The Demon in the Freezer

A Flash of Darkness

Dr. Christopher J. Davis, a British intelligence officer, was tidying up his office in the old Metropole Building off Trafalgar Square and was getting ready to catch a train home to Wiltshire at the end of a chill, dank day. Davis was an analyst on the Defence Intelligence Staff, with an area of expertise in chemical and biological weapons. He is a medical doctor with a Ph.D. from Oxford, and was then a surgeon commander in the Royal Navy. He has a serious, crisp manner, trim good looks, blue eyes and light brown hair, and an angular face.

The papers on Davis’s desk contained source intelligence — bits and pieces of information, some credible, some not, about chemical and biological weapons that some countries might or might not have. His job was to take all the bits and move them around, look at them, like fragments of broken glass, and try to assemble them into a picture of something. Chemical and biological weapons were then a backwater. Christopher Davis peered into the wastebasket — you couldn’t leave any papers there. Below his window, people were heading off into the darkness across Great Scotland Yard, toward their pubs and the Tube. He was anticipating with pleasure the long train ride home…. He could decompress, read, sleep…. A little trolley would come along with food….

The telephone rang. It was his boss, a man referred to as ADI-53. “Chris, you’d better come to my office right away. I’ve got a telegram you need to look at.”

Davis dropped and locked — dropped all the loose papers into combination safes in his office, spun the tumblers, locked his office — and hurried down the hall.

ADI-53 handed him a two-page, highly secret telegram. He said that the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), which is also called MI6, was “holding a high-level chap who’s just defected from the Soviet Union.” The SIS guys were keeping the man in a safe house outside London. He was a fifty-three-year-old chemist named Vladimir Pasechnik, the director of the Institute for Ultrapure Biopreparations in St. Petersburg. Dr. Pasechnik had been attending a drug-industry trade fair in Paris, and he had abruptly sought asylum in the British embassy. He was a so-called walk-in, an unexpected defector. The SIS people had taken him in for an immediate debriefing, and the telegram summarized the results. It was largely in Pasechnik’s own words: “I am part of Biopreparat, a large, secret program which is devoted to research, development, and production of biological weapons in the USSR,” it began. Two words in the telegram jumped out at Davis. They seemed to burn on the page: plague and smallpox.

Plague is Yersinia pestis, a bacterial microbe widely known as the Black Death, a contagious pestilence that wiped out one third of the population of Europe around 1348. Plague can travel from person to person through the air, propelled by a pneumonialike cough.

“Oh, shit!” Davis said to his boss.

Davis realized he was looking at a strategic biowarfare program. Plague and smallpox are not tactical weapons. They can’t be used in any sort of limited attack: they are designed to go out of control. They are intended to kill large numbers of people indiscriminately, and they have no other function. The target of smallpox is a civilian human population, not a concentration of military forces. At the end of the day, you can deal with anthrax because it is not transmissible in people, but plague and smallpox are entirely different matters. “If what is in front of me is accurate,” Christopher Davis said to his boss, “it means that they have strategic biological weapons. It also means they have launch systems or other means of delivery. We just haven’t found the systems yet.”

Early the next week, at a colorless business hotel in the south of London, Davis met Vladimir Pasechnik, who sat in a room with his handlers from MI6. They called him by his first name, and Davis became his main debriefer. Over a period of many months, he met with Vladimir in various hotels around London, listened to him, and asked questions. There were always handlers in the room, and there was always a technical specialist from the SIS. They did not bring Pasechnik into the headquarters of MI6, because it was assumed that KGB operatives had the place staked out. Vladimir had left his wife and children behind, and he was very worried about them.

He told Davis that Biopreparat, also known as the System, was huge. The program had vast stocks of frozen plague and smallpox that could be loaded onto missiles, although Pasechnik was not sure of the intended targets. The warhead material had been genetically engineered, he said. He understood only too well the modern techniques of molecular biology, as did his colleagues. One of the principal weapons was genetically modified (GM) plague that was resistant to antiobiotics. The Soviet microbiologists had created this GM plague with brute-force methods: they had taken natural plague and had exposed it again and again to powerful antibiotics, and in this way, they forced the rapid evolution of drug-resistant strains. This sort of research is known among bioweaponeers as “heating up” a germ. The heated-up pestis would spread from person to person in a lethal cough, and doctors would not have drugs to treat it effectively. One of the strains of GM plague was being manufactured by the ton, Vladimir said. He also said that Biopreparat scientists were trying to come up with even more powerful strains using the techniques of molecular biology — inserting foreign genes into plague to further heat it up.

Vladimir said that lately the Soviet Ministry of Defense had been demanding that biologists develop a new manufacturing process for making tonnage amounts of weapons-grade smallpox. Military biologists had been using an older process for making smallpox into warhead material, and now there was a new generation of missiles that they wanted to arm with variola. The Soviet military had long considered smallpox a strategic weapon — during the Eradication, when the Ministry of Health had been making and donating vaccine to the WHO, the Ministry of Defense had been making and stockpiling smallpox as a weapon. Much of the advanced work with smallpox was now happening in Siberia, at the Vector research facility, but he didn’t know much about it, he said.

Vladimir Pasechnik was anxious about the genetic-engineering research at Biopreparat. He was afraid that a genetically engineered virus or germ could escape from the weapons program. He said that genetic engineering was why he had defected. He didn’t want money, he wanted out. “I couldn’t sleep at night, thinking about what we were doing in our laboratories and the implications for the world,” he told his British debriefers.

The British had been sending encrypted messages to the CIA to inform them of what Pasechnik was saying, but they wanted to go face-to-face with the Americans for a comprehensive meeting. Christopher Davis and his colleagues wrapped up the debriefing of Pasechnik in the late spring of 1990. The British government then sent Davis and a close colleague from Defence Intelligence, Hamish Killip, to the headquarters of the CIA in Langley, Virginia, where they briefed their American colleagues on the details of the GM Black Death, and smallpox, and of the missiles tipped with bioweapons. The British weren’t absolutely certain that the biological strategic missiles were operational and ready for launch, but if they were, it was pretty clear that they would be targeted on North America.

