The Story Page 14

  The Iraqis offered preposterous explanations. The material had been lost. Some of it had fallen off a truck during shipment. Records of its fate had been destroyed in an unfortunate fire that had engulfed a single file cabinet in a government office. Material had been lost in postwar riots in which Iraqis attacked local research facilities and looted only the growth media.3 The only explanation they didn’t invoke, David Kelly remarked, was that their dog had eaten the media.

  As political pressure mounted over the inspectors’ findings, the cover crumbled. After years of denials, Dr. Taha finally acknowledged to inspectors in the summer of 1995 that Al Hakam had been built to produce anthrax and botulinum for germ weapons. And yes, she conceded, Iraq had systematically misled inspectors about the program that had made enough pathogens to endanger the planet. But, she added in tears, the weapons and the lethal pathogens produced at Hakam had all been destroyed. Our story reported that even then, few inspectors or US officials believed her. Most concluded that Baghdad was still hiding not only missiles and germ weapons but also the means to make both.

  Steve Engelberg’s hunch about the anthrax vaccinations of soldiers had paid off. Our reporting showed that the Pentagon’s concern about germs had been triggered not only by UNSCOM’s reports about Iraq but also by the implications of what Alibek and others had told Western intelligence agencies about the Soviet germ program.

  * * *

  In March 1998 I accompanied an interagency American team to Stepnogorsk, a city in the midst of the windblown Kazakh steppe, which, in Soviet times, had been closed to all but a few Soviet citizens. The biocomplex here was built in 1982 to develop a new, more lethal anthrax. Moscow’s most advanced germ warfare production plant, Stepnogorsk was the only major germ facility outside of the Soviet heartland. Eager for American help in cleaning up the biological debris and finding peaceful work for the 180 scientists who still worked there, the Kazakh government had permitted Andy Weber, then a young diplomat at the American Embassy in Almaty, to tour Stepnogorsk in the summer of 1995. Three years later, I was accompanying his team on yet another visit—the first Western journalist to gain such access.

  At his new post at the Pentagon, Weber told me that in Soviet times, Stepnogorsk had been listed on no map. Its address was a post office box, no. 2076. Although the CIA had deduced correctly from satellite photos of the configuration of the plant’s more than fifty buildings that it had been designed to produce biological agents, spy agencies had little idea how serious a threat it posed until two senior Soviet scientists had defected.

  As Andy and I stood in front of Building 221, the main production area, I was stunned by the size of what was now a decaying wreck. The ten fermentation vats towering four stories above us could each hold twenty thousand liters of fluid. The building itself was two football fields long.

  Working at full capacity, the vessels could brew three hundred tons of anthrax spores in a production cycle of 220 days, enough to fill many Intercontinental ballistic missiles. Since one hundred grams of dried anthrax was theoretically enough to wipe out a small city, the product of this plant alone, if dispersed under ideal conditions, was more than enough to have killed the entire American population. And Stepnogorsk was just one of at least six Soviet production facilities—a standby plant that could produce mass quantities of anthrax if an international crisis arose.

  Month by month, lab by lab, I negotiated access through friendly Russian scientists and sympathetic officials to other components of the Soviets’ biowarfare program, which at its peak had employed over sixty thousand scientists and technicians at over a hundred facilities throughout a country with eleven time zones. Sometimes I accompanied American officials; more often I was on my own. The Soviets had studied more than eighty biological agents and prepared more than a dozen others for war. The United States may have had a military-industrial complex, as I wrote later in our book Germs, but the Soviet Union was a military-industrial complex.

  It took months to arrange to meet Lev Sandakhchiev, the Soviet director of the State Research Center of Virology and Biotechnology, at a conference in Washington. But after we met, he emailed me a rare invitation to his center, known for short as Vector, a name worthy of a James Bond film. Located in Koltsovo, a remote corner of Siberia, Vector had been a crown jewel of the Soviet germ warfare program. For almost two decades it specialized in weaponizing the world’s deadliest viruses, including smallpox.

