The Cobra Event

by Richard Preston

  Most of the leading scientific figures in Soviet microbiology and molecular biology took military money and did research that was connected to the development of bioweapons. Some of the scientists lobbied for the money. Others didn’t know what was going on, or didn’t want to ask too many questions. In the West, there was strong, vehement, entrenched resistance to the idea that biological weapons work, and there was a worthy but perhaps naive hope that the Soviets would be reasonable about such weapons. Scientists in general believed that the treaty was working remarkably well. Biologists in particular congratulated themselves for being more alert and wise than the physicists, who had not managed to escape the taint of weapons of mass destruction.

  Meanwhile the intelligence community kept leaking allegations about a biological-weapons program in Russia. Scientists were (quite reasonably) suspicious of intelligence information of this kind—it wasn’t backed by much hard evidence, and it seemed to come from right-wing military people and from paranoids in the C.I.A., who, it was felt, tended to demonize Russia to serve their own interests. People who tried to say that the Soviets had used toxin weapons on hill people in Southeast Asia were pilloried in scientific journals. In 1979, when airborne anthrax drifted across the city of Sverdlovsk, killing some sixty-six people, American experts in biological weapons declared that the citizens of the city had eaten some bad meat. The chief proponent of this view was a Harvard University biochemist named Matthew S. Meselson, one of the architects of the Biological Weapons Convention. He had helped persuade the Nixon White House to embrace the treaty. Meselson insisted that the anthrax accident at Sverdlovsk had been a natural event. His view prevailed for a long time, even though there were those who said that the Sverdlovsk incident was an accident involving biological weapons.

  Then in 1989, Vladimir Pasechnik, a top Biopreparat scientist, defected to Great Britain. Pasechnik had been the director of a Biopreparat research facility known as the Institute for Ultrapure Biological Preparations, in Leningrad. British military intelligence gave Pasechnik the code name Paul. The British intelligence people spent months debriefing “Paul” in a safe house in the English countryside about fifty miles west of London.

  Pasechnik spoke of massive biowarfare facilities hidden all over the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union, he said, had deployed a variety of operational strategic biowar-heads on intercontinental missiles that were targeted all over the place and could be loaded with hot agents and launched quickly. Large stockpiles of hot agents were kept in bunkers near the launch sites, including huge amounts of smallpox. Dr. Pasechnik spoke very knowledgeably of genetic engineering—he knew exactly how it was done. He said that genetic engineering of weapons was a recent focus of work in his own laboratory. He said it had been done in a variety of places in the Soviet Union with a variety of hot biological agents.

  President George Bush and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher were briefed on the situation. It seemed possible that Pasechnik was exaggerating. Much of what he claimed was difficult to verify. The Soviet Union clearly had a biological-weapons program, but what was the extent of it? Bush and Thatcher put intense personal pressure on Mikhail Gorbachev to come clean about bioweapons and allow an inspection team to tour some of the Soviet bioweapons facilities.

  This was in the late fall and early winter of 1990, when the Soviet regime was in the process of crumbling in a welter of glasnost and perestroika, and the Soviet Union was heading for economic collapse and eventual breakup. At the same time, President Bush was preparing to go to war with Iraq. (The Gulf War started in January 1991.) American and allied troops were pouring into the Persian Gulf. Intelligence reports indicated that the Iraqis possessed an arsenal of biological weapons, but the Iraqi capabilities were not known. It suddenly appeared that the United States had been caught flat-footed in respect to biological weapons, both in the Soviet Union and in the Middle East.

  “I WAS ONLY ONE MAN in a group of inspectors,” Littleberry said to Masaccio, “but I think I can speak for all of my colleagues.”

  Just before Christmas 1990, Mark Littleberry and a group of Americans were flown to London on their way to Russia for an inspection tour. Some of the Americans were C.I.A. analysts, some were in the F.B.I., some were U.S. Army experts, and some, like Littleberry, were private scientists who happened to know a great deal about biological weapons.

