“I know all about the Soviet biological weapons program,” Yeltsin confessed. “It’s still going ahead.” He also said that the Russian scientists who ran the program were determined to continue their work. “They are fanatics, and they will not stop voluntarily,” Yeltsin said. He vowed to put an end to it. “I’m going to close down the institutes,” he promised, to “retire the director of the [Biopreparat] program.”
“We were stunned,” Braithwaite recalled in his memoir, “and we could do no more than thank him.”
Boris Yeltsin had admitted what every other Soviet leader, including Gorbachev, had been lying about for twenty-three years. With the information now public, the U.S. Congress got involved. So did the American press. Countering biological weapons was poised to become a massive new industry, expanding and proliferating at a phenomenal rate. DARPA would lead the way.
In America, Dr. Alibekov changed his name to sound more American. He was Dr. Ken Alibek now. He moved his family into a home in the suburbs outside Washington, D.C. This was the Soviet scientist who, over decades, had weaponized the bacterial infection glanders, orchestrated test trials of Marburg hemorrhagic fever, overseen the creation of the Soviet Union’s first tularemia bomb, and created a “battle strain” of anthrax, Strain 836, hailed as “the most virulent and vicious strain of anthrax known to man.” He was working for the U.S. government now.
Each day Alibek drove along the well-paved highways, past the big homes and the well-stocked stores, to an office building in Virginia just twenty minutes outside the nation’s capital, where he now worked. There, inside a secure room on the second floor, he answered questions asked of him by individuals from a wide variety of U.S. intelligence agencies, military agencies, and civilian organizations about Russia’s biological weapons programs.
Alibek confirmed what Vladimir Pasechnik had told British intelligence about Soviet advances in biotechnology and the development of Super Plague. But as deputy director of Biopreparat, Alibek had had access to many more classified programs than Pasechnik did, including delivery systems for the germ bombs. This work, Alibek said, took place inside a top secret unit of Biopreparat called the Biological Group, located inside the Soviet General Staff Operations Directorate. Here, weapons designers crafted specially designed missiles that would be used in a biological warfare attack against the United States. Weaponized pathogens are, for the most part, fragile microbes. They generally cannot withstand extreme temperature fluctuations, as happens in flight. The Soviets had solved this problem, Alibek said, by retrofitting long-range ICBM missiles with mini–space capsules, like the ones astronauts rode in. The missile was a MIRV, a multiple independently targetable reentry vehicle, meaning each ICBM was capable of carrying ten warheads over a range of six thousand miles. Its NATO reporting name was SS-18 Satan.
Alibek also provided chilling details about a Soviet bioweapons programs called Chimera, whereby genetic material from two or more different organisms was combined to produce more virulent germs. Alibek told his handlers they should be very worried about this program, and said he had direct knowledge of a trial developed in the late 1980s in which a chimera, or hybrid, strain was created by inserting Venezuelan equine encephalomyelitis genes into smallpox. One of the ultimate goals of Chimera, Alibek said, was to create a monster hybrid of smallpox and Ebola. Alibek warned his handlers that the Soviets had sold secrets about genetically modified bioweapons to Libya, Iran, Iraq, India, Cuba, and former Soviet bloc countries in eastern Europe. U.S. officials took notes and listened. Alibek’s greatest frustration, he would later say, was that these officials did not seem to comprehend the potentially catastrophic consequences of the Soviet program.
“They did not care about our genetic work,” Alibek lamented. “When it came to strategic questions,” his interrogators told him that they were uninterested in what he had to say. “We are only interested in what you know,” they said, “not what you think could happen.” The Pentagon was happy to learn what he knew about the inner workings of Biopreparat. Alibek’s information was useful, he was told, but his opinions were unwelcome. Soon, this too would change.
