Smallpox is nasty enough without being "awakened".

Taken from The Times, December 29, 2002

Demon in the freezer

by Richard Preston

Officially, smallpox has been eradicated, but illegal stocks are almost certainly held by Iraq and North Korea. Richard Preston, the acclaimed science writer, reveals a story of terrifying duplicity.

Late on a dank Friday afternoon in October 1989, Surgeon Commander Christopher Davis of the Royal Navy tidied up his office in the old Metropole building off Trafalgar Square. He was looking forward to the train home to Wiltshire.

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

Davis, who had both a medical degree and an Oxford PhD, was a military intelligence officer. An expert in chemical and biological weapons, something of a backwater 13 years ago, he worked as an analyst on the defence intelligence staff.

The papers on Davis’s desk contained source intelligence - bits and pieces of information, some credible, some not - about chemical and biological weapons some countries might or might not have. His job was to move the bits around, like fragments of broken glass, and try to assemble them into a picture of something.

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

ADI-53 handed him a two-page highly secret telegram and revealed that there was a "walk-in", an unexpected defector. Vladimir Pasechnik, director of the Soviet Institute of Ultra Pure Biochemical Preparations had sought asylum in the British embassy in Paris while at a drug industry trade fair.

The telegram summarised his initial debriefing. "I am part of Biopreparat, a large, secret programme 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 as he read on: plague and smallpox. "Oh, s***," he said to ADI-53.

Plague and smallpox weapons are intended to kill large numbers of people indiscriminately. The target is a civilian human population, not a concentration of military forces. Doctors generally consider smallpox to be the worst human disease. It is thought to have killed more people than any other infectious pathogen.

"If what is in front of me is accurate," Davis told his boss, "it means that they have strategic biological weapons."

Early the next week he met 53-year-old Pasechnik in an anonymous hotel room in south London. The Russian had left his wife and children behind and he was very worried about them. Davis, who has a crisp, serious manner but also trim good looks, became the defector’s main debriefer. Over a period of many months they met in various hotels around the capital, minded by officers from the secret intelligence service.

Pasechnik, a chemist by training, said that Biopreparat was huge. The programme had vast stocks of frozen plague and smallpox that could be loaded onto missiles. He also revealed that warhead material had been genetically engineered.

One of the principal weapons was genetically modified plague that was resistant to antibiotics. Soviet microbiologists had created it by exposing natural plague again and again to powerful antibiotics, forcing the rapid evolution of drug-resistant strains.

One of these was already being manufactured by the ton, Pasechnik said. The Soviet ministry of defence had demanded that the biologists also develop ways of making "tonnage amounts" of weapons-grade smallpox for use in a new generation of missiles.

Pasechnik said the Soviet military had been making and stockpiling smallpox as a strategic weapon even while the Soviet health ministry participated in the "eradication" - the World Health Organisation (WHO) campaign to rid the world of the disease from 1966 to 1979.

He feared that a genetically engineered virus or germ could escape from the weapons programme. That 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."

Davis finished debriefing Pasechnik in the late spring of 1990. He and a close colleague from defence intelligence then travelled to CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, to brief the Americans.

"I have the highest respect for the intelligence services of the USA," Davis said to me recently, "yet they were amazed at what we told them."

FOR their part, the CIA people had a secret that they did not share with their British visitors. It was classified as Noforn - no foreigners.

What was missing from the British briefing was information that Soviet biological strategic missiles were operational. The British were not absolutely certain. The Americans, however, knew that a Soviet intercontinental ballistic missile had been launched from Kamchatka - the peninsula that hangs down from Asia into the northern Pacific Ocean - carrying a massive and mysterious Mirv (multiple independent re-entry vehicle) payload.

American spy satellites and navy ships had watched as the Mirv detached from the launch vehicle and went on a free-fall arc through space over the Pacific Ocean before separating into 10 warheads which fell into the sea.

There was something different about this Mirv. It had an unusual shape and it did not spin, as nuclear warheads usually did. 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 Mirv was dumping heat into space as it soared over the Pacific. Why would it need to do that? The laws of thermodynamics indicated that if heat was pouring out then the Mirv had to be cold inside. This suggested a refrigeration system. But what needed to be kept cold? A nuclear warhead can tolerate heat above the boiling point of water.

