Biological and Chemical Weapons
Concerns Renewed About Russia’s Bio Weapons Program
CBW Chronicle, Volume II, Issue 4 (May 1998)
Two men with decades of experience inside the Soviet/Russian biological weapons complex have stepped forward recently with comments that have renewed concerns about the status of Russia’s germ weapons programs. Russia is a member of the Biological and Toxins Weapons Convention (BWC), which bans the development, production, use, and stockpiling of biological weapons. Dr. Ken Alibek and Lt.Col. Yevgeni Tulykin are among the latest to assert that offensive biological weapons research and development continues in Russia in violation of the BWC’s prohibitions. Moscow adamantly denies these allegations.
Doubts about the USSR’s compliance with the BWC arose not long after Moscow joined the treaty in 1975. In 1979, a suspicious outbreak of anthrax occurred at Sverdlovsk, where an up-and-coming politician named Boris Yeltsin was Communist Party chief. For years, Soviet officials blamed the resulting 68 deaths on consumption of contaminated meat, but the US government said that a leak from a military microbiology laboratory caused the disease outbreak. In 1992, new Russian President Yeltsin admitted that an accident at a military facility was the source of the outbreak. Like Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev before him, Yeltsin renounced Russia’s biological weapons program. In an 11 April 1992 decree, Yeltsin ordered cuts in program funding by thirty percent and personnel by fifty percent.
Given Yeltsin’s extraordinary admission and the lack of formal verification measures in the BWC, the United States and the United Kingdom urged Russia to enter into an arrangement that would allow the West to gain some confidence that Yeltsin’s orders were being followed. Moscow signed the UK-US-Russian Joint Statement on Biological Weapons in mid-September 1992, ostensibly to initiate on- going trilateral data exchanges and site visits at military and private sector biological facilities. After a rocky start, however, the trilateral process derailed. In October 1993 and January 1994, US and British officials visited several Russian industrial facilities. Russian officials reciprocated in February and March 1994 by visiting commercial and defensive research sites in the United Kingdom and the United States. Russia, however, balked at reciprocal access to the military facilities that some suspect may still be involved in offensive biological warfare activities. No trilateral inspections have occurred since 1994.
After the trilateral process stalled, the United States initiated laboratory-to-laboratory cooperative research projects with the primary intent of preventing "brain drain" of Russia’s germ weapons scientists to aspiring proliferators. Russian scientists were tasked to work on peaceful, disease prevention projects, such as research on a Siberian river fluke that causes liver cancer in humans. The American participants in this joint research are from the National Academy of Sciences, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Department of Defense. Under this scientific program, US scientists have been to several Biopreparat facilities, including the enormous Vector site in Novosibirsk, which has over 100 laboratory and administrative buildings. As of August 1997, the US Departments of State and Energy had funded eight cooperative research projects at an average cost of $20,000 a piece. The National Academy of Sciences has proposed sponsoring 45 additional joint research projects over a five year period at a total cost of $38 million.
The first defector to provide insight into the immense biological weapons complex that Russia inherited from the USSR was Vladimir Pasechnik, formerly the director of the Leningrad Institute of Especially Pure Biopreparations. Pasechnik, who defected to the United Kingdom in 1989, explained that in 1973 the Soviets set up a massive network of "commercial" pharmaceutical and vaccine facilities as the cover for their ultra-secret germ weapons program. Known as Biopreparat, about 9,000 scientists were among the more than 40,000 who worked in this nominally civilian complex. Among the more than 47 facilities that compose Biopreparat are 18 research institutes, 6 production facilities, and a Siberian storage plant. Figure 1 shows the location of some of the facilities in the vast Soviet/Russian germ weapons complex. Pasechnik also stated that the Soviets had developed a genetically engineered, antibiotic-resistant strain of Yersinia pestis, which causes the plague.
Alibek is the second high-ranking defector to describe what has happened inside this secrecy-shrouded weapons program. Alibek was known as Kanatjan Alibekov as he rose to become first deputy chief of the Biopreparat arm of the Soviet biological weapons program. His tenure inside the weapons complex lasted from 1975 to 1991. Then Alibek, who invented an anthrax strain that is four times more efficient than the standard military variant, defected to the United States in 1992. This February, Alibek made his first public statements about the Russian biological weapons program to the New York Times, the New Yorker, and ABC’s "PrimeTime Live." According to Alibek, the USSR continued a biological weapons program in the 1970s and 1980s out of fear that a covert US offensive germ warfare program remained active even after President Richard Nixon terminated it in 1969. Alibek claims that today Russia still conducts research on biological agents under the guise of defensive research activities. In addition to their work with the plague, Russian scientists have developed genetically altered strands of tularemia and glanders so that they are antibiotic resistant. Russian scientists from Obolensk published a research paper in Vaccine, a British medical journal, stating that they had genetically engineered an anthrax strain so that it resists the current vaccine.
During the heyday of the Soviet program, Alibek says that the USSR stockpiled at least 20 tons of weapons-grade smallpox. Other stockpiled agents included the plague and anthrax. In a 19 May 1998 meeting sponsored by the Chemical and Biological Arms Control Institute, Alibek told the audience that in 1942 the Soviets attempted to use tularemia against German troops on the Southern Front, causing an epidemic among German and Soviet troops, as well as civilians. Of the likelihood that the Russians are continuing offensive research, Alibek said: "In Russia was formed a mentality: If you have an opportunity to cheat, do it." To that end, Alibek asserts that the Soviets tested and weaponized a strain of the highly lethal Marburg virus. He maintains that Russian scientists began genetic engineering research with smallpox, working first with Venezuelan equine encephalitis. They may have also succeeded, he claims, in crossing the highly contagious smallpox with the extremely lethal Ebola virus.
Some of Alibek’s claims have been disputed. For instance, Alibek states that hundreds of people died in the 1979 Sverdlovsk incident, but Russian and Western experts concluded in a November 1994 Science article that only 64 deaths could be directly linked to the anthrax leak. Some Western experts also find it difficult to believe that the Soviets or Russians would pursue such a horrific "blackpox" combination because smallpox or Ebola alone can devastate a human population.
The account of another whistle blower, Tulykin, raises additional questions as to whether this program has indeed halted. Sverdlovsk, now known as Yekaterinburg, is still a closed or classified town. Tulykin told Time magazine that over the past few years efforts have begun to re-equip the laboratories in Compound 19, the military facility that leaked anthrax in 1979. Until his December 1996 retirement, Tulykin was the personnel director at Compound 19, where he had worked since 1978. This facility, he asserts, is being refurbished so that it can once again produce anthrax. Tulykin said that in 1997 "they reconstructed compartmentalized sectors in the labs to handle dangerous biological agents and prevent leaks like the one in 1979."
Maj.Gen. Anatoli Kharechko, Compound 19's commander, announced his plans to rebuild the facilities in a 1994 special edition of the site’s in-house newsletter. Kharechko strongly criticized Gorbachev’s decision to turn the facility into a vaccine production factory in order to "please his Western partners," and in January 1998 he used Compound 19's public address system to declare that the renovation will continue. Moscow adamantly denies charges that offensive biological weapons work is still underway at Yekaterinburg or elsewhere in Russia. Tulykin wonders why some 200 soldiers with rottweilers are patrolling Compound 19 if it is only a peaceful research site.
Until Russia allows more access to the facilities and scientists throughout Biopreparat and the military compounds, the outside world will be hard pressed to know what is going on behind those fences-work to cure or to create deadly diseases.