Several years later, Christopher Davis would receive the Order of the British Empire from Queen Elizabeth II. Though the Queen didn’t know it, he had received the O.B.E. for having said “Oh, shit” to his boss — it marked the first insight into the fact that the Russian biowarfare program was strategic, like a nuclear program.

“I have the highest respect for the intelligence services of the USA,” Davis said to me, recalling his visit to Langley, “yet they were amazed at what we told them.” The CIA officials may also have been dismayed that British intelligence had cracked open a strategic-weapons program in Russia that they had not known very much about. In the world of intelligence, it is not good to be told something new and important by an intelligence officer from another government. Yet even while they listened to Davis and Killip, the CIA people had their own secret knowledge, which they did not share with the British. They had classified this information as NOFORN, meaning that no foreigners could have it.

Forbidden Planet

Sometime before 1991, a Soviet intercontinental ballistic missile was launched from Kamchatka, the peninsula that hangs down from Asia into the northern Pacific Ocean. It carried a massive MIRV (multiple independent reentry vehicle) payload. A MIRV payload separates into individual warheads, which land on discrete targets. The MIRV itself is called a bus. It is rather like a bus: it carries the warheads and lets them off to head for their separate destinations.

American spy satellites and Navy ships watched the missile as it soared out of Kamchatka and above the atmosphere. The MIRV bus detached from the launch vehicle and went on a free-fall arc through space over the Pacific Ocean. The bus separated into ten warheads, and they fell into the sea. The American sensors pulled in some data about the shot, which had to be decoded and assembled and thought about. This took time, but something strange began to emerge. There was something different about this MIRV. The bus had an unusual shape, and it did odd things as it moved through space — rather than spinning, as the usual nuclear warheads did, it oriented itself in relation to the earth. Infrared cameras on American satellites photographed something that they had never seen on a Russian warhead before: a large fin panel that was glowing with heat — the bus was dumping heat into space as the vehicle soared over the Pacific. Why would it need to do that?

The laws of thermodynamics said that if there was heat pouring into space from the bus, then the inside of the bus had to be cold. This was a refrigeration system. But what on the bus needed to be kept cold? A nuclear warhead can tolerate heat above the boiling point of water. After the bus separated into its ten small warheads, each warhead punched down through the atmosphere, popped a parachute, and fell into the water. Nuclear warheads don’t need to come down on a parachute.

Several such tests took place, but it’s not clear when they happened or how much information the CIA really got. Analysis takes time, and nothing is ever crystal clear. In October 1988, the CIA obtained imagery of missiles sitting in storage bunkers or launch silos in Kamchatka. The imagery showed that the warheads were connected by pipes or hoses to refrigeration systems on the ground. All the Soviet missiles used liquid fuel, which needed to be kept cold, but even so, something about these cooling systems made the CIA analysts think they were not for cooling rocket fuel. Refrigeration implies life. The missiles appeared to contain living weapons.

The CIA has close ties with British intelligence. Even so, the CIA chose not to tell MI6 about the tests of the new missile warheads. The CIA could not be absolutely certain that the warheads were biological, or that a germ or virus could possibly be powerful enough to use in place of a nuclear weapon. It seems that there was a puzzlement going on within the American intelligence community over whether or not a germ that landed on a city from space could do any kind of real damage. And yet if it was true that biological missiles seemed to be aimed at the United States, just who should be informed of this? The NOFORN knowledge of the chilled biowarheads was tucked away inside the CIA like the meat in a walnut.

Shortly after Christopher Davis and Hamish Killip briefed the Americans on what Dr. Pasechnik had told them, the United States and Britain became a great deal more concerned about biological weapons. President George Bush and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher were briefed by their intelligence people on the ICBMs armed with plague and smallpox. Mrs. Thatcher hit the roof. She telephoned Mikhail Gorbachev, who was then the head of the Soviet Union, and forcefully asked him to open his country’s biowarfare facilities to a team of outside inspectors. Gorbachev stalled for a while, but he eventually agreed.

A secret British-American weapons-inspection team toured four of the main Biopreparat scientific facilities in January 1991. The team members included Christopher Davis. They ran into the same problems that the United Nations inspectors would later run into in Iraq. The Soviet biologists did not want to discuss their work and did not want anyone seeing their laboratories in operation. The inspectors were met with denials, evasions, time-wasting bureaucracy, stupefying, alcohol-laden meals that stretched on for hours, snarled transportation arrangements, and endless speeches about friendship and international cooperation. Whenever they could pull themselves away from a speech, they saw large Level 4 space-suit rooms that had been completely stripped of equipment and sterilized and were not in use, though the labs showed every sign of having been in operation recently. They traveled by bus to a huge microbiology facility south of Moscow called Obolensk. The facility was surrounded by layers of barbed wire and military guards. The head scientist was a lean-faced military officer and microbiologist named Dr. Nikolai Urakov, an expert in plague. Inside one of the Level 4 areas, the inspectors found an array of two-story-tall fermenter-production tanks. This was a major production facility for the GM plague, but the tanks were now empty. When Davis and the other inspectors accused Dr. Urakov of manufacturing plague by the ton, he blandly informed the inspectors that all the research at his institute was for medical purposes, since plague was “a problem” in Russia.

“This was clearly the most successful biological-weapons program on earth, yet these people just sat there and lied to us, and lied, and lied,” Davis said to me. He insists that the Russian government has never come clean. “To this day, we still do not know what happened in the military facilities that were the heart of the Russian program.”

Late in the day on January 14th, the team arrived at Vector, the sprawling virology complex situated in the larch and birch forests near a town called Koltsovo, about twenty miles east of Novosibirsk, in Siberia. They were offered vodka and caviar, lots of good food and many toasts to friendship, and were sent to bed. The next morning, after being treated to more vodka and caviar for breakfast, they demanded to see the building called Corpus 6. It is a homely brick structure, with windows rimmed in concrete. The stairs in Corpus 6 are crooked. Many of the buildings at Vector were constructed by gangs of prison laborers, and it is said that they wanted to make every concrete step slightly different in size. The Russian story is that the prisoners were hoping that some biologist would fall down the stairs and break his stinking neck.

