Amerithrax (49 page)
SVERDLOVSK’S
anthrax, as you know, was enough to de- stroy the world’s people many times over. The Russians had carefully hidden it away from Sverdlovsk—seventeen hun- dred miles away at Zima, near Irkutsk. One day Army sci- entists were ordered to dispose of Compound 19’s powder. But how? They had made the spores too hardy, too nearly indestructible. They packed the stainless steel canisters of
the lethal pink powder on two dozen rail cars and sent them rumbling across the Russian and Kazakh Republics to iso- lated Vozrozhdeniye Island. Translated from Russian,
Vozrozhdeniye
meant “Rebirth” or “Resurrection” or “Re- naissance.” The island was a rebirth of sorts, at least for Strain 836.
Strain 836, the most virulent and vicious strain of anthrax (of dozens purposely developed) ever known to man had survived years in the darkness and filth of the Kirov sewers and at Compound 19 had proved to be an unusually tough spore. The Kirov anthrax refined at Sverdlovsk was becom- ing even more lethal. The spores were awakening to new strength. In 1987, Strain 836, a pathogen created in the So- viet Union’s first anthrax factory, would be confirmed on bleak Rebirth Island.
Rebirth Island was a dismal, tear-shaped speck in the midst of a rubber-cement sea. It bobbed fifty miles off the Kazakh shoreline and twenty-three hundred miles south of Moscow. Scientists and technicians took a one-and-a-half- hour flight by MI-8 helicopter from the coastal town of Ar- alsk to the island. The shrinking Aral Sea divided the Central Asian countries of Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. Two decades earlier Soviet planners had diverted the Aral’s river sources into concrete irrigation canals. The sea silted over with clouds of toxic salts. The fourth largest inland sea be- gan to shrink, while Rebirth Island expanded from seventy- seven square miles to ten times that size.
The Soviets made Rebirth Island their largest open-air bioweapons testing site. Rebirth Island, under control of the Fifteenth Directorate, became Hell’s Island. In the summer it was 140 degrees Fahrenheit. The wind always blew south. Hot winds constantly blew dust off the desert test range. Like the dust at Ground Zero, it got in everyone’s eyes, hair, clothes, and food.
The technical base (well guarded by a four-hundred-man battalion) was hidden a mile from town behind a barbed wire fence. One hundred and fifty scientists and soldiers lived there in six rundown buildings—scientific headquar- ters. Collectively, the dusty settlement and labs and test site were known as Aralsk-7. Facilities for the soldiers were a
They held tests after dark on the eighty-square-mile test range, hoping the rising sun would extinguish any ambient bacteria. Condemned hamadryas baboons were tethered to parallel rows of telephone poles evenly spaced a kilometer apart. The baboons cost five to seven hundred dollars apiece and a single experiment used nearly one hundred of them. Anthrax bomblets, small metal spheres, were exploded three miles upwind.
After a dark, yellowish cloud settled over the baboons, soldiers in protective suits collected the dead and dying an- imals and transported them to a holding unit for postmor- tems. At the site, thousands of corpses were burned and the ashes buried in mass graves. Rebirth Island became the larg- est burial ground of weapons-grade anthrax in the world.
Tons of Strain 836 (code-named L3 and L4) were dumped, sprayed, and detonated over Rebirth Island until the stagnant sea was a marshland of sand and cement. Birds that flew over dropped from the sky until no more birds flew over the island. As the sea all around shrunk, the island grew closer to the mainland. What would the still-deadly anthrax do to the unknowing people on land?
Of course, the Soviets tried to disinfect the island after each test. They could not. They sealed the bacteria from the test range into stainless steel canisters. At the edge of the old test range, soldiers poured bleach into them to decon- taminate the deadly pink powder. Then they dug eleven huge pits and poured the sludge into the ground, burying the decontaminated spores. Analysis of soil samples from over half the anthrax burial pits on Vozrozhdeniye Island revealed that bleach-soaked anthrax spores buried there a decade earlier were still thriving and dangerous. Contami- nation spread into the sea. In 1972, a fishing boat went miss- ing from the mainland. It was found drifting much later, all onboard dead from plague germs and anthrax contamination. The men had sailed too close. There was no vaccine effec- tive against this island toxin—Strain 836, which had made
its long pilgrimage from Kirov to Sverdlovsk to Rebirth Is- land.
