Books : Germs : Excerpts

From Chapter Seven

Weber was surprised but delighted when Lepyoshkin accepted his invitation to accompany his team to other germ sites in Kazakhstan. American U-2 planes and spy satellites had taken hundreds of pictures of Vozrozhdeniye, or Renaissance, Island, the Soviet Union's largest open-air testing site. No American had ever visited this forbidding place, and Lepyoshkin knew every inch of it.

In the 1980s, Lepyoshkin had spent weeks on the island testing the anthrax developed at the Stepnogorsk complex as well as agents for other diseases: tularemia, Q fever, brucellosis, glanders, plague, and, according to Kazakh and American sources, even smallpox. Despite its isolation and inhospitable climate -- temperatures routinely plunged to zero in winter and soared to 140 degrees Fahrenheit in summer -- Lepyoshkin had an odd affinity for the island. Between tests, he had passed the time reading, playing volleyball, drinking vodka, and painting watercolors of the island's stark, flat landscape and gray-blue sea. Some of those sketches still decorated a wall of his tiny apartment in Stepnogorsk.

Perhaps it was their visit to Renaissance Island that solidified the unlikely bond between Weber and Lepyoshkin. The day after he was told that the team's fixed-wing aircraft would not be able to land on the island's dilapidated airstrip, Weber had plunked down $8,000 in hundred-dollar bills to rent a Soviet-era Kazakh helicopter that could make the flight. When Lepyoshkin learned that Weber had not cleared either the new plan or the expenditure with Washington, he exploded with laughter.

"Andy," Lepyoshkin said, patting the young American on the back, "you are a real cowboy!"

To Lepyoshkin, whose knowledge of America was based largely on the pirated Western movies he had watched on snowy nights with friends, a cowboy was a free spirit who continued fighting losing battles against powerful government bureaucrats. In an ideal society, the righteous cowboys would win, thought Lepyoshkin, who had always dreamed of living in such a world.

"You're the cowboy, Gennady," said Weber, returning the compliment. Lepyoshkin had also broken the rules by agreeing to accompany the Americans on their tour after having been denied official blessing.

Weber would never forget their trip to "Voz" Island, as the American team called their destination. As their MI-8 helicopter sped toward the island in the middle of the Aral Sea, signs of life rapidly diminished. Fishermen in their wooden boats had vanished; what had once been a living sea was now marshland. Scraggly trees gave way to patches of sagebrush until, finally, there was nothing left to see but salt-covered, cement-colored sand that had once been seabed, now cracked and dry. There were no birds. Nothing seemed to live here.

After the helicopter landed, Weber and his colleagues put on the white germ-warfare suits, masks, and respirators that the Pentagon had given them for the mission. The suits were added insurance in case a year's worth of vaccinations against a host of gruesome diseases failed to protect them. While Cowboy Weber was willing to incur Washington's anger over the unauthorized rental of a chopper, he was taking no chances with the germs.

He had first learned about Renaissance Island from intelligence reports based on Ken Alibek's debriefing. Alibek, it turned out, had brought with him one of the most closely guarded secrets of the Cold War: Vozrozhdeniye, he had told the Americans, was not only the former Soviet Union's major germ-testing range; it was also the world's largest burial ground of weapons-grade anthrax. For the United States, the visit was a potential intelligence gold mine.

Weber recalled Alibek's account of the island's sad history as he double-checked his suit, mask, and connecting air filter for holes or leaks. In the spring of 1988, scientists from Sverdlovsk had been ordered to dispose of tons of anthrax bacteria that the Soviet factory had produced and stored at Zima, near Irkutsk. Though the scientists were not told why, they had deduced that President Gorbachev was getting nervous about pressing glasnost at home and perestroika with the West while the evidence that Moscow had blatantly violated the germ treaty was being stored throughout the country. In the new climate, the Soviet Union's anthrax stockpile was becoming a potential liability. What would Moscow do if Britain or the United States demanded an inspection and found the telltale product -- a clear violation of the 1972 Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention, which the Soviets had been among the first to sign and ratify? The anthrax had to be destroyed. But where? And how? Anthrax spores were incredibly hardy, and Soviet science had made them even more so.

The scientists were ordered to dispose of the stockpile on Renaissance Island, their former test range, over a thousand miles away. Working in haste and total secrecy, they transferred the tons of bacteria -- enough to destroy the world's people many times over -- into stainless-steel canisters. Over the next several days, the canisters were packed onto a train two dozen cars long and sent on a lonely journey across the Russian and Kazakh republics to Vozrozhdeniye.

