Authors: David Hoffman
The war scare was real.
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n the years after World War II, the United States built an offensive biological weapons program, but it was abandoned by President Nixon in 1969. Three years later, the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention was signed, prohibiting the development and production of germs for warfare. The Soviet Union joined, and became one of the three nations to serve as a depository, or custodian, of the agreement. Then, in an audacious turn, Soviet leaders secretly broke their obligations and expanded research on offensive biological weapons through a vast and concealed complex of laboratories and institutes disguised as civilian facilities. Codes were created to keep track of all the pathogens and branches of the program. Bacteria were identified by the prefix “L.” Plague was L1, tularemia L2, brucellosis L3 and anthrax L4. Viruses were “N.” Smallpox was N1, Ebola was N2, Marburg N3 and so on. One part of the effort was called “Project Factor,” which was shortened from “virulence factor,” or “pathogenic factor.” Virulence is the relative ability of a pathogen to cause death. Boosting the virulence of bacteria and viruses made them more lethal. In parallel to Factor, other projects included “Bonfire,” a quest to create a new generation of germs that would resist antibiotics, while “Flute” attempted to fashion mind-altering compounds—a weapon that might cause a whole army to go crazy.
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“Ferment” was the name given to a drive for genetic engineering. Chemical weapons were “Foliant.”Separately,
Soviet scientists were also working on germs to wither crops and devastate livestock. This was called “Ecology.”
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In 1984, Sergei Popov was among the scientists at the forefront of Project Factor. He was thirty-four years old then, a bright young researcher, tall with a genial manner and a slightly reedy, pleasant voice. Popov worked in a scientific institute at Koltsovo, a small town amid the forests in western Siberia, twenty miles southeast of a much larger city, Novosibirsk. In the long Siberian winters, he rose when it was still dark and cold to get his young daughter ready for school. He described himself as a disciplined person, not strongly against authority, vaguely hopeful in the future of socialism, but aware of its deficiencies. He and his wife, Taissia, were both dedicated scientists, drawn to Koltsovo in 1976 by the promise of greater opportunity for research. Around him, the institute was growing quickly. Dozens of new buildings were being constructed, and modern equipment installed. The formal name was the Institute of Molecular Biology, and it later became known as Vector. In microbiology, “vector” refers to a vehicle for transferring fragments of DNA from one cell to another.
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Popov had grown up nearby, in Novosibirsk, and earned his university degrees there. Just south of the city was Akademgorodok, or Academic Town, which included the Novosibirsk State University and dozens of prestigious institutes for research into physics, mathematics, geology, chemistry and social sciences. With wide boulevards lined with pine, birch, spruce and cedar, and a large concentration of scientists, Akademgorodok was known for relatively free thinking in contrast to the stifling, ideological atmosphere of Moscow. The son of railway engineers, Popov was attracted to mathematics as a youth. His parents recognized his talent and sent him to a special school with an advanced program in mathematics. As a teenager, he was interested in chemistry. When he was sixteen years old, he decided to design his own rocket fuel. He succeeded, but it exploded in his face and eyes; a piece of glass got stuck in his eyelid, and acid burned him from head to toe. His scars eventually healed.
In 1984, at Vector, Popov was head of the chemistry department. He was facing a new challenge, the dawn of an ambitious quest to penetrate the secrets of the smallpox virus. Four years earlier, the World Health Organization had triumphantly announced that smallpox had been eradicated
from the face of the Earth. Millions of lives had been spared. But what the outside world didn’t know was that smallpox was an object of experimentation for the scientists at Vector.
The virus, which had killed more people than all the wars of the twentieth century combined, was itself to be made into a weapon of war.
