by Simon Levay
Looking at their records, Meselson and Guillemin saw that nearly all the victims either lived in the Chkalovskiy district to the southeast of Compound 19, or had worked in or visited that district in the relevant time span. Six victims lived or worked in Compound 19 itself. As already mentioned, several of the victims worked at the ceramics factory southeast of Compound 19. Another group of victims were five military reservists; these men all lived and worked outside of Chkalovskiy, but during the week starting Monday April 2, all five took a course at Compound 32, a military facility immediately to the south of Compound 19. The reservists came in each morning and left the district in the late afternoon. This strongly suggested that the anthrax release occurred during daytime hours on one of the weekdays from April 2 to April 6, most likely on April 2 or April 3, given that the earliest disease onset was on April 4.
When the researchers took a map of Sverdlovsk and plotted the daytime locations of all the victims during this time span, a striking pattern emerged. Nearly all the victims were located in an extremely narrow, cigar-shaped zone that began in Compound 19 and extended in a south-easterly direction. The closest victims – six of them – had been within Compound 19 itself. The most distant had been four kilometres away on the south-eastern outskirts of the city. Although no humans were affected beyond that distance, animals were: the veterinary cases occurred in six villages that lay precisely along a continuation of that south-easterly line. The most distant of these villages lay more than 50 kilometres from Compound 19.
Five victims were ‘outliers’ – they neither lived nor worked in the high-risk zone. Three of them had occupations, such as truck driver, that might have taken them into the zone. Information about the other cases was lacking.
Thus it was clear to the researchers that the anthrax cloud had originated at Compound 19 and the wind had blown it toward the southeast. This was the final clue that allowed Meselson to pin down the date of the accident. Sverdlovsk airport, like all major airports around the world, reports weather conditions every three hours to a United Nations agency, and this information is archived by the US National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado. When he obtained the records for the week in question, Meselson found that the wind had blown steadily to the southeast or south-southeast throughout the daylight hours on Monday, but never blew in that direction during the following two days. The wind did blow to the southeast for part of the day on Sunday April 1, but this day was ruled out because the military reservists were not in the area until Monday. Thus Monday, April 2, was pinned down with near certainty as the date of the incident. As icing on the analytical cake, it turned out that one of the reservists had attended classes at Compound 19 on only a single day – Monday.
Meselson now turned to another question: how much anthrax was released? To answer this, he had to make a lot of ‘guesstimates’ about factors such as the height of the release above ground, atmospheric conditions and the number of spores that would be required to cause a fatal infection. In the end, he concluded that the total release was quite small – less than a gram (four hundredths of an ounce), and perhaps as little as a few milligrams.
The researchers published their findings in two papers. A 1993 paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences presented the evidence from the pathological investigations, which pointed to the conclusion that most of the anthrax infections were acquired by inhalation and not by food consumption. In the following year, Meselson’s group published a paper in Science in which they presented the findings of their epidemiological studies, including the time, place and estimated amount of anthrax release.
Together, the two studies presented far more detailed and convincing evidence that the anthrax outbreak originated in the biological warfare facility than had any previous investigation. No one reading the Science paper could fail to be impressed by how weeks of plodding epidemiological footwork had allowed the researchers to plot a cigar-shaped ‘arrow’ that pointed unmistakably and accusingly at Compound 19.
Still, the study did have its detractors. For one thing, there were some who felt the whole topic was moot, given that the Russians had already admitted that their germ warfare institute caused the outbreak. Also, Meselson had not been able to answer the question that people were now asking, which was what exactly went wrong in Compound 19 that led to the anthrax release. Finally, there were some critics, such as germ-dispersal expert Bill Patrick, of Fort Detrick (home to the US Army Medical Research and Materiel Command), who felt that Meselson’s estimate of the amount of anthrax released was far too low. ‘We hooted [when we heard his numbers],’ is what Patrick told the authors of Germs.
The significance of the dispute over the amount of anthrax released is this: if the amount was very small, it was conceivable that it happened not as a result of weapons production but in the course of legitimate research or vaccine development – activities that were permitted under the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention. Tom Mangold and Jeff Goldberg, in their 1999 book Plague Wars, suggested that Meselson gravitated to a low estimate because he was clinging to his long-held hope or belief that the Soviets were abiding by the convention. They dug up some statements made by Meselson in the mid-90s that were consistent with this interpretation. Still, Meselson sticks by his estimate, and it has recently been confirmed in a re-analysis by physicist Dean Wilkening of Stanford University.
One still-unresolved mystery has to do with the ‘tail’ of anthrax cases which extended for six weeks beyond the initial outbreak. Most of these victims clearly had inhalation anthrax, not the gastrointestinal form, so it doesn’t seem likely that they got sick from eating tainted meat, as the CIA analysts had originally proposed. How then had they acquired their infections?
One theoretical possibility is that the anthrax release was not a single event but continued for several weeks, albeit at a lower rate. If this were the explanation, however, one would expect the later victims to be located in other places than in the cigar-shaped zone where the early victims lived or worked, because the wind blew in other directions on later days. In reality, they were located in exactly the same high-risk zone as the early victims.
