Cobra Event

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by Preston, Richard


  The U.S. Army's biological-weapons-production fac­ility was the Biological Directorate plant in Pine Bluff, Arkansas. In 1969, Littleberry had received an invitation from some Army researchers to visit the plant and see warheads being loaded. He watched workers packing bomblets with dry anthrax. They were wearing breath­ing masks and coveralls, and that was it. No protective space suits.

  'I'm looking at these guys, and I realize that they are all black guys,' Littleberry said to Masaccio. 'The over­seers were white. It was African-American men filling germ bombs, with the white guys telling them what to do.'

  He had tried to put it out of his mind. He had tried to tell himself that the men had well-paying jobs. He had tried to tell himself that the military had been good to him. 'It took me way too long to get through my stubborn head the reality of what was going on in Arkansas. It was expendable nigger-labor in a disease factory, that's what it was.'

  When Nixon shut down the American biological­weapons program in 1969, Mark Littleberry was out of work. 'Nixon put me out of a job, and I'm thankful. All I had to show for my M.D. was thousands of dead monkeys and some super-efficient biological weapons.'

  'Hold on,' Masaccio said. 'What I hear is that the biological shit was unusable. I hear that it wouldn't work.'

  'Where'd you hear that?' 'All my sources.'

  'That's crap,' Littleberry said. 'That is pure crap. It's the kind of unreal crap we've been hearing for years from the civilian scientific community, which has its

  head in the sand about bioweapons. We tested strategic biosystems for five years in the Pacific Ocean. We tested everything at Johnston Atoll, the lethal' stuff, all the means of deployment. Not everything worked. That's the whole point of research and development. But we learned what works. Believe me, those weapons work. You might not like the way that they work, but they work. Who told you the weapons don't work?'

  'Ah, one of our academic consultants. He has security clearances.'

  'An academic with security clearances. Did this guy describe what happened at Johnston Atoll?'

  Masaccio didn't answer.

  'Did he mention Johnston Atoll?' 'Nope.'

  'Then let's get back to reality,' Littleberry said. 'Nixon suddenly killed the program in late 1969. It was his decision to kill it. I was agonizing over this goddamned program, whether I should leave it, and Nixon killed it. I won't forgive Nixon for taking away a decision that I should have made for myself.'

  Littleberry decided that he had to do something to make up for his work with weapons. He applied to switch his officer's commission into the Public Health Service, and he went to work for the Centers for Disease Control, where he took part in the war on smallpox. In the early 1960s, a handful of doctors at the C.D.C. had an important idea. Their idea was that a virus could be eradicated from the planet. They chose the smallpox virus, variola, as the most likely candidate for total extinction, because it lives only in people. It doesn't hide in the rain forest in some animal where you can't eradicate it.

  Littleberry reached into his hip pocket and pulled out his wallet. He removed a small photograph. It was old and dog-eared, covered with plastic. He had been

  carrying it in his wallet for twenty years. He pushed it across the table toward Masaccio. 'This is the work that made me whole.'

  The photograph showed a thin African man standing in a parched landscape, beside a fence. He was squinting away from the camera. He wore no shirt. Blisters speckled his shoulders, arms, and chest.

  'Should I know him?' Masaccio asked.

  'Nope,' Littleberry said. 'But if you were a public health doctor you would. His name was Ali Maow Maalin. He was a cook. The place is Somalia, the date's October 26, 1977. Mr Maalin was the last human case of smallpox. The smallpox life-form has never made another natural appearance anywhere on earth. That was the end of the road for one of the worst diseases on the planet. I was there, with Jason Weisfeld, another C.D.C. doctor. We vaccinated everyone for miles around. That bastard wasn't able to jump from Mr Maalin to any other host. We wiped out that bastard. By we I mean thousands of public health doctors all over the world. Doctors in India. Doctors in Nigeria and China. Doctors in Bangladesh with no shoes. Local people. Today I'm afraid you have to wonder just how successful that smallpox campaign really was.'

  What Littleberry had in mind was the surprise that history and nature came up with in 1973, four years before the last naturally occurring case of smallpox and just a year after the signing of the Biological Weapons Convention. It was the biotechnology revolution.