When he started at Koltsovo, Popov was dreaming only about science. He and his wife were lured by the promises of Lev Sandakhchiev, a compact, intense, chain-smoking scientist of Armenian descent who was assistant scientific director of Vector, and became director in 1979. Sandakhchiev was known to many as a restless hustler for his fledgling institution. He offered them salaries that were 50 percent higher than elsewhere. He had plentiful job vacancies, which meant they could expect career advancement; he persuaded the authorities to allocate foreign currency to him for purchasing reagents and equipment; and he could offer them a good apartment, which was scarce elsewhere. Popov knew the location well, and as he rode his bicycle around, he marveled at the construction, including a new nine-story apartment building. Something big was happening here. Sandakhchiev told them they would be engaged in applied science, taking academic discoveries and creating useful products. Sergei and Taissia arrived with high hopes. “It was very attractive, and we knew nothing about biological weapons at that time,” Popov said. “Nobody even said a single word about it. It’s not like we were invited to do some kind of biological weapons research. No, no. Not at all. So we were completely naïve and we did not understand what was going on. And we were invited to join a new institution, and that was it.”
Sandakhchiev was in a hurry. He wanted to push the frontiers of genetic engineering in biological weapons. The sprawling facility included special departments for every step: to develop and produce culture media; to grow cells for the production of viruses; to grow the viruses; to isolate and manipulate DNA; to isolate the necessary enzymes; to test the results on animals, and more. His institute did achieve some gains in civilian research, but at the core, it was a laboratory to discover new methods of using viruses to kill people on a massive scale.
After earning his doctorate at Novosibirsk State University in 1976,
Popov became a junior scientist in the chemistry department at Vector. Chemistry was vital to unwrapping the secrets of genes. In the first year or two, he recalled, the scientists were given basic training in microbiology. They practiced growing viruses using harmless species variants, known as bacterial phages. In 1978, Popov was promoted to head of the chemistry department, and he began to learn the true goals Sandakhchiev had in mind. He got his clearance for access to top-secret information. “And at that point I became irreversibly involved in the biological weapons program.”
“So it was quite innocent,” he recalled. “They said, you are in the position of a department head, and you need to understand that in addition to academic research, we need to develop some military projects to defend our country.” Popov was prohibited from travel abroad without special permission. They asked him to sign a statement promising to keep the deepest secrets. “That was the beginning,” he said, “a very critical step. I committed myself. I signed the papers because there was no choice. Everybody was polite and nobody insisted, but I know very few people in my position who refused to cooperate. The refusal would be a kind of suicide, meaning the KGB would be after you for the rest of your life, and you would never get a decent job. I admire those people who had the courage to say ‘no.’ They were more mature than I was.”
Popov said he also had doubts about whether germs would ever be used in war, even as he became more deeply involved. “I never believed those weapons could ever be used. I always believed they would never be used, because it was so absurd, everything was so absurd and so self-destructive.” He said it would be “ridiculous” to use germs on a battlefield, the impact being so unpredictable. He added, “The only justification for me to be involved in this absurdity was that I was pushed … There was a popular saying that if they fire you, there will be just one place to find a job. It will be the Western Siberia Hat Company.” That was a metaphor for a humiliating dead end. At Koltsovo, by contrast, promising research challenges, facilities, and opportunity beckoned.
The KGB had a large presence at the institute, supervising documents, watching management, keeping an eye out for spies. Each employee went through a meticulous background check. Links to the outside world were forbidden, and contacts with foreigners rare. “And there was great, great suspicion regarding somebody who came from abroad,”
Popov recalled. “The KGB instructed us how to deal with the visitor, the KGB assigned a special person to follow every step of that visitor, and everybody who contacted that visitor fell under the KGB’s suspicion, so it was a lot of trouble to even talk to the foreigner.” Some scientific articles from overseas journals were distributed, but general Western literature was prohibited. Suspicion was rife. Once, the scientific secretary of the institute was accused of reading literature about yoga, Popov recalled. “And also he had been noticed standing on his head. Head down, and legs up, and that was clearly unacceptable for a person in his position. Although he did it purely at his leisure at home, his abnormal behavior raised the suspicion that if he was capable of doing something like this, he could not be trusted. He was dismissed.”
