A rchive Date
[ 17-02-2002 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ Russia ]
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[http://www.tv.cbc.ca/national/pgminfo/redlies/index.html
Biological Warfare and the Soviet Union
It was a horrible accident - for the people who died and for what it revealed. It would show the world the effects of anthrax on a civilian population, and it would expose the existence of a massive biological weapons program in the former Soviet Union; a program, some fear, exists to this day.
"People began to die around the fifth or sixth of April," says Dr. Marguerita Ilyenko, a hospital administrator in Sverdlovsk, Russia. "Before that, the doctors had noticed that animals were dying, sheep, pigs. Then the people began dying. I get in my office in the morning, and Rosa Gazeeva, who still works as a doctor in our hospital, tells me 'Five people died on me overnight.' So I say 'are you out of your mind?'
"I threw down my purse, rushed upstairs. It really was a nightmare. Ambulances were constantly bringing in patients. Some were still alive, others already dead."
In Sverdlovsk (now called Yekaterinburg), Russia, the faces of the dead on dozens of tombstones bear silent witness to one of the Soviet Union's darkest secrets: all mark one point in time; early April, 1979.
For years, there was very little information to explain why or how the people died. The cause of death was explained away with lies to conceal one of the most frightening developments of the Cold War.
While the world worried about the nuclear threat, the Soviet Union was secretly amassing the largest biological weapons program in global history. It involved thousands of scientists, who spent two decades turning deadly diseases like anthrax and smallpox into weapons of mass destruction. There are those who fear that work continues inside Russia today.
Sverdlovsk has a long association with death. Czar Nicholas II and his family were executed in Sverdlovsk. Today, if its one million citizens were asked to choose a sister city, it might well be Hiroshima.
In April, 1979, a horrifying accident happened at a secretive military base called "Compound 19." Behind imposing walls, a deadly production line turned out tonnes of anthrax powder for the Soviet Union's biological arsenal. One April morning, a small amount of the dust was accidentally released through the ventilation system. The invisible plume was blown over a working class neighbourhood and nearby ceramics factory.
Ivan Vershinin worked at that factory. His wife remembers the last time she saw him alive.
By the time I got home, the ambulance was already there. The doctors said 'put some clothes on him right away or he'll die at home.' I said good-bye to him and the ambulance took him away and that was it.'
The sick began pouring into hospitals all around Sverdlovsk. Some were vomiting blood, many complained their lungs were on fire. Most died within 48 hours, as doctors frantically searched for the cause.
Dr. Marguerita Ilyenko was the director at one hospital.
"I walked up to one of the patients," she remembers. "I can still see him before my eyes, and he is talking to me, he is still alive. But right there in front of me, I can already see death spots forming all over his body! On his neck, on his back, doctors know what this means. Then he began to vomit and died. It was a very quick death."
Tamara Markova arrived at another hospital, searching for her husband.
"I got there, but he wasn't on the list, so they went to look for him in the morgue and they found him," Markova says. "I forgot to tell you - when they were conducting the autopsy, the doctor said his lungs looked like jelly. They were completely destroyed."
The city's chief pathologist, Dr. Faina Abramova, was urgently called back to work, late at night, to observe one of the very first autopsies. She remembers one victim's brain membrane was covered with something that looked like a hat.
"It was red, so there was hemorrhage," she says. "So we were wondering what could cause this? I remembered that when I was a student, we learned that anthrax causes lesions in the brain. When this happens, the lesions resemble a cardinal's hat. But where could this anthrax have come from?
" They were trying to convince us that the illness came from meat. They said that somewhere outside the city, an entire herd of cattle had fallen ill and that the anthrax had come from them."
It was reasonable to suggest it had come from a farm around Sverdlovsk. Anthrax is a spore that grows naturally in pastures. Animals occasionally eat it when they graze, and people can pick up the infection if their skin comes in contact with diseased animals. It is not usually fatal in humans. There was another important difference. This anthrax had been inhaled, and the Soviet military knew it.
