[Congressional Record Volume 144, Number 26 (Thursday, March 12, 1998)]
[Senate]
[Pages S1876-S1882]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                           RUSSIAN BW PROGRAM

  Mr. KYL. Mr President, I call to the attention of my colleagues an 
article appearing in the March 9 edition of The New Yorker magazine 
that offers a chilling account of Russia's offensive biological weapons 
program. This article is based on an extensive interview with Mr. Ken 
Alibek, a Russian defector who was once second in command of the 
Russian offensive biological weapons program. Alibek's description of 
the Russian BW program is generally considered authoritative by a wide 
range of U.S. experts.
  The article provides a number of startling details about the Russian 
offensive BW program, also known as Biopreparat. Most startling of all 
is just how little we in the United States knew about this program. 
Despite the fact that Biopreparat was established in 1973--the year 
after the Soviet

[[Page S1877]]

Union signed the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention and pledged to 
forego an offensive BW program--and despite intelligence to the 
contrary, some in the U.S. scientific and arms control communities 
continued to maintain that Russia was not violating the treaty up to 
the moment that President Yeltsin admitted otherwise in 1992.
  Mr. President, what the Russians had accomplished by 1991 is 
frightening. According to Alibek, the Soviet Union had warheads for 
carrying biological weapons on intercontinental missiles that were 
aimed at the United States. These warheads could carry smallpox, plague 
and anthrax. The Soviets had apparently weaponized the Marburg virus--a 
hemorrhagic virus as gruesome as the Ebola virus--and were ready to 
begin large scale manufacture of the weapon as the Soviet Union was 
crumbling apart. Alibek is concerned that scientists may have left 
Russia with samples of this virus and other deadly bacteria. The 
possibility that Russian scientists, know-how and biological materials 
are available to rogue states and terrorists underscores the critical 
importance of improving our domestic preparedness to respond to BW 
attacks against the United States.
  We do not know the extent of the Russian biological weapons program 
today. There is evidence to suggest that a clandestine program 
continues, hidden away in military facilities run by the Ministry of 
Defense, which are off-limits to the West. The trilateral process, 
which was set up by the United States, United Kingdom, and Russia in 
1992 and calls for inspections of Russian biological-related 
facilities, has broken down. It has been years since an inspection took 
place. The Russians have objected to visits to military facilities. And 
where inspections occurred, the inspectors faced the same obstacles as 
U.N. inspectors face in Iraq.
  Mr. President, The New Yorker article should be required reading for 
all Senators. I ask unanimous consent that this article be printed in 
the Record. I understand from the Government Printing Office that it 
will cost approximately $2504 to include this article in the Record.
  There being no objection, the article was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

                  [From the New Yorker, Mar. 9, 1998]

                  Annals of Warfare--The Bioweaponeers


  In the last few years, Russian scientists have invented the world's 
   deadliest plagues. Have we learned about this too late to stop it?

                          (By Richard Preston)

       Ken Alibek is a quiet man, forty-seven years old, with 
     youthful looks and an attractive, open face. He lives in a 
     rented condominium in Arlington, Virginia, a five-minute walk 
     from his office at a private consulting firm. Alibek has dark 
     hair and Asian features, and a dimpled scar on his nose, 
     which he got in an accident that was ``not heroic,'' he says, 
     involving a machine in a biowarfare plant.
       Before he arrived in the United States, in 1992, Ken Alibek 
     was Dr. Kanatjan Alibekov, the first deputy chief of research 
     and production for the Soviet biological-weapons program. He 
     was the top scientist in the program, a sprawling, 
     clandestine enterprise known as Biopreparat, or The System, 
     by the scientists who worked in it. Biopreparat research-and-
     production facilities were flung all across the Soviet Union. 
     As Dr. Alibekov, Ken Alibek had thirty-two thousand 
     scientists and staff people working under him.
       Alibek has a Doctor of Sciences degree in anthrax. It is a 
     kind of super-degree, which he received in 1988, at the age 
     of thirty-seven, for directing the research team that 
     developed the Soviet Union's most powerful weapons-grade 
     anthrax. He did this research as head of the Stepnagorsk 
     bioweapons facility, in what is now Kazakhstan, which was 
     once the largest biowarfare production facility in the world. 
     The Alibekov anthrax became fully operational in 1989. It is 
     an amber-gray powder, finer than bath talc, with smooth, 
     creamy particles that tend to fly apart and vanish in the 
     air, becoming invisible and drifting for miles. The Alibekov 
     anthrax is four times more efficient than the standard 
     product.
       Ken Alibek is part of a diaspora of biologists who came out 
     of Russia following the breakup of the Soviet Union. 
     Government funding for research decreased dramatically, and 
     scientists who were working in the biowarfare program found 
     themselves without jobs. Some of them went looking abroad. A 
     few have come to the United States or Great Britain, but most 
     went elsewhere. ``No one knows where they are,'' Alibek says. 
     One can guess that they've ended up in Iraq, Syria, Libya, 
     China, Iran, perhaps Israel, perhaps India--but no one really 
     knows, probably not even the Russian government. No doubt 
     some of these biologists have carried the Alibekov formula in 
     their heads, if not master seed strains of the anthrax and 
     samples of the finished product in containers. The Alibekov 
     anthrax may be one of the more common bioweapons in the world 
     today. It seems plausible that Iraqi biologists, for 
     instance, know the Alibekov formula by now.
       One day, Ken Alibek and I were sitting in a conference room 
     near his office talking about the anthrax he and his research 
     team had developed. ``It's very difficult to say if I felt a 
     sense of excitement over this. It's very difficult to say 
     what I felt like,'' he said. ``It wouldn't be true to say 
     that I thought I was doing something wrong. I thought I had 
     done something very important. The anthrax was one of my 
     scientific results--my personal result.''
       I asked him if he'd tell me the formula for his anthrax.
       ``I can't say this,'' he answered.
       ``I won't publish it. I'm just curious,'' I said.
       ``Look, you must understand, this is unbelievably serious. 
     You can't publish this formula,'' he said. When I assured him 
     I wouldn't, he told me the formula for the Alibekov anthrax. 
     He uttered just one sentence. The Alibekov anthrax is simple, 
     and the formula is somewhat surprising, not quite what you'd 
     expect. Two unrelated materials are mixed with pure powdered 
     anthrax spores. It took a lot of research and testing to get 
     the trick right, and Alibek must have driven his research 
     group hard and skillfully to arrive at it. ``There are many 
     countries that would like to know how to do this,'' he said.
       Until last week, when Ken Alibek was interviewed on 
     ``PrimeTime Live,'' he was known in this country only to a 
     few government officials and intelligence experts and 
     defense-industry figures. What he told the C.I.A. and other 
     people with national-security clearances was usually 
     classified. Sometimes the information was so secret that even 
     he couldn't look at his reports once they were issued. ``The 
     first report I wrote, I only saw it once from across a room. 
     It was sitting on a table. They wouldn't let me go any closer 
     to it,'' Alibek says, with a tiny smile.
       What Alibek describes is shocking, even to those who 
     thought they had a pretty good idea of what bioweapons are 
     out there and who has them. But it is particularly timely now 
     that the public's attention has suddenly focussed on the 
     possibility of biological terrorism, which gained a peculiar 
     intensity in late February, when Larry Wayne Harris and 
     William Leavitt, Jr., were arrested by the F.B.I. outside Las 
     Vegas with what was thought to be weapons-grade anthrax in 
     the trunk of a car. The repeated news reports--which turned 
     out to be a false alarm--that they were planning a terrorist 
     attack on the New York City subway system clarified what had 
     seemed to be a vague threat hidden in Iraq. Bioterror had 
     come home.
       I first heard about Ken Alibek in 1995, although at that 
     time none of my contacts would tell me his name. He was 
     referred to only as No. 2. (Biodefector No. 1 had come out in 
     1989.) Last fall, when I finally figured out that No. 2 was 
     Alibekov, I called up a source who has connections to British 
     intelligence and told him I thought I knew who No. 2 was. He 
     cut me off. ``Don't say a name,'' he said. ``I can't confirm 
     anything. Have you forgotten that we are talking on a open 
     telephone line?'' That source went nowhere, but then I had an 
     idea. For several years, I have known a man named William C. 
     Patrick III, who in certain important respects is the leading 
     American expert on biological weapons. Before 1969, when 
     President Richard Nixon shut down the American biowarfare 
     program, Bill Patrick was the chief of product development 
     for the United States Army's biological-warfare laboratories 
     at Fort Detrick, Maryland. The ``products'' that Patrick and 
     his research group developed were powdered spores and viruses 
     that were loaded into bombs and sophisticated delivery 
     systems. Patrick was arguably the top bioweaponeer in the 
     United States. He and several hundred other scientists and 
     research-staff members lost their jobs when the biowarfare 
     facilities at Fort Detrick were closed down. (Today, to the 
     best of my knowledge, the scientists at the United States 
     Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, or 
     USAMRIID, at Fort Detrick don't make offensive bioweapons. 
     They develop vaccines and treatments to defend against them. 
     As far as I can tell, the United States has no bioweapons, 
     and one piece of evidence for this is that government 
     officials today are remarkably ignorant of them.)
       Bill Patrick, who is now seventy-one years old, is one of 
     only two or three scientists still alive and active in the 
     United States who have a hands-on technical understanding of 
     bioweapons. As he explained to me, ``There's a hell of a 
     disconnect between us fossils who know about biological 
     weapons and the younger generation.'' In 1991, on the eve of 
     the Gulf War, he was summoned to the Pentagon to take part in 
     a discussion of anthrax. Patrick sat in silence while a group 
     of intelligence analysts, young men and women dressed in 
     suits, discussed anthrax in knowledgeable-sounding voices. 
     ``I reached the conclusion that these people didn't know what 
     the hell they were talking about,'' Patrick recalls. He said, 
     ``Have any of you fellows actually seen anthrax?'' and he 
     reached into his pocket and pulled out a small jar of amber-
     brown powder, and hucked it across the table. It rattled and 
     bounced toward the analysts. They jerked away, some leaping 
     to their feet. The jar contained anthrax simulant, a 
     biopowder that is essentially