At the edge of the old test range, Soviet soldiers poured bleach into the canisters to decontaminate the deadly pink powder. Then they dug huge pits and poured the sludge into the ground, burying the decontaminated spores and, Moscow hoped, a serious political threat.

Now Weber was determined to dig up the anthrax and the past. As he and his team scrambled out of the helicopter, he noticed that Lepyoshkin declined the space suit they had offered him. If the anthrax hadn't killed him by now, Lepyoshkin joked, he was probably safe.

With Lepyoshkin at their side, the Americans explored the decaying laboratory and high-containment unit where Soviet scientists had handled the deadliest of agents. Though summer had just begun, the heat was a sledgehammer -- over 100 degrees, one scientist's thermometer showed. In their nonporous protective suits, the Americans sweated profusely. But the adrenaline rush of the mission -- knowing that they were the first Westerners ever to explore the island -- made them indifferent to their physical discomfort.

To Weber's surprise, not only was the lab deserted -- except for the occasional lizard, snake, or fly -- but it also had been stripped bare. What little the Soviets had not burned or buried when they had abandoned the site in 1992, local scavengers had stolen to sell at bazaars in Nukus and faraway Tashkent -- contaminated equipment, copper pipes, and even the floor and wall tiles, some of which they had left behind, shiny, lime-green tiles decorated with a fish motif. The vivaria that once housed thousands of smaller animals for tests -- rabbits, guinea pigs, white mice, and hamsters, as well as larger animals like horses, sheep, donkeys, monkeys, baboons, and apes -- were empty, their windows smashed or missing, their roofs collapsed.

In one bungalow, obviously a storage room, hundreds of small cages were stacked together; in another room stood a human-sized cage -- for large "nonhuman primates," man-sized monkeys, Lepyoshkin assured them. Back in the 1980s, Lepyoshkin had joked with Alibek, his boss at the time, about envying the doomed monkeys: the animals, at least, had been given bananas and other fruit for dinner, a luxury even for privileged Soviet germ scientists. It was gallows humor; the thousands of animals sent here had died hideous deaths, hundreds of them in a single experiment. The animals were long gone, but a stench familiar to veterans of the world of germ warfare clung to the ruins -- a blend of bleach, dust, animal waste, and death.

Just beyond the compound lay the vast desert test range -- delineated only by telephone poles, evenly spaced a kilometer apart, to which the animals had been tethered during open-air testing. Air-sampling devices fastened to the poles measured the concentration and particle size of the agent and atmospheric conditions during the tests.

After the American team toured the compound, scooping up surface samples from the lab walls and test-range soil, Weber and Lepyoshkin inspected the facility's housing compound on the northern part of the island, less than a mile away from the test range. The three-story buildings that had served as barracks, homes, kindergarten, and cafeteria were deserted, but at the peak of the testing, Russian scientists, technicians, and their families had lived here -- as many as a thousand people in all.

The children's playground, with its swings and a Russian version of a jungle gym, were an eerie reminder of those who had once called this forbidding place home. Lepyoshkin told Weber that most of the children had not been vaccinated against the agents that, until the 1970s, had been tested here, just a mile downwind -- tularemia, Q fever, brucellosis, glanders, typhus, VEE, and plague. In some cases, no vaccines existed for the strains that had been disseminated from planes by spray tanks and from aerial cluster bombs.

"We didn't test unless the wind was blowing south, away from the living quarters," Lepyoshkin said. Still, there had been accidents. A plain wooden cross marked the grave of a young woman scientist who had accidentally become infected with glanders. Moscow had never disclosed her death, or those of several local fishermen who had ventured too close to the island during an ill-fated test in 1972 and were subsequently found in their drifting boat, dead from plague.

Lepyoshkin, of course, had been vaccinated against many of the lethal pathogens he had tested -- several strains of which were apparently unknown to the Americans. Weber and his team had endured a year of painful shots to protect them against anthrax and other more exotic agents, but Lepyoshkin had been protected simply by stepping into a test chamber at the Stepnogorsk complex. As he had listened to soothing classical music, an aerosol vaccine had wafted across his body and into his lungs. The Soviet Union had pioneered mass immunization through aerosol, jet-injector, and oral vaccines, Lepyoshkin noted. In 1960, the Soviets had used an oral vaccine to inoculate some 6.6 million people, during a three-week period, against an outbreak of smallpox, which normally kills a third of unvaccinated victims. The United States would not begin testing aerosol vaccination techniques until the late 1990s, but aerosol protection had been routine in the Soviet Union. This was yet another area in which Soviet germ scientists had excelled; the United States had much to learn from them, Weber thought, as he listened to Lepyoshkin.