The inspectors were shown into the entry area of Corpus 6. A British inspector named David Kelly, a well-known research microbiologist at Oxford University, took a technician aside and asked him what virus they were working with there.

“We are working with smallpox,” the technician answered.

By early 1991, smallpox was supposed to exist only at the CDC and at the Moscow Institute. David Kelly was amazed to hear the word smallpox, and he repeated the question three times—“You mean you were working with variola major here?”—and he emphasized to the technician that his answer was very important. The technician responded emphatically, three times, that it was variola major. Kelly says that his interpreter was the best Russian interpreter that the British government has. “There was no ambiguity.”

The inspectors were stunned. Vector was not supposed to have any smallpox at all, much less be doing experiments with it.

The inspectors made their way up the crooked stairs of Corpus 6 to an upper level, and they entered a corridor. Along one side of the corridor was a line of glass windows looking in on a giant steel dynamic aerosol test chamber. The device is for testing bioweapons — it has no other purpose. Small explosives, or bomblets, are detonated inside the chamber, releasing a biological agent into the air of the chamber. The aerosol test chamber in Corpus 6 had tubes coming out of it. Sensors could be placed on the tubes — or monkeys or other animals could be clamped onto them — and exposed to the chamber’s air. On the other side of the corridor was a command center that bespoke serious business. The center had massive dials, lights, and switches that made it look like a set from a Russian remake of Forbidden Planet. (“It’s Krell metal…. Try your blaster on that, Captain.”)

The Vector scientists later explained to the inspectors that the chamber was a Model UKZD-25 bioexplosion test chamber. It was the largest and most sophisticated modern bioweapons test chamber that has been found in any country. The inspectors came to believe that the bomblets for the smallpox MIRV biowarheads had probably been tested and refined in the chamber.

The inspectors asked if they could put on space suits and go inside the chamber. They would have liked to take swab samples from the inner walls, but the Russians refused. “They said our vaccines might not protect us. This suggested that they had developed viruses that were resistant to American vaccines,” one of the inspectors, Dr. Frank Malinoski said. The Russians became agitated and ordered the inspectors to leave Corpus 6.

At a sumptuous dinner that evening, full of toasts to the new relationship, three inspectors — David Kelly, Frank Malinoski, and Christopher Davis — publicly confronted the head of Vector, a pox virologist and scientific administrator named Lev S. Sandakhchiev, about Vector’s smallpox. (His name is pronounced “Sun-dock-chev” but many scientists refer to him simply as Lev.) He backpedaled angrily. “Lev is gnomelike, a short man with a wizened, weather-beaten, lined face and black hair,” Christopher Davis said to me. “He’s very bright and capable, a tough individual, full of bonhomie, but he can be very nasty when he is upset.”

Sandakhchiev heatedly insisted that his technician had misspoken. He called on his deputy, Sergey Netesov, to support him. The two Vector leaders said that there had been no work with smallpox at Vector. The only place smallpox existed in Russia was at the WHO repository at the Moscow Institute. They said they had been doing genetic engineering with smallpox genes, that was all. Vector didn’t have any live smallpox, they said, only the virus’s DNA. The more they spoke about genetic engineering and the DNA of smallpox, the murkier and scarier the talk sounded to the inspectors. “They were both lying,” David Kelly said to me, “and it was a very, very tense moment. It seemed like an eternity.”

“The fact is, they had been testing smallpox in their explosion test chamber the week before we arrived,” Christopher Davis said. “The nerve of these people.”

The first deputy chief of research and production for Biopreparat, Dr. Kanatjan Alibekov, who was present at the Vector meetings, later defected to the United States in 1992. He became Ken Alibek, and he revealed a panoramic vista of Biopreparat, along with details that Christopher Davis and the others had not imagined. Alibek described a huge program that was broken into secret compartments. Very few people inside the program knew its scope. Because it was compartmentalized and secret, it had the potential to fall apart into smaller pieces, and the world might never know where all the pieces had gone.

It is now clear that the Soviet bioweapons program was quite advanced by the time the Soviet government fell, in December 1991. A couple of years earlier, in 1989, at a military facility known as the Zagorsk Virological Center, about thirty miles northeast of Moscow, biologists were making and tending a stockpile of twenty tons of weapons-grade smallpox. This is absolutely extraordinary, considering the security arrangements that prevail around the little collection of smallpox vials in Atlanta. The Zagorsk smallpox was apparently kept in insulated mobile canisters, so that it could be moved around on railcars or in cargo aircraft. It seems that there was another stockpile of frozen smallpox warhead material at a military facility called Pokrov, about fifty miles east of Moscow.

The biowarheads, Ken Alibek revealed, could be filled with dry powder or with liquid smallpox. Each MIRV bus had ten warheads, and each warhead had ten grapefruit-sized bomblets inside it. The warheads would float toward the earth on parachutes, and as they neared the ground they would burst apart, throwing out a fan of bomblets. Each bomblet could hold two hundred grams of liquid smallpox. The bomblets were likely pressurized with carbon-dioxide gas, which blew out a mist of variola. Each warhead could deliver a half gallon of smallpox mist, hissing from the bomblets as they rained down. The mist would drift above rooftops, and it would get into people outdoors, and it would get inside houses and schools, and it would be sucked into the vents of office buildings and shopping malls. One MIRV missile could deliver forty-five pounds of smallpox mist into a city. It doesn’t sound like a lot, until we consider how much smallpox Peter Los put into the air by coughing.

The smallpox that was designated for the warheads was evidently a strain that the Soviets named India-1. It had been collected in India in 1967, in a little place called Vopal, by Russian scientists who were apparently ordered by the KGB to get some really hot scabs. They probably tested this strain against other strains to get a sense of which was the hottest, or perhaps they selected a strain that seemed more resistant to vaccine. (This would almost certainly have required human testing.) In any case, the Vopal strain, or India-1, became a strategic weapon. The strain may be exceptionally virulent in humans. Officials of the Russian Federation have vaguely admitted to the existence of India-1, but the Russian government has so far refused to share the India-1 strain with any scientists outside Russia, and so its characteristics, and the means to defend against it, remain uncertain.

