The Demon in the Freezer Part 3

Neem Karoli Baba would notice he was meditating, and he would walk up to Brilliant, yank an apple out from under his blanket, and throw it at Brilliant's crotch. There would be a whack! and Brilliant's Aumm would turn into Oww, G.o.d! My b.a.l.l.s! and he would a.s.sume the "writhing lotus" position on the floor. The guru seemed to be hinting, Brilliant says now, that he needed to stand up on his feet and get back to the WHO in New Delhi, where his job awaited.

"On one of my trips, there was this tall guy sitting in the lobby of the WHO office. He looked up and said, 'Who are you? What are you doing here?' "

"I've come to work for the smallpox program," Brilliant replied.

"There isn't much of a program here."

"My guru says it will be eradicated. Who are you?"

"I'm D. A. Henderson. I'm the head of the program."

Brilliant was surprised to see the head of the global program sitting on a chair in the lobby doing nothing in particular. He later came to feel that Henderson was a little bit like the Lion in the Narnia books by C. S. Lewis. The Lion appears at key moments in the story, and he is a powerful presence who drives everything, but often you don't see him or realize what a force he is.

Henderson, for his part, was a little put off by Brilliant's white dress and his talk of a guru predicting a wipeout of smallpox. That day, Henderson wrote a note in the employment record, "Nice guy, sincere. Appears to have gone native."

Back at the ashram, Blanket Baba kept throwing apples at Brilliant's t.e.s.t.i.c.l.es. The situation was actually rather complicated. Indira Gandhi was herself a devotee of Neem Karoli Baba, and she had visited him at the monastery, where she had bowed down to him and touched his feet and asked for his advice. Blanket Baba wanted smallpox pulled up by the roots, and he was annoyed at Mrs. Gandhi for resisting the efforts of the World Health Organization to get on with the job. In fact, Neem Karoli Baba was probably the most powerful and feared mystic among the leaders of India; many of them journeyed to touch his feet and seek advice when they a.s.sumed high office. He had advised Indira Gandhi in 1962, when China invaded Indian territory in the Himalayas not far from his ashram. He had told her not to go to war with China because, he said, the Chinese army would soon withdraw from India anyway. The Chinese did partially withdraw their army, and Blanket Baba got a reputation for being able to predict the future. Larry Brilliant's trips to New Delhi were a small part of the guru's continuing effort to help India realize its future. The uprooting of smallpox, in the view of the guru, was the duty of India and was the world's destiny.

Brilliant thought he'd increase his chances of getting a job if he looked more Western, so every time he returned to New Delhi he trimmed off some of his beard and shortened his ponytail, and he began to replace articles of clothing. He ended up with medium-long hair and a short beard, and he was dressed in a checkered polyester suit with extra-wide lapels, a thick polyester tie, and a lime green Dacron shirt. He had made himself unnoticeable, for the seventies. By that time, Nicole Gra.s.set had decided to hire him, and D. A. Henderson agreed that he might have some potential as an eradicator. He started as a typist.

Eventually, they sent Brilliant to a nearby district to handle smallpox outbreaks, where if he got into trouble they could pull him out quickly. He saw his first cases of variola major. "You can't see smallpox and not be impressed," he said. He began to organize vaccination campaigns in villages. He would go into a village where there was smallpox, rent an elephant, and ride through the village telling people in Hindi that they should get vaccinated. People didn't want to be vaccinated. They felt that smallpox was an emanation of the G.o.ddess of smallpox, s.h.i.tala Ma, and that therefore the disease was part of the sacred order of the world; it was the dharma of people to have visitations from the disease.tBrilliant haunted the temples of s.h.i.tala Ma, because inside those temples people with smallpox could be found praying and dying. He would look up the local leaders, take them to a temple, chant in Sanskrit with them, and then ask for their help in dealing with smallpox. Speaking in Hindi, he told people that his guru, Neem Karoli Baba, taught that smallpox could be wiped out: "Worship the G.o.ddess and take the vaccine," he told them.

Brilliant traveled all over India with Henderson and the other leaders of the Eradication, and they came to know one another intimately. "D.A. read nothing but war novels and books about Patton and other great generals in history," Brilliant said. "Nicole Gra.s.set read nothing except scientific things. Bill Foege was reading philosophy and Christian literature-he's a devout Lutheran. I was reading mystical literature." They ran a fleet of five hundred jeeps. They had a hundred and thousand people working for the program, mostly on very small salaries. For a year and a half, at the peak of the campaign, every house in India was called on once a month by a health worker to see if anyone there had smallpox.

There were a hundred and twenty million houses in India, and Brilliant estimates that the program made almost two billion house calls during that year and a half. The Lions Club and the Rotary Club International paid huge amounts of the cost of eradicating the virus in India. "Those business guys with their lapel b.u.t.tons did this amazing thing," Brilliant says.

