Annals Of War - The
Bioweaponeers Source: The New Yorker March 9, 1998,
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 superdegree, 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 an 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 chucked 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 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 his 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 gloves.
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 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 underlayers. 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 forest 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 everything.
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 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 Ultrapure 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, discu ssing 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 its 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 technique 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, somewhat 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 them 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 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, an 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 ribbonlike 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 may 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. They 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 amenable 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 biologists. "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 1977, 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-care 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 smallpox 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 doses 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 no way to meet such a demand.
"Russia has researched the genetic alteration of
smallpox," Alibek told me. "In 1990 and 1991, we engineered a smallpox
at Vector. It was found that several areas of 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 a 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 Veepox. 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 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 advise 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 for 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."
Note: Richard Preston was featured in the ABC
"PrimeTime" television program on Alibek and bioweapons. He is author
of two best-selling books on biological hazards, The Hot Zone, a
non-fiction account of the Ebola virus, and The Cobra Event, a
novel.
by Richard Preston
pp. 52-65