When Science Goes Wrong

by Simon Levay

  Another series of events during the 1980s may have served to further undermine the CIA’s credibility in Meselson’s mind. This was the famous ‘yellow rain’ controversy. In 1981, US Secretary of State Alexander Haig publicly accused the Soviet Union of providing highly poisonous chemicals derived from fungi (mycotoxins) to its Communist allies in Vietnam and Laos, who had then used them in attacks against rebellious Hmong tribespeople. The Hmong had described the toxins as falling out of the sky in the form of a yellow rain, and said that persons touched by it quickly fell ill or died. The Hmong provided the CIA with samples of foliage covered by spots of ‘yellow rain’, and analysis of these spots supposedly revealed that they contained mycotoxins. These findings were the basis of Haig’s allegations.

  Very soon thereafter, British scientists discovered that the spots contained partially digested pollen. This led Matt Meselson to hypothesise that the yellow spots were nothing more than bee faeces. With other scientists; Meselson went to Thailand and actually observed a shower of ‘yellow rain’ as a swarm of Asian bees engaged in a mass cleansing flight. He even found ‘yellow rain’ on the windshields of cars in Harvard University’s parking lots. Further analysis of both the original samples and newly obtained ones failed to confirm the presence of mycotoxins. While it is still a possibility that chemical agents were used against the Hmong, the yellow rain itself seems to have been an entirely natural and harmless phenomenon.

  The yellow rain experience may have helped influence Meselson’s attitude about the Sverdlovsk allegations. Indeed, some recent accounts portray Meselson as becoming a flat-out nonbeliever in the CIA’s germ-warfare theory during the course of the 1980s. Judith Miller, Stephen Engelberg and William Broad – all writers for the New York Times – cited several statements by Meselson in their 2001 book, Germs, that seemed to indicate his acceptance of the Soviet explanation. In 1989, for example, they quote Meselson as testifying as follows before a Senate committee hearing: ‘The burden of the evidence available is that the anthrax outbreak was the result of a failure to keep anthrax-infected animals off the civilian meat market, as the Soviets had maintained, and not the result of an explosion at a biological weapons factory as previously asserted by the United States.’ And he added a general endorsement of the success of the Biological Weapons Convention. ‘Today, to the best of my knowledge, no nation possesses a stockpile of biological or toxin weapons.’

  When I interviewed Meselson in 2006, he expressed some irritation with this portrayal. ‘I didn’t say that [the Soviet explanation of the Sverdlovsk episode] was necessarily correct,’ he told me. ‘They should have quoted what was on either side of that, which was that we really didn’t know, and the only way to find out would be to go there and [carry out] an independent investigation.’ As Meselson paints it, his attitude at the time was one of healthy scientific scepticism toward either side’s account. ‘There are a number of reasons why you might repave a road. There might be many reasons why a minister of defence would go to a certain city – he might have a girlfriend there, even. For me, coming from peer-reviewed science, we have to look more carefully: let’s create some hypotheses and see if we can disprove them.’

  During the 1980s, Meselson did in fact make several attempts to organise a fact-finding trip to Sverdlovsk, but he was repeatedly stymied by a lack of cooperation on the part of Soviet authorities. This was probably due in part to their reluctance to allow anyone to investigate the anthrax outbreak, but in addition Sverdlovsk was generally off-limits to foreigners because it was a key node in the Soviet military-industrial complex.

  Meselson did go to Moscow in 1986, however, where a high-level Health Ministry official by the name of Pyotr Burgasov told him that the anthrax outbreak had been caused by contaminated cattle feed – a story which explained how an animal outbreak could have occurred before animals were put out to pasture.

  Two years later, Meselson brought Burgasov and two other officials to the United States where, in a series of lectures, they enlarged on this story. Most of the victims, they said, died of intestinal anthrax – and some of cutaneous anthrax that developed into a systemic infection – but none had inhalation anthrax, the form of the disease that would most likely have resulted from the release of anthrax spores into the atmosphere. Meselson seemed to accept this account, because he made public statements supporting its plausibility and once again criticised the official CIA viewpoint.

