Biohazard

1. Army Headquarters

Late in the winter of 1988, I was called to a meeting at Soviet army headquarters on Frunze Street in Moscow. The note of urgency in the message was hard to ignore. "We've set aside a special room for you, Colonel," said the clipped voice on the phone.

A black Volga was waiting at the curb, its motor running. The two armed bodyguards who accompanied me on top-secret business were slouched alongside, their fur hats pulled low against the cold. One held the door open as I climbed into the backseat, and followed me inside. The second slid in beside my driver, Slava. I told Slava to drive quickly.

It was usually a thirty-minute drive across town from my office to Red Army headquarters, but a fresh snowfall that morning had turned the streets into an Arctic snarl of spinning tires and raging drivers. Once or twice the flashing blue light on our official vehicle aroused the attention of a traffic policeman, who thrust his gloved band in the air to clear the way.

Close to an hour had passed by the time we finally pulled up in front of the austere granite building that housed the Ministry of Defense. I entered through a side entrance and stamped the snow from my boots. A junior officer took me to a small adjoining room, where I was issued a pass, and then on to a guard booth, where a young soldier examined my pass and picture, stared hard, and waved me on.

The first officer led me up a flight of stairs to a heavy armored door with a coded lock. He punched in a series of numbers and we walked into the sprawling suite of offices occupied by the Fifteenth Directorate of the Soviet army, the military wing of our biological weapons program.

I unzipped my parka and tried to relax.

Although I was a colonel, I never wore my uniform. Like all military personnel at Biopreparat, I was provided with a cover identity as an ordinary scientist. I carried two different versions of my internal passport, the identity card required of every Soviet citizen. One identified me as a civilian employee of Biopreparat. The other showed my military rank.

I had moved to Moscow with my wife Lena and my three children a year earlier, in 1987, to take a position at Biopreparat headquarters. The move to the capital was a refreshing change from the dreariness of army life in the provinces.

Thirteen years at a succession of secret laboratories and institutes in some of the most remote corners of the Soviet Union had not prepared me for the bewildering pace of my new job. There were meetings every week at army headquarters, the Kremlin, the offices of the Communist Party Central Committee, or one of the myriad scientific institutes in our network. By the spring of 1988, when I was named first deputy chief, I was seeing a doctor for a stress-related illness.

The commander of the Fifteenth Directorate, Lieutenant General Vladimir Lebedinsky, looked at me disapprovingly when I entered his office. He was absorbed in a discussion with three colonels, none of whom I had seen before.

"It's about time," he said curtly.

I started to complain about the snow, the traffic, but he waved me into silence.

Of all the military commanders I dealt with, Lebedinsky was the one I most hated to keep waiting. He had taken a paternal interest in my career since we first met in a laboratory at Omutninsk, six hundred miles east of Moscow, where I'd been assigned for several years after graduating from military medical school. Then in his sixties and at the end of an illustrious military career, he was one of the few senior officers who didn't hold my youth against me. At thirty-eight, I had vaulted over older and more experienced scientists to become the youngest first deputy director in Biopreparat's history. Many of the scientists I used to work for were now taking orders from me, and they didn't bother to hide their resentment.

Lebedinsky turned to the three colonels.

"Are we ready?" he said.

They nodded, and the general led us into an adjoining soundproof room. Notepads had been placed on the large wooden table, in front of each chair.

An orderly arrived with four steaming glasses of tea. Lebedinsky waited for him to leave and firmly closed the door.

"I'm not staying," he said, as I glanced at the glasses and did a quick count.

The three colonels came from the Biological Group, a unit of the General Staff Operations Directorate whose role was to arm bombers and missiles with the weapons we produced. It was the first time I had met anyone from that unit. Biopreparat was then developing a new biological weapon every year. Most of our time was devoted to research; we paid little attention to the details of deployment.

Lebedinsky quickly explained the reason for the special meeting. A decision had been made at the highest levels, he said, to arm SS-18 missiles with disease agents.

"We need to calculate how much time it will take to prepare the missiles for launching. I'm counting on you to help us out."

I nodded, as if this were a perfectly reasonable request. But I had been caught off guard. The giant SS-18 missiles, which could carry ten five-hundred-kiloton warheads apiece over a range of six thousand miles, had never been considered before as delivery vehicles for a biological attack.

When the Soviet biological warfare program began in the 1920s, our scientists attached crop sprayers to low-flying planes and hoped that a contrary wind wouldn't blow the germs the wrong way. After World War II, bombers armed with explosives were added to the arsenal. The Cold War fueled the development of ever more destructive armaments, and by the 1970s we had managed to harness single-warhead intercontinental ballistic missiles for use in the delivery of biological agents. Multiple-warhead missiles represented more of a challenge. Few of the agents we had weaponized could be prepared in sufficient quantities to fill hundreds of warheads simultaneously.

Work I had done with anthrax a few years earlier must have caught the attention of our strategic planners. Through a series of tests, I'd found a way to create a more potent anthrax weapon, so that fewer spores would be needed in an attack. The new technique allowed us to load more missiles with anthrax without straining our labs' resources. In the language of American nuclear strategists, we could produce "more bang for the buck."

I was being asked to put my discovery to work.

The colonels knew little about the fine points of microorganisms, but they understood missile technology. If I could develop the pathogens in sufficient quantities, they would target the warheads on major cities in the United States and Europe.

I made a few quick calculations on my notepad. At least four hundred kilograms of anthrax, prepared in dry form for use as an aerosol, would be required for ten warheads.

Our seed stock for anthrax production was kept inside refrigerated storerooms at three production facilities in Penza, Kurgan, and Stepnogorsk. The seed stock would have to be put through a delicate fermenting process to breed the billions of spores required. The process was complicated — and it took time. A single twenty-ton fermenter working at full capacity could produce enough spores to fill one missile in one or two days. With additives, we could probably boost the output to five hundred or six hundred kilograms a day. I finished my calculations and leaned back in my chair.

"With the fermenters we have available, it would take ten to fourteen days," I said.

The colonels looked pleased. Two weeks was not a problem. No one expected to go to war overnight.

The colonels didn't tell me which cities had been targeted for biological attack, and I didn't ask. New York, Los Angeles, Seattle, and Chicago were some of the targets to come up in subsequent meetings, but they were abstract concepts to me at the time. All I cared about was ensuring that our weapons would do the job they were designed for.

We stood up to stretch. The tension in the room lifted. Three of us went out to the hallway for a smoke. I had discovered that you could learn more in such casual moments than in a month's worth of memos passed around The System. The colonels were suddenly talkative.

Pressure from the top military command was making their lives impossible, they complained. No sooner had one weapons system been organized than an order came down to refine another one.

I told them we were having the same problem — but we all read the newspapers. Mikhail Gorbachev and his team of self-described reformers were publicly heralding a new era of rapprochement with the West. We joked that the mysteries of perestroika were beyond the scope of simple military men.

I don't remember giving a moment's thought to the fact that we had just sketched out a plan to kill millions of people.

Anthrax takes one to five days to incubate in the body. Victims often won't know that an anthrax attack has taken place until after they begin to feel the first symptoms. Even then, the nature of the illness will not at first be clear. The earliest signs of trouble — a slight nasal stuffiness, twinges of pain in the joints, fatigue, and a dry, persistent cough — resemble the onset of a cold or flu. To most people, the symptoms will seem too inconsequential to warrant a visit to the doctor.

In this first Stage, pulmonary anthrax can be treated with antibiotics. But it would take a highly alert public health system to recognize the evidence of an anthrax attack. Few physicians are trained to identify the disease, and the unremarkable nature of early symptoms makes an accurate diagnosis difficult.

The first symptoms are followed several days later by the anthrax "eclipse," a period in which the initial discomfort seems to fade, concealing the approaching danger. Proliferating bacteria will have begun to engulf the lymph nodes, local headquarters of the body's disease protection system. Within a matter of hours the bacteria will have taken over the entire lymphatic system. From there, they enter the bloodstream, continuing to multiply at a furious pace. Soon they begin to release a toxin that attacks all organs but is particularly damaging to the lungs, filling them with liquid and gradually cutting off their supply of oxygen.

Within twenty-four hours of this toxin's release, a victim's skin will begin to turn a faint bluish color. At this stage, every breath becomes more painful than the last. A choking fit and convulsions follow. The end usually comes suddenly: some victims of pulmonary anthrax have been known to die in the middle of a conversation. The disease is fatal in over 90 percent of untreated cases.

A hundred kilograms of anthrax spores would, in optimal atmospheric conditions, kill up to three million people in any of the densely populated metropolitan areas of the United States. A single SS-18 could wipe out the population of a city as large as New York.

Anthrax was not the only biological weapon earmarked for the SS-18s. When we sat down again after our break, we went over the available menu of toxic choices.

Plague could be prepared on a similar schedule. The plague weapon we had created in our laboratories was more virulent than the bubonic plague, which killed one quarter of the population of Europe in the Middle Ages. Smallpox was stockpiled in underground bunkers at our military plants, and we were developing a weapon prototype based on a rare filovirus called Marburg, a cousin of Ebola.

