Biohazard

Between ten thousand and twenty thousand spores, a microscopic quantity, are sufficient to infect someone with anthrax. The same anthrax bacterium will behave differently depending on how it enters the system. It is far more threatening if it is inhaled or ingested than if it enters through the skin. Inhalational anthrax was first identified in the early nineteenth century when workers in a textile mill were exposed to spores released into the air by the new industrial processes developed to make wool. It is often called wool sorters' disease.

As soon as an anthrax spore enters the body it germinates and begins to multiply. A few days will pass before the anthrax bacteria produce toxins which, in the simplest terms, bind to the protective membranes of target cells and cripple the ability of white blood cells to fight off disease. It is the toxin, and not the bacterium itself, that ravages the body and is responsible for death. If an anthrax victim is treated with high doses of penicillin injected into the bloodstream at short intervals for a week to ten days before the first toxins are released, chances of survival are almost 100 percent. But antibiotics can do little to fight the anthrax toxin. Combinations of penicillin and streptomycin have been used at this stage, but the prognosis is grim.

The headlong trajectory of pulmonary anthrax can be blocked if penicillin is administered before the first symptoms appear. I was told that thousands of Sverdlovsk residents were given antibiotics and vaccinated immediately after the first cases were reported, but it was too late to save the victims who had already begun to suffer from the fever, shortness of breath, and distinctive dark swellings along their chest and neck that mark the onset of pulmonary anthrax.

Sverdlovsk's anthrax was the most powerful of the dozens of strains investigated over the years by army scientists for their weapons potential. It was called Anthrax 836 and had been isolated, ironically, after another accident.

In 1953, a leak from the Kirov bacteriological facility spread anthrax into the city's sewer system. Vladimir Sizov, the army biologist who discovered the strain, came to work for Biopreparat years later and told me the story.

According to Sizov, an unknown quantity of liquid anthrax was accidentally released by a defective reactor at the Kirov plant. Army workers disinfected the sewer system immediately but soon found evidence of anthrax among the rodent population. Disinfections were ordered regularly after that, yet the disease continued to lurk underground for years. In 1956, Sizov found that one of the rodents captured in the Kirov sewers had developed a new strain, more virulent than the original. The army immediately ordered him to cultivate the new strain. It was eventually used as the basis for the weapon we planned to install in the SS-18s targeted on Western cities.

If it is impossible today to reconstruct exactly what happened during those frantic weeks in April and May of 1979, this is in part be cause the KGB did its work so well. I was told by army personnel involved in the cleanup that the corpses of the victims were bathed in chemical disinfectants and that much of the documentary evidence, including hospital records and pathologists' reports, was destroyed. To add verisimilitude to the cover story, several black-market vendors in Sverdlovsk were imprisoned on charges of selling contaminated meat.

I have often wondered whether the Party boss who ordered the rapid cleanup understood the fatal consequences of his actions. He should certainly be asked. The Communist Party chairman of Sverdlovsk at the time of the accident was Boris Yeltsin, the first leader of post-Soviet Russia.

Smirnov, the Fifteenth Directorate commander, met daily throughout the crisis with Yeltsin, a hard-nosed former construction manager who fought his way up the Party ladder to become head of the region, a position equivalent to the governor of an American state. Yeltsin enjoyed a reputation as a blunt politician who enjoyed putting the area's petty military-industrial tyrants in their places. He was as loyal as any other apparatchik to the Communist system and was keenly aware that he was expected to keep the regime's secrets. As Party chief of Sverdlovsk, he had carried out a Kremlin order to bulldoze the house where Czar Nicholas II and his family had been murdered in 1918.

According to a high-ranking military official who was in Sverdlovsk at the time, Yeltsin was so enraged by the lack of cooperation he received that he stormed over to Compound 19 and demanded entry. He was refused, on the orders of Defense Minister Dmitry Ustinov, who took over when Marshal Grechko died in 1976. Ustinov arrived at the site two weeks after the accident. As a Politburo member, he far outranked a provincial party boss.