A Trip to Abandoned Anthrax Island

KANTUBEK, Kazakhstan -- Despite a long-standing desire to visit the Aral Sea's Vozrozhdeniye Island, site of the remains of the world's largest biological-weapons testing range, I was aware that it was not, generally speaking, a desirable travel destination. But the man sitting across from me and sipping tea was making it less attractive by the minute. His name was Alim Aikimbayev and he was the deputy director of the very respectable Anti-Plague Institute in Almaty, Kazakhstan.

The scavengers who had been picking off bits and pieces of the 100-odd buildings on the site, he said, were criminals. "They will rob you, or they will kidnap you, or they will kill you," he said firmly.

Furthermore, I had a good chance of catching the plague. Not just the bacteria that are endemic to Central Asia, which are treatable with antibiotics and affect one or two people a year, but a strain that was specially designed in Russian laboratories to be resistant to antibiotics.

Then there was the matter of the tens of tons of anthrax hastily buried by the Russians in 1988 in the expectation of a visit to their original storage place in Sverdlovsk by Western inspectors monitoring compliance with the 1972 treaty banning biological weapons.

The Americans, only last June, had mounted a joint expedition with the Uzbek authorities -- most of the island is in Uzbekistan, the rest in Kazakhstan -- and cleaned up the anthrax dump, I knew.

"I was never worried about the anthrax," Aikimbayev said breezily. "I'm much more worried that the local gerbils will have caught the plague and survived." Fleas would transmit the virus indefinitely from gerbil to gerbil and would no doubt find in my ankles a refreshing change from rodent blood.

"The gerbils get a little sick from it, but they survive," he said. "You won't."

And furthermore, he said, when I start coughing six days after contacting the plague, I will infect everyone around me and start an epidemic before I die a horrible death.

The cute little rodents, which figure on one of Kazakhstan's stamps, were not among the animals used in tests for anthrax, tularemia, brucellosis, plague, typhus, Q fever, smallpox, botulinum toxin and Venezuelan equine encephalitis on the island.

The Soviets used horses, rabbits, monkeys, guinea pigs, rats and mice, all brought in from outside. They tried to exterminate every living thing from insects to antelopes before releasing germ-laden aerosols on the lab animals, but, Akimbayev and others involved say, some rodents buried deep in their pits may well have survived the poison -- and again the plague.

Three journalists had visited the island, but each only for a few hours. None had even spent even a night there.

* * *

Vozrozhdeniye Island had first been picked by the Soviets to test biological weapons in 1935, but was closed a year later when the leader of the team was arrested and shot during Stalin's purges. But its remoteness proved an enduring attraction, and in 1954 the Soviet military, having successfully caught up with the Americans in nuclear weapons, resumed work on biological warfare and began expanding the Vozrozhdeniye Island test site.

At the time, the United States was also developing bioweapons. Americans focused on ways of sickening enemy troops without killing them, on the grounds that a sick soldier immobilizes more enemy resources than a dead one. This made the accidental contamination of civilians and one's own troops politically more acceptable.

The Russians took the opposite tack: They bred and bio-engineered their viruses and bacteria and toxins to make them more lethal and more contagious on the assumption they would not be used on the battlefront anyway, but would be disseminated by missiles and bombs.

In 1969, President Richard Nixon followed the advice of an advisory commission that declared bioweapons dangerous and unnecessary and he announced the end of the U.S. biological weapons program, which was never revived.

The Russians took this with a grain of salt and, after signing the 1972 treaty banning such weapons, created Biopreparat, a huge civilian administration that would combine open work on vaccines with covert work on bioweapons.

Biopreparat civilians under control of the military started testing the weapons they developed on Vozrozhdeniye Island, and they didn't leave until 1992, when Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, which share the island, took over control of the island from the dissolved Soviet Union. Neither country has shown any interest in it and no one lives there.

In Soviet days, the testing was done in summer, and at its peak the island's population exceeded 2,000 people, according to Gennady Lepyoshkin, a former bioweaponeer who spent 18 summers there.

Lepyoshkin, 55, once ran the giant bioweapons production facility in Stepnogorsk, in northern Kazakhstan.

* * *

I began with a 30-hour train ride from Almaty to Aralsk, which until 1965 was one of the Aral Sea's two main ports and is now more than 200 kilometers from shore.