[[Page S1878]]

     identical to anthrax except that it doesn't kill. It is used 
     for experiments in which properties other than infectivity 
     are being tested. ``I got that through security, by the 
     way,'' Patrick observed.
       Later, Bill Patrick was the oldest United Nations weapons 
     inspector in Iraq. The Iraqis knew exactly who he was--the 
     former top scientist in the former American bioweapons 
     program. Iraqi intelligence people started calling his hotel 
     room in Baghdad at night, hissing, ``You son of bitch, 
     Patrick,'' and then hanging up. ``It was kind of an honor, 
     but it kept me awake,'' he says.
       Today, Bill Patrick is a consultant to many government 
     agencies--the C.I.A., the F.B.I., the Defense Intelligence 
     Agency, the City of New York--on the use of biological 
     weapons in a terrorist attack. Jerome Hauer, who is the head 
     of Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's Office of Emergency Management--
     the group that would handle a bioterror event in New York, 
     should one ever happen--said to me once, ``Bill Patrick is 
     one of the only guys who can tell us about some of these 
     biological agents. We all wonder what we're going to do when 
     he decides to light up a cigar and go sailing.'' Patrick is 
     able to tell emergency planners what will happen if a 
     biological weapon is released in an American city--how many 
     people will die, where they'll die, what the deaths will look 
     like. His reports are classified.
       Bill Patrick and Ken Alibek were counterparts. They had 
     been two of the top scientists in what had been the best 
     biowarfare programs on the planet. I speculated that Patrick 
     might know Alibek.
       ``Do I know Ken?'' Patrick boomed over the telephone. 
     ``We're close friends! My wife and I had Ken over for 
     Christmas this year with our family, because we think he's 
     kind of lonely.''
       Then I thought I understood: Patrick must have participated 
     in the long government discussions with Alibek--the 
     debriefing--that would have taken place after his arrival in 
     the United States. No one else in the U.S. government, not a 
     single soul, would have understood so clearly what Alibek was 
     talking about. The two scientists had become friends during 
     the process.
       I drove down to Bill Patrick's house in Maryland, on a 
     misty day in winter, when leafless white-oak trees and 
     poplars lay in a haze across the slopes of Catoctin Mountain. 
     The clouds pulled apart and the sun appeared, gleaming 
     through cirrus like a nickel. Patrick's house is a modern 
     version of a Swiss chalet, with a view of Fort Detrick and 
     rolling countryside.
       ``Come in, young man,'' Patrick said genially. A small dog 
     was yapping around his feet. Patrick has a gentlemanly 
     manner, a rather blocky face, with hair combed over a bald 
     head, and penetrating greenish eyes. He glanced at the sky 
     and seemed to sniff the air before ushering me into the 
     house. He is exquisitely sensitive to weather.
       Alibek arrived a short while later, driving a silver BMW. 
     After lunch, we settled down around the kitchen table. 
     Patrick brought out a bottle of Glenmorangie Scotch whiskey, 
     and we poured ourselves a round. It seemed a very Russian 
     thing to do. The whiskey was smoky and golden, and it moved 
     the talk forward.
       ``You know, I'm disappointed the agency didn't do better by 
     you, Ken,'' Patrick remarked. He turned to me. ``They let him 
     sign up for all these credit cards.''
       Alibek smiled wryly. ``This was a problem.'' The C.I.A. had 
     introduced him to Visa. ``I could buy things with the cards, 
     but it didn't seem like money. Then I found out you have to 
     pay for it later.''
       Alibek speaks English with a mild Russian accent that makes 
     his serious manner seem almost gloomy. He often has a 
     cigarette smoldering between is fingertips, but he works out 
     at a health club, and he has broad, firm shoulders. His brown 
     eyes seem sombre, and he wears black wire-rimmed eyeglasses. 
     He favors linen shirts with band collars, and soft wool-pique 
     jackets in dark, muted colors. He has a calm expression, with 
     a downward-glancing gaze, and he looks vaguely Chinese. 
     Ethnically, he is a Kazakh. He was born and raised in 
     Kazakhstan. In Russia, he was twenty-five pounds heavier, 
     really quite stout, but he says that he is a different person 
     now, even physically.
       I asked Alibek how he feels about living here. ``I'm happy 
     I'm not doing the work,'' he said. He paused. ``I'm not one 
     hundred per cent happy. I know how people feel about me in 
     Russia. Some of my scientific colleagues feel I am a 
     betrayer.'' Alibek keeps his emotions well hidden, perhaps 
     even from himself. He does not laugh easily. When he does 
     laugh, he is clearly enjoying himself, but his body is 
     slightly rigid. He quit Biopreparat in 1991, left Russia with 
     his family, and abruptly ended up in the United States. 
     According to Alibek, some of his former colleagues at 
     Biopreparat--which was privatized--sent word through 
     intermediaries that ``if you ever come to Russia you can 
     expect some problems.''
       ``I've got no desire to go to Russia,'' Alibek said, 
     shrugging. He recently separated from his wife, although they 
     enjoy a cordial relationship. She lives near him with their 
     two boys, whom he sees almost every day. His oldest child, a 
     daughter, is studying architecture at an Ivy League 
     university. At times, Alibek has suffered from loneliness and 
     a sense of dislocation, and he has had some concerns about 
     how he will support his wife and children in the United 
     States. The Alibeks had a privileged life in Russia, with 
     drivers to take them everywhere and all the money they could 