  With the new policy of openness promulgated by Mikhail Gorbachev in 1990, stories began appearing in the Soviet press that linked the Sverdlovsk outbreak not to tainted meat but to activities at the military microbiological institute. Later that year, the Wall Street Journal published a series of three articles on the outbreak by Peter Gumbel, then its Moscow bureau chief. Gumbel had travelled to Sverdlovsk and interviewed some of the relatives of the victims. Tamara Markova, for example, recounted how her husband Mikhail, then 46, had come down with a cough during the first week of April 1979, and had died shortly afterward. ‘The doctor said his lungs looked like jellied meat,’ Tamara told Gumbel. This and other accounts, as well as interviews with persons who were familiar with the autopsies that had been performed on the victims, persuaded Gumbel that the anthrax infections had been acquired by inhalation, not by consumption of tainted meat.

  Meanwhile, inside information about the alleged Soviet germ warfare programme became available. In late 1989, Vladimir Pasechnik, the director of the Institute of Ultrapure Biological Preparations in Leningrad, defected to Britain. There, he recounted to intelligence agents how his institute had been working on methods of delivering bacteriological agents. His own institute, Pasechnik said, was just one element of a massive network of germ warfare facilities known as Biopreparat, which employed 30,000 workers across the Soviet Union. Lethal bacteria such as plague and anthrax were manufactured and stored at these facilities, ready to be loaded into munitions and delivered by specially-adapted planes, cruise missiles and even intercontinental ballistic missiles. The weapons had been successfully tested on tethered monkeys on an island in the Aral Sea.

  The Soviet Union, if Pasechnik’s statements were to be believed, was violating the Biological Weapons Convention in the most flagrant way, though ironically Pasechnik said that he had never heard of the convention. His allegations did not become public knowledge until 1992, and he apparently did not provide specific information about the cause of the Sverdlovsk anthrax outbreak.

  After the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991, many embarrassing secrets of the Soviet era were exposed. In November 1991, a Russian general told the newspaper Izvestiya that the Sverdlovsk anthrax outbreak had originated at the bacteriological institute when workers had failed to activate safety filters, leading to a massive release of the bacterial spores into the atmosphere. In May of the following year, Russian President Boris Yeltsin (who had been the Communist Party boss in Sverdlovsk at the time of the anthrax outbreak) officially admitted that the outbreak had been caused by the Soviet military. He said that he gave orders for the bacteriological-warfare programme to be terminated.

  ‘In a sense you could say that he scooped us,’ Matt Meselson said of Yeltsin’s announcement. Scientists, like journalists, hate to be scooped: priority is everything. One way that scientists often deal with this problem is by minimising the significance of other people’s findings that anticipate their own. In this case, Meselson suggested to me that Yeltsin didn’t really have any solid reason to make the statement he did. ‘It was pretty slim evidence,’ he told me. It wasn’t based on an actual admission of guilt by the military, but on an unverified statement from one of Yeltsin’s advisors – a biologist named Alexey Yablokov – to the effect that ‘someone had found anthrax spores on a wall hanging of some kind’.

  Peter Gumbel, the Wall Street Journal reporter, received the same treatment. Gumbel’s account was so full of errors as to suggest that he never visited the area affected by the outbreak, according to a 2002 article by Boston College sociologist Jeanne Gui
llemin, who is Meselson’s wife and one of his collaborators in the Sverdlovsk study.

  In a recent email to me, Gumbel fired back. ‘I had just driven a 10-ton truck through [Meselson’s] credibility,’ he wrote. ‘He had staked his academic reputation on some Cold War lies. At best, he had been duped by some fairly crude propaganda. At worst, he was a naive apologist for a nasty regime. I imagine his Harvard colleagues snickered behind his back… And then his wife comes back and tries to trash me in her official account. I was surprised by the pettiness. It would have been more professional to acknowledge the groundwork that I did… As far as I know, I didn’t get my facts wrong. Unlike certain others…’

  In any event, the gradual flow of revelations made Meselson’s willingness to believe the Soviet denials less and less tenable, but they also gave him the opportunity he had long wished for – to visit Sverdlovsk and find out the truth for himself. In early 1992, with Yablokov’s help, Meselson obtained an invitation from Ural State University to come to Sverdlovsk to carry out an investigation.

