The Cobra Event (31 page)

The answers were vague. The inspectors went nose to nose with the Russian scientists. What did you
do
to smallpox? They pushed. They pushed harder. No answers came back. The situation became extremely tense, steel-hard with national-security implications, and it turned into a standoff. In the background were the shadows of intercontinental missiles loaded with living hot agents, and the inspectors wanted to know this: have you people targeted my country with smallpox in missiles? What kind of smallpox? Both sides understood that the inspectors were looking straight into the asshole of modern military biology.

No answers were forthcoming. The explanations of the Russian biologists just got stranger and stranger. They said that they were working on
clones
of smallpox, not on smallpox itself. Genetic experiments in the West involving smallpox are done using clones of the vaccinia virus, because vaccinia is harmless to humans (it’s the strain used for making the smallpox vaccine). To work on clones of smallpox is to work on recombinant smallpox. By insisting that they were working only on “clones of smallpox” the Russians essentially admitted that they were doing black biology with smallpox. As to whether they created whole new strains of smallpox, or whether they worked on parts of the smallpox virus, the Russians would not say. Did they take pieces of smallpox and mix them into some other virus or into a bacterium for study? Did they engineer a vaccine-elusive smallpox? It was impossible to tell.

All of the words of the Soviet biologists were captured on tape recordings. Their statements were translated and retranslated by Russian-language experts. The words were analyzed to death by experts working for the National Security Agency and other intelligence agencies. In the end, as Littleberry put it, “We never learned
what
the hell they did with smallpox.”

It should not be forgotten that these were military scientists. The goal of their research was military. They had tried and perhaps succeeded at making a genetically engineered smallpox. One participant in the confrontation between the inspectors and the Russian military biologists believed that they had mixed pieces of brain viruses into smallpox, thus making a brainpox—a smallpox that attacks the human brain.

After the inspection teams returned from Russia, the C.I.A., British intelligence, and the National Security Agency collectively had a heart attack. A gulf had opened up between the factual knowledge of the eyewitness inspectors and the belief structure of the civilian science community. Senior scientists, especially in microbiology and molecular biology, began to get accelerated security clearances and were briefed on the situation, not only with regard to Russia but other countries as well. Scientists who attended these briefings came away shocked. “Their eyes were like saucers,” according to one American scientist who was present at several such briefings. Biologists had discovered that one or more Manhattan bomb projects had occurred in their field, and they hadn’t known about it or believed that such a thing was possible. What was particularly upsetting for some of them was the realization that leading members of their own profession had invented and were developing weapons that were in some ways significantly more powerful than the hydrogen bomb.

Matthew Meselson at Harvard was still insisting that the Biological Weapons Convention was not being violated. For years he had dominated the discussion of biological weapons, and his opinions had been widely accepted. He had published articles in prestigious journals supporting the view that the anthrax deaths in Sverdlovsk in 1979 had been caused by the citizens eating bad meat, and he offered detailed scientific data from Russian colleagues to support him. It seems that the creators of the biological weapons treaty had become its guardians, with too great a stake in the treaty’s “success,” and this made them blind to the reality of bioweapons.

Russian news reporters began to investigate the Sverdlovsk accident, and in 1991, the Moscow bureau chief of
The Wall Street Journal
, Peter Gumbel, made three trips to Sverdlovsk, and at some personal risk, while he was being followed and harassed by the K.G.B., traced about half of the civilian victims. He located their families, who had wrenching stories to tell; he found doctors who had treated the victims; he unearthed medical evidence; and he showed that most of the victims had lived or worked next to a military compound. Meselson had written that the anthrax came from a “meat-processing plant at Aramil.” Gumbel went to Aramil and found no meat plant, only a picturesque village. He later confronted the Harvard professor with the fact that the meat plant didn’t exist. He reported rather dryly that “Prof. Meselson seemed taken aback.”

