The Dead Hand

by David Hoffman

  In general, the Soviet military preferred to use contagious pathogens like the smallpox virus and plague because they could cause epidemics. The military would simply light the spark, and the disease would spread like wildfire on its own. Tularemia is not contagious, and thus cannot be passed from human to human. Yet the military retained interest in tularemia because it required as few as ten microorganisms inhaled or ingested to infect someone.11 Tularemia is also stable and easy to aerosolize; the microorganism can survive for weeks at low temperatures.

  Unlike viruses, which are nothing more than a few genes and protein, with perhaps a membrane, bacteria live inside rigid outer walls. The wall is critical to the cell’s survival, giving it structure and support. Without it, the cell dies. In the 1930s and 1940s, antibiotics were developed that could attack bacteria; the first was penicillin. These drugs could slow or even kill the bacteria in several ways: weaken the cell wall, inhibit its growth or stop its replication. Antibiotics helped defeat infections that have threatened man through the centuries. Diseases such as rheumatic fever, syphilis and bacterial pneumonia became easily treatable. These miracle medicines held promise that some diseases could be wiped out. By the 1940s, there were dozens of antibiotics, but then came another twist: bacteria acquired resistance to them. Within a few years, many of the powerful wonder drugs were losing their efficacy. The remaining bacteria were no longer vulnerable to antibiotics, as a result of natural selection—those which were genetically able to resist the drugs had survived. Over time only the resistant bacteria remained, and the drugs lost their effectiveness.12

  The goal of Domaradsky’s research was to build a new microbe that would be resistant to many antibiotics. As an instrument of war, it would slice through helpless populations or armies like a scythe. According to Ken Alibek, who rose to become deputy director of the Soviet bioweapons program in the late 1980s, Domaradsky had once proposed to develop a strain of tularemia that would stand up against a whole spectrum of antibiotics, overcome vaccines and at the same time not lose its virulence. “The Soviet army wasn’t satisfied with weapons resistant to one type of antibiotic,” Alibek said. “The only worthwhile genetically altered weapon, for military strategists, was one that could resist all possible treatments.”13 The generals wanted a strain that could resist up to ten different antibiotics at once, Alibek recalled. The proposal was audacious, complex and difficult to fulfill.

  Domaradsky had little to work with. Knowledge in the Soviet Union about the tularemia microbe was scant. “We had no data on its biochemistry or its genetics,” he said. Domaradsky persuaded the Moscow authorities to let him recruit the best researchers in the country for his project.

  By his own account, Domaradsky’s long struggle was complicated by constant pressure from the Soviet leadership, which wanted results delivered on a rigid schedule of five-year plans. The biological weapons program was under the purview of a powerful agency, the Military Industrial Commission, which set down deadlines that Domaradsky found infuriating. By 1984, he had been working on the tularemia idea for nearly eight years. Every month, the bosses arrived from Moscow in official cars, driving up to Obolensk with sirens wailing and lights flashing. The visitors, impatient, wanted to know how the project was going, and turned to Domaradsky. His research was slow and painstaking. “That microbe does not recognize genetic information, nor does it possess the right genes for antibiotic resistance on its own,” he said of tularemia. While Domaradsky reported making progress toward conquering resistance to antibiotics, he said, “we were nowhere near” the second goal of creating a germ that could also overcome vaccines.

  Once, Domaradsky bitterly fought with his bosses when they suggested changing the outward appearance of the germ by attaching another organism, staphylococcus, to the tularemia bacteria. “This amounted to trying to stick a piece of the staphylococcus germ directly onto the surface of the tularemia cells, which could not possibly have worked,” he recalled. The creation would never replicate. “It’s a little like sticking the wings of a crow onto a cat and hoping the cat will produce flying kittens,” Domaradsky scolded.

  Domaradsky had been appointed scientific director of Obolensk in 1978. Four years later, a new general director was appointed, Major General Nikolai Urakov, who had come from a military laboratory in Kirov. Urakov was tall, his hair always combed in a swoop back from his forehead, a man of military style and bearing. He loved expressions such as “master the situation!” and “burn with a white-hot iron!,” which meant to utterly destroy something.