Behind the walls of Compound 19, the Soviet army was secretly coping with its own casualties. In the aftermath of the accident, the Soviets would lie to their own people in order to conceal what they were doing from the outside world.
Long before this accident, the Soviet Union and many other countries had signed the Biological Weapons Convention. It was a promise to end decades of germ warfare research by both sides in the Cold War. The Soviets had eagerly helped write the 1972 treaty. But in the process, they realized just how far their own research lagged behind the West.
So at the very moment they were publicly signing the treaty, they were secretly laying plans to break it.
Within one year of the signing, senior Soviet scientists, like Dr. Igor Domaradskizh, received marching orders from the Kremlin to begin covertly advancing the biological arms race.
The Kremlin established a biological warfare research program called Biopreparat.
"I think one of the reasons was that it was assumed that due to the great achievements in the area of molecular biology and genetics in England, the States, probably Canada, that they had likely managed to be ahead of where we were at that stage," Domaradskizh says. "Somehow we had to make up the gap that developed between us and those countries. And it was precisely because the convention had already been signed by them, that all this research was happening."
The headquarters of Biopreparat was established down a tree-shrouded laneway not far from the Kremlin. From behind its walls, officials coordinated the efforts of 47 different research facilities spread across the Soviet Union. Thousands of scientists took deadly germs like anthrax, smallpox and plague, and studied ways of releasing them into the air as weapons; perfected formulas were turned over to military facilities for mass production and stockpiling by the tonne.
As the program continued to grow and seek out new scientific talent, one promising young doctor was recruited right out of medical school. At the time of the anthrax accident in Sverdlovsk, Ken Alibek was just beginning his career at Biopreparat.
"I was, what you say, hardliner," Alibek says. "I was a Communist, and you know I was a person who believed this weapon was a part of the Soviet Union's arsenal."
Alibek says he never stopped to wonder why doctors trained to cure diseases were now using them to make weapons of mass destruction.
"Nobody considered people's life something precious. You know for us, we didn't calculate individuals - we calculated millions and millions. You know when you calculate millions, it's statistics; it's not tragedy."
So for a military that calculated deaths in the millions, the accident was but a blip on the learning curve. The KGB quickly descended on the city's hospitals to confiscate all medical records and alter death certificates. To ensure the final accident report cited food poisoning as the cause, Moscow despatched a more compliant pathologist named Dr. Nikiforov.
When Nikiforov's paper came out, it was a complete surprise - not only for us, but also for everyone," says Sverdlovsk pathologist Dr. Abramova. "All of the doctors who worked on this talked to each other. After the autopsy, all thought that this was a respiratory form of anthrax poisoning. In other words, it occurred through breathing. But this was just talk and it was quickly being muffled. Why? We were being advised to talk as little as possible."
A massive clean-up operation ordered to eliminate any trace of the military's anthrax. The city of Sverdlovsk was placed under a dusk to dawn curfew.
Teams of men wearing decontamination suits began making unexplained visits to the homes of those who died.
"An ambulance arrived and they sprayed everything in our house," Markova says. "They took away the linen and took away everything. They even sprayed our dishes."
Officials decided all of the dead would be buried together in a single section of the city's cemetery. Hospitals were ordered to look after many of the burials because families were too frightened to retrieve the bodies of loved ones.
"We were given instructions on how the corpse was to be wrapped in polyethylene sheets with a chlorine solution inside," Ilyenko says. " Teams were formed around the city, mostly composed of police officers, but they wouldn't get close to the coffins. They were also afraid, and stood there smiling. They wouldn't carry the corpses, so I had to get our own guys, carpenters, plumbers. I told them 'guys, I'll give you a bottle of alcohol each. Just help us.' That's how, using our own cars, we buried these people."
Some of the only records of the accident that still exist are documents Dr. Ilyenko managed to hide in a safe. They list the names of the those who died in civilian hospitals, almost 70 people in all. She says that number doesn't include the many soldiers who would have died.
By the time of the 1979 accident, Compound 19 was already the target of intense interest by Western intelligence agencies. In London, suspicion turned to alarm with news of the mysterious deaths in Sverdlovsk. Dr. Christopher Davis was a biological weapons expert with British intelligence.