In Aralsk, I was met by Sergei Sokolov, a 45-year-old hydrologist, who lived in a modest house with his wife and their 2-year-old daughter. In 1996, he had been on the last expedition of the Otto Schmidt, a small military boat of the Yaroslavets type that was the last ship afloat on the retreating sea. They had anchored in a bay that was full of larger, abandoned ships, and he told me he had climbed into them to find toothbrushes, towels and other personal items that pointed to a hasty departure.

He had hiked to the laboratory complex, several kilometers away, but had been unable to climb over the high, wire-topped fence around it. His expedition had been led and financed by Japanese hydrologists with no interest in biological warfare, so Sergei had not had a second chance to examine the lab -- until now, when he would join me on the trip.

Christopher Pala / For MT This is where horses were tied up. I imagined them standing patiently at dusk as the aerosols were tested.

He introduced me to Timur, who had his own UAZ jeep and would be our driver.

As we shopped for provisions in Aralsk's depressingly bare market, we met up with Timur and two fellows I took an instant dislike to. Timur said they were members of the team of scavengers who had been pilfering parts on the island for years and were my only hope to reach it. They wore shades over their eyes and contempt on their mouths and immediately asked for $1,000. I countered with a far lesser sum and suggested they think about it, hoping they would leave, but they eventually accepted, and one of them would come with us. His name was Shabo and we were now stuck with him. He was tall and athletic, with reddish skin unusual for a Kazakh and the standard set of gold teeth. He walked with a cane and was generally unpleasant.

That night, Almagul, Sergei's wife, came up with some news: Shabo was married to a relative of hers (good news) and had last year been freed after serving a seven-year prison sentence (not so good). But I figured the first would prevail over the second and we were in good hands.

The next morning we set off for a seven-hour drive on a series of bumpy tracks through the semi-desert. There were Bactrian camels at regular intervals, with enormous furry necks, brawny chests and long, delicate hind legs. At spots where man had drilled artesian wells, horses, sheep, goats and cows stood listlessly.

After a lunch of camel milk yogurt, bread and watermelon, we reached Kulande, a village of a few hundred people living mostly off their camel herds, for the soil is so salty that nothing edible can grow.

There were two trucks there loaded with beams, beds, pipes and assorted objects that had come from the island.

Shabo's group of scavengers, it emerged, had returned to Kulande from the island earlier than Shabo had expected, and the boat that brought them to the mainland had already left. The next boat would not return for days.

Shabo viewed this delay as an excellent opportunity to renegotiate what he must have considered a contract agreed to under duress: The loss of his time, he claimed, meant that we would have to pay him a premium. I strenuously objected but finally agreed to half a premium. Kazakh contempt for the sanctity of contracts is the biggest headache facing the foreign investors who are spending billions to develop the country's long-neglected oil deposits, and I began to see their point.

We spent the night with friends of Shabo's in a large compound. The elder brother worked in a small oil company that had drilled a single well in the area, apparently not striking oil. We sat in a big carpeted room around a low table, using pillows to cradle our elbows. The lady of the house sat at one end of the table, with a big kettle full of hot water, a teapot full of strong tea and a jug of camel milk, doling out filled cups.

Then came the beshparmak (literally "five fingers"), the national dish of Kazakhstan. Chunks of boiled mutton, rich in gristle and fat, are placed on top of a single, large platter of thick, flat unadorned noodles and eaten with the hands. Sometimes a tin spoon is provided, never a knife. Vegetables are unknown. I asked our host whether he knew what had been going on on Vozrozhdeniye Island. "Some kind of military stuff, I guess," he said. Was he interested in finding out?

"What do I care?" he said with a loud, contented laugh.

Two days later, we left for the coast to wait for the boat that brings in materials from the island. The spot was 60 kilometers away, and as we got closer we rode on land that had been under the sea 40, 20 and five years ago, according to Sergei, who, as a hydrologist, should know. In the end, the bushes became sparse and the scenery became as flat as the sea.

The scavengers' camp was composed of two broken-down trucks about a kilometer apart. Each had apparently ended its mobile life at the edge of the sea, which had then further retreated. Metal cages meant for small mammals and apparently imported from the island were piled up and some had been used as barbecue pits.

Three days later the boats showed up, towing a half-dozen packets of beams tied together. We felt a sense of elation. So did Shabo: He demanded yet another premium. We had a brief shouting match in which I whittled him down to the usual half a premium and we set off on the 20-kilometer trip to the island in a 7-meter skiff as the sun was setting.

