- Bakyt Atshabar has worked for the anti-plague Institute
for more than 25 years, and for much of that time there was little need
for security guards and fences and heavy metal doors with keypad locks.
As an unofficial part of the Soviet Union's vast bioweapons program, the
institute routinely kept dozens of different strains of anthrax, plague
and tularemia stored in unlocked refrigerators. But Moscow's ironclad
control
over life in Kazakhstan protected the labs. So did a veil of secrecy that
hid the institute's bioweapons role from local residents.
-
- When the Soviet Union collapsed, however, the thick
shrubs
surrounding the institute's campus began to attract petty thieves and
drunks.
"We had bums right outside my window here," says Atshabar, now
director of the institute, which is located in a leafy suburb of Alma-Ata,
the largest city in Kazakhstan. "They would sleep there"-he
points
to a tuft of trees-"and drink vodka." Criminals once broke in
and stole an aluminum part of a centrifuge, useless except as scrap metal.
It would have been even easier to rob-or smuggle out-a small vial of nasty
germs to sell on the black market. As far as anybody knows, no such theft
ever occurred at the institute (formally known as the Kazakh Science Center
for Quarantine and Zoonotic Diseases). But keeping close track of pathogen
cultures is next to impossible, even for the most tightly run lab. And
at the Alma-Ata institute, vials of anthrax are kept in coffee cans, which
themselves are stored in a 40-year-old refrigerator secured with a simple
padlock.
-
- In the wake of September 11, the Big Fear-the one driving
President George W. Bush's most important decisions and dire
pronouncements-is
that a terrorist group like Al Qaeda will eventually get its hands on
weapons
of mass destruction. These worries are heightened because U.S. officials
have learned that Osama bin Laden's network was trying to acquire such
weapons. Documents recovered from Qaeda safe houses and camps in
Afghanistan
"show that bin Laden was pursuing a sophisticated biological weapons
research program," CIA Director George Tenet told Congress earlier
this month. Bush has used such concerns to justify his warnings against
Iraq, Iran and North Korea-what he calls the "axis of evil."
Such countries "could provide these arms to terrorists," he
declared
in his State of the Union Message. In large part, it's the fear of WMD
in the hands of terrorists that is behind large increases in spending on
the military and on home-land defense.
-
- JOBS WITH AL QAEDA
-
- But the "rogue states" are not the only concern
when it comes to WMD proliferation. Some experts worry that the countries
of the former Soviet Union, with enormous stockpiles of pathogens, high
levels of corruption and grim conditions for scientists, could be
vulnerable
to terrorists looking for highly destructive agents. Al Qaeda itself
appears
to have targeted ex-Soviet weapons scientists for recruitment. According
to U.S. intelligence reports, some Russian experts traveled to Kandahar
for job interviews with unidentified Qaeda leaders. Intelligence officials
believe the Russians turned down the chance to work for bin Laden, however,
and by all accounts Al Qaeda's efforts to make or acquire bioweapons have
gone nowhere.
-
- So how worried should we be? At their peak, the Soviets
probably employed upwards of 60, 000 people on bioweapons projects, which
produced a greater volume and variety of deadly agents than any other
country.
When Ken Alibek, a senior Soviet bioweapons official, defected in 1992,
he described a staggering offensive bioweapons production capacity-4,500
metric tons of anthrax a year, for instance-and an alarming array of deadly
pathogens, including smallpox and antibiotic-resistant anthrax.
-
- Gennady Lepyoshkin was Alibek's deputy in the Soviet
era, and later took his job as head of the giant production facility at
Stepnogorsk in Kazakhstan. In its heyday, the facility, with fermenting
tanks as tall as four-story buildings, could produce 1.5 tons of weaponized
anthrax in only 24 hours. Lepyoshkin has more than 20 years' experience
in biowarfare, a doctorate in biology and another in microbiology. Now
he's unemployed.
-
- (Russian born, he was replaced recently by a Kazakh.)
As he walks along the perimeter fence at Stepnogorsk, where he no longer
has clearance, he drinks a shot of cognac in honor of his old haunt.
"Most
of our scientists left for Russia, Ukraine or Belarus," he says.
"But
the ones who stayed-biological and chemical engineers-make ends meet by
driving to Omsk to buy sausage and cheeses and then selling them
here."
-
- A few years ago the U.S. government estimated that 7,000
former Soviet bio-weaponeers were a "proliferation concern,"
says Amy Smithson, a bioweapons expert at the Stimson Center in Washington.
