Biohazard

5. Lab Work

I have lost all sense of smell and have the broadest range of allergies of anyone I know. I can't eat butter, cheese, eggs, mayonnaise, sausages, chocolate, or candy. I swallow two or three pills of anti-allergy medicine a day — more on bad days, when my sinuses start to drain. Every morning, I rub ointment over my face, neck, and hands to give my skin the natural lubricants it has lost. The countless vaccinations I received against anthrax, plague, and tularemia weakened my resistance to disease and probably shortened my life.

A bioweapons lab leaves its mark on a person forever. But this was all in the distant future when I stepped off the train in a desolate corner of western Russia on a wet midsummer's night in 1975. The East European Scientific Branch of the Institute of Applied Biochemistry was tucked away in a forest carpeted with mushrooms just outside the old Russian city of Omutninsk. It was almost a city of its own. More than ten thousand people lived and worked there, nearly a third of the population of the nearby town. Some thirty wrafherbeaten brick buildings, including dormitories, labs, schools, and a heating plant, dotted the grounds. The working area was surrounded by a concrete wall and an electric fence, but the entire complex could have been mistaken for any of the self-sufficient civilian industrial enterprises built by the dozens in equally remote areas of the country. Trucks lumbered in and out every day. Schoolchildren played in one section of the compound. The guards at the front gate never wore uniforms.

Omutninsk housed one of Russia's newest biological warfare facilities. A chemical plant that had been producing biopesticides in the compound since the 1960s was expanded by the Fifteenth Directorate to serve as a reserve "mobilization" plant for wartime production of biological weapons. In the 1970s, construction began on a new complex of buildings. When I arrived, two years after Brezhnev's secret decree, Biopreparat was in the process of turning Omutninsk into a major center of biological weapons production.

In organizational charts the compound was designated as the "Omutninsk Scientific and Production Base," but we referred to it in our coded cables by its post office box number: B-8389. Officially, Omutninsk manufactured pesticides and other agricultural chemicals. Unofficially it served as a training ground for the next generation of Soviet bioweaponeers.

Some ten or fifteen of us, all in our twenties, arrived that summer. Freshly commissioned officers, we came from military graduate institutes around the Soviet Union. Several had been trained, as I had, in medicine, but our group also included engineers, chemists, and biologists — picked after mysterious interviews followed by long background checks to ascertain that no hint of subversion lurked in our families.

From the very first night when I arrived, soaking wet, to report to my new commanding officer only to be chastised for wearing my military uniform, I knew I had entered into a new world. There were no orientation lectures or seminars, but if we had any doubts as to the real purpose of our assignment, they were quickly dispelled. We were given a paper with a list of regulations for behavior at the plant. At the bottom we were made to sign off on a pledge never to reveal what we were told or what we did.

Our "instructors" came from the KGB. They handed us more forms explaining that we would be doing top-secret research in biotechnology and biochemistry for defensive purposes. Then we were called, one by one, for individual sessions.

"You are aware that this isn't normal work," the officer told me as I sat down. It was a declaration, not a question.

"Yes," I replied.

"I have to inform you that there exists an international treaty on biological warfare, which the Soviet Union has signed," he went on. "According to that treaty no one is allowed to make biological weapons. But the United States signed it too, and we believe that the Americans are lying."

I told him, earnestly, that I believed it too. We had been taught as schoolchildren and it was drummed into us as young military officers that the capitalist world was united in only one aim: to destroy the Soviet Union. It was not difficult for me to believe that the United States would use any conceivable weapon against us, and that our own survival depended on matching their duplicity.

"Good," he said with a satisfied nod. "You can go now — and good luck."

The five minutes I spent with him represented the first and last time any official would bring up a question of ethics for the rest of my career.

Bacteria are cultivated identically whether they are intended for industrial application, weaponization, or vaccination. Working first with harmless microorganisms, we were taught how to make nutrient media, the broths in which they multiply. Making these potions is an art in itself. Bacteria require highly specialized mixtures of proteins, carbohydrates, and salts — often culled from plant or animal extracts — to achieve the most efficient growth rate.

We would take samples of the nutrient media and analyze their biochemical components, testing for pH and amino acids and calculating the concentration of carbohydrates and other compounds. Then we mixed in the seed material — the bacterial agent — to determine its quality, concentration, and viability. The process of seeding the agents was a delicate one and had to be performed under perfectly aseptic conditions. Next, we studied how temperature, oxygen concentration, differing components of nutrient media, and countless other factors affected bacterial growth.

Within months, I would move from the simple lab techniques of medical school to complicated industrial procedures in biochemistry and microbiology. For the first time in my life, I would work with pathogenic agents, learning how to infect lab animals and conduct autopsies.

Russian bioweaponeers divide their facilities into three zones, rated according to the safety of the materials with which they work. (Most countries have four.) Zone One is restricted to the preparation of nutrient media. Zones Two and Three are both "hot zones," sealed off from the outside world with special filtration systems. Zone Three at Omutninsk throbbed with the constant hum of steel dryers and centrifuges. In this zone, we had to wear bubble helmets, large gloves, and thick rubber outfits which we called "space suits." They gave us the slow, tentative stride of astronauts walking on the moon.

Zone Two had its own protective gear — not quite so cumbersome as the space suit, but still requiring an elaborate rite of passage from the outside world. To enter Zone Two we would shed our white lab coats and pants and put on a long surgeon's smock, stretching down to the ankles, and a cloth hood with openings for the eyes and nose. Over the hood we placed a sealed respirator mask. Then came high rubber boots and a pair of thin rubber gloves — two pairs if we were going to work with animals.

My first weeks at Omutninsk were exciting — and excruciating. I had been inside laboratories in medical school, but I had never seen a lab as large and forbidding as the one we were brought into on the first day. White tables stretched from one end of the room to the other, topped with microscopes, photometers, and row upon row of glistening glass test tubes and flasks.

We were given white lab coats, divided into smaller groups, and assigned to a lab technician who would serve as our mentor. My first trainer was a young woman named Svetlana, a blonde with blue eyes and a perpetually amused expression as she led us through our lab work. I was half in love with her, which made it all the more embarrassing when the fragile flasks she ordered me to sterilize kept shattering in my hands.

"What a bear this one is!" she said to one of my lab partners.

I thought I'd never get the hang of it.

But slowly I gained confidence in a laboratory world that seemed to offer new discoveries every day. I learned how to use the delicate pipettes to transfer liquids from one vial to another as we heated them over Bunsen burners. The magic of making cultures grow from minuscule particles barely discernible under the microscope fascinated me.

We would arrive at the lab at eight o'clock in the morning, breaking only for lunch in the small cafeteria at noon before returning to our microscopes and test tubes to work until dinner. Sometimes we spent the afternoon in the library poring over scientific texts, which we were expected to summarize at weekly conferences. The lab training was only a prelude to our initiation into the heart of Omutninsk's mysteries: the giant reactors in which the industrial production of pesticides took place.

The workers inside the industrial building were less tolerant of our youthful mistakes. They knew nothing of the real purpose of our training: as far as they were concerned, we were "fancy" university grads who had never gotten our hands dirty. We were set to work scrubbing floors and washing machines until we were considered trustworthy enough to assist in the running of the plant. The microorganisms we cultured inside the huge vats were harmless — such as Bacillus thuringiensis — but the complicated procedures involved in manufacturing them represented a rehearsal for our future work with pathogenic agents. The liquid cultures were transported between different buildings in the complex through special overhead pipes. The most important element of the process was to ensure that the cultures stayed pure from beginning to end. The need to keep our working materials and our machines sterile was drummed into us every minute of the day. Too tired and too excited to sleep when we returned to our dorms, we found relief from the pressures of the labs by venturing into town at night.

Omutninsk was a placid community of single-family wooden houses and narrow streets whose inhabitants seemed pleasantly oblivious to our activities. They had long experience in the art of weapon making. In the seventeenth-century, Peter the Great built an iron foundry in Omutninsk that became one of Russia's first weapons factories, turning out primitive cannons for the czar's armies. Three centuries later, military production still dominated the local economy. A dilapidated metallurgical plant responsible for supplying parts for rifles and artillery pieces employed most of the townspeople.

If the people of Omutninsk seemed to have little interest in what was going on in their backyard, some of us were beginning to wonder what we had gotten ourselves into.

Over quiet drinks in the town's only restaurant we argued incessantly about the work we were being groomed for. Some of the young scientists felt proud to be associated with secret affairs of state. Others were repelled by the idea of turning diseases into weapons — even if the project was defined as a national priority.

One of the four medical graduates who came with me from Tomsk, a tall, burly Siberian named Vladimir Rumyantsev, grew petulant and increasingly depressed. After returning from the restaurant, he would lie on his bed and stare at the ceiling for hours, nursing a bottle of vodka. We had become close during training, and I felt freer to exchange confidences with him than with others in the group.

"Kan, we're doctors!" he once exclaimed. "How can we do this?"

I was asking myself the same question. In the Oath of a Soviet Physician, which I'd taken at graduation, I had pledged to help the sick, "to do no harm," and to be on call "day, night, and vacation period." So far, I was principally fulfilling the third part of my pledge.

But I liked the lab work. I discovered an affinity for the meticulous processes involved in culturing organisms. The challenge of manipulating the tiny worlds that appeared under my microscope engaged me more intensely than anything I had ever done before. In the evenings, in medical texts and journals borrowed from the library, I read about the behavior of diseases until each one took on a distinct personality in my mind. I knew that the results of my studies could be used to kill people, but I couldn't figure out how to reconcile this knowledge with the pleasure I derived from research.

About four months into training, I decided to escape. It wasn't a bold attempt — I didn't want to confront the KGB or my military superiors, who seemed to have such a high sense of my potential— and I wasn't too surprised when it failed.

I took the train to Kirov, five hours away, and mailed a long letter to my father. I had not told my parents about my assignment, except to say that it was related to secret military matters. I thought I could avoid KGB interception by posting the letter as far as possible from the base, I still kept my words as vague as possible. I assumed my father could read between the lines. He knew the military far better than I.

My father, Bayzak Alibekov, was wounded seven times in World War II. He was decorated for bravery in the historic tank battles around Kursk and had risen to the rank of lieutenant colonel of police in Alma-Ata, after four frustrating years as a rural policeman. Our family boasted an illustrious lineage: my grandfather had been a hero on the Communist side of the Russian civil war. He was Kazakhstan's First People's Commissar of Internal Affairs, responsible for police and security in the 1920s and 1930s, and a street in Kazakhstan's old capital was named after him. Perhaps my background would give me an honorable way out.

In the letter, I asked my father to write to Marshal Andrei Grechko, then the minister of defense and one of the country's most admired military figures, to request that I be reassigned.

A week later I called my father from the long-distance telephone office in Omutninsk.

"Are you sure you want to do this?" he asked.

"Yes," I said eagerly. "You could tell the marshal that, as a wounded war veteran, you need your son close to home."

"That's true enough," he laughed. "I'm becoming a deaf old man."

He didn't ask me what I was doing for the army, and I didn't volunteer any information. He protested at first, but when he heard the anguish in my voice, he agreed to write the letter.

A warm and respectful note addressed to my father arrived in Alma-Ata a month later. "Dear Comrade Alibekov!" it began. "I salute you for your services to the Motherland, and I respect your wishes regarding your son. However, you must know that your son has been chosen to conduct very important work for our country, and we cannot spare him. It is always important for a son to be with his elderly parents, but of course you have another son and daughter living close by who can perform their obligations."

My father read Grechko's words to me over the telephone. He couldn't contain his excitement: he had received a letter signed by the great marshal himself! Meanwhile, I felt trapped.

Not long after that I began to feel proud — and a little flattered. If the defense minister himself regarded me as irreplaceable, who was I to argue with him? I could learn to enjoy being part of this strange and secret club.

I applied myself to the training with more energy than I had shown in weeks and gave up, for the time being, all thoughts of leaving. In the end, no one in our group left the program.

New buildings were going up all around the compound. Every day prisoners from a nearby labor camp were bused in with shovels and cement mixers. Biopreparat had signed a secret contract with the Ministry of Internal Affairs to employ prisoners doing hard time of ten years or longer as the principal construction force for new biological facilities around the country.

The foundations were laid for a pilot plant that would usher in a new era in the mass production of biological weapons, a plant that came to be known as Building 107. The flurry of construction activity left little doubt that we were part of a crucial national defense drive.

I soon had other reasons to value the status that came with my career. When I was transferred to a new post in Siberia, in March 1976,1 had met the woman who would become my wife.