A further mystery was that the warheads fell by parachute. Nuclear warheads do not need to come down on a parachute.

America monitored several of these Mirv tests. The CIA also obtained imagery of missiles sitting in storage bunkers or launch silos in Kamchatka. The warheads were connected to refrigeration systems. Refrigeration implies life. The missiles appeared to contain living weapons.

Shortly after Davis’s visit, President George Bush (Sr.) and the British Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, were briefed by their intelligence people on the missiles armed with plague and smallpox.

Thatcher hit the roof. She telephoned Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet leader, and forcefully asked him to open his country’s biowarfare facilities to a team of outside inspectors. Gorbachev stalled for a while but eventually agreed.

A secret British-American weapons inspection team, including Davis, toured four of the main Biopreparat scientific facilities in January 1991. 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 anybody seeing their laboratories in operation.

The inspectors were met by denials, evasions, time-wasting bureaucracy, stupefying alcohol-laden meals that stretched on for hours, snarled transportation arrangements and endless speeches about friendship and international co-operation.

Whenever they could pull themselves away from a speech, they saw large "level four" biosafety rooms that had been stripped of equipment and sterilised and were not in use, although the laboratories showed every sign of having been in operation recently.

Level four is the highest level of biosafety. At level four, scientists wearing bioprotective spacesuits - pressurised plastic suits that cover the entire body - work on lethal incurable viruses known as hot agents.

The inspectors travelled by bus to a huge microbiology facility south of Moscow called Obolensk. It was surrounded by layers of barbed wire and military guards.

They were met by a lean-faced military microbiologist.

Inside a level four area, the inspectors found an array of two-storey-tall fermenter production tanks. This was a production facility for genetically modified plague, but the tanks were now empty. When Davis and the other inspectors accused the Russian microbiologist of manufacturing plague by the ton, he blandly told them 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 programme on earth, yet these people just sat there and lied to us, and lied and lied," Davis said to me. He insists 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 programme."

Late on January 14 the team arrived at Vector, a sprawling virology complex in the forests near Koltsovo, about 20 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 a building called Corpus 6. It is a simple brick structure, constructed by prison labour.

David Kelly, a British research microbiologist, took a technician aside and asked him what virus they were working with there.

"We are working with smallpox," the technician answered.

Kelly was amazed. Since the WHO eradication campaign, smallpox was supposed to exist only at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, Georgia, and at the Moscow Institute - the two official repositories for surviving samples of the virus.

Kelly repeated the question three times. "You mean you were working with variola major (smallpox virus) here?" He emphasised to the technician that his answer was very important. The technician responded emphatically, three times, that it was variola major. Kelly says his interpreter was the best Russian interpreter 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.

On an upper level of Corpus 6, the inspectors found a line of windows looking in on a giant steel dynamic aerosol test chamber. Such a device is for testing bioweapons - it has no other purpose. Beside it was a command centre that bespoke serious business, with massive dials, lights and switches.

Vector scientists later told 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 bomblets for smallpox Mirv biowarheads had probably been tested and refined in the chamber.

The inspectors asked if they could put on biosafety spacesuits and go inside. 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 they had developed viruses that were resistant to American vaccines," said one of the inspectors, Frank Malinoski. 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, Kelly, Malinoski and Davis publicly confronted one of Vector’s leading pox virologists and scientific administrators. "He’s very bright and capable, a tough individual, full of bonhomie, but he can be very nasty when he is upset," Davis told me.

The administrator heatedly denied that Vector was working with smallpox. He called on his deputy to support him. They said they had been doing genetic engineering with smallpox genes, that was all. Vector didn’t have any live smallpox, only the virus’s DNA. "They were both lying," Kelly said to me, "and it was a very, very tense moment."

"The fact is, they had been testing smallpox in their explosion test chamber the week before we arrived," Davis said.

AFTER the American-British inspection team reported back, its findings were classified. The Soviet Union was breaking up and the American government decided to work quietly with the new Russian leadership to see if the problem could be settled without getting a lot of attention. If the world learnt that Russia had a huge biowarfare programme that involved genetic engineering, other countries might be tempted to get involved with dark biology.

