The Demon in the Freezer

by Richard Preston

  The CDC’s smallpox collection sits inside a liquid-nitrogen freezer. The freezer is a stainless-steel cylinder, about chest high, with a circular lid and a digital temperature display. At the bottom of the freezer there is a pool of liquid nitrogen, three inches deep, which maintains the air inside the freezer at a steady temperature of minus 321 degrees Fahrenheit. There are about four hundred and fifty different strains of smallpox inside the freezer. The samples are frozen in the little plastic vials called cryovials. The cryovials stand upright in small white boxes made of cardboard or plastic, which are divided with grid inserts, like cartons for storing wine. The boxes are stacked in metal racks, and they sit suspended over the pool of liquid nitrogen, bathed in cold fumes. The entire volume of the CDC’s smallpox is about the size of a beach ball.

  Officials at the CDC do not comment on such matters as where exactly the smallpox is stored or what the freezer looks like. The freezer is on wheels, and it can be moved around, and it may be moved from time to time, as in a shell game. It is covered with huge chains that are festooned with padlocks the size of grapefruits. The chains are connected to anchors or bolts in the floor or the walls, so that the freezer can’t be moved unless the chains are unlocked or cut. I have been told that the smallpox freezer can often be found sitting inside a steel chamber that is said to resemble a bank vault. The variola vault is enlaced with alarms, and it may be disguised. You might look straight at the vault and not know that your eyes are resting on the place where half the world’s known smallpox is hidden. There may be more than one variola vault. There may be a decoy vault. If you opened the decoy vault, you could find a freezer full of vials labeled SMALLPOX that held nothing but vaccine—a raised middle finger from the CDC to a feckless smallpox thief. The variola vault could be disguised to look like a janitor’s closet, but if you opened the door in search of a mop, you could find yourself face-to-face with a locked vault, having set off screaming alarms. If the variola alarms go off, armed federal marshals will show up fast.

  The smallpox at the CDC’s repository may be kept in mirrored form: there may be two freezers, designated the A freezer and the B freezer. The A and B freezers (if they exist, which is unclear) would each contain identical sets of vials—mirrored smallpox—so that if one freezer malfunctioned and its contents were ruined, the variola mirror would remain. No one will talk about mirrored smallpox today, but twenty years ago the smallpox was kept in mirrored form at the CDC. Whether that arrangement holds true today is presumably not known to anyone but a handful of top people at the CDC and to some of the security staff. People at the CDC do not discuss details of the storage, and many of them may not know of the existence of the vault. They don’t know, and they don’t ask.

  THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOON

  A Flash of Darkness

  OCTOBER 27, 1989

  DR. CHRISTOPHER J. DAVIS, a British intelligence officer, was tidying up his office in the old Metropole Building off Trafalgar Square and was getting ready to catch a train home to Wiltshire at the end of a chill, dank day. Davis was an analyst on the Defence Intelligence Staff, with an area of expertise in chemical and biological weapons. He is a medical doctor with a Ph.D. from Oxford, and was then a surgeon commander in the Royal Navy. He has a serious, crisp manner, trim good looks, blue eyes and light brown hair, and an angular face.

  The papers on Davis’s desk contained source intelligence—bits and pieces of information, some credible, some not, about chemical and biological weapons that some countries might or might not have. His job was to take all the bits and move them around, look at them, like fragments of broken glass, and try to assemble them into a picture of something. Chemical and biological weapons were then a backwater. Christopher Davis peered into the wastebasket—you couldn’t leave any papers there. Below his window, people were heading off into the darkness across Great Scotland Yard, toward their pubs and the Tube. He was anticipating with pleasure the long train ride home. . . . He could decompress, read, sleep. . . . A little trolley would come along with food. . . .

  The telephone rang. It was his boss, a man referred to as ADI-53. “Chris, you’d better come to my office right away. I’ve got a telegram you need to look at.”

