Cobra Event

by Preston, Richard

  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), Congo-Crimean 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 military­production 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. The British inspectors were especially appalled, and they flayed the Russian Scien­tists verbally for their irresponsible and dangerous research. In the background were the shadows of intercontinental missiles loaded with living hot agents, targeted on the United States and possibly Britain. 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 biologists 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 othe
r 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.

  Matthew Meselson at Harvard was still insisting that the Biological Weapons Convention was not being violated. For years he had dominated the discussion of biological weapons, and his opinions had been widely accepted. He had published articles in prestigious jour­nals supporting the view that the anthrax deaths in Sverdlovsk in 1979 had been caused by the citizens eating bad meat, and he offered detailed scientific data from Russian colleagues to support him. It seems that the creators of the biological weapons treaty had become its guardians, with too great a stake in the treaty's `success,' and this made them blind to Russian violations and to the reality of bio-weapons.

  Russian news reporters began to investigate the Sverdlovsk accident, and in 1991, the Moscow bureau chief of The Wall Street journal, Peter Gumbel, made three trips to Sverdlovsk, and at some personal risk, while he was being followed and harassed by the K.G.B., traced about half of the civilian victims. He located their families, who had wrenching stories to tell; he found doctors who had treated the victims; he unearthed medical evidence; and he showed that most of the victims had lived or worked next to a military com­pound. Meselson had written that the anthrax came from a 'meat-processing plant at Aramil.' Gumbel went to Aramil and found no meat plant, only a picturesque village. He later confronted the Harvard professor with the fact that the meat plant didn't exist. He reported rather drily that 'Prof. Meselson seemed taken aback.'

  Meselson found himself in an awkward position, to say the least. The Wall Street Journal's investigative reporting made it appear that the scientific data that he had published about Sverdlovsk was not only wrong but might have been fabricated by his Russian colleagues. Meselson had been both a victim and an unknowing disseminator of potentially misleading or even fraudulent scientific information. He got permission to go to Sverdlovsk, and with his wife Jeanne Guillemin and a team of collaborators, demonstrated that the outbreak really had been caused by an airborne release of anthrax from a military plant. He eventually published his findings in 1994 in the magazine Science. He did not, however, see fit to credit Peter Gumbel anywhere in his article.

  He and his co-authors concluded that only a pinch of anthrax had been released into the air, not a large amount - only a minuscule whiff of anthrax that might be almost invisible if held between thumb and forefinger. Some experts disputed the notion that such a tiny amount of anthrax could kill so many people in a plume across a city. It is more logical, and it now seems widely accepted, that the amount of anthrax was more than a pinch, but no one really knows. The accident involved production of anthrax for weapons, and the story is that filters had been left off grinding machines, but the world may never learn what really happened.

  The important thing is that Matthew Meselson had done an about-face. There is a world of difference

  between a pinch of weapon and a ton of bad meat. The other turnaround was more impressive, and it came from Russian president Boris Yeltsin, who confirmed to the world that modern Russia had inherited a biological­weapons program from the Soviet Union. This informa­tion was corroborated and expanded upon by two more senior defectors from the Russian bioweapons program. 'Cop officials in the Russian program have just recently released a list of the hot agents that the modern Russian military forces would be most likely to use in the event of war. In order of choice, it goes: smallpox, Black Death, and anthrax. One or more of them may be genetically engineered. Biological-weapons treaty? What treaty?

  Masaccio and Littleberry sat in silence for a while, as Masaccio took in the context in which the Cobra Event was being played out.

  'The cancer has metastasized,' Littleberry said. 'A lot of countries are into biological weapons now. Syria has a top-notch biological-weapons program. Syria is also believed to be a sponsor of terrorism - you would know more about that than I do, Frank. If Syria's got a program, you can wonder if Israel has gone seriously into black biology, and Israeli scientists are some of the best in the world. Iran is heavily into biological weapons; they know all about molecular biology, and they are also testing cruise missiles. Think about that. Think about line streakouts of an engineered hot agent. China has massive biological-weapons facilities out in the Sinkiang desert, but it's hard for us to know what they're doing, because our satellites are useless for detecting biowea­pons research. We can't see inside the buildings, and even if we could, we wouldn't know what was growing in the tanks. We do know that the Chinese are very good in the area of molecular biology. And that's not all. There are plenty of other countries that are developing

  bioweapons. None of these countries is that good. There are some clever idiots out there, and sooner or later, there is going to be a very serious biological accident. Something that will make Sverdlovsk look like a kiddie ride at the park. And I think it will be global, not just one city.'

  Littleberry went on to say that he sometimes won­dered if there had already been major accidents. 'The Gulf War Syndrome,' he said, 'is almost certainly caused by exposure to chemical weapons. But we have not yet totally ruled out the possibility that it's some kind of biological weapon. Maybe early in the war the Iraqis did a line laydown of some experimental agent that we never noticed. One jet flying along - we might not have recognized it as a laydown. It might mean that the Gulf War Syndrome could be contagious and spreading. I doubt it, but you never know. Now think about the AIDS virus. There's a lot of evidence that AIDS is a natural virus that comes from the Central African rain forests, but in fact the origin of AIDS is unknown. We cannot rule out the possibility that AIDS is a weapon. Is AIDS something that escaped from a weapons lab somewhere? I don't think so, but I keep wondering.'

  'Is Cobra like that? Did it escape from somewhere, Mark?'

  'I doubt it. Someone stole it from a lab, is my guess.' 'What about Russia? What's going on there now?' 'That's real touchy stuff. Real ugly. Real sensitive.' 'Of course,' Masaccio said. , 'There's a building at the Koltsovo Institute of Molecu lar Biology that doesn't have a name or a number,' Littleberry said. 'We nicknamed it Corpus Zero, and we demanded to be allowed to go inside.'

  After a lot of hesitation, the Russian minders finally agreed to allow the inspectors to have a very brief tour of Corpus Zero. Since that time, no inspector from the

  United States or anyplace else has been allowed back inside Corpus Zero. What is known about Corpus Zero is based on one brief visit in 1991.

  Corpus Zero is situated in a corner of the Koltsovo campus. It is a large building, made of brick, with small windows, a building shaped like a cube.


  'We didn't know what was going on inside Corpus Zero. The satellite imagery didn't show anything,' Littleberry said.

  All of the Koltsovo staff had been sent home at the time of the inspection, so Corpus Zero was deserted when the inspection team entered with a group of minders. There wasn't much to see. The building appeared to contain only office space and normal biology labs. On one of the laboratory benches, an inspector discovered a piece of paper pinned to the side of the bench with a tack. On it was written in English, 'The eagle can't catch a fly.' It seemed to be a way of thumbing one's nose at the inspectors.

  The inspectors were touring some offices when Little­berry told everyone that he was going to the men's room. As he was coming out of the men's room, he found that the team and the minders had gone down a hallway and were starting to turn a corner. He saw his chance. He went in the other direction.

  Littleberry had gone AWOL.

  Telling the story to Frank Masaccio, Littleberry found himself drifting back in time. The memory was so clear, set off in distinct edges from the foggy haze that followed.

  The corridors in Corpus Zero were in the shape of a ring, he realized. All the corridors circled around the center of the building but did not give access to the center. There had to be something hidden in the center of Corpus Zero. The building must have a hot zone at its core.

  How to reach the core? On the inside wall of a