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Far too often, governments behave like toddlers. They’re fickle. They don’t like to share. And good luck getting them to pay attention to any problem that isn’t directly in front of them. They like to push each other to the brink, and often do. But when they don’t, it’s usually because other people enter the proverbial room. Private citizens who step up and play peacemaker when their governments won’t or can’t. People who strive for collaboration and understanding, and sometimes end up finding it in unlikely places. Those people and the work they do, they’re the reason we’re all still here.
This season, we’ll hear from scientists, analysts, and idealists who have gone to crazy lengths just for a shot at making peace and building understanding From smoke-filled rooms in North Korea to secret labs in the Soviet Union… to the lawless seas, and even to the depths of outer space (or, at least, the conference rooms where they talk about the depths of outer space). This podcast tells the stories about the people holding us back from the brink.
Hosted by Dr. Jeffrey Lewis, a professor and scholar at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies on the Nonproliferation and Terrorism Studies faculty. Previously, he served as Director of the Nuclear Strategy and Nonproliferation Initiative at the New America Foundation and Executive Director of the Managing the Atom Project at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University. He is the founder of ArmsControlWonk.com, a leading resource on disarmament, arms control and nonproliferation issues.
Produced by Gilded Audio and the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies.
The Deal
Biosecurity [“The Leak from Compound 19”]
Transcript v4.2_FINAL
OPEN
[00:00]
MUSIC - curious
CLIP: We now turn to our ongoing coverage of the deadly summer flu outbreak, which continues to spread
JAIME: And basically the WHO goes in there and they collect some samples and they sequence them and they're like, okay, this is the flu virus.
CLIP: In both Aplea and Vizu medical facilities are overwhelmed with sick people.
JAIME: But after a bit of research, they figure out, oh huh this is weird, it doesn't look natural. It looks like it might have been engineered.
MUSIC - shift/out
If your heart is racing - relax. Let me explain. The deadly summer flu is made up. Obviously Aplea and Vizu aren't real places. They’re not World of Warcraft regions either. What you just heard was part of a game.
JAIME: I would say it’s a bio-themed wargame…
That's Jaime Yassif, Vice President of Global Biological Policy and Programs at the Nuclear Threat Initiative. She organized this ~ fun ~ summer flu game as part of the 2020 Munich Security Conference.
[01:00]
MUSIC - stately
SFX - creep in fancy conference sound design
JAIME: It's like the fanciest conference I've ever been to, it’s kinda cool. Kind of gilded, high ceilinged room with like columns and floor-to-ceiling windows and gold paneling and crystal chandeliers.
Amidst all of this extravagance, Jaime asked a handful of political VIPs to participate in something we call a “tabletop exercise.” Picture a bunch of middle aged people – and I'm being generous. Former senators and national security advisors. Executives of major biotechnology companies, you know the type. No one had to pick a team name or fight over a little metal thimble or the schnauzer game piece because they were all on the same team.
MUSIC- out
As fictional news reports give them updates, the group has to work together to save the world from the aforementioned deadly summer flu.
MUSIC / SFX - suspenseful
CLIP: …new outbreaks have erupted in London, New York, Beijing, Istanbul, New Delhi and Ottawa.
[02:00]
JAIME: It's a pretty nasty biological event that becomes globally devastating.
While case counts continue to rise, the group focuses on finding the origin of the virus. But Aplea, where the flu hit first, drags its feet.
ANCHOR: Given everything that's happening, why haven't we heard more from Aplea?
GUEST: Well, I think the government is worried. They have a lot invested in their growing biotech sector.
JAIME: And then the plot thickens.
The virus is traced to a lab. A government run lab. And while the group scrambles to enlist Aplea to develop a vaccine…
JAIME: A couple of scientists who used to work in this lab come forward and they basically say, listen, it was an accident. The biosafety there was really bad. And also, by the way, this was a bioweapons lab. It wasn't a biodefense lab. It was a covert illegal facility. We know cuz we were there.
MUSIC / SFX - OUT
Chaos ensues. Part of the group suggests economic sanctions against Aplea. Others want to blow up
[03:00]
the suspected bioweapons facility. The group realizes a fatal problem: there is no designated international entity that can lead a coordinated global response. The ship is, in an important way, rudderless. Now that the shit is hitting the fan, they are scrambling to clean up what they can within their own borders, when really what they’re dealing with is a public health crisis of global proportions.