Nearly three hundred projects were outlined in the last Five-Year Plan we had been given by the Military Industrial Commission, known by its Russian initials as the VPK. The VPK coordinated all of the Soviet Union's industrial production for military purposes. This gave it effective control over two thirds of the nation's industrial enterprises. A separate biological weapons directorate monitored our progress until our "products" were ready to be delivered to the Ministry of Defense, which we referred to as the Customer.

Our meeting ended after an hour or so of additional calculations. We shook hands, packed our papers, and congratulated one another on a productive session. On my way out I looked into Lebedinsky's office, but he was already gone. I never saw the colonels again.

Driving back to my office, I opened my briefcase to jot down a few more notes. Anyone who peered through the window would have seen a frowning, slightly overweight bureaucrat preoccupied with the country's business.

A strange twist of fortune had brought me to the pinnacle of power in Russia, a country that was not my own. My great-grandfather had been a khan, a member of the nobility in what is now Kazakhstan, in Central Asia, but I grew up in a system that lavished few of its privileges on non-Russians. My wife and daughter and two young sons had risen with me to a lifestyle inconceivable to the majority of Soviet citizens. With the combined salary of a senior bureaucrat and a high-ranking military officer, I earned as much as a Soviet government minister. But in the Communist system, money was not the measure of worth. What counted was the special status that gave us access to perks and influence in our supposedly egalitarian society.

Turning into the hidden driveway that led to the offices of Biopreparat on Samokatnaya Street, I began to focus on the rest of the day. I would only have time for a quick lunch before facing the mountain of messages and paperwork on my desk. The Volga glided past a concrete wall into a small courtyard. I packed up my notes and said a quick good-bye to Slava.

Slava never gave any hint of suspecting what went on in the meetings he took me to, and I never confided in him. We had been warned to be careful of what we said to lower-ranking employees. But I imagined he drew conclusions of his own, given the odd bits of conversation he overheard.

"Will you need me later?" he asked.

"Probably not till I go home," I told him. "I might be late again tonight."

The Moscow headquarters of Biopreparat, or the Main Directorate of the Council of Soviet Ministers as it was officially (and uninformatively) called, protected its secrets behind a yellow brick mansion with a green roof that had served as the home of the nineteenth-century vodka merchant Pyotr Smirnoff. The building's past and present associations provided an ironic symmetry: Smirnoff's product has done more than any foreign invader to undermine the health of Russian citizens.

Samokatnaya Street is so small and narrow that a pedestrian could easily miss it while walking down the nearby Yauza Embankment, overlooking one of the waterways that joins the Moscow River as it flows toward the Kremlin. There were five other buildings on our street, all largely obscured in the spring and summer by the thick foliage of ancient trees mercifully ignored by Communist city planners.

Despite its image as an impersonal city of cold buildings and wide boulevards, Moscow is dotted with hidden havens such as these. Even in winter, Samokatnaya Street was free from the surrounding bustle of the neighborhood, with its shabby residential apartment blocks, factories, and onion-dome churches.

Three centuries ago the area around Samokatnaya Street was known as the German Quarter. It was the only place in old Muscovy where foreigners (then universally described as German, regardless of their nationality) were allowed to live and carry on their business — at a safe distance from ordinary Russians, whom they might otherwise have infected with alien ideas, but close enough for the czars to exploit their skills.

A car bearing American diplomatic plates once turned up the street and parked opposite the building. KGB guards watched from inside as several people got out, peered at the fence for a few moments, and then returned and drove off. We talked about it for days afterward.

Savva Yermoshin, the KGB commander in charge of the building, was one of my closest friends at the time. He declared confidently that there was nothing to worry about, but security was tighter than usual for weeks.

I walked up a marble staircase, one of the few remaining architectural features of the old mansion, to my offices on the second floor. Nearly 150 people worked at headquarters, including technicians and administrative personnel, but the building exuded an air of restrained silence.

My secretary, Marina, was a plump, efficient woman in her late twenties. A slight tilt of her head told me that Yury Kalinin, the director of Biopreparat and my immediate boss, was already at work.

Marina sat with Kalinin's secretary, Tatyana, in the reception area connecting our offices. The two women disliked each other intensely because of some ancient quarrel and rarely spoke. When I wanted to speak to Kalinin, I had to address Tatyana directly. This time I bypassed her and knocked on his door. A brusque voice told me to enter.

Major General Yury Tikhonovich Kalinin, chief of the Main Directorate and deputy minister in the Ministry of Medical and Microbiological Industry, was sitting behind an enormous antique desk. A pair of heavy curtains had been drawn over the window near his armchair, and his office was wrapped in gloomy darkness. A picture of Mikhail Gorbachev hung on one wall. There was a gray safe in the corner.

I coughed and waited for him to notice me.

"So?" he said at last, without looking up.

"The meeting on Kirov Street lasted a little longer than I had expected," I said. "I thought I would check in."

"Interesting?" The general never used two words when one would do.

When I first visited his office as a young captain, Leonid Brezhnev's picture was hanging on the wall. Over the years, the portraits had changed to Yury Andropov, and then, briefly, to Konstantin Chernenko, reflecting the quick succession of ailing leaders who occupied the Kremlin during the early 1980s. Kalinin had no political opinions so far as I could tell. One leader was as good as another. What he respected was power.

I began to tell him about the plan to use SS-18s, but he seemed to know everything already. I wondered if Lebedinsky had called him.

"I knew you could handle it," he said and raised his hand in a gesture of dismissal. "Back to work, right?"

As usual, I was left with the impression that there were areas of this strange secret universe that I would never have access to. Not until much later did I realize that this was only Kalinin's way of spinning the illusions he needed to strengthen and maintain his authority.

Kalinin had risen swiftly in the army's chemical warfare corps— some claimed thanks to well-placed marriages — but he was an engineer, not a scientist. He was also impetuous, a man who enjoyed making quick decisions that took people by surprise — not the least his decision to bring me to Moscow. Against my natural inclinations, I admired him. In our gray bureaucracy, he stood out as an aristocrat.

He was tall, slim, an elegant dresser. His imported suits must have cost him more than he could afford, even on a general's salary. He lived with his second wife, a shy woman said to be the daughter of a four-star general, in a neighborhood Muscovites nicknamed "Tsarskoye Selo" ("Czar's Village") — a kind of inside joke because of the high-level officials it housed.

Kalinin never smoked and rarely drank, which set him apart from his peers, and was in excellent shape for a Soviet man in his early fifties. His black hair was always impeccably combed. With his high cheekbones and eagle nose, he looked like a member of the old Russian nobility.

Women adored him, and rumors of his amorous inclinations spiced up office gossip. Late one night I knocked on his door and walked in just as the general and Tatyana were hastily rearranging their clothes. He never mentioned it, and neither did I.

The charm Kalinin reserved for women was rarely experienced by his male subordinates. As I came to feel less awed in his presence, I would sometimes bring to him the case of a scientist or technician who needed a leave of absence for personal reasons. He invariably refused to listen.

"So," he would bark. "Now you're a psychiatrist!"

And he would order me back to work.

After even the briefest session with Kalinin I would retreat to my office with a sense of relief. I worked in a large room with a high ceiling and a window that looked out over a park by the river-bank. An oak desk I'd inherited from my predecessor occupied nearly half the space. The desk held the real symbols of my authority: five telephones. In Soviet government offices, an executive's status could be measured by the number of his phones — an indication of multiple sources of authority. I even had a kremlyovka, the small white phone that connects everyone in the upper reaches of the Soviet government, from the general secretary of the Communist Party to ordinary ministers of state.

Personal mementos of family or friends were taboo in the offices of senior government officials, but I had hung portraits of a few Russian scientists: D. I. Mendeleyev, who invented the periodic table of elements; Nikolai Pirogov, a nineteenth-century pioneer in military surgery; Professor Ilya Mechnikov, a Russian microbiologist who discovered cellular immunity.

I was eager to identify with Russia's glorious scientific past. Some day, I promised myself, I would return to pure research, or medicine.

The only other items in my office to suggest my training were books on microbiology, biochemistry, and medicine.

Sitting in a corner was a Western computer. I never used it, but it was another sign of "special" status in a regime that prohibited its citizens from owning a copier. I would have preferred a television or radio, but the KGB had banned them from the offices of senior personnel. Our security chiefs claimed that Western electronic surveillance was so good that foreign agents could decipher our deepest secrets by analyzing the vibrations of our conversations on glass. It made little sense to me: why not then ban the computer as well?

The KGB was thorough, and it lived by its own impenetrable logic. Once a month, security officers shooed all the lab chiefs and division heads out of their offices to check for bugs. Some believed that they were really checking on equipment they had themselves installed In record our conversations.

We all knew that we were being watched, but no one questioned the security precautions. We were engaged in secret combat against enemies who, we were told, would stop at nothing. The Americans had hidden behind a similar veil of secrecy when they launched the Manhattan Project to develop the first atomic bomb. Biopreparat, we believed, was our Manhattan Project.

Marina came in with a stack of messages. "Someone from Yermoshin's office is here to see you," she said.

