The Pentagon's Brain (31 page)

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 devastating 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.”

In the six years since his defection, Ken Alibek had been a busy man professionally. For the first few years of his new life in America, he held various research and consulting positions at the National Institutes of Health and the CIA and with private defense contractors. Notably, he developed a relationship with Dr. Charles Bailey, former chief scientist at USAMRIID. “I helped to build Alibek’s reputation with the military,” said Bailey. “A lot of people were impressed with Alibek. I was impressed.” When Bailey went to work for a defense contractor in Huntsville, Alabama, he brought Dr. Alibek along. Later, from 1996 to 1998, Alibek served as program manager at SRS Technologies, an information technology company based in California. In 1998 he and Bailey both worked as program managers for Battelle Memorial Institute, the defense contractor that handled ARPA’s Vietnam-era Project Agile reports. In April 1999, Alibek became president of a defense contractor called Hadron Advanced Biosystems, Inc., located in Manassas, Virginia, whose mission was to “develop innovative solutions for the intelligence community… including intelligent weapons systems and biological weapons defense.” Dr. Bailey served as vice president. Hadron became a go-to place for several former Soviet bioweapons engineers, microbiologists Alibek had formerly worked with at Biopreparat. Among them was Sergei Popov.

Popov was an expert in synthetic bioweapons and had been a member of the Biopreparat team that worked on the nefarious Chimera program in the Soviet Union, recombining genes to make stealth viruses. At Biopreparat, Popov had helped create a class of bioweapons with “new and unusual properties, difficult to recognize, difficult to treat,” Popov told the PBS program
Nova
in 1998. “Essentially I arranged the research towards more virulent agents causing more death and more pathological symptoms.” Like Alibek, Popov had defected to the United States after the Soviet Union ceased to exist.

At Hadron Advanced Biosystems, Alibek, Popov, and Bailey expressed their determination to find a cure-all against bioweapons, a broad-spectrum antidote that could shoot down dangerous pathogens in the body before they were able to infect a human host. This was similar to what DARPA director Larry Lynn was seeking when he asked his program managers to create a “Star Wars of biology” program. On
Nova,
Popov described what the doctors were working on as a countermeasure with the ability to “induce so-called ‘unspecific immunity,’ which would be efficient in protecting people against quite a big range of different diseases.” Alibek called the concept an “immune booster.” Other military research scientists called the idea impossible.

One noteworthy skeptic was Dr. Phillip K. Russell, the former commanding general of the Army Medical Research and Development Command. Dr. Russell told the
Wall Street Journal
that searching for a booster for the immune system was “complex and fraught with risk. Turn it on, and it does things that can be detrimental as well as protective.” Dr. Russell also stated that Dr. Alibek was better at theorizing than at experimenting, and that the former Soviet bioweapons engineer was “as much an enigma as a scientist as he is as an individual.”

Alibek stayed focused on his research goals. In 1999 he approached DARPA. Here was an agency that was willing to take risks. And
with a recent infusion of money from Congress, there were many new contracts to be had in biological warfare defense. As the chief scientist at defense contractor Hadron, Dr. Ken Alibek was in a prime position to receive DARPA contracts.

In the fall of 1999, Hadron Advanced Biosystems was awarded its first one-year DARPA contract, for $3.3 million, roughly $4.6 million in 2015. Alibek issued a press statement reading, “We hope this [DARPA] program is just the beginning of new, innovative research, funded by government agencies.” Alibek told colleagues that one day he hoped to build a drug manufacturing plant in the former Soviet republic of Ukraine. He also told colleagues that if terrorists got their hands on biological weapons, all of America would be at risk.

In October 1999, DARPA invited Dr. Alibek to testify before the House Committee on Armed Services’ Subcommittee on Research and Development and Subcommittee on Procurement. In his opening statement, Alibek told members of Congress in no uncertain terms what they should be afraid of. “What we need to expect,” Alibek said, is biological weapons in the hands of “some terrorist organization.”

Which is exactly what may or may not have happened two years later, in October 2001.