  The inspection team had a long wait in London. It was said that the procedure for inspecting Russian biological facilities was proving difficult to work out in detail. What was actually happening was that Gorbachev was stalling the inspection team in order to give his military people a chance to move the live weapons stocks out of the facilities and sterilize the buildings with chemicals. Suddenly, in January 1991, the team was told it was going in to have a look. While the world was preoccupied with the Gulf War, the inspectors flew to various sites in the Soviet Union.

  If there were any veils over their eyes before they went in, the veils fell away quickly. One inspector, an American who is an expert in advanced biotechnology production processes involving genetically engineered vaccines, would later say that when he went in, he was sure that the problem in Russia had been exaggerated by military people and by intelligence analysts. By the time he left, he had come to believe that the problem was so bad that it was impossible to see the bottom of it. It was “very scary,” he said.

  There were approximately sixteen identified major bioweapons facilities in the Soviet Union (or as many as fifty-two, if the smaller ones are counted). The team visited only four of them. The facilities were of two basic types: weapons-production facilities and research-and-development labs. Forty miles south of Moscow, near a town called Serpukhov, the teams explored the Center for Applied Microbiology at Obolensk, a large Biopreparat facility. Obolensk consists of thirty buildings. It is at least ten times the size of the USAMRIID complex at Fort Detrick. The main building at Obolensk is called Corpus One. It is eight stories tall, and it covers more than five acres of ground. It is an enormous monolithic biological laboratory with one and a half million square feet of laboratory space, making it one of the largest biological research facilities under one roof anywhere in the world. Corpus One is surrounded by triple layers of razor wire. The perimeter security includes tremblors (ground-vibration sensors), infrared body-heat detectors, and armed guards from the Special Forces. Inside Corpus One, the team had a chance to explore Soviet hot zones.

  They discovered that the design of Corpus One is different and somewhat more sophisticated than the design of the hot zones at USAMRIID or at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta. Obolensk Corpus One has ring-shaped hot zones, levels within levels. The hot core is at the center of the building, surrounded by concentric rings of graduated biohazard security, so that as you approach the building’s center, you go from Level 2, to Level 3, to Level 4. The Soviet scientists were justifiably proud of their ring design. They were also proud of their green AP-5 biohazard space suits. The Americans who tried them on said they were more comfortable than American biohazard suits.

  At Corpus One, the focus of research was Yersinia pestis, a bacterial organism that causes the plague. This is the organism that, during the time of the Black Death, around 1348, had killed off a third of the population of Europe in one sweep.

  The scientific director of Obolensk was a hawk-faced microbiologist and military general named Dr. N. N. Urakov. He had long, silvery, thick, straight hair that he wore swept back over his forehead. Urakov seemed to be a man without emotion, except when he spoke of the power of microorganisms, and then his voice resonated with commitment.

  The inspection teams found research areas in Corpus One that were designed for rapid mutation and fast selection of strains of plague while the strains were exposed to ultraviolet light and nuclear radiation. They came to the conclusion that the researchers were doing forced mutation and selection of strains of Black Death that could live and multiply in a nuclear-battle zone. The Obolensk Black Death was a strategic weapon. Tea
m members would later offer the opinion that the Obolensk Black Death was fully weaponized and integrated into the Soviet Union’s strategic forces and its war plans. It was a strategic bioweapon on two counts. First, it was apparently deployed in intercontinental strategic missile warheads targeted all over the planet, and second, it was highly contagious and incurable with medicine.

  The inspectors found forty giant fermenter tanks inside Corpus One’s hot zones. The tanks were used for growing huge quantities of something. They were twenty feet tall. The fact that they were placed inside the biocontainment zones was evidence that they were for growing hot agents. The tanks were about the largest reactor tanks that any of the inspectors had ever seen. Why would any legitimate medical research program need forty tanks for growing Black Death and other organisms, tanks twenty feet tall, inside a hot containment area that was surrounded by intense military security? One of the inspectors would later say that he thought you could supply the entire national output of the Iraqi biological-weapons program at the time of the Gulf War with a single Obolensk reactor tank. And there were a number of bioweapons-production facilities the scale of Obolensk scattered across Russia.

