The Demon in the Freezer (9 page)

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.