Lena Yemesheva was an attractive eighteen-year-old foreign-language student when we met in Alma-Ata earlier that winter. I was home for my first leave since going to Omutninsk. She was a friend of a cousin, who brought her to a Soviet Army Day concert in town. I liked her immediately. She had shining green eyes and came from a town close to the settlement in southern Kazakhstan where I had been born. Lena had studied physics before she was transferred to the Alma-Ata Institute of Foreign Languages, so we had in common a love of science as well.

We were married in August 1976 at the wedding palace in Alma-Ata and went to her father's home for a toi — the traditional Kazakh wedding feast.

Midway through our courtship, Lena had stopped asking me questions about my job. She had grown tired of my enigmatic reply that I was engaged in "secret work." Still, I was surprised at how readily she accepted the news that we would be making our first home together in the faraway Siberian city of Berdsk.

As she explained much later, all that counted in those days was the satisfaction of knowing that I was a military officer clearly marked out for the favors of the state.

The Berdsk Scientific and Production Base, or the Siberian Branch of the Institute of Applied Biochemistry, as it was formally called, was a welcome change from Omutninsk. Berdsk, about twenty-five hundred miles from Moscow, formed part of one of the most impressive scientific communities in the country. It was near the "academic city" of Novosibirsk, a center for advanced research in engineering, technology, and economics. Mikhail Gorbachev would later recruit his first perestroika brain trust from Novosibirsk's gifted group of economists and political scientists. The most interesting industrial landmark in Berdsk was a radio assembly plant built with the help of U.S. technicians in the 1940s. My assignment there soon made me forget my crisis of conscience the previous summer.

Biopreparat wanted to transform Berdsk into a prototype of a combined research center and weapons assembly line. The facility, built in the 1960s, had been used mainly as a reserve plant for assembling and filling bomblets with weaponized bacteria that would be produced at its own and other installations. As the Soviet bioweapons program expanded, such a division of labor proved cumbersome. Berdsk had no way of guaranteeing that the bomblets it produced wouldn't leak and threaten our own soldiers, Liquid or powdered simulants weren't adequate for leakage tests; you needed the real thing. But Berdsk didn't have a research and development lab of its own. Moscow headquarters ordered that one be built and purchased equipment from overseas to stock it. Rumyantsev and I found ourselves assigned together to a crash program aimed at turning the facility into an installation capable of developing new production techniques and formulations.

Hundreds of unopened boxes filled with new machines were piled up inside the facility when we arrived. They were intended for a new microbiology lab, but they had been sitting around for months. The staff only knew how to run an industrial assembly line; they had no idea how to create a laboratory.

Rumyantsev and I built a microbiology lab from scratch. We planned the layout of the room from the sterile working tables to the sinks and water pipes. Gradually unpacking the boxes, we pulled out microscopes, test tubes, ovens, and a collection of equipment gathered from every part of the world. There were U.S. and Japanese fermenters, Czechoslovak reactors, French-made flasks. The bulk of our equipment came from the United States and Great Britain. We owed a lot more to our old allies than anyone could publicly concede. The fact that we could use standard fermenting machinery was a vivid illustration of the dual nature of the tools of our trade.

Within three or four months, we presented our managers with a fully equipped laboratory.

In January 1977, the commander of Berdsk, Colonel Vitaly Kundin, returned from a visit to Biopreparat headquarters carrying two small ampoules filled with freeze-dried Brucella, a bacterium that preys on cattle and other livestock. Transmitted to humans as brucellosis, or Malta fever, the bacteria cause fever, sweats, a sore throat, and a dry cough, sometimes accompanied by vomiting, acute abdominal pains, and diarrhea. Even when treated, the illness can last for months, and it can become chronic. My knowledge of this disease came from other sources besides textbooks. My father suffered for years from recurring bouts of brucellosis that left him in so much pain he was sometimes unable to move his hands.

"Now that we have a laboratory, we have something to use it for," Kundin said cheerfully. "Why don't you fellows see what you can do with this?"

None of the Biopreparat labs manufactured brucellosis in any significant quantity. The standard growth medium used until then contained a milk protein called casein. Examining some of my textbooks, I discovered a recipe for a mixture of yeast extract, vitamins, and other growth stimulators that had produced high yields with other cultures. In our new lab, Rumyantsev and I spent long hours experimenting with various combinations of the mixture until we got it right.

After eight months of work, we presented our findings: our new growth medium produced a substantial yield of bacteria that could be weaponized. Moscow headquarters was pleased. For me, it was a personal achievement — I had gone from being a pupil to a practitioner.

In the fall of 1977 I was promoted to senior lieutenant and senior scientist for my work in Berdsk. I also became the head of a new family: Lena gave birth to our first child, Mira, that year, and our lives seemed perfect. With my growing salary and the professional esteem of my peers, I began to believe that I had found the best of all possible worlds in the Soviet Union.

Two years later, when Lena was pregnant with our second child, Alan, I was named acting lab chief at Berdsk. After Alan was born I was promoted again and handed a new assignment: I was ordered to return to Omutninsk to develop a production process to weaponize tularemia. Building 107, they told me, was finally ready.

6. Building 107

Omutninsk was a hive of activity. There were new buildings everywhere in the compound, but the one that mattered most was the spotless gray three-story structure designated as the pilot plant for tularemia.

Building 107 was structured according to the box-within-a-box principle, to keep the deadliest organisms out of the surrounding countryside. If you could lift the roof, it would resemble a Russian matryoshka doll. Snuggled inside the matryoshka is another doll, and then a tinier one inside, continuing until you reach the limits of the craftsman's skill, or, in this case, workable space.

The outer shell of Building 107 was Zone One. It housed the offices of administrative and security personnel and laboratories used for noninfectious organisms. Workers dressed in plain white lab coats and white pants milled in the corridors. Daylight poured through the windows, and the walls were plastered with resolutely upbeat Party banners: "Fulfill our Five-Year Plan in four years!" "Long Live the Communist Party of the Soviet Union!" It was possible to spend an entire day in Zone One without being aware of what was happening deeper inside the building.

Zone Two contained "hot" laboratories for work with pathogenic materials, storage vaults, animal cages, and giant sixteen-ton and twenty-ton fermenters, which soared to the upper levels of the building. Zone Three, nestled inside Zone Two, displayed the fruits of our engineering efforts since 1973: rows of gleaming steel centrifuges and drying and milling machines.

Both inner zones had their own air supply system. Noisy generators pumped air through an overhead latticework of exposed pipes, keeping the atmosphere inside at pressures slightly lower than normal to prevent contaminated air from seeping into Zone One. Hydrogen peroxide was sprayed into the air from nozzles in the ceiling. The distinctive smell of that particular disinfectant will stay with me forever. It wasn't just its smell that made an impression: for the dozen or so years I worked inside the labs, my black hair was bleached a dirty blond.

It was a world of invisible perils. One false step, a fumble, an unthinking gesture, could unleash a nightmare. We all knew enough to fear the hazards of the two hot zones, but we were young and felt invincible. We saw ourselves as custodians of a mystery that no one else understood, warriors or high priests of a secret cult whose rituals could not be revealed.

Late one Sunday night in March 1983, the phone rang in our apartment. I reached over to pick it up, trying not to wake Lena.

It was Nazil, one of the lab chiefs on night duty at Building 107.

"You'd better get down here," he said tersely. "We've got a problem."

I dressed quickly in the dark and hurried to the compound.

Once inside I went directly to the corridor that led to Zone Two. The corridor, called the "sanitary passageway," was a warren of small sterile rooms linked by a series of connecting doors. We entered through a sealed door with a coded lock. The door would be opened with a latch or by turning a heavy wheel, like a submarine. The codes changed once a week.

I stripped my clothes off and stuffed them into one of the lockers lining the walls. Then I walked into a second room, where a young nurse sat behind a desk. I had a nodding acquaintance with her outside the lab, having seen her walking her large dog, and was embarrassed at first to appear before her naked. But she always maintained a businesslike air as she wordlessly stuck a thermometer under my armpit and examined every inch of my body, including my teeth and gums. Any sign of bleeding from a cut or bruise, even from a nick while shaving, was grounds for barring further entry.

The buzz of the ventilators grew louder as I passed through the next rooms, picking up the separate items of my anti-plague suit: white socks and long johns, hood and cotton smock, respirator, goggles, boots, and gloves. The entire procedure was reversed on the way out, although the gloves were always the last to come off. Even with long practice, I never managed to complete the process in under fifteen minutes. That night, I was faster than usual.

Nazil was waiting for me inside Zone Two.

As we walked together down the corridors, he told me what had happened. The air pressure in the pipeline feeding one of the tularemia rooms had begun to drop precipitously. A technician had been working there an hour or so before, but she had gone home. She may have forgotten to reset the valves.

Nazil was anxious to get back to work before his shift ended. It was 11:00 P.M. He brought me to the room where the drop in pressure had been reported and hesitated at the door.

"Don't worry," I said. "Go back to your lab. I'm sure I can handle this."

Mollified, he set off down the corridor. I opened the door and took a few steps inside. It was pitch black. I reached back, groping in the darkness for the light switch. When I finally hit the switch and looked down, I found I was standing in a puddle of liquid tularemia.

It was milky brown — the highest possible concentration. The puddle at my feet was only a few centimeters deep, but there was enough tularemia on the floor to infect the entire population of the Soviet Union.

I called for Nazil, frozen in place, and heard him rustling toward me down the hall.

I was only two feet or so from the doorway, but I was trapped. If I tried to back out I would bring the disease with me into the corridor — and, potentially, into the rest of the zone.

Keeping my voice as calm as possible, I told Nazil to bring disinfectant quickly — anything he could find. I reached my gloved hand behind me and grabbed the bottle of hydrogen peroxide he handed through the partly open door.

I poured the solution over my boots. He handed me more bottles as I moved backward, tiny step by tiny step, pouring all the time.

By the time I was out of the room, three military scientists working in other parts of the zone had rushed to the scene, alerted by the commotion. The change in air pressure must have caused the culture to escape through the filter system. I closed the door and told them to disinfect everything I had touched, as well as the room itself.

I went back through the sanitary passageway, eased off my boots and protective suit, took a disinfecting shower, and submitted myself to a quick checkup by the nurse. She assured me that I was fine.

Silently, I congratulated myself on my good fortune. I tried to imagine what might have happened if I had lost my footing on the slippery floor. Although tularemia isn't usually deadly, we were working with a far more virulent strain than any I would ever have been exposed to in nature.

When we regrouped in Zone One, I advised Nazil and the others to take the antibiotics we had on hand for emergencies.

I went to my office and called Savva Yermoshin, chief of the KGB detachment at Omutninsk. Savva would later work with me at Biopreparat headquarters in Moscow.

I had obviously pulled him from a deep slumber.

"Savva, I'm sorry to wake you," I said. "I just wanted to let you know a small amount of tularemia was released inside Building 107 tonight."

I didn't expect him to do anything, but regulations required us to inform the KGB about the slightest break in routine.

"Anybody hurt?" he said in a voice fogged with sleep.

"No, it's all under control," I continued cheerfully. "We've got it cleaned up. There's nothing for you to do."

I looked at my watch after hanging up. It was almost 2 A.M.. It was pointless to call Moscow at that hour. I decided to wait until morning and went home, tired and relieved.

"What was the emergency?" Lena asked me sleepily as I padded around in the dark of our bedroom.

"Nothing important," I told her. "Go back to sleep."

Around lunchtime the next day I got a call from an extremely upset Kalinin.

"I've been trying to find you all morning and they keep telling me you're in meetings," he yelled. "How can you sit around in meetings when your building is leaking tularemia into the ground?"

Yermoshin, it appeared, knew more about the regulations than I did. He was supposed to inform his superiors whenever an emergency occurred, and he had duly contacted the KGB director for the Kirov region as soon our brief conversation ended. It didn't occur to me that such a minor mishap would need to be relayed up the chain of command, but the KGB chief in Kirov had called his bosses in Moscow, who called Kalinin early that morning.

By then, the story had become hopelessly mangled. Whatever the sleep-addled Yermoshin had told his senior officer, it had been magnified into a disaster threatening the entire region.

I tried to calm Kalinin down, but he didn't believe me. He had absolute faith in the KGB.

"I'm sending someone out there on the first train tomorrow morning," he said, and hung up.

The next morning I went to the station to pick up General Lev Klyucherov, the head of Biopreparat's scientific directorate. He arrived looking as if he'd spent the entire journey stewing with rage.