  In June of 1992, a team of five researchers went to Russia: Matt Meselson, Jeanne Guillemin, Alexis Shelokov, David Walker and Martin Hugh-Jones. Guillemin spoke some Russian, and her role would be to carry out and analyse interviews with families and survivors. Shelokov was a public health expert from the Salk Institute and a native Russian speaker. Walker, a pathologist from the University of Texas, would review any autopsy data they could find. Hugh-Jones, a veterinarian from Louisiana State University, would be in charge of investigating the anthrax outbreak as it affected animals. The team gave themselves two weeks to unravel a 13-year-old mystery.

  In Moscow, the group met with Pyotr Burgasov, the Health Ministry official (now retired) who had presented the ‘tainted meat’ story to the world. He stuck by this story, even though it was by now widely discredited and he himself was being portrayed in the Russian media as an accomplice of the KGB. Then the group travelled on to Sverdlovsk.

  Meselson and his colleagues wanted to find out who had contracted anthrax, where and when they had contracted it, what their symptoms were and what the autopsies revealed. Unfortunately, most of the relevant documents such as hospital case records were missing: they had been confiscated by the KGB soon after the 1979 outbreak. Meselson did know, however, that the anthrax victims were buried in a special section of a local cemetery. On Saturday June 6, the group went to the cemetery, where they indeed found a section containing 66 graves of men and women who had died in the six-week period beginning April 8, 1979. These included the graves of Anna Komina, whose death was recounted at the beginning of this chapter, and Mikhail Markov, the man whose widow was interviewed by Peter Gumbel. Interestingly, there were no children among the victims. In fact, there were no family groupings: the victims were unrelated to one another. This was somewhat inconsistent with the ‘tainted meat’ story, because one might expect several family members to be struck down if tainted meat was served.

  The researchers now had a list of the victims’ names, ages, and dates of death, but not yet their places of residence or work, nor any means to contact their relatives. But more information, including some of the victims’ home addresses, was provided by Margarita Ilyenko, a physician who was the director of one of the hospitals that received the anthrax victims. Ilyenko had not only treated the victims and saved some of their lives; she had also helped organise the community response, recruiting volunteers to survey the affected households, carry out disinfections and the like. She described how the bodies of the victims had overflowed the hospital’s morgue and piled up outside, while no one dared go near them for fear of catching whatever had caused their death.

  Later, toward the end of the team’s visit to Sverdlovsk, a Supreme Soviet deputy by the name of Larissa Mishustina handed the team an official list of 64 victims, with their addresses. The KGB had prepared the list after Boris Yeltsin ordered the victims’ families to be compensated – something that was never actually done.

  With this information, Jeanne Guillemin began touring the streets of the Chkalovskiy district where many of the victims had lived. As an interpreter she had Olga Yampolskaya, a Moscow physician who had joined their team. During the anthrax outbreak, Yampolskaya had been an assistant to the head clinician dealing with the outbreak, and she had herself treated some of the victims. Guillemin’s and Yampolskaya’s task was to knock at the addresses on her list and ask if the current resident was a relative of the deceased. In the Soviet era, people rarely moved and, although 13 years had passed, a surprisingly large number of the homes she visited were still occupied by the victims’ spouses or children.

  When they knocked at the address given for Fagim Dayanov on Escadronaya Street, for example, they found his widow, Rema. She told them that Fagim, like several other victims, had been employed at the ceramics factory, which was situated three kilometres from Compound 19 in a south-easterly direction. Fagim had remained healthy during the first few weeks of the outbreak. When the cause was identified as anthrax, vaccinations were made available; Rema agreed to be vaccinated but Fagim refused. On May 3, probably as part of the disinfection campaign, Fagim was told to clean the roof of the factory. He became ill on May 4 and was taken to the hospital on May 6. Rema and their son were not allowed to visit him until three days later, by which time he was desperately ill. The couple was kept separate by a glass partition and had to communicate by exchanging notes. On the evening of May 10 Fagim wrote: Rema – don’t go home. We may never look into each other’s eyes again. Rema eventually did go home, and Fagim died that night. When Rema returned to the hospital, not knowing that her husband was dead, she was directed to the morgue, where her husband’s body lay on a gurney, naked, with his chest, abdomen, and braincase sliced open. The autopsy had already been completed.