     use. The United States Government paid him consulting fees 
     while he was briefing scientists and officials, but now he is 
     on his own.
       Ken Alibek was raised in Alma-Ata, then the capital of 
     Kazakhstan. Alma-Ata is in central Asia, not far from the 
     Chinese border, on the medieval silk route. His first 
     language was Kazakh, and he learned Russian at school. He got 
     a medical degree at the military medical institute at Tomsk. 
     His special interest was infectious-disease epidemiology. At 
     some point while he was still in medical school, he was 
     chosen to work for Biopreparat. Since it was a secret system, 
     you didn't really apply; you were approached and brought in. 
     He rose fast. In 1982, at the age of thirty-one, he became 
     the acting director of the Omutninsk bioweapons-production 
     plant, a major facility in the Kirov region of Russia. 
     Eventually, he ended up working in Biopreparat's 
     headquarters, a large building in Moscow--the same building 
     where Biopreparat is situated today.
       In early April of 1988, Ken Alibek received a telephone 
     call in his office in Moscow. It came from his friend and 
     colleague Lev Sandakhchiev, the director of a Biopreparat 
     facility called Vector, a huge, isolated virology-research 
     campus in the larch forests outside Novosibirsk, a city in 
     western Siberia. In the late nineteen-eighties, Vector was 
     devoted largely to the development and production of virus 
     weapons (Dr. Sandakhchiev denies this.) Dr. Sandakhchiev 
     reported that there had been an accident. He was reluctant to 
     discuss it on the telephone.
       ``Send me the details in a cryptogram,'' Alibek said. Once 
     a day for the next fourteen days, Alibek received a new 
     cryptogram about the victim of the accident, Dr. Nikolai 
     Ustinov.
       Dr. Ustinov was forty-four years old. Alibek recalls him as 
     a fair-skinned man with light-brown hair, ethnically a 
     Russian. He had a wife and children. Alibek thought of him as 
     a good guy and a talented scientist, easy to talk with, 
     receptive to new ideas. Ustinov had been doing basic military 
     research on the Marburg virus, studying its potential as a 
     weapon. The long-term goal was to see if it could be loaded 
     into special biological warheads on the MIRV missiles that 
     were aimed at the United States. (A MIRV has multiple 
     warheads, which are directed at different targets.) At the 
     time, the Soviet biological missile warheads were designed to 
     be loaded with strategic/operational smallpox virus, Black 
     Death, and anthrax. The Marburg virus had potential for 
     weaponization, too. Marburg is a close cousin to the Ebola 
     virus, and is extremely lethal. Dr. Ustinov had been wearing 
     a spacesuit in a Level 4 hot lab, injecting guinea pigs with 
     Marburg virus. He pricked himself in the finger with a 
     needle, and it penetrated two layers of rubber globes.
       Nikolai Ustinov exited through an air lock and a chemical 
     decon shower to Level 3, and used an emergency telephone to 
     call his supervisor. The supervisor decided to put Ustinov 
     into a biocontainment hospital, a twenty-bed unit with steel 
     air-lock doors, like the doors of a submarine, where nurses 
     and doctors wearing spacesuits could monitor him. He was not 
     allowed to speak with his wife and children. Ustinov did not 
     seem to be afraid of dying, but, separated from his family, 
     he became deeply depressed.
       On about the fourth day, Ustinov developed a headache, and 
     his eyes turned red. Tiny hemorrhages were occurring in them. 
     He requested a laboratory notebook, and he began writing a 
     diary in it, every day. He was a scientist, and he was 
     determined to explain how he was dying. What does it feel 
     like to die of Marburg virus? What are the psychological 
     effects? For a while, he maintained a small hope that he 
     wouldn't die, but when his skin developed spontaneous bruises 
     he understood what the future held. Dr. Sandakhchiev's 
     cryptograms to Alibek were dry and factual, and didn't 
     include the human details. Alibek would later learn that 
     perhaps twice Ustinov had broken down and wept.
       Alibek was frantic to get help to Ustinov. He begged the 
     Ministry of Defense for a special immune serum, but 
     bureaucratic delays prevented its arrival in Siberia until it 
     was too late. When Ustinov began to vomit blood and pass 
     bloody black diarrhea, the doctor gave him transfusions, but 
     as they put the blood into him it came out of his mouth and 
     rectum. Ustinov was in prostration. They debated replacing 
     all the blood in his body with fresh new blood--a so-called 
     whole-body transfusion. They were afraid that that might 
     trigger a total flooding hemorrhage, which would kill him, so 
     they didn't do it.
       Alibek did not know exactly which strain of Marburg had 
     infected his colleague. It had been obtained by Soviet 
     intelligence somewhere, but the scientists were never told 
     where strains came from. The Marburg virus seems to live in 
     an unknown animal host in East Africa. It has been associated 
     with Kitum Cave, near Mt. Elgon, so the Soviet strain could 
     have been obtained around there, but Alibek suspected that it 
     came from Germany. In 1967, the virus had broken out at a 
     vaccine factory in Marburg, a small city in central Germany, 
     and had killed a number of people who were working with 
     monkeys that were being used to produce vaccine. One of the 
     survivors was a man named Popp, and Alibek thought that 
     Ustinov was probably dying of the strain that had come from 
     him.
       I have seen a photograph of a Marburg monkey worker taken 
     shortly before his death, in late summer, 1967. He is a stout

[[Page S1879]]