In 1991, the WHO had two hundred million doses of frozen smallpox vaccine in storage in the Gare Frigorifique in downtown Geneva. This was the world’s primary stockpile of smallpox vaccine. The vaccine stockpile was costing the WHO twenty-five thousand dollars a year in storage costs, largely for the electricity to run the freezers. In 1991, an advisory panel of experts known as the Ad Hoc Committee on Orthopoxvirus Infections recommended that 99.75 percent of the vaccine stockpile be destroyed, in part to save on electricity costs. Since the disease had been eradicated, there was no need for the vaccine. The vaccine was taken out of the freezers, sterilized in an oven, and thrown into Dumpsters. This move saved the WHO less than twenty-five thousand dollars a year, and left it with a total of five hundred thousand doses of smallpox vaccine. That is less than one dose of the vaccine for every twelve thousand people on earth. The WHO has no plans to increase its stockpile now, since replacing the lost quantity would cost a half-billion dollars, and it doesn’t have the money.

According to several independent sources, Lev Sandakhchiev was in charge of a research group at Vector in 1990 that devised a more efficient way to mass-produce warhead-grade smallpox in industrial-scale pharmaceutical tanks. In 1994—three years after the British and American bioweapons inspectors toured Vector and were told by Sandakhchiev that there was no smallpox there — his people built a prototype smallpox bioreactor and allegedly tested it with variola major. The reactor is a three-hundred-gallon tank that looks something like a hot-water heater with a maze of pipes around it. It sits on four stubby legs inside a Level 4 hot zone in the middle of Corpus 6, on the third floor of the building. The reactor was filled with plastic beads on which live kidney cells from African green monkeys were growing. Vector scientists would pump the reactor full of cell-nutrient fluid and a little bit of smallpox. The reactor ran at the temperature of blood. In a few days, variola would spread through the kidneys cells, and the bioreactor would become extremely hot with amplified variola, whereupon the liquid inside the reactor could be drawn off in pipes and frozen. In biological terms, the liquid was hot enough to have global implications. A single run of the reactor would have produced approximately one hundred trillion lethal doses of variola major — enough smallpox to give each person on the planet around two thousand infective doses of smallpox. Vector scientists steadfastly maintain, however, that they did no experiments with smallpox until 1997.

The Vector smallpox reactor is now reportedly in disrepair. No foreigners were allowed into the space-suit areas of Corpus 6 until 1999, when a team of American scientists went inside. The area had been sterilized, and they didn’t wear space suits, but they did wear Level 3 outfits. They noticed the pox bioreactor and asked what it was. A Vector employee replied, with a straight face, in a thick Russian accent, “Is a sewage-treatment fazility.”

The Americans were virologists, and they knew exactly what a virus bioreactor was. One of the Americans replied, “Oh, yeah, right.” The Vector scientists misunderstood the reply and thought the Americans had no problem with their tank. Recently, Sergey Netesov, the deputy director of Vector, insisted in an e-mail to an American government scientist named Alan Zelicoff that, indeed, the Vector pox reactor really is a sewage-treatment tank. “Sergey’s lying — he is simply lying,” Zelicoff said to me. “I am reminded of how Teddy Roosevelt said that Russians will lie even when it is not in their best interest to do so.”

The Vector scientists are dead broke. Some of the Vector weapons-production tanks are now occasionally used to manufacture flavored alcohol, which is marketed in Russia under the brand name Siberian Siren.

No one seems to know what happened to the many tons of frozen smallpox or the biowarheads. Today, both the Zagorsk Virological Center and the bioweapons facility at Pokrov are under extremely tight military security. Both sites are controlled by the Russian Ministry of Defense. They are closed to all outside observers and have never been visited by bioweapons inspectors or by representatives of the WHO. “When we approach people in those places,” Alan Zelicoff said, “the door is literally slammed in our faces. We are told to go away. I think the conclusion is that they are going ahead with BW [biowarfare].” The Zagorsk and Pokrov military officials have never offered the world any evidence that the many tons of smallpox once stored at these sites were destroyed. “The sixty-four-thousand-dollar question is what happened to the smallpox material for those warheads,” one source close to the situation said. “All we’ve ever gotten from our Russian colleagues is bland assurances like, ‘If it ever existed, it’s gone.’ It’s hard to get them to admit they charged the warheads with smallpox. We don’t know where the warheads are now. If they were charged with high-test smallpox, how were they decontaminated? We ask them, ‘Did you drain the warheads?’ and we don’t get an answer. If those warheads weren’t drained, then they have smallpox in them now.”

Nobody seems to trust the Zagorsk military virologists, not even other Russian bioweaponeers. The Vector scientists have been known to refer to them privately as svini—swine. The U.S. State Department circulated an internal brief indicating that Lev Sandakhchiev had been quoted in Pravda as saying that he was worried about the “probability that smallpox samples may exist in laboratories other than Novosibirsk [Vector], for example, in Kirov, Yekaterinburg, Sergiyev Posad [Zagorsk], and St. Petersburg.” Sandakhchiev later insisted that Pravda got him all wrong: “That I never said. This is insane!”

“Lev was no doubt punished for his remarks,” Zelicoff observed. “I’ll bet my paycheck the Russians have clandestine stocks of smallpox at Zagorsk,” another American government scientist who had spent time at Vector said to me. “The Russians themselves have told us that they lost control of their smallpox. They aren’t sure where it went, but they think it migrated to North Korea. They haven’t said when they lost control of it, but we think it happened around 1991, right when the Soviet Union was busting up.” A master-seed strain of smallpox virus could be a freeze-dried bit of variola the size of a toast crumb, or it could be a liquid droplet the size of a teardrop. If a teardrop of India-1 smallpox disappeared from a storage container the size of a gasoline tanker truck, it would not be missed.

