Amerithrax (14 page)

THEY
called it the Institute. Like anthrax itself, the Institute had begun life in a cow pasture. For a decade the National Guard had used the field as an airport and training camp for pilots. But in 1942, the Army selected old Detrick Field, with its rocks and open fields of buttercups and red clover, to become the home of its offensive biological weapons pro- gram. Overnight, the pasture mushroomed into “Camp” De- trick. Like multiplying bacteria, 250 buildings and quarters for five thousand swarmed over this stretch of rustic farm- land. Nestled in the foothills of the Catoctin Mountains of western Maryland, the camp occupied fifteen hundred acres in Frederick County some forty miles northwest of Wash- ington, D.C. To the north of the facility stood Woodsboro and the Monocacy River. To the east lay Ceresville and to the south, Buckeystown and Frederick.

By April 1943, that rural field, a distant memory, was crawling with more than seventeen hundred officers and en- listed personnel from every branch of the armed services. The pasture had been transformed into the top secret Institute—the brain center of the nation’s bioweapons pro- gram. From the beginning there were constant security fears. Every scientist endured a six-month-long background check. A top secret clearance was a prerequisite to work at the prestigious hub of the U.S. germ warfare research. The Army issued a .45-caliber side arm to each of its scientists and ordered them to keep the weapons within easy reach on their workbenches.

Every page of lab research, all testing and reports, each

phase of small-scale production, technical papers, and inter- course with industry and universities were initiated and in- tegrated through the maximum-security encampment. During World War II, the technicians who toiled at the In- stitute were surrounded by barbed-wire fences, floodlit tow- ers, and guards with machine guns. German shepherds strained at their leashes as sentries patrolled the wooden, tarpapered margin of “Black Maria,” the Institute’s first of- fensive biological weapons lab. The Army charged the tech- nicians of “Black Maria” with developing an efficient biological delivery system. “Get the germs to the enemy forces as intact and deadly as when they began,” they or- dered. Inspired by British tests at Porton Down, the scien- tists briefly considered using flies as anthrax carriers.

Institute scientists regularly investigated dysentery, glan- ders, typhus, and brucellosis. Brucellosis, like anthrax, was a disease found in cattle. Like anthrax it was not transmit- table by humans, but contracted by direct contact with se- cretions and excretions of infected animals such as contaminated milk products. The symptoms were remarka- bly like those of anthrax, including enlarged lymph nodes, joint pain, chills, fatigue, and long-lasting high fever. And like anthrax, brucellosis could be spread by aerosol. Unlike anthrax, brucellosis, with only a 5 percent fatality rate, was antibiotic resistant. The Institute cultivated botulism, small- pox, plague, paralytic shellfish poison, and cholera. Cholera bacteria thrived in water, while other pathogens did not. Cholera’s stability in water made it perfect for contaminat- ing reservoirs. But anthrax, called a “professional pathogen” because of its hardiness, was the hands-down choice of most bioweapons engineers. It remained the Institute’s biggest and most successful project.

During the prewar years, the Soviet Union and Britain had already added anthrax to their arsenals. The Institute’s pilot plant produced anthrax in ten-thousand-gallon tanks. The U.S. plant was so successful that, in September 1944, Britain ordered five hundred thousand bomblets that would each emit an ounce of anthrax mist that, if left untreated, would kill nearly every infected person. None of the weap- ons developed were ever used.

Between 1945 and 1950, the United States, along with Britain and the Soviet Union, continued postwar bioweapons research, evaluating agents that had shown the most prom- ise. The Institute would travel anywhere on earth to collect a sample of any deadly disease. In 1956, they developed agriculture agents to attack the Soviet wheat crop and Com- munist China rice paddies. They stored the pathogens at Rocky Mountain Arsenal near Denver (which also manu- factured plutonium for nuclear weapons) and at Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland.

