The Cobra Event (29 page)

Invisible History (III.)

WEDNESDAY NIGHT

SECURITY MATTERS
in the federal government are compartmentalized. Information from one agency flows to another agency through top managers. The flow is controlled by bureaucrats and intelligence people. This means that parts of the federal government don’t know what other parts are doing. Files are routinely destroyed, for security purposes, and people retire and die. The United States government does not know parts of its own history. The knowledge remains hidden in pockets.

In times of emergency, someone in one branch of the federal government may suddenly need information from someone in a different branch. Then people have to sit down in a room with each other and trade sensitive information by means of an informal conversation. This is secret oral history. It is not supposed to happen. It happens all the time.

Mark Littleberry telephoned Frank Masaccio and told him there was an area of knowledge that he, Masaccio, needed to become aware of, under conditions of security. Shortly afterward, Littleberry and Masaccio entered the F.B.I. Command Center in the Federal Building. It was night, and the room was deserted except for one agent, Caroline Landau, who was working on some video feeds. Masaccio stopped before a steel door on the west wall of the Command Center. It was the door to a room known as Conference 30-30. It is a secure room—actually a Mosler steel safe. He touched a combination keypad, and the two men settled in chairs around a small table, and the door clicked shut.

From the corner of her eye, Caroline Landau had watched the two men go into the secure room, and she had understood that it had to do with Cobra. I wonder if an operation is going down? she thought. She could feel an operation gathering in the air, like a weather front coming, bringing a gentle pickup of the wind, and the smell of a building electrical storm.

“
WE’VE FOUND
a lethal smallpox gene in the Cobra virus,” Littleberry said to Masaccio.

“Yeah?” It didn’t mean much to him.

“Will calls it the rocketing gene. It makes a protein that rockets the virus particles around the infected cell. You could think of it as fireworks going off inside the cell. It destroys brain cells while it shoots the virus everywhere. That’s why these people die so fast, Frank. The virus is rocketing through their brains. Cobra is part smallpox.”

Masaccio sucked his teeth and played with his class ring on his finger. “Fine, but when are you guys going to find me the perp?” he said.

“What you’re trying to do is change the outcome of history, you know,” Littleberry said.

Masaccio replied that he was well aware of that.

Littleberry settled back in the chair, feeling tired in his bones, and he wondered how long it would be before he could see his grandchildren and feel a wind from the Gulf of Mexico on his face. Finding a piece of smallpox in the Cobra virus was like…dying.

“It’s strange, Frank. I’m proud of what I did as a scientist. But I’m sorrier than ever for what I did as a human being. How do you reconcile that?”

“You don’t,” Masaccio said.

“Something happened to me late in the program. I mean in the American biological-weapons program. Late 1969. Just before Nixon killed it.”

The U.S. Army’s biological-weapons-production facility was the Biological Directorate plant in Pine Bluff, Arkansas. In 1969, Littleberry had received an invitation from some Army researchers to visit the plant and see warheads being loaded. He watched workers packing bomblets with dry anthrax. They were wearing breathing masks and coveralls, and that was it. No protective space suits.

“I’m looking at these guys, and I realize that they are all black guys,” Littleberry said to Masaccio. “The overseers were white. It was African-American men filling germ bombs, with the white guys telling them what to do.”

He had tried to put it out of his mind. He had tried to tell himself that the men had well-paying jobs. He had tried to tell himself that the military had been good to him. “It took me way too long to get through my stubborn head the
reality
of what was going on in Arkansas. It was expendable nigger-labor in a disease factory, that’s what it was.”

When Nixon shut down the American biological-weapons program in 1969, Mark Littleberry was out of work. “Nixon put me out of a job, and I’m thankful. All I had to show for my M.D. was thousands of dead monkeys and some super-efficient biological weapons.”

“Hold on,” Masaccio said. “What I hear is that the biological shit was unusable. I hear that it wouldn’t work.”

“Where’d you hear that?”

“All my sources.”

