Abstract
Biohazard By Ken Alibek, Random House, 1999, 336 pages; $24.95
In recent years, Hollywood movies and pulp fiction have captivated the public with hair-raising tales of microbes run amok. Now comes Biohazard, the autobiography of former Soviet bioweapon scientist Ken Alibek, which demonstrates that truth can be more harrowing than fiction. The book chronicles the career of Kanatjan Alibekov, a Kazakh who entered military medical school in 1973, where he became engrossed with the use of disease in war. After a meteoric rise through the ranks of Biopreparat–a vast complex of nominally civilian facilities that engaged in research, development, testing, and production of biological weapons–Alibek served as the program's first deputy director from 1988 to 1992. He defected to the United States in 1992, shortened his name to Ken Alibek, and began to tell the outside world of the ambitions and accomplishments of the Soviet Union's mammoth biological weapons program.
Alibek is the first high-ranking Soviet bioweaponeer to go public with his story. With the help of Stephen Handelman, a Time magazine columnist, Alibek provides extensive insight into the nether world of the Soviet biological weapons complex. He recounts how the Soviet Union expanded the frontiers of disease as a weapon of war–weaponizing new diseases, genetically altering others to be more lethal and/or more resistant to antibiotics, and polishing production and delivery capabilities.
The Soviet biological weapons program, which was launched in 1928 by a decree ordering the weaponization of typhus, started earlier than its now-defunct Western counterparts. Although the technical challenges of turning a disease into a reliable, dispersible weapon are considerable, by the onset of World War II Soviet scientists were able to equip the Red Army with weaponized tularemia. According to Alibek, the Soviets used tularemia in 1942 in an attempt to stop the German advance at Stalingrad. But the result was a massive outbreak of the germ's pneumonic form among both German and Soviet soldiers. The experience had a significant impact on Moscow's military plans. From then on, Soviet doctrine called for germ weapons to be employed not at the front, but deep behind enemy lines.
The Soviet germ warfare effort really came of age, however, when the program went underground in the early 1970s. From that point on, the Soviet Union systematically violated the 1972 treaty banning offensive biological weapons activities on a mind-boggling scale. Soviet leaders from Leonid Brezhnev to Mikhail Gorbachev personally authorized prohibited development, testing, and production efforts.
Gorbachev's involvement with the covert program appears to have been as considerable as that of his predecessors. Alibek cites several Gorbachev decrees stepping up the pace of work within the biological weapons complex, directing the creation of mobile production facilities so that inspectors could not uncover the program, and, incongruously, ordering the destruction of some offensive capabilities at the same time that others were preserved.
Alibek states that at its height in the 1980s, more than 60,000 people were employed in the Soviet biological weapons program. Biopreparat provided civilian cover for about half of the program's personnel. Soviet scientists counted among their achievements the successful weaponization of anthrax, smallpox, Marburg, and the plague. In the calculated manner that apparently governed the entire program, in the mid-1980s they jettisoned HIV as a possible agent because it took too long to blossom into AIDS. According to Alibek, by 1990 his colleagues were putting the “finishing touches” on Ebola and Lassa fever weapons. Several of the diseases in the Soviet stockpile do not have cures and thus constitute a death sentence for virtually anyone exposed to them. Infectious disease specialists do not even fully understand where some of these lethal microbes originated or how they mutate and spread.
These factors did not dissuade those directing or working in the Soviet biological weapons complex. Alibek insists that his fellow bioweaponeers were working on chimeras–weapons that cross the properties of two biological agents to create even deadlier concoctions. He describes two chimera projects in which scientists attempted to cross the brain-attacking Venezuelan equine encephalitus and the body-melting Ebola viruses with smallpox. Alibek says this work continued under the government of Boris Yeltsin, despite Yeltsin's April 11, 1992 order halting offensive biological weapons activities. Alibek points to recent journal articles by Russian scientists from Obolensk and Vector, two of Biopreparat's premier germ research institutes, suggesting that research on chimera agents is still under way.
Some passages in the book address technical matters–how various germs are cultivated and their effects. The lay reader need not be intimidated by these very comprehensible discussions. However, one cannot help reflecting on the truly unconscionable nature of this work, which is explained in the same manner that one would discuss the merits or shortcomings of a Broadway show. Alibek's medical training and military discipline may account for the book's clinical tone, which, juxtaposed with the factual presentation, can make a reader's skin crawl.
“Warning: The following program is fiction, but it may be too close to the truth for comfort.”
When he was first recruited, Alibek was told perfunctorily that an international treaty banned biological weapons activities, and he received the first of numerous (and incorrect) reminders that the United States had a hidden offensive program as well. He excelled at his work, perfecting techniques to improve the production of brucellosis, tularemia, and anthrax. Alibek was rewarded with a special military medal for “wartime services” and rose to the rank of colonel.
As Biopreparat's deputy director, he gained access to documents that covered the breadth of the germ weapons program and he was able to interact with many individuals who were present during some of the program's more infamous accidents. For instance, anthrax leaked from a production facility in Sverdlovsk in 1979, killing perhaps as many as 105 people, and a Vector scientist slipped and injected himself with Marburg, which led to a ghastly death. Alibek, who once found himself standing in a puddle of tularemia, matter-of-factly recounts these incidents and the deadly cost of the Soviet Union's all-out push to harness microbes for military use.
For readers who might have difficulty comprehending why a talented scientist would ever agree to work on germ warfare projects, Alibek explains the controls exerted to exploit the skills of Russia's best and brightest scientists. Working in isolated facilities and pressured with a stream of anti-American and for-the-good-of-the-Moth-erland propaganda, Alibek and some of his Biopreparat colleagues experienced an ethical struggle. Having gone wildly astray himself, Alibek decries the use of science or medicine for immoral purposes.
Alibek's book is sure to stir controversy. To begin with, Western scientists, policy-makers, and citizens tend to disbelieve that such risky weap-oneering would ever be undertaken. Alibek discusses this problem, and warns that even the U.S. intelligence community, which debriefed him for a year, does not seem to understand. His U.S. interrogators were concerned with how much was made and where, but did not appear to grasp the breadth, depth, intentions, and implications of the scientific wizardry that Soviet weaponeers achieved.
Biohazard's main deficiency is that Alibek offers no policy prescriptions for how to contain and eliminate the biological weapons menace that resides in Russia. Alibek observes that many of the same people who ran the program are still in positions of authority, and he argues persuasively that research on new germ weapons continues according to the goals outlined in the five-year plan that was in place when he fled Moscow.
For 17 years, Alibek devoted his life to enhancing his country's ability to unleash inconceivable quantities of unspeakable diseases upon humankind. Now he has begun to atone for his actions by telling the world about this germ warfare leviathan, and he hopes that his ominous tale will be taken seriously. Biohazard makes fascinating reading for anyone, but it should be required for those in the national security and public health fields who will be called upon if what was created in the Soviet biological weapons complex is ever used for military or terrorist purposes. It remains to be seen if the world's leaders can muster the resolve to take effective action against the remains of the Soviet disease juggernaut.