  Genetic engineering is all about moving genes from one organism to another. A gene is a strip of DNA that carries the code for making a particular protein in a living creature. A gene could be thought of as a piece of ribbon. A microscopic ribbon. The ribbon can be cut and pasted. Molecular biologists use certain splicing enzymes,

  which act as scissors, and which cut DNA. (Molecular biology is largely a matter of cutting and pasting ribbon.) You can snip the DNA where you want. You can chop it out of a longer piece of DNA, then put it into another organism. That is, you can transplant a gene. If you do it correctly, the organism will have a new working gene afterward. The organism will do something different; it will make a new protein. It will be a changed living creature, and it will pass its changed character to its offspring. If you allow the organism to multiply, you've cloned the organism. A clone is a designer copy. This is genetic engineering. One of the big complications is that when you move DNA from one organism to another it doesn't always work properly in its new home. But it can be made to work. An organism that contains strips of foreign DNA is known as a recombinant organism.

  The biotechnology revolution began in 1973, when Stanley N. Cohen, Herbert W. Boyer, and others suc­ceeded in putting working foreign genes into the bacte­rium E. coli, a microorganism that lives in the human gut. They made loops of DNA, and they managed to stick the loops inside E. coli cells. The cells were different afterward, because they had extra working DNA inside them. Cohen and Boyer shared the Nobel Prize for this achievement. The genes they transplanted gave E. coli resistance to some antibiotics. The organisms with their new features, their resistance to antibiotics, were not dangerous. They could easily be wiped out by other antibiotics. The experiment was perfectly safe.

  Cohen and Boyer had accomplished one of the historic experiments in twentieth-century science. It would lead to the growth of new industries in the United States, Japan, and Europe. New companies would be formed, diseases would be cured in new ways, and great insights into the nature of living systems would follow.

  However, almost immediately, scientists became wor­ried that moving genes from one microorganism to another could cause outbreaks of new infectious dis­eases, or environmental disasters. The concern was very great: recombinant organisms were frightening to think about. Concerned scientists urged a temporary halt in genetic experimentation until the scientific community could debate the hazards and come up with safety guidelines to prevent accidents. A meeting to discuss these issues took place in Asilomar, California, in the summer of 1975.

  The Asilomar Conference brought a sense of reason and calm to a situation that had seemed inherently frightening. After the Asilomar Conference, scientists proceeded cautiously in the area of genetic engineering. The so-called Asilomar Safety Guidelines for carrying out genetic experiments on microorganisms were estab­lished, and a variety of safety review boards and procedures were put in place. As it turned out, the concerns of Western scientists about the hazards of genetic engineering provided a blueprint for what was to become the Soviet bioweapons program.

  Around this time, a certain Dr Yuri Ovchinnikov, one of the founders of molecular biology in the Soviet Union, and some of his colleagues pitched the idea of a genetic­weapons program to the top Soviet leadership, including Leonid Brezhnev. Soon the Soviet leader began sending word down to the Soviet scientific community: do research in genetic engineering and you will have money; if your research has appl
ications for weapons, you will be given what you need.

  In 1973, the year of the Cohen and Boyer cloning experiment, the Central Committee of the Soviet Union had established an ostensibly civilian biotechnology research and production organization called Biopreparat. Participating scientists sometimes called it simply 'The

  Concern.' It was controlled and funded by the Soviet Ministry of Defense. The main business of Biopreparat was the creation of biological weapons using advanced scientific techniques. The first head of Biopreparat was General V. 1. Ogarkov.

  In 19 74, the Soviets established a complex of research institutes in Siberia devoted especially to developing advanced virus weapons using the techniques of molecu­lar biology. The centerpiece of the complex was the Institute of Molecular Biology at Koltsovo, a self­contained research complex in the birch forests twenty miles east of the city of Novosibirsk. The cover story was that the institute of Koltsovo was dedicated to making medicines. But for all the state research money spent on 'medicines' in Biopreparat, the Soviet Union suffered a chronic lack of the simplest medicines and vaccines. It seems pretty clear that the money wasn't being spent on medicine.