After he helped to eradicate smallpox, Larry Brilliant did other things: he became one of Jerry Garcia's physicians; he became the founder and co-owner of the Well, a famous early Internet operation; he became the CEO of SoftNet, a software company that reached three billion dollars in value on the stock market during the wild years of the Internet; he and Girija had three children; he became a professor of epidemiology at the University of Michigan; and, along with Wavy Gravy and Baba Ram Da.s.s, he established a medical foundation called the Seva Foundation. Today, the Seva Foundation has cured two million people of blindness in India and Nepal. Along the way, Brilliant got to know Steven Jobs through their common admiration for Neem Karoli Baba. Jobs had gone to India to become a devotee of the guru, but by then Blanket Baba had gone incommunicado (he had died), so Jobs went off to study at another ashram. "Steve Jobs was a pretty nondescript guy in India, walking around barefoot with a shaved head," Brilliant recalled. "Then he started Apple Computer. I said to him, 'Steve, why are you wasting your time with this stuff? It isn't going to go anywhere.' " Jobs later donated the first seed money to start the Seva Foundation.

"I've done a lot of things in life," Brilliant said, "but I've never encountered people as smart, as hardworking, as kind, or as n.o.ble as the people who worked on smallpox. Everything about them - D.

A. Henderson, Nicole Gra.s.set, Zdenek Jezek, Steve Jones, Bill Foege, Isao Arita, the other leaders - everything about them as people was secondary to the work of eradicating smallpox. We hated smallpox."

"D.A. once told me he thinks of smallpox as an ent.i.ty," I said.

"An ent.i.ty, yes. To me, smallpox was a she, because of the G.o.ddess. You would think of her as having secret meetings with all her generals and staff, planning attacks."

Attacks came out of nowhere. Early on, Brilliant was sent to deal with an outbreak centered in a train station in Bihar-the Tatanagar Station outbreak. He was twenty-eight years old, and s.h.i.tala Ma taught him a lesson he would never forget, for the Tatanagar outbreak blew up into the largest outbreak of smallpox in the world during the years of the Eradication, and it came as a total surprise. "I went to the train station, and I found a hundred people dying of smallpox," Brilliant said. "I started crying.

Women were handing me their babies. The babies were already dead. I heard rumors of birds carrying torn-off limbs of small children. Nothing in my life prepared me for that. I went to see the district medical officer and found him standing on a ladder in his office, alphabetizing his books. The look on his face was like a deer caught in headlights. 'Don't you know what's going on?' I said to him. 'What can I do?' he said."

The virus was traveling inside people up and down the railroad line. As the people moved, so did variola. The train station was exporting cases all over India and, in fact, all over the world. Brilliant began to see what a worldwide transportation system could do to amplify the virus globally in a very short time. He centered his effort first on the train station, where he found dozens of people with smallpox climbing onto a departing train. He started yelling at the stationmaster to stop the train. He had no authority, but the train stopped. He went to the police and told them to throw up roadblocks and quarantine the city. He closed the bus station and stopped all the buses from running, and he closed the airport. "I was just an American kid yelling," he says. Nicole Gra.s.set stepped in with her authority and political connections, and she put Brilliant in charge of the operation. It took six months of desperate work, millions of dollars, and hundreds of staffers and health workers to put down the Tatanagar outbreak of variola major. "That outbreak in the Tatanagar railway station gave rise to over a thousand more outbreaks all over the world, even in Tokyo," Brilliant said. "It is not enough to think you've cornered all but that last one case of smallpox, because that last one case can create those thousand outbreaks."

Rahima By 1974, smallpox was nearly gone from Asia. It had waned to a handful of cases in India and Nepal, but it was not yet finished in Bangladesh. Smallpox is a seasonal virus-it breaks out and spreads more easily when the weather is dry and cool, and it diminishes in moist, warm weather. People in Bangladesh called smallpox boshonto, which means "spring." In south Asia, smallpox surged upward in the early spring, which is the dry season, before the summer monsoons.tThe eradicators mounted especially ruthless vaccination campaigns when the virus was at its ebb. In Bangladesh, they attacked the virus as hard as possible from September to November each year, when the virus seemed almost to rest-this was like killing a vampire in its sleep.

The autumn of 1974 saw a near total victory over variola in Bangladesh. In the first week of October, only twenty-four cases of smallpox were detected in the entire country. The WHO doctors could feel the end coming, and they predicted that Eradication would occur by December.

The summer monsoon of 1974 was fierce, causing the worst floods in fifty years to hit Bangladesh, especially in areas where there were still a few cases of smallpox. The floods set people in motion, and they settled in city slums called bustees. A few of them carried smallpox with them, and by December, variola major had begun to flicker unseen through the bustees of Dhaka, the capital.