It was pitch dark when we docked at a camp of almost identical structure; only there were several dead trucks and a lot more rusty trash strewn around. We stepped inside one low-ceilinged structure, lit by a single light, that contained a long table around which a half-dozen dirty, unshaven men were eating a beshparmak of macaroni and potatoes. It was a den of thieves straight out of 1950s Hollywood.

But after I was politely ushered to a seat facing the entrance, at the traditional place of honor for guests, I found out my neighbor and the team leader, whom I'll call Nurlan, was a literate and educated man who had worked as a ranger in a nature reserve.

He said the scavengers had started coming to the island from Aralsk in 1996. They had first concentrated on valuable metals like lead, aluminum and copper. Now, he said, they were focused on water pipes, which were made of zinc-covered steel. "We brought out 120 tons last year," he said, "and this year we'll be taking out the last 80 tons." Construction materials like beams and floorboards were a staple of their work, he said.

	Christopher Pala / For MT A Soviet military mural still decorates the club in Kantubek, the town built around the biological weapons testing range on Vozrozhdeniye Island in the Aral Sea.

In the morning, they used a crankshaft to start up a four-wheel drive truck. We rode in the flatbed for the 50-kilometer drive to the town. The island had grown 10 times since the 1960s and last year its south coast was joined to mainland Uzbekistan. We drove along immense beaches where flocks of white flamingoes languidly took off as we approached. A goshawk preceded, flying low over the bushes, hunting for gerbils.

We stopped at the place that had been the last port of the island. Eight ships were standing on the sand, parallel-anchored along what used to be a long bay. They ranged from large water- and diesel-carrying tankers to a small tugboat and a torpedo boat that were almost entirely drowned in sand. There was also a Yaroslavets like the one Sergei had traveled on for the last cruise of any ship in the Aral Sea. He went inside some of the ships he had visited in 1996. They were as trashed now as they were pristine then, he said.

Finally we saw the buildings of Kantubek, the town built around the testing range, emerge from the horizon. It was on a slight elevation, just above a former bay whose center was now covered with white salt. We pulled up at a three-story building, and the scavengers showed us a ground-floor apartment they slept in when they were in town. Normally, they said, they preferred to stay at the beach camp and came in every day to gather materials.

Our driver took us to the top of the building, from which I counted more than 80 structures. There were two huge tanks that looked like they belonged in a refinery but were used to heat water for the entire town. Nearby was a huge building housing the diesel generators that kept the electricity flowing. Two big buildings were housing and recreation for the military.

On the outskirts, in what appeared to be a garage for more than 30 trucks, two T-52 tanks stood side by side. In case anyone had wanted to steal them, a physical impossibility even in 1992, the departing Russians had blown up the barrel of one and the turret of the other. Two armored personnel carriers stood nearby.

Lepyoshkin, the former bioweaponeer, said they were used to test their effectiveness against aerosols.

In the center was a soccer pitch, complete with stands. The field was strewn with hulks of yellow tractors, green trucks and a red fire truck, all gutted and rusting. Most of the buildings dated from the 1970s, a few from the late '50s and '60s.

There were street signs, such as no parking or even no standing, or announcing a clinic or a pedestrian crossing. Some of the buildings had lost their roofs to decay or the scavengers' appetite for good timber, which is sorely lacking in treeless western Kazakhstan.

Inside the apartment buildings, doors and floorboards were gone, sinks were missing or bereft of connecting pipes and dust was everywhere.

Next to ours was one of the town's biggest buildings, the klub. The floorboards were gone there too, but a huge mural of a stern-looking soldier with planes, rockets and ships faced the wall where a movie screen had hung. In the rubble I picked up a portrait of Captain Alexander Oleksenko, presumably a military equivalent of employee-of-the-month. A yellowing copy of a January 1989 "Sovietskaya Rossiya" bannered the news that "The Soviet People Are With the Party."

We were probably in the only military site of this size that was abandoned by the Soviets and never reoccupied by anyone else.

* * *

The window on Soviet military life was all very interesting, but it was not what we had come for. So we headed up a road made up of slabs of concrete with protruding steel rods and were soon at the lab complex entrance, 3 kilometers from Kantubek.