… Sound familiar?
BEAT / MUSIC
This isn’t an episode about the pandemic, but it is an episode about what’s wrong with global biosecurity.
INTRO
TONY BLAIR: Bio terror possibilities may seem like the realm of science fiction, but we would be wise now to prepare for their potential use by non-state actors.
BUSH: Saddam Hussein still has chemical and biological weapons and is increasing his capabilities to make more.
CLINTON: Think how many people can be killed by just a tiny bit of anthrax.
[04:00]
MUSIC out
I. THE GAP
By the end of Jaime’s exercise, the virus has spread all over the world, and 50 million people have died in a span of two years. Jamie and her NTI colleagues knew the exercise participants would fail to contain the virus. That was the point.
JAIME: What we discovered through this exercise is that there's no real mechanism in place within the international system that's designed to address that.
MUSIC - driving
After the conference, Jamie flew home and started drafting recommendations about some kind of mechanism in the international system that might actually be able to respond to a global outbreak.
JEFFREY: So you designed it in 2019. You're doing it in February, 2020.
JAIME: Correct.
JEFFREY: And so we're just getting the first inklings that something's up.
JAIME: Right.
JEFFREY: I mean, that's gotta be the last time that most of those people travel abroad, right?
JAIME: Yes. In fact, that was the last weekend I traveled abroad before lockdown. Our team came back from Munich and
[05:00]
we all hunkered down. That's right.
JEFFREY: So, I mean, was that strange to then watch the real –
JAIME: Yes.
JAIME: In the report that we published about this exercise, we did note there was like some striking similarity between the fictional scenario in our exercise and some of the concerns that we raised and the gaps that we found and how Covid actually played out over the next year.
JAIME: You know, there's a part of the exercise where the participants are living with ambiguity, right? We don't know if this was natural or an accident or, or a deliberate attack. Like it's unclear.
BEAT / MUSIC fade out
After years of research, it seems pretty clear Covid 19 made a natural jump from wild animals to human beings. BUT just like the exercise, the Covid 19 response was politicized. Governments were quick to place blame, but responses were fatally slow and lacked
[06:00]
cooperation or transparency.
BEAT
Experts like Jaime were not surprised that the response to COVID 19 was so underwhelming. If you work on public health and biosecurity issues, you're used to this kind of thing… Because even though nearly every country in the world has joined the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention, which bans bioweapons... There is no verification mechanism. Because biological research is inherently dual-use. It’s hard to distinguish between a lab that’s trying to protect public health and a lab that’s trying to assault it.
I have a story to tell you. Because – while COVID 19 did not leak from a lab, sometimes accidents happen.
II. ‘A COMPLETELY NATURAL OUTBREAK
MUSIC - ominous
CLIP: Sverdlovsk, the industrial capital of the Soviet Union, where smokestacks dominate the skyline and the only work is factory work. [duck under]
PETER: Sverdlovsk was a
[07:00]
military industrial base where they made SS 20 missiles and other , uh, armaments.
That’s Peter Gumbel. He’s a European correspondent who has written about everything from the French education system to German identity. In 1991, he was reporting for the Wall Street Journal from Moscow.
These ‘other’ non-missile armaments that Peter mentioned were at the core of a decade’s old story he was chasing.
CLIP: In early April, 1979, nearly a hundred residents of the former Soviet city of Sverdlovsk began complaining of high fever, headaches, and difficulty breathing. Before it was over, over 65 people died.
Sverdlovsk had been hit by an anthrax outbreak. And there was suspicion that the outbreak might not have been natural. This was the middle of the Cold War, and tensions were very high. The West suspected the Soviets might be secretly developing biological weapons.
[08:00]
PETER: It was not clear what had happened. There were two versions which were very contradictory.
BEAT
PETER: You had a, an American version, which was accusing the Soviet Union of having illegally, uh, in violation of this treaty, developed biological weapons, which then had led to a leak at a secret military facility. And you had this Soviet version, which was, uh, an extremely angry denial, first of all, but then a rather elaborate tale that they concocted and developed over the years.
The Soviets claimed that local livestock in Sverdlovsk had been infected with natural anthrax spores, which then got into the food supply.
