[Congressional Record Volume 144, Number 26 (Thursday, March 12, 1998)]
[Senate]
[Pages S1876-S1882]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
RUSSIAN BW PROGRAM
Mr. KYL. Mr President, I call to the attention of my colleagues an
article appearing in the March 9 edition of The New Yorker magazine
that offers a chilling account of Russia's offensive biological weapons
program. This article is based on an extensive interview with Mr. Ken
Alibek, a Russian defector who was once second in command of the
Russian offensive biological weapons program. Alibek's description of
the Russian BW program is generally considered authoritative by a wide
range of U.S. experts.
The article provides a number of startling details about the Russian
offensive BW program, also known as Biopreparat. Most startling of all
is just how little we in the United States knew about this program.
Despite the fact that Biopreparat was established in 1973--the year
after the Soviet
[[Page S1877]]
Union signed the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention and pledged to
forego an offensive BW program--and despite intelligence to the
contrary, some in the U.S. scientific and arms control communities
continued to maintain that Russia was not violating the treaty up to
the moment that President Yeltsin admitted otherwise in 1992.
Mr. President, what the Russians had accomplished by 1991 is
frightening. According to Alibek, the Soviet Union had warheads for
carrying biological weapons on intercontinental missiles that were
aimed at the United States. These warheads could carry smallpox, plague
and anthrax. The Soviets had apparently weaponized the Marburg virus--a
hemorrhagic virus as gruesome as the Ebola virus--and were ready to
begin large scale manufacture of the weapon as the Soviet Union was
crumbling apart. Alibek is concerned that scientists may have left
Russia with samples of this virus and other deadly bacteria. The
possibility that Russian scientists, know-how and biological materials
are available to rogue states and terrorists underscores the critical
importance of improving our domestic preparedness to respond to BW
attacks against the United States.
We do not know the extent of the Russian biological weapons program
today. There is evidence to suggest that a clandestine program
continues, hidden away in military facilities run by the Ministry of
Defense, which are off-limits to the West. The trilateral process,
which was set up by the United States, United Kingdom, and Russia in
1992 and calls for inspections of Russian biological-related
facilities, has broken down. It has been years since an inspection took
place. The Russians have objected to visits to military facilities. And
where inspections occurred, the inspectors faced the same obstacles as
U.N. inspectors face in Iraq.
Mr. President, The New Yorker article should be required reading for
all Senators. I ask unanimous consent that this article be printed in
the Record. I understand from the Government Printing Office that it
will cost approximately $2504 to include this article in the Record.
There being no objection, the article was ordered to be printed in
the Record, as follows:
[From the New Yorker, Mar. 9, 1998]
Annals of Warfare--The Bioweaponeers
In the last few years, Russian scientists have invented the world's
deadliest plagues. Have we learned about this too late to stop it?
(By Richard Preston)
Ken Alibek is a quiet man, forty-seven years old, with
youthful looks and an attractive, open face. He lives in a
rented condominium in Arlington, Virginia, a five-minute walk
from his office at a private consulting firm. Alibek has dark
hair and Asian features, and a dimpled scar on his nose,
which he got in an accident that was ``not heroic,'' he says,
involving a machine in a biowarfare plant.
Before he arrived in the United States, in 1992, Ken Alibek
was Dr. Kanatjan Alibekov, the first deputy chief of research
and production for the Soviet biological-weapons program. He
was the top scientist in the program, a sprawling,
clandestine enterprise known as Biopreparat, or The System,
by the scientists who worked in it. Biopreparat research-and-
production facilities were flung all across the Soviet Union.
As Dr. Alibekov, Ken Alibek had thirty-two thousand
scientists and staff people working under him.
Alibek has a Doctor of Sciences degree in anthrax. It is a
kind of super-degree, which he received in 1988, at the age
of thirty-seven, for directing the research team that
developed the Soviet Union's most powerful weapons-grade
anthrax. He did this research as head of the Stepnagorsk
bioweapons facility, in what is now Kazakhstan, which was
once the largest biowarfare production facility in the world.
The Alibekov anthrax became fully operational in 1989. It is
an amber-gray powder, finer than bath talc, with smooth,
creamy particles that tend to fly apart and vanish in the
air, becoming invisible and drifting for miles. The Alibekov
anthrax is four times more efficient than the standard
product.
Ken Alibek is part of a diaspora of biologists who came out
of Russia following the breakup of the Soviet Union.
Government funding for research decreased dramatically, and
scientists who were working in the biowarfare program found
themselves without jobs. Some of them went looking abroad. A
few have come to the United States or Great Britain, but most
went elsewhere. ``No one knows where they are,'' Alibek says.
One can guess that they've ended up in Iraq, Syria, Libya,
China, Iran, perhaps Israel, perhaps India--but no one really
knows, probably not even the Russian government. No doubt
some of these biologists have carried the Alibekov formula in
their heads, if not master seed strains of the anthrax and
samples of the finished product in containers. The Alibekov
anthrax may be one of the more common bioweapons in the world
today. It seems plausible that Iraqi biologists, for
instance, know the Alibekov formula by now.
One day, Ken Alibek and I were sitting in a conference room
near his office talking about the anthrax he and his research
team had developed. ``It's very difficult to say if I felt a
sense of excitement over this. It's very difficult to say
what I felt like,'' he said. ``It wouldn't be true to say
that I thought I was doing something wrong. I thought I had
done something very important. The anthrax was one of my
scientific results--my personal result.''
I asked him if he'd tell me the formula for his anthrax.
``I can't say this,'' he answered.
``I won't publish it. I'm just curious,'' I said.
``Look, you must understand, this is unbelievably serious.
You can't publish this formula,'' he said. When I assured him
I wouldn't, he told me the formula for the Alibekov anthrax.
He uttered just one sentence. The Alibekov anthrax is simple,
and the formula is somewhat surprising, not quite what you'd
expect. Two unrelated materials are mixed with pure powdered
anthrax spores. It took a lot of research and testing to get
the trick right, and Alibek must have driven his research
group hard and skillfully to arrive at it. ``There are many
countries that would like to know how to do this,'' he said.
Until last week, when Ken Alibek was interviewed on
``PrimeTime Live,'' he was known in this country only to a
few government officials and intelligence experts and
defense-industry figures. What he told the C.I.A. and other
people with national-security clearances was usually
classified. Sometimes the information was so secret that even
he couldn't look at his reports once they were issued. ``The
first report I wrote, I only saw it once from across a room.
It was sitting on a table. They wouldn't let me go any closer
to it,'' Alibek says, with a tiny smile.
What Alibek describes is shocking, even to those who
thought they had a pretty good idea of what bioweapons are
out there and who has them. But it is particularly timely now
that the public's attention has suddenly focussed on the
possibility of biological terrorism, which gained a peculiar
intensity in late February, when Larry Wayne Harris and
William Leavitt, Jr., were arrested by the F.B.I. outside Las
Vegas with what was thought to be weapons-grade anthrax in
the trunk of a car. The repeated news reports--which turned
out to be a false alarm--that they were planning a terrorist
attack on the New York City subway system clarified what had
seemed to be a vague threat hidden in Iraq. Bioterror had
come home.
