Review: Biohazard (Ken Alibek with S. Handelman, 319 pp, Random House, 1999)

Other countries, and terrorist organizations, do not necessarily share this belief.

For instance, Botulinum toxin, a natural molecule produced by the anaerobic bacterium Clostridium botulinum, was the first weapon used by the Aum Shinrikyo terrorists in Japan. Botulinum toxin is the most poisonous substance known: as little as 10 ng can be fatal to a 150 lb person.

In 1942 the German Panzer Corps attacking Stalingrad was suddenly decimated by a mysterious tularemia outbreak. Later, between 1982 and 1984, during the USSR-Afghanistan war, mysterious outbreaks of glanders, a lethal horse disease caused by Malleomyces mallei bacteria, occurred in Afghanistan.

The reason for these outbreaks is no longer a mystery. Ken Alibek, the Deputy Director of Biopreparat, the USSR's largest biological weapons facility, who (according to this account) tried to destroy his own research records on bioweapons and then defected to the U.S. in 1992, describes his brief investigation into the Stalingrad incident, and concludes that it could not have been a natural outbreak. He also recounts second-hand information from a member of the Fifteenth Directorate (part of the USSR's Ministry of Defense) that the Afghanistan incident was also man-made.

His book relates the story of his experiences at Biopreparat and describes the Soviet bioweapons facilities at Zagorsk, where smallpox, Q fever, and Venezuelan equine encephalitis were cultivated; Kirov, where viruses like Marburg, Ebola, and tularemia were produced; Vozrozhdeniya, their testing area; and the infamous anthrax facility at Sverdlovsk, where a 'biological Chernobyl' occurred.

In 1979, the anthrax drying plant at Sverdlovsk accidentally released a cloud of anthrax spores that killed as many as 100 people with the pulmonary form of anthrax. The book also recounts other, smaller accidents that were not reported by the news media.

The author also repeats the myth about British or Americans (depending on which version of the myth one hears) in colonial America distributing smallpox-infected blankets among the American Indians in order to massacre them. This story first appeared at the beginning of the political correctness movement, as an example of White males supposedly oppressing other ethnic groups. However, there are too many inconsistencies in this story for it to be credible. Viruses were not discovered until 1898. In the 17th and 18th centuries, it was believed that diseases were spread by "bad air", or maybe by acts of God against sinners. In view of this, it is unclear why the colonists would think that a blanket would be an efficient way to spread the disease. Also, if the colonists were in possession of smallpox-covered blankets, why wouldn't the colonists get wiped out from smallpox as well? This story, which becomes more elaborate as time goes on, has the aura of a disinformation campaign.

Indeed, the original Trent diary on which this rumor is based says absolutely nothing about giving Indians smallpox. On the contrary, Trent wrote:

... [the Indians] returned and said they would hold fast of the Chain of friendship. Out of our regard to them we gave them two Blankets and an Handkerchief out of the Small Pox Hospital. I hope it will have the desired effect.

Speaking of disinformation, the KGB also played a large role in distributing disinformation about bioweapons. According to The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive by historian Christopher Andrew and the defector Vasili Mitrokhin, the bizarre rumor that AIDS was created by American biological weapons scientists, was in fact invented by the KGB. The Soviets were convinced that the USA was creating biological weapons, and, according to documents smuggled out of Russia by Mitrokhin, invented this rumor to create racial disharmony in the U.S. and antipathy among our allies. This pathological suspiciousness also fueled the Soviet biological weapons program.

The author's most sensational claim, however, is that Russia is now working on a genetically-altered virus combining elements of smallpox and Ebola. Although it seems highly improbable that such a virus is really possible, there is little doubt that Russia could still have a sizeable stockpile of smallpox virus. They could well have tried to mutate the virus to improve its resistance against protective countermeasures. The fact that people are no longer vaccinated against smallpox means that this is a true "doomsday" weapon.

This is a short book, written in a breezy, first-person journalistic style. Unlike the historical and well-documented Mitrokin Archive, none of the claims in the book are documented with any evidence. Thus, the extent to which the claims in the book are true, anti-Soviet disinformation, or even fiction cannot be evaluated. However, there are no major scientific gaffes in the book. The author seems knowledgeable enough about viruses to be authentic and the bulk of his claims are plausible.

However, he seems to have a high degree of credulousness concerning unsubstantiated rumors, such as the 'blanket' rumor mentioned above or the smallpox-Ebola rumor in his book. Perhaps this results from his many years of working in a Communist dictatorship, where truth was handed down by decree; it might also explain how he could have been persuaded to create biological weapons despite his own misgivings.

One suspects, in fact, that the book is actually incomplete. It is easy to imagine many other ways in which people obsessed with a quest for national or ideological supremacy, or merely misguided patriotism, could re-engineer infectious agents to create incurable, deadly plagues. The most frightening thing about this book is not that a foreign government would stockpile viruses, but how easy this would be for terrorists with no scientific knowledge, whose only goal is to spread death.

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