     man, lying on a hospital bed without a shirt. His mouth is 
     slack, his teeth are covered with blood. He is hemorrhaging 
     from the mouth and nose. The blood has run down his neck and 
     pooled in the hollow of his throat. It looks spidery, because 
     it's unable to clot. He also seems to be leaking blood from 
     his nipples.
       The final pages of Dr. Nikolai Ustinov's scientific journal 
     are smeared with unclotted blood. His skin developed starlike 
     hemorrhages in the underlayer. Incredibly--the Vector 
     scientists had never seen this--he sweated blood directly 
     from the pores of his skin, and left bloody fingerprints on 
     the pages of his diary. He wept again before he died.
       Ken Alibek is nearly hypnotic when he speaks of these 
     things in his flat voice. We sat around the kitchen table as 
     if we were old friends sharing a story. A gray light shone 
     through the kitchen window, and I saw the red flash of a 
     cardinal near the Patricks' bird feeder, almost a flicker of 
     blood. The dog noticed a squirrel, and started barking. ``Go 
     get him, Billy,'' Patrick said, rising to let the dog out.
       Dr. Ustinov died on April 30, 1988. An autopsy was 
     performed in the spacesuit morgue of the biocontainment 
     hospital. If this was indeed the Popp strain of Marburg 
     virus--and who could say?--it was incredibly lethal. It 
     produced effects in the human body that were stunning, 
     terrifying. Alibek says that a pathology team removed 
     Ustinov's liver and his spleen. They sucked a quantity of his 
     destroyed blood out of a leg vein using large syringes.
       They froze the blood and the body parts. They kept the 
     Ustinov strain alive and continually replicating in the 
     laboratories at Vector. They named the strain Variant U, 
     after Ustinov, and they learned how to mass-produce it in 
     simple bioreactors, flasks used for growing viruses. They 
     dried Variant U, and processed it into an inhalable dust. The 
     particles of Variant U were coated to protect them in the air 
     so that they would drift for many miles.
       In late 1990, Biopreparat researchers tested airborne 
     Variant U on monkeys and other small animals in special 
     explosion-test chambers at the Stepnagorsk plant. Marburg 
     Variant U proved to be extremely potent in airborne form. 
     They found that just one to five microscopic particles of 
     Variant U lodged in the lungs of a monkey were almost 
     guaranteed to make the animal crash, bleed, and die. With 
     normal weapons-grade anthrax, in comparison, it takes about 
     eight thousand spores lodged in the lungs to pretty much 
     guarantee infection and death.
       Alibek said that by the fall of 1991, just before Boris 
     Yeltsin came to power, Marburg Variant U was on the verge of 
     becoming a strategic/operational biological weapon, ready to 
     be manufactured in large quantities and loaded into warheads 
     on MIRVs. These warheads are sinister things. Ten separate 
     cone-shaped warheads, each targeted on a different location, 
     sit atop a missile. Special cooling systems inside each 
     warhead keep the virus alive during the heat of reentry 
     through the earth's atmosphere. ``If we can land a cosmonaut 
     to earth alive, we can do the same with a virus,'' Alibek 
     explained. ``We use parachutes.'' The biowarheads are 
     parachuted over a city, and at a certain altitude they break 
     apart. Out of each warhead bursts a spray of more than a 
     hundred oval bomblets the size of small cantaloupes. The 
     cantaloupes fly out a distance and then split in overlapping 
     patterns, releasing a haze of bioparticles that quickly 
     becomes invisible.
       Variant U never became part of the Soviets' strategic 
     arsenal, which was stocked with Black Death, Alibekov 
     anthrax, and powdered smallpox. (Never less than twenty tons 
     of weapons-grade dry smallpox was stockpiled in bunkers.) But 
     it seems quite possible that when the Russian biowarfare 
     facilities fell on hard times and biologists began leaving 
     Russia to work in other countries, some of them carried 
     freeze-dried Variant U with them, ready for further 
     experimentation. Variant U started, perhaps, with a monkey 
     worker named Popp, but its end in the human species is yet to 
     be seen.
       A generation ago, biological weapons were called germ-
     warfare weapons. Biological weapons are very different from 
     chemical weapons. A chemical weapon is a poison that kills 
     upon contact with the skin. Bioweapons are microorganisms, 
     bacteria or viruses, that invade the body, multiply inside 
     it, and destroy it. Bioweapons can be used as strategic 
     weapons. That is, they are incredibly powerful and dangerous. 
     They can kill huge numbers of people if they are used 
     properly, and their effects are not limited to one place or a 
     small target. Chemical weapons, on the other hand, can be 
     used only tactically. It is virtually impossible to put 
     enough of a chemical in the air in a high enough 
     concentration to wipe out a large number of people over a 
     large territory. And chemicals aren't alive and can't spread 
     through an infectious process.
       There are two basic types of biological weapons, those that 
     are contagious and those that are not. Anthrax is not 
     contagious: people don't spread it among themselves; you 
     can't catch anthrax from someone who is dying of it. Smallpox 
     is contagious. It spreads rapidly, magnifying itself, causing 
     mortality and chaos on a large scale.
       Like any weapon, a biological weapon can be released 
     accidentally, but when a biological accident happens, the 
     consequences can be particularly insidious. I talked about 
     this with Ken Alibek that day in Bill Patrick's kitchen, 
     while we drank whiskey in the soft light of a winter 
     afternoon. Alibek spoke about how bioweapons have a 
     disturbing tendency to invade nonhuman populations of living 
     creatures--thus finding a new niche in the ecosystems of the 
     earth, apart from the human species. When he was the acting 
     director of the biowarfare facility at Omutninsk, his safety 
     officers discovered that wild rodents living in the woods 
     outside the factory had become chronically infected with the 
     Schu-4 military strain of tularemia--a bacterium that causes 
     a type of pneumonia--which was being made in the plant. It 
     was a hot, lethal strain that came from the United States: an 
     American biological weapon that the Soviets had managed to 
     obtain during the nineteen-fifties. Now, unexpectedly, the 
     wild rodents were spreading Schu-4 among themselves in the 
     forests around Omutninsk. The rodents were not the natural 
     host of tularemia, but it had apparently established itself 
     in them as new hosts. People catch tularemia easily from 
     rodents, and it can be fatal. Alibek mounted an investigation 
     and found that a pipe running through a basement area had a 
     small leak and was dripping a suspension of tularemia cells 
     into the ground. The rodents may have come in contact with 
     the contaminated soil in that one spot.
       The staff tried to sterilize the frost of rodents near the 
     plant. That didn't work, because rodents are impossible to 
     eradicate. ``We could not get rid of the rodents. We tried 
     everything,'' Alibek said. ``Nobody knows today, but we can 
     assume that the tularemia is still there in the rodents.'' 
     Nobody knows if anyone has died of the American-Russian 
     tularemia around the Kirov region.
       ``Could it have spread across Russia in rodents?'' I asked.
       ``This I don't know.''
       Biopreparat, or The System, was set up in 1973, just a year 
     after the Soviet Union signed the Biological and Toxin 
     Weapons Convention, an agreement banning the development, 
     use, and stockpiling of biological weapons. The United 
     States, which had ended its offensive-bioweapons program in 
     1969, also signed the treaty, as did Great Britain. (Some 
     hundred and forty nations have signed the convention by now.) 
     The Soviets continued to believe, however, that the United 
     States had not ended its bioweapons program but simply hidden 
     it away, turning it into a ``black''weapons program. ``The 
     notion that the Americans had given up their biological 
     weapons was thought of as the great American lie,'' a British 
     intelligence officer recalls. ``In fact, most of the 
     Biopreparat scientists had never even heard of the Biological 
     Weapons Convention.''
       Biopreparat consisted of some forty research-and-production 
     facilities. About a dozen of them were enormous. Perhaps half 
     of the employees developed weapons and the other half made 
     medicines. Biopreparat worked both sides of the street: it 
     cured diseases and invented new ones. An island in the Aral 
     Sea, curiously named Rebirth Island, was used for open-air 
     weapons testing. Large numbers of animals, and perhaps some 
     humans, died there. Biopreparat was modelled to some extent 
     on the Manhattan Project, the program that led to the 
     first atomic bomb. Military people administered the 
     program and scientists did the research-and-development 
     work.
       Somehow, Biopreparat's weapons program remained invisible 
     to the American scientific community. There was a commonly 
     held belief among many American scientists, supported by the 
     strong, even passionate views of a handful of experts in 
     biological weapons, that the Soviet Union was not violating 
     the treaty. This view persisted, despite reports to the 
     contrary from intelligence agencies, which were often viewed 
     as being driven by right-wing ideology.
       One of the side effects of the closing of the American 
     bioweapons program was that the United States lost its 
     technical understanding of biological weapons. There has long 
     been a general feeling among American scientists--it's hard 
     to say just how widespread it is, but it is definitely 
     there--that biological weapons don't work. They are said to 
     be uncontrollable, liable to infect their users, or 
     unworkable in any practical sense. A generation ago, leading 
     physicists in this country understood nuclear weapons because 
     they had built them, and they had observed their effects in 
     field tests and in war. The current generation of American 
     molecular biologists has been spared the agony of having 
     created weapons of mass destruction, but, since these 
     biologists haven't built them, or tested them, they don't 
     know much about their real performance characteristics.
       Sitting in Bill Patrick's kitchen, I said to Alibek, 
     ``There seems to be a common belief among American scientists 
     that biological weapons aren't effective as weapons. You see 
     these views quoted occasionally in newspapers and 
     magazines.''
       Alibek looked disturbed, then annoyed. ``You test them to 
     find out. You learn how to make them work,'' he said to me. 
     ``I had a meeting yesterday at a defense agency. They knew 
     absolutely nothing about biological weapons. They want to 
     develop protection against them, but all their expertise is 
     in nuclear weapons. I can say I don't believe that nuclear 
     weapons work. Nuclear weapons destroy everthing. Biological 
     weapons are more . . . beneficial. They don't destroy 
     buildings, they only destroy vital activity.''
       ``Vital activity?''
       ``People,'' he said.
       The first defector to emerge from Biopreparat was Vladimir 
     Pasechnik, a microbiologist, who arrived in Great Britain