I first heard about Ken Alibek in 1995, although at that
time none of my contacts would tell me his name. He was
referred to only as No. 2. (Biodefector No. 1 had come out in
1989.) Last fall, when I finally figured out that No. 2 was
Alibekov, I called up a source who has connections to British
intelligence and told him I thought I knew who No. 2 was. He
cut me off. ``Don't say a name,'' he said. ``I can't confirm
anything. Have you forgotten that we are talking on a open
telephone line?'' That source went nowhere, but then I had an
idea. For several years, I have known a man named William C.
Patrick III, who in certain important respects is the leading
American expert on biological weapons. Before 1969, when
President Richard Nixon shut down the American biowarfare
program, Bill Patrick was the chief of product development
for the United States Army's biological-warfare laboratories
at Fort Detrick, Maryland. The ``products'' that Patrick and
his research group developed were powdered spores and viruses
that were loaded into bombs and sophisticated delivery
systems. Patrick was arguably the top bioweaponeer in the
United States. He and several hundred other scientists and
research-staff members lost their jobs when the biowarfare
facilities at Fort Detrick were closed down. (Today, to the
best of my knowledge, the scientists at the United States
Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, or
USAMRIID, at Fort Detrick don't make offensive bioweapons.
They develop vaccines and treatments to defend against them.
As far as I can tell, the United States has no bioweapons,
and one piece of evidence for this is that government
officials today are remarkably ignorant of them.)
Bill Patrick, who is now seventy-one years old, is one of
only two or three scientists still alive and active in the
United States who have a hands-on technical understanding of
bioweapons. As he explained to me, ``There's a hell of a
disconnect between us fossils who know about biological
weapons and the younger generation.'' In 1991, on the eve of
the Gulf War, he was summoned to the Pentagon to take part in
a discussion of anthrax. Patrick sat in silence while a group
of intelligence analysts, young men and women dressed in
suits, discussed anthrax in knowledgeable-sounding voices.
``I reached the conclusion that these people didn't know what
the hell they were talking about,'' Patrick recalls. He said,
``Have any of you fellows actually seen anthrax?'' and he
reached into his pocket and pulled out a small jar of amber-
brown powder, and hucked it across the table. It rattled and
bounced toward the analysts. They jerked away, some leaping
to their feet. The jar contained anthrax simulant, a
biopowder that is essentially
[[Page S1878]]
identical to anthrax except that it doesn't kill. It is used
for experiments in which properties other than infectivity
are being tested. ``I got that through security, by the
way,'' Patrick observed.
Later, Bill Patrick was the oldest United Nations weapons
inspector in Iraq. The Iraqis knew exactly who he was--the
former top scientist in the former American bioweapons
program. Iraqi intelligence people started calling his hotel
room in Baghdad at night, hissing, ``You son of bitch,
Patrick,'' and then hanging up. ``It was kind of an honor,
but it kept me awake,'' he says.
Today, Bill Patrick is a consultant to many government
agencies--the C.I.A., the F.B.I., the Defense Intelligence
Agency, the City of New York--on the use of biological
weapons in a terrorist attack. Jerome Hauer, who is the head
of Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's Office of Emergency Management--
the group that would handle a bioterror event in New York,
should one ever happen--said to me once, ``Bill Patrick is
one of the only guys who can tell us about some of these
biological agents. We all wonder what we're going to do when
he decides to light up a cigar and go sailing.'' Patrick is
able to tell emergency planners what will happen if a
biological weapon is released in an American city--how many
people will die, where they'll die, what the deaths will look
like. His reports are classified.
Bill Patrick and Ken Alibek were counterparts. They had
been two of the top scientists in what had been the best
biowarfare programs on the planet. I speculated that Patrick
might know Alibek.
``Do I know Ken?'' Patrick boomed over the telephone.
``We're close friends! My wife and I had Ken over for
Christmas this year with our family, because we think he's
kind of lonely.''
Then I thought I understood: Patrick must have participated
in the long government discussions with Alibek--the
debriefing--that would have taken place after his arrival in
the United States. No one else in the U.S. government, not a
single soul, would have understood so clearly what Alibek was
talking about. The two scientists had become friends during
the process.
I drove down to Bill Patrick's house in Maryland, on a
misty day in winter, when leafless white-oak trees and
poplars lay in a haze across the slopes of Catoctin Mountain.
The clouds pulled apart and the sun appeared, gleaming
through cirrus like a nickel. Patrick's house is a modern
version of a Swiss chalet, with a view of Fort Detrick and
rolling countryside.
``Come in, young man,'' Patrick said genially. A small dog
was yapping around his feet. Patrick has a gentlemanly
manner, a rather blocky face, with hair combed over a bald
head, and penetrating greenish eyes. He glanced at the sky
and seemed to sniff the air before ushering me into the
house. He is exquisitely sensitive to weather.
Alibek arrived a short while later, driving a silver BMW.
After lunch, we settled down around the kitchen table.
Patrick brought out a bottle of Glenmorangie Scotch whiskey,
and we poured ourselves a round. It seemed a very Russian
thing to do. The whiskey was smoky and golden, and it moved
the talk forward.
``You know, I'm disappointed the agency didn't do better by
you, Ken,'' Patrick remarked. He turned to me. ``They let him
sign up for all these credit cards.''
Alibek smiled wryly. ``This was a problem.'' The C.I.A. had
introduced him to Visa. ``I could buy things with the cards,
but it didn't seem like money. Then I found out you have to
pay for it later.''
Alibek speaks English with a mild Russian accent that makes
his serious manner seem almost gloomy. He often has a
cigarette smoldering between is fingertips, but he works out
at a health club, and he has broad, firm shoulders. His brown
eyes seem sombre, and he wears black wire-rimmed eyeglasses.
He favors linen shirts with band collars, and soft wool-pique
jackets in dark, muted colors. He has a calm expression, with
a downward-glancing gaze, and he looks vaguely Chinese.
Ethnically, he is a Kazakh. He was born and raised in
Kazakhstan. In Russia, he was twenty-five pounds heavier,
really quite stout, but he says that he is a different person
now, even physically.
I asked Alibek how he feels about living here. ``I'm happy
I'm not doing the work,'' he said. He paused. ``I'm not one
hundred per cent happy. I know how people feel about me in
Russia. Some of my scientific colleagues feel I am a
betrayer.'' Alibek keeps his emotions well hidden, perhaps
even from himself. He does not laugh easily. When he does
laugh, he is clearly enjoying himself, but his body is
slightly rigid. He quit Biopreparat in 1991, left Russia with
his family, and abruptly ended up in the United States.
According to Alibek, some of his former colleagues at
Biopreparat--which was privatized--sent word through
intermediaries that ``if you ever come to Russia you can
expect some problems.''