Strain 836 had journeyed to a city of germs and death so shrouded in furtiveness the Soviets listed it only as a post office box number in the remote northeastern part of Ka- zakhstan’s Central Asian steppes. The complex owed its very existence to the Sverdlovsk accident. After the disaster, production at Compound 19 stopped because of growing Western demands to inspect the facility. Of the three facil- ities in Russia designated as anthrax production centers in case of war, Sverdlovsk had been the only active production facility. Penza and Kurgan were only standbys, awaiting or- ders to activate the strains of anthrax in their vaults. In 1981 Brezhnev signed a secret decree relocating all biological weapons–making equipment and materials from Sverdlovsk. In order to fill the production gap created by the now- discredited anthrax plant in the Urals, the Soviets upgraded Stepnogorsk, a small biological research facility a thousand miles from Moscow. In 1982, Soviet slave labor swiftly con- structed a huge plant in the remote desert to develop and
manufacture an improved, more deadly variant of anthrax.
The next year, sixty-five army technicians and scientists from Sverdlovsk, fearful of further contamination, arrived in Kazakhstan. The Stepnogorsk Scientific Experimental and Production Base, one of six production facilities managed by the Fifteenth Directorate of the Soviet Ministry of De- fense, was capable of producing nearly ten tons of anthrax a day. Within five years, its combined production capacity reached nearly five thousand tons a year. Equipped for large- scale cultivation, Stepnogorsk generated thousands of tons of anthrax, plague, and smallpox for use in missiles and other weapons.
Stepnogorsk’s pride was Strain 836, the most virulent and powerful of the dozens of anthrax strains investigated as weapons over the years by army scientists. A photo taken on May Day 1985 at Stepnogorsk showed the anthrax de- velopers and their children holding balloons and celebrating like happy employees anywhere. Dr. Ken Alibek recalled that the following year a technician was infected with an- thrax in a lab that was supposed to be sterile. He had an
abrasion on his neck, one of the most dangerous places to contract cutaneous anthrax in the body.
They first treated the patient with streptomycin and pen- icillin, 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. In a final effort to save his life, they injected him with an ab- normally high dose of antibiotics. “If treated with high doses of penicillin into the bloodstream at short intervals for a week to ten days before the first toxins are released, survival is 100 percent,” said Alibek. The shock dose succeeded and the technician recovered.
During the last half of the twentieth century, as anthrax as a weapon of mass destruction began to be increasingly stockpiled by nations and terrorists, the Russians engineered anthrax strains resistant to penicillin, doxycycline, and other antibiotics. They did this by splicing in genes from naturally resistant strains of bacteria, such as
E. coli
, the common intestinal bacterium.
Stepnogorsk’s Strain 836 was made three times as strong and lethal as Sverdlovsk’s anthrax. During that outbreak, an aggressive treatment of penicillin, anti-anthrax globulin, cephalosporin, chloramphenicol, and corticosteroids; hydra- tion; and artificial respiration had saved fifteen lives. The Russians not only made Strain 836 resistant to heat and cold, but developed variants that would defeat antibiotics.
