The Demon in the Freezer

by Richard Preston

  The inspectors were stunned. Vector was not supposed to have any smallpox at all, much less be doing experiments with it.

  The inspectors made their way up the crooked stairs of Corpus 6 to an upper level, and they entered a corridor. Along one side of the corridor was a line of glass windows looking in on a giant steel dynamic aerosol test chamber. The device is for testing bioweapons—it has no other purpose. Small explosives, or bomblets, are detonated inside the chamber, releasing a biological agent into the air of the chamber. The aerosol test chamber in Corpus 6 had tubes coming out of it. Sensors could be placed on the tubes—or monkeys or other animals could be clamped onto them—and exposed to the chamber’s air. On the other side of the corridor was a command center that bespoke serious business. The center had massive dials, lights, and switches that made it look like a set from a Russian remake of Forbidden Planet. (“It’s Krell metal. . . . Try your blaster on that, Captain.”)

  The Vector scientists later explained to the inspectors that the chamber was a Model UKZD-25 bioexplosion test chamber. It was the largest and most sophisticated modern bioweapons test chamber that has been found in any country. The inspectors came to believe that the bomblets for the smallpox MIRV biowarheads had probably been tested and refined in the chamber.

  The inspectors asked if they could put on space suits and go inside the chamber. They would have liked to take swab samples from the inner walls, but the Russians refused. “They said our vaccines might not protect us. This suggested that they had developed viruses that were resistant to American vaccines,” one of the inspectors, Dr. Frank Malinoski said. The Russians became agitated and ordered the inspectors to leave Corpus 6.

  At a sumptuous dinner that evening, full of toasts to the new relationship, three inspectors—David Kelly, Frank Malinoski, and Christopher Davis—publicly confronted the head of Vector, a pox virologist and scientific administrator named Lev S. Sandakhchiev, about Vector’s smallpox. (His name is pronounced “Sun-dock-chev” but many scientists refer to him simply as Lev.) He backpedaled angrily. “Lev is gnomelike, a short man with a wizened, weather-beaten, lined face and black hair,” Christopher Davis said to me. “He’s very bright and capable, a tough individual, full of bonhomie, but he can be very nasty when he is upset.”

  Sandakhchiev heatedly insisted that his technician had misspoken. He called on his deputy, Sergey Netesov, to support him. The two Vector leaders said that there had been no work with smallpox at Vector. The only place smallpox existed in Russia was at the WHO repository at the Moscow Institute. They said they had been doing genetic engineering with smallpox genes, that was all. Vector didn’t have any live smallpox, they said, only the virus’s DNA. The more they spoke about genetic engineering and the DNA of smallpox, the murkier and scarier the talk sounded to the inspectors. “They were both lying,” David Kelly said to me, “and it was a very, very tense moment. It seemed like an eternity.”

  “The fact is, they had been testing smallpox in their explosion test chamber the week before we arrived,” Christopher Davis said. “The nerve of these people.”

  The first deputy chief of research and production for Biopreparat, Dr. Kanatjan Alibekov, who was present at the Vector meetings, later defected to the United States in 1992. He became Ken Alibek, and he revealed a panoramic vista of Biopreparat, along with details that Christopher Davis and the others had not imagined. Alibek described a huge program that was broken into secret compartments. Very few people inside the program knew its scope. Because it was compartmentalized and secret, it had the potential to fall apart into smaller pieces, and the world might never know where all the pieces had gone.

  IT IS NOW CLEAR that the Soviet bioweapons program was quite advanced by the time the Soviet government fell, in December 1991. A couple of years earlier, in 1989, at a military facility known as the Zagorsk Virological Center, about thirty miles northeast of Moscow, biologists were making and tending a stockpile of twenty tons of weapons-grade smallpox. This is absolutely extraordinary, considering the security arrangements that prevail around the little collection of smallpox vials in Atlanta. The Zagorsk smallpox was apparently kept in insulated mobile canisters, so that it could be moved around on railcars or in cargo aircraft. It seems that there was another stockpile of frozen smallpox warhead material at a military facility called Pokrov, about fifty miles east of Moscow.