In January 1975, the government of Bangladesh decided to clear out the bustees. Bulldozers flattened several in Dhaka, and the police ordered everyone to go back to their home villages. Around one hundred thousand people streamed out of Dhaka. Every person in Bangladesh lives within a two-week travel time of every other person in Bangladesh. The biological situation there is no different from what it was in Egypt or the river valleys of China thousands of years ago. Since the incubation period of smallpox is eleven to fourteen days, some of the people who came out of the bustees were incubating variola and didn't know it, and they brought it back to their villages. In February 1975, with the coming of spring, variola major roared up in more than twelve hundred places across Bangladesh. It seemed to rise out of nowhere and everywhere, coalescing out of brushfires into a viral crown fire across the country.

The event was breathtaking in its suddenness, and it shook the eradicators to the core. The rings of containment began to fail across Bangladesh. The eradicators didn't even know where to put rings, because variola seemed to be putting rings around them. They were seeing two hundred new outbreaks of smallpox every week. A failed ring vaccination was called a containment failure. During March 1975, there were nearly a thousand containment failures. It is said today that when the rings began failing in Bangladesh in the early spring of 1975, some of the leaders of the Eradication gave up hope. They felt that they had been wrong about variola after all, that ring containment wouldn't work in the end, and that the evolutionary biologists might have been right in saying that no virus could be eradicated from nature.

The program leaders in Geneva threw everything they had into the outbreak. Eradicators streamed in from the Soviet Union, Brazil, Czechoslovakia, Egypt, Great Britain, France, Sweden, and other countries. Although he had no legal authority to do so, D. A. Henderson threatened to close down the ports in Bangladesh and cut off all shipping if the government didn't mobilize its resources and get its act together. The government of Sweden poured resources into the campaign, and OXFAM, a private charity based in Great Britain, sent large amounts of money and people. Those who arrived to help received a little bit of training and were thrown into the field. The eradicators mounted ring vaccinations across Bangladesh, and they traced cases and contacts, trying to surround the life-form, and then the summer monsoons arrived, bringing wet weather. An act of nature helped to cool the viral fire, and by the end of the monsoons of 1975 smallpox was again waning. On September 15th, in Chittagong, along the eastern side of the Bay of Bengal, a boy was found with smallpox. He was the world's last case of variola major.

They waited for two months to be sure, but there were no more reported cases. Finally, on November 14th, the program leaders in Geneva sent out a press release announcing that for the first time in human history the world was free of variola major.

The Smallpox Eradication Program team leader in charge of Bangladesh was an American doctor named Stanley O. Foster. The day after the announcement, Stan Foster received three telexes.

One came from the WHO: CONGRATULATIONS FOR GREATEST ACHIEVEMENT. Another came from the Centers for Disease Control: CONGRATULATIONS ALL DELIGHTED.

There was also a third telex: ONE ACTIVE SMALLPOX CASE DETECTED VILLAGE KURALIA ... BHOLA.

Bhola Island sits in the lower delta of the Ganges and Brahmaputra rivers, where their waters merge with the Bay of Bengal. Bhola Island was the place toward which Wavy Gravy and Larry Brilliant had set out four years before in their painted buses, hoping to help someone.

Stan Foster grabbed a shortwave radio, threw a few things into a small knapsack, and left immediately for Bhola Island, traveling alone. He went to a pier in Dhaka and boarded a decrepit paddlewheel steamer called the Rocket, and took a pa.s.senger cabin on the deck. The Rocket was three hundred feet long, and it burned coal. It was a sidewheeler that had been built in 1924, and now it was a rusted hulk, jammed with humanity, chuffing and splashing down the Ganges toward the sea. Foster leaned on the rail as the boat made its way slowly along muddy channels, pa.s.sing low sh.o.r.es lit by distant gleams of oil lamps. A waxing moon climbed across the stars, and he turned into his berth and slept.

The air developed a hint of salt, and the Rocket entered an estuary, and shortly after sunrise the boat arrived at the port of Berisal, the end of the line, where Foster disembarked. He boarded a smallpox speedboat-an outboard motorboat run by the Eradication program-and it took him down across a vast brown bay, dotted with wooden sailing craft. He pa.s.sed canoes and lateen rigs and catboats and square riggers, with cotton sails patched with cloths of bright colors; and he came to Bhola Island. It is thirty miles long, and it then contained a million people but nothing like a city. The speedboat stopped at a pier, and Foster disembarked. He was greeted by a team of local eradicators.

The island was a sandy mudflat where rice grew in profusion. There were palm trees and banana trees, and little houses of thatch, and lots of people everywhere. Foster and the local team got into a Land Rover and headed down a rutted road. The road got too muddy for the vehicle, so they parked and walked to Kuralia. They were always in the presence of people, working in the rice fields, crowding the paths. "You can't be in private in that country," Stan Foster said to me.