It would take only five kilograms of the anthrax 836 de- veloped at the Kazakhstan base to infect 50 percent of peo- ple living in a square kilometer or territory. The Sverdlovsk strain had needed at least fifteen kilograms to achieve the same results. Only after Strain 836 had been successfully tested on bleak Rebirth Island in 1987, did Moscow finally take Sverdlovsk off the roster of anthrax production plants. Alibek found a more efficient way to produce the anthrax mutated by Kirov’s sewer rats and refined at Sverdlovsk and Rebirth Island. Alibek, the mastermind for decades behind Russia’s experiments with bioterrorism, invented the world’s most powerful anthrax. The quiet-spoken biologist had graduated from the military faculty of the Tomsk Med- ical Institute in 1975, where he majored in infectious dis-
eases and epidemiology. He held Ph.D.s in microbiology, for research and development of plague and tularemia bio- logical weapons, and in biotechnology, for developing the technology to manufacture anthrax bioweapons on an in- dustrial scale. Alibek’s strain needed fewer spores to be ef- fective, and delivered “more bang for the buck.” His powdered and liquid formulations of anthrax were many times as lethal as the anthrax that was produced at Kirov, Sverdlovsk,
and
Rebirth Island. Alibek described his type of anthrax to author Richard Preston as being “an amber- gray powder, finer than bath talc, with smooth, creamy, fluffy particles that tend to fly apart and vanish into the air.” Alibek said the particles stick to lungs like glue, just as Amerithrax’s did.
Just as Fort Detrick was known by biowarfare intimates as “the Institute,” Biopreparat, which ran Stepnogorsk, was known as “the Concern.” Alibek called Biopreparat “the darkest conspiracy of the cold war, a network so secret that its members could not be told what colleagues in other parts of the organization were doing or where.” The Concern was a civilian agency created in 1973. Its stated mission was developing vaccines, biopesticides, and lab equipment, but this was only a cover for weapons work. Joining the Con- cern in 1975, he was deputy chief of the agency from 1988 to 1992.
Encircled by gray walls and electric fences, Stepnogorsk presented a skyline of strange buildings and towers. The little city sat in an area denuded of all vegetation, with wide spaces between the buildings. Everything was kept open and clear so no spy could hide behind anything. And they had learned a lesson from the Sverdlovsk disaster. There was no foliage. Hosing down contaminated shrubs had caused new infections in Sverdlovsk. And Stepnogorsk was isolated from highly populated areas.
Zone 2 was the first biosafety enclosure—storage vaults, rows of seed, and industrial reactors, sealed lab windows hiding hooded technicians. The enormous autoclave in Building 221 was used to sterilize nutrient media and for the deactivation of anthrax cultures. Ten twenty-ton fermen- tation vats, towering four stories high and each holding
The foreground view from Building 221, the main pro- duction site, was of a building housing aerosol explosive chambers and bunkers for filling and assembling biological munitions. Directly behind, framed by large open spaces, stood an anthrax drying facility. By the late 1980s the Con- cern, with a budget of one billion dollars, employed a work- force of forty thousand scientists, technicians, and support staff. Nine thousand scientists with substantial bioweapons expertise conducted experiments on roughly fifty different pathogens.
At the main Kazakhstan facility and eight satellite labs they stored eighty strains of anthrax, plague, smallpox, and cholera. They collected brucellosis and tularemia bacteria and smallpox, Marburg, and Ebola viruses. Some trials blended different agents to create superbugs or mask symp- toms. Biopreparat had once employed seven hundred sci- entists and run fifty labs and production sites throughout the former Soviet Union. The Ministry of Defense ran four other facilities devoted to developing bioweapons. Four of those labs developed anti-crop and anti-animal agents for warfare. At the viral research site called Vector (the Russian State Research Center of Virology and Biotechnology) hundreds of deadly genetically altered bacterial strains were stored in small glass flasks. Inside refrigerated vaults hundreds of tiny vials of freeze-dried bacteria stood on metal trays in rows. This Siberian “Museum of Cultures” contained more than one hundred varieties of smallpox, Marburg, and Ebola vi- ruses and highly virulent plague bacteria. Vector stood in a forest clearing on the southern outskirts of Koltsovo, “an abandoned village transformed into a closed city,” near No- vosibirsk, Siberia. Ken Alibek, who went to Koltsovo in December 1987, proclaimed Vector the biggest, most so- phisticated facility ever to refine viruses for weapons. Vector was adjacent to a huge civilian biotechnological plant, “Pro-
gress,” which produced herbicides and ethanol.