A young KGB officer stepped in after her and waited for her to leave.

"Yes?" I said. But I knew what would happen next.

Since we operated under the fiction that none of the secretaries knew what we did, they could not be allowed in our presence when our "secrets" were discussed.

The officer handed me a folder with a note from Yermoshin. "Stuff from the third floor," I read in his hurried scrawl.

The third floor was home to our "First Department," the unit responsible for maintaining our secret files and all communications with Biopreparat facilities around the country. The only people allowed in, besides security personnel, were Kalinin and myself. It was administered by the KGB.

Sometimes I went upstairs myself. For one thing, it was the only place in the building where you could copy documents. The First Department was the sole custodian of our copier machine. It also offered a good opportunity to gossip with Yermoshin. Our families had spent time together a few weekends earlier.

I riffled through the papers in front of me while the officer stayed in the room, as he was obliged to do.

There were requests for supplies from one of our lab chiefs in Siberia; a notice of an "urgent" meeting at the Kremlin later that afternoon; a minor accident at one of our labs in western Russia which had sparked a debate between physicians at the Ministry of Health, who wanted to isolate the infected workers, and a general at the lab, who didn't. The general, typically, argued that isolation was unnecessary and would only stir up the staff. And there were the latest reports of a field test in the Aral Sea.

2. Rebirth Island

Ten centuries ago, according to Russian legend, there was a mysterious kingdom on the shores of the Black Sea called Tmu Tarakan. Its name was variously translated as the "Place of Darkness" or the "Kingdom of Cockroaches." Modern-day Muscovites use the phrase whenever they want to describe a destination that is as loathsome as it is remote.

Every April during the 1980s and early 1990s a team of Biopreparat scientists set off for a place we jokingly referred to as Tmu Tarakan. Located twenty-three hundred miles south of Moscow, its name was Rebirth Island. Our teams would spend four or five months there, living in army barracks and testing that year's supply of biological weapons.

Rebirth Island is a tear-shaped speck in the Aral Sea, which divides the Central Asian countries of Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. Languishing fifty miles off the Kazakh shoreline in waters so polluted by the runoff of agricultural fertilizers that nothing could possibly live in them anymore, it was the antithesis of its name. The only year-round inhabitants as far as anyone could see were lizards.

Open discussion of the island's seasonal activities was strictly forbidden. Scientists couldn't tell their families where they were going, or why.

A half-dozen tumbledown buildings served as the scientific headquarters, as well as the barracks, for a migratory population that sometimes numbered as many as 150 people, including scientists, technicians, and a unit of soldiers responsible for firing the weapons and tying down the animals. A secret landing strip had been built nearby, but airplane traffic was kept to a minimum. When the first teams arrived in April, a thin layer of green grass covered the sandy soil. By June, the vegetation had withered to brown shoots. Winds swirling off the desert steppes provided the only respite from the heat. There were no birds, and the dust settled everywhere, getting into clothes, hair, and eyes, sweeping through the animal cages and into the food and scientists' notebooks.

The Aral Sea was once the world's fourth-largest inland body of water, but it has been shrinking every year since the 1960s when, in a wrong-headed agricultural experiment, Soviet state planners ordered the diversion of the Aral's river sources into concrete irrigation canals. The canals were to transform this part of Central Asia into a cotton bowl. After the first bumper harvests, the desert soil was exhausted, and local residents have been reaping the consequences ever since. The rivers silted over and clouds of toxic salts billow across the region every year, leaving one of the world's highest cancer rates in their wake.

We made a unique contribution of our own to the region's multiplying environmental tragedies.

In 1972, two fishermen died when a shift in the direction of the wind sent a cloud of plague over their boat. In the 1970s and 1980s, abnormally high incidences of plague were detected among rodents in inhabited areas north of the testing ground. Following the Soviet collapse in late 1991, doctors reported outbreaks of plague in several areas of Central Asia. It is impossible to prove that these outbreaks were connected to our activities, but it seems more than likely.

The army's Fifteenth Directorate, which ran the Rebirth Island complex, operated a year-round command post in Aralsk, the closest mainland community. A single, nearly impassable dirt road linked Aralsk with the outside world. The town was once a fishing port, but the shrinking sea left it stranded like a shipwreck sixty miles from shore. Once home to several thriving fish canneries, Aralsk had begun to shrivel up, following the pattern of the sea from which it took its name.

We used to say that the most fortunate inhabitants of the Soviet Union were the condemned monkeys of Rebirth Island. They were fed oranges, apples, bananas, and other fresh fruits rarely seen by Soviet citizens. Our work teams could only admire this vision of plenty from afar. Each piece of fruit was carefully inventoried and guarded to dissuade members of the scientific teams from giving in to temptation. It was grudgingly acknowledged that our test subjects needed to stay healthy until their last breath, while the scientists, who had to subsist on rations of cold porridge and fatty sausage, were expendable.

Our team members were better off than those who spent their lives in the area. Scientists on the occasional foraging trips into town were shocked to see the earthen huts with no running water that served as dwellings for most of the inhabitants. Malnutrition and hepatitis were common.

This was a familiar scene to anyone who has ever traveled in the rural areas of the former Soviet Union, but it never failed to infuriate me. I was born several hundred miles away, on the site of another failed agricultural experiment in southern Kazakhstan. All Kazakhs know that the money spent on Soviet military programs could have fed and clothed hundreds of communities like Aralsk. But in those days, we would never have dared say such a thing.

When the day's experiments were completed, the small migrant population of scientists and soldiers could only look forward to nights of interminable boredom. Once or twice a week, sentimental Soviet war movies were shown on a rickety movie projector powered by the camp's sole electric generator. Drinking was the most popular social activity on the island. Although no vodka was available, some enterprising souls obtained bottles of distilled spirits. Some took their solace a bit too seriously: alcoholism was a chronic problem among the scientists on these expeditions.

Sex was the second most popular activity. Scientists rarely mixed with the soldiers, mostly young recruits, but the Biopreparat teams often included female technicians. The combination of loneliness and boredom fueled numerous affairs, as well as gossip, which spiced up the dry reports we received back in Moscow. The end of a testing period would inevitably bring news of a divorce or a pregnancy that would be hard to explain back home.

The assignment suited those who enjoyed enforced vacations from their wives, mistresses, or children, but for most people the blend of relentless monotony and sleepless vigilance made even the stressful conditions in our labs seem attractive. In Moscow all that counted was the steady stream of reports that gave our bureaucracy its principal justification.

At the height of the U.S. offensive biological weapons program, American scientists restricted themselves to developing armaments that could be countered by antibiotics or vaccines, out of a concern for protecting troops and civilians from potential accidents. The Soviet government decided that the best agents were those for which there was no known cure. This shaped the entire course of our program and thrust us into a never-ending race against the medical profession. Every time a new treatment or vaccine came to light somewhere, we were back in our labs, trying to figure out how to overcome its effects.

Trafficking in germs and viruses was legal then, as it is today. In the name of scientific research, our agents purchased strains from university research laboratories and biotech firms around the world with no difficulty. Representatives of Soviet scientific and trade organizations based in Europe, as well as in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, had standing instructions to look out for new or unusual diseases. It was from the United States, for instance, that we obtained Machupo, the virus that causes Bolivian hemorrhagic fever. We picked up Marburg, related to the Ebola virus, from Germany.

The KGB was our most dependable supplier of raw material. They were known within Biopreparat by the code name "Capturing Agency One." Vials arrived in Russia almost every month with exotic fluids, powders, and cultures gathered by our intelligence agents in every corner of the globe. They were then sent by diplomatic pouch to Moscow, where Biopreparat technicians cautiously repackaged them. When I worked in provincial institutes, I was often ordered to pick up these toxic dispatches with a pair of armed guards in tow.

We were never permitted to travel by air. The consequences of a crash in one of our aging Aeroflot planes was too horrible to contemplate. Instead, dressed in civilian clothes, we returned in the cramped, sweaty passenger compartments of trains, trying to be inconspicuous.

By the mid-1980s, every Biopreparat laboratory, scientific institute, and production facility was working at full capacity. There were new agents, new strains of viruses and bacteria, and new methods of dispersal to test every month. We even explored AIDS and Legionnaire's disease. Both, as it happened, proved too unstable for use on the battlefield or against civilian populations. After studying one strain of the AIDS virus collected from the United States in 1985, we determined that HIV's long incubation period made it unsuitable for military use. You couldn't strike terror in an enemy's forces by infecting them with a disease whose symptoms took years to develop.

We had greater success in our work on more traditional killers.

One of the most infectious diseases known to man, smallpox, was declared eradicated by the World Health Organization in 1980. The last naturally occurring case was reported in 1977, and the medical profession judges the minor health risk associated with a vaccine greater than forgoing inoculation. Today, it isn't possible to get a smallpox vaccination in the United States, unless you are a lab scientist or a member of the military. This was for us an excellent reason to weaponize it. Although we officially had a small amount of the virus in the Ivanovsky Institute of Virology in Moscow — matching the world's only other legal repository of the strain in the United States — we cultivated tons of smallpox in our secret lab in Zagorsk (now Sergiyev Posad), the famous Russian cathedral city a half hour's drive from the capital. At Zagorsk, we experimented with the culture until we came up with a weapons-quality variant. Smallpox was then quietly added to our arsenal.