Washington was suspicious but – the United States had also just accused the Soviets of using chemical weapons in Southeast Asia, only to have it backfire spectacularly.
CLIP: Spokesman said the US still believes the death of some 10,000 people in Laos, Cambodia, and Afghanistan was the result
[09:00]
of chemical weapons supplied by the Soviet Union. Yesterday, two US scientists maintained that was wrong, that the yellow rain phenomenon had a very natural cause – that it was the feces of honeybees on massive defecation flights.
SFX - buzzing builds
MUSIC - tense
Look, I'm not telling you this just so that I can mention massive defecation flights. When an unexplained yellow rain kills a bunch of people during a civil war, it’s not unreasonable to think the Soviet Union might have supplied chemical weapons. One of the scientists who showed that yellow rain was probably natural also thought the Sverdlovsk outbreak might be natural too.
PETER: A very distinguished Harvard professor, uh, Matthew Meselson.
Meselson was kind of a celebrity in the biological and chemical weapons space. At the behest of the US government, Meselson worked closely with Soviet officials in the years following the outbreak. And at first he thought the Soviet story was plausible – that citizens ate meat
[10:00]
that had been tainted with anthrax.
PETER: So that gave it some pretty amazing heft, as you can imagine, it wasn't just propaganda, it was a, you know, a Harvard professor.
Let's not get too excited about that affiliation. They've hired their fair share of bozos.
CLIP: Jeffrey Lewis, uh used to be the Director of Managing the Atom Project at Harvard University –
BEAT
Anyway - at one point, in a show of openness, Soviet officials had come to the US to share evidence that supported their explanation of a natural outbreak.
PETER: The evidence they presented was partly anecdotal.
MUS - investigative
During their trip to Washington, Soviet doctors described how natural anthrax in the soil spread to some livestock, how after those livestock were slaughtered, their bones ground up into meal, and then how that meal was fed to other livestock that the victims eventually ate. Many of the US experts who watched the presentation left the room convinced that this version was plausible.
[11:00]
MUS - awkward
But by 1991, cracks had begun to appear in the official version of events.
PETER: Essentially you had a change in the Soviet leadership. Gorbachev came to power and became president. You had a bit of a sense of opening up that there was a bit more truth starting to come out.
In pockets of the Soviet press, murmurs of a different version of events began to circulate. That's when Peter started to chase this story.
MUS - mysterious
On a trip to Moscow, Peter got his hands on some reporting by a woman named Natalia Zenova.
PETER: Who was uh, at the time a correspondent for the Soviet literary magazine called Liternaya Gazeta, who actually started writing, uh, articles, which questioned the official version. As soon as I knew I was able to go to Sverdlovsk I got in touch with her and said, can I come and see you? And she said, absolutely. And she was delighted to help me.
[12:00]
Natalia told Peter everything she knew. And then she put Peter in touch with her sources.
PETER: I was completely neutral on this. All I knew was that there was a tremendous mystery around this. There were holes. You could just, you know, you could drive a truck through them basically.
BEAT - music fade or rise to signal transition
MIDROLL
III. BOOTS ON THE GROUND
Anthrax poisoning begins with flu-like symptoms: headache, muscle pains, maybe some chest discomfort and a cough. After a day or two, a victim might start to feel like they’re improving, but then it gets tough to breathe and the lymph nodes in the chest become swollen. As their lungs fill up with fluid and their fever intensifies, the infection spreads to their brain and spinal cord, often ending in a fatal brain hemorrhage.
PETER: I mean, this thing was absolutely devastating to die from. It just ripped apart your body.
[13:00]
One victim arrived home from work with a cough, which later progressed into a high fever. He was rushed to the hospital and died within a couple of hours. The official cause of death: bacterial pneumonia.
BEAT
PETER: You have to remember, this was a military town, so people who lived there were often working in the military industrial complex. So there was a fair amount of loyalty to the Soviet state among the people who lived in Sverdlovsk at the time. But nonetheless, you know, the fact that they had suffered such a horrible tragedy in their own family and then were told to shut up about it, really made them very angry and very sad at the same time.
Of the 64 people we know definitely died, more than half of them either lived or worked in the same district of the city. Two dozen were employees at a ceramics factory that made toilets, mugs, drain pipes, that kind of thing. And four of them lived in the barracks across the street from a known military research facility called Compound 19.