A microbiologist named Richard O. Spertzel was the head of the United Nations biological-weapons inspection teams in Iraq — the UNSCOM teams — between 1994 and 1998. Spertzel joined the Army in the late nineteen fifties and was assigned to the American biological-weapons program at Fort Detrick, where he served as a veterinarian and medical officer. When the biowarfare program was shut down in 1969, he stayed on at USAMRIID, working the peaceful side of biodefense. He knows a good deal about biological weapons. Spertzel is now in his late sixties, a stocky man with glasses and a white flattop buzz cut. He has an understated, blunt way of talking. He made some forty trips to Iraq, until the inspectors were kicked out for being too nosy. Spertzel picked his way through suspected sites of biological-weapons research and development, and he directed the analysis and destruction of the main Iraqi anthrax plant, Al Hakm, a complex of buildings on a missile base in the desert west of Baghdad. The UN teams blew up Al Hakm with a large amount of dynamite. Spertzel now lives on a ten-acre spread in the country just outside Frederick, Maryland, within a few minutes’ drive of USAMRIID.

“There is no question in my mind that the Iraqis have seed stocks of smallpox,” Spertzel said to me.

“Why do you think that?”

“In a nutshell, the Iraqis formally acknowledged to us that they were acquiring weapons of mass destruction by 1974,” he said. By then, Spertzel explained, the Iraqis had already built a pair of Biosafety Level 3 lab complexes at a base called Salman Pak, which covers a peninsula that sticks out in a bend of the Tigris River. Salman Pak was run by the Iraqi security service. They had what they called an “antiterrorist training camp” there. “It would have taken a while to build these biocontainment labs at Salman Pak, so we think their biowarfare program dates back to 1973 or earlier,” Spertzel said.

In 1972, an outbreak of smallpox occurred in Iran and spread into Iraq. “There would have been many samples of smallpox in hospital labs in Iraq after that outbreak,” Spertzel said. “It is inconceivable to me that at just the time when they were starting a biowarfare program they would have gone around Iraq and thrown out all their smallpox.”

In the mid-nineties, the UN inspectors often used the Habaniya air base outside Baghdad. Every time they flew into Habaniya and took the road to town, they drove past a group of dusty concrete buildings that were run by a branch of the Ministry of Health called Comodia. The Comodia buildings were warehouses and repair shops, and they were surrounded by apartment buildings and residential neighborhoods. This did not seem to be a likely place for biowarfare activity, but in Iraq you could never be sure, so one day the inspectors decided to have a look around Comodia.

The repair shop was a nothing. They went into the warehouse. On the second floor they found a machine sitting by itself in its own room, awaiting repair. The inspectors recognized the machine as a type of freeze-dryer that is used for filling small tubes with seed stocks of freeze-dried virus. The machine had a label on it that said SMALLPOX.

“I just hoped they’d sterilized the thing,” Spertzel remarked.

The top virus expert in the Iraqi biowarfare program was Dr. Hazem Ali, a beefy, robust, proud man in his forties, who had a Ph.D. in virology from Newcastle University in England. He spoke fluent English with a British accent. “He was one of the more brilliant scientists we had contact with,” Spertzel said. Dr. Ali ran a complex of Level 3 biocontainment labs called Al Manal, which was Iraq’s virus-weapons development facility. Al Manal is in the outer suburbs of Baghdad. The UN people spent some time questioning Dr. Ali in a room in the Al Rashid Hotel, and in September 1995, they questioned him in a conference room where television cameras were operated by the Iraqi government. Spertzel listened while Dr. Ali described his work with poxviruses at Al Manal. Dr. Ali said that he and his group had been working to develop camelpox virus as a biological weapon. Camelpox virus is extremely closely related to smallpox. It makes camels sick, yet it hardly ever infects people — you could run your hands over the wet, crusted muzzle of a pustulated camel, then lick your hands and rub them on your face, and you would probably not catch camelpox.

“You sit back and listen to this, and you try to control your emotions,” Spertzel said. “If I heard that from some Joe Blow on the street I would say, ‘He’s an idiot,’ but this was Dr. Hazem Ali, and he is not an idiot, he is a British-educated Ph.D. virologist. Our only explanation for their camelpox was that it was a cover for research on smallpox.” The biocontainment zones at Al Manal were kept at Level 3, but the safety controls didn’t look like they were up to Western standards. The Americans and most of the Europeans on the UN team were very afraid of Al Manal. They wanted to blow the place up, but the French government vetoed that idea.

Al Manal had been built by a French vaccine company then known as Pasteur Mérieux (now part of Aventis-Pasteur). Pasteur Mérieux had constructed it as a plant for making veterinary vaccines and had run the facility while training Iraqi staff on the equipment. The Pasteur Mérieux people left Al Manal several years before it was converted into a poxvirus-weapons facility, and though they may have been a little naïve, there is no evidence they ever thought Iraq would use the plant for weapons.

In any event, the French government did not want to see a French-built plant dynamited, principally because that might threaten France’s other commercial interests in Iraq. The United Nations had to find a less obvious way to give the facility the deep six. “We filled the air-circulation system with a mixture of foam and concrete before we left Iraq, and I believe we made the labs unusable,” Spertzel said. Not that it matters. A Level 3 lab is not expensive to build or very difficult to hide. Most legitimate Level 3 research facilities are a few rooms, and they can be anywhere.

In 1999, the Iraqi government asked the United Nations for funds to reopen Al Manal. The UN turned down the request.

“Their biowarfare program continues,” Spertzel said, “and the chance the Iraqis are continuing research into smallpox today is high.”

After the American-British inspection team visited Vector in 1991 and found evidence that the Vector scientists were doing genetic work with smallpox and were testing the live virus in a chamber for strategic-weapons systems, its findings were classified. The U.S. government decided to work quietly with the new leadership of the Russian Federation to see if the problem could be settled without getting a lot of attention. If the world learned that Russia had a huge biowarfare program, and one that involved genetic engineering, then other countries might be impressed and tempted to get involved with dark biology. One leading expert close to the negotiations between the United States and Russia said that the diplomatic approach failed; the Russians stonewalled the Americans, and the inspections stopped. “The whole thing went into the sand,” he said.