  Weber and his team had outmaneuvered government skeptics, especially at the Pentagon, and forged an agreement with Sandakhchiev for access and assistance to Vector after he and other experts had visited the complex and concluded that it appeared to have stopped illicit germ research after the Soviet Union’s collapse. Sandakhchiev confided to Weber that he had received little funding from Moscow since 1991. But he couldn’t simply abandon the hundreds of people on his staff. Where would they go? For whom would they work? He had 2,200 scientists to house and pay—half the number at its peak of operations—a lab to run, and monkeys and research supplies to buy.

  There was both danger and opportunity in Vector’s desperation. Iraq, Iran, or North Korea would surely offer jobs to financially strapped scientists. Vector was already selling diagnostic kits for hepatitis, and antivirals and other medications to Tehran. If Sandakhchiev was as committed as he seemed to transforming Vector into an open, international viral research center, his dream would only advance America’s own security interests.

  Washington initially gave Vector about $3 million—“chump change,” as Andy Weber’s boss called it. But to cash-strapped Sandakhchiev, the money was roughly half his annual budget. It not only ensured his center’s survival but also that his scientists would be less likely to be lured away.

  In September 1999 Weber and I traveled to Siberia for Vector’s twenty-fifth anniversary. The World Health Organization had designated this remote center as one of the world’s two repositories of the now eradicated smallpox virus—the other being America’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta. Moscow had worried Western scientists by secretly moving its deadly smallpox stockpile from a lab in Moscow to Vector in 1994 (supposedly to safeguard it against radical Islamist terrorists). The Russians were storing 120 smallpox isolates at Vector—the world’s largest collection, twice the size of America’s—as well as 10,000 of the world’s most exotic viruses and strains of other lethal pathogens Soviet scientists had tried to weaponize: Marburg, Ebola, Lassa fever, and others that cause the most deadly, contagious hemorrhagic fevers.

  Sandakhchiev stressed his concern that such strains might fall into jihadi or Iranian hands. An Armenian, he feared that the insurgency in the former Soviet state of Chechnya was a warning of things to come in Russia. Andy, known at the Pentagon for his calm demeanor and fluent Russian, tried to assure Lev that the best guarantee against the spread of such weapons and expertise to Muslim fanatics was cooperation with Washington. I was struck by the trust Sandakhchiev seemed to place in Weber, with whom he spent much time in the banya, or sauna—and also by Weber’s ability to elicit from him some of the deepest secrets about germ warfare.

  Why were Sandakhchiev and other Soviet scientists willing to speak freely in the sauna’s confines? Andy smiled. Probably because there were no watchful eyes and ears in such places, he said; listening devices were hard to hide in the towels they wore into the banya, and the rooms were too hot to bug.

  * * *

  It wasn’t long before I encountered signs of the Iranian germ-hunting teams that Sandakhchiev feared. In December 1998 I was visiting the All-Russian Institute of Phytopathology in Golitsino, just west of Moscow, an institute that in the Soviet era had made germs for killing crops. Since the Soviet Union’s collapse, the institute had struggled to stay afloat through peaceful research. The facility was so poorly heated that I wore my scarf and coat. But despite having reduced its staff from 1,200 to 276, many of whom were paid intermittently, Golitsino still excelled at manipulating plant genes to resist
herbicides, insects, and disease.

  As I chatted over tea with Yuri Spiridonov, a crop expert who headed the lab’s herbicide department, he mentioned that a five-man team of Iranian scientists had visited Golitsino the previous year. The head of the delegation was Mehdi Rezayat, whose business card identified him as the director of Tehran Medical Sciences University’s pharmacology department and also as a “scientific adviser” for Iran’s then president, Mohammad Khatami. Dr. Rezayat, who spoke fluent English, had expressed great interest in scientific exchanges. He claimed to have already visited most of the former Soviet labs and met their directors and top scientists.