MUSIC - tense
[14:00]
If the victims died from eating tainted meat, it would’ve been a huge coincidence if most of them lived and worked in the same area.
PETER: That already was, you know, a little surprising. If you had, uh, essentially believed a theory about this being ingested, then you wouldn't have expected to see anything like the same geographic concentration of people who, who had died.
There are two likely ways that anthrax can enter a victim’s body: ingestion or inhalation. Ingestion means eating, like eating beef that came from a cow that had naturally been exposed to anthrax. Inhalation means breathing, like breathing in toxic fumes from a research compound leaking anthrax.
Peter had to determine whether the victims ate the anthrax or breathed it in. And you can easily see in an autopsy how a victim was exposed to anthrax.
BEAT / MUS out
The official Soviet autopsy reports
[15:00]
showed anthrax damage in the victim's stomachs. Peter happened to know that local officials in Sverdlovsk had done their own postmortems before those autopsy reports… but–
MARTIN: The documents were removed by the KGB six months after the epidemic.
This is Martin Hugh Jones, a veterinary epidemiologist who visited Sverdlovsk after Peter in the early 1990s. During this visit, Martin and the team met a pathologist who had conducted the autopsies. Her name was Faina Abramova.
MARTIN: A babushka. A gem of common sense and expertise. She was retired but was called back in as the head of pathological anatomical department in hospital number 40, the major hospital during the epidemic.
Abramova and her assistant did 42 autopsies and saved small pieces of the victim's respiratory tissue.
Abramova’s clever neglect to add a label to the samples
[16:00]
was what ultimately prevented the KGB from finding and destroying them.
MARTIN: The tissue blocks were hidden in plain view in an unlabeled box on a high shelf in the laboratory.
PETER: She was obviously a very resourceful person, and when it became obvious that this was a delicate issue, she moved the samples from her lab and kept them in the basement of her house.
By the time Martin and his team arrived, they were still intact.
Her stash of lung tissue indicated that the spores had in fact been inhaled, not ingested. Later, a victim's widow told Peter that doctors said her husband's lungs looked like jellied meat.
PETER: It was very clear that actually, uh, this had attacked people's lungs. It had therefore been airborne and so completely destroying the, uh, the official Soviet theory.
The nail in the coffin came on Peter's third reporting trip to Sverdlovsk when he finally worked up enough trust with the locals
[17:00]
to get access to the most crucial location of the Soviet's food chain narrative.
PETER: This famous factory where they had supposedly ground up the tainted animals and turned them into bone meal, which was then used as animal feed, it was out, uh, in a little village actually outside Sverdlovsk.
Remember – in the official Soviet telling of the story, this factory was the link between the anthrax-sickened cows and the local food supply. It didn't take much digging to realize that this time, that explanation was… beeshit.
PETER: I talked to the director and I talked to people who'd been there, you know, in 1979, and they were saying this whole story about we used to grind up the animal bones is just complete nonsense. We never ground up animal bones.
BEAT / MUS - curious
PETER: It turns out that the factory had never been set up to process meat. It was a bakery, essentially a ground up flour. And that was then the moment I knew I had a story that was pretty watertight.
[18:00]
Peter didn't know all the details. There were still some unanswered questions. But he was confident the anthrax outbreak did not originate in the food supply. It was much more likely the victims had inhaled airborne anthrax, that a deadly plume of anthrax had somehow leaked from Compound 19, and Peter was sure the Soviets were hiding it.
MUSIC / BEAT/ CUE
Compound 19 was only one piece of a larger secret Soviet military project called Biopreparat. Peter published his findings in 1991, and the following year, the former director of the program left the chaos of post-Soviet Russia for the United States. He eventually spilled all of Biopreparat’s secrets to the public.
INTERVIEWER: Just outta curiosity, how many different types of agents were developed uh, during the, time that you were there?
KEN ALIBEK: I can say dozens of agents, uh, were developed for, for example, smallpox,
[19:00]
uh, plague, anthrax. It didn't matter how many people would die in case of an accident. And we've got a good example, Sverdlovsk of 1979.
BEAT / CUE
Accidents happen. People die. Apparently, in the case of Sverdlovsk, when governments try to cover up accidents, more people die.
