| A deadly
Soviet threat lives on
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In a Kazakh
institute, living germs designed for warfare are a ‘terrorist’s
treasure’ |
| A flimsy
door with an ancient lock is all that separates terrorists from
vials of deadly biological agents at the Plague Research Institute
in Almaty, Kazakhstan. NBC's Dana Lewis reports. |
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By Dana
Lewis
NBC NEWS |
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ALMATY, Kazakhstan — Down a
street from where children play, just yards away from homes and
vegetable gardens, the Plague Research Institute in Kazakhstan’s
commercial capital is a terrorist’s dream. Under the guise of
civilian research, the institute collected and housed thousands of
deadly germs during the Soviet era to be used against the United
States in a war. Until recently, the facility was completely
unguarded.
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“THE PLAGUE
INSTITUTE is a terrorist’s treasure,” said Andy Weber, a representative of
the Pentagon’s threat reduction program, a U.S. body charged with
preventing and responding to threats against the United States.
It’s not difficult to see why terrorists might target
the Plague Research Institute for their wares.
Recently, Weber strolled into a dimly lit room in one of the
facility’s buildings. He opened the door of one of nine rumbling Soviet
refrigerators revealing a horror inside: test-tubes containing samples of
anthrax, tularemia, and plague, some dating back to the 1940s, all
alive.
Anthrax is 90 percent lethal. “Drop
it and you can be infected,” a lab worker warned. A strain of the plague
known as the Black Death “can kill you in a very quick and painful way,”
Weber said. “It produces high quantities of toxins which cause your lungs
to fill up with a bloody froth. Vital organs are deprived of oxygen and
cease to function.” |
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EASY ACCESS TO
DEATH
All that stands between
intruders and this deadly cache are the worn padlocks on the refrigerators
— and a wax seal. The buildings themselves, until recently, had nothing
more than wooden doors guarding this trove of death.
“One kick,” said Weber, and anyone could walk
inside.
The 1,400 test tubes stored in these
nine refrigerators are one of the dark legacies of the Cold War. Soviet
researchers ostensibly used the Plague Research Institute for civilian
purposes, collecting natural biological organisms from the field. During
the Soviet era, scientists conducted research on plague strains most
virulent and resistant to antibiotics, and pursued vaccines for the
strains. |
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But the reality, according to a former Soviet bioweapons official,
was much different. Ken Alibek, a former Soviet colonel who worked in
Russia’s biological weapons program and defected to the United States in
1992, said the civilian research at the institute was only a “cover” for a
deadly biological weapons program that violated high-level treaties
between the Kremlin and Washington.
“This
system of anti-plague institutes was created in the 1920s to fight
infectious diseases like plague,” Alibek said. “For decades we had no idea
these institutes had another purpose.”
The
anti-plague researchers, Alibek said, helped find new strains which could
be used to develop new biological weapons to be placed on warheads and
aimed at the United States.
This system “was
one of the best suppliers for the Soviet Union’s offensive biological
program,” said Alibek, who himself ran a facility in Kazakhstan known as
Stepnagorsk. That is where biological germs were brewed in huge quantities
and loaded into bombs and missiles meant to target U.S. cities in the time
of war.
Just a teaspoon full of anthrax
could kill thousands.
If Stepnagorsk was the
end of the biological weapon assembly line, the anti-plague institute was
the beginning, the collection
facility. |
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FACILITY DISMANTLED BY
U.S.
Stepnagorsk, two footballs
fields long, wasn’t discovered by U.S. intelligence until Alibek’s
defection eight years ago. It was also a secret known only by the highest
levels of Soviet power.
Today, it’s being
cut to pieces with the consent of the Kazakh government — and millions of
dollars in U.S. funding — so it can never again produce biological
weapons.
The Plague Research Institute is
also receiving U.S. aid. Until recently, the facility was completely
unprotected — without alarms or guards. The Pentagon will pay nearly a
million dollars to guard it. Research will continue, but only, officials
say, to protect the public against disease by developing vaccines and
studying germs. The anti-plague institute says it no longer has any
connection to offensive biological programs. But it’s past research and
stored samples are still a threat.
“There’s
been a lot of talk of nuclear smuggling,” said the Pentagon’s Weber.
“However, I personally believe that loose [germs] could perhaps be even
more realistically used by terrorist groups to attack targets over here
and in the United States.” |
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Kazakhstan’s
President Nursultan Nazarbayev told NBC News that he thinks development
and testing of biological weapons should be a war crime.
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According to Weber, U.S. experts working to secure the facility
found evidence that Soviet researchers not only collected killer germs but
also “genetically manipulated strains of plague which could have been sort
of designer strains of plague for increased lethality.”
The director of the Plague Research Institute answers that
accusation coyly.
“The experiments were
aimed at defining differences between the strains, but not with the goal
to find a strain with heightened virulence or resistance to antibiotics,”
Baheed Atshabar told NBC News. “We never aimed for that. If they resulted,
they resulted.”
PRESIDENT CONDEMNS
SECRECY
In an exclusive interview
with NBC News, Kazakhstan President Nursultan Nazarbayev said that much of
the Soviet Union’s past offensive biological and even nuclear research in
his country is still a closely held secret. Nazarbayev said he would like
to see more transparency from Russia’s President Vladimir Putin on the
question of existing biological weapons.
“It’s a question as to whether the Russian state is fulfilling its
international obligations or not. There is no way for me to know whether
they are or not. It’s a question of international control,” Nazarbayev
said.
The Kazakh leader said that he thinks
development and testing of biological weapons should be a war crime. “I
believe it must be a war crime because it’s the same as nuclear weapons,
but it’s an even more cruel destruction of people and every living
being.”
Weber has pushed for and obtained
U.S. government funding to have the anti-plague institute “locked down.”
Already barbed-wire fencing is being put in place, steel doors fitted to
the laboratories and, for the first time in years, a 24-hour guard service
— all paid for by the Pentagon’s threat-reduction program and American
taxpayers. Alarms that haven’t worked in years are being replaced in
attempt to keep a terrorist’s dream from becoming America’s
nightmare.
NBC’s Robert Windrem contributed to this report.
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