  Spiridonov had been suspicious of his Iranian guests. For one thing, several delegation members seemed to be clerics, not scientists. “They just sat there most of the time, saying nothing, sitting on their hands,” he said. For another, Rezayat was studiously ambiguous about precisely what he wanted the Russian scientists to do when and if they accepted Iran’s invitation to visit or work there. Finally, a few members of Rezayat’s team had shown particular interest in learning about microbes that could be used in war to destroy or protect crops, and in “dual use” genetic engineering that could be used in legitimate research but also to make deadly pathogens for which there were no antidotes.

  More than one US intelligence official had already told me that Mehdi Rezayat was a senior Iranian intelligence officer—a recruiter of technology and talent for Iran’s WMD programs, especially its germ weapons program. No CIA official was willing to be quoted about him, but Ahmad Hashim, a Middle East expert who consulted for the US government, let me quote him as saying that Rezayat’s branch of intelligence was well known for its “relentless pursuit” of equipment and expertise in deadly weaponry, and not just in Russia.4 The same branch was also responsible for public health, a convenient cover.

  Dr. Spiridonov claimed to have declined several invitations to visit Tehran, but said that three of the institute’s scientists had gone there. Who could blame them? Rezayat was offering germ weapon scientists $5,000 a month—more than Russian scientists made in a year given Russia’s increasingly chaotic economy.

  I always seemed to be two steps behind the peripatetic Dr. Rezayat. But on a trip to Moscow in December 1998, scientists at a lab he had visited gave me a copy of his business card. Rezayat had left the lab that morning and was still in Moscow, staying at a hotel not far from mine. His business card in hand, I raced to his hotel. The concierge told me that Rezayat had just left. When I reached him later that day by phone (at a number he had scrawled on the back of his card) and asked to meet him, he sounded flustered. Realizing that I might not have another chance to seek direct comment from him for my story, I asked him bluntly whether he was helping recruit Russian scientists for Iran’s germ warfare program. Regaining his composure, Rezayat said calmly that such charges were both common and false. He was willing to meet me to discuss the matter further, he added, but not without Tehran’s approval. He promised to seek permission. A day later, his assistant called to say that Dr. Rezayat was no longer in Russia.

  * * *

  Now in June 1999, I wondered whether Dr. Rezayat had discovered Voz Island, the place where germs went to die, as I double-checked my mask and rubber gloves. The Russian helicopter pilot smirked at my precautions, his bloodshot eyes focused with amused disdain on the plastic bottle of Purell and one small baggie of dried bleach I had stuffed into my knapsack, just in case. He had been to the island many times, he told me. Nothing lived here.

  That was not true. As I walked toward the vast laboratory complex from the island’s germ test range where the chopper had landed, a tiny lizard slithered by one of the telephone poles from which detectors had measured germs and to which animals had been tied during open-air testing. The telephone poles, about a kilometer apart, stretched as far as I could see.

  The laboratory and its high-containment unit where the deadliest of tests were conducted had been stripped bare of their equipment, pipes, and even their floor and wall tiles. Only a few remained. The once shiny light-green mosaics were decorated with a fish motif—a nice touch, I thought. Such tiles were a hallmark of germ labs: they were easy to wash down and decontaminate with bleach. Intelligence experts told me that what the Soviets had left behind, scavengers—apparently impervious to fears of contamination—had stripped away for sale at bazaars in the Uzbek cities of Nukus and faraway Tashkent. They had done the same at the nuclear test site of Semipalatinsk, in Kazakhstan, where I had reported on the closing of one of the tunnels the Soviets had built inside the mountain range to conduct underground nuclear tests. Thanks to the smugglers’ ingenuity, radioactive copper was now being sold in markets and bazaars throughout Central Asia.