A second possibility would be that the later victims acquired their infections from anthrax that had been deposited on surfaces during the initial release and then re-entered the atmosphere at some later time. Such an explanation seems particularly appropriate for victims like Fagim Dayanov who, as described earlier, fell ill in early May, a day after he was sent to clean the roof of the ceramics factory. Did he stir up a secondary aerosol of anthrax during that cleaning operation and thus breathe in enough spores to develop an infection?
When I asked Matt Meselson about this, he acknowledged that secondary infections were a possibility, but he considered this explanation unlikely. Anthrax spores are so tiny, he told me, that once they bind to surfaces they are held there by surprisingly strong electrostatic forces and are very difficult to pull back into the atmosphere. Larger clumps of spores can be re-aerosolised, but such clumps are not effective infectious agents because they do not penetrate deep into the air sacs of the lungs, which they need to reach order to trigger an infection.
Meselson favours a third explanation for the late cases, which is that those victims inhaled the anthrax spores on Monday April 2, just like the early victims, but simply took longer to fall ill – up to six weeks in some cases. This contradicts conventional medical wisdom, which says that the incubation period for inhalation anthrax is just a very few days – just one day in some cases. Meselson dug up some old studies, however, in which monkeys were exposed to anthrax by inhalation. Some of these monkeys took weeks to fall ill. Such long incubation periods were not observed in more recent studies, but according to Meselson that was because researchers simply didn’t wait that long – the animals were sacrificed after a few days whether they were sick or well.
In theory, analysis of the late victims’ locations during the outbreak could resolve this issue: if v
ictims such as Dayanov had been away from Chkalovskiy during the first week of April and then returned to the high-risk zone before becoming ill, that would suggest that they acquired their infection from secondary aerosols. Such cases were not found, but the numbers are too small to make a definitive judgment on this basis. Thus, the question of how the victims in the tail of the outbreak acquired their infection remains unresolved.
How exactly did the anthrax release come about? In 1999, Ken Alibek, the defector who ran the Soviet germ-warfare programme, came out with his own book (written with Stephen Handelman), titled Biohazard. In it, Alibek presented a detailed account of what he was told happened:
On the last Friday of March 1979, a technician in the anthrax drying plant at Compound 19, the biological arms production facility in Sverdlovsk, scribbled a quick note for his supervisor before going home. ‘Filter clogged so I’ve removed it. Replacement necessary,’ the note said.
Compound 19 was the Fifteenth Directorate’s busiest production plant. Three shifts operated around the clock, manufacturing a dry anthrax weapon for the Soviet arsenal. It was stressful and dangerous work. The fermented anthrax cultures had to be separated from their liquid base and dried before they could be ground up into a fine powder for use in aerosol form, and there were always spores floating in the air. Workers were given regular vaccinations, but the large filters clamped over the exhaust pipes were all that stood between the anthrax dust and the outside world.
After each shift, the big drying machines were shut down briefly for maintenance checks. A clogged air filter was not an unusual occurrence, but it had to be replaced immediately.
Lieutenant-Colonel Nikolai Chernyshov, supervisor of the afternoon shift that day, was in as much of a hurry to get home as his workers. Under the army’s rules, he should have recorded the information about the defective filter in the logbook for the next shift, but perhaps the importance of the technician’s note didn’t register in his mind, or perhaps he was simply overtired.
When the night shift manager came on duty, he scanned the logbook. Finding nothing unusual, he gave the command to start the machines up again. A fine dust containing anthrax spores and chemical additives swept through the exhaust pipes into the night air.
In attributing the accident to a failure to replace a filter, Alibek’s account meshed well with the statement made by a Russian general to Izvestiya in 1991, as described earlier. On the other hand, there are details that are inconsistent with the findings of the Meselson group, most notably the date and time of the anthrax release. If the Meselson group is right, Friday March 30 is definitively ruled out, because the wind was blowing in the exact opposite direction – toward the northwest – on that day, which would have carried the lethal plume toward downtown Sverdlovsk and away from the Chkalovskiy district. Also, the military reservists were not in the area at any time on that day.
In a 2006 interview, I asked Alibek how he came by the information about the accident that he presented in his book. He said that it was told to him by a senior scientist by the name of Mikhail Kuzmitsch during a two-hour train ride in 1983. Kuzmitsch was working in the anthrax plant at the time of the accident. When I pressed him about the inconsistencies with Meselson’s account, he replied with the kind of non-answer that surely reflected decades of training in the Soviet bureaucracy. ‘I respect his work,’ he said, ‘and he respects mine.’
I suggested a possible resolution, which was that the removal of the filter did happen at the end of the day shift on Friday as Kuzmitsch told him, but that the plant lay idle over the weekend and wasn’t started up until Monday, so that the release was delayed until that day. Alibek agreed that this was a possibility, and added that he wasn’t sure whether the plant would have been running through the weekend.