"Whatever you're trying to hide," he said at once, his face reddening, "it's not going to work."

I asked him to come into my office and went over the entire incident step by step. Klyucherov softened slightly and seemed persuaded. After all, he could see for himself that no one had fallen ill.

No one, that is, but me.

Toward the end of Klyucherov's visit, my body started to shake. Chills, and a sudden wave of nausea, overcame me so quickly I wanted to bury my head in my arms.

It's a cold, I thought. I've been working too hard.

But it felt worse than any cold I'd ever had. I could feel my face burning with fever.

"What's happened to you?" Klyucherov asked in a tone that was now much friendlier. "You look like you're about to die."

I smiled weakly. "It's just a cold," I said. "I had a long night. I could do with some tea."

I went home as soon as the general left. There was no doubt in my mind as to what was wrong: tularemia begins with flu-like symptoms and it moves through the body quickly.

At home I went straight to my small library of medical textbooks and took down from the shelves every book on infectious diseases I could find. Antidotes were not my field of expertise. I tried to think through my next step.

If this ever got out, Klyucherov, Kalinin, and everyone else in Moscow would make my life more miserable than it was even now. They would accuse me of trying to hide the seriousness of the incident and would wonder what kind of scientist would forget in such a situation to take the proper antibiotics. I had told Nazil and the others to take antibiotics, but for some inexplicable reason I hadn't taken any myself.

I felt humiliated and confused. By the time I'd left Building 107 that night, I had been completely disinfected. I must have caught the disease in a matter of seconds, between leaving the sanitary passageway and entering the shower. But how? Then it came to me. I must have brushed my face while taking off my mask and hood. A hundred cells, an amount smaller than a speck of dust, would have been enough to infect me through an imperceptible cut or scratch.

I knew it was safe to stay at home: there was no danger that the infection in my body would spread to Lena and the children.

Tularemia can be inhaled or ingested or contracted through bites or scratches. It rarely passes directly from person to person, but it can be carried by fleas, ticks, rats, and other rodents and can enter the bloodstream through minor abrasions. The disease is marked by a sudden onset of fever and chills, often followed by an incapacitating headache. As soon as it enters the body, the bacteria will begin to multiply locally, gradually spreading to lymph nodes and distant organs, including the liver and spleen.

Even after successful antibiotics were developed in the 1940s, tularemia was considered an ideal weapon for the battlefield due to the speed with which it could overwhelm an opponent's medical resources, leaving hospitals and physicians unable to cope with a flood of patients in need of constant treatment.

If taken immediately, antibiotics can contain the spread of the disease and kill invading bacteria in a matter of days. The later the drugs are administered, the longer a victim will suffer. Particularly acute cases have been known to linger for months.

Tetracycline was thought to be the best antidote for tularemia, but I had no way of knowing how well it would work against the strain we had produced in our lab. In exceptional cases, certain highly virulent strains are capable of overcoming ordinary antibiotic treatment and can be fatal.

I called a friend's wife, a physician at the local hospital, and told her I needed tetracycline urgently. Under normal circumstances I would have required a prescription, but in a small town it was easy to cut corners.

"How much?" she asked, without registering the least surprise.

Calculating quickly, I asked for three times the customary dose. There were advantages to Soviet secrecy. I would have had a hard time getting that amount of tetracycline in the United States without a good explanation. I told her not to tell anyone.

I wanted a high-impact, crash dose. If it didn't work, I'd have to check myself into the hospital. Self-treatment had its limitations.

An hour later, my friend's wife showed up with the pills in a cavernous shopping bag, the kind Russian women carry around for emergencies. Lena answered the door. I sat in the armchair in the living room, too sick to move.

By the end of the day, my fever had begun to drop. I stayed home the next day, after calling in with a cold. By Wednesday or Thursday, three days after my exposure, I was better, although I continued to take high doses of tetracycline for the next ten days. I was able to return to work the following Monday.

When Lena asked me what had happened, I told her I'd had a mild infection after an accident with one of the substances in the lab. She knew nothing about tularemia, since I never shared with her the details of my work. She pretended to be calmed by my assurances that nothing was wrong, but when we finally left the Soviet Union she confessed how frightened she had been.

I had covered up the incident, but it was a powerful reminder of the consequences of our trade.

7. Accident at Sverdlovsk

Biopreparat was the darkest conspiracy of the cold war, a network so secret that its members could not be told what colleagues in other parts of the organization were doing, or where. Yet even the most furtive networks are made of human beings. Gossip, professional rivalry, and ordinary curiosity ensured that we always knew a lot more than our leaders imagined.

Eventually, everyone found out about Sverdlovsk.

I first learned what happened there in a typically, and maddeningly, casual manner. It was June 1979, two months after the accident had occurred, and I was in Siberia, struggling through a period when nothing seemed to go right. The few successes I had achieved felt dull and unimportant and, despite the recognition 1 was getting from Moscow, I was convinced my career was going nowhere. I had managed to persuade myself that the world had passed me by.

There was no one to complain to except Lena, until I found a sympathetic ear in a colonel sent to Berdsk on a routine inspection trip from headquarters.

His name was Oleg Pavlov. He was the kind of man who would drop official business at a moment's notice for a glass of vodka and a chat. One Friday, after a tedious discussion of our research budget, he asked me if there were any places around town one could go to enjoy, as he put it, "the real Siberia."

I told him our workers spent weekend afternoons swimming and picnicking with their families at a nearby river. On a weekday, there would be no one there.

"Wonderful!" he boomed. "Let's get some refreshments."

It was a lovely, warm summer day. The park by the riverbank was deserted and the birch trees shifted gently in the breeze. Pavlov tore off his clothes and jumped into the water with a yell. I followed him, watching with amusement as he splashed like a child in the ice-cold stream.

We clambered to the shore, dried ourselves, dressed, and unwrapped packages of hard-boiled eggs, sausages, bread, and onions. Pavlov brought out a bottle of clear vodka and two glasses. We sat in the shade, blissfully contemplating the world.

In Russia, a glass of vodka is an invitation to expose your soul. Without planning to, I began to pour out my frustrations.

"I can't get anything done here!" I said. "There are never enough scientists, and we never do important work anyway. I wish they would give us something serious to do."

Pavlov swallowed the contents of his glass in one gulp and set it down on the riverbank.

"Don't be an ass," he said.

I was too stunned to speak.

"Let me give you some advice," he went on. "Never wish for something too hard, because you just might get it."

I wondered if the vodka had made me more candid than I ought to have been, especially with someone from headquarters.

I tried to save face. "I should never drink in the afternoons," I said, hoping that he would smile and change the subject.

But Pavlov didn't smile.

"You know about Sverdlovsk, don't you?" he asked suddenly.

I considered what to say. Most of us knew, unofficially, about the army biological research facility in Sverdlovsk, in the eastern foothills of the Urals. It was built after the war, using specifications found in the Japanese germ warfare documents captured in Manchuria.

"Well, I know they're doing anthrax work," I responded. "Have they had some kind of achievement?"

He shook his head in irritation. "You haven't been told? There's been an accident."

"What kind of accident?"

He poured out another glass of vodka, drank it down, and smiled mischievously.

"You're too young to hear about this kind of thing."

I begged him to tell me more, but he refused.

"I can't tell you if you don't already know," he said in an exasperated voice. "I only brought it up to show you how lucky you are not to be doing the kind of work you want to do, the 'important work' they were doing in Sverdlovsk. You're young, you're happy, you've got a family. That's reason enough not to be ambitious."

He poured himself a third glass. I thought I'd let it go at that.

"They are idiots!" he exploded after a prolonged silence. "They killed a lot of people."

Pavlov returned to Moscow after several more days of paperwork in Berdsk. He was careful never to mention Sverdlovsk again.

The story went public a few months later — in a way. In November 1979, a Russian magazine published by anti-Soviet emigres in what was then West Germany reported that an explosion in a military facility in the southwest section of Sverdlovsk had released a cloud of deadly bacteria the previous April. It claimed that as many as a thousand people had died. Western news agencies picked up the story, quoting U.S. intelligence officials who claimed that the accident was clear evidence of Soviet violation of the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention.

Moscow denied the reports. On June 12, 1980, a statement published by the official Soviet news agency TASS declared that there had only been a "natural outbreak of anthrax among domestic animals" in the Sverdlovsk region.

"Cases of skin and intestinal forms of anthrax were reported in people, because dressing of animals was sometimes conducted without observing rules established by veterinary inspections," the statement said, adding that all of the patients had been treated successfully in local hospitals.

This was a lie, of course.

The German magazine and the U.S. intelligence sources were right that there had been an accident, but they got many of the facts wrong. Within a year, every senior Biopreparat official knew that something terrible had happened at Sverdlovsk. Nothing was said officially, but the news spread like wildfire. I learned the truth by talking to people who had been at the plant when the accident happened, and to army officers who had been in charge of the cleanup.

My pursuit of the facts was not a matter of indulging idle curiosity. We had to know what had happened if we were to protect ourselves from a similar disaster. As I rose higher in The System, I applied some of the lessons of Sverdlovsk to the plants under my control.

In fact, as neither Oleg Pavlov nor I could have known at the time, the Sverdlovsk incident would precipitate my speedy advancement. Not only did it help me get the "serious" work I'd been craving, but it set Biopreparat on a new course of development over the next decade.

On the last Friday of March 1979, a technician in the anthrax drying plant at Compound 19, the biological arms production facility in Sverdlovsk, scribbled a quick note for his supervisor before going home. "Filter clogged so I've removed it. Replacement necessary," the note said.

Compound 19 was the Fifteenth Directorate's busiest production plant. Three shifts operated around the clock, manufacturing a dry anthrax weapon for the Soviet arsenal. It was stressful and dangerous work. The fermented anthrax cultures had to be separated from their liquid base and dried before they could be ground into a fine powder for use in an aerosol form, and there were always spores floating in the air. Workers were given regular vaccinations, but the large filters clamped over the exhaust pipes were all that stood between the anthrax dust and the outside world.

After each shift, the big drying machines were shut down briefly for maintenance checks. A clogged air filter was not an unusual occurrence, but it had to be replaced immediately.

Lieutenant Colonel Nikolai Chernyshov, supervisor of the afternoon shift that day, was in as much of a hurry to get home as his workers. Under the army's rules, he should have recorded the information about the defective filter in the logbook for the next shift, but perhaps the importance of the technician's note didn't register in his mind, or perhaps he was simply overtired.

When the night shift manager came on duty, he scanned the logbook. Finding nothing unusual, he gave the command to start the machines up again. A fine dust containing anthrax spores and chemical additives swept through the exhaust pipes into the night air.

Several hours passed before a worker noticed that the filter was missing. The shift supervisor shut the machines down at once and ordered a new filter installed. Several senior officers were informed, but no one alerted city officials or Ministry of Defense headquarters in Moscow.

In the next few days, all the workers on the night shift of a ceramic-making plant across the street from the facility fell ill. The plant had been directly in the path of the wind that night. Within a week, nearly all of them were dead.

By then hospitals were admitting dozens of patients from other areas of town who had worked in the plant's vicinity. Curiously, there were few women or children among the victims. Years later, some Western analysts wondered if the Soviets had developed a "gender weapon" capable of attacking only adult males. But women seldom worked night shifts in production plants, and few children would have been playing in the streets late on a Friday night.

Western scientists who have examined data from the accident believe that it occurred on Tuesday, April 3, or Wednesday, April 4, because the first cases did not surface until two or three days after that, which would fit the usual incubation period for anthrax. These arguments suggest to me how well Soviet officials were able to manipulate information and conceal the truth.

A colleague placed the accident on Friday, March 30, 1979. He was a Sverdlovsk scientist who recalled that he and other technicians learned of the first anthrax death — an auxiliary worker named Nikolayev — on the following Monday. That it happened on a Friday night helps explain why the workers were so anxious to get home and why so many people had passed by that evening, heading for a drink at a nearby bar. It is not unreasonable to assume that the KGB coverup included altering the dates on the medical reports of the first cases.

The last case was reported on May 19. The Soviet Union later claimed that 96 people were stricken with the disease and 66 died. The scientist who was working in the Sverdlovsk facility at the time told me the death toll was 105, but we will probably never know for sure. What is certain is that it was the worst single outbreak of inhalational anthrax on record this century.

There could have been no illusions in Moscow as to the cause of the outbreak. Chernyshov's lapse in judgment was reported as soon as the first deaths occurred. A delegation led by Colonel General Yefim Smirnov, commander of the Fifteenth Directorate, flew to Sverdlovsk a week after the incident. He was joined by Pyotr Burgasov, then deputy minister of health and a member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. Burgasov brought with him a team of five doctors, but the government's concern for secrecy determined the handling of the medical crisis.