There had been a blind spot at the Pentagon and at DARPA since the earliest days of the Cold War, an aloof indifference to the opinions of biologists. Officials at the White House and the Defense Department were much more interested in what the hard scientists, like the Jason scientists, had to say. Back in 1968 Nobel laureate Joshua Lederberg pointed out this disadvantage in a science column he wrote regularly for the Washington Post, accusing the federal government of “blindness to the pace of biological advance and its accessibility to the most perilous genocidal experimentation.” Lederberg was referring to biological weapons. Starting in 1945, with the advent of the atomic bomb, the Pentagon had largely relied on the advice and counsel of physicists and mathematicians as far as advanced weaponry was concerned, but rarely biologists.
If World War I had been the chemists’ war and World War II the physicists’ war, now, given the threats facing the Pentagon, would World War III be the biologists’ war?
Briefed on Alibek’s revelations about the Soviet bioweapons program, DARPA was quick to note this blind spot and to take action. “DoD had very little capability in biology” in the early 1990s, recalls Larry Lynn, DARPA’s director from 1995 to 1998. Now DARPA recognized just how worrisome it was that biology, and the life sciences in general, could lead the next revolution in military affairs, and recognized, too, that the Department of Defense was behind the curve. The Pentagon needed its own core group of advisors, American scientists at the leading edge of biology. The Jason scientists were contacted.
Since leaving the Institute of Defense Analyses in 1973, the Jason scientists had had several homes. For the first eight years they received their defense contracts through the Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, California. SRI was a longtime ARPA contractor and an information technology pioneer, and had been one of the first four nodes on the ARPANET. Under the SRI in the 1970s, the Jasons brought several computer scientists and electrical engineers into their ranks. And because they no longer served ARPA alone, their client list had expanded. Under the SRI banner, the Jasons conducted studies and wrote reports for the CIA, the Navy, NASA, the Department of Energy, the Defense Nuclear Agency, the National Science Foundation, and others.
In 1981 the Jason scientists moved their headquarters to the east coast once again, this time under the MITRE Corporation banner. There, Gordon MacDonald, himself a Jason scientist, served as MITRE’s chief scientist. Business continued to grow, with the Jasons still conducting most of their work as summer studies.
In 1986, defense contractor General Dynamics gave the Jason scientists their own room, back in California again, on its sprawling 120-acre La Jolla campus, which they still used as of 2014. “It’s a SCIF,” Murph Goldberger explained in a 2014 interview, referring to a “sensitive compartmented information facility,” meaning it was built to Defense Department security specifications and ringed by a barbed-wire perimeter. The room at General Dynamics was not exactly a college dormitory with a view of the ocean, but as Goldberger noted, “times have changed.”
After the Berlin Wall came down and the bioweapons threat ratcheted up, Jason “was told it was wise to bring biologists into the ranks,” said Goldberger. DARPA director Larry Lynn reached out personally to Joshua Lederberg. After decades of forewarning, Lederberg was finally brought on board as a defense scientist. He would now serve as chairman of DARPA’s science advisors for biology. In 1994, DARPA director Larry Lynn and a team traveled to Moscow, laying plans for how to use technology to keep track of what was going on there. The details of this trip remain classified.
Biological weapons were the new national security concern, and in the fall of 1995, in an effort to have sanctions against his country relieved, Iraqi president Saddam Hussein disclosed to the United Nations that Iraq had been producing biological weapons by the ton, including botulinum toxin, camelpox, and hemorrhagic
conjunctivitis. Iraq admitted it had hundreds of scientists working in at least five separate facilities, a number of which were located underground, and which had survived destruction in the Gulf War. In 1996, the CIA provided President Clinton with reports on the biological weapons programs believed to be in existence inside North Korea, Iran, Iraq, Libya, and Syria—all still classified in 2015. In 1997, the Jasons were asked to conduct a summer study on biological weapons threats. The group had a new scientist in their ranks, the microbiologist Stephen M. Block, who, several years later, published some of the unclassified findings of this Jason summer study.