[[Page S1880]]

     in 1989, just as the Soviet Union was beginning to crumble. 
     (He was No. 1 to Alibek's No. 2.) Pasechnik frightened 
     British intelligence, and later the C.I.A., when he told them 
     that his work as director of the Institute of Ultra-pure 
     Biopreparations, in Leningrad, had involved offensive-
     biowarfare research into Yersinia pestis, a pestilential 
     microbe that causes plague, or Black Death--an airborne 
     contagious bacterial organism that wiped out a third of the 
     population of Europe around the year 1348. Natural plague is 
     curable with antibiotics. After listening to Dr. Pasechnik, 
     the British concluded that the Soviet Union had developed a 
     genetically engineered strain of plague that was resistant to 
     antibiotics. Because the Black Death can travel through the 
     air in a cough from person to person, a strain of multi-drug-
     resistant Black Death might be able to amplify itself through 
     a human population in ever-widening chains of infection, 
     culminating in a biological crown fire in the human species. 
     No nuclear weapon could do that. What was the Soviet Union 
     doing developing strategic contagious biological weapons? ``I 
     couldn't sleep at night, thinking about what we were doing,'' 
     Pasechnik told his British handlers. Even though Western 
     intelligence agencies had known that the Russians had a 
     bioweapons program, they had not known what was being 
     developed, and that the United States was a so-called deep 
     target, far enough away so that the Soviet Union wouldn't be 
     contaminated.
       President George Bush and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher 
     were briefed on Pasechnik's revelations, and they put direct 
     personal pressure on Mikhail Gorbachev to open up the 
     biowarfare facilities in the U.S.S.R. to a team of outside 
     inspectors. Eventually, he agreed, and a joint British-
     American weapons-inspection team toured four of the main 
     Biopreparat facilities in January, 1991. The inspectors 
     visited Vector (the virology complex outside Novosibirsk, 
     where Ustinov died) and a giant, high-security facility south 
     of Moscow called the State Research Center for Applied 
     Microbiology at Obolensk, where they found fermenter tanks--
     forty of them, each two stories tall. They were maintained at 
     Biosafety Level 4, inside huge ring-shaped biocontainment 
     zones, in a building called Corpus One. The facility was 
     dedicated to research on a variety of bacterial microbes, 
     especially Yersinia pestis. The Level 4 production tanks were 
     obviously intended for making enormous quantities of 
     something deadly, but when the inspectors arrived the tanks 
     were sparkling clean and sterile.
       As the British and American weapons inspectors toured the 
     Biopreparat facilities, they ran into the same problems that 
     recently faced the United Nations Special Commission 
     inspectors in Iraq. They were met with denials, evasions, and 
     large rooms that had been stripped of equipment and cleaned 
     up. A British inspector said to me, ``This was clearly the 
     most successful biological-weapons program on earth. These 
     people just sat there and lied to us, and lied, and lied.''
       The deal was that after the Americans and the British had 
     peeked at Biopreparat a team of Soviet inspectors was to 
     visit the United States. In December, 1991, Ken Alibek and a 
     number of leading Biopreparat scientists and military people 
     visited USAMRIID, at Fort Detrick, the Army's Dugway Proving 
     Ground, in Utah, and the Army's old bioweapons-production 
     facility in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, which had been abandoned 
     and partly dismantled in 1969. The Russians stumbled around 
     the weeds in Pine Bluff and saw rusting railroad tracks, 
     buildings with their roofs falling in, and nothing that 
     worked. Alibek was pretty well convinced by the time he got 
     home that the United States did not have a bioweapons 
     program. But when the final report was issued by the 
     inspectors to the government of Boris Yeltsin it stated that 
     they had found plenty of evidence for a program. Alibek 
     refused to participate in the writing of that report, and he 
     decided to quit Biopreparat.
       ``It was a confused situation,'' he said. ``It was at the 
     exact time when the Soviet Union collapsed. I told all these 
     people I didn't agree with their politics.'' For a few 
     months, he hung on in Moscow, supporting his family by 
     trading--``It was easy to make money in those days, you could 
     trade anything''--but he found that his telephone was tapped, 
     and that the K.G.B. had set up a so-called gray unit to watch 
     him, a surveillance team stationed near his apartment. He 
     decided to move his family to Alma-Ata, in Kazakhstan. What 
     happened next Alibek refuses to talk about. He will not tell 
     me how he got his family to the United States. Once here, he 
     dropped completely out of sight. It is pretty obvious that he 
     was holed up with American intelligence people, discussing 
     his scientific and technical knowledge with them. Several 
     years went by and Dr. Alibekov morphed into Ken Alibek.
       The most powerful bioweapons are dry powders formed of tiny 
     particles that are designed to lodge in the human lung. The 
     particles are amber or pink. They have a strong tendency to 
     fly apart from one another, so that if you throw them in the 
     air they disperse like a crowd leaving Yankee Stadium. As 
     they disperse, they become invisible to the human eye, 
     normally within five seconds after the release. You can't see 
     a bioweapon, you can't smell it, you can't taste it, and you 
     don't know it was there until days later, when you start to 
     cough and bleed, and by that time you may be spreading it 
     around. Bill Patrick holds five patents on special processes 
     for making biodusts that will disperse rapidly in the air and 
     form an invisible sea of particles. His patents are 
     classified. The U.S. government does not want anyone to 
     obtain Patrick's research.
       The particles of a bioweapon are exceedingly small, about 
     one to five microns in diameter. You could imagine the size 
     this way: around fifty to a hundred bioparticles lined up in 
     a row would span the thickness of a human hair. The particles 
     are light and fluffy, and don't fall to earth. You can 
     imagine motes of dust dancing in a shaft of sunlight. Dust 
     motes are mostly bits of hair and fuzz. They are much larger 
     than weaponized bioparticles. If a dust mote were as thick 
     as a log, then a weaponized bioparticle would resemble a 
     child's marble. The tiny size of a weaponized bioparticle 
     allows it to be sucked into the deepest sacs of the lung, 
     where it sticks to the membrane, and enters the 
     bloodstream, and begins to replicate. A bioweapon can kill 
     you with just one particle in the lung. If the weapon is 
     contagious in human-to-human transmission, you will kill a 
     lot of other people, too. So much death emergent from one 
     particle. Given the right weather conditions, a bioweapon 
     will drift in the air for up to a hundred miles.
       Sunlight kills a bioweapon. That is, a bioweapon 
     biodegrades in sunlight. It has a ``half-life,'' like nuclear 
     radiation. This is known as the decay time of the bioweapon. 
     Anthrax has a long decay time--it has a tough spore. 
     Tularemia has a decay time of only a few minutes in sunlight. 
     Therefore, tularemia should always be released at night.
       For many years during the nineteen-fifties and sixties, 
     Bill Patrick had his doubts that bioweapons work. Those 
     doubts were removed decisively during the summer of 1968, 
     when one of the biggest of a long series of open-air 
     biological tests was conducted over the Pacific Ocean 
     downwind of Johnston Atoll, a thousand miles southwest of 
     Hawaii. There, in reaches of open sea, American strategic 
     tests of bioweapons had been conducted secretly for four 
     years. Until very recently, these tests remained unknown to 
     people without security clearances.
       ``We tested certain real agents, and some of them were 
     lethal,'' Patrick said. The American strategic tests of 
     bioweapons were as expensive and elaborate as the tests of 
     the first hydrogen bombs at Eniwetok Atoll. They involved 
     enough ships to have made the world's fifth-largest 
     independent navy. The ships were positioned around Johnston 
     Atoll, upwind from a number of barges loaded with hundreds of 
     rhesus monkeys.
       Late one afternoon, Bill Patrick went out to Johnston Atoll 
     and stood on the beach to watch a test. At sunset, just as 
     the sun touched the horizon, a Marine Phantom jet flew in 
     low, heading on a straight line parallel to the beach, and 
     then continued over the horizon. Meanwhile, a single pod 
     under is wings released a weaponized powder. The powder 
     trailed into the air like a whiff of smoke and disappeared 
     completely. This was visual evidence that the particles were 
     flying away from one another. Patrick's patents worked.
       The scientists call this a line-source laydown. The jet was 
     disseminating a small amount of biopowder for every mile of 
     flight (the exact amount is still classified). One can 
     imagine a jet doing a line-source laydown over Los Angeles, 
     flying from the San Fernando Valley to Long Beach, releasing 
     dust from a single pod under the wing. It would take a few 
     minutes. The jet would appear on radar, but the trail of 
     bioweapon would be invisible. In Iraq, United Nations 
     inspectors found a videotape of an Iraqi Phantom jet doing a 
     line-source laydown over the desert. The techniques looked 
     precisely like the American laydowns, even to the Iraqis' use 
     of a Phantom jet. The one difference was that the Iraqi 
     Phantom had no pilot: it was a remote-controlled drone.
       At Johnston Atoll, the line of particles moved with the 
     wind over the sea, some-what like a windshield wiper sweeping 
     over glass. Stationed in the path of the particles, at 
     intervals extending many miles away, were the barges full of 
     monkeys, manned by nervous Navy crews wearing biohazard 
     spacesuits. The line of bioparticles passed over the barges 
     one by one. Then the monkeys were taken back to Johnston 
     Atoll, and over the next few days half of the died. Half of 
     the monkeys survived, and were fine. Patrick could see, 
     clearly enough, that a jet that did a laydown of a modest 
     amount of military bioweapon over Los Angeles could kill half 
     the city. It would probably be more efficient at causing 
     human deaths than a ten-megaton hydrogen bomb.
       ``What was the agent you used?'' I asked Patrick.
       ``I don't want to tell you. It may still be classified. The 
     real reason is that a lot of countries would like to know 
     what we used, and not just the Iraqis. When we saw those test 
     results, we knew beyond a doubt that biological weapons are 
     strategic weapons. We were surprised. Even we didn't think 
     they would work that well.''
       ``But the agent you used was curable with antibiotics, 
     right?'' I said.
       ``Sure.''
       ``So people could be cured--''
       ``Well, think about it. Let's say you hit the city of 
     Frederick, right here. That's a small city, with a population 
     of about fifty thousand. You could cause thirty thousand 
     infections. To treat the infections, you'd need--let me 
     see.'' He calculated quickly: ``Eighty-four grams of 
     antibiotic per person . . . that's . . . oh, my heavens, 
     you'd need more