Local health workers led Foster and his team to a house belonging to Mr. Waziuddin Banu, a poor man who could neither read nor write. He owned no land but worked the land for others. Banu's house had a thatched roof and walls made of woven fronds of palm.

It was dark inside Banu's house. "I go in the house," Foster said, "and I can't see any cases of smallpox. Then I see this burlap sack in the corner, with a foot sticking out. It was a little kid covered with cla.s.sical pox-a moderate case, not severe." The victim was a little girl, three years old, named Rahima Banu. She was frightened of Foster, and had popped herself into the sack when he came in the door. Rahima had scabbed over, and most of her scabs had already fallen off. She had caught the virus from her uncle, a ten-year-old boy named Hares. Rahima, Hares, and a few other people with smallpox in the village had been diagnosed by an eight-year-old girl named Bilkisunnessa. She reported the cases to a local health worker, and she eventually collected a reward of sixty-two dollars from the WHO-a fortune for a girl on Bhola Island.

Stan Foster raised Dhaka on the radio and told his people that he had confirmed a case of smallpox. That night, an eradicator named Daniel Tarantola put together a large team in Dhaka, with twenty motorcycles and barrels of gasoline, and they set out for Bhola Island aboard the Rocket. The team organized a ring vaccination on the island, and they traced contacts, and vaccinated everybody who might have been exposed. In succeeding weeks, they searched all over the island for new cases, but they didn't find any. Now variola major was really finished on earth. The hot type of smallpox had been uprooted.

When Stan Foster was with Rahima Banu, he took a bifurcated needle and used it to gently lift six scabs from her legs and feet. He tucked them into a plastic vial that had a red top. The removal of the little girl's scabs would not have hurt much, because they were falling off anyway. Each of Rahima's scabs was a brownish crust about the size of the worn nub of a pencil eraser.

When he returned to Dhaka, Foster gave the scabs to a virologist named Farida Huq, and she confirmed they were smallpox, and then she put the vial of Rahima's scabs into a metal canister, along with a sheet of paper identifying the specimen. The canister went into a cardboard mailing tube and was sent to headquarters in Geneva. A secretary named Celia Sands handled all the smallpox samples-largely scabs in tubes-that were sent in from the field. She opened the packages on a table in the work area in the middle of the SEP cubicles, took out the red-topped plastic tubes full of scabs, and entered the information about them into a log. She was getting smallpox boosters once a year. ("Now, when you think about how we handled the specimens, it's so different from the way it's done today," she said to me. "Nothing ever happened, though.") After she had logged and inspected them, she sent the samples on to one of two smallpox repositories, either to the CDC or to the Inst.i.tute for Viral Preparations in Moscow.tThese two places were known as WHO Collaborating Centres. Sands alternated sending samples to one or the other, so that the Americans and the Russians would end up with roughly equal amounts of scabs.

The smallpox at the Moscow Inst.i.tute was cared for by a fluffyhaired, somewhat stout pox virologist named Svetlana Marennikova. She was highly regarded among pox experts, who found her scientific ideas provocative and solid.

Rahima's six scabs ended up at the CDC, where around Christmas of 1975, a pox virologist named Joseph Esposito transferred them with tweezers into a little plastic vial, smaller than a person's pinky. With an extrafine Sanford Sharpie pen, he wrote RAHIMA on the vial, added some other identifying data, and placed the vial in the CDC's reference freezer containing smallpox strains.

The strain of variola major that came from those scabs is known The end of variola major, autumn 1974 to autumn 1975. These successive maps of Bangladesh like frames of a movie that show the last blowup and final eradication of variola major from the human species. You can see rings of containment around outbreaks, as well as "containment failures"-smallpox bursting out. As the virus wanes under vaccination, it moves toward the east and south, and finally it ends up on Bhola Island.

Courtesy of Stanley O. Foster, Center for Public Health Preparedness and Research, Rollins School of Public Health, Emory University, from The Eradication of Smallpox from Bangladesh, by A. K. Joarder, D. Tarantola, and J. Tulloch (New Delhi: WHO South East Asia Regional Office, 1980).

today as the Rahima. All six of her scabs are said to have been used up in scientific research, but the Rahima exists, frozen in small plastic vials full of translucent white ice, which looks like frozen skim milk.

The milkiness is caused by vast numbers of particles of the Rahima strain, which have been grown in virus cultures and are now suspended in the ice. The Rahima sleeps in a freezer and will never die, unless and until the human race decides to end its relationship with variola, and puts the Rahima and all other smallpox strains to death.