PETER: I think, uh, perhaps what I took away in the decades that followed was a healthy and an important skepticism about anything anybody says about any weapons. It's not just in the old Soviet Union, um, but it is, you know, across the world, people, people lie about these things.
MUSIC - contemplative
IV. RISK MANAGEMENT
Sverdlovsk is one of many examples that has contributed, over the decades, to the air of secrecy when it comes to biosecurity. It is incredibly difficult to regulate or monitor what nations are doing on the ground in their research labs.
For every case like Sverdlosk though, there are
[20:00]
also cases like the yellow rain, where suspicions about chemical and biological weapons turn out to be unfounded.
CLIPS:
CLINTON: It's not just a question of whether Saddam Hussein might put 'em on a scud missile, an anthrax head, and send it to some city of people he wanted to destroy.
MUS - driving
REPORTER: These are the remains of the Al-Shifa factory in Khartoum targeted by cruise missiles and where, according to the White House, deadly chemicals were made for use with nerve gas.
BUSH: Anybody who would mail anthrax with the attempt to harm American citizens is a terrorist. And there’s no question that Al Qaeda is a terrorist organization
So the secrecy continues... This lack of cooperation between governments poses a dangerous threat to the whole human race. You can’t ask a country to stop research meant to protect people from disease. But there are few mechanisms in place for safety or transparency.
That was part of the dilemma of Jaime’s scenario of the summer flu outbreak
[21:00]
in Aplea – scientists doing the very research that could have saved millions of lives weren’t able to communicate openly to solve the problem.
MUS out
In a way, it’s a lot like what happened during the pandemic. Instead of working together to try to come up with a solution or get to the bottom of how this all happened, countries went their own way. To this day China won’t even accept US vaccines. The way the world responded to Covid 19 lacked an effective, unified response.
JAIME: And a lot of people lost their lives as a result, I think probably unnecessarily. And so in that sense, there are a lot of themes of weak systems, inadequate systems.
Jamie and NTI have a list of recommendations to respond to future pandemics. One of them is establishing a UN agency that can work with scientists to keep tabs on the capabilities of rapidly developing biotechnology so that we can identify potential risks.
JAIME: How can we use new tools and technologies to get those
[22:00]
data about human systems and where the risks are. How can we do that in a way that's like shareable internationally? How can we use open source intelligence and publicly available information and unclassified sources to get, sort of, get picture that would be useful within the UN system.
They also recommend that science funding organizations make risk identification a requirement of receiving research money. They call on labs, governments, and researchers to commit to a new standard of transparency, including site visits.
JAIME: If we're gonna build more labs to do research and development on Covid and other viruses, we need to make sure that the safety and security is built in by design.
And lastly, they recommend that the international community collaborate to develop a joint assessment mechanism that can lead to quicker pandemic responses and act in the interest of all human beings.
JAIME: Both public health and preventing naturally emerging infectious disease outbreaks and biosecurity and biosafety, those are all really critically important. We shouldn't be thinking about them as a in some sort of competition.
BEAT / MUS
[23:00]
I firmly believe an all the above strategy is needed and that we're all on the same team.
Because disease doesn’t care what team you’re on. If the world can take NTI’s recommendations seriously, maybe we’d be one step closer to being united against a common enemy.
JAIME: A lot of people are employed to develop the technology and advance it, and there's not a lot of resources being put into figuring out how to safeguard it. It's not a lot of people's day job to think about that.
JEFFREY: But it is your day job.
JAIME: It is my day job.
JEFFREY: It’s a pretty good day job.
JAIME: It’s great. I feel very lucky.
Thanks for listening - I’m Jeffrey Lewis and this is The Reason We’re All Still Here. It's executive produced by me, Andy Chugg and Whitney Donaldson. Special thanks to the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies
[24:00]
at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey.
This episode was produced by Kelsey Albright, Olivia Canny and Stephen Wood. It was written by Olivia Canny and me. Story editing from Sara Joyner. Additional editing from Whitney Donaldson. Technical direction and engineering by Nick ‘The Wizard’ Dooley. Music and sound design by Andy Chugg. Fact-checking by Charles Richter. Additional production support from Gemma Castelli-Foley. Show Art by Ronin Wood and Anton Maryniuk.
Special thanks to Jessica Varnum, Christina Ragasa, Megan Larson and Maggie Taylor.
[25:48]