  While Domaradsky treasured his independence, and was eager to follow his curiosity into different subjects, Urakov tried to force progress on the tularemia project, and refused to let Domaradsky work on other pathogens. He made Domaradsky’s life miserable, sometimes calling meetings about tularemia on Saturday so the scientist could not visit his family in Moscow. “Being a soldier to the marrow of his bones, Urakov respected only force and brooked no arguments,” Domaradsky complained years later in his memoir. “For me and my colleagues, however, the most difficult aspect of Urakov’s regime was the complete neglect of fundamental science. Everyone who has ever dealt with the genetics of bacteria knows how complicated it is to produce a new strain, indeed to create a new species! In order to make Urakov realize this, we reported to him every detail of our work: how we obtained different variants, and the methods we used.” But Domaradsky said the director would not listen.

  “I don’t need your strains! I need just one strain!” Urakov declared. “We are not playing here, we are making a weapon!”

  In the laboratory, Domaradsky faced a huge obstacle: if a bacterium acquired some new characteristic, it could lose others. This happened to tularemia. “Having become resistant to several antibiotics, the strain lost its virulence, which was unacceptable to the military,” he said. If the virulence fell, or if a test animal managed to survive a day longer, the military regarded it as a serious setback. “The desired bioweapons strain had to be fully virulent and deliverable in aerosol form. One germ cell had to be enough to start a lethal infection in a monkey,” Domaradsky said. “Furthermore, the infection had to be incurable.”

  Domaradsky came up with a fresh approach. He suggested taking two strains, both of which had lost virulence because of genetic engineering, but both having gained resistance to different antibiotics, and combining them into one super-germ. The pair, working together, might compensate for what each had lost in the genetic engineering. Domaradsky called this the “binary” approach, and had high hopes for it. The result might be “a rapidly growing, extremely virulent, and essentially untreatable disease, which would bring about the same result as if we had managed to produce a single super strain with its virulence and other properties intact.” He estimated the pair might be resistant to six or eight antibiotics at once. “This would make countering a biological weapons attack all but impossible,” he said, “especially on a large scale.”

  But Urakov stubbornly rejected his plan.

  As a young man, Domaradsky experienced the hardships and horrors of the early decades of the Soviet Union. Born in Moscow in 1925, he grew up in Saratov, along the Volga River, where his father had been sent after arrest and imprisonment during Stalin’s Great Terror. A grandfather was also arrested. Domaradsky never forgot the persecution of his relatives, the cruelty and violence of the system and the hunger of those early years. In late 1942, Domaradsky’s family fled to safety in Kazakhstan. In 1943, at seventeen years old, Domaradsky was summoned by the military for duty, but he was rejected because of the polio limp. He decided to study medicine and returned to Saratov after the war. By 1950, he had graduated from university and was assigned a research job at the All Union Anti-Plague Institute in Saratov, known informally as Mikrob.

  Plague, the Black Death of the Middle Ages, has long been feared in Russia, and epidemics swept southern parts of the country in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As a result, the Soviet Union established a network of specia
lized institutes to prevent and control plague outbreaks, and the Mikrob institute became the nerve center for the whole country, organizing investigations of the steppes and the deserts. Rodents such as marmots, gerbils and prairie dogs carried plague and it sometimes flared into epizootic outbreaks, an epidemic among animals that could spill over into human populations. The agent, Yersinia pestis, is transmitted from sick rodents to humans through fleas. In the field, Soviet plague-control researchers had to be microbiologists, epidemiologists, zoologists, parasitologists and sometimes general practitioners.