The weak strain of smallpox, variola minor or alastrim, continued to run in chains of transmission around the Horn of Africa. The eradicators focused their attention there. On October 27th, 1977, a hospital cook in Somalia named Ali Maow Maalin broke out with the world's final natural case of variola.

They vaccinated fifty-seven thousand people around him, and the final ring tightened, and the life cycle of the virus stopped.

A Slit Throat In the late summer of 1978, less than a year after Ali Maow Maalin contracted the last naturally occurring case of smallpox, Janet Parker, a medical photographer in Birmingham, England, became sick.

Confined at home, she developed a blistering rash all over her body. Her doctor believed she was having a bad reaction to a drug. Parker lived alone, and she became too ill to care for herself. Her seventyseven-year-old father came to her house, helped Janet into his car, and drove her home to stay with him and her mother. Parker grew sicker, and her parents took her to the hospital, where doctors were stunned to discover that she had smallpox.

Mr. Parker came down with a fever twelve days after he had driven Janet home in his car, and as he was breaking with variola he died of a heart attack. Janet died of kidney failure in early September.

She had been vaccinated for smallpox as an adult, twelve years before she died, but her immunity had worn off. Janet's mother broke with smallpox and survived; she was the last person on earth who is known, publicly, to have been infected with variola. In Somalia, WHO doctors described the deaths in the Parker family to Ali Maow Maalin, the hospital cook. They say he burst into tears. "I'll no longer be the last case of smallpox!" he said to them.

Janet Parker had worked in a darkroom on the third floor of a building at the medical school of the University of Birmingham. One floor below her darkroom, and down the hall some distance, a smallpox researcher named Henry Bedson was doing experiments with variola. Bedson was a thin, gentle, youthful-looking man who was internationally known and had established personal friendships with many of the eradicators. A team of investigators from the WHO was never able to pin down exactly how Janet Parker became infected, but they believed that particles of the virus had floated out of Bedson's smallpox room, drifted through a room used for animal research, had then been sucked into the building's air-vent system, had traveled upward one floor, pa.s.sed through a room known as the telephone room, pa.s.sed through two more small rooms, and finally gotten inside Parker's darkroom, and had lodged in her throat or lungs.

On September 2nd, as Janet Parker lay desperately ill, Henry Bedson was discovered lying unconscious in the potting shed behind his house. He had slit his throat with a pair of scissors, and much of the blood in his body had drained out. He died five days later, despite transfusions.

When Bedson slit his throat, the eradicators woke up to the fact that although the disease was gone, the virus wasn't, and they stepped up their efforts to gain control of all the known stocks of smallpox in the world. They felt that as human immunity to the virus waned year by year, the potential for laboratory accidents was growing.

In 1975, at least seventy-five laboratories had frozen stocks of smallpox virus. Poxviruses, including smallpox, can survive for many decades in a freezer without damage or loss of infective potencyprobably for at least fifty years. A freezer with a few vials of smallpox in it could become a biological time bomb. In 1976, a year before the last natural cases of smallpox occurred, the WHO formally asked all laboratories holding smallpox to either destroy their stocks or send them to one of the two Collaborating Centres. The WHO had no legal power to compel anyone to give up their smallpox, but D. A. Henderson and the others were tough and persistent. One by one, the laboratories that were keeping smallpox sent their samples to America and Russia or destroyed them or said they had destroyed them.

Vault Today, variola exists officially in only two repositories, the Collaborating Centres. One of the repositories is the Maximum Containment Laboratory at the CDC in Atlanta. The other repository is in Russia. When scientists handle variola, international rules require them to wear full s.p.a.ce suits and to be inside a sealed Biosafety Level 4 containment zone. The WHO forbids any laboratory from possessing more than ten percent of the DNA of variola, and no one is officially allowed to do experiments with smallpox DNA. Variola is now exotic to the human species, highly infective in humans, lethal, and difficult or impossible to cure. It is generally believed to be the most dangerous virus to the human species.

