were successfully infected, the contagious nature of the organisms ensured that the disease would wipe out agricultural activity over a wide area in a matter of months.

Many of the ministry’s facilities were installed in the centers of towns and cities, to keep their military connection camouflaged. This suggests how little those who ruled our lives worried about our health.

Across the street from the apartment block where I grew up in Alma-Ata (now Almaty), the former capital of the Soviet Socialist Republic of Kazakhstan, a large, rusting factory served as a makeshift playground for children in the neighborhood. It was a fantastic world of hulking machinery and cavernous tunnels, made all the more alluring by the large Keep Out signs posted conspicuously on the property. We would crawl through the fence on afternoons after school and, shifting through piles of metal, would occasionally stumble on odd-smelling canisters, painted in army green. Luckily, we never managed to open them.

Many years later, going through some old reports, I discovered that the factory was used by the Ministry of Agriculture until the early 1960s to make anti-crop and anti-livestock agents. It was called Biokombinat.

The Soviet Union’s approach to biological warfare took a new turn in September 1945, Ken Alibek explains (in Biohazard), when Soviet troops in Manchuria overran a Japanese military facility known as Water Purification Unit 731:

The unit, commanded by Lieutenant General Shiro Ishii, experimented with anthrax, dysentery, cholera, and plague on U.S., British, and Commonwealth POWs. During the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, porcelain canisters of fleas infected with plague and other primitive biological weapons were used in air raids that killed thousands of rural Chinese.

The captured Japanese documents were sent to Moscow, where they made absorbing reading. They included blueprints for biological warfare assembly plants, far larger and more complex than our own. Japan’s program had been organized like a small industry, with a central production facility fed by continuous research and development.

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In 1946, a year after the war ended, a new army biological research complex was established at Sverdlovsk.

Biological warfare was the furthest thing from his mind, Ken Alibek explains (in Biohazard), when he entered the military faculty of the Tomsk Medical Institute in 1973 to begin graduate studies as a cadet intern:

I was planning to become a military psychiatrist, until a professor gave me an assignment that changed my relationship to medicine. He asked me to analyze a mysterious outbreak of tularemia on the German-Soviet front shortly before the Battle of Stalingrad in 1942.

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The first victims of tularemia were German panzer troops, who fell ill in such large numbers during the late summer of 1942 that the Nazi campaign in southern Russia ground to a temporary halt. Thousands of Russian soldiers and civilians living in the Volga region came down with tularemia within a week of the initial German outbreak. The Soviet high command rushed ten mobile military hospitals into the area, a sign of the extraordinary rise in the number of cases.

Most of the journals reported this as a naturally occurring epidemic, but there had never been such a widespread outbreak in Russia before. One epidemiological study provided a telling statistic: in 1941, ten thousand cases of tularemia had been reported in the Soviet Union. In the year of the Stalingrad outbreak, the number of cases soared to more than one hundred thousand. In 1943, the incidence of disease returned to ten thousand.

It seemed strange that so many men had first fallen sick on one side only. The opposing armies were so close together that a simultaneous outbreak was all but inevitable. Only exposure to a sudden and concentrated quantity of tularemia could explain the onslaught of infections in the German troops alone. Seventy percent of those infected came down with a pneumonic form of the disease, which could only have been caused by purposeful dissemination.

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“It suggests that this epidemic was caused intentionally.”

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He pointed to the paper I had left on his desk.

“I don’t want to see this until you’ve given it some thought. And never … never mention to anyone else what you just told me. Believe me, you’ll be doing yourself a favor.”

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Years later, an elderly lieutenant colonel who worked in the secret bacteriological weapons facility in the city of Kirov during the war told me that a tularemia weapon was developed in Kirov in 1941, the year before the Battle of Stalingrad. He left me with no doubt that the weapon had been used.

The lesson of Stalingrad would not be forgotten by our biological warfare strategists. In the postwar years, the Soviet high command shifted its attention from battlefield deployment to “deep targets” far behind enemy lines, where there was no danger of infecting one’s own troops.

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The moral argument for using any available weapon against an enemy threatening us with certain annihilation seemed to me irrefutable. I came away from that assignment fascinated by the notion that disease could be used as an instrument of war. I began to read everything I could find about epidemiology and the biological sciences.

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:

“And then suddenly everything’d go black!”

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.

[…]

Open-air testing at Rebirth Island stopped in 1992. Records of what happened there no longer exist.