  The biochemistry of the plague microbe had not been studied in the Soviet Union. For his doctorate, Domaradsky decided to examine the organism’s protein metabolism. He successfully defended his doctorate in 1956. Within a year, at thirty-one years old, he was appointed director of the anti-plague institute at Irkutsk in Siberia, which handled plague control and research for the entire Far East. In 1964, he was transferred to the anti-plague institute in Rostov-on-Don. It was a time of turmoil. The focus of the institute was being shifted from routine work on plague control to devising new ways to defend against biological weapons. This was Domaradsky’s first, tentative step into the world of germ warfare. The search for defenses against biological attack was known as “Problem No. 5.”14

  In the Cold War years of the 1950s and 1960s, both superpowers built arsenals of biological weapons from existing, known pathogens. Domaradsky viewed his work as a contribution to civil defense, a prudent measure to protect the population in the event of attack, just as underground bunkers would protect citizens from nuclear bomb fallout. The move to Rostov gave Domaradsky a rich opportunity to research the plague microbe just at the moment when microbiology was resurfacing in the Soviet Union.

  Genetics expanded rapidly in the West with the discovery of the structure of DNA by James Watson, Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins in 1953. In the decades that followed, scientists found ways to manipulate DNA in the laboratory. But in the Soviet Union, this was known only to a few Soviet scientists through smuggled journals and reports.

  The field was paralyzed for a generation, starting in the 1930s, because of the influence of Trofim Lysenko, an agronomist who claimed that the acquired characteristics of plants and animals could be altered by tailoring their environment, and then passed from one generation to the next. Lysenko denied the fundamentals of genetics. He became a member of the Academy of Sciences, and his critics were persecuted and sent to the prison camps, including the great botanist and geneticist Nikolai Vavilov. By the 1950s, genetics disappeared as a discipline in the Soviet Union. Lysenko’s downfall came only a year after the ouster of Nikita Khrushchev as Soviet leader in October 1964.15

  Lysenko had left few scientists untouched. Domaradsky recalled that he had to insert some “rubbish” into his own doctorate dissertation to conform with Lysenko. But with Lysenko’s influence fading in the early 1960s, Domaradsky could push more deeply into the genetics of plague. At the Rostov laboratories, Domaradsky and his researchers made a major advance in understanding the nature of plasmids, strands of genetic material found in bacteria that carry the codes for such things as virulence and antibiotic resistance. Plasmids are used in genetic engineering because they can replicate without harming the organisms they come from and can be transferred into another bacterium, even of a different bacterial species. Domaradsky considered one of his triumphs the development of an antibiotic-resistant strain of plague that could be used for vaccines. It was developed for civil defense, he told himself; the Rostov institute had never been working directly on weapons. “On the other hand, there was a dark side to that research,” Domaradsky later acknowledged, “though I did not realize it at the time.” The dark side was that his discovery could just as easily be applied to Yersinia pestis to create a new, killer plague.

  For centuries, humans have sought to use toxins and toxic agents in war. The very terms “toxic” and “toxin” are derived from the ancient Greek toxikon pharmakon (arrow poison). The first biowarfare was conducted with what are called fomites—the crude use of filth, animal carcasses and contagion as weapons. These have been used to contaminate wells, reservoirs and other water sources of armies and civilian populations under attack since antiquity, through the Napoleonic era and into the twentieth century.16

  In World War I, advances in science and military technology gave rise to widespread use of chemical weapons. The use of German chlorine gas at Ypres on April 22, 1915, opened an epoch of horror. Over the next three years, 113,000 tons of chemical weapons agents were used in battle, killing more than 91,000 and wounding 1.2 million.17 In the aftermath, 128 nations signed an international agreement, the Geneva Protocol, on June 17, 1925, pledging never to use chemical or biological agents in war. The United States, despite being the country that championed the treaty, did not ratify the agreement at the time, and many nations signed but said they would reserve the right to retaliate with chemical weapons as a deterrent.18

  The Geneva Protocol was little more than a no-first-use agreement. It did not stop basic research, production or possession of chemical and biological weapons, and there were no provisions for inspection.

  Chemical weapons consist of inert substances, such as arsenic, while biological weapons are made from living things, such as bacteria and viruses. A third category are toxins, which are isolated from living organisms, but unlike bacteria or viruses, they can’t replicate.

  In the years that followed the Geneva Protocol, the race to discover biological weapons did not stop.