The CDC's smallpox collection sits inside a liquid-nitrogen freezer. The freezer is a stainless-steel cylinder, about chest high, with a circular lid and a digital temperature display. At the bottom of the freezer there is a pool of liquid nitrogen, three inches deep, which maintains the air inside the freezer at a steady temperature of minus 321 degrees Fahrenheit. There are about four hundred and fifty different strains of smallpox inside the freezer. The samples are frozen in the little plastic vials called cryovials. The cryovials stand upright in small white boxes made of cardboard or plastic, which are divided with grid inserts, like cartons for storing wine. The boxes are stacked in metal racks, and they sit suspended over the pool of liquid nitrogen, bathed in cold fumes. The entire volume of the CDC's smallpox is about the size of a beach ball.t Officials at the CDC do not comment on such matters as where exactly the smallpox is stored or what the freezer looks like. The freezer is on wheels, and it can be moved around, and it may be moved from time to time, as in a sh.e.l.l game. It is covered with huge chains that are festooned with padlocks the size of grapefruits. The chains are connected to anchors or bolts in the floor or the walls, so that the freezer can't be moved unless the chains are unlocked or cut. I have been told that the smallpox freezer can often be found sitting inside a steel chamber that is said to resemble a bank vault. The variola vault is enlaced with alarms, and it may be disguised. You might look straight at the vault and not know that your eyes are resting on the place where half the world's known smallpox is hidden. There may be more than one variola vault. There may be a decoy vault. If you opened the decoy vault, you could find a freezer full of vials labeled SMALLPOX that held nothing but vaccine-a raised middle finger from the CDC to a f.e.c.kless smallpox thief. The variola vault could be disguised to look like a janitor's closet, but if you opened the door in search of a mop, you could find yourself face-to-face with a locked vault, having set off screaming alarms. If the variola alarms go off, armed federal marshals will show up fast.

The smallpox at the CDC's repository may be kept in mirrored form: there may be two freezers, designated the A freezer and the B freezer. The A and B freezers (if they exist, which is unclear) would each contain identical sets of vials-mirrored smallpox-so that if one freezer malfunctioned and its contents were ruined, the variola mirror would remain. No one will talk about mirrored smallpox today, but twenty years ago the smallpox was kept in mirrored form at the CDC. Whether that arrangement holds true today is presumably not known to anyone but a handful of top people at the CDC and to some of the security staff. People at the CDC do not discuss details of the storage, and many of them may not know of the existence of the vault. They don't know, and they don't ask.

Part Four - THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOON

A Flash of Darkness

October 27, 1989

Dr. Christopher J. Davis, a British intelligence officer, was tidying up his office in the old Metropole Building off Trafalgar Square and was getting ready to catch a train home to Wiltshire at the end of chill, dank day. Davis was an a.n.a.lyst on the Defence Intelligence Staff, with an area of expertise in chemical and biological weapons. He s a medical doctor with a Ph.D. from Oxford, and was then a surgeon commander in the Royal Navy. He has a serious, crisp manner, trim good looks, blue eyes and light brown hair, and an angular face.

The papers on Davis's desk contained source intelligence-bits and pieces of information, some credible, some not, about chemical and biological weapons that some countries might or might not have.

His ob was to take all the bits and move them around, look at them, like fragments of broken gla.s.s, and try to a.s.semble them into a picture of something. Chemical and biological weapons were then a backwater. Christopher Davis peered into the wastebasket-you couldn't leave any papers there. Below his window, people were heading off into the darkness across Great Scotland Yard, toward their pubs and the Tube. He was antic.i.p.ating with pleasure the long train ride home.... He ould decompress, read, sleep.... A little trolley would come along with food....

The telephone rang. It was his boss, a man referred to as ADI-53.

Chris, you'd better come to my office right away. I've got a telegram you need to look at."

Davis dropped and locked-dropped all the loose papers into combination safes in his office, spun the tumblers, locked his office-and hurried down the hall.

ADI-53 handed him a two-page, highly secret telegram. He said that the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), which is also called MI6, was "holding a high-level chap who's just defected from the Soviet Union." The SIS guys were keeping the man in a safe house outside London. He was a fifty-three-year-old chemist named Vladimir Pasechnik, the director of the Inst.i.tute for Ultrapure Biopreparations in St. Petersburg. Dr. Pasechnik had been attending a drug-industry trade fair in Paris, and he had abruptly sought asylum in the British emba.s.sy. He was a so-called walk-in, an unexpected defector. The SIS people had taken him in for an immediate debriefing, and the telegram summarized the results. It was largely in Pasechnik's own words: "I am part of Biopreparat, a large, secret program which is devoted to research, development, and production of biological weapons in the USSR," it began. Two words in the telegram jumped out at Davis. They seemed to burn on the page: plague and smallpox.

Plague is Yersinia pestis, a bacterial microbe widely known as the Black Death, a contagious pestilence that wiped out one third of the population of Europe around 1348. Plague can travel from person to person through the air, propelled by a pneumonialike cough.

"Oh, s.h.i.t!" Davis said to his boss.

Davis realized he was looking at a strategic biowarfare program. Plague and smallpox are not tactical weapons. They can't be used in any sort of limited attack: they are designed to go out of control.

They are intended to kill large numbers of people indiscriminately, and they have no other function. The target of smallpox is a civilian human population, not a concentration of military forces. At the end of the day, you can deal with anthrax because it is not transmissible in people, but plague and smallpox are entirely different matters. "If what is in front of me is accurate," Christopher Davis said to his boss, "it means that they have strategic biological weapons. It also means they have launch systems or other means of delivery. We just haven't found the systems yet."