  The production equipment in Corpus One was sparkling clean and sterile when the inspectors arrived. The rooms and tanks smelled of bleach and chemicals. All of the living biological materials, the so-called seed stocks and growth media, had been removed from the parts of Corpus One that the inspectors were allowed to visit. The team took swab samples, but nothing grew in the test tubes.

  Dr. Urakov insisted to the Americans and the British that the medical research at Obolensk was entirely peaceful in nature. When asked by the inspectors why the Soviet Union had built a heavily guarded military research site, with one and a half million square feet of space, with forty reactor vessels two stories tall, much of it dedicated to Level 4 space-suit research and production of Black Death, Dr. Urakov answered that Black Death was a problem in the Soviet Union.

  The inspectors agreed with him on that score.

  However, they pointed out that the Soviet Union was reporting only a handful of deaths from plague every year, so plague couldn’t be that much of a problem. Especially, they said, because plague is controllable with simple antibiotics.

  Dr. Urakov answered that in a country as large as the Soviet Union there was “a need for research.”

  The inspectors began to ask questions about genetic engineering. Did the need for research include the need to do genetic engineering of Black Death for the purposes of creating a weapon?

  Dr. Urakov’s answers were disturbing. He suggested that his people were working with strains of Black Death that were incredibly deadly—strains you would not believe. He claimed they were natural strains. He said that vaccines didn’t work on the strains. The inspectors had the impression that he was making veiled boasts about his staff’s accomplishments in genetic engineering, but they couldn’t be sure. Urakov and his colleagues stunned the inspectors by offering to arrange for a “technology transfer” with the United States, whereby the United States would have access to the discoveries at Obolensk—for an unstated price. They insinuated that since the United States had fallen behind the Soviet Union in the area of biological weapons, the inspections were a cover—an excuse to pry into what Soviet scientists had done, so that the United States could play catch-up.

  In fact it is easy to put antibiotic-resistant genes into bacteria—it’s a basic technique, nothing fancy. Subsequent reports from Western intelligence agencies alleged that, in fact, the Obolensk Black Death was resistant to sixteen antibiotics and to nuclear radiation. How the Russians had actually developed such a strain—if they had—wasn’t clear. Had they used genetic engineering, or had they used more traditional, tried-and-true methods for developing hot strains? In any case, the United States lodged a demand with the government of Russia for an explanation as to whether Russia did or did not have a weapons-production Black Death that was multidrug resistant. To date, Russian biologists and political leaders have not given any answer to this question that makes sense. There have been only vague denials.

  “That Obolensk Black Death is an amazing product,” Littleberry said. “It is basically incurable with medicine. And it is contagious as hell in humans. If someone threw a pound of Obolensk Black Death into the Paris Metro, you would not want to be living anywhere near Paris. One of our big concerns is that the Russian government appears to have lost control over these engineered military strains.”

  THE INSPECTION TEAM flew to the city of Novosibirsk, in western Siberia. Twenty miles east of the city, in a forest of birch trees and larches, is the bioresearch complex known as the Koltsovo Institute of Molecular Biology. It consists of about thirty buildings. The buildings contain a variety of hot zones in the ring-shaped Russian design. Here the focus of research is on viruses—Ebola virus, Marburg virus, a South American brain agent called VEE (Venezuelan equine encephalitis), Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever, tick-borne encephalitis (another brain virus), and Machupo (Bolivian hemorrhagic fever).

  The team learned that the Koltsovo research facility had bioreactor tanks designed for growing smallpox virus. It dawned on them that Soviet smallpox military-production capacity could be many tons a year.

  Littleberry was stunned. “It was one of the worst moments of my life,” he said to Masaccio. “I was thinking of those doctors in India and Africa, fighting smallpox inch by inch, and meanwhile this Biopreparat monster was making smallpox by the ton.”

  It came out that Koltsovo was not the only place in Russia that had smallpox military-production capacity. There were two other places. One was a facility in a city just outside Moscow called Zagorsk (now Sergyev Posad), and another military smallpox weapons-production plant was at Pokrov.