  Japan’s quest was horrific. After reading of the Geneva accord in 1927, a Japanese military scientist, Lieutenant General Shiro Ishii, traveled the globe, and concluded Japan should arm itself with the weapon others were forsaking. The Japanese biological weapons program included four biological warfare units in China between 1936 and 1945. The largest of them during World War II was known as Unit 731, at Ping Fan in occupied Manchuria. Japan cultivated deadly bacteria and carried out large-scale, open-air testing of live pathogens, including anthrax as bacterial slurry in bombs. Japan also tested pathogens on prisoners of war. The precise death toll is not known but was in the thousands, and perhaps more if various epidemics are included. Japanese aircraft also dropped ceramic bombs containing plague-infested fleas, and grain to attract rats, in a series of field tests of aerial biological bombs on eleven Chinese cities in 1940. In the end, the military effectiveness of the Japanese weapons remains unclear. But the toll in death and suffering overall was large.19

  For Russian troops in the wars at the turn of the twentieth century—the Russo-Japanese war, World War I and the civil war of 1918–1921—infectious diseases transmitted naturally caused far greater casualties than battlefield wounds. Typhus was feared the most; an epidemic during the civil war made a deep impression on the military commanders—disease had been more deadly than bullets. The Red Army looked for methods to defend against disease, but also experimented with biological weapons.20 A British spy, in a secret intelligence report sent to London, described open-air tests of a crude aerial bomb in October 1926 on Kulali Island in the Caspian Sea. The bomb contained ampoules of tetanus bacilli in a steel cylinder, with blades that would cause it to rotate as it fell. At the right moment, the bomb exploded and the germs were broadcast out—the tests showed they were spread up to five hundred meters away and did not lose their virulence.21

  In 1928, a full-scale biowarfare program was ordered by the Soviet Union’s Revolutionary Military Council. The decree ordered the transformation of typhus into a battlefield weapon. The main biowarfare laboratory was located in Leningrad. One hundred miles north, at a prison camp on Solovetsky Island in the White Sea, additional tests were made in the 1930s with typhus, Q fever, glanders and melioidosis.

  At the start of World War II, with the German advance, all the Soviet germ warfare facilities were hurriedly evacuated eastward by rail to the city of Kirov, where the whole effort was reassembled in the regional hospital.

  At war
’s end, the Soviet Union had acquired and weaponized a group of biological warfare agents they referred to as the golden triangle: plague, anthrax and cholera. Soviet troops had overrun the Japanese biological weapons headquarters in Manchuria in 1945. They found buildings destroyed by the retreating Japanese, but they seized prisoners and documents. In 1949, the Soviets tried a dozen Japanese prisoners who testified about germ warfare experiments. Details of the Japanese biological weapons program were sent to Moscow, including “blueprints for biological warfare assembly plants, far larger and more complex than our own.” Stalin ordered the Japanese plans to be used to build a military research facility in Sverdlovsk. Yet another laboratory run by the military was opened in the city of Zagorsk, north of Moscow, in 1953 for the study of viruses. And a remote base for germ warfare testing, which had been used in 1937–1938, was reactivated in the Aral Sea in the early 1950s.22

  Through the 1950s and 1960s, American intelligence agencies struggled to learn more about Soviet biological weapons, but without much success. There was a tantalizing hint about the island in the Aral Sea. It was first identified as a potential bioweapons testing site by Walter Hirsch, a captured German chemical warfare expert who mentioned the site in a 1951 report he wrote for the United States.23 The American intelligence community then examined everything they could find about the Aral Sea, but came up with nothing. A 1954 CIA intelligence estimate declared:

  The USSR has the technical knowledge, trained personnel, and facilities necessary for a program of research and development in biological warfare, and we believe that such a program is almost certainly in progress. Firm evidence on the subject is, however, exceedingly scanty, and is likely to remain so because of the ease with which such a program can be concealed. Our estimates must be almost exclusively of what the USSR is capable of accomplishing in this field, rather than of what it has in fact accomplished.24