The anthrax burial site of the (former) USSR may pose a danger to the world * The danger of escaping from Renaissance Island
Judith Miller
The third thousand
According to American and Asian officials, in the spring of 1988, 1,360 km east of Moscow, bacteriologists were ordered to carry out their most critical mission. Quickly and in complete secrecy, the scientists in Sverdlovsk transferred hundreds of tons of anthrax bacteria - enough to wipe out the entire world several times - into huge containers. They poured into them a bleaching agent designed to purify the deadly pink powder, loaded them onto 12 railway cars and sent the illegal shipment to a remote island in the heart of the Aral Sea, a distance of almost 1,500 km.
Russian soldiers dug huge pits in which they buried the bacteria and with them, so Moscow hoped, also a serious political danger. While Mikhail Gorbachev pushed the processes of glasnost and perestroika and tightened his ties with the West, intelligence evidence accumulated in Washington that the Soviet Union was producing tons of deadly bacteria - contrary to the treaty it signed.
Vozrozhdaniye Island was a natural choice. Until 1992, when the army finally left the place, Renaissance Island, the translation of its name from Russian, served as the main experimental site of the Soviet Union. Today the island, which is under the control of Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, is the world's largest burial site for anthrax bacteria.
For the United States, the site is an intelligence gold mine. According to Uzbek and American officials, it has been visited in the last four years, at the invitation of Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, by scientists and intelligence experts who took samples of the buried bacteria. The examination of the samples revealed that even though the anthrax bacteria had been soaked at least twice in bleaching agents, some of the spores were still alive and could be deadly. The test also revealed that the anthrax vaccine currently given to the 2.4 million American soldiers is effective against the Russian strain, at least the one found on the island.
This finding did calm the Clinton administration, but not Kazakhstan, and certainly not Uzbekistan, which has conducted oil exploration in two-thirds of the island's territory that is in its possession. Since the Aral Sea is shrinking - as a result of a mistaken Soviet irrigation policy - the area of this isolated and abandoned island has increased from 200 to 2,000 square kilometers and soon it is expected to connect with the mainland.
Uzbek and Kazakh experts fear that the anthrax spores will manage to escape from their burial place, with the help of rodents or birds, and reach the soil of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. This disease is transmitted from animals to humans by direct contact; It can be treated with antibiotics if diagnosed immediately. American and Central Asian officials also fear that terrorists will get their hands on the anthrax on the island and use it to create additional amounts of the bacteria.
In 1992, President Boris Yeltsin issued an order to close the site and undertook to dismantle and clean up the laboratories there within three years. But the Russian government, under financial difficulties, never completed the work, and Russia never admitted its responsibility in this matter.
Scientists from the United States Army refused to comment on the tests they conducted on the anthrax samples. But officials said the labs were still trying to decipher the molecular structure of the Russian anthrax, to understand why some of the spores survived. According to one of the experts in the army, "this variety has been proven to be particularly resistant, and it is not even the strongest variety that the Soviet Union created."
The flight to Manokus Island, the nearest Uzbek military base, takes 90 minutes. As you get closer to the island, the signs of life disappear, as do the fishermen in their wooden boats and the vegetation. In the end, only sand covered with salt remained. There is nothing alive on the island, not even birds.
The island's remote location explains why it was the preferred Russian site for covert activity. According to a study to be published soon by the Monterey Institute for International Studies in California, Stalin used to exile to islands rich Russian peasants whom he sought to suppress.
The research shows that in 1936 the island was transferred to the responsibility of the Ministry of Defense, and in 1954 it established a biological weapons testing site called Arlesk-7. According to the researchers, the lack of vegetation, the dry climate, and the sandy soil whose temperature reaches 60 degrees in the summer are ideal for experiments with bacteria Since they "reduce the spread and survival of disease-causing organisms".
According to American officials, it was only in 1992, after the defection of Dr. Ken Elibeck, a senior official in the biological warfare program, that the United States discovered the site's existence. Alibek was the director of the huge factory for the production of anthrax in Stephanogorsk, which is now in Kazakhstan. From 1988 until his desertion, he served as deputy director of Biofrat, the secret network of about 40 ostensibly peace-loving facilities that provided civilian cover for biological weapons work.
