The Dead Hand

concrete joint accomplishment of Reagan, the dreamer, and Gorbachev, the radical, nuclear abolitionists who found each other at the right moment. In remarks before they signed the treaty, Reagan said, “We have listened to the wisdom of an old Russian maxim, doveryai, no proveryai—trust, but verify.”

“You repeat that at every meeting,” Gorbachev said.

“I like it,” Reagan replied, smiling.

————— 13 ————— GERMS, GAS AND SECRETS

In the thick woods south of Moscow, at Obolensk, the microbiologist Igor Domaradsky redoubled his search for agents of death. He experimented with genetic engineering, combining the gene of diphtheria with the agents of plague or tularemia to make a hybrid pathogen. He turned his results over to the military, never to hear of them again. He labored to engineer a tularemia strain resistant to antibiotics. If used in a weapon, once spread, the disease would be difficult to treat. He created two strains that retained their virulence, but with only limited resistance to antibiotics. This was always the challenge—Domaradsky had never been able to achieve a high resistance and, simultaneously, sufficient virulence. If he got higher resistance, he got less virulence. One of the strains was tested on monkeys, but proved unsatisfactory. Domaradsky was adrift, and his conflict with the institute director, Nikolai Urakov, worsened as the months went by. Urakov blocked one of Domaradsky’s students from receiving a doctorate, questioned Domaradsky’s salary, gave Domaradsky piles of paperwork and insisted Domaradsky move out of his breezy flat in Protvino and into the dark woods at Obolensk. Domaradsky at one point took a daring step, writing a letter of complaint about Urakov to the Politburo. The letter resulted in an internal investigation and more conflict. Finally, Domaradsky asked to be transferred to another job in Moscow. He left Obolensk in the summer of 1987, having done much to launch the biological weapons program, but never to return.

Domaradsky thought his research on genetically modified agents fell short. He believed the search for a tularemia agent was a stopgap idea. It wasn’t contagious and the military wanted more virulent and dangerous pathogens that could spread. Overall, he said, “Very little was done to develop a new generation of these weapons, as had been the original goal” of the interagency council he had joined in Moscow in 1975. “I have to say that it has justified neither the hopes nor the colossal investment of material. Essentially nothing remarkable was ever produced…”¹

Domaradsky’s conclusion was premature. As he left, others took up the quest to create the agents of death.

In Domaradsky’s final year at Obolensk, a new scientist arrived. Sergei Popov was the bright young researcher who had worked on genetic engineering at Koltsovo, figuring out how to make the immune system turn on itself. At the time he arrived at Obolensk, the new building for working on dangerous pathogens was rising out of the forest. Popov recalled seeing Domaradsky roaming the halls, a bitter outcast. They did not talk. Popov believes he was brought in as Domaradsky’s successor in the intensifying search for genetically altered agents to be used in a biological weapon. When he departed Koltsovo in 1986, Popov turned over to other scientists his “construct,” the piece of DNA that would be inserted into a genome. Once at Obolensk, he began to look for ways to broaden his early discovery, using bacteria as the vehicle instead of viruses. “New, improved constructs had been provided to me in Obolensk,” he recalled. “My mission was to continue what had been started in Koltsovo.” The goal was to create agents with new and unusual characteristics, causing death in ways that would be unfathomable, and unstoppable.

For Popov, the Obolensk lifestyle seemed a welcome change from Koltsovo. With Moscow only an hour away, Popov drove north and loaded up his car with food and goods unknown in Koltsovo. But at work, Popov ran into resistance from Urakov, who was not pleased. “Urakov did not want me there,” Popov said. “Why would he? It was recognized that he had not kept up with the problem, and that microbiology was underdeveloped at the institute. Domaradsky also failed to meet the goal, and Biopreparat decided to assign a new person who would solve the problem. And imagine, a military general who was told something like this. He was against me from the very beginning! But Biopreparat insisted.”

In the years that followed, Popov sought to engineer some of the most hazardous biological agents ever imagined. Using his earlier experience with the smallpox virus, he sought to create a pathogen that would deceive the victim. With genetic engineering, he hoped to create a deadly one-two punch: a first wave that would cause illness, followed by recovery, then a second wave that would be unexpected and fatal. It was a profoundly evil idea, to manipulate the very smallest building blocks of life, creating a germ that could not be stopped by remedies known to mankind. Nor was the idea his handiwork alone. It was the deliberate policy of the Soviet state.

The method Popov took was to construct a pathogen within a pathogen; the second one would deliver the deadly assault. He told Urakov he wanted to try five different microbes as the vehicle, or the first stage of the illness. Each of the agents was under control of a different group at the institute, and Popov would have to work with them all. The five were: Burkhholderia mallei, which causes glanders, an infectious disease primarily affecting horses; Burkholderia pseudomallei, which causes melioidosis, an infectious disease prevalent in tropical climates; Yersinia pestis, which causes plague; Bacillus anthracis, which causes anthrax; and Legionella, which leads to legionellosis, or Legionnaires’ disease. Although Popov was at the center of the research, thousands of people participated in it. The best and brightest graduates from Soviet universities were recruited for Obolensk. Each floor of the new building was outfitted for work on different pathogens. Popov scrutinized each for signs that it would make a good carrier. Anthrax didn’t work; plague was not good enough. Eventually, Popov found that only Legionella would succeed. The amount needed was small; a lethal dose was only a few Legionella cells. But there were technical obstacles; it wasn’t easy to grow enough Legionella to experiment with and, if weaponized, it would be very difficult to mass- produce.

For the second stage, Popov returned to the lessons of Koltsovo and his discovery there. He inserted into Legionella the genetic material that would cause the body to attack its own nervous system. Nerves are covered with a myelin insulation that helps them transmit impulses. Popov’s plan was to cause the body’s immune system to destroy the myelin. This would cause paralysis and, eventually, death. If the new genetically engineered pathogen worked, the victim would first come down with Legionnaires’ disease, a form of pneumonia. “Some of the infected would die, and some recover, absolutely recover. However, in two weeks the recovered person would develop paralysis and would die,” Popov explained. The paralysis and death were caused by the destruction of the myelin insulation. In effect, the body would wreck its own nervous system. “When your body tries to heal itself,” Popov said, “it actually does the reverse.”

“It was deceptive,” Popov said. “The first wave disease would disappear or would never be an acute disease. It could be a little bit of coughing, or nothing, you don’t feel it, that’s it. And then two weeks later, the disease would be hardly treatable, actually there would be no way to effectively treat it.”

The idea took him years to perfect. But the result was so terrible that when Popov saw what happened to guinea pigs during testing, he was overwhelmed with doubt.²

On the bleak steppe of Kazakhstan, new workers streamed into the massive new factory at Stepnogorsk. By 1986, Ken Alibek, the chief of the anthrax assembly line, recalled that he supervised nine hundred people, and the Soviets had created “the most effective anthrax weapon ever produced.” He remembered working at a frenzied pace, spending all his days and nights in the laboratories. “I still shuddered occasionally when I looked at the bacteria multiplying in our fermenters and considered that they could end the lives of millions of people. But the secret culture of our labs had changed my outlook.”

The pressure-cooker environment took a heavy toll, and accidents happened every week. Once, he recalled, a technician was infected with anthrax. The man’s neck began to bulge, closing off his breathing. Antibiotics did not work. Within days, death seemed inevitable. At the last minute, they injected the man with a huge dose of anthrax antiserum and saved him. “The technician’s narrow escape drove home the potency of our new weapon,” Alibek