[[Page S1881]]

     than two tons of antibiotic, delivered overnight! There isn't 
     that much antibiotic stored anywhere in the United States. 
     Now think about New York City. It doesn't take a 
     mathematician to see that if you hit New York with a 
     biological weapon you are gonna tie things up for a while.''
       Today, Biopreparat is a much smaller organization than it 
     was during the Soviet years, and it is ostensibly dedicated 
     entirely to peaceful research and production. You can buy 
     face cream and vodka made by Biopreparat. Vector, where 
     Variant U was developed, is no longer part of Biopreparat. 
     The Vector laboratories are undergoing an extremely painful 
     and perhaps incomplete conversion to peaceful use, and the 
     Vector scientists are secretive about some of their work. Dr. 
     Frank Malinoski, who was a member of the British-American 
     team that inspected Vector in the early nineteen-nineties, 
     told me that it is now generally believed that the weapons 
     program has been taken over by the Russian Ministry of 
     Defense. ``If Biopreparat was once an egg, then the weapons 
     program was the yolk of the egg,'' he said. ``They've hard-
     boiled the egg, and taken out the yolk and hidden it.''
       If, in fact, the yolk exists, what can Western governments 
     do about it? After years of avoiding confrontation with the 
     Russians over bioweapons, American officials are still 
     uncertain how to proceed. Twenty million dollars or so--no 
     one seems sure of the amount--has been budgeted by a 
     hodgepodge of agencies to offer financial support to Russian 
     biologists for peaceful research (so they won't go abroad). 
     The National Academy of Sciences, for example, spent a 
     million and a half dollars on research funding for the 
     Russians this past year. But the agencies are in a quandary, 
     and fear the scandal that would ensue if it turned out that 
     their funds had been diverted for weapons research.
       The yolk of the bioweapons program may now be hidden away 
     in military facilities run by the Russian Ministry of 
     Defense, which are off limits to Americans. The largest of 
     these is a complex near Sergiyev Posad, and old town about 
     thirty miles northeast of Moscow. It's not clear how much 
     real control Boris Yeltsin has over the Russian military. If 
     the Ministry of Defense wanted to have a bioweapons program, 
     could anyone tell it to stop? One prominent American 
     scientist said to me, ``All of our efforts in touchy-feely 
     relationships have certainly engaged the former Biopreparat 
     people, but we've been turned down flat by the military 
     people. No doubt they're hiding something at Sergiyev Posad, 
     but what are they hiding? Is it a weapons program? Or is it a 
     shadow that doesn't mean anything, like the shadow on the 
     shade in `Home Alone'? We just don't know.''
       Meanwhile, there is strong suspicion that at some of the 
     more visible laboratories weapons-related genetic engineering 
     is being conducted. Genetic engineering, in military terms, 
     is the creation of genetically altered viruses and bacteria 
     in order to enhance their power as weapons. This work can be 
     done by altering an organism's DNA, which is the ribbon-like 
     molecule that contains the organism's genetic code and is 
     found in every cell and in every virus particle. Three months 
     ago, researchers at the Center for Applied Microbiology at 
     Obolensk--the place south of Moscow where Biopreparat once 
     developed and mass-produced hot strains of Black Death for 
     Soviet missiles and weapons systems--published a paper in the 
     British medical journal Vaccine describing how they'd created 
     a genetically engineered anthrax. The Obolensk anthrax, they 
     reported, was resistant to the standard anthrax vaccine.
       Ken Alibek thinks that the Russians published information 
     about their research because ``they are trying to get some 
     kind of `legalization' of military genetic engineering,'' and 
     because they are proud of their work. The Biological Weapons 
     Convention is vague on exactly what constitutes research into 
     an offensive weapon. Alibek said that the Russian biologists 
     are trying to push the envelope of what is permissible. Then, 
     ``if someone other than Boris Yeltsin was in power, they 
     could re-create their entire biological-weapons program 
     quickly.''
       Western biowarfare experts don't know if the new engineered 
     anthrax is as deadly as normal anthrax, but it my be, and it 
     could fall into the wrong hands, such as Iraq or Iran. The 
     real problem may lie in those countries. Genetic-engineering 
     work can be done in a small building by a few Ph.D. 
     researchers, using tabletop machines that are available 
     anywhere in the world at no great cost. In high schools in 
     the United States today, students are taught how to do 
     genetic engineering. The learn how to create new variants of 
     (safe) bacteria which are resistant to antibiotics. One 
     genetic-engineering kit for high-school students costs forty-
     two dollars and is sold through the mail.
       A virus that seems particularly amendable to engineering is 
     smallpox. According to Alibek and others, it is possible that 
     smallpox has left Russia for parts unknown, travelling in the 
     pockets of mercenary biologist. ``Iran, Iraq, probably Libya, 
     probably Syria, and North Korea could have smallpox,'' Alibek 
     said. He bases his list partly on what Russian intelligence 
     told him while he was in the program, for the Russians were 
     very sensitive to other countries' bioweapons programs, and 
     watched carefully. Bioweapons programs may exist in Israel 
     (which has never signed the bioweapons treaty) and Pakistan. 
     Alibek is convinced that India has a program. He says that 
     when he was in Biopreparat, Russian intelligence showed him 