``I've got no desire to go to Russia,'' Alibek said,
shrugging. He recently separated from his wife, although they
enjoy a cordial relationship. She lives near him with their
two boys, whom he sees almost every day. His oldest child, a
daughter, is studying architecture at an Ivy League
university. At times, Alibek has suffered from loneliness and
a sense of dislocation, and he has had some concerns about
how he will support his wife and children in the United
States. The Alibeks had a privileged life in Russia, with
drivers to take them everywhere and all the money they could
use. The United States Government paid him consulting fees
while he was briefing scientists and officials, but now he is
on his own.
Ken Alibek was raised in Alma-Ata, then the capital of
Kazakhstan. Alma-Ata is in central Asia, not far from the
Chinese border, on the medieval silk route. His first
language was Kazakh, and he learned Russian at school. He got
a medical degree at the military medical institute at Tomsk.
His special interest was infectious-disease epidemiology. At
some point while he was still in medical school, he was
chosen to work for Biopreparat. Since it was a secret system,
you didn't really apply; you were approached and brought in.
He rose fast. In 1982, at the age of thirty-one, he became
the acting director of the Omutninsk bioweapons-production
plant, a major facility in the Kirov region of Russia.
Eventually, he ended up working in Biopreparat's
headquarters, a large building in Moscow--the same building
where Biopreparat is situated today.
In early April of 1988, Ken Alibek received a telephone
call in his office in Moscow. It came from his friend and
colleague Lev Sandakhchiev, the director of a Biopreparat
facility called Vector, a huge, isolated virology-research
campus in the larch forests outside Novosibirsk, a city in
western Siberia. In the late nineteen-eighties, Vector was
devoted largely to the development and production of virus
weapons (Dr. Sandakhchiev denies this.) Dr. Sandakhchiev
reported that there had been an accident. He was reluctant to
discuss it on the telephone.
``Send me the details in a cryptogram,'' Alibek said. Once
a day for the next fourteen days, Alibek received a new
cryptogram about the victim of the accident, Dr. Nikolai
Ustinov.
Dr. Ustinov was forty-four years old. Alibek recalls him as
a fair-skinned man with light-brown hair, ethnically a
Russian. He had a wife and children. Alibek thought of him as
a good guy and a talented scientist, easy to talk with,
receptive to new ideas. Ustinov had been doing basic military
research on the Marburg virus, studying its potential as a
weapon. The long-term goal was to see if it could be loaded
into special biological warheads on the MIRV missiles that
were aimed at the United States. (A MIRV has multiple
warheads, which are directed at different targets.) At the
time, the Soviet biological missile warheads were designed to
be loaded with strategic/operational smallpox virus, Black
Death, and anthrax. The Marburg virus had potential for
weaponization, too. Marburg is a close cousin to the Ebola
virus, and is extremely lethal. Dr. Ustinov had been wearing
a spacesuit in a Level 4 hot lab, injecting guinea pigs with
Marburg virus. He pricked himself in the finger with a
needle, and it penetrated two layers of rubber globes.
Nikolai Ustinov exited through an air lock and a chemical
decon shower to Level 3, and used an emergency telephone to
call his supervisor. The supervisor decided to put Ustinov
into a biocontainment hospital, a twenty-bed unit with steel
air-lock doors, like the doors of a submarine, where nurses
and doctors wearing spacesuits could monitor him. He was not
allowed to speak with his wife and children. Ustinov did not
seem to be afraid of dying, but, separated from his family,
he became deeply depressed.
On about the fourth day, Ustinov developed a headache, and
his eyes turned red. Tiny hemorrhages were occurring in them.
He requested a laboratory notebook, and he began writing a
diary in it, every day. He was a scientist, and he was
determined to explain how he was dying. What does it feel
like to die of Marburg virus? What are the psychological
effects? For a while, he maintained a small hope that he
wouldn't die, but when his skin developed spontaneous bruises
he understood what the future held. Dr. Sandakhchiev's
cryptograms to Alibek were dry and factual, and didn't
include the human details. Alibek would later learn that
perhaps twice Ustinov had broken down and wept.
Alibek was frantic to get help to Ustinov. He begged the
Ministry of Defense for a special immune serum, but
bureaucratic delays prevented its arrival in Siberia until it
was too late. When Ustinov began to vomit blood and pass
bloody black diarrhea, the doctor gave him transfusions, but
as they put the blood into him it came out of his mouth and
rectum. Ustinov was in prostration. They debated replacing
all the blood in his body with fresh new blood--a so-called
whole-body transfusion. They were afraid that that might
trigger a total flooding hemorrhage, which would kill him, so
they didn't do it.
Alibek did not know exactly which strain of Marburg had
infected his colleague. It had been obtained by Soviet
intelligence somewhere, but the scientists were never told
where strains came from. The Marburg virus seems to live in
an unknown animal host in East Africa. It has been associated
with Kitum Cave, near Mt. Elgon, so the Soviet strain could
have been obtained around there, but Alibek suspected that it
came from Germany. In 1967, the virus had broken out at a
vaccine factory in Marburg, a small city in central Germany,
and had killed a number of people who were working with
monkeys that were being used to produce vaccine. One of the
survivors was a man named Popp, and Alibek thought that
Ustinov was probably dying of the strain that had come from
him.
I have seen a photograph of a Marburg monkey worker taken
shortly before his death, in late summer, 1967. He is a stout
[[Page S1879]]
man, lying on a hospital bed without a shirt. His mouth is
slack, his teeth are covered with blood. He is hemorrhaging
from the mouth and nose. The blood has run down his neck and
pooled in the hollow of his throat. It looks spidery, because
it's unable to clot. He also seems to be leaking blood from
his nipples.
The final pages of Dr. Nikolai Ustinov's scientific journal
are smeared with unclotted blood. His skin developed starlike
hemorrhages in the underlayer. Incredibly--the Vector
scientists had never seen this--he sweated blood directly
from the pores of his skin, and left bloody fingerprints on
the pages of his diary. He wept again before he died.
Ken Alibek is nearly hypnotic when he speaks of these
things in his flat voice. We sat around the kitchen table as
if we were old friends sharing a story. A gray light shone
through the kitchen window, and I saw the red flash of a
cardinal near the Patricks' bird feeder, almost a flicker of
blood. The dog noticed a squirrel, and started barking. ``Go
get him, Billy,'' Patrick said, rising to let the dog out.
Dr. Ustinov died on April 30, 1988. An autopsy was
performed in the spacesuit morgue of the biocontainment
hospital. If this was indeed the Popp strain of Marburg
virus--and who could say?--it was incredibly lethal. It
produced effects in the human body that were stunning,
terrifying. Alibek says that a pathology team removed
Ustinov's liver and his spleen. They sucked a quantity of his
destroyed blood out of a leg vein using large syringes.