No one wanted to set off a panic or to alert outsiders. Sverdlovsk residents were informed that the deaths were caused by a truckload of contaminated meat sold on the black market. Printed fliers advised people to stay away from "unofficial" food vendors. More than one hundred stray dogs were rounded up and killed, on the grounds that they represented a danger to public health after having been seen scavenging near markets where the meat was sold. Meanwhile, military sentries were posted in the immediate neighborhood of the plant to keep intruders away, and KGB officers pretending to be doctors visited the homes of victims' families with falsified death certificates.

Whether residents suspected the truth or not, military and KGB control ensured that the city remained orderly. A Northwestern University physics professor named Donald E. Ellis, who was in Sverdlovsk at the time on an exchange program, reported that he noticed nothing unusual in the city. "I don't exclude the possibility that something may have occurred," he told The New York Times years later, "but I think either I or my wife would have sensed some effort to protect us from it. We… were not aware of any restrictions."

Residents had been living behind a thick veil of security for decades. Since World War II, Sverdlovsk, renamed after an early Bolshevik leader, had been the heart of the Soviet military-industrial complex, turning out tanks, nuclear rockets, and other armaments as well as biological weapons. In 1958, a major nuclear accident occurred at another site in the region, near the city of Chelyabinsk. The exact details of what happened are hazy, but reports from both Western and Communist sources indicate that a military reactor was damaged, resulting in the spread of radioactive dust over several thousand square kilometers. Twelve villages

were evacuated.

The determination with which Soviet officials set about concealing the Sverdlovsk leak from their own people as well as the world was, under the circumstances, not surprising. The truth would have severely embarrassed the nation's leaders, many of whom were not even aware that biological arms production was under way, and caused an international crisis. It wasn't at first clear that the coverup would succeed. Army commanders worried that they might not be able to contain the disaster.

"We couldn't understand why people continued to die," a general who was there told me much later. "We assumed that this was a quick, one-time exposure and that our mopping-up would be completed in a few days, but there were deaths for a month and a half after the release."

The coverup was responsible for turning what began as a medical emergency into a small epidemic.

The local Communist Party boss, who was apparently told that there had been a leak of hazardous material from the plant, ordered city workers to scrub and trim trees, spray roads, and hose down roofs. This spread the spores further through "secondary aerosols" — spores that had settled after the initial release and were stirred up again by the cleanup blitz. Anthrax dust drifted through the city, and new victims arrived at the hospitals with black ulcerous swellings on their skin.

The cutaneous form of anthrax, contracted when spores enter the body through a cut or abrasion on the surface of the skin, occurs naturally in rural areas around the world, especially those with large herds of domestic cattle, sheep, and goats. It is the most common form of anthrax and is rarely lethal when treated with antibiotics such as penicillin. Russians refer to it as the "Siberian ulcer," as it manifests itself through the formation of small and localized lesions on the surface of the skin. An outbreak of cutaneous anthrax in the region was credible, but it wouldn't explain why so many factory workers, who could have had no contact with animals, were suddenly sick, or why so many died.

Anthrax spores can survive for years — even decades — in a dormant state. Animals will become infected while foraging for food. The spores germinate in a matter of hours and multiply in their hosts, returning to spore form when they die or on contact with oxygen. Men and women who work with infected animals — butchers, tanners, farmers, and workers in textile mills — become infected in turn through abrasions, by inhaling spores or drinking contaminated water, or, in rare cases, by eating contaminated meat. Soviet officials fell back on the claim that the disease was caused by contaminated meat. Doctors displayed photos that suggested victims had contracted intestinal anthrax, by far the rarest form of the disease (it accounts for fewer than 1 percent of all cases). But officials could not hide the presence of pulmonary or inhalational anthrax, the most lethal of all.

Between ten thousand and twenty thousand spores, a microscopic quantity, are sufficient to infect someone with anthrax. The same anthrax bacterium will behave differently depending on how it enters the system. It is far more threatening if it is inhaled or ingested than if it enters through the skin. Inhalational anthrax was first identified in the early nineteenth century when workers in a textile mill were exposed to spores released into the air by the new industrial processes developed to make wool. It is often called wool sorters' disease.

As soon as an anthrax spore enters the body it germinates and begins to multiply. A few days will pass before the anthrax bacteria produce toxins which, in the simplest terms, bind to the protective membranes of target cells and cripple the ability of white blood cells to fight off disease. It is the toxin, and not the bacterium itself, that ravages the body and is responsible for death. If an anthrax victim is treated with high doses of penicillin injected into the bloodstream at short intervals for a week to ten days before the first toxins are released, chances of survival are almost 100 percent. But antibiotics can do little to fight the anthrax toxin. Combinations of penicillin and streptomycin have been used at this stage, but the prognosis is grim.

The headlong trajectory of pulmonary anthrax can be blocked if penicillin is administered before the first symptoms appear. I was told that thousands of Sverdlovsk residents were given antibiotics and vaccinated immediately after the first cases were reported, but it was too late to save the victims who had already begun to suffer from the fever, shortness of breath, and distinctive dark swellings along their chest and neck that mark the onset of pulmonary anthrax.

Sverdlovsk's anthrax was the most powerful of the dozens of strains investigated over the years by army scientists for their weapons potential. It was called Anthrax 836 and had been isolated, ironically, after another accident.

In 1953, a leak from the Kirov bacteriological facility spread anthrax into the city's sewer system. Vladimir Sizov, the army biologist who discovered the strain, came to work for Biopreparat years later and told me the story.

According to Sizov, an unknown quantity of liquid anthrax was accidentally released by a defective reactor at the Kirov plant. Army workers disinfected the sewer system immediately but soon found evidence of anthrax among the rodent population. Disinfections were ordered regularly after that, yet the disease continued to lurk underground for years. In 1956, Sizov found that one of the rodents captured in the Kirov sewers had developed a new strain, more virulent than the original. The army immediately ordered him to cultivate the new strain. It was eventually used as the basis for the weapon we planned to install in the SS-18s targeted on Western cities.

If it is impossible today to reconstruct exactly what happened during those frantic weeks in April and May of 1979, this is in part be cause the KGB did its work so well. I was told by army personnel involved in the cleanup that the corpses of the victims were bathed in chemical disinfectants and that much of the documentary evidence, including hospital records and pathologists' reports, was destroyed. To add verisimilitude to the cover story, several black-market vendors in Sverdlovsk were imprisoned on charges of selling contaminated meat.

I have often wondered whether the Party boss who ordered the rapid cleanup understood the fatal consequences of his actions. He should certainly be asked. The Communist Party chairman of Sverdlovsk at the time of the accident was Boris Yeltsin, the first leader of post-Soviet Russia.

Smirnov, the Fifteenth Directorate commander, met daily throughout the crisis with Yeltsin, a hard-nosed former construction manager who fought his way up the Party ladder to become head of the region, a position equivalent to the governor of an American state. Yeltsin enjoyed a reputation as a blunt politician who enjoyed putting the area's petty military-industrial tyrants in their places. He was as loyal as any other apparatchik to the Communist system and was keenly aware that he was expected to keep the regime's secrets. As Party chief of Sverdlovsk, he had carried out a Kremlin order to bulldoze the house where Czar Nicholas II and his family had been murdered in 1918.

According to a high-ranking military official who was in Sverdlovsk at the time, Yeltsin was so enraged by the lack of cooperation he received that he stormed over to Compound 19 and demanded entry. He was refused, on the orders of Defense Minister Dmitry Ustinov, who took over when Marshal Grechko died in 1976. Ustinov arrived at the site two weeks after the accident. As a Politburo member, he far outranked a provincial party boss.

While Yeltsin has since apologized for his role in bulldozing the house where the czar was murdered, he has said almost nothing about the anthrax accident at Sverdlovsk. In his autobiography Against the Grain, published in 1990, he briefly referred to the "tragic" outbreak and tucked away in a footnote the assertion that the epidemic was caused by a "leak from a secret factory." A full accounting is long overdue.

In the years since the accident, Sverdlovsk has been called by analysts and many Russians themselves a "biological Chernobyl." They are right. The casualty figures do not compare with those following the 1986 explosion at the Ukrainian nuclear plant, but just as the Chernobyl disaster alerted the world to our questionable management of nuclear power, Sverdlovsk was a grim warning of the dangers of our secret science.

In February 1981, two years after the accident, I received an anxious call from the director of Omutninsk, Vladimir Valov, at my office in Building 107. I was then chief of the main technological department. The message was that some "very important generals" would arrive at the compound later that day.

"Tell everyone in your staff to go home early — except for the technicians in the inner zones," he said. "You'll have to stay around to escort them."

At 5:30 p.m. a jeep pulled up to the front door and two officers emerged. The first was General Vladimir Lebedinsky, who had replaced Smirnov as Fifteenth Directorate commander. The second officer was taller and heavyset. He had a distinctive air of authority, suggesting he was senior to Lebedinsky. Later, I was told he was the head of the military department of the Communist Party Central Committee, the real source of power in the military establishment. His name was Shakhov. Both men wore civilian clothing.

Lebedinsky was surprisingly polite for a senior officer. He apologized for inconveniencing me and asked if I could show them Building 107. Everyone was curious about Omutninsk, and I was getting used to conducting tours for top officials. I brought them proudly to a spot where they could look through sealed windows into Zone Two, the first biosafety enclosure.

They peered at the storage vaults and rows of seed and industrial reactors. One or two hooded technicians were doing cleanup work.

"That's a hell of a lot of glass for such a small amount of germs," Lebedinsky joked. "We don't need to go through all of that in our installations."

His partner gave him a cold look.

"Maybe if you had, Comrade General, you would have avoided what happened at Sverdlovsk," he said quietly.

Lebedinsky turned pale and said nothing. I had never seen a powerful general cut down like that. Both men seemed to have forgotten I was there.

After a few moments Lebedinsky turned on his heels and walked past us down the corridor. I was about to follow, but Shakhov put his hand on my arm and shook his head. He followed the general out a few moments later, ending our tour.

The biggest challenge facing the biological warfare establishment after Sverdlovsk was what to do with the plant itself. It couldn't continue anthrax production now that the eyes of the West were fixed on its activities. The city was closed to foreigners, but we could be certain that Western surveillance efforts would increase.

Three facilities in the country were designated as centers for anthrax production in case of war: Sverdlovsk, Penza, and Kurgan. Sverdlovsk had been the only active production facility; the others were on standby, keeping strains of anthrax in their vaults for the day when an order from Moscow would activate their production lines. The army was desperate to get the industrial anthrax production lines at Sverdlovsk running again. It lobbied hard to revoke the temporary suspension of activities at the plant ordered by Party bosses after the accident.

Pressure to produce more biological weapons was increasing by the month, but hardly anyone at senior levels of the government understood what they were. The average military commander regarded biological armaments as another type of weapon, slightly more useful than dynamite, perhaps, but not particularly more dangerous. Party bureaucrats recognized how lethal such weapons could be, but they didn't understand the unique hazards associated with making them.

Biopreparat took advantage of this confusion to press its case. Our tularemia weapon had shown that we could be as successful as the army in developing new weapons. The fact that we were outwardly a civilian organization made it more likely that our work could be concealed from the West. To the army's astonishment, it found itself outflanked by the tiny agency it had once regarded with contempt.

In 1981, Brezhnev signed a secret decree ordering the relocation of all biological weapons-making equipment and materials from Sverdlovsk to Stepnogorsk, a small biological research facility operated by Biopreparat in the remote deserts of northern Kazakhstan.

This decision would affect me directly. I was developing a reputation for getting results. Uncertainties about the direction of my life, and the morality of what I was doing, had long since receded.

Everyone soon learned of the plans to upgrade Stepnogorsk for anthrax production — it was the subject of office gossip for months. The most ambitious amongst us were eager to be part of a project that was bound to receive unlimited support and money. I put in a bid to become manager, the warning of Oleg Pavlov having long since been forgotten.

I was still only a major, a rank that didn't qualify me for a senior management position, but I was filled with more confidence than I probably deserved. My success with tularemia had given me an edge over other candidates, and I thought I could handle the job.

I called Kalinin and asked to speak with him about taking over as director of the plant. I think he enjoyed the brashness of my approach. There was just one difficulty: Stepnogorsk already had a director, a colonel appointed earlier that year. Kalinin told me to go on vacation while he considered a strategy.

