A very small group of intelligence officials in the United States and Great Britain worked on biological weapons. They were mainly technical specialists, and they were outnumbered in the intelligence and policy community, where vast staffs worked on nuclear and strategic weapons, and on topics such as the Soviet economy. The CIA even had a full-time analyst devoted to monitoring canned goods in Soviet stores. The germ warfare experts felt like a lonely band, warning of dangers that were often not taken seriously by others and for which they could not offer absolute proof. Christopher Davis, who served on the British Defense Intelligence staff for ten years as the senior specialist on biological weapons, said that methods that had worked for counting nuclear missile silos were virtually useless when it came to assessing a biological weapons program. The missiles and hardware could be tracked from above, but not the pathogens. “A building is a building at the end of the day,” he explained. “It might have some strange features but there is little one can conclude about its function without x-ray eyes. You can’t tell what anyone is doing inside, and that’s the key question. In intelligence terms, it’s a very hard target.”33
The claims of the biological weapons experts met with deep skepticism by other defense, intelligence and policy officials. “The biological weapons clique inside Washington was so doomsdayish, that they tended to undermine their own credibility,” said Doug MacEachin, who had become arms control director at the CIA in March 1989. “It never had a whole lot of credibility. They went beyond the evidence too many times.” MacEachin was also influenced by his own calculation that biological weapons would have little use on the battlefield; thus no one would go to all the trouble, certainly not in the nuclear age.34
In the autumn of 1989, Ken Alibek, deputy director of Biopreparat, recalled visiting Obolensk, south of Moscow. On the first floor of the big new building, in the auditorium, the annual review of work at the institute was held. “We were not allowed to bring briefcases or bags inside the room,” Alibek recalled. “We could take notes, but they were gathered up by security guards after each meeting. We had to get special permission to see them again.”
The next-to-last speaker was Sergei Popov, the young researcher who had worked at both Koltsovo and Obolensk. He approached the lectern to give a report on a project that Alibek called “Bonfire.”
“Few paid attention at first. Work on Bonfire had dragged on for some fifteen years, and most of us had given up hope of ever achieving results.”
But Alibek added that his attention perked up when Popov announced that a suitable bacterial host had been found. This was the two-punch weapon in which one agent would be the vehicle and the attack on the immune system would be the second, deadly strike. Alibek recalled watching an experiment involving animals. Alibek wrote in his memoir they were rabbits, but Popov said later they were guinea pigs. Behind glass walls in a laboratory, a half-dozen were strapped to boards to keep them from squirming free. Each was fitted with a masklike mechanical device connected to a ventilation system. Watching from the other side of the glass, a technician pressed a button, delivering small bursts of the genetically altered pathogen to each animal. When the experiment was over, the animals were returned to their cages for examination. They all developed symptoms of one sickness, such as high temperatures. In one test, several also developed signs of another illness. “They twitched and they lay still,” Alibek recalled. “Their hindquarters had been paralyzed—evidence of myelin toxin.”
It was Popov’s two-punch killer agent on display. “The test was a success,” Alibek recalled. “A single genetically engineered agent had produced symptoms of two different diseases, one of which could not be traced.” The room fell silent. “We all recognized the implications of what the scientist had achieved. A new class of weapons had been found.”35
Popov vividly recalled working with the guinea pigs. By 1989, the scientists at Obolensk had reached a period of uncertainty. There was less money than before. “It was a frustrating time of disappointment and moral challenge,” he said. “And at that time, I made a commitment to myself. I committed myself to never deal with animal experiments again. The trigger was my last huge experiment with guinea pigs. Something like a few hundred guinea pigs had been held in a containment facility. I and my colleagues visited them every day. Wearing space suits, we fed the survivors and took out the dead. I was very shocked with how it went. Nothing new, but it was unpleasant. Absolutely unpleasant.
“I just couldn’t stand any more the conditions the animals were held in. We saw animals dying, awfully, starving, experiencing paralysis and convulsions in conditions neglecting the very sense of life. The agent paralyzed half of the animal’s body. I did not want to be involved in this any more.”36
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THE GREATEST BREAKTHROUGH
Vladimir Pasechnik was reserved, diffident and modest, but his face brightened when talk turned to science. In a photograph taken in the 1980s, when he was an institute director in Leningrad, he was wearing a corduroy jacket, glancing up from his desk, creases across his forehead, his hair receding, eyes inquiring, one hand holding down a notebook or journal. Born in 1937, Pasechnik lost both his parents in the siege of Stalingrad. He had overcome many obstacles to study as a physicist, and graduated at the top of his class at the Leningrad Polytechnic Institute. But the sacrifices of the war left a deep scar on Pasechnik, and he was determined to use his science for peaceful purposes. After graduation, he became a researcher at the Institute of Higher Molecular Compounds in Leningrad, attracted by the chance to create new antibiotics and treat diseases like cancer.1 In 1974, one of Pasechnik’s professors was asked to recommend a young researcher for a special assignment. Pasechnik was selected to set up a new scientific research facility, the Institute of Ultra Pure Biological Preparations in Leningrad.2 It seemed a promising opportunity—the new institute would have resources for the best equipment and could attract the finest talent. He took the job, and in the years that followed he demonstrated ability as a talented and strong-willed manager. By 1981, the institute had become one of the most advanced microbiology facilities in the Soviet Union. It was also part of Biopreparat, the secret Soviet biological weapons machine. Pasechnik later told people that it was about this time that he realized the research could not be just for defensive purposes, as he originally believed, but was for offensive weapons.
While Domaradsky and Popov attempted to modify the genetic makeup of pathogens, Pasechnik’s mission was more practical: to optimize the pathogens for use in combat, and to build superefficient industrial methods to produce them. If anthrax or other agents were to be deployed in wartime, they needed to be manufactured in large batches, remain stable, survive dissemination into the air and be effectively dispersed. Pasechnik’s job was to find ways to prepare and manufacture the pathogens so they could be weaponized without losing effectiveness and virulence. Working with models of the deadly agents, he sought to master the complex process of how to concentrate the pathogens and turn them into aerosols.3
Soviet biological weapons builders were bedeviled with complications. Before being deployed as an aerosol, a pathogen must be mixed in a proper “formulation,” with the addition of chemicals and other substances, specific for each germ. If done correctly, it will maintain the pathogen’s virulence or toxicity while in storage or in the weapon. But if done incorrectly, the agents may die or lose their power. They can also clog nozzles or clump up inside a weapon, which would make it ineffective, or they can be neutralized by the environment once disseminated. Also, they can face other complications that render them ineffective, such as the anthrax spores killed by phage lysis bacteria in Stepnogorsk. Moreover, it was essential to keep the particles small, to penetrate deep into the lungs of the victims. According to U.S. estimates, the ideal size is one to five microns; a micron is one-millionth of a meter. If larger, they would be filtered out by the upper respiratory tract before reaching the lungs; larger particles also settle out of the air more quickly. However, Biopreparat and the Soviet military produced agents up to twelve microns, knowing that, even if they did not reach the lungs, they would still infect the victim once trapped inside the body in the upper respiratory tract.4
One of Pasechnik’s most important inventions was a “milling” machine that used a powerful blast of air to turn batches of dried agent into a fine powder. He also developed new methods of microencapsulation—covering the tiny particles containing the infectious agents in polymer capsules to preserve and protect them from ultraviolet light. Pasechnik frequently accompanied the officers from the 15th Main Directorate of the Defense Ministry when