In her book, Jeanne Guillemin gave Alibek the same treatment she meted out to Peter Gumbel: she took him to task for the apparent errors in his account, and suggested that they threw his entire explanation for what had happened into doubt. Meselson took a mellower view of the matter. He reminded me that details such as dates can easily change as they are stored in memory or reported to others. ‘The fundamentals are correct,’ he said. ‘The only thing we disagree about is the day of the week – a pretty small detail.’
Given that the origin of the anthrax outbreak in the germ warfare institute has been admitted by the president of Russia, described in detail by the onetime boss of the Soviet germ warfare programme, and proven by Meselson’s research, one might think that there would be universal acceptance of this explanation. Jeanne Guillemin told me, however, that a book on infectious diseases distributed recently by the Russian Ministry of Health attributes the outbreak to – yes – tainted meat.
As far as is known, Russia and the United States (and the United Kingdom) now adhere to the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention and no longer have any military stocks of anthrax or other pathogens. The country whose continued engagement in production of biological weapons has aroused the greatest concern is Iraq. Although Iraq signed the convention in 1972, Saddam Hussein instituted a biological weapons programme soon after he came to power in 1979; it included the manufacture of anthrax, plague, botulinum toxin and aflatoxin, albeit in nothing like the quantities reported for the Soviet Union. Saddam was apparently deterred from using these weapons during the 1991 Gulf War by the threat of overwhelming military reprisals on the part of the United States. In the diplomatic battles preceding the 2003 invasion of Iraq, his alleged possession of weapons of mass destruction, including bacterial weapons, was a central issue, but none were found either by UN inspectors before the invasion or by the US/British forces afterward. Apparently, Saddam had been telling the truth when he said that he had terminated those programmes and destroyed existing stocks of biological agents.
In the dark days after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the American people were put in a state of even greater alarm by a series of small-scale but deadly attacks involving anthrax. Several letters containing anthrax in powder form were mailed to national news organisations and politicians. The intended targets, who included NBC television news anchor Tom Brokaw, Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle and Senator Patrick Leahy, escaped harm, but 22 other people contracted anthrax infections and five of them died. In August 2002, Attorney General John Ashcroft named Steven Hatfill, a former Army bioweapons researcher, as a ‘person of interest’ in the investigation of the attacks, but in March 2008 Hatfill was officially exonerated, and he received a multimillion-dollar settlement from the Justice Department. The FBI then focused on another suspect, Bruce Ivins, a senior biodefence researcher at Fort Detrick who had himself participated in the investigation of the anthrax attacks. Ivins committed suicide in July 2008. Shortly thereafter the Justice Department announced its conclusion that Ivins was the sole perpetrator of the anthrax mailings. Ivins had a history of mental instability, but the exact motivation for his actions remains a matter of speculation.
Another accident involving the airborne release of a virus from a laboratory occurred in England less than a year before the Sverdlovsk incident. The virus was smallpox, and the release was not from a military facility but from the laboratory of Henry Bedson, a smallpox researcher at the University of Birmingham.
Janet Parker, a 40-year-old medical photographer who worked on the floor above Bedson’s laboratory, apparently inhaled virus particles that had entered her workspace through the building’s ventilation system. Parker died – the last person on Earth to be killed by smallpox, which was eliminated in the wild in 1977. A few days after her diagnosis, but before she died, Henry Bedson walked down to the potting shed at the bottom of his garden and committed suicide by slashing his own throat.
FORENSIC SCIENCE: The Wrong Man
ON FRIDAY, OCTOBER 30, 1998, a 16-year-old African American youth by the name of Josiah Sutton walked to a neighbourhood convenience store at the corner of Fondren Road and West Bellfort Street on the southwest side of Houston, Texas. He was accom
panied by his friend Gregory Adams. Although they were behaving innocently enough, the two youths were stopped by police, handcuffed and placed in the back of a squad car. Sutton didn’t see freedom again for four and a half years.
Five days earlier, sometime after midnight on the night of October 25, a 41-year-old rape victim arrived at a Houston hospital. After medical treatment and the taking of forensic samples, she gave investigators the following account of what had happened: at about 11pm, she was parking her car outside her apartment complex on Fondren Road when she was approached by two African American teenagers, one of whom was armed with a gun. They forced her back into the vehicle and drove it to a deserted location where they forced her to engage in oral and vaginal intercourse with both of them. She said that two other men approached the parked vehicle and witnessed the rape, but did nothing to help her and in fact chatted casually with the attackers. They even suggested at one point that the rapists should take care not to leave fingerprints. After the rape, the two attackers drove her to the southern outskirts of Houston and left her in a field.
The woman described her two attackers to police. They were black, and no more than 20 years old. The one who had held the gun to her head, and who had driven her car, wore a baseball cap with the peak turned sideway; he was about 5ft 7in tall and weighed about 9st 6lbs – significantly smaller than herself (she was 5ft 10in tall and weighed more than 14 stones. The other man, the woman said, was about the same height as the first, but even skinnier – about 8st 5lbs. He had been wearing a skullcap.