I know, I know. I said I'd be doing a bunch of deep dives on Ukraine and yes, I do have *a lot* that are about half done. However, I've also been seriously bogged down by editing so I had to put it all off until I had more time. I'll probably finish a few posts over the weekend.

For now, I'm going to take a bit of a detour from my regularly scheduled programming. Russia is making a lot of noise about Nazis and the US's bioweapons program in Ukraine as part of their propaganda machine, so I decided to talk about one specific event involving the USSR's bioweapons program, and tangentially, the United States as well.

Stick with me, folks. I'm going to be talking about the Sverdlovsk anthrax leak. If you're curious, my deep dive on Anthrax Island is basically part two of this story (I'm writing them out of order because that's how I roll.). You can read it here.

Ready? Let's go.

Sverdlovsk anthrax leak (image here)

In the 1970s, the United States and Russia were locked in the Cold War, each side staring at the other over this huge iron curtain. Not much information flowed in or out. It's a time of spies and subterfuge, danger and impending disaster.

It wasn't until October, 1979 that word started to reach the West via a Russian-language newspaper in Germany, that something was happening in Russia. Something we might want to be aware of. The newspaper claimed there was a "major germ incident" taking place and "thousands were dying." In early 1980, the same newspaper released information about an explosion at a secret military base near a city called Sverdlovsk (now Yekaterinburg). Supposedly, this explosion took place at a top secret military base, and resulted in releasing thousands of anthrax spores into the air. Now, the paper claimed, the area had been put under military control for decontamination.

Soon, newspapers in the UK and US picked up the story. Rumors began to spread. "As these reports emerged, U.S. intelligence began to look more carefully at satellite imagery and signals intercepts from the spring of 1979 and found possibly corroborative signs of a serious accident such as roadblocks and decontamination trucks around Compound 19, a military installation in Sverdlovsk, as well as a visit by Soviet Defense Minister Ustinov to the city. The anthrax explanation also seems plausible, given the past history of U.S. and Soviet efforts to develop the deadly microbe into a biological weapon." (NSA Archive)

The event in question transpired on April 2, 1979. Soon after, people began falling ill with fevers, coughing, and vomiting. The government said the illness was caused by tainted meat, specifically cattle infected with anthrax. Within six weeks, some sixty-six people died, with numerous others gravely ill. Soon, the United States and United Kingdom started probing into a potential anthrax outbreak, or biological weapons disaster. "The Soviets denied it—vehemently. In 1988, Soviet officials came to the U.S. to give a three-hour talk at the National Academy of Science, presenting facts and figures and even slides of gut tissue from autopsies. 'Sverdlovsk's 'mystery epidemic' of 1979 lost much of its mystery this month,' began a Science news article at the time, 'when a group of Soviet doctors came to the United States and met with scientists and reports to give a firsthand account of what happened.'" (The Atlantic)

Not everyone bought the story the Soviets were selling, though. The United States had eyes on the ground, and satellite images. Intelligence was coming in drips and drabs that something was happening, and it certainly wasn't infected meat. All the signs were there for a biological weapons program, which had long been a suspicion anyway.

Anthrax is a naturally occurring substance. Spores live in the soil and can occasionally make people sick, but what was happening in 1979 was beyond anything anyone had ever seen. And, the US intelligence committee had already gathered classified information about a potential bioweapons lab in the area. All the evidence was there. The Soviets might be saying one thing, but it was becoming increasingly clear to the outside world that that explosion on April 2, 1979 was at a secret bioweapons facility, and it was probably anthrax that was infecting people in the region.

So what was Sverdlovsk?

Sverdlovsk was a closed Soviet city and a major manufacture hub for the Soviet military machine in World War II. According to Wikipedia, "The biological warfare facility in Sverdlovsk was built during the period 1947 to 1949 and was a spin-off of the Soviet Union's main military BW facility in Kirov... The new facility, known as the USSR Ministry of Defense's Scientific-Research Institute of Hygiene became operational on 19 July 1949. Alibek suggests that the construction of the institute incorporated technologies which had been gleaned from captured scientists who had participated in the Japanese biological warfare program. Research was initiated at Sverdlovsk on bacterial pathogens including Bacillus anthracis. In 1951, a program was launched which focused on botulinum toxin. Later in the 1970s interest in the latter ceased and there was a major focus on B. Anthracis. In 1974, the facility was re-named as the Scientific-Research Institute of Bacterial Vaccine Preparations."

Compound 19 was where the biological weapons program was housed, created between the years of 1947-1949. "A meat-processing plant was located nearby with a view to supplying components of bacterial nutrient media. There was a high degree of autonomy with regard to the secret base. As well as the military institute, Compound 19 embraced its own 75-bed military hospital, a postal service, a range of shops, a kindergarten, schools, a social club, a sports stadium, parks and walkways, a civil registry office and its own special prosecutor's office. Sentries and construction workers at the site required special security clearance." (Wikipedia)

The compound itself was broken into several areas. The residential area house some 7,000 people. The biological weapons program was held in the most secure central part of the compound, in main offices and underground laboratories.