"The island was smaller and beautiful then," Lepyoshkin recalled wistfully. "From the lab you could almost touch the blue sea sparkling in the sun."

Because of wrongheaded Soviet irrigation policies, the Aral Sea was shrinking. Once the world's fourth-largest inland sea, it now ranked tenth. Its surface had shrunk by half between 1960 and 1990, its volume reduced by 75 percent. As a result, the dusty, tear-shaped speck of an island had grown from 77 to 770 square miles. At low tide on some hot summer days, it was already connected to the mainland. Soon this once isolated island would be permanently linked to the Uzbek mainland by a natural land bridge. Then the buried anthrax germs -- and who knows what else -- might escape their sandy tomb. Carried by gophers and other rodents, lizards, and birds, the spores could be brought to the mainland. Since anthrax bacteria spread from animals to human beings by direct contact, the potential for widespread contamination of people whose health was already abysmal would only increase -- if the anthrax spores were still alive.

The local population already suffered from a variety of mysterious illnesses -- rare forms of cancer -- that may have been attributable not just to poverty and environmental degradation but also to the region's biological and chemical legacy. No one knew for sure. There had been no census in the region since 1989, and health statistics were either nonexistent or unreliable.

Weber's team had been told of the region's plight during their stay at Aralsk, Vozrozhdeniye Island's military support headquarters, where the Soviet army had kept a four-hundred-man battalion of soldiers skilled in germ warfare and some six hundred other troops. Before traveling to the island, the American team had spent a long night at the town's only hotel, a sweltering, bug-infested ruin, where they had talked to the former Soviet port's residents.

According to Doctors Without Borders, the volunteer physicians' group, people of the region, especially those in Karakalpakstan, a semiautonomous republic in Uzbekistan that borders the sea on the southern side, were among the former Soviet Union's most chronically sick people. Some 90 percent of the women were anemic. Infant mortality rates were comparable to those of sub-Saharan Africa. There was an alarming increase in kidney disease and various cancers. Two-thirds of the population suffered from some chronic illness, many from tuberculosis, whose incidence soared after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

At Aralsk, on the Kazakh side of the sea, the local government had turned one of the deserted Soviet army barracks into a tuberculosis colony where patients could be relatively isolated. But there were no drugs for them. Aralsk's population, along with the sea that had once supported a local fishing industry, had shrunk; there were now fewer than ten thousand people. There was no work. The children on the hot, dusty streets seemed listless and pale. Even the dogs and camels looked sick.

What would happen to them, Weber wondered, if the island's legacy of still-deadly anthrax came ashore as the sea continued to shrink? On the Uzbek side of the island, which included most of the testing complex, an Uzbek oil company had started exploratory drilling. Some oil riggers had even set up temporary headquarters in the barracks that had once housed the Soviet germ scientists. Was the buried anthrax still alive? Could there be still other deadly remnants of Vozrozhdeniye Island's past?

When he returned to Almaty, the Kazakh capital, Weber briefed Ashton B. Carter, an assistant defense secretary who was touring the region. Weber's mission to Stepnogorsk had proved that what Pasechnik and Alibek had told the West about the former Soviet germ-warfare program was true. Biopreparat was, as Ken Alibek had called it, the Soviet Union's "Manhattan Project."

While Biopreparat institutes inside Russia were still closed to foreigners and even to most Russians, Weber's visit to some of the largest, most lethal sites in now independent Kazakhstan had created a unique opportunity, Weber and Carter agreed. If the Clinton administration could help Kazakhstan salvage and convert its facilities, especially the complex at Stepnogorsk, it might prevent the scientists there from returning to germ-warfare work and discourage the sale of their expertise to rogue states or terrorists. It could also create a precedent. A flourishing, prosperous Stepnogorsk would be a showcase to other former Soviet republics and even to Russia, which strongly resisted biological cooperation with the West. America, Weber urged Carter, had to make Stepnogorsk a "poster child" for the benefits of transparency, international cooperation, and nonproliferation.