  The biowarheads, Ken Alibek revealed, could be filled with dry powder or with liquid smallpox. Each MIRV bus had ten warheads, and each warhead had ten grapefruit-sized bomblets inside it. The warheads would float toward the earth on parachutes, and as they neared the ground they would burst apart, throwing out a fan of bomblets. Each bomblet could hold two hundred grams of liquid smallpox. The bomblets were likely pressurized with carbon-dioxide gas, which blew out a mist of variola. Each warhead could deliver a half gallon of smallpox mist, hissing from the bomblets as they rained down. The mist would drift above rooftops, and it would get into people outdoors, and it would get inside houses and schools, and it would be sucked into the vents of office buildings and shopping malls. One MIRV missile could deliver forty-five pounds of smallpox mist into a city. It doesn’t sound like a lot, until we consider how much smallpox Peter Los put into the air by coughing.

  The smallpox that was designated for the warheads was evidently a strain that the Soviets named India-1. It had been collected in India in 1967, in a little place called Vopal, by Russian scientists who were apparently ordered by the KGB to get some really hot scabs. They probably tested this strain against other strains to get a sense of which was the hottest, or perhaps they selected a strain that seemed more resistant to vaccine. (This would almost certainly have required human testing.) In any case, the Vopal strain, or India-1, became a strategic weapon. The strain may be exceptionally virulent in humans. Officials of the Russian Federation have vaguely admitted to the existence of India-1, but the Russian government has so far refused to share the India-1 strain with any scientists outside Russia, and so its characteristics, and the means to defend against it, remain uncertain.

  In 1991, the WHO had two hundred million doses of frozen smallpox vaccine in storage in the Gare Frigorifique in downtown Geneva. This was the world’s primary stockpile of smallpox vaccine. The vaccine stockpile was costing the WHO twenty-five thousand dollars a year in storage costs, largely for the electricity to run the freezers. In 1991, an advisory panel of experts known as the Ad Hoc Committee on Orthopoxvirus Infections recommended that 99.75 percent of the vaccine stockpile be destroyed, in part to save on electricity costs. Since the disease had been eradicated, there was no need for the vaccine. The vaccine was taken out of the freezers, sterilized in an oven, and thrown into Dumpsters. This move saved the WHO less than twenty-five thousand dollars a year, and left it with a total of five hundred thousand doses of smallpox vaccine. That is less than one dose of the vaccine for every twelve thousand people on earth. The WHO has no plans to increase its stockpile now, since replacing the lost quantity would cost a half-billion dollars, and it doesn’t have the money.

  According to several independent sources, Lev Sandakhchiev was in charge of a research group at Vector in 1990 that devised a more efficient way to mass-produce warhead-grade smallpox in industrial-scale pharmaceutical tanks. In 1994—three years after the British and American bioweapons inspectors toured Vector and were told by Sandakhchiev that there was no smallpox there—his people built a prototype smallpox bioreactor and allegedly tested it with variola major. The reactor is a three-hundred-gallon tank that looks something like a hot-water heater with a maze of pipes around it. It sits on four stubby legs inside a Level 4 hot zone in the middle of Corpus 6, on the third floor of the building. The reactor was filled with plastic beads on which live kidney cells from African green monkeys were growing. Vector scientists would pump the reactor full of cell-nutrient fluid and a little bit of smallpox. The reactor ran at the temperature of blood. In a few days, variola would spread through the kidneys cells, and the bi
oreactor would become extremely hot with amplified variola, whereupon the liquid inside the reactor could be drawn off in pipes and frozen. In biological terms, the liquid was hot enough to have global implications. A single run of the reactor would have produced approximately one hundred trillion lethal doses of variola major—enough smallpox to give each person on the planet around two thousand infective doses of smallpox. Vector scientists steadfastly maintain, however, that they did no experiments with smallpox until 1997.

  The Vector smallpox reactor is now reportedly in disrepair. No foreigners were allowed into the space-suit areas of Corpus 6 until 1999, when a team of American scientists went inside. The area had been sterilized, and they didn’t wear space suits, but they did wear Level 3 outfits. They noticed the pox bioreactor and asked what it was. A Vector employee replied, with a straight face, in a thick Russian accent, “Is a sewage-treatment fazility.”