“That’s crap,” Littleberry said. “That is pure crap. It’s the kind of unreal crap we’ve been hearing for years from the civilian scientific community, which has its head in the sand about bioweapons. We tested strategic biosystems for five years in the Pacific Ocean. We tested
everything
at Johnston Atoll, the lethal stuff, all the means of deployment. Not everything worked. That’s the whole point of research and development. But we learned what works. Believe me, those weapons work. You might not like the way that they work, but they work. Who told you the weapons don’t work?”

“Ah, one of our academic consultants. He has security clearances.”

“An academic with security clearances. Did this guy describe what happened at Johnston Atoll?”

Masaccio didn’t answer.

“Did he
mention
Johnston Atoll?”

“Nope.”

“Then let’s get back to reality,” Littleberry said. “Nixon suddenly killed the program in late 1969. It was his decision to kill it. I was agonizing over this goddamned program, whether I should leave it, and Nixon killed it. I won’t forgive Nixon for taking away a decision that I should have made for myself.”

Littleberry decided that he had to do something to make up for his work with weapons. He applied to switch his officer’s commission into the Public Health Service, and he went to work for the Centers for Disease Control, where he took part in the war on smallpox. In the early 1960s, a handful of doctors at the C.D.C. had an important idea. Their idea was that a virus could be eradicated from the planet. They chose the smallpox virus, variola, as the most likely candidate for total extinction, because it lives only in people. It doesn’t hide in the rain forest in some animal where you can’t eradicate it.

Littleberry reached into his hip pocket and pulled out his wallet. He removed a small photograph. It was old and dog-eared, covered with plastic. He had been carrying it in his wallet for twenty years. He pushed it across the table toward Masaccio. “This is the work that made me whole.”

The photograph showed a thin African man standing in a parched landscape, beside a fence. He was squinting away from the camera. He wore no shirt. Blisters speckled his shoulders, arms, and chest.

“Should I know him?” Masaccio asked.

“Nope,” Littleberry said. “But if you were a public health doctor you would. His name was Ali Maow Maalin. He was a cook. The place is Somalia, the date’s October 26, 1977. Mr. Maalin was the last human case of smallpox. The smallpox life-form has never made another natural appearance anywhere on earth. That was the end of the road for one of the worst diseases on the planet. I was there, with Jason Weisfeld, another C.D.C. doctor. We vaccinated everyone for miles around. That bastard wasn’t able to jump from Mr. Maalin to any other host. We wiped out that bastard. By
we
I mean thousands of public health doctors all over the world. Doctors in India. Doctors in Nigeria and China. Doctors in Bangladesh with no shoes. Local people. Today I’m afraid you have to wonder just how successful that smallpox campaign really was.”

What Littleberry had in mind was the surprise that history and nature came up with in 1973, four years before the last naturally occurring case of smallpox and just a year after the signing of the Biological Weapons Convention. It was the biotechnology revolution.

GENETIC ENGINEERING
is all about moving genes from one organism to another. A gene is a strip of DNA that carries the code for making a particular protein in a living creature. A gene could be thought of as a piece of ribbon. A microscopic ribbon. The ribbon can be cut and pasted. Molecular biologists use certain splicing enzymes, which act as scissors, and which cut DNA. (Molecular biology is largely a matter of cutting and pasting ribbon.) You can snip the DNA where you want. You can chop it out of a longer piece of DNA, then put it into another organism. That is, you can transplant a gene. If you do it correctly, the organism will have a new working gene afterward. The organism will do something different; it will make a new protein. It will be a changed living creature, and it will pass its changed character to its offspring. If you allow the organism to multiply, you’ve cloned the organism. A clone is a designer copy. This is genetic engineering. One of the big complications is that when you move DNA from one organism to another it doesn’t always work properly in its new home. But it can be made to work. An organism that contains strips of foreign DNA is known as a recombinant organism.

The biotechnology revolution began in 1973, when Stanley N. Cohen, Herbert W. Boyer, and others succeeded in putting working foreign genes into the bacterium
E. coli
, a microorganism that lives in the human gut. They made loops of DNA, and they managed to stick the loops inside
E. coli
cells. The cells were different afterward, because they had extra working DNA inside them. Cohen and Boyer shared the Nobel Prize for this achievement. The genes they transplanted gave
E. coli
resistance to some antibiotics. The organisms with their new features, their resistance to antibiotics, were not dangerous. They could easily be wiped out by other antibiotics. The experiment was perfectly safe.