“Their BW [biowarfare] program was like an egg,” Frank Malinoski (who had been a member of the inspection team) told me. “We saw the white of the egg, but we didn’t see the yolk. They hard-boiled the egg, and they took out the yolk and hid it away.”

In 1997, the Russian government suddenly announced that the smallpox collection in Moscow had been moved to Vector. The WHO rubberstamped that decision one year later, and Vector became the only official repository of smallpox besides the CDC.

Today, Vector is largely abandoned, and about eighty percent of the buildings there are in ruins or are not being used. Under the Cooperative Threat Reduction Program, the U.S. government has given millions of dollars to the Vector scientists to help them do peaceful research. Visiting American scientists have been told that delegations of biologists or officials from Iran have visited Vector and tried to hire it as a subcontractor to do unspecified research into such viruses as Ebola, Marburg, and perhaps smallpox. In the American intelligence community, Iran is widely believed to have a vigorous and modern biological-weapons program, which it probably established in response to Iraq’s biowarfare program.

No outsiders have ever seen the smallpox freezers inside Corpus 6, but there are two of them, an A and a B. The Vector mirrored smallpox is said to contain one hundred and twenty different named samples of variola. Each of them is probably stored in two or more identical master-seed vials. Corpus 6 is surrounded by razor wire and is under military guard, with a security system that was built by the Bechtel Group and paid for by the U.S. government, in the hope of keeping the Vector smallpox from migrating somewhere else.

Battle in Geneva

Peter Jahrling, the senior scientist at USAMRIID who was called to the office at four in the morning on October 16th, 2001, when the Daschle letter full of anthrax was being analyzed at the Institute, is the codiscoverer and namer of the Ebola Reston virus, the only type of Ebola that has ever been seen in the Western Hemisphere. Ebola is an emerging virus from the rain forests and savannas of Africa that causes people to die with hemorrhages flowing from the openings of the body. There are now five identified species of Ebola. The hottest of them, Ebola Zaire, kills up to ninety-five percent of its infected victims, and there is no cure for it. Jahrling discovered the Ebola Reston virus in 1989, during an outbreak of Ebola in Reston, Virginia, a suburb of Washington, D.C. Before he knew what the virus was, he inadvertently inhaled a whiff of it from a small flask. Tom Geisbert, the USAMRIID microscopist whom Jahrling would later ask to examine the Daschle anthax, also took a whiff. The two scientists tested their blood every day for a while after that, but they never became sick. They are the official codiscoverers of Ebola Reston, and they have continued to collaborate on research into Ebola. Peter Jahrling also discovered that an antiviral drug called ribaviran can be used successfully to cure people who are infected with Lassa, the Level 4 virus that turns people into bleeders.

In the nineteen nineties, as the presence of biological weapons in Russia and other countries became more obvious and more alarming, Peter Jahrling expanded his interests beyond Ebola and began to study smallpox. He worked with the Cooperative Threat Reduction Program, and he flew frequently to Vector, where he got to know Lev Sandakhchiev, Sergey Netesov, and many other Vector people. He exchanged Christmas cards with them every year and drank vodka with them when he visited. He liked them personally and tried to get along with them.

In the late nineties, there was virtually no smallpox vaccine on hand in the United States — at any rate, nowhere near enough to stop even a small outbreak. Jahrling got involved in efforts to create a national stockpile, but he came to believe that the vaccine would not be sufficient if there was a bioterror attack on the United States. The traditional vaccine, vaccinia, has a rate of bad reactions, including brain disease and death, that probably makes it unacceptable by modern standards of pharmaceutical safety. About one in five people couldn’t receive the vaccine under current rules. The vaccine is a live virus, and it can sicken or kill people who have lowered immune systems. Today, many people have lowered immunity, including those who are taking immunosuppressive drugs, such as people in chemotherapy or people with inflammatory diseases. Many people also have lowered immunity because they are HIV-positive. The vaccine can’t be given to people with eczema, or to family members of someone with eczema or other skin conditions, and it can’t be given to pregnant women or to families that have a baby in the house. The pustule formed by a vaccination is contagious if it oozes. If the smallpox vaccine was given indiscriminately to everyone in the United States, it is suspected that at least three hundred people would die, or perhaps one thousand or more — no one really knows — and many other people would be sickened. If a pharmaceutical company marketed a drug that killed a thousand people, it would be one of the biggest scandals in the history of the drug industry.

Peter Jahrling had a loose-knit group of researchers around him, and he pushed them to develop other ways of protecting people against smallpox. He was encouraged by the increasing success of antiviral drugs in fighting HIV.

One of Jahrling’s collaborators at USAMRIID, a virologist named John Huggins, ran some experiments and found that a drug called cidofovir (which is marketed under the brand name Vistide) could be used to successfully treat monkeys infected with monkeypox. Working in the Maximum Containment Lab at the CDC in 1995, Huggins also found that cidofovir seemed to work against smallpox in a test tube. Cidofovir might help people with smallpox, and possibly other smallpox drugs could be found. An antiviral drug for smallpox could also be used to treat people who had bad reactions to the existing vaccine; it could be a safety net for immune-compromised people in case millions of people needed to be vaccinated for smallpox quickly.

In order to develop drugs and a new vaccine for smallpox, it would be necessary to do experiments with live variola. The Food and Drug Administration would never license a drug or vaccine for smallpox unless it had been tested and shown to work on at least one type of infected animal. Two centuries ago, Edward Jenner had tested his vaccine in a human challenge trial. Human challenge trials with real smallpox today would be unethical and highly illegal, and might well be considered a crime against humanity. There were going to have to be other ways to test cures for variola besides Edward Jenner’s way.