The Institute’s eight-story Building 470, a windowless skyscraper among the flat buildings, dominated the land- scape. From its beginnings in 1952, Building 470 was a prototype factory for making anthrax—from seed stock to dry, lethal spore powder to be loaded into bombs or rockets. A single “run” within one of the forty-foot-high fermenters inside produced an eighteen-hundred-gallon batch of anthrax mixture, about seven thousand grams of anthrax each week. Only the “Eight Ball,” the facility’s enormous one-million- liter aerosol test chamber, was more striking. Inside the hol- low, four-story metal sphere the Institute’s scientists exploded germs to create infectious aerosols for testing, until 1973 when the “Eight Ball” burned to the ground. To wea- ponize anthrax, to make it stable and durable enough to survive delivery, was difficult. The Institute produced five thousand anthrax bombs, but even the most capable dis- pensed only 3 percent of its spores. The rest were destroyed by the vast temperatures of detonation.

Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, scientists working in Building 1412 continued perfecting germ weapons. In secret large-scale experiments, the Army’s Institute standardized a value of eight thousand inhaled anthrax spores as the lethal dosage for 50 percent of the exposed human population re- ceiving it—the so-called LD50. This stood for a dose fatal to half the population, the “log-normal” model used to cal- culate risk factors and anthrax munitions requirements. The model took into account that some people were more sus- ceptible to infection than others. In more intimate tests, sci- entists discovered they needed only four thousand spores to achieve LD50.

Theoretically, one hundred grams of dried anthrax could wipe out a small city. The eight billion lethal doses con- tained in a single gallon of anthrax was enough to kill every man, woman, and child on earth. At the Institute, as in Rus- sia, they cultured anthrax in huge quantities. A few grains of freeze-dried anthrax bacteria inside a stoppered triangular vial were taken from a refrigerated vault. A nutrient medium was added and the mixture was transferred into larger con- tainers to incubate forty-eight hours in thermostatic oven boxes. The correct temperature was crucial—too much heat could destroy the anthrax bacteria.

Over two days, the scientists nurtured death, coaxing it into growth until the meager seed stock had grown to bil- lions. When the liquid mixture was withdrawn from the ov- ens, technicians siphoned it off into large flasks connected to air-bubbling machines. The machines distributed oxygen evenly, encouraging more bacteria growth.

Each new generation of bacteria was shifted to progres- sively larger vessels until the resulting translucent cola- colored froth was piped under vacuum pressure into giant fermenters to incubate. After another two days the bacteria mix was passed through a centrifuge, then concentrated thirty times further through a separator. When it reached its maximum concentration, the anthrax resembled coffee swirl- ing with cream.

Separated from its liquid base, the anthrax bacteria had to be dried to powdered form. It was difficult to do without destroying them. Then the tiny protective spores they formed had to be milled, also without killing the bacteria. The result was a fine, odorless powder usually colored white or beige. Weaponizing anthrax meant making the organisms a smaller, standard size for use in aerosol form. To enter the lungs and trigger inhalational anthrax, bacterial spore- particles had to be smaller than five microns wide. Spores between one and five microns wide jetted right by nose hairs and cilia along the windpipe, breaching the respiratory sys- tem’s natural defense system. A single microscopic invader under five microns wide could penetrate deep into the lungs, multiply in the moist respiratory mucosa, and produce mil- lions of deadly offspring.

But since an ordinary human cell is about ten microns wide (a human hair is ten times wider), grains larger than ten microns rarely reach the lungs. It would take two hun- dred spores to span the thickness of a hair. The mechanical milling required to make fine dust artificially also creates an electrostatic charge sufficient to bind anthrax spores into large clumps. Those lumps are harmless because they cannot reach the lungs. To keep the spores separate and deadly, the fermented anthrax culture had to be mixed with additives to stabilize it.

The Institute’s bioweapons specialists had settled on a chemical additive, silica, to remove the static between the particles and prevent them from clinging together. The Iraq and Soviet biowarfare programs used a substance called bentonite, a mixture of pharmaceutical-grade silica and alu- minum, instead of silica. Bentonite, a clay additive, is the generic term for a class of natural or processed clays derived from volcanic ash useful in reducing the static charge of spores. Spores milled to the right size and purged of elec- trostatic charge are still hard to separate.

Weaponizing was also about keeping the individual par- ticles light enough to hang effortlessly in midair like gos- samer so they could be inhaled before settling to the ground. The Institute’s wispy spores could be sprayed widely in the ragged skies to float for miles. But what sprayer could dispense such a fine mist to infect substantial numbers of people?