However, one leading expert close to the negotiations between America and Russia said the diplomatic approach failed. The Russians stonewalled the Americans and the inspections stopped. "The whole thing went into the sand," he said.

According to several independent sources, the Vector administrator who had denied working with smallpox took charge of a research group that devised a more efficient way to mass-produce warhead-grade smallpox in industrial scale pharmaceutical tanks.

In 1994, three years after the Soviet Union collapsed, they built a prototype smallpox bioreactor inside the level four hot zone in Vector’s Corpus 6 and allegedly tested it with variola major.

The bioreactor - a 300-gallon tank resembling a hot-water heater with a maze of pipes around it - 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 kidney cells and the bioreactor would become extremely hot with amplified variola.

A single run of the reactor would have produced approximately 100 trillion (100,000,000,000,000) lethal doses of variola major - enough to give each person on the planet about 2,000 infective doses.

Even this pales beside the old Soviet stockpile, however. It is now clear that in 1989, when Davis first learnt of the biowarfare programme, Soviet biologists were already making and tending 20 tons of weapons-grade smallpox at a military facility known as the Zagorsk virological centre, about 30 miles northeast of Moscow. It seems there was another stockpile of frozen smallpox warhead material at a military facility called Pokrov, 50 miles east of Moscow.

The former first deputy chief of research and production for Biopreparat, Dr Kanatjan Alibekov - who was in charge at Vector during the Anglo-American inspection and later defected to America, changing his name to Ken Alibek - has revealed how smallpox stocks could be used in biowarheads. Each Mirv had 10 warheads and each warhead had 10 grapefruit-sized bomblets inside it. The warheads would float towards the earth on parachutes. As they neared the ground they would burst apart, throwing out a fan of bomblets that hissed smallpox mist.

One Mirv missile could deliver 45lb of smallpox mist into a city. The mist would drift above rooftops, getting inside houses and schools and into the air-conditioning vents of office buildings and shopping malls. It doesn’t sound like a lot until one realises how deadly and easily spread the smallpox virus is (see panel).

Today both the Zagorsk virological centre and the bioweapons facility at Pokrov are controlled by the Russian ministry of defence. They are closed to all outside observers and have never been visited by bioweapons inspectors or by WHO representatives. "When we approach people in those places," said Alan Zelicoff, an American government scientist, "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 biological warfare."

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. One source close to the situation said: "All we’ve ever got 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."

Another American government scientist who 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 smallpox disappeared from a storage container the size of a petrol tanker, it would not be missed.

Alibek has warned that biological weapons technology can proliferate from Russia to countries unfriendly to America.

Today his former colleagues at Vector are dead broke. Some of the Vector weapons-production tanks are occasionally used to manufacture flavoured alcohol. Vector is largely abandoned and about 80% of its buildings are in ruins or are not being used. Yet Russia’s official WHO stock of smallpox virus is stored there, in Corpus 6, having been moved from the Moscow Institute. It is surrounded by razor wire and is under military guard, with a security system built by the Bechtel Group and paid for by the US government in the hope of keeping the Vector smallpox from migrating somewhere else.

In an attempt to keep them from selling their services to countries such as Iran and Iraq, the American 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 tried to hire Vector as a subcontractor to do unspecified research into such viruses as ebola, Marburg, and perhaps smallpox.

In the US intelligence community, Iran is widely believed to have a vigorous and modern biological weapons programme. Iran probably established this in response to Iraq’s biowarfare programme - now, of course, the hot problem of the moment.

A microbiologist named Richard Spertzel was head of the UN biological weapons inspection teams in Iraq - the Unscom teams - between 1994 and 1998. A veteran of the American military’s own biowarfare programme, which was shut down in 1969, he is now in his late sixties, a stocky man with glasses and a white flattop buzz cut.

Spertzel made some 40 trips to Iraq until the inspectors were kicked out for being too nosy. He picked his way through suspected sites of biological weapons research and development and directed the analysis and destruction of the main Iraqi anthrax plant, Al-Hakm, on a missile base in the desert west of Baghdad. The UN teams blew it up.