By the 1980s, so many different varieties of unconventional weapons were being developed and tested in the Soviet Union that a complex code, arranged according to letters of the alphabet, was developed to keep track of them. Words beginning with F, for example, were assigned to chemical weapons ("Foliant") and to psychotropic, or behavior-altering, biological and chemical agents ("Flute").

The letter L covered bacterial weapons. In order to further conceal what we were working on, each disease agent carried its own subcode. Plague was L1; tularemia L2; brucellosis and anthrax were L3 and L4, respectively. Glanders was L5, melioidosis L6, and so on. Weapons based on viruses fell under the letter N. Smallpox, for instance, was described in clandestine communications as N1. Ebola was N2, Marburg N3, Machupo or Bolivian hemorrhagic fever N4.

The skittish behavior of microorganisms leads many experts to question their effectiveness as weapons. One of the problems has always been to find a reliable means of delivery, one that prevents biological agents from losing virulence when they are dispersed. It is the equivalent of what biologists call a "vector" for the transmittal of disease.

Over the centuries, armies have often used primitive methods to spread pestilence. The Romans dropped poison into wells to contaminate their enemies' water supplies. The English gave blankets smeared with smallpox to Indians in the eighteenth century during the French and Indian Wars. Confederate troops in the American Civil War left corpses of animals to rot in ponds along the path of Union forces. And during World War II, Japanese planes dropped porcelain bombs containing billions of plague-infected fleas over Manchuria.

The most effective way of contaminating humans is through the air we breathe, but this has always been difficult to achieve. Soviet scientists combined the knowledge gained from postwar biochemistry and genetic research with modern industrial techniques to develop what are called "aerosol" weapons — particles suspended in a mist, like the spray of an insecticide, or a fine dust, like talcum powder.

Temperature and weather conditions will determine the success of an aerosol's dissemination. Bacteria and viruses arc generally vulnerable to sunlight; ultraviolet light kills them quickly. Heavy rain or snow, wind currents, and humidity impede their effectiveness.

Such obstacles complicate the planning of a biological attack, but they are not insurmountable. A bioweaponeer will know to strike at dusk, during periods when a blanket of cool air covers a warmer layer over the ground — a weather condition called an inversion, which keeps particles from being blown away by wind currents. We packed our biological agents in small melon-sized metal balls, called bomblets, set to explode several miles upwind from the target city. Meticulous calculation would be required to hit several cities at the same time with maximum effectiveness, but a single attack launched from a plane or from a single sprayer perched on a rooftop requires minimal skill.

Primitive aerosols lose their virulence and dissipate quickly. In our labs, we experimented with special additives to keep our agents from decaying when transported over long distances and to keep them alive in adverse weather conditions. These manipulated agents, more stable and more lethal, were our biological weapons.

We would first test our aerosols in special static chambers, where air flow was controlled to monitor the particle distribution after a small explosion or discharge. The last stage in determining a weapon's efficiency was live animal tests, such as the ones we conducted in the Aral Sea.

We tested a variety of animals, including rabbits and guinea pigs, but monkeys, whose respiratory systems are so similar to ours, were the most effective surrogates for humans. An average person takes in ten liters of air every minute. A monkey inhales four. If four particles of an agent in a given volume of air killed at least 50 percent of the monkeys exposed to an aerosol, we could assume that ten particles would have an equally lethal effect on human beings.

Our standard measure of success for a biological weapon was referred to as Q₅₀, representing the amount needed to infect 50 percent of all exposed human beings in one square kilometer of territory. The Soviet Union devoted an enormous amount of time and money to developing concentrated aerosols that could reach the Q₅₀ level with minuscule numbers of bacterial cells or viral particles.

The most effective biological weapons go on killing long after they are used. Some viruses, such as Marburg, are so hazardous that casually inhaling as few as three microscopic viral particles several days after an attack would be enough to kill you. Biowarfare strategists often look beyond the immediate target to focus on the epidemic behavior of disease-causing agents.

Unlike nuclear weapons, which pulverize everything in their target area, biological weapons leave buildings, transportation systems, and other infrastructure intact. They should properly be called mass casualty weapons, not weapons of mass destruction.

Until General Yury Tikhonovich Kalinin took over Biopreparat in 1979, six years after it was created by a secret Kremlin decree, the agency didn't achieve much. Its first chief was an uninspiring but pleasant army general named Vsevolod Ogarkov, who was transferred from the Fifteenth Directorate, the branch of the defense ministry that had supervised the development of biological weapons since World War II.

The commanders of the Fifteenth Directorate thought of Biopreparat as an extension of the military research program and therefore subject to their control. Ostensibly operating as a civilian pharmaceutical enterprise, the agency could engage in genetic research without arousing suspicion. It could participate in international conferences, interact with the world scientific community, and obtain disease strains from foreign microbe banks — all activities which would have been impossible for a military laboratory.

Conflict between the Fifteenth Directorate and Biopreparat was inevitable. The military hierarchy was not equipped to deal with the relatively free-wheeling atmosphere of scientific research at the new agency. Many of the colonels and generals who had crossed town from army headquarters to Samokatnaya Street were scientists themselves, and the simple act of shedding their military uniforms and donning civilian clothing liberated them overnight. Excited by the prospect of cutting-edge research, some chose to reject the strict parameters laid down by defense headquarters.

The army chiefs responded by doing everything in their power to undermine the agency, which they had come to view as an upstart child. Ogarkov, already overwhelmed by the bureaucratic hassles of establishing an untested new structure within the Soviet government, didn't have the strength to fight them. In 1975, Biopreparat was assigned a Five-Year Plan to develop new biological weapons. Four years later, not a single new weapon had been produced.

Few expected Kalinin, then a forty-one-year-old engineer trained at the army's chemical warfare academy, to make a difference. He was considered a dark horse from the beginning: his knowledge of biological weapons was limited, and he had few friends in the Fifteenth Directorate. But the elegant Kalinin proved a master of political intrigue, maneuvering himself from an obscure post as lab chief in Zagorsk into a management job at one of Biopreparat's institutes and then into the director's chair. A first marriage to the daughter of a lab director, and a second to the daughter of a senior general, helped smooth his path up the ladder. His knack for forging friendships with senior military commanders and academicians at the Soviet Academy of Sciences was equally useful.

Unable to challenge his opponents at army headquarters directly, Kalinin expanded his new dominion by stealth. With the help of powerful friends, Biopreparat's new chief seized institutes controlled by other agencies, grabbing their scientists and recruiting thousands of new ones. He obtained funds to erect dozens of research and production buildings where none had existed before. Between 1975 and 1980, the number of Biopreparat employees quintupled. Most of this increase came in the year after Kalinin's appointment.

Kalinin knew his empire-building was futile unless he could show results. With no significant weapons project under way after nearly two years at Biopreparat's helm, the general was, understandably, in a desperate mood.

In June 1981, he called me at the laboratory in Omutninsk, where I had just been reassigned as chief of technological development. I snapped to attention when I heard his voice. We were all in awe of Kalinin by reputation, and the sheer improbability of a call from the Great Man to a young scientist made me wonder what I could have done wrong.

"I want you to come to Moscow," he announced.

"Yes, of course," I replied.

"I'm going to nominate you deputy director of Omutninsk."

I knew the general had a mercurial temperament, but this sounded alarmingly whimsical. I was just six years out of graduate school, a thirty-one-year-old captain with a lot of energy and only a few achievements to show for it. My name had come to the attention of superior officers thanks to a technique I had recently developed for improving biological weapons production. But I had only just been promoted to my new job. I was nervous, and wanted at the time to say no.

"Well?" Kalinin was still waiting.

"I'll be there tomorrow morning," I said.

It was my first visit to Kalinin's office. I climbed to the second floor and stopped by his secretary's desk. She offered me a glass of tea.

"They're not ready for you yet," she said a little hesitantly. "There's a bit of a disagreement."

I could hear it. The shouting penetrated beyond Kalinin's closed doors, though I couldn't make out who was there or what they were saying.

Seconds later, a red-faced man came barreling out of the door and stopped in front of me. He looked me up and down.

"I don't know what you think you're up to!" he barked. "You're nothing but a puppy."

He stormed back into the office.

I waited another half hour or so, and then Kalinin himself came out. He looked mildly apologetic.

"Go to your hotel," he said. "Have some lunch. I'll call you later."

I did as I was told, but I couldn't eat. Privately, I'd decided to return to Omutninsk as soon as I diplomatically could and to pretend none of this had ever happened.

Kalinin called me late in the afternoon.

"Congratulations," he said. "You are now the new deputy director of Omutninsk."

I began to stammer out a reply, but he interrupted me in mid-sentence. "Just get down here at once."