They froze the blood and the body parts. They kept the
Ustinov strain alive and continually replicating in the
laboratories at Vector. They named the strain Variant U,
after Ustinov, and they learned how to mass-produce it in
simple bioreactors, flasks used for growing viruses. They
dried Variant U, and processed it into an inhalable dust. The
particles of Variant U were coated to protect them in the air
so that they would drift for many miles.
In late 1990, Biopreparat researchers tested airborne
Variant U on monkeys and other small animals in special
explosion-test chambers at the Stepnagorsk plant. Marburg
Variant U proved to be extremely potent in airborne form.
They found that just one to five microscopic particles of
Variant U lodged in the lungs of a monkey were almost
guaranteed to make the animal crash, bleed, and die. With
normal weapons-grade anthrax, in comparison, it takes about
eight thousand spores lodged in the lungs to pretty much
guarantee infection and death.
Alibek said that by the fall of 1991, just before Boris
Yeltsin came to power, Marburg Variant U was on the verge of
becoming a strategic/operational biological weapon, ready to
be manufactured in large quantities and loaded into warheads
on MIRVs. These warheads are sinister things. Ten separate
cone-shaped warheads, each targeted on a different location,
sit atop a missile. Special cooling systems inside each
warhead keep the virus alive during the heat of reentry
through the earth's atmosphere. ``If we can land a cosmonaut
to earth alive, we can do the same with a virus,'' Alibek
explained. ``We use parachutes.'' The biowarheads are
parachuted over a city, and at a certain altitude they break
apart. Out of each warhead bursts a spray of more than a
hundred oval bomblets the size of small cantaloupes. The
cantaloupes fly out a distance and then split in overlapping
patterns, releasing a haze of bioparticles that quickly
becomes invisible.
Variant U never became part of the Soviets' strategic
arsenal, which was stocked with Black Death, Alibekov
anthrax, and powdered smallpox. (Never less than twenty tons
of weapons-grade dry smallpox was stockpiled in bunkers.) But
it seems quite possible that when the Russian biowarfare
facilities fell on hard times and biologists began leaving
Russia to work in other countries, some of them carried
freeze-dried Variant U with them, ready for further
experimentation. Variant U started, perhaps, with a monkey
worker named Popp, but its end in the human species is yet to
be seen.
A generation ago, biological weapons were called germ-
warfare weapons. Biological weapons are very different from
chemical weapons. A chemical weapon is a poison that kills
upon contact with the skin. Bioweapons are microorganisms,
bacteria or viruses, that invade the body, multiply inside
it, and destroy it. Bioweapons can be used as strategic
weapons. That is, they are incredibly powerful and dangerous.
They can kill huge numbers of people if they are used
properly, and their effects are not limited to one place or a
small target. Chemical weapons, on the other hand, can be
used only tactically. It is virtually impossible to put
enough of a chemical in the air in a high enough
concentration to wipe out a large number of people over a
large territory. And chemicals aren't alive and can't spread
through an infectious process.
There are two basic types of biological weapons, those that
are contagious and those that are not. Anthrax is not
contagious: people don't spread it among themselves; you
can't catch anthrax from someone who is dying of it. Smallpox
is contagious. It spreads rapidly, magnifying itself, causing
mortality and chaos on a large scale.
Like any weapon, a biological weapon can be released
accidentally, but when a biological accident happens, the
consequences can be particularly insidious. I talked about
this with Ken Alibek that day in Bill Patrick's kitchen,
while we drank whiskey in the soft light of a winter
afternoon. Alibek spoke about how bioweapons have a
disturbing tendency to invade nonhuman populations of living
creatures--thus finding a new niche in the ecosystems of the
earth, apart from the human species. When he was the acting
director of the biowarfare facility at Omutninsk, his safety
officers discovered that wild rodents living in the woods
outside the factory had become chronically infected with the
Schu-4 military strain of tularemia--a bacterium that causes
a type of pneumonia--which was being made in the plant. It
was a hot, lethal strain that came from the United States: an
American biological weapon that the Soviets had managed to
obtain during the nineteen-fifties. Now, unexpectedly, the
wild rodents were spreading Schu-4 among themselves in the
forests around Omutninsk. The rodents were not the natural
host of tularemia, but it had apparently established itself
in them as new hosts. People catch tularemia easily from
rodents, and it can be fatal. Alibek mounted an investigation
and found that a pipe running through a basement area had a
small leak and was dripping a suspension of tularemia cells
into the ground. The rodents may have come in contact with
the contaminated soil in that one spot.
The staff tried to sterilize the frost of rodents near the
plant. That didn't work, because rodents are impossible to
eradicate. ``We could not get rid of the rodents. We tried
everything,'' Alibek said. ``Nobody knows today, but we can
assume that the tularemia is still there in the rodents.''
Nobody knows if anyone has died of the American-Russian
tularemia around the Kirov region.
``Could it have spread across Russia in rodents?'' I asked.
``This I don't know.''
Biopreparat, or The System, was set up in 1973, just a year
after the Soviet Union signed the Biological and Toxin
Weapons Convention, an agreement banning the development,
use, and stockpiling of biological weapons. The United
States, which had ended its offensive-bioweapons program in
1969, also signed the treaty, as did Great Britain. (Some
hundred and forty nations have signed the convention by now.)
The Soviets continued to believe, however, that the United
States had not ended its bioweapons program but simply hidden
it away, turning it into a ``black''weapons program. ``The
notion that the Americans had given up their biological
weapons was thought of as the great American lie,'' a British
intelligence officer recalls. ``In fact, most of the
Biopreparat scientists had never even heard of the Biological
Weapons Convention.''
Biopreparat consisted of some forty research-and-production
facilities. About a dozen of them were enormous. Perhaps half
of the employees developed weapons and the other half made
medicines. Biopreparat worked both sides of the street: it
cured diseases and invented new ones. An island in the Aral
Sea, curiously named Rebirth Island, was used for open-air
weapons testing. Large numbers of animals, and perhaps some
humans, died there. Biopreparat was modelled to some extent
on the Manhattan Project, the program that led to the
first atomic bomb. Military people administered the
program and scientists did the research-and-development
work.
Somehow, Biopreparat's weapons program remained invisible
to the American scientific community. There was a commonly
held belief among many American scientists, supported by the
strong, even passionate views of a handful of experts in
biological weapons, that the Soviet Union was not violating
the treaty. This view persisted, despite reports to the
contrary from intelligence agencies, which were often viewed
as being driven by right-wing ideology.
One of the side effects of the closing of the American
bioweapons program was that the United States lost its
technical understanding of biological weapons. There has long
been a general feeling among American scientists--it's hard
to say just how widespread it is, but it is definitely
there--that biological weapons don't work. They are said to
be uncontrollable, liable to infect their users, or
unworkable in any practical sense. A generation ago, leading
physicists in this country understood nuclear weapons because
they had built them, and they had observed their effects in
field tests and in war. The current generation of American
molecular biologists has been spared the agony of having
created weapons of mass destruction, but, since these
biologists haven't built them, or tested them, they don't
know much about their real performance characteristics.