R
etired four-star general Paul F. Gorman recalls first learning about the “weakling of the battlefield” as a young soldier in the 1950s. This was before Gorman fought in Vietnam, before he served as special assistant to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, before the Department of Defense detailed him to the CIA, and before he completed his uniformed service and became commander in chief of the U.S. Southern Command.

“Soldiers get tired and soldiers get fearful,” said Gorman, age eighty-nine in 2014, in an interview for this book. “Frequently, soldiers just don’t want to fight. Attention must always be paid to the soldier himself.” Since its inception in 1958, DARPA’s focus has been on the research and development of vast weapons systems of the future. Starting in 1990, and owing to individuals like General Gorman, a new focus was put on soldiers, airmen, and sailors. On transforming humans for war.

General Gorman learned about the weakling of the battlefield while reading S. L. A. Marshall, the U.S. Army combat historian during World War II. After interviewing soldiers who participated
in the Normandy beach landings, Marshall concluded, “On the field of battle man is not only a thinking animal but a beast of burden.” It was fatigue that was responsible for an overwhelming number of casualties, Marshall learned.

“I didn’t know my strength was gone until I hit the beach,” Sergeant Bruce Hensley told Marshall. “I was carrying part of a machine gun. Normally I could run with it… but I found I couldn’t even walk with it…. So I crawled across the sand dragging it with me. I felt ashamed of my own weakness, but looking around I saw the others crawling and dragging the weights they normally carried.”

And Staff Sergeant Thomas B. Turner told Marshall, “Under fire we learned what we had never been told—that fear and fatigue are about the same in their effect on an advance,” such as storming a beach.

Reading these soldiers’ accounts of exhaustion from the sheer weight of what they carried into battle planted an idea in Paul Gorman’s brain. Decades later, in the 1970s, Gorman was at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, in New Mexico, “working on a sensitive program,” when he got an idea about how to strengthen the weakling of the battlefield. It could be done, he thought, with a strength-amplifying mechanical suit.

“Los Alamos was developing a suit for people who had to be encapsulated because they were working in a radioactive environment,” Gorman recalls. The suits were lead-lined, heavy, and cumbersome. “Much of the science focused on how to lighten the load.” But Gorman noticed something else as well. “The [people] inside the suits struggled with sensory deprivation,” he says, “and when deprived of sensory inputs, a person cannot function at capacity for very long.” Soldiers need strength and endurance, which led to Gorman’s pioneering idea for a battle suit of the future: the “quintessential man-machine interface [for] the soldier who fights on foot.”

General Gorman retired from the Army in 1985 and began working for DARPA. In 1990 he wrote a paper describing an “integrated powered exoskeleton” that could transform the weakling
of the battlefield into a veritable super-soldier. Gorman’s SuperTroop concept would make the soldier stronger and give him enhanced command, control, communication, and intelligence capabilities. This was the origin of the now famous DARPA exoskeleton.

The exoskeleton Gorman proposed offered protection against chemical, biological, electromagnetic, and ballistic threats, including direct fire from a .50 caliber bullet. It “incorporated audio, visual and haptic [touch] sensors,” Gorman explains, including thermal imaging for the eyes, sound suppression for the ears, and fiber optics from head to fingertips. Its interior would be climate controlled, and each soldier would have his own physiological specifications embedded on a chip within his dog tags. “When a soldier donned his ST [SuperTroop] battledress,” Gorman wrote, “he would insert one dog-tag into a slot under the chest armor, thereby loading his personal program into the battle suit’s computer,” giving the twenty-first-century soldier an extraordinary ability to hear, see, move, shoot, and communicate. “The exoskeleton would require a very powerful computer,” Gorman surmised. Since the technology did not yet exist, he proposed that the SuperTroop concept be fielded first through SIMNET simulators. A program called the Soldier System Model and Simulation was born, and work on the DARPA exoskeleton began.

DARPA had spent the previous three decades focusing on advancing weapons platforms. Now the agency would research and develop technologies for the dismounted soldier. The biological weapons threat caused DARPA to bring biologists into its ranks, and with the life sciences at the fore, DARPA began to look inside the human body, toward a scientific capability that could transform soldiers from the inside out.