After September 11, they upped the figure to 10,000. Suddenly, formerly
benign activities began to look worrisome-veterinary institutes, for
instance,
hold livestock pathogens that in the wrong hands could devastate a nation's
farms.
-
- FROM WEAPONS TO VACCINES
-
- For the past eight years the State Department has been
retraining former weapons scientists and helping institutes turn their
bioweapons programs into peaceful, commercial ventures. The incoming Bush
administration initially regarded this-and similar efforts to help Russian
scientists-with deep suspicion. But 9-11 changed that. Now the Defense
Department's work on former Soviet bioweapons facilities is to be greatly
expanded, from $17 million in the current fiscal year to $55 million. Early
this year the State Department's assistance program received a one-time
appropriation of $30 million, which it will use to dismantle the
Stepnogorsk
military fermenters and put former Soviet scientists to work making
vaccines.
"They do a great job with the resources they have," says
Smithson,
"but even with the extra money they're only getting at the tip of
the iceberg."
-
- Not everyone agrees. It would be irresponsible for an
expert like Smithson not to be concerned, but many respected specialists
believe the numbers of unemployed bioweapons scientists are exaggerated.
Alibek, the Soviet defector, has said that there are perhaps 100 former
Soviet scientists capable of building a soup-to-nuts bioweapons factory.
Western bioweapons experts put that figure higher-"the low
hundreds,"
says one. But the more important point, says an intelligence source, is
that "we think we know where almost all of those people are."
An effort by Iran to recruit former Soviet scientists in 1997, in fact,
helped invigorate the U.S. push to pay the scientists to stay in place.
"We said, 'Work with us and you will get funding for real
collaborative
research; work with Iran and you will never see a penny of our
money',"
says Elisa Harris, who handled nonproliferation programs in the Clinton
administration. Experts also stress, moreover, how difficult it is to turn
a pathogen into a bioweapons agent like the "aerosolized" anthrax
sent through the U.S. mail system in October. (Although investigators
haven't
ruled out a foreign source, the prevailing theory is still that the anthrax
came from within the United States.)
-
- But what about ready-made stockpiles of weaponized
agents,
or even just virulent strains? Two years ago the DOD began helping former
Soviet bioweapons labs to beef up security. The institute in Alma-Ata,
which houses cultures of nonweaponized, but still dangerous, germs, now
boasts a 2.5-meter concrete wall topped with barbed wire. Two guards armed
with stun guns and tear gas patrol the front and rear entrances. But still,
nobody is searched upon entering or leaving the building. And on a recent
visit, no security guards were posted at the door to the "highly
hazardous
infections" wing.
-
- The larger problem is that the Alma-Ata lab is about
as good as it gets. Kazakhstan alone has eight other anti-plague institutes
and about 140 minor labs. None of them have had the benefit of the DOD
program. Beyond Kazakhstan, throughout the ruins of the Soviet empire,
hundreds of laboratories holding samples of bioweapons agents also are
poorly guarded. September 11 spurred the Bush administration to take the
issue more seriously. But when success includes anthrax vials in coffee
cans, it'll be a long time, if ever, before anybody feels absolutely
secure.
With John Barry, Mark Hosenball and Adam Rogers in Washington
-
- New Fears About an Old Threat
-
- U.S. officials have long worried about lax security at
former Soviet bioweapons facilities. These concerns were heightened after
the September 11 attacks. Select from the cities below to find out where
bio-weapons agents are located in Russia:
-
- Kirov - Plague, Anthrax
-
- Koltsovo - Smallpox, Hemorrhagic fevers (including Ebola,
Marburg, Lassa Viruses and others)
-
- Minsk - Anthrax, Tularemia, Plague
-
- Obninsk - Hemorrhagic fevers (including Ebola, Marburg,
Lassa Viruses and others)
-
- Omutninsk - Plague, Tularemia
-
- Penza - Anthrax
-
- Rostov - Anthrax, Tularemia, Plague
-
- Samara - Anthrax, Tularemia, Plague
-
- Saratov - Anthrax, Tularemia, Plague
-
- Sergiyev Posad - Tularemia
-
- Stavropol - Anthrax, Tularemia, Plague
-
- St. Petersberg - Anthrax, Tularemia, Plague
-
- Tbilisi - Hemorrhagic fevers (including Ebola, Marburg,
Lassa Viruses and others)
-
- Volgograd - Anthrax, Tularemia, Plague
-
- Yekaterinburg - Tularemia, Botulism
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