Sitting in Bill Patrick's kitchen, I said to Alibek,
``There seems to be a common belief among American scientists
that biological weapons aren't effective as weapons. You see
these views quoted occasionally in newspapers and
magazines.''
Alibek looked disturbed, then annoyed. ``You test them to
find out. You learn how to make them work,'' he said to me.
``I had a meeting yesterday at a defense agency. They knew
absolutely nothing about biological weapons. They want to
develop protection against them, but all their expertise is
in nuclear weapons. I can say I don't believe that nuclear
weapons work. Nuclear weapons destroy everthing. Biological
weapons are more . . . beneficial. They don't destroy
buildings, they only destroy vital activity.''
``Vital activity?''
``People,'' he said.
The first defector to emerge from Biopreparat was Vladimir
Pasechnik, a microbiologist, who arrived in Great Britain
[[Page S1880]]
in 1989, just as the Soviet Union was beginning to crumble.
(He was No. 1 to Alibek's No. 2.) Pasechnik frightened
British intelligence, and later the C.I.A., when he told them
that his work as director of the Institute of Ultra-pure
Biopreparations, in Leningrad, had involved offensive-
biowarfare research into Yersinia pestis, a pestilential
microbe that causes plague, or Black Death--an airborne
contagious bacterial organism that wiped out a third of the
population of Europe around the year 1348. Natural plague is
curable with antibiotics. After listening to Dr. Pasechnik,
the British concluded that the Soviet Union had developed a
genetically engineered strain of plague that was resistant to
antibiotics. Because the Black Death can travel through the
air in a cough from person to person, a strain of multi-drug-
resistant Black Death might be able to amplify itself through
a human population in ever-widening chains of infection,
culminating in a biological crown fire in the human species.
No nuclear weapon could do that. What was the Soviet Union
doing developing strategic contagious biological weapons? ``I
couldn't sleep at night, thinking about what we were doing,''
Pasechnik told his British handlers. Even though Western
intelligence agencies had known that the Russians had a
bioweapons program, they had not known what was being
developed, and that the United States was a so-called deep
target, far enough away so that the Soviet Union wouldn't be
contaminated.
President George Bush and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher
were briefed on Pasechnik's revelations, and they put direct
personal pressure on Mikhail Gorbachev to open up the
biowarfare facilities in the U.S.S.R. to a team of outside
inspectors. Eventually, he agreed, and a joint British-
American weapons-inspection team toured four of the main
Biopreparat facilities in January, 1991. The inspectors
visited Vector (the virology complex outside Novosibirsk,
where Ustinov died) and a giant, high-security facility south
of Moscow called the State Research Center for Applied
Microbiology at Obolensk, where they found fermenter tanks--
forty of them, each two stories tall. They were maintained at
Biosafety Level 4, inside huge ring-shaped biocontainment
zones, in a building called Corpus One. The facility was
dedicated to research on a variety of bacterial microbes,
especially Yersinia pestis. The Level 4 production tanks were
obviously intended for making enormous quantities of
something deadly, but when the inspectors arrived the tanks
were sparkling clean and sterile.
As the British and American weapons inspectors toured the
Biopreparat facilities, they ran into the same problems that
recently faced the United Nations Special Commission
inspectors in Iraq. They were met with denials, evasions, and
large rooms that had been stripped of equipment and cleaned
up. A British inspector said to me, ``This was clearly the
most successful biological-weapons program on earth. These
people just sat there and lied to us, and lied, and lied.''
The deal was that after the Americans and the British had
peeked at Biopreparat a team of Soviet inspectors was to
visit the United States. In December, 1991, Ken Alibek and a
number of leading Biopreparat scientists and military people
visited USAMRIID, at Fort Detrick, the Army's Dugway Proving
Ground, in Utah, and the Army's old bioweapons-production
facility in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, which had been abandoned
and partly dismantled in 1969. The Russians stumbled around
the weeds in Pine Bluff and saw rusting railroad tracks,
buildings with their roofs falling in, and nothing that
worked. Alibek was pretty well convinced by the time he got
home that the United States did not have a bioweapons
program. But when the final report was issued by the
inspectors to the government of Boris Yeltsin it stated that
they had found plenty of evidence for a program. Alibek
refused to participate in the writing of that report, and he
decided to quit Biopreparat.
``It was a confused situation,'' he said. ``It was at the
exact time when the Soviet Union collapsed. I told all these
people I didn't agree with their politics.'' For a few
months, he hung on in Moscow, supporting his family by
trading--``It was easy to make money in those days, you could
trade anything''--but he found that his telephone was tapped,
and that the K.G.B. had set up a so-called gray unit to watch
him, a surveillance team stationed near his apartment. He
decided to move his family to Alma-Ata, in Kazakhstan. What
happened next Alibek refuses to talk about. He will not tell
me how he got his family to the United States. Once here, he
dropped completely out of sight. It is pretty obvious that he
was holed up with American intelligence people, discussing
his scientific and technical knowledge with them. Several
years went by and Dr. Alibekov morphed into Ken Alibek.
The most powerful bioweapons are dry powders formed of tiny
particles that are designed to lodge in the human lung. The
particles are amber or pink. They have a strong tendency to
fly apart from one another, so that if you throw them in the
air they disperse like a crowd leaving Yankee Stadium. As
they disperse, they become invisible to the human eye,
normally within five seconds after the release. You can't see
a bioweapon, you can't smell it, you can't taste it, and you
don't know it was there until days later, when you start to
cough and bleed, and by that time you may be spreading it
around. Bill Patrick holds five patents on special processes
for making biodusts that will disperse rapidly in the air and
form an invisible sea of particles. His patents are
classified. The U.S. government does not want anyone to
obtain Patrick's research.
The particles of a bioweapon are exceedingly small, about
one to five microns in diameter. You could imagine the size
this way: around fifty to a hundred bioparticles lined up in
a row would span the thickness of a human hair. The particles
are light and fluffy, and don't fall to earth. You can
imagine motes of dust dancing in a shaft of sunlight. Dust
motes are mostly bits of hair and fuzz. They are much larger
than weaponized bioparticles. If a dust mote were as thick
as a log, then a weaponized bioparticle would resemble a
child's marble. The tiny size of a weaponized bioparticle
allows it to be sucked into the deepest sacs of the lung,
where it sticks to the membrane, and enters the
bloodstream, and begins to replicate. A bioweapon can kill
you with just one particle in the lung. If the weapon is
contagious in human-to-human transmission, you will kill a
lot of other people, too. So much death emergent from one
particle. Given the right weather conditions, a bioweapon
will drift in the air for up to a hundred miles.
Sunlight kills a bioweapon. That is, a bioweapon
biodegrades in sunlight. It has a ``half-life,'' like nuclear
radiation. This is known as the decay time of the bioweapon.
Anthrax has a long decay time--it has a tough spore.