That afternoon, Kalinin was in one of his rare expansive moods. He took some pleasure in telling me what had happened. It was partly a way of flaunting his achievement before an admiring subordinate, but I'm sure he also wanted to let me know from the start who was boss.

"The thing is," he began, "a couple of the armchair generals in that room disagreed with your appointment — Benetsky, most of all."

Benetsky was Kalinin's deputy, and the man who had given me the tongue-lashing. He was also a powerful military bureaucrat who had recently been transferred from the Ministry of Defense. Everyone knew that Kalinin feared him.

"Benetsky insisted that a thirty-year-old captain can't possibly manage lieutenant colonels and majors," Kalinin said. "He said he had never heard of anything so ridiculous in all of his career."

Kalinin now had a sly smile on his face, a smile I would get to know well. "But I managed to convince him you'd do all right."

"How?" I ventured fearfully.

"You'll turn our tularemia project around."

It was an assignment no scientist of my age and experience could have expected to get so early in his career. Both Biopreparat and the Fifteenth Directorate had been searching for years for a way of making tularemia into a more effective biological weapon. I knew the project was fraught with risk, but I was caught up in the challenge.

Tularemia is a debilitating illness, rife among wild animals and common in the Rocky Mountains, California, Oklahoma, parts of eastern Europe, and Siberia. It is a hardy organism, capable of surviving for weeks, sometimes months, in decaying animal corpses. Tularemia is primarily transmitted to humans by ticks, mosquitoes, and wild rabbits, though squirrels, sheep, cats, and dogs have also been identified as carriers. While highly infectious, it almost never spreads directly from one person to another.

Victims can be laid up for weeks with chills, nausea, headaches, and fever. If left untreated, symptoms usually last two to four weeks, hut they can continue for months. Francisella tularensis is lethal in 30 percent of untreated cases.

After World War II, scientists in the United States, Britain, and Canada developed tularemia for use on the battlefield, where it could immobilize an entire division through the intensive medical care required for each stricken soldier.

Soviet commanders considered tularemia an unpredictable weapon for close-quarter tactical maneuvers. The risk of infecting one's own troops was high. But we had obtained, from a leading international research institute in Europe, a strain capable of overcoming immunity in vaccinated monkeys.

Our civilian credentials ensured that no questions were asked when we requested it. As far as we knew, there had never been an attempt anywhere in the world to weaponize a vaccine-resistant strain of tularemia. For Kalinin, the project represented a chance to prove what Biopreparat could do.

We spent months in frustrating calculations and false starts, but by the early summer of 1982, we were ready to test our new weapon on Rebirth Island. The military had been running biological weapons trials there for years, but this was the first time Biopreparat would use the testing grounds on the Aral Sea — we'd never had a weapon to test before. We knew the high command would be watching jealously and counting on us to fail.

The process of getting a biological weapon approved for inclusion in the Soviet arsenal had changed little since the war. Test results had to be vetted by officials at the Military-Industrial Commission in Moscow and the complex lab work involved in preparing what we called the "final formulation" — the liquid or powdered version of the agent to be used in bombs or sprayers— had to be written down like a recipe, so that it could be reproduced by any technician at any of our production plants.

If the Ministry of Defense was satisfied with the test results, and if the final formulation was judged to be sound, a report would be prepared for the chief of the Army General Staff, who would issue an order officially designating the new weapon part of the Soviet arsenal. The recipe would then be stamped "top secret" and filed at headquarters, with a copy to the production plant assigned to produce the weapon.

If the Ministry of Defense was not satisfied, research would begin all over again.

Five hundred monkeys were ordered from Africa for tularemia tests on Rebirth Island. We scheduled a series of special flights from the military airport at Kubinka, outside Moscow.

Importing that many animals at one time without arousing suspicion was not as difficult as it sounds. The arrangements were made well in advance by clandestine overseas trading associations run by the Soviet Ministry of External Trade, which also supplied us with the cages and other special equipment. I don't know how we would have explained such an emergency request if we had been asked, but in the old Soviet Union, no one ever asked.

Since we were testing a vaccine-resistant weapon, all of the monkeys had to be immunized before they were exposed.

Back in the labs at Omutninsk, we filled twenty bomblets with my new tularemia weapon and prepared them for shipment to Rebirth Island.

Two senior officers were placed in charge of the tularemia test team that year: General Anatoly Vorobyov, first deputy director of Biopreparat, and General Lebedinsky of the Fifteenth Directorate. I was ordered to stay at Omutninsk to prepare an alternate formula for testing later that summer. I found it hard to concentrate on my lab work.

Information from Rebirth Island was difficult to come by. There was no telephone at the test center, and the only communication with Aralsk was through cryptograms on the army's closed-circuit communications network. I would have no idea what had really happened until my colleagues made their way back to Omutninsk.

When the coded test results filtered back the news was better than anyone had expected, including me. Nearly all the immunized monkeys died. I received a call from a very happy Kalinin.

"Kanatjan!" he shouted over the phone line from Moscow. It was one of the few times in those early days that he used my first name. "You are a great man!"

Other congratulatory calls followed from colleagues in Moscow who had heard about the results. A few weeks later I made the long trip to Moscow again, this time to receive a special military medal for "wartime services" from the gloating Kalinin.

Perplexingly, there was no word from the Fifteenth Directorate for weeks — not even an indication that a formal review was under way. Then we received a stilted letter from the Ministry of Defense.

"This weapon cannot be accepted into the arsenal," the letter said. "Our investigation has shown that preliminary testing of blood samples in affected monkeys was not done correctly."

The ministry was right. General Vorobyov had neglected a couple of established procedures in his haste to prepare the monkeys. His lapse of attention had little bearing on the success of the tests, but the military decided to put us in our place. The Fifteenth Directorate was not about to hand its rival an easy victory, particularly on a project directed by a "puppy." Kalinin was furious.

It turned out to be a minor setback. The next year we conducted new tests with an even more efficient dry variant of tularemia, following all the procedures meticulously, and the new version of weaponized tularemia entered the Soviet arsenal. The achievement launched Biopreparat as a significant force in the nation's weapons establishment. Kalinin was now safely ensconced in the backstairs club of Kremlin military politics, and I had been initiated into the fraternity.

Meanwhile, at Rebirth Island, everything connected to the tularemia test, from research notes to blood samples to the monkeys' corpses, had to be incinerated. The testing area was swept clean of all signs of human and animal occupation and then disinfected to eliminate all "footprints" of biological activity.

Open-air testing at Rebirth Island stopped in 1992. Records of what happened there no longer exist.

3. Military Medicine

Biological warfare was the furthest thing from my mind when I entered the military faculty of the Tomsk Medical Institute in 1973 to begin graduate studies as a cadet intern. I was planning to become a military psychiatrist, until a professor gave me an assignment that changed my relationship to medicine. He asked me to analyze a mysterious outbreak of tularemia on the German-Soviet front shortly before the Battle of Stalingrad in 1942.

The assignment was for a course in epidemiology. Most students disliked the professor, the balding, stony-faced Colonel Aksyonenko, but I respected him. He didn't seem to take himself quite so seriously as the other members of our faculty, who flaunted their advanced degrees and senior ranks. I even liked his lectures. They captured my attention in a way that other courses in military medicine, field surgery, and hygiene — courses we had to take before receiving an officer's commission and a posting — never did.

At the institute library, I spent several nights leafing through the twenty-five-volume History of Soviet Military Medicine in the Great Patriotic War: 1941–1945 and pulled from the shelves dust-caked scientific journals from the wartime era. As I read, I became fascinated by what seemed an inexplicable sequence of events.

The first victims of tularemia were German panzer troops, who fell ill in such large numbers during the late summer of 1942 that the Nazi campaign in southern Russia ground to a temporary halt. Thousands of Russian soldiers and civilians living in the Volga region came down with tularemia within a week of the initial German outbreak. The Soviet high command rushed ten mobile military hospitals into the area, a sign of the extraordinary rise in the number of cases.

Most of the journals reported this as a naturally occurring epidemic, but there had never been such a widespread outbreak in Russia before. One epidemiological study provided a telling statistic: in 1941, ten thousand cases of tularemia had been reported in the Soviet Union. In the year of the Stalingrad outbreak, the number of cases soared to more than one hundred thousand. In 1943, the incidence of disease returned to ten thousand.

It seemed strange that so many men had first fallen sick on one side only. The opposing armies were so close together that a simultaneous outbreak was all but inevitable. Only exposure to a sudden and concentrated quantity of tularemia could explain the onslaught of infections in the German troops alone. Seventy percent of those infected came down with a pneumonic form of the disease, which could only have been caused by purposeful dissemination.

When I walked into my professor's office with a draft of my paper, I thought I had solved the puzzle. He was concentrating on the latest edition of Krasnaya Zvezda, the official army newspaper.

"So, what have you discovered?" Aksyonenko asked, smiling up at me before returning to his paper.

"I've studied the records, Colonel," I said cautiously. "The pattern of the disease doesn't suggest a natural outbreak."

He looked up sharply. "What does it suggest?"

"It suggests that this epidemic was caused intentionally."

He cut me off before I could continue.