     evidence that China has a large bioweapons program.
       The deadliest natural smallpox virus is known as Variola 
     major. Natural smallpox was eradicated from the earth in 
     1997, when the last human case of it appeared, in Somalia. 
     Since then, the virus has lived only in laboratories. 
     Smallpox is an extremely lethal virus, and it is highly 
     contagious in the air. When a child with chicken pox 
     appears in a school classroom, many or most of the 
     children in the class may go on to catch chicken pox. 
     Smallpox is as contagious as chicken pox. One case of 
     smallpox can give rise to twenty new cases. Each of those 
     cases can start twenty more. In 1970, when a man infected 
     with smallpox appeared in an emergency room in Germany, 
     seventeen cases of smallpox appeared in the hospital on 
     the floors above. Ultimately, the German government 
     vaccinated a hundred thousand people to stop the outbreak. 
     Two years later in Yugoslavia, a man with a severe case of 
     smallpox visited several hospitals before dying in an 
     intensive-case unit. To stop the resulting outbreak, which 
     forced twenty thousand people into isolation. Yugoslav 
     health authorities had to vaccinate virtually the entire 
     population of the country within three weeks. Smallpox can 
     start the biological equivalent of a runaway chain 
     reaction. About a third of the people who get a hot strain 
     of smallpox die of it. The skin puffs up with blisters the 
     size of hazelnuts, especially over the face. A severe case 
     of small pox can essentially burn the skin off one's body.
       The smallpox vaccine wears off after ten to twenty years. 
     None of us are immune any longer, unless we've had a recent 
     shot. There are currently seven million usable does of 
     smallpox vaccine stored in the United States, in one location 
     in Pennsylvania. If an outbreak occurred here, it might be 
     necessary to vaccinate all two hundred and seventy million 
     people in the United States in a matter of weeks. There would 
     be not way to meet such a demand.
       ``Russia has researched the genetic alternation of 
     smallpox,'' Alibek told me. ``In 1990 and 1991, we engineered 
     a smallpox at Vector. It was found that several areas the 
     smallpox genome''--the DNA--``can be used for the 
     introduction of some foreign genetic material. The first 
     development was smallpox, and VEE.'' VEE, or Venezuelan 
     equine encephalitis, is brain virus. It causes a severe 
     headache and near-coma, but it is generally not lethal. 
     Alibek said that the researchers spliced VEE into smallpox. 
     The result was a recombinant chimera virus. In ancient Greek 
     myth, the chimera was a monster made from parts of different 
     animals. Recombination means the mixing of genes from 
     different organisms. ``It is called smallpox-VEE chimera,'' 
     Alibek said. It could also be called Vee-pox. Under a 
     microscope, Alibek said, the Veepox looks like smallpox, but 
     it isn't.
       According to Alibek, there was one major technical hurdle 
     to clear in the creation of a workable Veepox chimera, and he 
     says that it took the Vector researchers years to solve the 
     problem. They solved it by finding more than one place in the 
     smallpox DNA where you could insert new genes without 
     decreasing smallpox's ability to cause disease. Many 
     researchers feel that the smallpox virus doesn't cause 
     disease in animals in any way that is useful for 
     understanding its effects on humans. Alibek says that the 
     Russians tested Veepox in monkeys, but he says that he 
     doesn't know the results.
       More recently, Alibek claims, the Vector researchers may 
     have created a recombinant Ebola-smallpox chimera. One could 
     call it Ebolapox. Ebola virus uses the molecule RNA for its 
     genetic code, whereas smallpox uses DNA. Alibek believes that 
     the Russian researchers made a DNA copy of the disease-
     causing parts of Ebola, then grafted them into smallpox. 
     Alibek said he thinks that the Ebolapox virus is stable--that 
     is, that it will replicate successfully in a test tube or in 
     animals--which means that, once created, Ebolapox will live 
     forever in a laboratory, and will not uncreate itself. Thus a 
     new form of life may have been brought into the world.
       ``The Ebolapox could produce the form of smallpox called 
     blackpox,'' Alibek says. Blackpox, sometimes known as 
     hemorrhagic smallpox, is the most severe type of smallpox 
     disease. In a blackpox infection, the skin does not develop 
     blisters. Instead, the skin becomes dark all over. Blood 
     vessels leak, resulting in severe internal hemorrhaging. 
     Blackpox is invariably fatal. ``As a weapon, the Ebolapox 
     would give the hemorrhages and high mortality rate of Ebola 
     virus, which would give you a blackpox, plus the very high 
     contagiousness of smallpox,'' Alibek said.
       Bill Patrick became exasperated. ``Ken! Ken! I think you've 
     got overkill here. What is the point of creating an Ebola 
     smallpox? I mean, it would be nice to do this from a 
     scientific point of view, sure. But with old-fashioned 
     natural smallpox you can bring a society to its knees. You 
     don't need any Ebolapox, Ken. Why, you're just gonna kill 
     everybody.''
       ``I suspect that this research has been done,'' Alibek said 
     calmly.
       Lev Sandakhchiev, the head of Vector, strongly denies this. 
     ``In our center we developed vaccinia-virus recombinants with 
     VEE viruses and some others,'' he says. Vaccinia is a 
     harmless virus related to smallpox. It is used for making 
     vaccines.
       ``How much do you think it would cost to create genetically 
     engineered smallpox?'' I asked Alibek.
       ``This is not expensive.'' He paused, thinking. ``A few 
     million dollars. This is what it