A few weeks later I was on the way to Stepnogorsk with my family. I had been appointed deputy director of the upgraded anthrax facility. After we settled in, I went out for dinner with the director and some of the Stepnogorsk managers. Toward the end of the evening, the vodka was running freely.

The director, a colonel named Davydkin, pulled me to his side and gave me a playful punch.

"Kanatjan," he said, "it's really nice to have you here — but I want you to tell me the truth. You're here to take my job, aren't you?"

I laughed. "Of course not! Where did you ever get that idea?"

In less than a month, Davydkin was transferred and I was appointed director of the Kazakhstan Scientific and Production Base in Stepnogorsk.

Back in Sverdlovsk, anthrax production at Compound 19 was officially stopped. The military facility would continue to serve as a research base and a storage site for biological weapons. In 1983, the first of sixty-five army technicians and scientists from the now-discredited anthrax plant in the Urals began to arrive in Kazakhstan. One of them was Nikolai Chernyshov.

Chernyshov walked into my office in 1984, accompanied by the chief of Stepnogorsk's Biosafety Division, a lieutenant colonel named Gennady Lepyoshkin. The two young men made a startling contrast.

Lepyoshkin was sharp-tongued and gregarious, a man whose energy made him seem larger than any room he occupied. Chernyshov was a little older, in his late thirties, his brown hair already flecked with gray. I knew nothing about his background except that he was regarded as an expert in anthrax drying methods. He refused to look me in the eyes.

I hated to act as a "boss," especially in the company of men my age, and we soon launched into a free-flowing discussion about people we knew in common at Biopreparat and the Fifteenth Directorate. Chernyshov hardly participated. I noticed that his hands trembled as he held his teacup.

Lepyoshkin noticed my glances and began to grin.

"Kolya!" he said, turning to Chernyshov. "Why don't you tell our commander Kanatjan what you have done?"

"Go on, tell me," I said with a smile, enjoying our camaraderie. "I won't punish you."

I thought Chernyshov might have committed some embarrassing blunder in the lab. He was an experienced scientist; I couldn't imagine it was anything serious.

Chernyshov turned beet red. He kept sipping his tea and reIused to talk.

Lepyoshkin was enjoying himself too much to hold back.

"Have you heard about the Sverdlovsk accident?" he asked me.

By then, of course, I had.

"Do you know who was responsible?"

"Who?"

"You're sitting across the table from him."

I stared at Chernyshov in disbelief. His face was riveted on an invisible spot in front of him, and his hands began to shake so violently that he had to put his teacup down. He looked as if he was about to burst into tears.

Lepyoshkin began to describe what had happened that March afternoon in Sverdlovsk. Chernyshov didn't try to deny a thing. He refused to say a word.

His friend kept smiling. "So, now you know: this is the guy who killed all those people."

Chernyshov finally got up and walked out. I thought Lepyoshkin had been unnecessarily harsh, but I also felt a stirring of anger. Chernyshov would carry the guilt for his moment of thoughtlessness for the rest of his life. But he had never been punished, and no one in any position of authority had bothered to inform me of his responsibility for the accident before he was transferred to my facility.

For the good of our biological warfare program, Chernyshov's mistake had to be kept quiet. A thorough investigation of what had happened in Compound 19 would raise too many awkward questions even inside our own government about our activities. This was further proof that secrecy was valued above all else in our system — even if it endangered our own safety. In the West, an accident of such magnitude would have been investigated ad nauseam and its lessons distributed, however quietly, to those working in similar areas. Our coverup virtually guaranteed further disasters.

A few months later I ran into another veteran of Sverdlovsk, Lieutenant Colonel Boris Kozhevnikov. In the year following the accident, he told me, a work crew was ordered to take a boxload of 250-liter containers filled with dried anthrax to storage bunkers inside Compound 19. Kozhevnikov had been assigned to escort the workers as they rolled the containers on carts toward the bunker a few hundred feet away. One cart hit a bump, and a container fell open.

I was aghast. "What did you do?" I asked him.

"I just closed it." He shrugged.

Hastily, he added that he had ordered disinfectant poured everywhere. No one had fallen sick. And, of course, his superiors were not informed.

Nine years after the Sverdlovsk accident, a group of Soviet medical experts arrived in the United States to reveal the "truth" about what happened in 1979. Invited by Dr. Matthew Meselson, a noted Harvard professor, they toured Washington, Baltimore, and Cambridge with a stack of reports and photographs purporting to show that all the victims had contracted either intestinal or cutaneous anthrax. Pyotr Burgasov, who led the original Ministry of Health team into Sverdlovsk, headed the delegation.

Burgasov had by then retired as deputy health minister to become a government adviser. With a rueful smile, he acknowledged that a public explanation was long overdue. He blamed the delay on the Soviet government's reluctance to reveal embarrassing deficiencies in its public health system. The West's fascination with perestroika and glasnost helped persuade most of his listeners.

"Sverdlovsk's 'mystery epidemic' of 1979 lost much of its mystery this month," declared the respected U.S. journal Science in an April 1988 account of the Soviet doctors' trip. "For eight years, U.S. officials have voiced suspicions about an unprecedented outbreak of anthrax that occurred in April 1979 among the people of Sverdlovsk; [but the Soviets claimed] people had become sick... from eating bad meat they bought from 'private' butchers.

"Three Soviet officials came to visit the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C., on 11 April… [they] gave the same explanation as in 1980, but provided many more details, convincing some long-time doubters that the account was true."

A few months before Burgasov and the other officials left for the United States, a copy of the paper that he was to present in America landed on my desk in Moscow. I was asked, as Biopreparat's scientific chief, to rubber-stamp his conclusions.

At the time, it didn't matter to me whether Americans were told the truth or not, but I thought Burgasov's account would never pass muster with any self-respecting epidemiologist. How could anyone believe that people would go on eating "contaminated" meat for weeks after the first victims fell sick? The story might explain a few deaths, but not an epidemic. And how could they explain that the majority of the victims were adult males? Didn't women and children eat meat?

The man who had asked for my comments was General Lebedinsky. When I returned to his office at army headquarters, I handed the paper back to him.

"Can you tell me, General," I said, "what the real cause of the Sverdlovsk accident was?"

"Contaminated meat, of course," he said at once.

I reminded him of the afternoon in Omutninsk, years earlier, where he had been reprimanded by the man from the Central Committee.

He looked surprised.

"You remember that?" he said. He flashed one of his paternal smiles.

"Listen," he said. "If you think you know what caused this thing that's your business, but never ask me what happened. Each time you ask, my answer will always be 'contaminated meat.' "

I refused to sign off on the paper, believing it would make us look foolish abroad. Burgasov was furious.

"Tell that young man to write his own paper," he fumed at Kalinin, who impolitically passed the remark on to me.

Burgasov took his version of events to America, and I was astonished to hear that his visit was a success.

The truth about Sverdlovsk, or at least some of it, finally emerged in Russia during an interview granted by Boris Yeltsin to a Komsomolskaya Pravda reporter, published on May 27, 1993.

"Our military developments were the reason [for the accident]," Yeltsin said cryptically, adding that he had asked then-KGB chairman Yuri Andropov and Defense Minister Ustinov to close down the bacteriological facility as soon as he heard about the anthrax release.

When the reporter asked why he had been silent for so long, Yeltsin answered, "Nobody asked me."

Now, for some reason, the coverup has resumed. In 1998, Russian newspapers published articles quoting officials on the "real" cause of the anthrax outbreak two decades earlier.

They said it was contaminated meat.

8. Progress

Within a few weeks of my assignment to Stepnogorsk I was ordered to Moscow for briefings. It was a sobering experience. At the KGB's First Department, on the top floor of the Samokatnaya Street headquarters, I was shown a secret decree issued by Brezhnev the previous year, in 1982. I had never been allowed to see such top-secret material before.

An intelligence officer pulled the decree from a red folder tied with a string, placed it gravely on a desk, and stood behind me while I read. He would only let me see the sections that corresponded to my duties. I already knew the gist of the order: we were to transform our sleepy facility in northern Kazakhstan into a munitions plant that would eventually replace Sverdlovsk.

Anthrax 836, first discovered in Kirov in 1953, was our best candidate to become what we called a "battle strain" — one that was reproducible in large quantities, of high virulence, and transportable. Once I'd worked out the technique for its cultivation, concentration, and preparation, I was to develop the infrastructure to reproduce it on a massive scale — a goal that had eluded our military scientists for years. This meant assembling batteries of fermenters, drying and milling machines, and centrifuges, as well as the equipment required for preparing and filling hundreds of bombs.

My job at Stepnogorsk was, in effect, to create the world's most efficient assembly line for the mass production of weaponized anthrax.

There were many in Moscow's close-knit biological warfare establishment who believed it couldn't be done and who hoped that Biopreparat and its assertive commander would stumble in the effort. Our success with tularemia the previous year had turned Kalinin into an influential figure. He was ruffling egos throughout the army command.

At one of my Moscow meetings, an elderly general named Tarasenko, then deputy commander of the Fifteenth Directorate, pulled me aside.

"Congratulations on your new job, Major Alibekov," he said, patting me on the shoulder. "It's about time we gave our young people more responsibility."

I smiled, pleased by his attention. Tarasenko was a veteran military scientist, one of the most respected figures in Soviet biological and chemical weapons research.

"But you should watch out for yourself," he continued. "The mountain of metal they want you to build down there will never do what it's supposed to do. Believe me, I've had thirty years of experience with these things, and I know what works. This won't."

I was too stunned to reply. He nudged my shoulder again.

"I'm sure you'll be given everything you need," he said, "but Biopreparat is trying to create a monument, and in the end you'll be the one who will have to dismantle it when it falls."

The Kazakhstan Scientific and Production Base was established in 1982, tacked on to a state enterprise called the Progress Scientific and Production Association, which manufactured pesticides and fertilizer. The new facility occupied more than half the buildings in the compound, but the several thousand pesticide workers employed there could not be told of its new function. It had been chosen as one of six biowarfare facilities in the country designed to be mobilized as special production units in the event of war.

Officially, I was deputy director of the Progress Association, but my secret job title gave me more authority than the director: I was "war commander" of the entire installation. This was a daunting prospect for someone whose military knowledge was based on two years of basic training. I was expected to take control of the factory during what the army called "special periods" of rising tensions between the superpowers. Upon receipt of a coded message from Moscow, I was to transform Progress into a munitions plant.

Strains of virulent bacteria would be pulled from our vaults and seeded in our reactors and fermenters. Anthrax was our main agent at Stepnogorsk, but we also worked with glanders and were prepared to weaponize tularemia and plague. The pathogenic weapons that emerged would be poured into bomblets and spray tanks and loaded into trucks for shipment to a railroad station or airfield, from which point they would be transported to military sites around Russia for placement on bombers or ballistic missiles.

I was to maintain production until I received an order from Moscow to stop, or until our plant was destroyed.

It may be hard for anyone to imagine today the seriousness with which we prepared for war, but along with most of my colleagues, I believed that a superpower conflict was inevitable.

In the early 1980s, relations between the Soviet Union and the West had plummeted to their lowest point in decades. The election of President Ronald Reagan had led to the biggest American arms buildup our generation had seen. Our soldiers were dying in Afghanistan at the hands of U.S.-backed guerrillas, and Washington was about to deploy a new generation of cruise missiles in Western Europe, capable of reaching Soviet soil in minutes. Intelligence reports claimed that Americans envisioned the death of at least sixty million Soviet citizens in the case of a nuclear war.

We didn't need hawkish intelligence briefings to persuade us of the danger. Our newspapers chafed over Reagan's description of our country as an evil empire, and the angry rhetoric of our leaders undermined the sense of security most of us had grown up with during the detente of the 1970s. Although we joked amongst our selves about the senile old men in the Kremlin, it was easy to believe that the West would seize upon our moment of weakness to destroy us. It was even conceivable that our army strategists would call for a preemptive strike, perhaps with biological weapons.

The Progress Scientific and Production Association was the eeriest place I had ever worked. Encamped on a windy plain ten miles from the uranium-mining town of Stepnogorsk, the enterprise was ringed with high gray walls and an electric-wire fence. The surrounding land was stripped of all vegetation, partly as a safeguard against the accidental release of pathogens (a lesson from Sverdlovsk, where hosing down the contaminated bushes had created a new source of infection), and partly to preserve a clear line of sight against intruders. Motion sensors were embedded everywhere.