The most significant threat, noted Block, was the accelerated pace at which discoveries in molecular biology were being made. “Recent advances in life sciences have changed the nature and scope” of microbiology, he wrote, revealing “inevitably, a dark side.” The Jason scientists warned just how dangerous the threat of genetically engineered pathogens had become. Modern bioscience has made “possible the creation of entirely new WMD, endowed with unprecedented power to destroy,” Block wrote. “Was [this alarmist] hype, or largely warranted?” he asked. Block said the Jason scientists had concluded “the latter.” In Block’s opinion, “it seems likely that such weapons will eventually come to exist, simply because of the lamentable ease with which they may be constructed.” They were cheap, easy to make, and, if you knew what you were looking for and could find out how to create them, freely available in the public domain.
The ability to genetically engineer pathogens had raised the threat level. For use as a weapon, the possibilities were limitless. “If you were to mix Ebola with the communicability of measles to create a pathogen that would continue to alter itself in such a way to evade treatment,” wrote Block, the rate of Ebola’s transmission and infectivity would skyrocket. These stealth viruses, which Alibek called chimeras, were even more menacing from a psychological perspective, Block said.
“The basic idea behind a stealth virus is to produce a tightly regulated, cryptic viral infection, using a vector that can enter and spread in human cells, remaining resident for lengthy periods without detectable harm,” Block wrote, calling this a “silent viral load.” One example that exists naturally is herpes simplex, or the common cold sore. The virus lies dormant until it is one day triggered by what is believed to be an environmental assault on the body, like sunburn or stress. Similarly, an unwitting population could be “slowly pre-infected with a stealth virus over an extended period, possibly years, and then synchronously triggered,” Block wrote. This wicked concept had enormous potential in the realm of psychological warfare. As far as using a stealth virus as a weapon, the Jasons were dually concerned. Stealth viruses carried with them “a utility beyond that of traditional bioweapons,” they concluded. “For example they could be disseminated and used to blackmail a population based on their activation.”
If the notion of a stealth virus, or silent load, sounded improbable, Block cited a little-known controversy involving the anti-polio vaccination campaign of the late 1950s and early 1960s. According to Block, during this effort millions of Americans risked contracting the “cryptic human infection” of monkey virus, without ever being told. “These vaccines,” writes Block, “were prepared using live African green monkey kidney cells, and batches of polio vaccine became contaminated by low levels of a monkey virus, Simian virus 40 (SV40), which eluded the quality control procedures of the day. As a result, large numbers of people—probably millions, in fact—were inadvertently exposed to SV40.” Block says that two possible outcomes of this medical disaster remain debated. One side says the 98 million people vaccinated dodged a bullet. The other side believes there is evidence that the vaccine did harm. “A great deal of speculation occurs about whether [simian virus] may be responsible for some disease” that manifests much later in the vaccinated person’s life, says Block, including cancer. The subject remains highly contentious, with vaccine makers and the National Institutes for Health engaged in acrimonious debate with scientists who have found the SV40 monkey virus in cancerous human tumors.
The 1997 Jason report on biological weapons remains classified. Shortly after it was completed, President Clinton issued two Presidential Decision Directives, PDD 62 and PDD 63, both of which addressed the biological weapons threat and both of which also remained classified as of 2015. Biological warfare defense was now a “very high DARPA priority.” In 1996, DARPA opened a new office called the Unconventional Countermeasures Program. Congress quickly funded this “high-priority initiative” with $30 million for its first fiscal year. “DARPA is seeking partnerships with the research community and the biotechnology and pharmaceutical industries to develop innovative new treatment, prevention and diagnostic strategies for biological warfare threats,” read one of the earliest program overview memos.
Initially, DARPA’s primary focus was on protecting U.S. soldiers. An internal memo noted, “Troops, ports, airfields, supply depots, etc. are vulnerable to biological attacks,” and yet, paradoxically, “most likely first use [of bioweapons] will be against population centers of ours or our allies.” DARPA had a mission to develop “broad strategies to counter the threat.” This effort explored four areas: sensing, protection, diagnosis, and countermeasures. But DARPA as an agency was dedicated to advanced research and development, and the first three areas, sensing, protection, and diagnosis, were “only marginally protective.” DARPA wanted its scientists and researchers to strive for revolutionary goals, to focus on innovative countermeasures that did not yet exist. Larry Lynn told program managers that he wanted to create the “Star Wars of biology,” a reference to President Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative. Lynn challenged DARPA scientists to push existing biotech boundaries and to come up with a vaccine, gene, or chemical that could allow the human body to “incapacitate or debilitate” a biological agent on its own, before the pathogen made its host sick. It was a brilliant, bold idea. But could it work? Was there time?
