Isegoria

Ken Alibek explains (in Biohazard) what happened when a Soviet bio-weapons researcher did not return from a trip abroad:

“Who gave him permission to go?”

“I did,” I said. “But I told you about it.”

Shortly after Pasechnik’s initial request, I had informed Kalinin of the invitation from the French company. I had full authority to grant permission for such trips, but Kalinin had told me to keep him abreast of staff movements.

“I don’t remember that,” Kalinin shot back, glancing at Bykov. “You didn’t tell me a thing!”

I felt an involuntary shudder. Kalinin was making it perfectly clear that I was on my own. He looked uncomfortable nonetheless.

Bykov seemed suddenly to enjoy the awkward position in which his rival had been placed. A veteran of Kremlin power struggles, he knew how to take advantage of such situations.

Skipping ahead:

“Well, we think we know where he is.”

“How did you find him?”

“We used a psychic,” Yermoshin explained.

“We showed him a photo of Pasechnik, and he stared at it for a long time until he told us that your man was on some sort of island, a big island, very close to the sea.”

“An island?” I said, puzzled.

“Yes of course,” Yermoshin went on.

“And he said there was a large old building, with two or three men working with him.”

I started to smile. I had never dreamed the KGB was interested in extrasensory perception.

Skipping way, way ahead:

In January 1995, long after I had defected, I was invited by the British government to discuss biodefense issues. During a break, several British officers came up to me and we began to talk through an interpreter about Pasechnik, whom I had not seen since 1989. The mood was light, and I casually told them the story of the KGB and its psychic. They didn’t laugh.

“But that’s exactly where we had him,” one of the officers said. “We wanted to keep him secure, so we brought him to an old house on the coast.”

The KGB psychic was either remarkably talented or he had remarkably good contacts. Even at the time, I suspected that Yermoshin had been ordered to let me in on the psychic’s “secret” to check my reaction. Bykov or Kalinin must have been determined to catch me up. If I had not shown surprise at the news about the island, it would have been proof of guilt. I was angry with Yermoshin for agreeing to be part of such a clumsy trick.

Their reaction:

A consensus was reached quickly. Everything relating to secret defense work at Pasechnik’s facility would have to be destroyed. The Institute of Ultra-Pure Biopreparations would become civilian in fact as well as in name. This would leave a major hole in our program, but there was no alternative.

[…]

“There’s only one thing to do. He has to be killed.”

[…]

One of the KGB colonels spoke up. “I’d like to stop this discussion,” he said softly.

“Nobody is going to say anything about killing here.”

A chill came over the room. I think we all got the message: if an assassination was required, the KGB needed no advice from amateurs.

The Institute of Ultra-Pure Biopreparations, Ken Alibek explains (in Biohazard), provided many of the Soviet Union’s breakthroughs in bio-weapons production:

One of its most notable contributions was a milling machine that used a powerful blast of air to turn bacterial and viral mixtures into a fine powder. Nothing like this “jet-stream” machine had ever been built before, at least so far as we knew. It was intended to replace the heavy ball-bearing mills used for decades by the Ministry of Defense and to become a standard fixture at all of our production plants.

Work was also done on new approaches to drying and microencapsulation—the process of covering agents in polymer capsules to preserve and protect them from ultraviolet light. Highly pathogenic agents were forbidden inside the city limits, so the focus of the institute was on developing new processes and equipment.

One of Pasechnik’s most important projects was the modification of cruise missiles for the delivery of biological agents. The Leningrad scientists were asked to analyze the efficiency of aerosol clouds sprayed from a “fast-flying, low-altitude moving object” containing one or more twenty-liter canisters of liquid or dry agent. They designed a moving platform to release canisters as the missile passed over successive targets. The canisters would break apart on impact with the air.

The first recorded outbreak of the virus we now call the Marburg virus occurred in 1967, Ken Alibek explains (in Biohazard), at the Behring pharmaceutical works in Marburg, an old university town seventy miles north of Frankfurt:

An animal keeper died two weeks after he contracted a mysterious illness from green monkeys sent to the Behring lab from central Africa. The lab was culturing vaccines in kidney cells extracted from the monkeys. Other workers soon fell sick, and similar cases were reported at laboratories in Frankfurt and Belgrade, both of which had received shiploads of green monkeys from central Africa at the same time.