Over the years, a high number of Detrick scientists had become victims of their own pathogens. Two women work- ers gave birth to babies with severe birth defects and both children perished. Four men working at the Institute died from exposure to pathogens, two from anthrax infection. In 1951, William A. Boyles, a forty-six-year-old microbiolo- gist, inhaled anthrax spores on the job just before Thanks- giving and died on November 25. In 1958, fifty-three- year-old Joel E. Willard, an electrician who worked in the “hot” areas of Building 470, succumbed to inhalational an- thrax in July. He had been changing lightbulbs in a test building where animals were exposed to anthrax. A sam- pling taken after Willard’s death showed the building was

so “grossly” contaminated that Willard had to be buried in a lead casket. The Institute named Boyles Street and Willard Place in their honor.

Boyles and Willard, like every worker at the Institute, had signed a waiver that gave the government rights to their bodies if they died from a disease contracted at the Institute. “Dr. [Ralph E.] Lincoln had me pull a sample of Willard’s dried blood,” said W. Irving Jones Jr., an Institute biochem- ist. “We were able to grow [the anthrax bacteria] right up. And it was deadly.” Willard’s substrain of anthrax, success- fully tested on animals, was used for a new and more pow- erful weapons strain.

Like the Soviets, the Institute had no qualms about using human accident victims to boost the killing power of their anthrax arsenal. Ken Alibek, a former deputy chief of the Soviet bioweapons program and now president of Advanced Biosystems, a consulting company in Manassas, Virginia, told the tale of an unfortunate scientist, Nikolai Ustinov, and his encounter with the Marburg virus. In 1967, in Marburg, Germany, twenty-five lab workers were infected with an agent, previously unidentified, but now called the Marburg virus. Seven of them died. Ustinov accidentally pricked him- self while injecting a guinea pig with Marburg virus. Two weeks later he died an agonizing death. “No one needed to debate the next step,” Alibek recalled. “Orders went out im- mediately to replace the old strain with the new, which was called, in a move the wry Ustinov might have appreciated, ‘Variant U.’” Alibek, with his bowl-shaped haircut, ap- peared amiable for someone who had worked hand in hand with death for so many years.

The original weapons strain of anthrax used at the Insti- tute had been a variety called Vollum after the British sci- entist who isolated it from an Oxford cow just before World War II. British bioweapons engineers made the first altera- tions. They replaced the Vollum strain with a substrain, “M36,” by passing the original strain through a series of infected monkeys to increase its virulence.

In 1951, the Institute perfected the Vollum microbes to create Strain 11966. After Boyles’s death, references to the M36 variant of Vollum were replaced by references to the

highly deadly “Vollum 1B strain” of anthrax for use in an- thrax warheads. In the Vollum 1B strain, particles of aerosol mist measured only one micron, a highly desirable quality in a lethal aerosol.

The virulent, heightened bacteria collected from Wil- lard’s and Boyles’s bodies enabled the scientists to isolate and upgrade the Vollum strain a second and possibly third time. The Vollum weapons strain was changed by passage through Boyles’s body into Vollum 1B. “That’s where Vol- lum 1B came from,” said Bill Patrick, a tireless problem solver and manager who formerly headed Detrick’s product development division. “It’s 1-Boyles.” Patrick was born July 24, 1926, in Furman, South Carolina, and earned a bache- lor’s degree in biology from the University of South Caro- lina and a master’s degree in microbiology from the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. He joined the bio- weapons program at Fort Detrick as a production manager in April 1951 while simultaneously working toward a doc- torate in microbiology at the University of Maryland.

After the Institute’s bioweapons program was shut down, he became a private consultant. His business card showed a skull and crossbones. Atop his stationery was a drawing of the Grim Reaper, his black scythe labeled biological war- fare, his boney outstretched arm sowing a rain of germs. Patrick had been an Iraqi weapons inspector in 1994 and was probably the only man in America who knew how to make weaponized anthrax. Patrick also knew how easy it was for a terrorist to launch a germ attack against America. “Anthrax gets stronger as it goes through a human host,” said Bill Walter, who joined the Institute in 1951 as a “prin- cipal investigator.” “So we got pulmonary spores from Bill Boyles and Joel Willard. And finally we got it from Lefty