  The Americans were virologists, and they knew exactly what a virus bioreactor was. One of the Americans replied, “Oh, yeah, right.” The Vector scientists misunderstood the reply and thought the Americans had no problem with their tank. Recently, Sergey Netesov, the deputy director of Vector, insisted in an e-mail to an American government scientist named Alan Zelicoff that, indeed, the Vector pox reactor really is a sewage-treatment tank. “Sergey’s lying—he is simply lying,” Zelicoff said to me. “I am reminded of how Teddy Roosevelt said that Russians will lie even when it is not in their best interest to do so.”

  The Vector scientists are dead broke. Some of the Vector weapons-production tanks are now occasionally used to manufacture flavored alcohol, which is marketed in Russia under the brand name Siberian Siren.

  No one seems to know what happened to the many tons of frozen smallpox or the biowarheads. Today, both the Zagorsk Virological Center and the bioweapons facility at Pokrov are under extremely tight military security. Both sites are controlled by the Russian Ministry of Defense. They are closed to all outside observers and have never been visited by bioweapons inspectors or by representatives of the WHO. “When we approach people in those places,” Alan Zelicoff said, “the door is literally slammed in our faces. We are told to go away. I think the conclusion is that they are going ahead with BW [biowarfare].” The Zagorsk and Pokrov military officials have never offered the world any evidence that the many tons of smallpox once stored at these sites were destroyed. “The sixty-four-thousand-dollar question is what happened to the smallpox material for those warheads,” one source close to the situation said. “All we’ve ever gotten from our Russian colleagues is bland assurances like, ‘If it ever existed, it’s gone.’ It’s hard to get them to admit they charged the warheads with smallpox. We don’t know where the warheads are now. If they were charged with high-test smallpox, how were they decontaminated? We ask them, ‘Did you drain the warheads?’ and we don’t get an answer. If those warheads weren’t drained, then they have smallpox in them now.”

  Nobody seems to trust the Zagorsk military virologists, not even other Russian bioweaponeers. The Vector scientists have been known to refer to them privately as svini—swine. The U.S. State Department circulated an internal brief indicating that Lev Sandakhchiev had been quoted in Pravda as saying that he was worried about the “probability that smallpox samples may exist in laboratories other than Novosibirsk [Vector], for example, in Kirov, Yekaterinburg, Sergiyev Posad [Zagorsk], and St. Petersburg.” Sandakhchiev later insisted that Pravda got him all wrong: “That I never said. This is insane!”

  “Lev was no doubt punished for his remarks,” Zelicoff observed. “I’ll bet my paycheck the Russians have clandestine stocks of smallpox at Zagorsk,” another American government scientist who had spent time at Vector said to me. “The Russians themselves have told us that they lost control of their smallpox. They aren’t sure where it went, but they think it migrated to North Korea. They haven’t said when they lost control of it, but we think it happened around 1991, right when the Soviet Union was busting up.” A master-seed strain of smallpox virus could be a freeze-dried bit of variola the size of a toast crumb, or it could be a liquid droplet the size of a teardrop. If a teardrop of India-1 smallpox disappeared from a storage container the size of a gasoline tanker truck, it would not be missed.

  A MICROBIOLOGIST named Richard O. Spertzel was the head of the United Nations biological-weapons inspection teams in Iraq—the UNSCOM teams—between 1994 and 1998. Spertzel joined the Army in the late nineteen fifties and was assigned to the American biological-weapons program at Fort Detrick, where he served as a veterinarian and medical officer. When the biowarfare program was shut down in 1969, he stayed on at USAMRIID, working the peaceful side of biodefense. He knows a good deal about biological weapons. Spertzel is now in his late sixties, a stocky man with glasses and a white flattop buzz cut. He has an understated, blunt way of talking. He made some forty trips to Iraq, until the inspectors were kicked out for being too nosy. Spertzel picked his way through suspected sites of biological-weapons research and development, and he directed the analysis and destruction of the main Iraqi anthrax plant, Al Hakm, a complex of buildings on a missile base in the desert west of Baghdad. The UN teams blew up Al Hakm with a large amount of dynamite. Spertzel now lives on a ten-acre spread in the country just outside Frederick, Maryland, within a few minutes’ drive of USAMRIID.

  “There is no question in my mind that the Iraqis have seed stocks of smallpox,” Spertzel said to me.

  “Why do you think that?”