  Most of the leading scientific figures in Soviet microbi­ology and molecular biology took military money and did research that was connected to the development of bioweapons. Some of the scientists lobbied for the money. Others didn't know what was going on, or didn't want to ask too many questions. In the West, there was strong, vehement, entrenched resistance to the idea that biologi­cal weapons work, and there was a worthy but perhaps naive hope that the Soviets would be reasonable about such. weapons. Scientists in general believed that the treaty was working remarkably well. Biologists in partic­ular congratulated themselves for being more alert and wise than the physicists, who had not managed to escape the taint of weapons of mass destruction.

  Meanwhile the intelligence community kept leaking allegations about a biological-weapons program in Rus­sia. Scientists were (quite reasonably) suspicious of intelligence information of this kind - it wasn't backed by

  much hard evidence, and it seemed to come from right­wing military people and from paranoids in the C.I.A., who, it was felt, tended to demonize Russia to serve their own interests. People who tried to say that the Soviets had used toxin weapons on hill people in Southeast Asia were pilloried in scientific journals. In 1979, when airborne anthrax drifted across the city of Sverdlovsk, killing at least sixty-six people (perhaps many more than that), American experts in biological weapons declared that the citizens of the city had eaten some bad meat. The chief proponent of this view was a Harvard University biochemist named Matthew S. Meselson, one of the architects of the Biological Weapons Convention. He had helped persuade the Nixon White House to embrace the treaty. Meselson insisted that the anthrax accident at Sverdlovsk had been a natural event. His view prevailed for a long time, even though there were those who said that the Sverdlovsk incident was an accident involving biological weapons.

  Then in 1989, Vladimir Pasechnik, a top Biopreparat scientist, defected to Great Britain. Pasechnik had been the director of a Biopreparat research facility known as the Institute for Ultrapure Biological Preparations, in Leningrad. British military intelligence gave Pasechnik the code name Paul. The British intelligence people spent months debriefing 'Paul' in a safe house in the English countryside about fifty miles west of London.

  Pasechnik spoke of massive biowarfare facilities hidden all over the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union, he said, had deployed a variety of operational strategic biowarheads on intercontinental missiles that were targeted all over the place and could be loaded with hot agents and launched quickly. Large stockpiles of hot agents were kept in bunkers near the launch sites, including massive amounts of smallpox. Dr Pasechnik spoke very knowl­edgeably of genetic engineering - he knew exactly how it

  was done. He said that genetic engineering of weapons was a recent focus of work in his own laboratory. He said it had been done in a variety of places in the Soviet Union with a variety of hot biological agents.

  President George Bush and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher were briefed on the situation. It seemed possible that Pasechnik was exaggerating. Much of what he claimed was difficult to verify. The Soviet Union clearly had a biological-weapons program, but what was the extent of it? Bush and Thatcher put intense personal pressure on Mikhail Gorbachev to come clean about bioweapons and allow an inspection team to tour some of the Soviet bioweapons facilities.

  This was in the late fall and early winter of 1990, when the Soviet regime was in the process of crumbling in a welter of glasnost and perestroika, and the Soviet Union was heading for economic collapse and eventual breakup. At the same time, President Bush was prepar­ing to go to war with Iraq. (The Gulf War started in January 1991.) American and allied troops were pouring into the Persian Gulf. Intelligence reports indicated that the Iraqis possessed an arsenal of biological weapons, but the Iraqi capabilities were not known. It suddenly appeared that the United States had been caught flat­footed in respect to biological weapons, both in the Soviet Union and in the Middle East.

  'I was only one man in a group of inspectors,' Littleberry said to Masaccio, 'but I think I can speak for all of my colleagues.'

  Just before Christmas 1990, Mark Littleberry and a group of Americans were flown to London on their way to Russia for an inspection tour. Some of the Americans were C.I.A. analysts. some were in the F.B.I., some were U.S. Army experts, and some, like Littleberry, were

  private scientists who happened to know a great deal about biological weapons.