Meselson found himself in an awkward position, to say the least.
The Wall Street Journal
’s investigative reporting made it appear that the scientific data that he had published about Sverdlovsk was not only wrong but might have been fabricated by his Russian colleagues. Meselson had been both a victim and an unknowing disseminator of potentially misleading or even fraudulent scientific information. He got permission to go to Sverdlovsk, and with his wife Jeanne Guillemin and a team of collaborators, demonstrated that the outbreak really had been caused by an airborne release of anthrax from a military plant. He eventually published his findings in 1994 in the magazine
Science
. He did not, however, see fit to credit Peter Gumbel anywhere in his article.

He and his co-authors concluded that only a pinch of anthrax had been released into the air, not a large amount—only a minuscule whiff of anthrax that might be almost invisible if held between thumb and forefinger. Some experts disputed the notion that such a tiny amount of anthrax could kill so many people in a plume across a city. It is more logical, and it now seems widely accepted, that the amount of anthrax was more than a pinch, but no one really knows. The accident involved production of anthrax for weapons, and the story is that filters had been left off grinding machines, but the world may never learn what really happened.

The important thing is that Matthew Meselson had done an about-face. There is a world of difference between a pinch of weapon and a ton of bad meat. The other turnaround was more impressive, and it came from Russian president Boris Yeltsin, who confirmed to the world that modern Russia had inherited a biological-weapons program from the Soviet Union. This information was corroborated and expanded upon by two more senior defectors from the Russian bioweapons program. Top officials in the Russian program have just recently released a list of the hot agents that the modern Russian military forces would be most likely to use in the event of war. In order of choice, it goes: smallpox, Black Death, and anthrax. One or more of them may be genetically engineered. Biological-weapons treaty? What treaty?

MASACCIO AND LITTLEBERRY
sat in silence for a while, as Masaccio took in the context in which the Cobra Event was being played out.

“The cancer has metastasized,” Littleberry said. “A lot of countries are into biological weapons now. Syria has a top-notch biological-weapons program. Syria is also believed to be a sponsor of terrorism—you would know more about that than I do, Frank. If Syria’s got a program, you can wonder if Israel has gone seriously into black biology, and Israeli scientists are some of the best in the world. Iran is heavily into biological weapons; they know all about molecular biology, and they are also testing cruise missiles. Think about that. Think about line streakouts of an engineered hot agent. China has massive biological-weapons facilities out in the Sinkiang desert, but it’s hard for us to know what they’re doing, because our satellites are useless for detecting bioweapons research. We can’t see inside the buildings, and even if we could, we wouldn’t know what was growing in the tanks. We do know that the Chinese are very good in the area of molecular biology. And that’s not all. There are plenty of other countries that are developing bioweapons. None of these countries is
that
good. There are some clever idiots out there, and sooner or later, there is going to be a very serious biological accident. Something that will make Sverdlovsk look like a kiddie ride at the park. And I think it will be global, not just one city.”

Littleberry went on to say that he sometimes wondered if there had already been major accidents. “The Gulf War Syndrome,” he said, “is almost certainly caused by exposure to chemical weapons. But we have not yet totally ruled out the possibility that it’s some kind of biological weapon. Maybe early in the war the Iraqis did a line laydown of some experimental agent that we never noticed. One jet flying along—we might not have recognized it as a laydown. It might mean that the Gulf War Syndrome could be contagious and spreading. I doubt it, but you never know. Now think about the AIDS virus. There’s a lot of evidence that AIDS is a natural virus that comes from the Central African rain forests, but in fact the origin of AIDS is unknown. We cannot
rule out
the possibility that AIDS is a weapon. Is AIDS something that escaped from a weapons lab somewhere? I don’t think so, but I keep wondering.”

“Is Cobra like that? Did it escape from somewhere, Mark?”

“I doubt it. Someone stole it from a lab, is my guess.”

“What about Russia? What’s going on there now?”

“That’s real touchy stuff. Real ugly. Real sensitive.”

“Of course,” Masaccio said.