The 1994 international nonfiction best-seller The Hot Zone, by Richard Preston, is about the origins of, and incidents involving, the Ebola virus. Three years later, in 1997, Preston wrote a fictional account of a bioterrorism attack in New York City, titled The Cobra Event. Preston’s genetically engineered biological weapon, a chimera virus called Cobra, is imaginary, but his information was based on real reporting. He had interviewed Christopher Davis, the Royal Navy surgeon who had been Vladimir Pasechnik’s original handler, as well as Ken Alibek and many top scientists at USAMRIID.
President Clinton read The Cobra Event shortly after it was published and was alarmed. He asked Secretary of Defense William Cohen to read the book and have an intelligence analysis of the viability of a real-life Cobra event written up. Secretary of Health and Human Services Donna E. Shalala also read The Cobra Event and included a plot summary in a journal article she authored for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The following year, in 1998, Richard Preston testified before Congress in Senate hearings on the question “Threats to America: Are We Prepared?”
“Biopreparat was like an egg,” Preston said of the Soviet program. “The outside part was devoted to peaceful medical research. The hidden inner part, the yolk, was devoted to the creation and production of sophisticated bioweapons powders—smallpox, black plague, anthrax, tularemia, the Marburg virus, and certain brain viruses.” In this public forum, Preston outlined Russia’s capacity to launch a biological weapons attack on the United States. Using smallpox as an example, Preston said that as recently as a few years prior, Soviet-era ICBMs fitted with specially loaded MIRV warheads stood ready and able to launch. Those warheads, Preston said, carried “twenty tons of freeze-dried small-pox powder” and “probably… an equal number of Black Death [plague] warheads.” Before the Berlin Wall came down, Preston summarized, if the Soviets had decided to launch a biological weapons attack against the United States, his research indicated that they “could have easily hit the one-hundred largest cities in the United States with devastat
ing combined outbreaks of strategic smallpox and Black Death, an attack that could easily kill as many people as a major nuclear war.” The Soviet Union no longer existed, but the warheads and their contents did. The congressional hearings supported the idea that biological warfare was an apocalyptic nightmare waiting to happen. Something radical had to be done. The bioweapons defense industry was like a sleeping giant, now awakened.
Ken Alibek had been in the United States for six years. He spoke English now, had friends, held lucrative defense contractor jobs, and was primed to enter the public domain. In February 1998 Alibek made his first television appearance on the ABC News program Primetime Live. In planning for World War III, Alibek said, the Russians had prepared “hundreds of tons” of bioweapons. Now, even with the wall down, Alibek said, the Russians “continue to do research to develop new biological agents.” In March, Richard Preston profiled Dr. Alibek for the New Yorker magazine. Copies of the article were distributed to members of Congress through the Congressional Record.
Before the Primetime Live airing, Ken Alibek was not a public figure. He had been moving quietly in U.S. government, military, and intelligence circles, sharing information with individuals who held national security clearances similar to his own. Now, his opinions found a much wider audience. American citizens were interested in what he had to say and so were the Joint Chiefs of Staff. In May 1998 Alibek testified before a congressional committee hearing on terrorism and intelligence. He even had a private meeting at the Pentagon, in the E-Ring, where he briefed General Joseph W. Ralston, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the second-highest-ranking military officer in the United States. The narrative of the biological weapons threat was gaining traction in the mainstream press. In June 1998, President Clinton asked Congress to provide $294 million in funding for anti-bioterrorism programs. In October, Alibek was featured in the PBS Frontline documentary “Plague War.”