"The professionals in the field were convinced that there was a large and growing program," Davis says. "What that program contained, where it was headed, just how complex it was, is another issue. It's difficult to accuse large buildings of bad things, you know. You've got to have someone inside them walk out and say we're doing x, y and z. And then you can say, uh huh, well we thought so."
It would take ten long years, but that's exactly what would happen, with the defection of Vladimir Pasechnik in 1989. Pasechnik was the administrative head of Biopreparat when he was whisked out of Moscow by British agents.
"I came to the conclusion that one possible way to stop the program will be bring the news about it to the Western side," Pasechnik says.
"He confirmed how much of a cover-up we'd been subject to," Davis says. "I think surprise is not quite the word; it's a sort of gulp feeling, and you think "oh dear." You've got a very strong impression of a deliberate planned program. We're talking, you know 25 to 30,000 people working on the program; uh maybe more in different capacities over a large number of years. It is sometimes difficult to convey the sheer magnitude and sophistication of it. And it's easily said oh, they had a big program. It wasn't just big, it was massive."
By the time Vladimir Pasechnik defected to Britain, Ken Alibek had risen to become Biopreparat's chief scientist. During a scientific exchange visit to the United States, Alibek came to the unsettling conclusion the U.S. was not engaging in similar biological weapons research. With the CIA's assistance, he defected to the West, bringing with him firsthand scientific knowledge of the Soviet's secret program.
"They were shocked; shocked because you know they couldn't imagine that the Soviet Union had such an enormous, very powerful and sophisticated offensive program," Alibek says.
In the years since the Sverdlovsk accident, Alibek and a research team had taken the Soviet military's anthrax and made it even more deadly. He developed a process to take ground up anthrax spores and coat each particle in plastic and resin. It kept the anthrax aloft four times longer, increasing its ability to infect people.
"The main idea was just to make it more efficient. Just, for example, using a pretty small amount of this weapon to cover as much as possible territory, populated territory, [ to kill as many people as possible.]" Alibek says.
Over remote parts of the Soviet Union, Alibek's new anthrax and other biological weapons were tested on animals. The various substances were later placed inside cantaloupe shaped balls that could be packed inside the warheads of intercontinental ballistic missiles.
Richard Preston , author of books and articles on the effects of biological warfare, "It appears the Soviets had enough biowarhead material on hand to be able to knock out the top 100 cities in the United States."
"It appears that the Soviet government had developed intercontinental missile systems that were targeted on North America. They were loaded with such things as smallpox, black death, anthrax and the Marburg virus, which is a close cousin of ebola, and causes this massive hemorrhagic bleeding in human victims," Preston says.
Ken Alibek is now a consultant to the Pentagon. He has warned a Congressional committee the U.S. still has much to fear from the Russians.
"Until the Russians have provided a complete accounting of the biological weapons activities, it's very difficult to believe that they have ceased all these activities," Alibek says.
His words fell on receptive ears. The Soviet Union may have collapsed and Russian officials may insist all biological weapons research has stopped, but there are fears the Russian military may still be developing such weapons on its own.
"I see a lot of very very suspicious signs," Alibek says. "We need to understand we don't have to believe in everything that Russia says. There is a Russian expression: believe, but check. So we need to check; we need to be sure that nothing is going on."
It's one of the ironies of this massive biological weapons program that its only victims, so far, have been the Russian people themselves - offering the world a rare human example of the horribly real effects of biological weapons.
"What we know about the effect of nuclear weapons is largely from studying what happened to human populations in Hiroshima and Nagasaki," Preston says. "What we know about anthrax is largely what we can tell from what happened in Sverdlovsk."
In an overgrown corner of the Sverdlovsk cemetery, the forgotten shallow graves of at least some of the soldiers who died inside Compound 19. Weather and time have worn away the only bare reminder of their existence. What the world cannot yet establish is whether the program they worked for has really ended - or continues, buried and hidden, like its victims.
 World Fact Book (CIA)]
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