"Please," he said softly. "I want you to do me a favor and forget you ever said what you just did. I will forget it too."

I stared at him in confusion.

"All I asked you to do was describe how we handled the outbreak, how we contained it." Aksyonenko had begun to frown. "You have gone beyond your assignment."

He pointed to the paper I had left on his desk. "I don't want to see this until you've given it some thought. And never... never mention to anyone else what you just told me. Believe me, you'll be doing yourself a favor."

The final version of my paper did not mention the likelihood of deliberate infection. Yet Aksyonenko's reaction convinced me that I was on to something: Soviet troops must have sprayed tularemia at the Germans. A sudden change in the direction of the wind, or contaminated rodents passing through the lines, had infected our soldiers and the disease had then spread through the region.

Years later, an elderly lieutenant colonel who worked in the secret bacteriological weapons facility in the city of Kirov during the war told me that a tularemia weapon was developed in Kirov in 1941, the year before the Battle of Stalingrad. He left me with no doubt that the weapon had been used.

The lesson of Stalingrad would not be forgotten by our biological warfare strategists. In the postwar years, the Soviet high command shifted its attention from battlefield deployment to "deep targets" far behind enemy lines, where there was no danger of infecting one's own troops.

Stalingrad was a test of survival for the Soviet Union. If the city had been lost, the nation's industrial heartland in the Urals would have fallen before the advancing German-tanks. More than one million of our soldiers died defending the city. In forcing the Germans into a humiliating retreat, they had turned the tide of the war.

The moral argument for using any available weapon against an enemy threatening us with certain annihilation seemed to me irrefutable. I came away from that assignment fascinated by the notion that disease could be used as an instrument of war. I began to read everything I could find about epidemiology and the biological sciences.

Near the army barracks on Rebirth Island stands a grave marked by a small headstone with an illegible name. A young woman was buried there, a member of one of the first teams of army scientists to conduct weapons trials at the Aral Sea proving ground. She died of glanders, a disease that normally strikes down horses, in 1942.

Nothing else about her is known.

Dozens, perhaps hundreds, of people have given their lives in the service of our scientific research. Occasionally their names crop up in classified files, but many deaths have gone unrecorded. The headstone on Rebirth Island was a rare public acknowledgment, for those who possessed the security clearances to see it, of the human cost of our program.

The history of Biopreparat and of the Soviet biological war machine is written in casualty reports, government decrees, instruction manuals for the manufacture of our pathogenic weapons, and summaries of test trials. When I became second-in-command of Biopreparat, I was able to obtain access to many of these records, kept off limits to most employees. But even the records didn't tell the entire story.

Over time, carefully, so as not to draw attention, I managed to find out more through conversations with old-timers who remembered what the records did not, or would not, say. This is how I learned that the Soviet Union's involvement with biological warfare began long before World War II.

A year after taking power in 1917, the Bolshevik government plunged into a savage conflict with anti-Communist forces determined to bring down the fledgling workers' state. Red and White armies clashed from Siberia to the Crimean Peninsula, and by the time hostilities ended in 1921, as many as ten million people had lost their lives. The majority of the deaths did not result from injuries on the battlefield. They were caused by famine and disease.

The casualties inflicted by a brutal epidemic of typhus from 1918 to 1921 made a deep impression on the commanders of the Red Army. Even if they knew nothing of the history of biological warfare, they could recognize that disease had served as a more potent weapon than bullets or artillery shells.

Victory in the civil war did not relieve the pressure on the new government. Hostile foreign powers menaced the Bolshevik experiment on every side, and the weakened Soviet state seemed unlikely to survive another onslaught. Someone realized that one of Russia's natural resources, its scientific talent, might help the revolution survive.

In 1928, the governing Revolutionary Military Council signed a secret decree ordering the transformation of typhus into a battlefield weapon. Three years earlier the fledgling Soviet government had signed an international treaty in Geneva banning the use of poison gas and bacteriological weapons. The weapons program was placed under the control of the GPU (the State Political Directorate), one of the predecessors of the KGB. It would continue to be supervised by state security organs until the early 1950s.

The 1928 decree represented a momentous decision. Bred in the unsanitary conditions of the battlefront or the slum, epidemic typhus has ravaged mankind for centuries. It is carried by lice from one infected person to another and cannot reproduce outside its host. Unlike typhoid fever, which is caused by salmonella bacteria, typhus is a rickettsial disease, carried by tiny rod-shaped microorganisms.

Once inside the body, the rickettsiae swarm through the blood, breaking down the cell walls of blood vessels as they multiply. Around seven to ten days after infection, victims will abruptly develop the first symptoms, beginning with throbbing headaches and a high fever. The stricken tissues become inflamed as they try to fight off the invaders, triggering a rash that spreads over the body. Spots of gangrene will sometimes appear on fingertips and other extremities as blood circulation slows down. Without treatment, the disease will send its victims into weeks of delirium and is fatal in 40 percent of cases.

Improvements in hygiene eradicated epidemic typhus from most of western Europe in the twentieth century, but it continues to afflict Africa, parts of South America, and Asia. A typhus vaccine was developed during World War II, though it is rarely used today, other than to immunize travelers to regions where the disease remains endemic. Administered in three separate doses over the course of five months, it provides almost complete protection from the disease. It was at one time also used for treatment, but it has been replaced in that capacity by antibiotics.

When the Soviet Union first turned to typhus, there was no known way to control or contain this relentlessly efficient killer. The question facing our scientists was how to harness that efficiency.

Infecting lice with typhus and spreading them among a target population was not practical. Eventually someone hit on the idea of breeding typhus in the labs and spraying it in an aerosol form from airplanes.

Early biological weapons work involved primitive methods. The pathogens were bred in chicken embryos or in live animals such as rats that were killed when the concentration of pathogens was highest and were liquefied in large blenders. The liquid was then poured into explosives.

I learned about the 1928 decree and the early typhus experiments from a set of old reports at the Ministry of Defense. Summaries of experiments and testing, they were purposefully short on detail. No one wanted to commit the full information to paper. I can only assume that the original records have long since been destroyed. I was able to piece the rest of the story together with the help of veterans in our program who had learned the facts in turn from older scientists.

The first Soviet facility used for biological warfare research was the Leningrad Military Academy. Small teams of military and GPU scientists began to explore ways of growing significant quantities of typhus rickettsiae. The first attempts to cultivate typhus in the lab employed chicken embryos. Thousands of chicken eggs were sent each week to the Leningrad Military Academy — at a time when most Soviet citizens were lucky to get one full meal a day. By the 1930s, the Leningrad Academy had produced powdered and liquid versions of typhus, for use in a primitive aerosol.

Despite the program's secrecy, the Soviet government could not resist providing a public hint of its achievements. Marshal Kliment Voroshilov, a civil war cavalry hero who was Stalin's commissar for defense, declared on February 22, 1938, that although the Soviet Union planned to uphold the Geneva Protocol outlawing biological weapons, "should our enemies employ such methods against us, then I can tell you that we are ready — quite ready — to employ them against an aggressor on his own soil."

The biological weapons program soon expanded to harness other diseases. The Leningrad Military Academy sent some of its scientists and equipment one hundred miles north to the White Sea, a barren Arctic expanse flecked with tiny islands used to house political prisoners. By the mid-1930s Solovetsky Island, one of the largest, was the second major site of the Soviet biological warfare program.

At Solovetsky, a Soviet prison which later became the hub of Stalin's "Gulag Archipelago" concentration-camp system, scientists worked with typhus, Q fever, glanders, and melioidosis (an incapacitating disease similar to glanders). Solovetsky's large laboratory compound was built by prison labor. Many of the prisoners may also have been involuntary participants in our earliest experiments with biological agents.

The summary reports compiled by the Ministry of Defense describe several dozen cases of melioidosis from that period. The material I saw was intentionally vague as to whether humans were involved, but the way the case reports were arranged — with nineteen in one group, eleven in another, and twelve in yet another— suggested an irregular pattern not usually associated with animal testing. And the symptoms described could only have been experienced by human subjects. There have been repeated allegations in the West about Soviet germ warfare experiments on humans, but I have seen no other reports to indicate that these took place after the 1930s.

The research exacted a grim toll on our scientists. One account of a test with plague in the late 1930s ended with a cryptic note: "This experiment was not finished due to the death of the researcher." Another from the same period reported that twenty workers had been infected with glanders during experiments. The report didn't say where these experiments took place, or whether the workers had died, but in the days before antibiotics, death on exposure was virtually certain.

The biological agents explored before World War II underline the Soviet Union's primary interest in developing battlefield weapons designed to incapacitate enemy troops. Although this objective was reversed after the tularemia outbreak among our soldiers at Stalingrad, the laboratories in Leningrad and on Solovetsky Island were considered so crucial to Soviet defenses that when Nazi tanks invaded Russia in 1941, the high command ordered the immediate evacuation of both sites.

The lab equipment, fermenters, and glass vials containing strains of diseases were loaded on a train and sent south to the city of Gorky. On the day they arrived, Germans subjected Gorky to its first — and only — aerial bombardment of the war. Panicked commanders ordered the train to keep moving.