Inside the compound, dozens of white and gray buildings were arranged on a grid of narrow streets. It was a miniature city, with a skyline of oddly shaped towers and buildings, some more than five stories high. There were separate entrances for civilian and military employees. Armed guards were stationed at both.

Security inside the compound was even more oppressive. Following the Sverdlovsk accident, intelligence organs had increased their influence throughout the Soviet biological weapons establishment. No explicit connection was ever drawn between what had happened in the Urals and the tightening of security regulations, but it was made clear to us that no one wanted another uncomfortable bout of international attention.

As a lab scientist, my worst fear had been that a careless act might put my life and that of my immediate coworkers at risk. As director, I had become responsible for the health and safety of tens of thousands of people in the nearby community. It was my job to make sure that our secrets stayed, both literally and figuratively, behind the walls of our compound.

At night, Lena told me I was grinding my teeth so hard it kept her awake. And I was talking in my sleep.

"You keep mumbling about requirements for this, requirements for that," she smiled. "You ought to forget about things when you come home." Even if I had wanted to forget, one person at Stepnogorsk was determined to keep my level of anxiety as high as possible.

One morning in October 1983, a few weeks after I arrived, KGB lieutenant colonel Anatoly Bulgak, commander of the facility's counterintelligence unit, poked his head around the door of my office.

"Mind if I come in?" he said.

He was inside before I could reply.

He plumped down in a chair close to my desk and casually stretched his legs out on the floor as if he had been doing this every morning of his life.

"Since you and I have to work together," he said, "I think we should be friends."

"What do you need?" I said.

"It's not what I need. It's really what you need."

He paused. I said nothing.

"You and I know a lot of new people will have to be brought here in the near future," he went on, clearly disappointed by my lack of response. "This place will get crowded, and it will be easy to make mistakes."

"Mistakes?"

He sat up in the chair and put a hand on each knee, to emphasize the seriousness of what he was about to say.

"Mistakes of the security kind. We can't afford that."

I bristled at his use of "we."

"I don't see any reason to worry," I said. "I'm sure I'll be able to call on you if there's a problem."

"You don't understand," Bulgak went on impassively. "It would be natural, and sensible, to go over the personnel lists ahead of time. That way, there won't be any problems with Moscow."

"I don't think you are qualified to choose scientists — are you?" I said.

I tried to make this sound like an innocent remark, but he recognized it immediately as the insult it was meant to be.

Bulgak possessed a country policeman's dim awe of science. He resented anyone who made him conscious of his ignorance. When I came to know him better, I understood that he was terrified of what went on in our labs. Whenever he suspected a worker of pilfering, or protested one of our security procedures, I would invite him to don a biological protective suit and come with me into Zone Two so as to investigate for himself, but he would back off, hastily insisting he would join me "some other time" when he wasn't busy.

A knock on the door broke the silence. It was one of my lab chiefs, with a problem demanding immediate attention. Bulgak rose to his feet and smirked.

"You can't do this without my help," he said. "Try it, you'll see."

He sidled past my visitor without acknowledging his presence and walked out. I caught a faint look of distaste in the lab chief's eyes as we watched him go.

Bulgak was easy to dislike. He was a bland-featured man in his mid-thirties with shrewd eyes and an unpleasant demeanor. Every element of his personality appeared calculated to impress others. The clothes he favored — padded ash gray suits and dark shoes— seemed to have been chosen from a catalog for secret policemen. He had been transferred to Stepnogorsk from a rural KGB office in southern Kazakhstan six months before my arrival.

But Bulgak was smaller than the sum of his parts. While plant workers feared him in person, they mocked him behind his back. I didn't need to know much about him to understand the power he commanded in our institution. The KGB operated a counterintelligence unit in every biological weapons research lab in the Soviet Union. Its chief automatically served as a deputy director of the facility, but he reported through his KGB superiors to Lubyanka, the massive building in central Moscow that had served as the nation's secret police headquarters since the early years of Soviet power.

Every director had to accept this alternative chain of command without complaint. The KGB devoted as much energy to watching Biopreparat's senior managers as it did to lower-ranking employees. Avoiding intelligence scrutiny was impossible: although fewer than ten or fifteen KGB employees were assigned to each facility, the units relied on informers to keep us in line.

Savva Yermoshin used to boast that "one out of every ten Soviet citizens" unofficially reported to the security organs, insinuating that the same ratio held true in our agency. I never tried to dispute him. He had probably already discovered from my personnel file that I nearly became a KGB informer myself. My bitter memory of that experience no doubt influenced my handling of Anatoly Bulgak.

It was in 1978, five years before I arrived at Stepnogorsk, when I was a junior scientist at Berdsk. I had just completed my first major assignment, the development of a lab technique for weaponizing brucellosis. The task had been authorized by Lev Klyucherov, who was then a colonel and Biopreparat's scientific chief, and in a burst of youthful exuberance I fired off a triumphant report to Moscow. I was sure Klyucherov would want to know the results immediately.

I received no answer. This should have been a warning.

A few days later, the commander of the KGB's counterintelligence unit at Berdsk, Colonel Filipenko, walked into my office holding a copy of my report.

"What does this mean?" he asked.

Flattered that even the KGB was interested in my work, I launched into a description of the steps I had taken to manufacture the weapon prototype. I was in the midst of a lengthy recital of the composition of the nutrient medium when Filipenko cut me off.

"I don't think you understand me," he said. "What I'm asking you is who told you to do this?"

Surprised, I said it was an assignment from Colonel Klyucherov.

"That can't be true," he snapped. "I just spoke to him in Moscow, and he knows nothing about it."

"But he gave…" I stopped in mid-sentence.

With a sinking feeling, I suddenly realized I had overlooked a regulation requiring us to inform the KGB detachment at our labs of all "special projects." This was a legacy of the prewar era, when the secret police, under Lavrenty Beria, were the coordinators of all biological warfare activity. Before the Sverdlovsk accident, most people ignored such minor security precautions, but the regulation was there to be enforced, and I had landed my superiors in a mess.

My supervisor at Berdsk was not sympathetic when I called him.

"You know you weren't supposed to create anything, just to analyze whether it could be done," he said coolly. "You went beyond your orders."

It was futile to argue. I realized that the KGB would seize on my indiscretion to charge that a Biopreparat scientist was developing weapons on his own. A good manager might have made excuses for my inexperience, but Klyucherov and the supervisor were more interested in protecting themselves and shielding Biopreparat.

The next day I was summoned to Berdsk KGB headquarters. A second notice was sent to Vladimir Rumyantsev, the friend who had worked with me on the project.

We walked to the KGB's two-story building near the center of town, too frightened to speak. An officer in civilian clothes escorted us inside and waved me into the commander's office. Rumyantsev was told to wait his turn.

The commander, Kuznetsov, was reading my report. Piles of paper were strewn across his desk. I looked around for somewhere to sit, but there was no chair.

Kuznetsov didn't bother to glance up when I walked in. He read my paper with an impassive absorption that reminded me of one of my professors at Tomsk and shook his head every few minutes in theatrical dismay. Finally, he pushed his chair back, stood up, and strode over to me, placing his face within a few inches of my own.

"Why did you do it?" he shouted.

"I received an order," I responded weakly.

"So, you're a fascist?"

"What?"

"Only a fascist would answer that he killed people because of an order."

"But I didn't kill anybody," I protested. "I just did the work I was asked to do."

"That doesn't matter. You are obviously the kind of person who would kill on demand. You have no brain of your own!"

His voice increased in decibels with each sentence. I was petrified. I almost began to believe I had killed someone.

The tirade seemed to go on for hours. Kuznetsov continued to accuse me of being a fascist, and I continued to deny it. I didn't know what else to do, or exactly what he wanted. Would he stop shouting if I confessed to my fascist tendencies? A confession seemed pointless, especially if I was going to be fired anyway.

The image of my father and his battle decorations passed through my mind. Would he believe his son was a fascist?

"Look," I said at last, my voice rising in frustration. "If you think I'm a fascist, why don't you put me in jail!"

Kuznetsov stopped shouting, looked deep into my eyes, and went back to his desk. The sudden quiet was chilling.

"Well, Lieutenant," he smiled, "we don't need to do that. People make mistakes. I can forgive you, perhaps — but I need your help."

"How?"

"I'll tell you," he said, spreading his large hands on the desk. "One of the things in your favor is that we know you've just joined the Party, correct?"

I nodded. Communist Party membership wasn't essential to employment in our labs, but it was one of the criteria for getting ahead. I had joined because I knew it would look good on my record.

"You're bright and you're a scientist," Kuznetsov continued, now radiating benevolence. "But a lot of other scientists haven't joined the Party. That means we really don't know what kind of people they are or what they're thinking. Maybe they have doubts; maybe some of them express opinions against our Motherland."

Kuznetsov looked at me expectantly, but I had no idea what he was getting at.

"Well," he came to the point. "You can help us figure out what's going on."

Then I understood. "You want me to be an informer?" I said.

"No, no," he answered quickly, as if the idea repelled him. "Just a kind of assistant."

All at once, my confidence returned. They weren't going to fire me, after all. I felt ashamed of having been so frightened. I replied, lightly, "Without pay?"

It took a moment for my question to sink in. Then Kuznetsov exploded again.

"It you think this is a joke, you'll be sorry soon enough," he said, and dismissed me.

I found Rumyantsev, pale and nervous, pacing the hallway outside the office. I didn't know what he had heard and was about to whisper an encouraging word when Kuznetsov appeared behind me.

"Don't wait around for your friend," he said. "Go home."

Rumyantsev came to my apartment later that night, carrying two bottles of vodka. Silently, we finished one bottle and then started on the other.

At last, he spoke.

"Kanatjan," he said, "I know you told them no."

"That's right," I answered, now fully recovered from Kuznetsov's interrogation and proud of having stood up to him.

He took another drink and pursed his lips. "It's the same thing I told them."

"It doesn't matter," I said. "Don't worry about it." We went on to other subjects.

Over the next several months he would from time to time pull me aside at parties and make oblique references to our interview with the KGB.

"You're such a good guy," he said once, clapping me on the back. "I'm a bad guy."

I didn't want to believe that Kuznetsov had been able to bully my friend into serving as an informer, but I also didn't want to know if it was true. We drifted apart after Berdsk. I helped him secure a senior post in Biopreparat when I became deputy director, but he was fired when his superiors accused him of arrogance. Many years later, after I arrived in the United States, I was hurt to learn that he had told a mutual friend I was a spy.

By the time we finished our construction program at Stepnogorsk, the facility looked like the mountain of metal Tarasenko had warned me about.

New buildings had risen from the desert floor, dramatically changing the skyline. One of them, Building 600, was the largest indoor testing facility constructed up to that time in the Soviet Union. It was more than fifty feet high, with two giant stainless steel testing chambers hidden inside. The first chamber, designed to withstand the force of a powerful explosion, would be used to analyze the decay rate and dissemination capacities of aerosol mixtures contained in our germ bombs. The second was for testing animals. We also constructed a network of underground bunkers to store our materials and an elaborate system of ventilation and waste pipes.

Bioweapons are not rocket launchers. They cannot be loaded and fired. The most virulent culture in a test tube is useless as an offensive weapon until it has been put through a process that gives it stability and predictability. The manufacturing technique is, in a sense, the real weapon, and it is harder to develop than individual agents.

At Stepnogorsk, the process of weaponizing anthrax would begin with a few grains of freeze-dried bacteria kept in a stoppered vial. Hundreds of tiny vials no bigger than test tubes were stored in metal trays inside a refrigerated vault, each over a soft towel soaked in disinfectant and each bearing a "passport" tag identifying the main features of the strain, including when it was created. One vial was enough to produce the munitions for an intercontinental war.

No one was ever allowed into the vault alone. At least two people — a lab technician and scientist — had to be present when a vial was taken down from the shelf, checked against a list, and wheeled i n a metal cart into the operating laboratory.

We standardized the process after months of testing our production lines. First, the scientist would pour a small amount of a nutrient medium into the vial. The composition of this medium varies according to the strain being cultured, and the special formulas developed for what we called, with no attempt at irony, the "mother culture" were classified.

With a tiny pipette, the scientist would draw the mixture out of the vial and transfer a small amount into several slightly larger bottles. The bottles would be wheeled into another room, placed inside heated boxes about the size of a microwave oven, and left to incubate for one or two days.

Heat can kill bacteria, which is why pasteurizers of milk turn the temperatures of their ovens as high as 55 degrees Celsius to ensure that no harmful organisms remain in the product that goes to the supermarket. Weapons makers want their bacteria to survive, so one of the central challenges of bioweaponeering is to find the right temperatures at which different pathogenic microorganisms can grow rapidly without being cooked to death. This process has much in common with techniques for making vaccines.