  Besides these often-painful interviews with the victims’ relatives, Meselson’s team had extensive discussions with the two pathologists, Faina Abramova and Lev Grinberg, who had conducted most of the autopsies. It was Abramova who made the initial diagnosis of anthrax, based on the observation of the anthrax bacillus in tissue samples. She related how the KGB had come to her hospital to confiscate all the medical and autopsy records and tissue samples, but she successfully hid much of the material: she placed jars containing tissue samples among other items in her pathology museum, and she concealed paperwork in filing cabinets devoted to other matters. Thus, Abramova and Grinberg were able to give Meselson’s team a comprehensive description of 42 cases. All of them had shown signs of infection in the thoracic cavity, with bleeding from thoracic lymph nodes and from the mediastinum (the area between the left and right lungs). Some victims also had involvement of the gut, but this involvement was probably secondary to a systemic infection, because the mesenteric lymph nodes (the nodes that receive lymph from the intestines) were affected in only a few cases. In short, the pathological findings were consistent with inhalation anthrax in most or all cases, just as Peter Gumbel had concluded in his Wall Street Journal articles the previous year.

  The two weeks that Meselson’s team had allotted themselves for the trip to Russia came to an end before they were able to carry out most of their interviews with the victims’ relatives, and they resolved to make a return trip the following year. Nevertheless, even with the results that they obtained on the 1992 visit, two things were clear: the outbreak was caused by the airborne release of anthrax spores and, second, most of the victims either lived or worked in the Chkalovskiy district of Sverdlovsk at the time they became ill. The researchers’ findings were thus pointing strongly toward the conclusion that Meselson had long resisted, namely that the outbreak was caused by an accident at Compound 19, the suspected germ-warfare institute.

  In the autumn of 1992, an event occurred that to some degree made Meselson’s investigations irrelevant. The second-in-command at Biopreparat, the network of Soviet facilities that Vladimir Pasechnik had fingered as a germ warfare agency, defected to the United States. His name was Kanatjan Alibe
kov, but he later anglicised it to Ken Alibek. When interviewed by the CIA, Alibek poured out a truly horrifying account of the Soviet germ warfare programme, a description that went far beyond what Pasechnik had revealed. Among other things, he said that the Soviets had produced hundreds of tons of anthrax. The lethal dose of anthrax when inhaled is about 10,000 spores, or ten billionths of a gram, so the Soviets had manufactured enough of the spores – in theory – to kill the entire population of the planet millions of times over. Alibek identified Compound 19 as being heavily involved in research, production and weaponisation, and he said that he himself had developed a strain of anthrax that was far more lethal than those that occurred in nature.

  Meselson was still determined to complete his own study, and in August of 1993 he and Guillemin returned to Sverdlovsk. They interviewed more relatives of the deceased victims, as well as some of the few victims who had recovered, and they obtained detailed information about the victims’ whereabouts during the outbreak. In addition, they visited several villages outside Sverdlovsk where farm animals had come down with anthrax during the same period. One place they were not allowed to visit was Compound 19, the suspected site of anthrax release; although anthrax production had probably long ceased it was still a military facility, and Meselson could not obtain the required authorisation to enter.

  Back in the United States, Meselson and Guillemin put all the information together in an attempt to pin down the time and place of the anthrax release. The first person to fall ill, a 48-year-old ceramics factory employee named Vera Kozlova, did so on Wednesday April 4, so there must have been some release of anthrax before then – probably a day or two before, given what was known about the minimum incubation period for inhalation anthrax. So many victims fell ill in the few days after Kozlova was struck down that it seemed likely that a single release event very early in that week had caused most of the infections.