The wooden fence that had defeated Sergei in 1996 was almost all gone, and some parts of it had been neatly piled up for removal by the scavengers. We walked right into the main entrance.

In the center of the compound was a series of eight warehouses. The U.S.-Uzbek expedition that had come here in May to neutralize the anthrax spores had also burned the warehouses, the scavengers said. But much survived: We saw an array of test tubes, bottles and petri dishes, some still in their original wrapping. The fire had left some oddly bent, like the melting watches in a Dali painting, but most were still intact. It was all surprisingly low-tech: There were nails everywhere but no screws.

A pair of two-story buildings near the entrance had inexplicably been spared. Hundreds of animal cages encrusted with dust pointed to their use: This is where the animals were kept before the tests, Lepyoshkin confirmed. We found a full-body suit, complete with glass face mask and a hose attachment in the back for air, that could have been used to handle the animals when they were dying.

In one room we found a cage of just the right size for a human being. Lepyoshkin said they were used to house units of four monkeys, one male and three females. They lived together until the final experiment.

Poking out of the rubble I found dusty issues of the British Medical Journal and of the Journal of Infectious Diseases.

The lab buildings seemed to have been trashed by the departing Soviets and, judging by the thickness of the dust, left pretty much alone since. But a strong smell of ether, chlorine and something indefinable still hung in the air and gave out a powerful sense of evil.

I wondered what the people must have been thinking as they watched animals die -- not so humans could live but so humans could die. Did they really believe that Americans were doing the same thing? Did they not realize that nuclear weapons, of which the Soviet Union had the largest stockpile, were surely more reliable? Did close friends confide doubts to each other?

After my trip, I tracked Lepyoshkin in Stepnogorsk, northern Kazakhstan, and asked him if he had had any qualms about being part of a program that was designed to produce enough germs to kill the entire population on earth many times over.

"No," he said and shook his head vigorously, "absolutely not, because I knew the weapons would never be used. When nuclear weapons were made, no one thought they would be used. You'd have to be mad to use them."

He paused, and added, "But now that there's terrorism, it's more scary. You know biological weapons are cheap. We calculated that to kill half the population on one square kilometer costs $2,000 with conventional weapons, $800 with a nuclear weapon, $600 with a chemical weapon and $1 with a bio-weapon. One dollar!"

"But we never discussed this among ourselves," he continued. "We were doing interesting work, and we were proud of it. We discovered new methods to improve the immune system. We developed an anthrax vaccine that was given to the whole army and it's considered to be the best in the world. Same with our plague vaccine, it's been used more than 40 years."

* * *

After two days of poking though the mess, awed by both the scale of the Soviet effort and the extent of the destruction, we got Nurlan and his men to drive us to the test site, which Aikimbayev had told me was about 15 kilometers south of the lab complex.

It was on a plateau, with gnarled saxaul trees and antelope and fox tracks visible. The trees had leaned into the track and the driver crashed through them with abandon. Clearly it hadn't been driven through for years.

We stopped near what seemed like a telephone pole. Leading away from it were 1 meter-high concrete posts at 100-meter intervals, on a track with the wind, which was fairly constant. I imagined the cages were placed downwind from the aerosol.

We drove on to a place where four poles had been set horizontally on pickets about 50 centimeters from the ground. There were rusty chains attached and even a few mangers: This is where the horses had been tied up. I imagined them standing patiently in a row at dusk, when the aerosols were tested.

Finally we reached the highest point on the island, where a 12-meter observation tower stood over the foundations of a destroyed building. A radio antenna still soared. It was from here that the wind speed and direction was relayed to the lab and to the staff laying out the animals and manning the aerosols.

From the top of the tower I could see six dirt roads going in various directions to other test sites.

It was all very spare.

I looked around for rodent holes, and there were plenty. I wore thick socks against flea bites and received none.

Right by the tower there were some bones that Nurlan identified as coming from a saiga antelope. I wondered what it had died of. Germs? The Kalashnikov of a soldier tired of military kasha?

After four days, it was time to go.

On our way back to the coast, the scavengers stopped for a couple of hours. I wandered down to the bay, which was covered with white salt crystals, and scooped some up. A pinch was quite tasty, so I decided to take some home. All I had was a box of cinnamon Tic-Tacs, so I emptied these out in a pocket and filled the box with salt. When it was full I noticed the words on the label: "Incredible stuff!"