[[Page S1882]]

     cost us for making the smallpox-VEE chimera at Vector in 1990 
     and 1991.
       Ken Alibek's statements about the genetic engineering of 
     smallpox are disturbing. I felt a need to hear some 
     perspective from senior scientists who are close to the 
     situation. Dr. Peter Jahrling is the chief scientist at 
     USAMRIID, and he has visited Russia four times in recent 
     months. (``It seems as if all I do these days is visit 
     Russia,'' he said to me.) He knows the scientists at Vector 
     pretty well. He has listened to Alibek and questioned him 
     carefully, and he doesn't believe him about the Ebola-
     smallpox chimera. ``His talk about chimeras of Ebola is sheer 
     fantasy, in my opinion,'' Jahrling said. ``This would be 
     technically formidable. We have seen zero evidence of the 
     Vector scientists doing that. But a smallpox chimera--is it 
     plausible? Yes, it is, and I think that's scary. The truth 
     is, I'm not so worried about governments anymore. I think 
     genetic engineering has been reduced to simple enough 
     principles so that any reasonably equipped group of 
     reasonably good scientists would be able to construct a 
     credible threat using genetic engineering. I don't think 
     anyone could knock out New York City with a genetically 
     engineered bug, but someone might be able to knock out a few 
     people and thereby make an incredible panic.''
       Joshua Lederberg is a member of a working group of 
     scientists at the National Academy of Sciences who advice the 
     government on biological weapons and the potential for 
     bioterrorism. He is a professor at Rockefeller University, in 
     Manhattan, and is considered to be one of the founders of the 
     biotechnology revolution. He received the Nobel Prize for 
     discovering--in 1946, when he was a young man--that bacteria 
     can swap genes with each other. It was apparent to him even 
     back then that people would soon be moving genes around, for 
     evil as well as good.
       I found Lederberg in his office, in a modest building 
     covered with vines, in a green island of grass and trees on 
     Manhattan's East Side. He is in his seventies, a man of 
     modest size and modest girth, with a trim white beard, 
     glasses, intelligent hazel eyes, and careful sentences. 
     Lederberg knows Alibek and Pasechnik. He said to me, ``They 
     are offering very important evidence. You have to look 
     carefully at what they're saying, but I offer high 
     credibility to their remarks in general.'' He seemed to be 
     choosing his words. As far as what was going on at Vector, he 
     says that ``with smallpox, anything could have happened. Lev 
     Sandakhchiev is one of the world's authorities on the 
     smallpox genome. But there are all kinds of reasons you'd 
     want to introduce modifications into smallpox.'' He said that 
     you might, for example, alter smallpox in order to make a 
     vaccine. ``You have to prove intent to make a weapon,'' he 
     said.
       Researchers normally introduce new genes into the vaccinia 
     virus. Vaccinia doesn't cause major illness in humans, but if 
     you're infected with it you become immune to smallpox. When 
     the new genes are introduced into vaccinia, they tend to make 
     the virus even weaker, even less able to trigger disease. 
     Putting new genes into smallpox presumably might make it 
     weaker, too. Alibek insisted that the Russians have found 
     places in the genome of smallpox where you can insert new 
     genes, yet the virus remains deadly.
       I said to Lederberg, ``If someone is adding genes from 
     Ebola to smallpox virus, and it's making the smallpox more 
     deadly, as Alibek says is happening in Russia, isn't that 
     evidence of intent to make a weapon?''
       ``No,'' he said firmly. ``You can't prove intent by the 
     experiment itself. It's not even clear to me that adding 
     Ebola genes to smallpox would make it more deadly. What 
     troubles me is that this kind of work is being done in a 
     clandestine way. They are not telling us what is going on. To 
     be doing such potentially evil research without telling us 
     what they are doing is a provocation. To do an experiment of 
     this kind in the United States would be almost impossible. 
     There would be an extensive review, and it might well not be 
     allowed for safety reasons. The experiment is extremely 
     dangerous, because things could get out of hand.''
       Lederberg agreed that Russia does have a clandestine 
     biological-weapons program today, though it's not at all 
     clear how much Vector and Biopreparat have to do with 
     it, since they are independent entities. As for the 
     biological missiles once aimed at the U.S., it doesn't 
     surprise him: ``You can put anything in a ballistic 
     missile.''
       Lederberg seems to be a man who has looked into the face of 
     evil for a long time and hasn't blinked. He is part of a 
     group of scientists and government officials who are trying 
     to maintain a dialogue with Russian biologists and bring them 
     into the international community of science. ``Our best hope 
     is to have a dialogue with Sandakhchiev,'' he said quietly. 
     ``There is no technical solution to the problem of biological 
     weapons. It needs an ethical, human, and moral solution if 
     it's going to happen at all. Don't ask me what the odds are 
     for an ethical solution, but there is no other solution.'' He 
     paused, considering his words. ``But would an ethical 
     solution appeal to a sociopath?''
       Terrorism is the uncontrolled part of the equation. A while 
     ago, Richard Butler, who is the head of the United Nations 
     Special Commission weapons-inspection teams in Iraq, remarked 
     to me, ``Everyone wonders what kinds of delivery systems Iraq 
     may have for biological weapons, but it seems to me that the 
     best delivery system would be a suitcase left in the 
     Washington subway.''
       Could something like that happen? What would it be like? 
     The truth is that no one really knows, because lethal 
     bioterror on a major scale has not occurred. At one point in 
     my talk with Ken Alibek in Bill Patrick's kitchen that winter 
     afternoon, we took a break, and the former master 
     bioweaponeers stood on the lawn outside the house, looking 
     down on the city of Frederick. The view reaches to the Mt. 
     Airy Ridge, a blue line in the distance. Clouds had covered 
     the sun again.
       Patrick was squinting east, with a professional need to 
     understand the nuances of wind and cloud. ``The wind is ten 
     to twelve miles an hour, gusting a bit.'' He pointed to smoke 
     coming from a building in the valley. ``See the smoke there? 
     It's drifting up a little, but see how it hangs? We have sort 
     of an inversion today, not a good one. I'd say it's a good 
     day for anthrax or Q fever.''
       Alibek lit a cigarette and watched the sky. He appraises 
     weather the same way Patrick does.
       Suddenly Patrick turned on his heel and went into his 
     garage. He returned in a few moments carrying a large 
     mayonnaise jar. He unscrewed the cap. The jar contained a 
     fine, creamy, fluffy powder, with a mottled pink tinge. The 
     pink was the dried blood of chicken embryos, he explained. 
     ``This is a simulant for VEE.'' It was a fake version of the 
     weaponized brain virus. It was sterile, and had no living 
     organisms in it. It was harmless.
       The VEE virus can be grown in weapons-grade concentration 
     in live chicken embryos. When the embryos are swimming with 
     virus particles, you break open the eggs (you had better be 
     wearing a spacesuit), and you harvest the sick embryos. You 
     freeze-dry them and process them into a powder using one of 
     Patrick's secret methods.
       He shook the jar under my face. The blood-tinged powder 
     climbed the sides of the jar. A tendril of simulated 
     bioweapon reached for my nose.
       Instinctively, I jerked my head back.
       Patrick walked across the lawn and stood by an oak tree. 
     Suddenly he extended his arm and heaved the contents of the 
     jar into the air. His simulated brain-virus weapon blasted 
     through the branches of a dogwood tree and took off in the 
     wind heading straight down a meadow and across the street, 
     booming with celerity toward Frederick. Within seconds, the 
     aerosol cloud had become invisible. But the particles were 
     there, moving with the breeze at a steady ten to twelve miles 
     an hour.
       Alibek watched, tugging at his cigarette, nonchalant, 
     mildly amused. ``Yeah. You won't see the cloud now.''
       ``Some of those particles'll go eighteen to twenty miles, 
     maybe to the Mt. Airy Ridge,'' Patrick remarked. The 
     simulated brain virus would arrive in Mt. Airy in less than 
     two hours. He walked back and put his hand on Alibek's 
     shoulder, and smiled.
       Alibek nodded.
       ``What are you thinking?'' I asked Alibek.
       He pursed his lips and shrugged. ``This is not exciting for 
     me.''
       Patrick went on, ``Say you wanted to hit Frederick today, 
     Ken, what would you use?''
       Alibek glanced at the sky, weighing the weather and his 
     options. ``I'd use anthrax mixed with smallpox.''

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