Spertzel now lives on a 10-acre spread just outside Frederick, Maryland, within a few minutes’ drive of the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases. This was the centre of the army’s germ weapons research and development until the programme was shut down and is now the principal biodefence laboratory in America.

"There is no question in my mind 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 three laboratory complexes at Salman Pak, a base run by the Iraqi security service on a bend of the Tigris River. "It would have taken a while to build these biocontainment labs at Salman Pak, so we think their biowarfare programme dates back to 1973 or earlier," Spertzel said.

In the mid-1990s, the UN inspectors often used the Habbaniya airbase outside Baghdad. On the road to town, they would pass a group of warehouses and repair shops run by a branch of the Iraqi ministry of health. They were surrounded by residential neighbourhoods and did not seem to be a likely place for biowarfare activity, but the inspectors decided to have a look. On the second floor of a warehouse they found a machine sitting by itself in its own room, awaiting repair. The inspectors recognised the machine as a type of freeze-dryer 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 sterilised the thing," Spertzel remarked.

The top virus expert in the Iraqi biowarfare programme was Dr Hazem Ali, a beefy, proud man in his forties who had a PhD in virology from Newcastle University. He spoke fluent English with a British accent. "He was one of the more brilliant scientists we had contact with," Spertzel said. Ali ran Iraq’s virus weapons development facility, a complex of level three biocontainment laboratories called Al Manal in the outer suburbs of Baghdad. In September 1995 the UN people questioned him in a conference room before television cameras operated by the Iraqi government. Spertzel listened while Ali said he and his group had been working to develop camelpox virus as a biological weapon. The inspectors did not believe Ali. Camelpox virus is extremely closely related to smallpox yet hardly ever infects people. You could run your hands over the wet, crusted muzzle of a pustulated camel, 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 PhD virologist.

Our only explanation for their camelpox was that it was a cover for research in smallpox." 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. In 1999 the Iraqi government asked the UN for funds to reopen Al Manal. The UN turned down the request. "Their biowarfare programme continues," Spertzel said, "and the chance the Iraqis are continuing research into smallpox today is high." Ali is still at work and is one of several top scientists whom the new UN inspection team in Iraq wishes to question.

ONE beautiful April day I visited Christopher Davis and his wife Louise at their house by the banks of the River Og in Wiltshire. We drank glasses of New Zealand white wine while they prepared a dinner of pasta primavera. In the distance, shadows were reaching along the Marlborough Downs. Davis wiped his hands and took me down a hallway to his study, where he began shuffling through old books on biowarfare. I noticed a leather box propped on a shelf, stamped with gold letters: OBE Mil. I opened it and found the gold medal of an Order of the British Empire resting on blue silk. "Is this yours?" He gave a little laugh. "What did you do?" It took much delicate questioning before he finally admitted why he thought he’d got it. They gave it to him for saying "Oh, s***" to his boss on that Friday afternoon. It was felt that Davis had provided Britain with a stunning first insight into the fact that the Soviet biowarfare programme was a strategic weapons programme, designed to destroy human populations.

We went outdoors, glasses of wine in hand, and breathed the air. Flycatchers dipped over the river and there was a smell of dew in the grass. Davis still had the Russian biowarfare stocks on his mind. Iraq, by comparison, was a sideshow. "They’ve won the game, you know," he said, and sipped his wine. "The weapons people, I mean — they’ve won. The inspections have stopped. Life will go on, of course, and everyone will live out their lives, unless something goes awry. "If something goes wrong with these biological weapons, it’s going to go very wrong, and our world will become the planet Zargon and life will become unimaginable."

Who has smallpox?

A list of the nations and groups that the CIA believes either have clandestine stocks of smallpox or are trying actively to get the virus would include the Russian Federation, India, Pakistan, China, Israel, Iraq, North Korea, Iran, the former Yugoslavia, perhaps Cuba, perhaps Taiwan, and possibly France. Some of those countries may be doing genetic engineering on smallpox. Al-Qaeda would be on the list, as well as Aum Shinrikyo, the Japanese cult that released sarin nerve gas in the Tokyo subway system. There is most likely a fair amount of smallpox loose in the world. Nobody knows where all of it is or what people intend to do with it.

Where do you think VITAS came from?