  Davis dropped and locked—dropped all the loose papers into combination safes in his office, spun the tumblers, locked his office—and hurried down the hall.

  ADI-53 handed him a two-page, highly secret telegram. He said that the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), which is also called MI6, was “holding a high-level chap who’s just defected from the Soviet Union.” The SIS guys were keeping the man in a safe house outside London. He was a fifty-three-year-old chemist named Vladimir Pasechnik, the director of the Institute for Ultrapure Biopreparations in St. Petersburg. Dr. Pasechnik had been attending a drug-industry trade fair in Paris, and he had abruptly sought asylum in the British embassy. He was a so-called walk-in, an unexpected defector. The SIS people had taken him in for an immediate debriefing, and the telegram summarized the results. It was largely in Pasechnik’s own words: “I am part of Biopreparat, a large, secret program which is devoted to research, development, and production of biological weapons in the USSR,” it began. Two words in the telegram jumped out at Davis. They seemed to burn on the page: plague and smallpox.

  Plague is Yersinia pestis, a bacterial microbe widely known as the Black Death, a contagious pestilence that wiped out one third of the population of Europe around 1348. Plague can travel from person to person through the air, propelled by a pneumonialike cough.

  “Oh, shit!” Davis said to his boss.

  Davis realized he was looking at a strategic biowarfare program. Plague and smallpox are not tactical weapons. They can’t be used in any sort of limited attack: they are designed to go out of control. They are intended to kill large numbers of people indiscriminately, and they have no other function. The target of smallpox is a civilian human population, not a concentration of military forces. At the end of the day, you can deal with anthrax because it is not transmissible in people, but plague and smallpox are entirely different matters. “If what is in front of me is accurate,” Christopher Davis said to his boss, “it means that they have strategic biological weapons. It also means they have launch systems or other means of delivery. We just haven’t found the systems yet.”

  EARLY THE NEXT WEEK, at a colorless business hotel in the south of London, Davis met Vladimir Pasechnik, who sat in a room with his handlers from MI6. They called him by his first name, and Davis became his main debriefer. Over a period of many months, he met with Vladimir in various hotels around London, listened to him, and asked questions. There were always handlers in the room, and there was always a technical specialist from the SIS. They did not bring Pasechnik into the headquarters of MI6, because it was assumed that KGB operatives had the place staked out. Vladimir had left his wife and children behind, and he was very worried about them.

  He told Davis that Biopreparat, also known as the System, was huge. The program had vast stocks of frozen plague and smallpox that could be loaded onto missiles, although Pasechnik was not sure of the intended targets. The warhead material had been genetically engineered, he said. He understood only too well the modern techniques of molecular biology, as did his colleagues. One of the principal weapons was genetically modified (GM) plague that was resistant to antiobiotics. The Soviet microbiologists had created this GM plague with brute-force methods: they had taken natural plague and had exposed it again and again to powerful antibiotics, and in this way, they forced the rapid evolution of drug-resistant strains. This sort of research is known among bioweaponeers as “heating up” a germ. The heated-up pestis would spread from person to person in a lethal cough, and doctors would not have drugs to treat it effectively. One of the strains of GM plague was being manufactured by the ton, Vladimir said. He also said that Biopreparat scientists were trying to come up with even more powerful strains using the techniques of molecular biology—inserting foreign genes into plague to further heat i
t up.

  Vladimir said that lately the Soviet Ministry of Defense had been demanding that biologists develop a new manufacturing process for making tonnage amounts of weapons-grade smallpox. Military biologists had been using an older process for making smallpox into warhead material, and now there was a new generation of missiles that they wanted to arm with variola. The Soviet military had long considered smallpox a strategic weapon—during the Eradication, when the Ministry of Health had been making and donating vaccine to the WHO, the Ministry of Defense had been making and stockpiling smallpox as a weapon. Much of the advanced work with smallpox was now happening in Siberia, at the Vector research facility, but he didn’t know much about it, he said.