Throughout the 1990s, the exponential progress of three technologies made this possible: biotechnology, information technology, and nanotechnology. In 1999 DARPA created the Defense Sciences Office (DSO) and made Michael Goldblatt its director. With
twenty-eight program managers under his control, Goldblatt would be overseeing the single largest number of program managers at DARPA, an agency that in 1999 had 140 program managers in total.

Michael Goldblatt came to DARPA with a radical vision. He believed that through advanced technology, in twenty or fifty years’ time, human beings could be the “first species to control evolution.” In an interview for this book in 2014, Goldblatt described the climate at DARPA when he arrived. “Biology was an area where the Defense Department was underserved. War was shifting. The pattern of warfare was shifting. So was the thinking.” The turn of the century “was a radical time to be at DARPA,” Goldblatt says, and in this time of momentous change he saw great opportunity. “Suddenly, there were zoologists in the office.” As director of DSO at DARPA, Goldblatt believed that defense sciences could demonstrate that “the next frontier was inside of our own selves.” In this way, at DARPA, Goldblatt became a pioneer in military-based transhumanism—the notion that man can and will alter the human condition fundamentally by augmenting humans with machines and other means.

When Goldblatt arrived at DARPA in 1999, the Biological Warfare Defense Program was two and a half years old. “The threat was growing far faster than the solutions were coming in. It was a hard problem,” Goldblatt recalls. “[President] Clinton gave lots of money to the countermeasures program for unconventional pathogens,” he says. “There was lots of money for biology programs at DARPA.” Goldblatt saw the creation of the super-soldier as imperative to twenty-first-century warfare. “Soldiers having no physical, physiological, or cognitive limitation will be key to survival and operational dominance in the future,” Goldblatt told his program managers just a few weeks after arriving at DARPA.

How did Michael Goldblatt, a biologist and venture capitalist from the Midwest, end up running what would be one of the most
consequential defense sciences programs of the early twenty-first century?

“In the mid-1990s I had not heard of DARPA,” Goldblatt insists. But as chief science officer and vice president of research, development, and nutrition at McDonald’s, the world’s largest fast food restaurant chain, Goldblatt had his finger on the pulse of food-related national health scares. When, in 1993, four children died and 623 people fell seriously ill after eating
E. coli–
infected hamburgers sold at Jack in the Box restaurants, Goldblatt became hyper-aware. All of a sudden, a previously unknown bacterium, O157:H7, “was on everybody’s radar,” says Goldblatt. Every person in the fast food business “was on pathogen alert.”

Goldblatt, the venture capitalist, got an idea. “In an effort to identify ways to enhance food safety and eliminate unwanted pathogens, a guy I was working with, Alvin Chow, and I came up with a technology for self-sterilizing packages—packages that sterilized products in the field.” McDonald’s decided not to use the technology that Goldblatt and Chow had developed, so the two men sought out a different buyer. “We thought this technology would be useful to the government,” Goldblatt says. “We did some research and found this group called DARPA. I called them. No response. I wrote to them. No response. I called again. I said, ‘This is Michael Goldblatt from McDonald’s. I’d like to speak with Larry Lynn,’” the director of DARPA. “After a short while, he called me back. He thought I was with McDonnell Aircraft. I said, ‘No, McDonald’s hamburgers.’ There was riotous laughter,” Goldblatt recalls. “I told Larry about the self-sterilizing packages. How they could be used in field hospitals or on the battlefield. Larry was blown away. He said, ‘We want you to come to DARPA.’ And I did.”

At DARPA, Goldblatt realized that almost anything that could be imagined could at least be tried. In the Defense Sciences Office, programs were initiated to develop technologies that would make
soldiers, also called warfighters, stronger, smarter, more capable, and would give them more endurance than other humans. One program, called Persistence in Combat, addressed three areas that slowed soldiers down on the battlefield: pain, wounds, and excessive bleeding.

Goldblatt hired a biotechnology firm to develop a pain vaccine. “It works with the body’s inflammatory response that is responsible for pain,” Goldblatt explained in 2014. The way the vaccine would work is that, if a soldier got shot, he would experience “ten to thirty seconds of agony then no pain for thirty days. The vaccine would reduce the pain triggered by inflammation and swelling,” allowing the warfighter to keep fighting so long as bleeding could be stopped. To develop new ways to try to stop bleeding, Goldblatt initiated another program that involved injecting millions of microscopic magnets into a person, which could later be brought together into a single area to stop bleeding with the wave of a wand. The scientist in charge of that program, Dr. Harry T. Whelan, worked on several “rapid healing” programs under the banner “DARPA Soldier Self Care.”