Tularemia has a decay time of only a few minutes in sunlight.
Therefore, tularemia should always be released at night.
For many years during the nineteen-fifties and sixties,
Bill Patrick had his doubts that bioweapons work. Those
doubts were removed decisively during the summer of 1968,
when one of the biggest of a long series of open-air
biological tests was conducted over the Pacific Ocean
downwind of Johnston Atoll, a thousand miles southwest of
Hawaii. There, in reaches of open sea, American strategic
tests of bioweapons had been conducted secretly for four
years. Until very recently, these tests remained unknown to
people without security clearances.
``We tested certain real agents, and some of them were
lethal,'' Patrick said. The American strategic tests of
bioweapons were as expensive and elaborate as the tests of
the first hydrogen bombs at Eniwetok Atoll. They involved
enough ships to have made the world's fifth-largest
independent navy. The ships were positioned around Johnston
Atoll, upwind from a number of barges loaded with hundreds of
rhesus monkeys.
Late one afternoon, Bill Patrick went out to Johnston Atoll
and stood on the beach to watch a test. At sunset, just as
the sun touched the horizon, a Marine Phantom jet flew in
low, heading on a straight line parallel to the beach, and
then continued over the horizon. Meanwhile, a single pod
under is wings released a weaponized powder. The powder
trailed into the air like a whiff of smoke and disappeared
completely. This was visual evidence that the particles were
flying away from one another. Patrick's patents worked.
The scientists call this a line-source laydown. The jet was
disseminating a small amount of biopowder for every mile of
flight (the exact amount is still classified). One can
imagine a jet doing a line-source laydown over Los Angeles,
flying from the San Fernando Valley to Long Beach, releasing
dust from a single pod under the wing. It would take a few
minutes. The jet would appear on radar, but the trail of
bioweapon would be invisible. In Iraq, United Nations
inspectors found a videotape of an Iraqi Phantom jet doing a
line-source laydown over the desert. The techniques looked
precisely like the American laydowns, even to the Iraqis' use
of a Phantom jet. The one difference was that the Iraqi
Phantom had no pilot: it was a remote-controlled drone.
At Johnston Atoll, the line of particles moved with the
wind over the sea, some-what like a windshield wiper sweeping
over glass. Stationed in the path of the particles, at
intervals extending many miles away, were the barges full of
monkeys, manned by nervous Navy crews wearing biohazard
spacesuits. The line of bioparticles passed over the barges
one by one. Then the monkeys were taken back to Johnston
Atoll, and over the next few days half of the died. Half of
the monkeys survived, and were fine. Patrick could see,
clearly enough, that a jet that did a laydown of a modest
amount of military bioweapon over Los Angeles could kill half
the city. It would probably be more efficient at causing
human deaths than a ten-megaton hydrogen bomb.
``What was the agent you used?'' I asked Patrick.
``I don't want to tell you. It may still be classified. The
real reason is that a lot of countries would like to know
what we used, and not just the Iraqis. When we saw those test
results, we knew beyond a doubt that biological weapons are
strategic weapons. We were surprised. Even we didn't think
they would work that well.''
``But the agent you used was curable with antibiotics,
right?'' I said.
``Sure.''
``So people could be cured--''
``Well, think about it. Let's say you hit the city of
Frederick, right here. That's a small city, with a population
of about fifty thousand. You could cause thirty thousand
infections. To treat the infections, you'd need--let me
see.'' He calculated quickly: ``Eighty-four grams of
antibiotic per person . . . that's . . . oh, my heavens,
you'd need more
[[Page S1881]]
than two tons of antibiotic, delivered overnight! There isn't
that much antibiotic stored anywhere in the United States.
Now think about New York City. It doesn't take a
mathematician to see that if you hit New York with a
biological weapon you are gonna tie things up for a while.''
Today, Biopreparat is a much smaller organization than it
was during the Soviet years, and it is ostensibly dedicated
entirely to peaceful research and production. You can buy
face cream and vodka made by Biopreparat. Vector, where
Variant U was developed, is no longer part of Biopreparat.
The Vector laboratories are undergoing an extremely painful
and perhaps incomplete conversion to peaceful use, and the
Vector scientists are secretive about some of their work. Dr.
Frank Malinoski, who was a member of the British-American
team that inspected Vector in the early nineteen-nineties,
told me that it is now generally believed that the weapons
program has been taken over by the Russian Ministry of
Defense. ``If Biopreparat was once an egg, then the weapons
program was the yolk of the egg,'' he said. ``They've hard-
boiled the egg, and taken out the yolk and hidden it.''
If, in fact, the yolk exists, what can Western governments
do about it? After years of avoiding confrontation with the
Russians over bioweapons, American officials are still
uncertain how to proceed. Twenty million dollars or so--no
one seems sure of the amount--has been budgeted by a
hodgepodge of agencies to offer financial support to Russian
biologists for peaceful research (so they won't go abroad).
The National Academy of Sciences, for example, spent a
million and a half dollars on research funding for the
Russians this past year. But the agencies are in a quandary,
and fear the scandal that would ensue if it turned out that
their funds had been diverted for weapons research.
The yolk of the bioweapons program may now be hidden away
in military facilities run by the Russian Ministry of
Defense, which are off limits to Americans. The largest of
these is a complex near Sergiyev Posad, and old town about
thirty miles northeast of Moscow. It's not clear how much
real control Boris Yeltsin has over the Russian military. If
the Ministry of Defense wanted to have a bioweapons program,
could anyone tell it to stop? One prominent American
scientist said to me, ``All of our efforts in touchy-feely
relationships have certainly engaged the former Biopreparat
people, but we've been turned down flat by the military
people. No doubt they're hiding something at Sergiyev Posad,
but what are they hiding? Is it a weapons program? Or is it a
shadow that doesn't mean anything, like the shadow on the
shade in `Home Alone'? We just don't know.''
Meanwhile, there is strong suspicion that at some of the
more visible laboratories weapons-related genetic engineering
is being conducted. Genetic engineering, in military terms,
is the creation of genetically altered viruses and bacteria
in order to enhance their power as weapons. This work can be
done by altering an organism's DNA, which is the ribbon-like
molecule that contains the organism's genetic code and is
found in every cell and in every virus particle. Three months
ago, researchers at the Center for Applied Microbiology at
Obolensk--the place south of Moscow where Biopreparat once
developed and mass-produced hot strains of Black Death for
Soviet missiles and weapons systems--published a paper in the
British medical journal Vaccine describing how they'd created
a genetically engineered anthrax. The Obolensk anthrax, they
reported, was resistant to the standard anthrax vaccine.
Ken Alibek thinks that the Russians published information
about their research because ``they are trying to get some
kind of `legalization' of military genetic engineering,'' and
because they are proud of their work. The Biological Weapons
Convention is vague on exactly what constitutes research into
an offensive weapon. Alibek said that the Russian biologists
are trying to push the envelope of what is permissible. Then,
``if someone other than Boris Yeltsin was in power, they
could re-create their entire biological-weapons program
quickly.''