  Vladimir Pasechnik was anxious about the genetic-engineering research at Biopreparat. He was afraid that a genetically engineered virus or germ could escape from the weapons program. He said that genetic engineering was why he had defected. He didn’t want money, he wanted out. “I couldn’t sleep at night, thinking about what we were doing in our laboratories and the implications for the world,” he told his British debriefers.

  THE BRITISH had been sending encrypted messages to the CIA to inform them of what Pasechnik was saying, but they wanted to go face-to-face with the Americans for a comprehensive meeting. Christopher Davis and his colleagues wrapped up the debriefing of Pasechnik in the late spring of 1990. The British government then sent Davis and a close colleague from Defence Intelligence, Hamish Killip, to the headquarters of the CIA in Langley, Virginia, where they briefed their American colleagues on the details of the GM Black Death, and smallpox, and of the missiles tipped with bioweapons. The British weren’t absolutely certain that the biological strategic missiles were operational and ready for launch, but if they were, it was pretty clear that they would be targeted on North America.

  Several years later, Christopher Davis would receive the Order of the British Empire from Queen Elizabeth II. Though the Queen didn’t know it, he had received the O.B.E. for having said “Oh, shit” to his boss—it marked the first insight into the fact that the Russian biowarfare program was strategic, like a nuclear program.

  “I have the highest respect for the intelligence services of the USA,” Davis said to me, recalling his visit to Langley, “yet they were amazed at what we told them.” The CIA officials may also have been dismayed that British intelligence had cracked open a strategic-weapons program in Russia that they had not known very much about. In the world of intelligence, it is not good to be told something new and important by an intelligence officer from another government. Yet even while they listened to Davis and Killip, the CIA people had their own secret knowledge, which they did not share with the British. They had classified this information as NOFORN, meaning that no foreigners could have it.

  Forbidden Planet

  SOMETIME before 1991, a Soviet intercontinental ballistic missile was launched from Kamchatka, the peninsula that hangs down from Asia into the northern Pacific Ocean. It carried a massive MIRV (multiple independent reentry vehicle) payload. A MIRV payload separates into individual warheads, which land on discrete targets. The MIRV itself is called a bus. It is rather like a bus: it carries the warheads and lets them off to head for their separate destinations.

  American spy satellites and Navy ships watched the missile as it soared out of Kamchatka and above the atmosphere. The MIRV bus detached from the launch vehicle and went on a free-fall arc through space over the Pacific Ocean. The bus separated into ten warheads, and they fell into the sea. The American sensors pulled in some data about the shot, which had to be decoded and assembled and thought about. This took time, but something strange began to emerge. There was something different about this MIRV. The bus had an unusual shape, and it did odd things as it moved through space—rather than spinning, as the usual nuclear warheads did, it oriented itself in relation to the earth. Infrared cameras on American satellites photographed something that they had never seen on a Russian warhead before: a large fin panel that was glowing with heat—the bus was dumping heat into space as the vehicle soared over the Pacific. Why would it need to do that?

  The laws of thermodynamics said that if there was heat pouring into space from the bus, then the inside of the bus had to be cold. This was a refrigeration system. But what on the bus needed to be kept cold? A nuclear warhead can tolerate heat above the boiling point of water. After the bus separated into its ten small warheads, each warhead punched down through the atmosphere, popped a parachute, and fell into the water. Nuclear warheads don’t need to come down on a parachute.

  Several such tests took place, but it’s not clear when they happened or how much information the CIA really got. Analysis takes time, and nothing is ever crystal clear. In October 1988, the CIA obtained imagery of missiles sitting in storage bunkers or launch silos in Kamchatka. The imagery showed that the warheads were connected by pipes or hoses to refrigeration systems on the ground. All the Soviet missiles used liquid fuel, which needed to be kept cold, but even so, something about these cooling systems made the CIA analysts think they were not for cooling rocket fuel. Refrigeration implies life. The missiles appeared to contain living weapons.