Early the next week, at a colorless business hotel in the south of London, Davis met Vladimir Pasechnik, who sat in a room with his handlers from MI6. They called him by his first name, and Davis became his main debriefer. Over a period of many months, he met with Vladimir in various hotels around London, listened to him, and asked questions. There were always handlers in the room, and there was always a technical specialist from the SIS. They did not bring Pasechnik into the headquarters of M16, because it was a.s.sumed that KGB operatives had the place staked out. Vladimir had left his wife and children behind, and he was very worried about them.

He told Davis that Biopreparat, also known as the System, was huge. The program had vast stocks of frozen plague and smallpox that could be loaded onto missiles, although Pasechnik was not sure of the intended targets. The warhead material had been genetically engineered, he said. He understood only too well the modern techniques of molecular biology, as did his colleagues. One of the princ.i.p.al weapons was genetically modified (GM) plague that was resistant to antiobiotics. The Soviet microbiologists had created this GM plague with brute-force methods: they had taken natural plague and had exposed it again and again to powerful antibiotics, and in this way, they forced the rapid evolution of drug-resistant strains. This sort of research is known among bioweaponeers as "heating up" a germ. The heated-up pestis would spread from person to person in a lethal cough, and doctors would not have drugs to treat it effectively. One of the strains of GM plague was being manufactured by the ton, Vladimir said. He also said that Biopreparat scientists were trying to come up with even more powerful strains using the techniques of molecular biology-inserting foreign genes into plague to further heat it up.

Vladimir said that lately the Soviet Ministry of Defense had been demanding that biologists develop a new manufacturing process for making tonnage amounts of weapons-grade smallpox. Military biologists had been using an older process for making smallpox into warhead material, and now there was a new generation of missiles that they wanted to arm with variola. The Soviet military had long considered smallpox a strategic weapon-during the Eradication, when the Ministry of Health had been making and donating vaccine to the WHO, the Ministry of Defense had been making and stockpiling smallpox as a weapon. Much of the advanced work with smallpox was now happening in Siberia, at the Vector research facility, but he didn't know much about it, he said.

Vladimir Pasechnik was anxious about the genetic-engineering research at Biopreparat. He was afraid that a genetically engineered virus or germ could escape from the weapons program. He said that genetic engineering was why he had defected. He didn't want money, he wanted out. "I couldn't sleep at night, thinking about what we were doing in our laboratories and the implications for the world," he told his British debriefers.

The British had been sending encrypted messages to the CIA to inform them of what Pasechnik was saying, but they wanted to go faceto-face with the Americans for a comprehensive meeting.

Christopher Davis and his colleagues wrapped up the debriefing of Pasechnik in the late spring of 1990.

The British government then sent Davis and a close colleague from Defence Intelligence, Hamish Killip, to the headquarters of the CIA in Langley, Virginia, where they briefed their American colleagues on the details of the GM Black Death, and smallpox, and of the missiles tipped with bioweapons. The British weren't absolutely certain that the biological strategic missiles were operational and ready for launch, but if they were, it was pretty clear that they would be targeted on North America.

Several years later, Christopher Davis would receive the Order of the British Empire from Queen Elizabeth II. Though the Queen didn't know it, he had received the O.B.E. for having said "Oh, s.h.i.t" to his boss-it marked the first insight into the fact that the Russian biowarfare program was strategic, like a nuclear program.

"I have the highest respect for the intelligence services of the USA," Davis said to me, recalling his visit to Langley, "yet they were amazed at what we told them." The CIA officials may also have been dismayed that British intelligence had cracked open a strategic-weapons program in Russia that they had not known very much about. In the world of intelligence, it is not good to be told something new and important by an intelligence officer from another government. Yet even while they listened to Davis and Killip, the CIA people had their own secret knowledge, which they did not share with the British. They had cla.s.sified this information as NOFORN, meaning that no foreigners could have it.

Forbidden Planet Sometime before 1991, a Soviet intercontinental ballistic missile was launched from Kamchatka, the peninsula that hangs down from Asia into the northern Pacific Ocean. It carried a ma.s.sive MIRV (multiple independent reentry vehicle) payload. A MIRV payload separates into individual warheads, which land on discrete targets. The MIRV itself is called a bus. It is rather like a bus: it carries the warheads and lets them off to head for their separate destinations.

American spy satellites and Navy ships watched the missile as it soared out of Kamchatka and above the atmosphere. The MIRV bus detached from the launch vehicle and went on a free-fall arc through s.p.a.ce over the Pacific Ocean. The bus separated into ten warheads, and they fell into the sea.