A seed stock in a standard vial will swell to billions of microorganisms after less than forty-eight hours, but it would take days or even weeks of patient brewing to produce the quantities required for weaponization.

Once this liquid culture emerges from the thermostatic oven, it is siphoned off into large flasks. The flasks are brought to another room where they are connected to air-bubbling machines, which turn the liquid into a light froth. With oxygen distributed more evenly around the mixture, the bacteria can now grow more efficiently.

At this stage the liquid culture is translucent and deep brown, something like the color of Coca-Cola. The greater the bacterial concentration, the lighter and more opaque it will become: by the time it reaches maximum concentration, it will look like coffee mixed with cream.

A bioweaponeer works with recipes. The raw ingredients are similar, but quantities and combinations of nutrient media, heat, and time vary. If the mixture overheats, one has to begin the entire process over again.

Each new generation of bacteria is transferred into progressively larger vessels, until there is enough anthrax to pipe under vacuum pressure into a room containing several fermenters. These giant cauldrons incubate the substance for one or two more days. The bacteria continue to multiply until the scientist judges that they have reached maximum concentration, at which point they are passed through a centrifuge to be concentrated as much as thirty times further.

Our centrifuges resembled the separators used to make milk, butter, and cream at any dairy. In fact, they were produced for us by a plant in Tula, south of Moscow, that manufactures dairy equipment.

Even at this stage, you do not yet have a weapon. The pathogen has to be mixed with additives to stabilize it over a long period. Like nutrient media, the additives are another "patented" element of the process.

The final formulation is sent along underground pipes to a nearby building, where it will be filtered into the munitions carrier. The machines that measure and pour fixed quantities of our pathogens dozens of times a minute are virtually identical to those used by soft-drink bottling plants. As the reactor is emptied, the seed stock from another tray of vials would have been cultured for the start of another cycle.

This process could be kept running night and day. Our experiments with different assembly-line techniques fueled our rapidly expanding program. By 1987, the combined production capacity of our anthrax lines around the country was nearly five thousand tons a year, although the actual mobilization plans authorized by the Ministry of Defense provided for a lower amount. Kurgan was to produce one thousand tons; Penza five hundred tons and Stepnogorsk three hundred tons.

My requests for equipment and building materials were rarely denied. My biggest problem was the shortage of staff.

About forty scientists were working at Stepnogorsk when I assumed control. Few of them were qualified for the advanced research that needed to be done. To fulfill Kalinin's vision, I would have to hire hundreds of new technicians and scientists, but the rules for employment at Stepnogorsk, as in all of our secret military installations, were rigorously enforced. Prospective workers had to undergo an intensive security check that could last months — months that I couldn't afford.

I knew Bulgak was right about the dangers of precipitately taking on staff, but the pressure to meet deadlines set by Moscow gave me little choice.

I launched an unofficial recruiting drive for construction workers, technicians, and scientists, tapping the work force in the city of Stepnogorsk and civilian institutes elsewhere in the country. Many of the people I brought to the base lacked proper clearances tor secret work, so I hired them as temporary workers while their security checks were being done. Within a few months, I had almost two hundred new employees.

There were no awkward questions from headquarters, and our expansion and construction activities soon engaged so much of my time that I stopped worrying about Moscow's security rules. I recruited more people, quietly transferring them into full-time positions as soon as their personnel checks were completed. The success of our experiments, I imagined, had neutralized procedural concerns. But Anatoly Bulgak was not about to forget my insult. His network of informers kept him posted on my irregular hiring practices, and when he had accumulated enough evidence, he decided to teach me a lesson.

A year after our unfriendly encounter, I was ordered to Moscow. The order came directly from Kalinin. No explanation was offered, nor did I expect one. I assumed he wanted a personal report on our progress.

After a three-and-a-half-hour flight to Moscow on a cramped Aeroflot plane, I went straight to his office. Kalinin's secretary said he was busy. This didn't particularly surprise me. Kalinin was the type to order someone back from halfway around the world and then keep him waiting for days.

To my surprise, the secretary handed me a note from KGB colonel Vladimir Dorogov, counterintelligence chief for the entire Biopreparat organization.

"See me immediately," the note said.

Dorogov was staring out the window when I stepped into his office on the third floor, hands clasped behind his back. When he turned to face me, I was surprised by the ferocity of his expression.

"Do you realize how much danger you have put our country

in?" he said coldly.

He walked to his desk and pulled out a folder with the names of the workers I had hired in the previous six months. There were red lines under several of them.

"We have excellent officers in Stepnogorsk," Dorogov continued. "But you seem to have chosen to resist their help. Frankly, I have never seen anything like this in my entire career."

His glacial calm was unnerving.

"Comrade Colonel, there is an explanation," I said.

"There can be no explanation!" he said. "I've seen your records and I know your history, Alibekov. This is not the first time you've been foolish."

He then gave me a blow-by-blow description of my encounter with Kuznetsov six years earlier.

"What shall we do about this?" he said.

"I don't know," I said, truthfully.

This was not merely a violation of procedure: in their minds I had opened the entire program up to sabotage. I began to believe that my career was rapidly drawing to an end.

But the KGB surprised me again. Dorogov opened the top drawer of his desk and pulled out a blank sheet of paper.

"On this sheet," he said, "you will write down everything you did and explain why it was wrong."

As I reached for it, he locked my wrist in a painful grip.

"Just remember," he said. "This is a small piece of paper, but it will have to cover your ass perfectly."

The next day Kalinin agreed to see me. He handed me the paper I had written, which was now attached to an official reprimand, and told me to sign my name to both sheets. It was a tradition that went back to Stalin's time: my signature affirmed t,he charges against me and concurred in advance with whatever "people's punishment" I was deemed to deserve.

My humiliation, apparently, was my punishment.

"If you ever break the rules again," Kalinin said, "it will be the last time."

Today, I understand that they could not have fired me, but it was not obvious to me then. Putting another manager in my place would have slowed the momentum of our program, perhaps even derailed it, and Kalinin had too much invested in Stepnogorsk's success. He must have used all of his influence to fight off the KGB. If I failed, his career would be destroyed as surely as mine.

I shared Kalinin's determination to succeed at any cost, which added irony to my predicament. The idealistic young doctor from Tomsk who had agonized over the difference between saving lives and taking them was gone. The worst possible fate for me had become banishment from Biopreparat, and from the privileges that came with it.

The transformation wasn't yet complete. I still shuddered occasionally when I looked at the bacteria multiplying in our fermenters and considered that they could end the lives of millions of people. But the secret culture of our labs had changed my outlook. My parents would not have recognized the man I had become.

I returned to Stepnogorsk determined to work with the dispassionate efficiency Biopreparat required of all its managers. My family took second place. Some weeks I lost all track of time while I was inside the compound, going home only for a nap and a snack before setting off again. In 1985, my third child, Timur, was born, but I was almost never there: while Lena took care of the baby, I was working feverishly in the labs.

I was angrier and lonelier than I had ever been in my life. When I first arrived at Progress, I had been filled with excitement about returning to Kazakhstan after so many years in the Russian north. Stepnogorsk was only a short plane ride from my parents' home, and I looked forward to being around people who looked like me and who spoke the language I had learned as a child. But there were no Kazakhs at my facility, and only a few were scattered among the Russian faces in the city of Stepnogorsk. Even as I had become the perfect model of a Soviet bureaucrat, I felt alienated from everything and everyone around me.

My oldest child, Mira, was treated well by her teachers and friends because she was the daughter of the director, but I knew that some of her classmates mocked her as "black" and called her "funny-face" behind her back.

The few quiet moments I stole in our apartment were used to work on my Ph.D. thesis. It was absolutely necessary to complete the thesis if I was to maintain my career path at Biopreparat. Nothing else seemed important.

Eventually, Bulgak and I came to an uneasy truce. He was shrewd enough never to ask me about my trip to Moscow, although he clearly relished my humiliation. He would eventually, to my relief, be transferred back to his provincial detachment, but not before he became embroiled in a security problem of his own.

One of the units under Bulgak's control was called the Division for Special Countermeasures Against Foreign Engineering Intelligence Services. It was a convoluted title for the straightforward job of making sure that nothing we did at Stepnogorsk was detectable in the outside world.

My improvements to the plant had complicated Bulgak's life. He needed people with sufficient technical expertise to mask all traces of the prodigious flow of waste from our fermenters. Bulgak found a civilian engineer to head the Countermeasures Division who soon proved to be one of our most talented workers in the arts of camouflage. His name was Markin.

Markin was a shy man in his late thirties or early forties. Although most of his coworkers liked him, he kept largely to himself. Few knew how complicated his personal life was.

Markin had fallen in love with the widow of one of the KGB officers who had worked at the plant. They married after a brief courtship, but the marriage quickly soured. They fought constantly, and Markin began to look more downcast with each passing month.

Finally, he applied for a leave of absence, explaining that he needed to take care of his sick mother. The leave was granted. A few weeks later, Bulgak walked into my office holding a letter from a small village in the Gorky region.

"Read this," he said, his brow furrowing with anxiety.

Markin wrote that he didn't want to return to Stepnogorsk. "I respectfully ask that you allow me to retire to the collective farm where my ailing mother lives," the letter said. "But I beg you not to think that there is any other reason for my departure. I am not a traitor, just an insignificant person who would like to live in the peace of nature."

I handed the letter back to Bulgak.

"I guess he's found a way to escape his wife." I smiled.

Bulgak didn't smile. "We can't let him go," he insisted. "He knows too much."

"I le knows a lot," I agreed. "But what foreign spy is going to plod through the mud of Gorky to find him out? I don't think we have anything to worry about. Besides, he's not in the army or the KGB. You can't keep him here."

Bulgak looked away distractedly. "We'll see," he said.

A few days later, I found Bulgak in a more cheerful mood.

"One of my men just spoke with the local commander in Gorky about the Markin problem," he grinned. "The guys there are complaining that they have two headaches now."

"What does that mean?"

Bulgak gave me a pitying look. "If you followed politics," he lectured, "you would learn what's really going on in the world. Don't you know that's where they've got Sakharov?"

Andrei Sakharov, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist and the father of our hydrogen bomb, had been exiled to Gorky in 1980 for public criticism of the Soviet leadership. It seemed strange to put Markin in the same class of "headache" as the outspoken physicist.

Bulgak and I were going over new security regulations some weeks later when he sat up in his chair like a man pricked by a needle.

"What's wrong?" I asked.

"I almost forgot," he said. "Remember the two headaches I told you about? In Gorky?"

I told him I did.

"Well," he went on, relishing every word, "Gorky only has one headache again."

"What does that mean?"

"It means," said Bulgak, "that Markin is no more."

"You mean he left Gorky?"

"Unwillingly," he said. "He's dead."

"What happened?" I asked uneasily.

"It seems he drowned. He was drinking a little too much and he went out for a swim and never came back."

"I didn't know Markin liked to swim."

An enigmatic smile played on Bulgak's features.

"The important thing is that Gorky has only one headache again," he said.

"Was he killed?"

Bulgak looked hurt.

"How would I know?" he said. "What matters is that we don't have to worry about Markin anymore." By 1986 we had over nine hundred people at the plant, and more were coming every month. The contingent from Sverdlovsk, which included the unfortunate Nikolai Chernyshov, helped us achieve a breakthrough in developing the most effective anthrax weapon ever produced. But the pressure-cooker atmosphere took a heavy toll. There were one or two accidents every week.

Once Gennady Lepyoshkin, the chief of our biosafety directorate, reported that a technician had been infected with anthrax in a lab that was supposed to be sterile. He had an abrasion on his neck, one of the most dangerous places in the body through which to contract cutaneous anthrax. When the neck swells, it interferes with breathing.

At first we treated him with streptomycin and penicillin, the most effective antibiotics for use against cutaneous anthrax, but a painful swelling erupted on his chest and spread over his body, making it increasingly difficult for him to breathe. Within three days, death seemed inevitable. A gloomy message was being prepared for Moscow when, in a final attempt to save his life, we gave him an abnormally high dose of anthrax antiserum. The shock dose worked: he began to recover.

The technician's narrow escape drove home the potency of our new weapon. Our powdered and liquid formulations of anthrax were three times as strong as the weapons that had been manufactured at Sverdlovsk. It would take only five kilograms of the Anthrax 836 developed at the Kazakhstan base to infect half the people living in a square kilometer of territory; the Sverdlovsk weapon needed at least fifteen kilograms to achieve the same impact.