Shortly before the Eradication was formally declared complete in December 1979, D. A. Henderson moved to Baltimore and became the dean of the School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University. He and his family settled into a solid brick Georgian house near the campus. They built a Japanese garden along the side of the house, and D.A. enjoyed entertaining students and faculty there. He loved to spend a Saturday in the family room, in a big easy chair by the sliding glass doors that looked out on the garden. For years, his wife, Nana, had been asking him if he had any plans to retire; he said he would like to retire, but not immediately. He served as a presidential science adviser in the Bush, Sr., White House for a while, and he has a top secret — level national-security clearance. He began hearing about the Soviet/Russian biowarfare program in the mid-nineties. Starting in 1995, the government gave national-security clearances to people involved with public health, microbiology, and smallpox. Many of them were taken into a conference room at USAMRIID and briefed by Peter Jahrling and others who had special knowledge. They were also briefed by Ken Alibek, the second major defector to come out of Biopreparat after Vladimir Pasechnik.

D. A. Henderson was dismayed by what he learned. He was slow to accept the disturbing information that he was getting about smallpox in the Soviet Union, and he could hardly bear to confront it. Soviet public health doctors had been the early driving conscience behind the Eradication, and the country had donated much vaccine to the effort. Svetlana Marennikova, the keeper of the WHO’s smallpox in Moscow, had seemed to be a thoroughly professional scientist. It wounded Henderson to accept this, but by early 1997, he had concluded that smallpox was by no means under control in just two freezers. What shocked him the most was the revelation of the twenty tons of smallpox at Zagorsk. In his mind, this was an obscenity. As early as 1998, he became alarmed about Osama bin Laden, and he began making public statements about the possibility that bin Laden’s organization would acquire smallpox. He began working behind the scenes to encourage the U.S. government to build up a stockpile of the smallpox vaccine, but he found this hard going, since no one seemed to take the threat very seriously. Nobody, except for a handful of people like Peter Jahrling, seemed to understand how bad the disease was or how fast it would spread. Increasingly concerned about the threat of biological terrorism, Henderson founded the Johns Hopkins University Center for Civilian Biodefense Strategies and became its first director.

One gray winter day in 1999, I visited Henderson in his house, and we sat in the family room and ate ham sandwiches and drank Molson beers. He was older yet the same man — six feet two, broad shouldered, with a seamed, angular face, pointed ears, and a thick brush of hair, though now gray. He filled the room with his gravelly voice and an aura of human power. He was the medical doctor who had driven variola out of humanity. The walls and shelves of the room were crowded with African and Asian sculptures and wooden Ethiopian crosses that he had picked up during his travels. “If smallpox were to appear anywhere in the world today, the way airplane travel is now, about six weeks would be enough time to seed cases around the world,” he said. “Dropping an atomic bomb could cause casualties in a specific area, but dropping smallpox could engulf the world.” He sipped his Molson, and the sky turned the color of bluestone, and raindrops splattered across the wooden decks in the Japanese garden.

At that time, very few public health experts or government officials took D. A. Henderson seriously when he said he thought a global smallpox outbreak could really happen. He was viewed in Washington as an older guy who had become a pain in the neck. Henderson intended to remain a pain in the neck for the foreseeable future. He had preserved his top-secret national-security clearance, because he believed that if a bioterror event occurred, the government might want to pull him in to help, and he would need a security clearance in order to serve. Because he had the clearance, he heard about little bioterror threats that didn’t get into the news. He felt they were harbingers of something bigger. “In the last ten days,” he remarked to me, “we’ve had fourteen different anthrax scares. Everybody and his brother is threatening to use anthrax. Of course, a real bioterror event is going to happen one of these days.”

In a calm, persistent voice, he argued for the destruction of the official stocks of variola. “What we need to do is create a climate where smallpox is considered too morally reprehensible to be used as a weapon,” he said. “It would make the possession of smallpox in a laboratory a crime against humanity. The likelihood that the virus would be used as a weapon is diminished by a global commitment to destroy it. How much it is diminished I don’t know. But it adds a level of safety.”

Henderson was a member of the Ad Hoc Committee on Orthopoxvirus Infections, the smallpox advisory panel for the WHO. The committee was composed largely of veterans of the Eradication, and they met at irregular intervals in Geneva. Starting in 1980, they began to discuss getting rid of the two repositories of the virus — the one at the CDC and the one in Moscow. Henderson now says that at that time he didn’t care much one way or the other whether the stocks were destroyed, since the disease had been eradicated, and that was the main thing. Between the CDC freezer and the Russian freezer, there were not more than a couple of pounds of frozen smallpox material, all told. The vials would have fit into a few cardboard boxes, and heating them in an oven would seem to be easy.

Some of the committee members felt that destroying the stocks of smallpox in Atlanta and Moscow amounted to the purposeful extinction of a species. Even though it was variola, the worst human disease, would it be proper to send it to extinction? (They didn’t know that the Soviet Union was then making variola by the ton for loading into ICBMs.)

In 1990, the U.S. secretary of health, Louis Sullivan, asked the WHO what its position was: should smallpox be made extinct as a species? The Ad Hoc Committee solicited the views of the major societies of microbiology, along with the Russian academy of medical sciences. The answers came back, and they were unanimous: variola should die. Nobody wanted variola kept around. Even so, the committee proposed that the information in the DNA of smallpox be preserved. In 1991, the CDC pox virologist Joseph Esposito and the genomic scientist J. Craig Venter decoded the entire DNA of the Rahima strain of smallpox. The genetic information in the Rahima strain could be kept, while Rahima and its fellow strains could be made extinct.

In 1994, the committee and the World Health Assembly voted unanimously to destroy all the stocks of smallpox, and they set a deadline of June 30th, 1995, for the execution. The official stocks would be cooked in autoclaves — ovens that would make the vials of smallpox sterile. But then, abruptly, the British Ministry of Defence and the U.S. Department of Defense began to object to the plan. The 1995 deadline passed, and the stocks of smallpox still sat in the freezers.