  The CIA has close ties with British intelligence. Even so, the CIA chose not to tell MI6 about the tests of the new missile warheads. The CIA could not be absolutely certain that the warheads were biological, or that a germ or virus could possibly be powerful enough to use in place of a nuclear weapon. It seems that there was a puzzlement going on within the American intelligence community over whether or not a germ that landed on a city from space could do any kind of real damage. And yet if it was true that biological missiles seemed to be aimed at the United States, just who should be informed of this? The NOFORN knowledge of the chilled biowarheads was tucked away inside the CIA like the meat in a walnut.

  SHORTLY AFTER Christopher Davis and Hamish Killip briefed the Americans on what Dr. Pasechnik had told them, the United States and Britain became a great deal more concerned about biological weapons. President George Bush and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher were briefed by their intelligence people on the ICBMs armed with plague and smallpox. Mrs. Thatcher hit the roof. She telephoned Mikhail Gorbachev, who was then the head of the Soviet Union, and forcefully asked him to open his country’s biowarfare facilities to a team of outside inspectors. Gorbachev stalled for a while, but he eventually agreed.

  A secret British-American weapons-inspection team toured four of the main Biopreparat scientific facilities in January 1991. The team members included Christopher Davis. They ran into the same problems that the United Nations inspectors would later run into in Iraq. The Soviet biologists did not want to discuss their work and did not want anyone seeing their laboratories in operation. The inspectors were met with denials, evasions, time-wasting bureaucracy, stupefying, alcohol-laden meals that stretched on for hours, snarled transportation arrangements, and endless speeches about friendship and international cooperation. Whenever they could pull themselves away from a speech, they saw large Level 4 space-suit rooms that had been completely stripped of equipment and sterilized and were not in use, though the labs showed every sign of having been in operation recently. They traveled by bus to a huge microbiology facility south of Moscow called Obolensk. The facility was surrounded by layers of barbed wire and military guards. The head scientist was a lean-faced military officer and microbiologist named Dr. Nikolai Urakov, an expert in plague. Inside one of the Level 4 areas, the inspectors found an array of two-story-tall fermenter-production tanks. This was a major production facility for the GM plague, but the tanks were now empty. When Davis and the other inspectors accused Dr. Urakov of manufacturing plague by the ton, he blandly informed the inspectors that all the research at his institute was for medical purposes, since plague was “a problem” in Russia.

  “This was clearly the most successful biological-weapons program on earth, yet these people just sat there and lied to us, and lied, and lied,” Davis said to me. He insists that the Russia
n government has never come clean. “To this day, we still do not know what happened in the military facilities that were the heart of the Russian program.”

  Late in the day on January 14th, the team arrived at Vector, the sprawling virology complex situated in the larch and birch forests near a town called Koltsovo, about twenty miles east of Novosibirsk, in Siberia. They were offered vodka and caviar, lots of good food and many toasts to friendship, and were sent to bed. The next morning, after being treated to more vodka and caviar for breakfast, they demanded to see the building called Corpus 6. It is a homely brick structure, with windows rimmed in concrete. The stairs in Corpus 6 are crooked. Many of the buildings at Vector were constructed by gangs of prison laborers, and it is said that they wanted to make every concrete step slightly different in size. The Russian story is that the prisoners were hoping that some biologist would fall down the stairs and break his stinking neck.

  The inspectors were shown into the entry area of Corpus 6. A British inspector named David Kelly, a well-known research microbiologist at Oxford University, took a technician aside and asked him what virus they were working with there.

  “We are working with smallpox,” the technician answered.

  By early 1991, smallpox was supposed to exist only at the CDC and at the Moscow Institute. David Kelly was amazed to hear the word smallpox, and he repeated the question three times—“You mean you were working with variola major here?”—and he emphasized to the technician that his answer was very important. The technician responded emphatically, three times, that it was variola major. Kelly says that his interpreter was the best Russian interpreter that the British government has. “There was no ambiguity.”