They came to a stop at Kirov, west of the Ural Mountains. The commanders of the expedition expropriated an army hospital for the severely wounded on Oktyabrsky Prospekt in the center of town (the patients were sent elsewhere) and the equipment was hastily reassembled. A new production line was working within weeks. It soon proved its value to the war effort. The lieutenant colonel who told me about the tularemia production line at Kirov also suggested that an outbreak of Q fever among German troops on leave in Crimea in 1943 was the result of an attempt to use another one of the biological warfare agents developed by his facility. I was never able to investigate this further, but Q fever was practically unheard of in Russia prior to that outbreak.

The region was swamped with refugees, transplanted munitions factories, and relocated airplane assembly plants when the production team arrived in Kirov. Scientists worried that the loss of Solovetsky Island left them with no place to test their agents. They started a search for a new testing ground, safe from the Germans and remote enough to avoid infecting the civilian population. The search led them to Rebirth Island.

The Soviet Union's approach to biological warfare took a new turn in September 1945, when Soviet troops in Manchuria overran a Japanese military facility known as Water Purification Unit 731.

Unit 731 operated Japan's secret germ warfare program. Rumors of the unit's activities in northern China had been circulating in Russia and the West since the late 1930s, but the details finally emerged through captured documents and the testimony of Japanese prisoners of war. The unit, commanded by Lieutenant General Shiro Ishii, experimented with anthrax, dysentery, cholera, and plague on U.S., British, and Commonwealth POWs. During the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, porcelain canisters of fleas infected with plague and other primitive biological weapons were used in air raids that killed thousands of rural Chinese.

The captured Japanese documents were sent to Moscow, where they made absorbing reading. They included blueprints for biological warfare assembly plants, far larger and more complex than our own. Japan's program had been organized like a small industry, with a central production facility fed by continuous research and development.

Stalin ordered his most trusted aide, the sadistic KGB chief Lavrenty Beria, to match and if possible surpass what the Japanese had accomplished. In 1946, a year after the war ended, a new army biological research complex was established at Sverdlovsk. Construction engineers followed the designs laid out in the captured Japanese blueprints.

Stalin died in 1953. Beria was executed the same year, after an abortive attempt to seize power in the Kremlin. Under the new Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, the responsibility for biological warfare was transferred to the Fifteenth Directorate of the Red Army. Colonel General Yefim Smirnov, chief of army medical services during World War II, became commander.

Smirnov was an impassioned advocate of biological weapons. He believed that they would dominate the battlefield of the future. A physician who had served briefly under Stalin as minister of health, he transformed the program into a strategic arm of the military and remained a dominating presence in the Soviet biological warfare program for the next twenty years. Smirnov worked so swiftly that Defense Minister Marshal Georgi Zhukov could announce in 1956 that Moscow was capable of deploying biological as well as chemical weapons in the next war — an announcement that set off a flurry of new offensive research in the West. Few Soviet citizens were aware of it.

By the late 1950s, facilities investigating every aspect of biological warfare were dotted across the country.

One of the most successful programs was created by the Ministry of Agriculture. A special division was established to research and manufacture anti-livestock and anti-crop weapons. The division was given the uninspired title of Main Directorate for Scientific and Production Enterprises. The biowarfare program was code-named "Ecology."

Scientists at the agriculture ministry developed variants of foot-and-mouth disease and rinderpest for use against cows, African swine fever for pigs, and ornithosis and psittacosis to strike down chickens. Like anti-personnel biological weapons, these agents were designed to be sprayed from tanks attached to Ilyushin bombers and flown low over a target area along a straight line for hundreds of miles.

This "line source" method of dissemination could cover large stretches of farmland. Even if only a few animals were successfully infected, the contagious nature of the organisms ensured that the disease would wipe out agricultural activity over a wide area in a matter of months.

Many of the ministry's facilities were installed in the centers of towns and cities, to keep their military connection camouflaged. This suggests how little those who ruled our lives worried about our health.

Across the street from the apartment block where I grew up in Alma-Ata (now Almaty), the former capital of the Soviet Socialist Republic of Kazakhstan, a large, rusting factory served as a makeshift playground for children in the neighborhood. It was a fantastic world of hulking machinery and cavernous tunnels, made all the more alluring by the large Keep Out signs posted conspicuously on the property. We would crawl through the fence on afternoons after school and, shifting through piles of metal, would occasionally stumble on odd-smelling canisters, painted in army green. Luckily, we never managed to open them.

Many years later, going through some old reports, I discovered that the factory was used by the Ministry of Agriculture until the early 1960s to make anti-crop and anti-livestock agents. It was called Biokombinat.

4. The Enzyme Project

In the early days of the Cold War, when we appeared to be leading the world in space and nuclear weapons technology, Soviet biology was paralyzed. We had gone from being one of the world's powerhouses of immunological and epidemiological research to a backwater of demoralized and discredited scientists. The cause was one man — a Russian agronomist named Trofim Lysenko.

Lysenko came to national attention in the late 1920s, when he reported a successful experiment breeding winter peas in a remote farm station in Azerbaijan. His cultivation of several generations of plants resistant to cold temperatures led him to conclude that genetic theories about humans were wrong: rather than being a slave of his genes, man was capable of changing his essential traits through exposure to different environmental conditions.

Lysenko, who once bragged that he never reported the results of an experiment that contradicted his theories, claimed his work proved that environment was more important than heredity in the evolution of plants and animals. Calling genetics a bourgeois discipline that insulted the proletariat, he emerged as a paragon of the "new" Soviet science based on Marxist materialism. By the 1940s Lysenko was a confidant of Stalin. With the patronage of the Soviet dictator, he maneuvered his way to the top of the Soviet scientific establishment, imposing, in the process, an iron brand of political correctness on the nation's biologists.

Dissenting scientists were condemned to prison camps or publicly humiliated. No journal that published an article on genetics could survive. By the 1950s, little remained of the pioneering spirit of Russia's great biologists and geneticists.

The gap in our scientific knowledge was of no interest to the strategic planners responsible for modernizing our weapons program after World War II. Genetics didn't seem to have any connection to biological warfare. But a series of brilliant discoveries between the 1950s and 1970s unleashed a revolution in Western science, forcing the Soviet Union to recognize that it was behind in more ways than one.

In 1953, two young scientists, James Watson and Francis Crick, identified the shape of DNA, the genetic code that determines the behavior of all life on earth. Over the next two decades, researchers found ways to manipulate DNA in the laboratory. They discovered that genes of separate organisms could be cloned and spliced together, a process that opened a new frontier in the study of the behavior and treatment of disease.

Soviet biologists knew about the work in the West thanks to smuggled journals and reports, but research conducted in Russian labs was heavily restricted. The influence of Lysenko — who lived until 1976—was too powerful. A few experts recognized that the ability to manipulate genes broadened the horizon of bioweaponeering, offering the possibility of producing new strains capable of overcoming vaccines and antidotes. To some, it also raised the disconcerting possibility that our competitors in the West could put us at a severe strategic disadvantage.

Only one scientist had the clout, and the courage, to speak up. His name was Yury Ovchinnikov, vice president of the Soviet Academy of Sciences and a renowned molecular biologist.

Ovchinnikov understood the significance of what he had read in Western scientific journals, and he knew that there were no Soviet laboratories, and few Soviet scientists, equipped to match that level of work. He decided to resolve the crisis in Russian biology by appealing to the self-interest of the masters of our militarized economy. In 1972, he asked the Ministry of Defense to support a genetics program devoted to developing new agents for biological warfare.

Our practical-minded generals, like their counterparts everywhere in the world, were conservative and not easy to convince. Few of them knew the extent to which the Soviet Union was already committed to biological warfare, and even those who understood the concept had become skeptical of the extravagant claims for their importance made by old warhorses like Smirnov and Zhukov. They wanted weapons that would fire, explode, blast — not germs that no one could see. But Ovchinnikov was persuasive. The most skeptical military commander would have to agree that it was dangerous, if not outrageous, to be behind the West in anything.

Ovchinnikov found an influential ally in Leonid Brezhnev. The one-time metallurgical engineer who led the Soviet Union for eighteen years until his death in 1982 regarded the magisterial akademiks of the Soviet scientific establishment with a respect bordering on awe. Ovchinnikov was soon giving private lectures on genetics to Brezhnev and his aides. Slowly, the message sank in. Ovchinnikov, the youngest academician in the country, was appointed to a state commission exploring the military implications of the new gene-splicing technology.

The commission's work led to the most ambitious Soviet arms program since the development of the hydrogen bomb. Launched by a secret Brezhnev decree in 1973, the program aimed to modernize existing biological weapons and to develop genetically altered pathogens, resistant to antibiotics and vaccines, which could be turned into powerful weapons for use in intercontinental war-fare. The program was called Enzyme.

The 1973 decree led that same year to the founding of Biopreparat. The nation's best biologists, epidemiologists, and biochemists were recruited in an effort that would soon absorb billions of rubles from the state treasury and spawn the most advanced program for genetically engineered weapons in the world.