In his book, "Biohazard," Alibek does not refer to what was buried on the island, but reports that various types of biological weapons were tested in Vazrozhdaniye in the 70s. In 1986 and 1987, he said in an interview, a strain of bacteria was tested there that produces something that was found to be resistant to antibiotics . In 1987, the book says, Alibek's team tested the anthrax he had developed in Stephanogorsk.
Monterey and Elibek researchers claim that the Soviet Army laboratories also tested typhus, botulinum toxin, smallpox and bacteria with unique characteristics such as a high level of virulence, resistance to ultraviolet rays or heat or those that have undergone a process of genetic engineering.
The evidence of this horrific research is growing. When approaching the experimental area, it is impossible not to notice the telephone poles located at a distance of a kilometer from each other "on which detectors designed to check the presence of bacteria were mounted". The laboratories were emptied of equipment and according to intelligence experts, what was left was looted by people apparently indifferent to the danger of contamination. The closed Beaver that used to house thousands of smaller animals stands desolate today. Its windows are shattered and its ceiling has collapsed. In one of the rooms there are human-sized cages, apparently intended for what the scientists defined as "human-sized monkeys". Hundreds of them died horrific deaths, sometimes in a single experiment, US and Russian scientists claim. Less than a kilometer and a half from the laboratory are the soldiers' quarters, the scientists' quarters, the kindergarten and the cafeteria.
The Russian scientists said that most of the children were not vaccinated against the substances. "We did not conduct experiments unless the wind blew in a southerly direction, away from the residential area," said Dr. Gennady L. Lepyushkin, the Soviet colonel, formerly in charge of Stapogorsk.
Uzbek officials said that only after their country gained independence, in 1992, did they realize the consequences of the biological inheritance they had received. In 1995, after Moscow refused to disclose what chemical or biological facilities had been built on its soil, Uzbekistan sought Washington's help. This year Pentagon officials visited the island. Two years later, Uzbekistan invited more American experts to take samples from the buried anthrax. The Americans wore white spacesuit-style protective suits and wore gas masks, the experts said. All members of the delegation were vaccinated. "It was like landing on the moon," said one of the officials, "only scarier."
Dr. William Patrick, who made biological weapons for the United States military before President Richard Nixon outlawed them 30 years ago, said that with the help of the samples the scientists will be able to determine not only the strength of the Soviet anthrax strains, but also whether the anthrax passed a process of genetic engineering or if its properties have been modified in other ways. US officials said that decontamination of the island, given its size and the amount of anthrax buried there, could be a very expensive process.
The residents living near the island are well aware of Moscow's disregard for their health and safety. No region of Uzbekistan has been so badly affected by the economic policies of the Soviet Union or the pursuit of unconventional weapons as Karakalpakstan. Karakalpakstan, the semi-autonomous Uzbek republic of nearly five million people, has seen its thriving fishing industry in the Aral Sea destroyed and its groundwater reservoir polluted.
Yusup Kamlov, an Uzbek scientist who heads the Union for the Protection of the Aral Sea, an independent environmental organization, defined the situation as "almost hopeless." "The sea level has dropped by about half, its volume by .75%. The sea is dying," he said.
The residents of Karakalpakstan, said Ian Samal, a representative of the "Doctors Without Borders" organization in the region, are among "the most chronically ill in the entire former Soviet Union." Two thirds of the population suffer from chronic diseases, mostly tuberculosis.
Most biological weapons scientists who are familiar with Vozrozhdaniye claim that there is no immediate danger to the local population. But as the sea continued to shrink, the island became more and more accessible. According to one of the scientists, who recently visited the island, in some of the pits the anthrax sediment is starting to seep through the sand. Although Uzbek officials have blocked access to Renaissance Island, there is no doubt that local residents will come into contact with the deadly bacteria once the island connects with the mainland. "Right now we just don't know anything," Samal said. "It's very scary not knowing what you're dealing with."