The governments of nonindustrial countries that had suffered from smallpox didn’t like the idea of American and British military people keeping smallpox: it made them very nervous. In 1996, the WHO General Assembly voted for the total destruction of the official stocks and set a new deadline of June 30th, 1999, but as that deadline approached, opposition to the destruction persisted. It was now coming both from Russia and from some members of the American scientific community, mainly virologists, who wanted to study smallpox for pure scientific curiosity. In the summer of 1998, the Institute of Medicine, a branch of the National Academy of Sciences, formed a panel of experts to explore the question of what sorts of important research might require real variola. D. A. Henderson smoldered about it. He objected to the very way in which the panel was posing the question: “If you ask a scientist what research could be done if he had the live smallpox virus, of course he’s going to tell you a lot of research could be done.” In his view, there was no good scientific justification for research into real variola. He had no illusions any longer that variola sat in only two freezers, but he felt that the United States and Russia had an opportunity to show the world the moral high ground. He felt that the traditional vaccine had worked in the Eradication and would work again if there ever was a bioterror attack with smallpox. He thought that an antiviral drug for smallpox was a long shot that would waste resources, and that the research would interfere with the far more important task of showing the world that the United States and Russia could get along fine without smallpox. “To get a new drug for smallpox will cost three hundred million dollars, and the money simply isn’t there,” he said.

On January 14th, 1999, the Ad Hoc Committee on Orthopoxvirus Infections met at the WHO, in a conference room in an annex building. The meeting was chaired by D. A. Henderson. The participants were the inner circle of the committee. There were also a number of straphangers — people sitting in chairs at the edges of the room, sometimes asking questions. One of them was Peter Jahrling. Lev Sandakhchiev, the head of Vector was in the inner circle of the eradicators. Sandakhchiev is a chain-smoker, and at every break he went outdoors and paced along a walkway in the cold, wreathed in a cloud of pungent blue smoke from his Russian cigarettes.

Lev gave a presentation. He read from a long, prepared text in English, and when he answered questions, Svetlana Marennikova, the former guardian of the WHO smallpox repository in Moscow, helped to translate for him into English. Sandakhchiev said that there had been no work with smallpox at Vector until very recently. Though the WHO smallpox had been moved to Vector in 1994, he said, it had sat in a freezer for three years, and nobody there had used the virus for experiments until 1997.

This caused a big stir in the room: the WHO had not officially made Vector the repository until 1998, but here Sandakhchiev was saying that the smallpox had been moved out of Moscow without anyone’s permission and years earlier than had been supposed.

The Japanese eradicator, Dr. Isao Arita, was particularly dismayed, and he grilled the Russian pox scientists: “Why did you move it then? Why didn’t you tell us?”

Henderson had good reason to believe that Sandakhchiev and his people had been developing and testing smallpox for weapons in 1990. “I rolled my eyes,” he recalled later. “And I saw Peter Jahrling and other people rolling their eyes at me. It was quite elaborate and quite unbelievable. We’re sitting there, he’s presenting us with all this horseshit, and he knows it’s horseshit. He was lying flagrantly.”

Toward the end of the meeting, Henderson gave his views. He spoke for forty-five minutes in his gravelly voice, with passion and restrained anger. He said that Osama bin Laden represented a danger to the world. He said that bin Laden could get smallpox and would use it. He said that the Aum Shinrikyo sect in Japan could get smallpox and use it. He said if smallpox was used as a bioterror weapon, everyone on earth was in danger, and it was imperative that the leading countries of the world agree to destroy the official stocks of variola. Looking straight at Sandakhchiev and at his old colleague Marennikova, he said he believed that smallpox existed in at least three places in Russia. He said that several biowarfare scientists from Russia had “gone south”—to countries in the Middle East. He spoke of his opposition to any further research with variola in the laboratory, and he posed a question to the room: “How many requests for experiments with variola have you actually had in the past twenty years?”

Lev Sandakhchiev firmly insisted that he and his people hadn’t been doing anything with smallpox until very recently.

As for the CDC, it had had virtually no requests for experiments with smallpox. The smallpox had been sleeping peacefully in the freezer, except when the Rahima strain was taken out and its DNA was sequenced by Esposito and Venter. But Peter Jahrling wanted to awaken the smallpox stocks and use them in research. Speaking from his seat as an onlooker, he said, “D.A., the tools of molecular biology have advanced quite a bit in the past twenty years. Just because there hasn’t been any demand for variola in the past, it doesn’t mean there won’t be demand for variola in the future.”

Henderson answered by saying that the arguments for keeping smallpox in order to do research for antiviral drugs or better vaccines were completely specious. He said that a new vaccine would require an animal model, and that we would never have. Smallpox would not infect an animal; it was a virus of people. It is safe to say that D. A. Henderson was in almost unbearable agony as he gave that speech.

The meeting ended with a vote on whether to keep or destroy the stocks. It went five to four in favor of destroying smallpox — a narrow victory for Henderson. But the virus had already passed out of the control of the WHO, and Lev Sandakhchiev had more or less said so. Henderson felt terrible regret that he and the other members of the committee hadn’t voted to destroy the stocks in 1980, right after the Eradication. Everyone would have agreed to it, and they could have done it then.

The execution date of smallpox, June 30th, 1999, began to loom. In April, the Institute of Medicine issued a report saying that if the world wanted to have a new vaccine or an antiviral drug for smallpox, then the virus would need to be kept for scientific experiments. President Bill Clinton had personally favored the destruction of smallpox, but the report changed his mind, and the White House now strongly endorsed the idea of keeping the stocks. A month later, the WHO General Assembly voted to keep smallpox alive for another three years, until June 30th, 2002. Researchers — principally Peter Jahrling and his group — could use that time to see if it would be possible to cure smallpox with a drug or if it would be possible to find an animal that could be infected with smallpox so that new vaccines could be tested.

The stakes could not have been higher for Jahrling. He felt that a smallpox emergency could be as bad as a nuclear emergency. “Smallpox is the one virus that can basically bring the world to its knees. And the likelihood of smallpox being visited on us is far greater than a nuclear war, in my opinion,” he said to me. Now he had three years to do something about it. There were times when he woke up, bolt upright in bed, sleepless at three o’clock in the morning with Pocken-angst, with anxiety about smallpox. He would talk to D. A. Henderson in his head: Goddamn it, D.A…. He and the eradicator agreed perfectly on the nature of variola — it was the mother of all biological weapons. But they could not agree on what to do about it.