So, what exactly happened here?

Sometime between April 2-3, reports said there was a release of anthrax spores from a four-storey building in the center of Compound 19's special zone. Those spores were then carried on the wind to parts of Sverdlovsk, and several surrounding villages. Russian sources claim the incident was due to "a defect in an air-handling system which carried exhaust from a spray dryer."

"The precise number of fatalities associated with the military leakage of anthrax spores is not known with any degree of certitude... the incident led directly to the deaths of at least 68 people in Sverlovsk itself and to cases of animal anthrax in nearby villages to the southeast of the city. 'According to the official data, 95 people were infected, 68 (71.5%) died but actually the number of the dead and infected was larger." The leakage of anthrax hit the ceramics factory south of compound 19 the hardest. The factory, which employed 2,190 personnel, was in possession of a ventilation system which sucked air from the outside, directing some to the furnaces with the remainder being directed to the workforce. In the coming weeks, at least 18 of the workers at the factory died." (wikipedia)

Soon, the Soviet government mobilized. People had to be taken care of. The story needed to be controlled. Secret operations in Sverdlovsk to control the incident and decontaminate were under way. The city was effectively shut down. Those who were sick were administered Tetracycline. Those who were extremely ill were sent to the hospital. Families of the infected were monitored for symptoms, clothes were taken and disposed of. Buildings were hosed down with chlorine A large-scale vaccination program was underway in the area for the general population culminating in around 59,000 people in the region (some 80% of the population) to be injected with the Soviet STI anthrax vaccine. A special counsel in Moscow was created to manage the response.

Contaminated meat was the story that was put around, but to the West, suspicions were all but proven fact. This was not the result of contaminated meat, but a biological weapons outbreak.

According to the NSA Archives, putting this incident in further historical perspective is important. For a long time during the Cold War, the Soviet Union, the United States, and several other nations had robust and active biological weapons programs. In the mid/late 1960s and into the 1970s, these programs were being publicly scrutinized. In 1969, President Richard Nixon ended the United States bioweapons program after it had received extreme criticism due to events in the Vietnam War. There were, at this time, very real international fears that all these biological weapons programs could get very, very out of hand and become as threatening as nuclear missiles, only in very different ways. Something had to be done.

One such criticism of the program, as quoted in the NSA Archives says, "The entire experimental legacy is dismaying, from the hundreds of dead monkeys at Fort Derrick to the spectacle of Seventh Day Adventist soldiers, the vaccinated volunteers in Project Whitecoat, strapped to chairs amid cages of animals in the Utah sunlight as Q fever aerosols are blown over them. Most chilling are the mock scenarios played out in urban areas: light bulbs filled with simulated BW agents being dropped in New York subways, men in Washington National Airport spraying psuedo-BW from briefcases, and similar tests in California and Texas and over the Florida Keys."

Soon after, the United States banned its biological weapons programs, save for research in defending against potential biological weapons attacks. "Nixon made a similar decision ending the U.S. toxins program in February 1970. Pursuant to these decisions, the Department of Defense developed plans to destroy all the existing stocks of U.S. biological and toxin weapons, which at the time included over 200 pounds of anthrax." (NSA Archives) In 1972, the United States joined with 100 other nations in signing the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention, which banned being in possession of biological weapons except for defensive research. (Which went into effect in 1975)

But when nations play, nothing is ever really as easy as it sounds, and no one is innocent. As stated in this excerpt I pulled from the NSA Archives:

As subsequent revelations made clear, continued classified biological warfare programs did continue, and the ordered destruction of biological and toxin agents was not as thorough as first believed. The book by the New York Times journalists details the subsequent history of U.S. classified research on biological warfare agents, one critical piece of which was provided by the Church Committee investigations into the activities of the CIA in 1975. As detailed in the committee hearings and discussed in Germs, these hearings revealed that the CIA had long been involved in stockpiling biological agents for use in assassination attempts on foreign leaders, most notably Cuba's Fidel Castro, and had worked closely with Ft. Detrick in this program between 1952 and 1970. Equally troubling was the evidence that the CIA had maintained a small stockpile of biological agents and toxins in violation of Nixon's ban that were capable of sickening or killing millions of people. Among this stockpile was 100 grams of anthrax, as well as smallpox, Venezuelan equine encephalomyelitis virus, salmonella, and clostridium botulinum, or botulism germs. (NSA Archives)

But more than that, there were global tensions at play too. The Soviet Union was embroiled in a war in Afghanistan. There were still Cold War was big and tense. The political landscape was changing. To keep the incident at Sverdlovsk under control, they had to lie about what was happening. The United States, worried about empire building, Soviet expansion, potential nuclear disasters, wars erupting and whatever else, had to be content to watch it play out via spies (probably), intel collected from sundry place, and satellite images. "It was tainted meat," the Soviets said, and the United States had to kind of nod their heads, smile, and accept that on the face of it while watching, very carefully, to try and understand, from a distance, what was really happening.