Twenty-four lab technicians came down with the unknown disease, along with six of the nurses caring for them. Of the thirty-one people infected, seven died. This kind of undiagnosed outbreak would be alarming enough, but it was the horror of their deaths that caught the attention of biologists and tropical disease specialists around the world.

The mysterious virus appeared to liquefy body organs. One of the survivors went mad after the organism chewed away his brain cells. Before the victims died, every inch of their bodies was wet with blood.

Following tradition, the virus was named after the place where it was first identified. It would alter forever the image of a city that has been a center of European philosophy, science, and religion for centuries.

Some of the world’s greatest bacteriologists and biochemists have studied at Marburg—including Albrecht Kossel, whose research laid the groundwork for the discovery of DNA, and Alexandre Yersin, a codiscoverer of the plague bacterium (named Yersinia pestis after him). The lab in which Marburg was first smeared on a glass slide was itself named after the man credited with founding the science of immunology—Emil von Behring.

A similar virus surfaced nine years later on the banks of the Ebola River in Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of Congo. By the time that epidemic died out, 430 people were dead in Zaire and nearby Sudan.

[…]

Under an electron microscope, both organisms seemed to proliferate by shooting out tiny filament-like threads, like the lines cast by fishermen, from the cells they had already scoured for the food they needed to grow. The threads were often bent at the top, like fishing hooks, and as they prepared to invade a new cell they curled into rings, like microscopic Cheerios. Marburg and Ebola were deemed to belong to a new family of viral organisms. They were called filoviruses.

[…]

Ebola’s mortality rate is between 70 and 90 percent.

Naturally the Soviets developed weaponized versions:

A strain of Marburg arrived in the Soviet Union a decade after it was first isolated, during one of our periodic global searches for promising material. It wasn’t clear from the records whether we obtained it from the United States or directly from Germany, but it was immediately added to our growing collection of viral warfare agents. We were already investigating a number of microorganisms that weaken blood vessels and cause hemorrhagic fevers, such as Junin from Argentina and Machupo from Bolivia.

And, naturally, accidents occurred:

Ustinov had been conducting a series of experiments with guinea pigs and rabbits to monitor the effects of increasingly higher concentrations of Marburg. The injection of such a highly concentrated dose directly into his thumb meant that he now had hundreds, perhaps thousands of times more particles of the virus coursing through his body than any of the victims in Germany. I thought his chances of survival were near zero.

[…]

This was less than two years after Chernobyl; the Soviet Union was in no mood for a new disaster.

[…]

No technician should have worked long hours with such a contagious organism. People tired easily in the heavy protective suits required for Zone Three. Their reflexes slowed down, and it was easy to become careless. Adding to our problems, Marburg research had begun at Vector before a supply of antiserum was on hand.

Ustinov’s illness lasted nearly three weeks. Throughout that time, none of his colleagues was allowed to stop working.

[…]

Ustinov had been injecting Marburg into guinea pigs with the help of a lab technician, working through a glove box. He was not in a full space suit and was wearing two thin layers of rubber gloves instead of the thick mitts normally required for such work in Zone Three. The gloves provided the flexibility to control the laboratory animals, who will otherwise squirm and try to wriggle out of a technician’s grip.

Our rules required that animals targeted for injection be strapped to a wooden board to hold them securely in place. That day, Ustinov wasn’t following procedure. He decided to steady the guinea pigs with his gloved hand. Perhaps he thought it would help calm them. Or perhaps he was in too much of a hurry.

The technician became distracted and nudged him accidentally. Ustinov’s hand slipped just as he was pressing down on the syringe. The needle went through the guinea pig and punctured his thumb, drawing blood.

The needle went in no farther than half a centimeter, but the faint spot of blood indicated that liquid Marburg had entered his bloodstream. As soon as he realized what had happened, Ustinov called the duty supervisor from the telephone inside the lab.

From then on, the procedures established for such emergencies were followed to the letter. Doctors and nurses dressed in protective suits were waiting for him as he emerged from the disinfectant shower. They rushed him to the small hospital in the Vector compound, a twenty-bed isolation facility sealed off from the outside with thick walls and pressure-locked doors.