The Enzyme project focused on tularemia, plague, anthrax, and glanders — all diseases that had been successfully weaponized by our military scientists but whose effects had been undermined by the development of antibiotics. But there were many other agents under review, including viral agents such as smallpox, Marburg, Ebola, Machupo, Junin, and VEE.

The Soviet Union's biowarfare research was concentrated at army factories in the cities of Sverdlovsk, Kirov, and Zagorsk. These were the only sites classified as "hot mode" — sufficiently insulated for work with highly infectious organisms.

Over the next decade, dozens of biological warfare installations disguised as centers of pharmaceutical or medical research were built throughout the country. In Leningrad, the Institute of Ultra-Pure Biopreparations was created to develop new techniques and equipment for cultivating pathogenic agents. At Omutninsk, in the pine forests near Kirov, a bacteriological research and weapons production facility was constructed alongside an old munitions plant operated by the Ministry of Defense. An entire "research city" for genetic engineering went up at Obolensk, just south of Moscow, and the Lyubuchany Institute of Immunology was established in Chekhov, also in the Moscow region, to investigate antibiotic-resistant disease strains. For work on viruses, the enormous Vector research and testing compound was built near the Siberian city of Novosibirsk.

These were just some of the facilities opened by Biopreparat. Existing state laboratories and research centers were also sucked into the new world created by Brezhnev's program. Several biological facilities managed by the Ministry of Health, including the large anti-plague research complexes in Kuybyshev, Minsk, Saratov, Irkutsk, Volgograd, and Almaty, were given special funding for weapons-oriented genetic research. The Soviet Academy of Sciences also played a significant role, conscripting four Moscow-region institutes into the Enzyme project: the Institute of Protein, the Institute of Molecular Biology, the Institute of Biochemistry and Physiology of Microorganisms, and the Institute of Bioorganic Chemistry.

Meanwhile, our testing program accelerated. Between 1979 and 1989, the Soviet Union conducted large scale tests of an aerosol containing Bacillus thuringiensis — a harmless simulant — over the Novosibirsk region, using a plane with civilian markings. Similar experiments were run at a military proving ground near the city of Nukus in the Kara Kalpak Republic, and in the Caucasus. Another harmless agent, Serratia marcescens, was used in several tests conducted by the Institute of Biological Machinery inside the Moscow Metro system during the 1980s. Ballistic missiles containing simulants of biological agents were fired in tests over the Pacific Ocean between 1960 and 1980.

To manage the vast outlay of funds, a special department was created within Gosplan, the state economic planning committee. The operating and capital budget, considered too secret to keep in the hands of the civilian apparatchiks who ran every other sector of the Soviet economy, was administered by a high-ranking general.

Our program paralleled the Soviet nuclear complex in organization and secrecy. Both generated a sprawl of clandestine cities, manufacturing plants, and research centers across the Soviet Union. The atomic weapons network controlled by the Ministry of Medium Machine Building was much larger, but the production of microbes doesn't require uranium mines or a massive work force. When our biological warfare program was operating at its peak level, in the late 1980s, more than sixty thousand people were engaged in research, testing, production, and equipment design throughout the country. This included some thirty thousand Biopreparat employees.

Money was never a problem. As late as 1990, when Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev was promising the world major cutbacks in our arsenals, I was authorized to spend the equivalent of $200 million, including $70 million for new buildings. The total figure spent that year on biological weapons development was close to a billion dollars.

Biopreparat was the "brains" of the weapons program, supplying the scientific and engineering expertise for the projects commissioned by the army command. A special council, the Inter-Agency Scientific and Technical Council, acted as an advisory board. leaded by a government minister, the commission comprised twenty five members from the principal scientific organizations of the country. Before I left Biopreparat in 1992, I served as deputy chief, with Kalinin. The chairman was Valery Bykov, then minister of medical industry.

Yury Ovchinnikov lived long enough to see his original ideas bear fruit. He died of cancer in 1987, when still in his fifties. I saw Ovchinnikov only once, at a large meeting in the Biopreparat offices. He was tall, charismatic, and elegant, very much like Kalinin. The two men knew each other well, and Ovchinnikov's quiet patronage was probably the deciding factor in transferring Kalinin, then an ambitious and relatively unknown officer in the Army Chemical Corps, into the coveted new agency when it was established in 1973.

Ovchinnikov had rescued Soviet biology from the morass of ideological politics, only to harness it to Soviet militarism. Although his name now graces a prominent Moscow science institute, he is remembered by many of us as the father of our modern biological warfare program. As Ovchinnikov recognized, such a program can only be as good as its scientists. The challenge was to find scientists willing to lead secret lives.

In April 1975, two months before I graduated from the Tomsk Medical Institute, a polite white-haired man in civilian clothes came from Moscow to the drab industrial town in Siberia where I had spent the previous two years in graduate study.

He wanted to meet several of the students who had specialized in epidemiology and infectious diseases. By then, I was one of them. In the intervening years, I had attended lectures on all forms of weapons of mass destruction and learned methods of protecting troops against nuclear, biological, and chemical attacks. No one ever suggested that we had a biological weapons program of our own. Instead, we were warned that as our enemies had them, it was vital for us to understand how they worked.

As I had learned from my brief foray into the Battle of Stalingrad, biological warfare was not the sort of thing you discussed openly. But I was fascinated by this area of military medicine. The romantic image of medics saving lives amidst the smoke and drama of a battlefield had appealed to me since I was a young boy. It struck me that military physicians were soldiers after their own fashion, waging a private war against an enemy that knew how to exploit every human weakness. The only weapons available to us were our skills in identifying symptoms and in applying the correct treatment.

My interests in epidemiology and in laboratory research were an ideal combination for the secret agency created two years earlier. This enthusiasm impressed my teachers. Aksyonenko must have passed my name on to the mysterious government recruiter, along with other students who showed the same passion for exploring the behavior of diseases.

Our visitor was soft-spoken and courteous. We were impressed that he had been given a special office to meet each one of us privately. I eventually learned he was a colonel from the human resources division of Biopreparat. He died several months after our meeting in Tomsk. I will never forget that meeting.

He was dressed in a dark suit and tie, but he carried himself erect, like a military man. He shook my hand with a firm grip.

"You have a good record and excellent recommendations from your teachers," he began. "Do you enjoy research?" "Yes, sir," I said at once.

"Good," he smiled. "You seem to be exactly the sort of person we're interested in." "What for?" I asked.

"I work for an organization attached to the Council of Ministers," he said elliptically, "and we could use your skills. I'm not permitted to say more, but I can tell you it has something to do with biological defense."

When I heard the phrase "Council of Ministers," I was thrilled. It was the highest government body in the land, redolent of power and authority. The prospect of working in a secret program for the state excited me, as did the idea of living in Moscow — which I automatically assumed was part of his invitation.

I also assumed he was not telling the entire truth when he spoke of biological defense. A special knowledge comes with growing up in a state like the Soviet Union. You were constantly alert to the probability that what you were being told had little relation to the message that was being conveyed. But the fact of the matter was that, at the age of twenty-five, I was too flattered by his attention to care.

"I'm interested," I said.

"Naturally," he went on, watching me carefully, "nothing can be final until we check you out. I'm going to give you a number of forms. Answer every question, in detail, and bring them back to me."

I stood up, forms in hand, and turned to go.

"One more thing," he called out. "Don't tell your friends or teachers about this conversation. Not even your parents."

The interview had lasted less than ten minutes, but it was enough to inspire in me a sense of the significance of what I was being asked to do. I obeyed his order almost to the letter. I called my parents and told them I might be getting an important assignment in Moscow, but that they would have to wait before I could tell them more.

A few weeks after the interview, we stood in our crisp new junior lieutenants' uniforms and polished knee-length boots on the parade ground of the institute. It was graduation day, and the commanding officer began to read out the names of every newly commissioned lieutenant and his assignment. A few students received coveted postings in East Germany or Poland. Others were condemned to the backwoods boredom of a provincial army base.

My name wasn't called until the end of the ceremony.

"Lieutenant Kanatjan Alibekov!"

I stepped forward and saluted.

"You are assigned to the Council of Ministers of the Soviet Union!"

The names of four other classmates followed, all with the same assignment. Unbeknownst to me, they had also been interviewed by the friendly white-haired man.

I couldn't help but grin: I was going to Moscow.

Several days later, each of us was called to the school's administrative office to receive our letter of assignment. I looked it over quickly, and my face fell.

I was assigned to a post office box.

"What does this mean?" I asked. "Where is this?"

The officer who gave me the letter tried not to smile when he saw my expression.

"Omutninsk," he said. "It's near Kirov, but you're not supposed to tell anyone. You'll be getting a letter of authority, which you can use to get a train ticket."

All five of us, it turned out, were going to the same place. Some of our other classmates had been impressed when they first heard of our assignment to the Council of Ministers. A few shrewder students understood that we were pointed toward secret work. Some even guessed that we were going to biological "research facilities," although no one was quite sure what they were, and no one dared ask.

"You're going to have a very short life," one of my friends said breezily. "I've heard no one lasts in those programs more than a couple of years."