  Littleberry: “This story you hear about how smallpox is just kept in one freezer in Russia today? Complete bullshit. The Russian Ministry of Defense is keeping seed stocks of smallpox virus at multiple locations in military superfreezers. The Russian military people are not gonna give up their smallpox, no way. Smallpox is a strategic weapon. It’s especially valuable as a weapon now that the natural virus has been eliminated from the human population.” Most people on earth have lost their immunity to smallpox. It is incredibly lethal and infective. One person infected with it can easily infect twenty more people, so a small outbreak in a population lacking immunity will mushroom into a lethal burn. “We all think we’re protected because we had our smallpox vaccinations as kids,” Littleberry said. “Bad news—the smallpox shot wears off after ten to twenty years. The last shots were given out twenty years ago. Except to soldiers. Soldiers still get them.”

  The world’s total supply of smallpox vaccine currently stands at enough shots for half a million people—enough to vaccinate one out of every ten thousand people worldwide. If smallpox started jumping from human to human in a global outbreak, smallpox vaccine would become more valuable than diamonds. On the other hand, smallpox can be engineered to elude a vaccine, rendering the existing vaccine worthless.

  At Koltsovo, the research staff admitted to the inspectors that they were “working with the DNA of the smallpox virus.” The statement shocked the inspectors. It shocked them as much as anything they had encountered. They did not understand what it meant to “work with the DNA of smallpox,” so they asked for clarification.

  The answers were vague. The inspectors went nose to nose with the Russian scientists. What did you do to smallpox? They pushed. They pushed harder. No answers came back. The situation became extremely tense, steel-hard with national-security implications, and it turned into a standoff. In the background were the shadows of intercontinental missiles loaded with living hot agents, and the inspectors wanted to know this: have you people targeted my country with smallpox in missiles? What kind of smallpox? Both sides understood that the inspectors were looking straight into the asshole of modern military biology.

  No answers were forthcoming. The explanations of the Russian biol
ogists just got stranger and stranger. They said that they were working on clones of smallpox, not on smallpox itself. Genetic experiments in the West involving smallpox are done using clones of the vaccinia virus, because vaccinia is harmless to humans (it’s the strain used for making the smallpox vaccine). To work on clones of smallpox is to work on recombinant smallpox. By insisting that they were working only on “clones of smallpox” the Russians essentially admitted that they were doing black biology with smallpox. As to whether they created whole new strains of smallpox, or whether they worked on parts of the smallpox virus, the Russians would not say. Did they take pieces of smallpox and mix them into some other virus or into a bacterium for study? Did they engineer a vaccine-elusive smallpox? It was impossible to tell.

  All of the words of the Soviet biologists were captured on tape recordings. Their statements were translated and retranslated by Russian-language experts. The words were analyzed to death by experts working for the National Security Agency and other intelligence agencies. In the end, as Littleberry put it, “We never learned what the hell they did with smallpox.”

  It should not be forgotten that these were military scientists. The goal of their research was military. They had tried and perhaps succeeded at making a genetically engineered smallpox. One participant in the confrontation between the inspectors and the Russian military biologists believed that they had mixed pieces of brain viruses into smallpox, thus making a brainpox—a smallpox that attacks the human brain.

  After the inspection teams returned from Russia, the C.I.A., British intelligence, and the National Security Agency collectively had a heart attack. A gulf had opened up between the factual knowledge of the eyewitness inspectors and the belief structure of the civilian science community. Senior scientists, especially in microbiology and molecular biology, began to get accelerated security clearances and were briefed on the situation, not only with regard to Russia but other countries as well. Scientists who attended these briefings came away shocked. “Their eyes were like saucers,” according to one American scientist who was present at several such briefings. Biologists had discovered that one or more Manhattan bomb projects had occurred in their field, and they hadn’t known about it or believed that such a thing was possible. What was particularly upsetting for some of them was the realization that leading members of their own profession had invented and were developing weapons that were in some ways significantly more powerful than the hydrogen bomb.