  “In a nutshell, the Iraqis formally acknowledged to us that they were acquiring weapons of mass destruction by 1974,” he said. By then, Spertzel explained, the Iraqis had already built a pair of Biosafety Level 3 lab complexes at a base called Salman Pak, which covers a peninsula that sticks out in a bend of the Tigris River. Salman Pak was run by the Iraqi security service. They had what they called an “antiterrorist training camp” there. “It would have taken a while to build these biocontainment labs at Salman Pak, so we think their biowarfare program dates back to 1973 or earlier,” Spertzel said.

  In 1972, an outbreak of smallpox occurred in Iran and spread into Iraq. “There would have been many samples of smallpox in hospital labs in Iraq after that outbreak,” Spertzel said. “It is inconceivable to me that at just the time when they were starting a biowarfare program they would have gone around Iraq and thrown out all their smallpox.”

  In the mid-nineties, the UN inspectors often used the Habaniya air base outside Baghdad. Every time they flew into Habaniya and took the road to town, they drove past a group of dusty concrete buildings that were run by a branch of the Ministry of Health called Comodia. The Comodia buildings were warehouses and repair shops, and they were surrounded by apartment buildings and residential neighborhoods. This did not seem to be a likely place for biowarfare activity, but in Iraq you could never be sure, so one day the inspectors decided to have a look around Comodia.

  The repair shop was a nothing. They went into the warehouse. On the second floor they found a machine sitting by itself in its own room, awaiting repair. The inspectors recognized the machine as a type of freeze-dryer that is used for filling small tubes with seed stocks of freeze-dried virus. The machine had a label on it that said SMALLPOX.

  “I just hoped they’d sterilized the thing,” Spertzel remarked.

  The top virus expert in the Iraqi biowarfare program was Dr. Hazem Ali, a beefy, robust, proud man in his forties, who had a Ph.D. in virology from Newcastle University in England. He spoke fluent English with a British accent. “He was one of the more brilliant scientists we had contact with,” Spertzel said. Dr. Ali ran a complex of Level 3 biocontainment labs called Al Manal, which was Iraq’s virus-weapons development facility. Al Manal is in the outer suburbs of Baghdad. The UN people spent some time questioning Dr. Ali in a room in the Al Rashid Hotel, and in September 1995, they questioned him in a conference room where television cameras were operated by the Iraqi government. Spertzel listened while Dr. Ali described his work with poxviruses
at Al Manal. Dr. Ali said that he and his group had been working to develop camelpox virus as a biological weapon. Camelpox virus is extremely closely related to smallpox. It makes camels sick, yet it hardly ever infects people—you could run your hands over the wet, crusted muzzle of a pustulated camel, then lick your hands and rub them on your face, and you would probably not catch camelpox.

  “You sit back and listen to this, and you try to control your emotions,” Spertzel said. “If I heard that from some Joe Blow on the street I would say, ‘He’s an idiot,’ but this was Dr. Hazem Ali, and he is not an idiot, he is a British-educated Ph.D. virologist. Our only explanation for their camelpox was that it was a cover for research on smallpox.” The biocontainment zones at Al Manal were kept at Level 3, but the safety controls didn’t look like they were up to Western standards. The Americans and most of the Europeans on the UN team were very afraid of Al Manal. They wanted to blow the place up, but the French government vetoed that idea.

  Al Manal had been built by a French vaccine company then known as Pasteur Mérieux (now part of Aventis-Pasteur). Pasteur Mérieux had constructed it as a plant for making veterinary vaccines and had run the facility while training Iraqi staff on the equipment. The Pasteur Mérieux people left Al Manal several years before it was converted into a poxvirus-weapons facility, and though they may have been a little naïve, there is no evidence they ever thought Iraq would use the plant for weapons.

  In any event, the French government did not want to see a French-built plant dynamited, principally because that might threaten France’s other commercial interests in Iraq. The United Nations had to find a less obvious way to give the facility the deep six. “We filled the air-circulation system with a mixture of foam and concrete before we left Iraq, and I believe we made the labs unusable,” Spertzel said. Not that it matters. A Level 3 lab is not expensive to build or very difficult to hide. Most legitimate Level 3 research facilities are a few rooms, and they can be anywhere.