The true purpose of Koltsovo was concealed with a “legend,” or cover story. “The so-called open legend provided to everybody was that the purpose of the institute was to push the development of industrial microbiology. And we wanted to know how to modify microbes, how to make them producers of different kinds of biological substances. It was a legitimate goal, which covered up the biological weapons program, because its purpose sounded exactly like the peaceful program. There was only one exception—those modified microbes had, ultimately, to be killers.”
Amid all the secrecy, Popov recognized a fault in the cover story. A normal institute of this size would be a source of dozens or hundreds of scientific papers in the professional journals. But Popov said scientists were severely restricted in what they could publish. Any paper had to say nothing about their real work, and fit the cover story. “It had to be a confusing, or misleading, or irrelevant story,” he said. The dearth of serious papers from a facility with thousands of research workers would be suspicious. If not making discoveries for science, what were they doing? But Popov was told by high-level officials that the United States had a hidden biological weapons program too, and he believed it. There was hardly any discussion of the 1972 treaty. “You know, the overall perception was that we were quite undeveloped, which was mainly true,” Popov said, reflecting on his thinking in those times. “We thought about ourselves as a country that needed to develop its own capability in terms of biological weapons. We feared being without them, and nobody essentially ever doubted that the Americans had the best biological weapons. And think
about the predominant social mentality of the Soviets at that time. Who ever doubted that Americans were always cheating on us? Nobody did, simply because we always did—and expected others would be stupid not to behave in the same way.”
Viruses are extraordinarily small, submicroscopic particles, hundreds of times smaller than a grain of sand, that infect a biological organism and cause disease. They were first discovered by Dmitri Ivanovsky, a Russian microbiologist, in 1892, and six years later by Martinus Beijerinck, a Dutch microbiologist and botanist. Ivanovsky was trying to understand why tobacco mosaic disease, in the sap of tobacco plants, could not be captured by a porcelain filter that trapped bacteria. He realized that the disease particle was so small that it was passing through the filter. Viruses are barely life-forms, consisting of nothing more than a protein shell and bits of genetic material and sometimes a membrane. But they can be destroyers, carrying incredibly high virulence and contagiousness. They have caused smallpox and influenza epidemics. They work by infecting a host cell, then directing the cell to replicate and produce more viruses. Unlike bacteria, they cannot be treated with antibiotics.
Sandakhchiev’s dream was to build viral demons the world had never known—viruses that would attack troops or populations. But there were formidable hurdles to be overcome in this still-backward realm of Soviet science. The researchers had to learn to walk before they could run, and one of the early challenges was to synthesize genetic material, to make artificial DNA. At the time, methods were known in the West for creating simple genes, but the Soviet Union was still far behind. In the first six months of 1980, Sandakhchiev sent Popov on an extraordinary mission. Popov went to the University of Cambridge, England, to the famous Laboratory of Molecular Biology, a center of many of the world’s advances in microbiology, to absorb and copy the technology for DNA synthesis and bring it back. Travel abroad by a participant in the Soviet bioweapons program was highly unusual, and Popov’s trip had to be approved by the Central Committee of the Communist Party in Moscow. Popov went alone, without his family, posing as a civilian researcher for six months, studying intensively, and returned to Koltsovo with the
know-how. He also had been given a glimpse of life in the West—something he never forgot.
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When he returned to Koltsovo, laborious and time-consuming synthesis of DNA got underway. The fragments of genetic material had to be fabricated from nucleotides, the fundamental units of nucleic acids, one by one. For a small gene, this might be feasible. For example, somatostatin, a growth regulatory hormone, is a tiny protein, only fourteen amino acids long. Scientists could synthesize it by making a DNA chain forty-two nucleotides long. But more complex genes could require hundreds or thousands of nucleotides. In his laboratory, Popov recalled, he often had more than fifty scientists with doctorate training engaged in this arduous work. “The labs were filled up with flasks, bottles of solvents and reagents, people standing in front of numerous fume hoods, doing that tedious, step-by-step chemical procedure.”