Western biowarfare experts don't know if the new engineered
anthrax is as deadly as normal anthrax, but it my be, and it
could fall into the wrong hands, such as Iraq or Iran. The
real problem may lie in those countries. Genetic-engineering
work can be done in a small building by a few Ph.D.
researchers, using tabletop machines that are available
anywhere in the world at no great cost. In high schools in
the United States today, students are taught how to do
genetic engineering. The learn how to create new variants of
(safe) bacteria which are resistant to antibiotics. One
genetic-engineering kit for high-school students costs forty-
two dollars and is sold through the mail.
A virus that seems particularly amendable to engineering is
smallpox. According to Alibek and others, it is possible that
smallpox has left Russia for parts unknown, travelling in the
pockets of mercenary biologist. ``Iran, Iraq, probably Libya,
probably Syria, and North Korea could have smallpox,'' Alibek
said. He bases his list partly on what Russian intelligence
told him while he was in the program, for the Russians were
very sensitive to other countries' bioweapons programs, and
watched carefully. Bioweapons programs may exist in Israel
(which has never signed the bioweapons treaty) and Pakistan.
Alibek is convinced that India has a program. He says that
when he was in Biopreparat, Russian intelligence showed him
evidence that China has a large bioweapons program.
The deadliest natural smallpox virus is known as Variola
major. Natural smallpox was eradicated from the earth in
1997, when the last human case of it appeared, in Somalia.
Since then, the virus has lived only in laboratories.
Smallpox is an extremely lethal virus, and it is highly
contagious in the air. When a child with chicken pox
appears in a school classroom, many or most of the
children in the class may go on to catch chicken pox.
Smallpox is as contagious as chicken pox. One case of
smallpox can give rise to twenty new cases. Each of those
cases can start twenty more. In 1970, when a man infected
with smallpox appeared in an emergency room in Germany,
seventeen cases of smallpox appeared in the hospital on
the floors above. Ultimately, the German government
vaccinated a hundred thousand people to stop the outbreak.
Two years later in Yugoslavia, a man with a severe case of
smallpox visited several hospitals before dying in an
intensive-case unit. To stop the resulting outbreak, which
forced twenty thousand people into isolation. Yugoslav
health authorities had to vaccinate virtually the entire
population of the country within three weeks. Smallpox can
start the biological equivalent of a runaway chain
reaction. About a third of the people who get a hot strain
of smallpox die of it. The skin puffs up with blisters the
size of hazelnuts, especially over the face. A severe case
of small pox can essentially burn the skin off one's body.
The smallpox vaccine wears off after ten to twenty years.
None of us are immune any longer, unless we've had a recent
shot. There are currently seven million usable does of
smallpox vaccine stored in the United States, in one location
in Pennsylvania. If an outbreak occurred here, it might be
necessary to vaccinate all two hundred and seventy million
people in the United States in a matter of weeks. There would
be not way to meet such a demand.
``Russia has researched the genetic alternation of
smallpox,'' Alibek told me. ``In 1990 and 1991, we engineered
a smallpox at Vector. It was found that several areas the
smallpox genome''--the DNA--``can be used for the
introduction of some foreign genetic material. The first
development was smallpox, and VEE.'' VEE, or Venezuelan
equine encephalitis, is brain virus. It causes a severe
headache and near-coma, but it is generally not lethal.
Alibek said that the researchers spliced VEE into smallpox.
The result was a recombinant chimera virus. In ancient Greek
myth, the chimera was a monster made from parts of different
animals. Recombination means the mixing of genes from
different organisms. ``It is called smallpox-VEE chimera,''
Alibek said. It could also be called Vee-pox. Under a
microscope, Alibek said, the Veepox looks like smallpox, but
it isn't.
According to Alibek, there was one major technical hurdle
to clear in the creation of a workable Veepox chimera, and he
says that it took the Vector researchers years to solve the
problem. They solved it by finding more than one place in the
smallpox DNA where you could insert new genes without
decreasing smallpox's ability to cause disease. Many
researchers feel that the smallpox virus doesn't cause
disease in animals in any way that is useful for
understanding its effects on humans. Alibek says that the
Russians tested Veepox in monkeys, but he says that he
doesn't know the results.
More recently, Alibek claims, the Vector researchers may
have created a recombinant Ebola-smallpox chimera. One could
call it Ebolapox. Ebola virus uses the molecule RNA for its
genetic code, whereas smallpox uses DNA. Alibek believes that
the Russian researchers made a DNA copy of the disease-
causing parts of Ebola, then grafted them into smallpox.
Alibek said he thinks that the Ebolapox virus is stable--that
is, that it will replicate successfully in a test tube or in
animals--which means that, once created, Ebolapox will live
forever in a laboratory, and will not uncreate itself. Thus a
new form of life may have been brought into the world.
``The Ebolapox could produce the form of smallpox called
blackpox,'' Alibek says. Blackpox, sometimes known as
hemorrhagic smallpox, is the most severe type of smallpox
disease. In a blackpox infection, the skin does not develop
blisters. Instead, the skin becomes dark all over. Blood
vessels leak, resulting in severe internal hemorrhaging.
Blackpox is invariably fatal. ``As a weapon, the Ebolapox
would give the hemorrhages and high mortality rate of Ebola
virus, which would give you a blackpox, plus the very high
contagiousness of smallpox,'' Alibek said.
Bill Patrick became exasperated. ``Ken! Ken! I think you've
got overkill here. What is the point of creating an Ebola
smallpox? I mean, it would be nice to do this from a
scientific point of view, sure. But with old-fashioned
natural smallpox you can bring a society to its knees. You
don't need any Ebolapox, Ken. Why, you're just gonna kill
everybody.''
``I suspect that this research has been done,'' Alibek said
calmly.
Lev Sandakhchiev, the head of Vector, strongly denies this.
``In our center we developed vaccinia-virus recombinants with
VEE viruses and some others,'' he says. Vaccinia is a
harmless virus related to smallpox. It is used for making
vaccines.
``How much do you think it would cost to create genetically
engineered smallpox?'' I asked Alibek.
``This is not expensive.'' He paused, thinking. ``A few
million dollars. This is what it
[[Page S1882]]
cost us for making the smallpox-VEE chimera at Vector in 1990
and 1991.
Ken Alibek's statements about the genetic engineering of
smallpox are disturbing. I felt a need to hear some
perspective from senior scientists who are close to the
situation. Dr. Peter Jahrling is the chief scientist at
USAMRIID, and he has visited Russia four times in recent
months. (``It seems as if all I do these days is visit
Russia,'' he said to me.) He knows the scientists at Vector
pretty well. He has listened to Alibek and questioned him
carefully, and he doesn't believe him about the Ebola-
smallpox chimera. ``His talk about chimeras of Ebola is sheer
fantasy, in my opinion,'' Jahrling said. ``This would be
technically formidable. We have seen zero evidence of the
Vector scientists doing that. But a smallpox chimera--is it
plausible? Yes, it is, and I think that's scary. The truth
is, I'm not so worried about governments anymore. I think
genetic engineering has been reduced to simple enough
principles so that any reasonably equipped group of
reasonably good scientists would be able to construct a
credible threat using genetic engineering. I don't think
anyone could knock out New York City with a genetically
engineered bug, but someone might be able to knock out a few
people and thereby make an incredible panic.''