Another idea regarding ways to allow wounded soldiers to survive blood loss and avoid going into shock involved figuring out a way to get a human to go into a kind of hibernation, or suspended animation, until help arrived. Achieving this goal would give a soldier precious hours, or even days, to survive while awaiting evacuation or triage. Bears hibernate. Why can’t man? DARPA DSO scientists asked these and other questions, including, could a chemical compound like hydrogen sulfide produce a hibernation-like state in a man?

Sleep was another field of intense research at DSO. In the Continually Assisted Performance program, scientists worked on ways to create a “24/7 soldier,” one who required little or no sleep for up to seven days. If this could be achieved, the enemy’s need for sleep would put them at an extreme disadvantage. Goldblatt’s program
managers hired marine biologists studying certain sea animals to look for clues. Whales and dolphins don’t sleep; as mammals, they would drown if they did. Unlike humans, they are somehow able to control the lobes of their left and right brains so that while one lobe sleeps, the opposite lobe stays awake, allowing the animal to swim. While some DARPA scientists ruminated over the question of how humans might one day control the lobes of their own brains, other scientists experimented with drugs like Modafinil, a powerful medication used to counter sleep apnea and narcolepsy, to keep warfighters awake.

To address strength and endurance issues, Goldblatt initiated a program called the Mechanically Dominant Soldier. What if soldiers could have ten times the muscle endurance of enemy soldiers? What if they could leap seven feet and be able to cool down their own body temperature? What if the military benchmark of eighty pull-ups a day could be raised to three hundred pull-ups a day? “We want every war fighter to look like Lance Armstrong as far as metabolic profile,” program manager Joe Bielitzki told
Washington Post
reporter Joel Garreau a decade before Armstrong resigned from athletics in disgrace.

Under the DSO banner, in a program called the Brain-Machine Interface, DARPA scientists studied how brain implants could enhance cognitive ability. The program’s first goal was to create “a wireless brain modem for a freely moving rat,” said DARPA’s Dr. Eric Eisenstadt in 1999. The scientists would implant a chip in the rat’s brain to see if they could remotely control the animal’s movements. “The objective of this effort,” Eisenstadt explained, “is to use remote teleoperation via direct interconnections with the brain.” DARPA’s bigger vision for its Brain-Machine Interface program was to allow future “soldiers [to] communicate by thought alone.”

Dr. Eisenstadt asked his program managers to “picture a time when humans see in the UV [ultraviolet] and IR [infrared] portions of the electromagnetic spectrum, or hear speech on the noisy
flight deck of an aircraft carrier.” What might sound like science fiction elsewhere in the world at DARPA was future science. “Imagine a time when the human brain has its own wireless modem so that instead of acting on thoughts, warfighters have thoughts that act,” Eisenstadt suggested. Fifteen years later, the Brain-Machine Interface program would astound. But turn-of-the-millennium critics cried foul, and a spotlight was turned on DARPA’s super-soldier pursuits. Critics said that the quest to enhance human performance on the battlefield would lead scientists down a morally dangerous path. Michael Goldblatt disagreed.

“How is an exoskeleton or a brain implant different from a pacemaker or a cochlear implant or a prosthetic?” Goldblatt asked in a 2014 interview. For Goldblatt, the scientific exploration into transhumanism is personal. His daughter Gina was born with cerebral palsy, a group of permanent physical disorders related to movement that get worse over time, never better. Goldblatt believes that the physically impaired or weak have every right to compete with their fellows, and if science allows them a way and a means to do so, that science should be pursued. “When we learned Gina had cerebral palsy,” said Goldblatt, “I called the smartest person I knew. He said to me, ‘It’s permanent. Now accept that.’” Goldblatt could still recall the long, dark silence that followed that statement until finally the smart person on the other end of the phone said to him, “Now ask yourself, what are you going to do about it?”