“There’s a building at the Koltsovo Institute of Molecular Biology that doesn’t have a name or a number,” Littleberry said. “We nicknamed it Corpus Zero, and we demanded to be allowed to go inside.”

After a lot of hesitation, the Russian minders finally agreed to allow the inspectors to have a very brief tour of Corpus Zero. Since that time, no inspector from the United States or anyplace else has been allowed back inside Corpus Zero. What is known about Corpus Zero is based on one brief visit in 1991.

Corpus Zero is situated in a corner of the Koltsovo campus. It is a large building, made of brick, with small windows, a building shaped like a cube.

“We didn’t know what was going on inside Corpus Zero. The satellite imagery didn’t show anything,” Littleberry said.

All of the Koltsovo staff had been sent home at the time of the inspection, so Corpus Zero was deserted when the inspection team entered with a group of minders. There wasn’t much to see. The building appeared to contain only office space and normal biology labs. On one of the laboratory benches, an inspector discovered a piece of paper pinned to the side of the bench with a tack. On it was written in English, “The eagle can’t catch a fly.” It seemed to be a way of thumbing one’s nose at the inspectors.

The inspectors were touring some offices when Littleberry told everyone that he was going to the men’s room. As he was coming out of the men’s room, he found that the team and the minders had gone down a hallway and were starting to turn a corner. He saw his chance. He went in the other direction.

Littleberry had gone AWOL.

Telling the story to Frank Masaccio, Littleberry found himself drifting back in time. The memory was so clear, set off in distinct edges from the foggy haze that followed.

The corridors in Corpus Zero were in the shape of a ring, he realized. All the corridors circled around the center of the building but did not give access to the center. There had to be something hidden in the center of Corpus Zero. The building must have a hot zone at its core.

How to reach the core? On the inside wall of a corridor, he found an unmarked steel door. It did not have a biohazard symbol on it. Littleberry opened it. He found himself in a corridor heading inward. The light was dim, and he turned on his flashlight.

It was a blank corridor. He kept going, and opened a far door. He found himself in a vast interior space. It was the center of Corpus Zero, and it was pitch-dark. He switched on his flashlight. He was standing in a hangar-like room, several stories tall. In the center sat an enormous steel cube. He played his flashlight over the cube. Sticking out of the cube in various places were probes and tubes—they were obviously sensor devices, monitoring devices. They were there to monitor something happening inside the cube.

He circled the cube, his footsteps echoing on the concrete floor, and he found a control room. There were computer consoles and all manner of gauges and controls. The room was deserted, the staff gone, the computers turned off.

Littleberry turned and faced the cube. That was when he saw the stairs. The stairs led halfway up the side of the cube to a door. The door had a circular wheel handle, like a pressure door in a submarine. His flashlight played over the door, and then he saw the symbol. The door was marked with a red biohazard flower.

The flower beckoned to Littleberry like his own fate. Fuck it, I’ll hold my breath, he said to himself. When he arrived at the landing at the top of the stairs, he spun the wheel. Locks pulled back. He took a breath, opened the door, and shone his flashlight in.

He began to descend a stairway into the chamber. He knew what the chamber was. It was an explosion-test chamber. It was for testing small bioweapons in the air. The chamber is used to simulate a battlefield environment that has gone hot with a biological weapon.

He heard a whimpering sound.

“Hello?” he said.

There was no answer.

At the bottom of the chamber he found a passage leading off horizontally. He looked into it and pointed his flashlight around, and found the cages for the test animals. In one of the cages a female monkey sat crouched. He saw that she was a rhesus monkey. She reached toward him and drew her hand away.

“Sorry, sweetheart,” he said. “I don’t have any food.”

He played his flashlight over the animal. Like all female primates, she had breasts for suckling her young. He saw that her nipples were leaking blood. Her body was peppered with a rash of black blood blisters, half-hidden in her fur. The blisters looked like garnets in the light of his flashlight. He saw pools of blood at the bottom of the animal’s cage. She was hemorrhaging from the vagina. She was a simulated human female in a simulated biological war zone.