Cohen and Boyer had accomplished one of the historic experiments in twentieth-century science. It would lead to the growth of new industries in the United States, Japan, and Europe. New companies would be formed, diseases would be cured in new ways, and great insights into the nature of living systems would follow.

However, almost immediately, scientists became worried that moving genes from one microorganism to another could cause outbreaks of new infectious diseases, or environmental disasters. The concern was very great: recombinant organisms were frightening to think about. Concerned scientists urged a temporary halt in genetic experimentation until the scientific community could debate the hazards and come up with safety guidelines to prevent accidents. A meeting to discuss these issues took place in Asilomar, California, in the summer of 1975.

The Asilomar Conference brought a sense of reason and calm to a situation that had seemed inherently frightening. After the Asilomar Conference, scientists proceeded cautiously in the area of genetic engineering. The so-called Asilomar Safety Guidelines for carrying out genetic experiments on microorganisms were established, and a variety of safety review boards and procedures were put in place. As it turned out, the concerns of Western scientists about the hazards of genetic engineering provided a blueprint for what was to become the Soviet bioweapons program.

Around this time, a certain Dr. Yuri Ovchinnikov, one of the founders of molecular biology in the Soviet Union, and some of his colleagues pitched the idea of a genetic-weapons program to the top Soviet leadership, including Leonid Brezhnev. Soon the Soviet leader began sending word down to the Soviet scientific community: do research in genetic engineering and you will have money; if your research has applications for weapons, you will be given what you need.

In 1973, the year of the Cohen and Boyer cloning experiment, the Central Committee of the Soviet Union had established an ostensibly civilian biotechnology research and production organization called Biopreparat. Participating scientists sometimes called it simply “The Concern.” It was controlled and funded by the Soviet Ministry of Defense. The main business of Biopreparat was the creation of biological weapons using advanced scientific techniques. The first head of Biopreparat was General V. I. Ogarkov.

In 1974, the Soviets established a complex of research institutes in Siberia devoted especially to developing advanced virus weapons using the techniques of molecular biology. The centerpiece of the complex was the Institute of Molecular Biology at Koltsovo, a self-contained research complex in the birch forests twenty miles east of the city of Novosibirsk. The cover story was that the institute of Koltsovo was dedicated to making medicines. But for all the state research money spent on “medicines” in Biopreparat, the Soviet Union suffered a chronic lack of the simplest medicines and vaccines. It seems pretty clear that the money wasn’t being spent on medicine.

Most of the leading scientific figures in Soviet microbiology and molecular biology took military money and did research that was connected to the development of bioweapons. Some of the scientists lobbied for the money. Others didn’t know what was going on, or didn’t want to ask too many questions. In the West, there was strong, vehement, entrenched resistance to the idea that biological weapons work, and there was a worthy but perhaps naive hope that the Soviets would be reasonable about such weapons. Scientists in general believed that the treaty was working remarkably well. Biologists in particular congratulated themselves for being more alert and wise than the physicists, who had not managed to escape the taint of weapons of mass destruction.

Meanwhile the intelligence community kept leaking allegations about a biological-weapons program in Russia. Scientists were (quite reasonably) suspicious of intelligence information of this kind—it wasn’t backed by much hard evidence, and it seemed to come from right-wing military people and from paranoids in the C.I.A., who, it was felt, tended to demonize Russia to serve their own interests. People who tried to say that the Soviets had used toxin weapons on hill people in Southeast Asia were pilloried in scientific journals. In 1979, when airborne anthrax drifted across the city of Sverdlovsk, killing some sixty-six people, American experts in biological weapons declared that the citizens of the city had eaten some bad meat. The chief proponent of this view was a Harvard University biochemist named Matthew S. Meselson, one of the architects of the Biological Weapons Convention. He had helped persuade the Nixon White House to embrace the treaty. Meselson insisted that the anthrax accident at Sverdlovsk had been a natural event. His view prevailed for a long time, even though there were those who said that the Sverdlovsk incident was an accident involving biological weapons.