[…]

Within a couple of days he was complaining of a severe headache and nausea. Gradually, he became passive and uncommunicative, as his features froze in toxic shock. On the fourth day his eyes turned red and tiny bruises appeared all over his body: capillaries close to his skin had begun to hemorrhage.

Ustinov twitched silently in his bed while the virus multiplied in his system. Too tired to speak, or to turn over, or to eat, he would drift in and out of consciousness, staring for long periods of time at nothing. Occasionally, lucidity would return. He called for paper during those brief moments to record the progress of the virus as it foraged through his body. Sometimes he burst into tears.

On the tenth day, his fever subsided and he stopped retching. As brilliant a scientist as he was, Ustinov began to entertain the delusion that he was improving. He started smiling again and asked about his family.

[…]

By the fifteenth day, the tiny bruises on Ustinov’s body had turned dark blue, and his skin was as thin as parchment. The blood pooling underneath began oozing through. It streamed from his nose, mouth, and genitals. Through a mechanism that is still poorly understood, the virus prevents normal coagulation: the platelets responsible for clotting blood are destroyed. As the virus spreads, the body’s internal organs literally begin to melt away.

Shuddering bouts of diarrhea left rivers of black liquid on his sheets. The scraps of paper on which he had been scribbling his symptoms and which the nurses had gingerly carried out to transcribe each day no longer littered the floor. There was nothing more to write.

[…]

Each viral particle, or virion, forms a brick that pushes against the cell walls until they burst. The cells then sprout wavering hair-like antennae that home in on their next target, where the process of foraging and destruction blindly repeats itself.

[…]

The doctors from the Ministry of Health arrived early in the first week with the antiserum. To no one’s surprise, it proved useless. Antiviral drugs such as ribavirin and interferon were also tried. Hemorrhagic fevers can sometimes be treated with whole-body blood transfusions, but the medical team concluded that it would in this case be ineffective.

[…]

I don’t know how the senior levels of our bureaucracy reacted to Ustinov’s death, but no condolence letter was ever sent to his widow. Sandakchiev asked us for ten thousand rubles as special compensation for his family in addition to the normal pension survivors were entitled to. It was a princely sum in those days, and Kalinin balked at first, but he finally approved the request.

[…]

The risk of contagion made normal interment impossible, so his corpse was covered with chloramine disinfectant and wrapped in plastic sheeting. The remains were placed inside a metal box, welded shut, and fitted into a wooden coffin. Only then was it safe to lay him in the ground.

[…]

The small group of mourners included Ustinov’s immediate family, his closest colleagues, and a cordon of KGB agents who had worked frantically to keep the circumstances of his illness secret. No one came from Moscow.

Regulations prohibited the circulation of any reports about accidents, fatal or otherwise, but news of the tragedy spread quickly through The System.

[…]

A virus grown in laboratory conditions is liable to become more virulent when it passes through the live incubator of a human or an animal body. Few were surprised, therefore, when samples of Marburg taken from Ustinov’s organs after his autopsy differed slightly from the original strain. Further testing showed that the new variation was much more powerful and stable.

No one needed to debate the next step. Orders went out immediately to replace the old strain with the new, which was called, in a move that the wry Ustinov might have appreciated, “Variant U.”

[…]

After testing the weapon in explosive chambers, we applied it to the monkeys. Every one of the twelve monkeys contracted the virus. They were all dead within three weeks.

In early 1990, Marburg Variant U was ready for approval by the Ministry of Defense.

Our scientist had found it more difficult to cultivate Ebola than Marburg—they were not able to reach the necessary concentration—but by the end of 1990, the long-term problem of cultivation had been solved and we were close to developing a new Ebola weapon. Meanwhile, at Zagorsk (Sergiyev Posad) military scientists were putting the finishing touches on new Lassa fever and monkey pox biological weapons.

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.

[…]

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.

[…]

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

[…]

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.

[…]

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.

[…]

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

[…]

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.

[…]

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.

[…]

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.

[…]

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

[…]

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

[…]

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.

[…]

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.

[…]

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.

[…]

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.

[…]

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.

[…]

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.

[…]

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.

[…]

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.