  The inspection team had a long wait in London. It was said that the procedure for inspecting Russian biological facilities was proving difficult to work out in detail. What was actually happening was that Gorbachev was stalling the inspection team in order to give his military people a chance to move the five weapons stocks out of the facilities and sterilize the buildings with chemicals. Suddenly, in January 1991, the team was told it was going in to have a look. While the world was preoccu­pied with the Gulf War, the inspectors flew to various sites in the Soviet Union.

  If there were any veils over their eyes before they went in, the veils fell away quickly. One inspector, an American who is an expert in advanced biotechnology production processes involving genetically engineered vaccines, would later say that when he went in, he was sure that the problem in Russia had been exaggerated by military people and by intelligence analysts. By the time he left, he had come to believe that the problem was so bad that it was impossible to see the bottom of it. It was 'very scary,' he said.

  There were approximately sixteen identified major bioweapons facilities in the Soviet Union (or as many as fifty-two, if the smaller ones are counted). The team visited only four of them. The facilities were of two basic types: weapons-production facilities and research-and­development labs. Forty miles south of Moscow, near a town called Serpukhov, the teams explored the Center for Applied Microbiology at Obolensk, a large Biopreparat facility. Obolensk consists of thirty buildings. It is at least ten times the size of the USAMRIID complex at Fort Detrick. The main building at Obolensk is called Corpus One. It is eight stories tall, and it covers more than five acres of ground. It is an enormous monolithic biological

  laboratory with one and a half million square feet of laboratory space, making it one of the largest biological research facilities under one roof anywhere in the world. Corpus One is surrounded by triple layers of razor wire. The perimeter security includes tremblors (ground­vibration sensors), infrared body-heat detectors, and armed guards from the Special Forces. Inside Corpus One, the team had a chance to explore Soviet hot zones.

  They discovered that the design of Corpus One is different and somewhat more sophisticated than the design of the hot zones at USAMRIID or at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta. Obolensk Corpus One has ring-shaped hot zones, levels within levels. The hot core is at the center of the building, surrounded by concentric rings of graduated biohazard
security, so that as you approach the building's center, you go from Level 2, to Level 3, to Level 4. The Soviet scientists were justifiably proud of their ring design. They were also proud of their green AP-5 biohazard space suits. The Americans who tried them on said they were more comfortable than American biohazard suits.

  At Corpus One, the focus of research was Yersinia pestis, a bacterial organism that causes the plague. This is the organism that in the Middle Ages had killed off a third of the population of Europe in one sweep during the time of the Black Death, around 1348.

  The scientific director of Obolensk was a hawk-faced microbiologist and military general named Dr N. N. Urakov. He had long, silvery, thick, straight hair that he wore swept back over his forehead. Urakov seemed to be a man without emotion, except when he spoke of the power of microorganisms, and then his voice resonated with commitment.

  The inspection teams found research areas in Corpus One that were designed for rapid mutation and fast selection of strains of plague while the strains were

  exposed to ultraviolet light and nuclear radiation. They came to the conclusion that the researchers were doing forced mutation and selection of strains of Black Death that could live and multiply in a nuclear-battle zone. The Obolensk Black Death was a strategic weapon. Team members would later offer the opinion that the Obolensk Black Death was fully weaponized and integrated into the Soviet Union's strategic forces and its war plans. It was a strategic bioweapon on two counts. First, it was apparently deployed in intercontinental strategic missile warheads targeted all over the planet, and second, it was highly contagious and incurable with medicine.

  The inspectors found forty giant fermenter tanks inside Corpus One's hot zones. The tanks were used for growing huge quantities of something. They were twenty feet tall. The fact that they were placed inside the biocontainment zones was evidence that they were for growing hot agents. The tanks were about the largest reactor tanks that any of the inspectors had ever seen. Why would any legitimate medical research program need forty tanks for growing Black Death and other organisms, tanks twenty feet tall, inside a hot containment area that was surrounded by intense military security? One of the inspectors would later say that he thought you could supply the entire national output of the Iraqi biological­weapons program at the time of the Gulf War with a single Obolensk reactor tank. And there were a number of bioweapons-production facilities the scale of Obolensk scattered across Russia.

 

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