  The vivaria that once housed thousands of smaller animals killed in germ tests—rabbits, guinea pigs, white mice, and hamsters—and larger animals such as horses, sheep, donkeys, monkeys, and baboons, were now empty, their windows smashed or missing, roofs collapsed.5

  In one bungalow, obviously a storage room, hundreds of small cages were stacked. Next to them was a room containing a human-sized cage—apparently for what scientists call “nonhuman primates.” Hundreds of all-too-human primates had died hideous deaths, sometimes in a single experiment, Ken Alibek and Gennady Lepyoshkin, Stepnogorsk’s current director, had told me.

  Both scientists adamantly denied that the Soviets had ever experimented on people. I had no way of knowing whether that was true. But the KGB, which had its own labs for developing germ weapons for assassinations, had apparently not been as fastidious. Bill Broad, who had focused on Soviet efforts to use genetically engineered germs and toxins to cause psychological and physiological changes in still-murky programs named Bonfire and Flute, was told that KGB scientists had experimented on human beings as part of these programs.

  There were rumors that the Soviets had even tested smallpox here on Voz Island. Uzbek and Kazakh officials had often complained about having been the Soviet Union’s nuclear and biological dumping ground. Voz Island’s sad history was emblematic of Moscow’s disdain for the citizens of the Muslim “stans.”

  In the spring of 1988, as President Mikhail Gorbachev had grown ever more nervous that evidence of the illicit germ weapons program that he had approved and doubled in size might be uncovered, Russian germ scientists had been ordered to dispose of the evidence. But where could hundreds of tons of dried anthrax be buried? Moscow had selected Voz, over a thousand miles away from Sverdlovsk, where much of the anthrax had been made, and Zima, near Irkutsk, where it was stored.

  Working in haste and total secrecy, scientists had transferred tons of the germs into stainless-steel canisters that were loaded onto a train two dozen cars long and sent on a long journey to Voz. At the edge of the test range, Soviet soldiers had poured bleach into the canisters to decontaminate the deadly pink powder, dug huge pits, and poured the sludge into the ground, burying the decontaminated spores, and so, Moscow hoped, a serious political embarrassment.

  Andy Weber’s team, which had dug up some of the anthrax and sent it back to America for testing, had discovered that some of the hardy little spores were still alive. Tests of soil samples from six of the eleven burial pits showed that although the spores had been soaked in bleach at least twice and buried for almost a decade under three to five feet of sand, some remained potentially deadly. But the tests had also shown that the anthrax vaccine being given American military personnel was effective against the strain found on Voz.

  The discovery had further alarmed Kazakh and Uzbek officials. Because the Aral Sea was shrinking, officials feared that the spores might escape their sandy tomb and be carried to the mainland by lizards like the one I had seen, rodents, and birds. American officials feared that as access to the island became easier, the buried anthrax could also be dug up by terrorists. Doctors Without Borders told me that people in the Uzbek and Kazakh regions near testing areas like Voz were chronically ill. In desperation, Uzbek and Kazakh officials had turned to Web
er and the Americans for help in cleaning up the biological debris.

  En route back to the chopper, I stopped at the northern part of the site. Less than a mile from the lab stood the three-story barracks, homes, kindergarten, and cafeteria that Russian scientists and their families had used—about a thousand people in all. I took pictures of the children’s playground with its swings and a jungle gym—an eerie reminder of those who had once called this forbidding place home. Gennady Lepyoshkin had told me that most of the children who lived here had not been vaccinated against the agents that were tested just a few miles downwind. They hadn’t tested unless the wind was blowing south, away from their living quarters, he told me.

  Lepyoshkin spoke almost nostalgically of his weeks here in the mid-1980s, testing Stepnogorsk’s “products.” The watercolors he had painted when he was not working with deadly microbes, playing volleyball, or drinking vodka still hung on the walls of his small flat in Stepnogorsk. The island was smaller and more beautiful then, he told me. From his bedroom, you could see the sea.

  * * *

  As I thought about Voz Island, I concluded that Ronald Reagan had been right about at least one thing: there was only one word to describe the systematic creation of disease by the ton—evil.