The American sensors pulled in some data about the shot, which had to be decoded and a.s.sembled and thought about.tThis took time, but something strange began to emerge. There was something different about this MIRV. The bus had an unusual shape, and it did odd things as it moved through s.p.a.ce-rather than spinning, as the usual nuclear warheads did, it oriented itself in relation to the earth. Infrared cameras on American satellites photographed something that they had never seen on a Russian warhead before: a large fin panel that was glowing with heat-the bus was dumping heat into s.p.a.ce as the vehicle soared over the Pacific. Why would it need to do that? The laws of thermodynamics said that if there was heat pouring into s.p.a.ce from the bus, then the inside of the bus had to be cold. This was a refrigeration system. But what on the bus needed to be kept cold? A nuclear warhead can tolerate heat above the boiling point of water. After the bus separated into its ten small warheads, each warhead punched down through the atmosphere, popped a parachute, and fell into the water. Nuclear warheads don't need to come down on a parachute.

Several such tests took place, but it's not clear when they happened or how much information the CIA really got. a.n.a.lysis takes time, and nothing is ever crystal clear. In October 1988, the CIA obtained imagery of missiles sitting in storage bunkers or launch silos in Kamchatka. The imagery showed that the warheads were connected by pipes or hoses to refrigeration systems on the ground. All the Soviet missiles used liquid fuel, which needed to be kept cold, but even so, something about these cooling systems made the CIA a.n.a.lysts think they were not for cooling rocket fuel. Refrigeration implies life. The missiles appeared to contain living weapons.

The CIA has close ties with British intelligence. Even so, the CIA chose not to tell M16 about the tests of the new missile warheads. The CIA could not be absolutely certain that the warheads were biological, or that a germ or virus could possibly be powerful enough to use in place of a nuclear weapon.

It seems that there was a puzzlement going on within the American intelligence community over whether or not a germ that landed on a city from s.p.a.ce could do any kind of real damage. And yet if it was true that biological missiles seemed to be aimed at the United States, just who should be informed of this?

The NOFORN knowledge of the chilled biowarheads was tucked away inside the CIA like the meat in a walnut.

Shortly after Christopher Davis and Hamish Fillip briefed the Americans on what Dr. Pasechnik had told them, the United States and Britain became a great deal more concerned about biological weapons. President George Bush and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher were briefed by their intelligence people on the ICBMs armed with plague and smallpox. Mrs. Thatcher hit the roof. She telephoned Mikhail Gorbachev, who was then the head of the Soviet Union, and forcefully asked him to open his country's biowarfare facilities to a team of outside inspectors. Gorbachev stalled for a while, but he eventually agreed.

A secret British-American weapons-inspection team toured four of the main Biopreparat scientific facilities in January 1991. The team members included Christopher Davis. They ran into the same problems that the United Nations inspectors would later run into in Iraq.

The Soviet biologists did not want to discuss their work and did not want anyone seeing their laboratories in operation. The inspectors were met with denials, evasions, time-wasting bureaucracy, stupefying, alcohol-laden meals that stretched on for hours, snarled transportation arrangements, and endless speeches about friendship and international cooperation. Whenever they could pull themselves away from a speech, they saw large Level 4 s.p.a.ce-suit rooms that had been completely stripped of equipment and sterilized and were not in use, though the labs showed every sign of having been in operation recently. They traveled by bus to a huge microbiology facility south of Moscow called Obolensk. The facility was surrounded by layers of barbed wire and military guards. The head scientist was a lean-faced military officer and microbiologist named Dr. Nikolai Urakov, an expert in plague.

Inside one of the Level 4 areas, the inspectors found an array of two-story-tall fermenter-production tanks. This was a major production facility for the GM plague, but the tanks were now empty. When Davis and the other inspectors accused Dr. Urakov of manufacturing plague by the ton, he blandly informed the inspectors that all the research at his inst.i.tute was for medical purposes, since plague was "a problem" in Russia.

"This was clearly the most successful biological-weapons program on earth, yet these people just sat there and lied to us, and lied, and lied," Davis said to me. He insists that the Russian government has never come clean. "To this day, we still do not know what happened in the military facilities that were the heart of the Russian program."

Late in the day on January 14th, the team arrived at Vector, the sprawling virology complex situated in the larch and birch forests near a town called Koltsovo, about twenty miles east of Novosibirsk, in Siberia. They were offered vodka and caviar, lots of good food and many toasts to friendship, and were sent to bed. The next morning, after being treated to more vodka and caviar for breakfast, they demanded to see the building called Corpus 6. It is a homely brick structure, with windows rimmed in concrete. The stairs in Corpus 6 are crooked. Many of the buildings at Vector were constructed by gangs of prison laborers, and it is said that they wanted to make every concrete step slightly different in size. The Russian story is that the prisoners were hoping that some biologist would fall down the stairs and break his stinking neck.