Through the years, pressure had been put on the Soviet Union to come clean about what had happened in Sverdlovsk, with very little success. It wasn't until 1991 that things began to change. I'll let the NSA Archives tell the story:

The final breakthrough did not come until after the Soviet Union had ceased to exist at the end of 1991, and Boris Yeltsin came to power as the new head of the Russian government. Yeltsin had a personal connection to the Sverdlovsk issue, as he had been Communist Party chief in the region at the time of the anthrax outbreak, and he believed the KGB and military had lied to him about the true explanation. At a summit meeting with President George Bush in February 1992, Yeltsin told Bush that he agreed with U.S. accusations regarding Soviet violation of the 1972 biological weapons convention, that the Sverdlovsk incident was the result of an accident at a Soviet biological warfare installation, and promised to clean up this problem. In a May 27th interview, Yeltsin publicly revealed what he had told Bush in private:

"We are still deceiving you, Mr. Bush. We promised to eliminate bacteriological weapons. But some of our experts did everything possible to prevent me from learning the truth. It was not easy, but I outfoxed them. I caught them red-handed. I found two test sites. They are inoculating tracts of land with anthrax, allowing wild animals to go there and observing them..."

In a subsequent interivew, Yeltsin expanded on the deception he says the Soviet military had played upon him and the world concerning the Sverdlovsk outbreak:

Interviewer: You knew about the development of bacteriological weapons in Sverdlovsk. But it was only recently that you first talked about it publicly. Why did you keep it quiet all this time?

Yeltsin: First, nobody asked me about it. And, second, when I learned these developments were under way, I visited [the KGB chairman Yuriy] Andropov... When there was an anthrax outbreak, the official conclusion stated it was carried by some dog, though later the KGB admitted that our military development was the cause. Andropov phoned [Minister of Defense Dimitriy] Ustinov and ordered these production facilities to be completely scrapped. I believed that this had been done. It turned out that the laboratories were simply moved to anther oblast and development of the weapons continued. And I told Bush, [British prime minister John] Major and [French president Francois] Mitterand this, that the program was under way... I signed a degree setting up a special committee and banning the program. It was only after this that experts flew out specially and stopped the work. ca

It wasn't until 1992, during the collapse of the Soviet Union, that the truth of what happened at Sverdlovsk was revealed. A Harvard biologist named Matthew Meselson led a team of American scientists to investigate, and found evidence that contradicted the official party line. According to The Atlantic, "That evidence was the bodies of the victims. The pathologists who performed the autopsies back in 1979, Faina Abramova and Lev Grinberg had hidden the tissue samples, preserved all this time with formaldehyde and embedded in paraffin wax."

Anthrax spores, however, when inhaled give off certain signs that are recognizable and different from anthrax spores that are ingested, and once more Western scientists started seeing these tissue samples, and the evidence taken by the scientist studying the event, it became widely recognized that these people died from inhalation of anthrax rather than ingestion of it. More evidence started piling up. Research teams started tracing the path of infection, and it soon became clear that wind had carried spores from a central location. Everyone who had been infected had lived downwind of Compound 19.

And so, an incident that transpired in 1979, remained covered up until 1992 and was finally becoming known to the world.

But microscopes and maps only do so much. What people wanted to know was what exactly had been released? What was being studied at Compound 19, and what effect could it have when released on a population at large? This was the largest anthrax outbreak, and it's important to understand it. To do that, you need DNA. "Sequencing could shed light on whether the Soviets were working on antibiotic-or vaccine-resistant strains that could make anthrax an even deadlier biological weapon." (The Atlantic)

Some thirty-seven years later, the strain of anthrax that was used has finally been isolated and its genome mapped out. This largest outbreak of inhalation anthrax was a perfectly average strain. Nothing fancy or overly terrifying, however perhaps that is what makes it even more frightening. Biological weapons exist, and are often resistant to any kind of treatment, cure, vaccine, or pill. If this "perfectly ordinary" strain of anthrax could impact this many people, and was this fatal, imagine what could happen if a "perfectly unordinary" strain had been released into the world.

According to Science.org, "Anthrax, caused by the bacterium Bacillus anthracis, kills few people naturally but is exquisitely suitable for use in bioweapons. That's because the bacterium produces spores: tiny, dry survival capsules that can lie dormant in the soil for many decades. Spore can be weaponized and delivered by the trillions as an invisible, odorless aerosol. After nestling inside the human lung, they can cause severe infection that, if not treated with antibiotics, kills 90% of those it infects." Further, the article goes on to say that a study in 2006 found that releasing just 1 kilogram of anthrax spores over Washington DC could have the effect of killing between 4,000-50,000 people.

While there is no evidence that this particular outbreak of anthrax was anything save run-of-the mill anthrax, it was still deadly and the damage was extensive. The end result of all of this resulted in Anthrax Island, which you can read about here. In 1992, Russia once again formally agreed to end their biological weapons programs, though there have been international doubts about whether the country has completely fallen through.

In the end, if this particular strain of anthrax ever appears in the world again, thanks to some very determined scientists, it will be instantly recognized.

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Sverdlovsk Anthrax Leak: Cover-ups and Deadly Biological Weapons

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