Joshua Lederberg is a member of a working group of
scientists at the National Academy of Sciences who advice the
government on biological weapons and the potential for
bioterrorism. He is a professor at Rockefeller University, in
Manhattan, and is considered to be one of the founders of the
biotechnology revolution. He received the Nobel Prize for
discovering--in 1946, when he was a young man--that bacteria
can swap genes with each other. It was apparent to him even
back then that people would soon be moving genes around, for
evil as well as good.
I found Lederberg in his office, in a modest building
covered with vines, in a green island of grass and trees on
Manhattan's East Side. He is in his seventies, a man of
modest size and modest girth, with a trim white beard,
glasses, intelligent hazel eyes, and careful sentences.
Lederberg knows Alibek and Pasechnik. He said to me, ``They
are offering very important evidence. You have to look
carefully at what they're saying, but I offer high
credibility to their remarks in general.'' He seemed to be
choosing his words. As far as what was going on at Vector, he
says that ``with smallpox, anything could have happened. Lev
Sandakhchiev is one of the world's authorities on the
smallpox genome. But there are all kinds of reasons you'd
want to introduce modifications into smallpox.'' He said that
you might, for example, alter smallpox in order to make a
vaccine. ``You have to prove intent to make a weapon,'' he
said.
Researchers normally introduce new genes into the vaccinia
virus. Vaccinia doesn't cause major illness in humans, but if
you're infected with it you become immune to smallpox. When
the new genes are introduced into vaccinia, they tend to make
the virus even weaker, even less able to trigger disease.
Putting new genes into smallpox presumably might make it
weaker, too. Alibek insisted that the Russians have found
places in the genome of smallpox where you can insert new
genes, yet the virus remains deadly.
I said to Lederberg, ``If someone is adding genes from
Ebola to smallpox virus, and it's making the smallpox more
deadly, as Alibek says is happening in Russia, isn't that
evidence of intent to make a weapon?''
``No,'' he said firmly. ``You can't prove intent by the
experiment itself. It's not even clear to me that adding
Ebola genes to smallpox would make it more deadly. What
troubles me is that this kind of work is being done in a
clandestine way. They are not telling us what is going on. To
be doing such potentially evil research without telling us
what they are doing is a provocation. To do an experiment of
this kind in the United States would be almost impossible.
There would be an extensive review, and it might well not be
allowed for safety reasons. The experiment is extremely
dangerous, because things could get out of hand.''
Lederberg agreed that Russia does have a clandestine
biological-weapons program today, though it's not at all
clear how much Vector and Biopreparat have to do with
it, since they are independent entities. As for the
biological missiles once aimed at the U.S., it doesn't
surprise him: ``You can put anything in a ballistic
missile.''
Lederberg seems to be a man who has looked into the face of
evil for a long time and hasn't blinked. He is part of a
group of scientists and government officials who are trying
to maintain a dialogue with Russian biologists and bring them
into the international community of science. ``Our best hope
is to have a dialogue with Sandakhchiev,'' he said quietly.
``There is no technical solution to the problem of biological
weapons. It needs an ethical, human, and moral solution if
it's going to happen at all. Don't ask me what the odds are
for an ethical solution, but there is no other solution.'' He
paused, considering his words. ``But would an ethical
solution appeal to a sociopath?''
Terrorism is the uncontrolled part of the equation. A while
ago, Richard Butler, who is the head of the United Nations
Special Commission weapons-inspection teams in Iraq, remarked
to me, ``Everyone wonders what kinds of delivery systems Iraq
may have for biological weapons, but it seems to me that the
best delivery system would be a suitcase left in the
Washington subway.''
Could something like that happen? What would it be like?
The truth is that no one really knows, because lethal
bioterror on a major scale has not occurred. At one point in
my talk with Ken Alibek in Bill Patrick's kitchen that winter
afternoon, we took a break, and the former master
bioweaponeers stood on the lawn outside the house, looking
down on the city of Frederick. The view reaches to the Mt.
Airy Ridge, a blue line in the distance. Clouds had covered
the sun again.
Patrick was squinting east, with a professional need to
understand the nuances of wind and cloud. ``The wind is ten
to twelve miles an hour, gusting a bit.'' He pointed to smoke
coming from a building in the valley. ``See the smoke there?
It's drifting up a little, but see how it hangs? We have sort
of an inversion today, not a good one. I'd say it's a good
day for anthrax or Q fever.''
Alibek lit a cigarette and watched the sky. He appraises
weather the same way Patrick does.
Suddenly Patrick turned on his heel and went into his
garage. He returned in a few moments carrying a large
mayonnaise jar. He unscrewed the cap. The jar contained a
fine, creamy, fluffy powder, with a mottled pink tinge. The
pink was the dried blood of chicken embryos, he explained.
``This is a simulant for VEE.'' It was a fake version of the
weaponized brain virus. It was sterile, and had no living
organisms in it. It was harmless.
The VEE virus can be grown in weapons-grade concentration
in live chicken embryos. When the embryos are swimming with
virus particles, you break open the eggs (you had better be
wearing a spacesuit), and you harvest the sick embryos. You
freeze-dry them and process them into a powder using one of
Patrick's secret methods.
He shook the jar under my face. The blood-tinged powder
climbed the sides of the jar. A tendril of simulated
bioweapon reached for my nose.
Instinctively, I jerked my head back.
Patrick walked across the lawn and stood by an oak tree.
Suddenly he extended his arm and heaved the contents of the
jar into the air. His simulated brain-virus weapon blasted
through the branches of a dogwood tree and took off in the
wind heading straight down a meadow and across the street,
booming with celerity toward Frederick. Within seconds, the
aerosol cloud had become invisible. But the particles were
there, moving with the breeze at a steady ten to twelve miles
an hour.
Alibek watched, tugging at his cigarette, nonchalant,
mildly amused. ``Yeah. You won't see the cloud now.''
``Some of those particles'll go eighteen to twenty miles,
maybe to the Mt. Airy Ridge,'' Patrick remarked. The
simulated brain virus would arrive in Mt. Airy in less than
two hours. He walked back and put his hand on Alibek's
shoulder, and smiled.
Alibek nodded.
``What are you thinking?'' I asked Alibek.
He pursed his lips and shrugged. ``This is not exciting for
me.''
Patrick went on, ``Say you wanted to hit Frederick today,
Ken, what would you use?''
Alibek glanced at the sky, weighing the weather and his
options. ``I'd use anthrax mixed with smallpox.''
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