The destructive power of the new weapon was confirmed in tests on Rebirth Island in 1987. Lepyoshkin, who became my senior deputy that year, flew down to the Aral Sea to supervise the field trials. When he reported success, Moscow finally took Sverdlovsk Compound 19 off the roster of anthrax production plants.

Stepnogorsk more than compensated for the lost capacity of the army plant. Our factory could turn out two tons of anthrax a day in a process as reliable and efficient as producing tanks, trucks, cars, or Coca-Cola.

With the creation of the world's first industrial-scale biological weapons factory, the Soviet Union became the world's first — and only — biological superpower.

To be sure, we had already achieved global dominance in this field by the 1980s, when we could launch a biological attack with intercontinental ballistic missiles on targets thousands of miles away. But Stepnogorsk demonstrated our ability to wage biological warfare on a scale matched by no other nation in history. We had taken the science of biowarfare further in the previous four years than it had traveled in the four decades since World War II.

Needless to say, we didn't advertise our accomplishment. The accident at Sverdlovsk had briefly opened a window on our biological warfare program to the outside world, but since then our secrets had stayed well hidden. The international community still knew nothing of Biopreparat, and it had no reason to suspect our program's growing dimensions.

9. Smallpox

The word virus comes from the Latin term for poison. Viruses are invisible under most microscopes and hundreds of thou sands of times smaller than a grain of sand. Their existence was unsuspected until Dmitry Ivanovsky, a Russian microbiologist, discovered them in the late nineteenth century while investigating an outbreak of mosaic disease in tobacco plants. Ivanovsky found

that the mysterious agent responsible for this disease was able to pass through filters that otherwise blocked bacteria. Over half a century would pass before the first virus was seen and identified under an electron microscope, but Ivanovsky's discovery launched a new field of research into infectious diseases.

As more viruses were discovered, scientists grew increasingly baffled by their behavior. Viruses seem to exist on the threshold of

life, remaining inert until they fasten onto the cells of other organisms. They are structurally simpler than bacteria, consisting only of a protein shell, a sequence of DNA or RNA, and sometimes a lipid membrane, but they are capable of annihilating the most sophisticated biological system. Not all viruses kill their hosts — to do so is in many ways impractical — but when they do, they often combine incredible virulence with a high degree of contagiousness. A virus is programmed for its own procreation, but it cannot do this alone. First it must locate a host with the cell structure and nutrients necessary for it to reproduce. Viruses come to life inside the nucleus or cytoplasm of their host cells, fusing with them and ultimately hijacking their functions.

The human body commands a number of complex mechanisms for resisting, containing, and killing pathogenic microorganisms. The immune system works on many levels at once, like an army with scouts and infantrymen, naval and air power, a sophisticated information network, and a carefully delineated command structure. Some cells are responsible for surveillance, others for coordinating information; some focus on local maneuvers while still others direct more general attacks. Immunologists distinguish between specific and nonspecific immunological reactions. Specific or acquired immune responses depend on memory cells, which store information about previous invaders and thus play a significant role in conferring immunity.

Among the most important agents in the immune system are T cells. They act as scouts, circulating through the bloodstream and moving into lymph nodes, on the lookout for foreign substances. As soon as a virus enters the bloodstream and infects its first cell, it will be recognized by T cells, which immediately activate, replicating themselves and sending out signals, calling for the formation of antibodies and attracting them to the site of infection. Antibodies are like ground troops. They are particularly effective at attacking viruses and bacteria that are still coursing through the system, before they have infiltrated target cells.

Within seconds of infection, defensive proteins and inflammatory agents are released, which activate natural killer cells and lead them to the site of infection. Interferon, one of the most powerful antiviral agents, degrades viral RNA, slows down protein synthesis, and inhibits viral reproduction in infected cells.

By the end of the first week or the beginning of the second, tin-body will in many cases have developed virus-specific antibodies, which sometimes seek to neutralize the virus by binding to its sin face and preventing it from penetrating into new cells. But viruses are adept and mutate quickly. Countless are now capable of inhibiting and neutralizing the body's natural defenses, rendering their resistance ineffective.

New viruses can appear without warning, and viruses once considered harmless to man can suddenly morph into killers. They can be responsible for devastating epidemics, such as AIDS or Ebola, or they can be benign, like the virus that causes some warts. Some viruses only infect plants. Others target animal life. Arboviruses, transmitted by insects, usually aim for the brain, muscles, liver, heart, and kidneys. Enteric viruses lay siege to the gastointestinal tract, entering the body through contaminated water or food. Respiratory viruses, responsible for measles, mumps, and chicken pox, are airborne viruses that assault the nose and throat. More than one hundred different viruses have been identified as causes of the common cold.

Of all the diseases that have tormented mankind, smallpox has left the oldest and the deepest scars. Recorded as early as 1122 B.C. in China, it altered the course of history, ravaging eighteenth-century Europe and decimating the native populations of North America.

Smallpox comes from the pox family of viruses, which assault the upper respiratory tract. Variola major, the scientific name by which the smallpox virus is known, is patient and systematic. It will begin by insinuating itself into cells close to the surface of the skin and in the neural system. The smallpox virus sheds its shell as soon as it enters a live cell, and quickly begins to multiply. Viral transcription begins almost immediately, inhibiting DNA synthesis and thereby preventing the cell from activating its defense mechanisms. Once the virus has inserted its genetic information into the host cell, proteins and enzymes are created to help it mature and develop. The progress of the virus can be mapped by the spread of tiny pink spots from the face and arms to the lower regions of the body.

Smallpox symptoms were once familiar to every doctor. After a quiet incubation period of five to ten days, the virus manifests itself suddenly. The first stage of the disease brings high fever, vomiting, headache, and a strange stiffness. This can last from two to four days. Within less than a week, small spots will begin to develop, forming a rash around the face. As the rash spreads over the following week these spots will develop into painful blisters. In the normal course of the illness, the blisters form scabs that linger for several weeks until they dry and fall off, leaving scars. More severe forms of black or red pox can lead to death within three to four days.

The modern struggle to conquer smallpox began in 1796, when the British physician Edward Jenner observed that milkmaids who had contracted a mild form of pox virus from cows appeared to be immune to smallpox. Jenner injected an eight-year-old boy with material taken from lesions on the hand of an infected milkmaid. The boy developed a slight fever. Two months later Jenner inoculated him with smallpox, but he didn't contract the disease. The physician concluded that the milder strain, which he named vaccinia, provided immunity.

Smallpox "vaccine" — the name chosen to honor Jenner's work— became the principal instrument for tackling the disease. His discovery, the first vaccine, revolutionized medicine.

On May 8, 1980, the World Health Organization announced that smallpox had been eradicated from the planet. The last naturally occurring case was reported in Somalia in 1977, and no new cases had been detected in three years. The WHO recommended the discontinuation of smallpox immunization programs, observing that there was no longer any need to subject people to even the negligible risk connected with vaccination.

The international agency simultaneously adopted a resolution restricting the world's stocks of smallpox to four sites, where limited quantities would be available for research purposes. A few years later, the sites were narrowed down to two: the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta and the Ivanovsky Institute of Virology in Moscow.

The conquest of smallpox generated a special feeling of accomplishment in the Soviet Union: the worldwide crusade against smallpox had been a Soviet initiative. Moscow first proposed the campaign at a World Health Organization meeting in 1958, and its sponsorship of vaccination programs in the third world won it admirers everywhere. Russia had suffered its share of smallpox outbreaks over the centuries, finally managing to eliminate the disease in 1936, after a decade-long immunization program sponsored by the fledgling Bolshevik government.

Soon after the WHO announcement, smallpox was included in a list of viral and bacterial weapons targeted for improvement in the 1981-85 Five-Year-Plan.

Where other governments saw a medical victory, the Kremlin perceived a military opportunity. A world no longer protected from smallpox was a world newly vulnerable to the disease. In 1981, Soviet researchers began to explore what the Kremlin hoped would be a better version of a smallpox weapon that had been in our arsenal for decades. The work was at first cursory. Military commanders were reluctant to devote energy and resources to an enterprise that promised no immediate results. The Soviet Union, they reasoned, had already gone further with smallpox weapons than any other country.

In 1947, the Soviet Union established its first smallpox weapons factory just outside the ancient cathedral town of Zagorsk, forty minutes' drive northwest of Moscow. Zagorsk (now Sergiyev Posad) is the site of the walled fourteenth-century Trinity-St. Sergius Monastery, one of the most revered places in the Russian Orthodox religion. A few miles away, in another walled compound, Soviet army scientists at the Virological Center of the Ministry of Defense devoutly cultivated smallpox, Q fever, and Venezuelan equine encephalitis in the embryos of chicken eggs.

It was a cumbersome process, but an effective one. Using tiny syringes, laboratory workers injected microscopic amounts of smallpox virus into eggs and sealed each egg with paraffin. The eggs were placed inside thermostatic ovens for several days while the embryo host cells stirred the virus into life. As it monopolized the cells' normal growth mechanisms, the virus spawned successive replications of itself until the host was engulfed or destroyed. The eggs were then punctured and the liquid inside poured into special vats and mixed with stabilizing materials. The resulting weapon could remain potent in refrigerated conditions for at least a year.

Every month, hundreds of thousands of eggs produced at nearby collective farms were consigned to Zagorsk's weapons-assembly lines. Under a state-controlled agricultural system it was easy to conceal the purpose of hijacking so many eggs from the marketplace. The "egg-weapon" process for smallpox proved so successful that a second production facility was opened at Pokrov, near Moscow, in a plant operated by the Ministry of Agriculture.

In 1959, a traveler from India infected forty-six Muscovites with smallpox before authorities realized what had happened. The traveler had been vaccinated, but smallpox vaccinations lose their effectiveness over time, and while his weakened immunity was enough to protect him from suffering the symptoms of the disease, he could still pass it on to others. The strain of Variola major in his system was so virulent that an epidemic was only narrowly averted. Partly in response to this incident, the Soviet government sent a special medical team to India to help purge the virus from the subcontinent.

KGB agents went with them.

They returned to Russia with a strain of Indian smallpox excellently suited to weapons production. It was highly virulent and was stable enough to retain its infectious qualities over time. This meant that, with the proper additives, it could be stored longer than the strains in Soviet stockpiles. Within a few years, India's unwitting gift became our principal battle strain of smallpox. It was dubbed India-1967, to commemorate the year of its isolation. In our secret code, it became India-1.

In the 1970s, smallpox was considered so important to our biological arsenal that the Soviet military command issued an order to maintain an annual stockpile of twenty tons. The weapons were stored at army facilities in Zagorsk. Annual quotas of smallpox were required as it decayed over time. We never wanted to be caught short.

The episode of the Indian traveler underlined some of Variola major's impressive qualities as a weapon. The smallpox virus is so hardy that it can remain infectious for long periods, even in the soiled linen of those who have been infected. Smallpox victims are infectious from the moment of their first symptoms until the healing of the last scar, two to three weeks later, and they can transmit the disease to others with as little as a cough.

Not all viruses spread through direct human contact, but those that do are the most contagious. Influenza's ability to travel from one person to another propelled by a sneeze or a cough or even by touching the clothes of an infected person enables it to leapfrog through classrooms and cross international borders and to fuel lethal pandemics such as the flu of 1918. Measles and chicken pox, the tormentors of early childhood, are similarly spread through ordinary human contact, which means that the virus can remain alive outside its host long enough to travel through the air and infect another person. Some of the viruses for hemorrhagic fevers— Machupo, Ebola, Lassa fever, and Junin — spread through personal contact. Ebola ravages its hosts and dies quickly on exposure to oxygen, though a number of people who have had only glancing contact with Ebola victims have come down with the disease.

A large body of Western scientific opinion considers Variola major an unlikely weapon, despite its contagiousness. Smallpox does not normally occur in animals, though monkeys can contract it without spreading it to others. Humans are the virus's only natural hosts. There is no way, therefore, for the disease to propagate in nature. Some scientists argue that an outbreak among humans would be contained through quarantine and vaccination before it could develop into an epidemic, as happened in Moscow in 1959. These scientists go on to maintain that the virus's long incubation period offers additional protection. Since the disease takes seven to ten days to incubate, they claim there would be plenty of time to take medical countermeasures after a smallpox attack. The first order of priority would be to contain the outbreak through a program of blanket vaccination. Smallpox vaccines are thought to become effective within a few days. They were found in clinical tests performed many years ago to reduce the severity of the disease. But there is no guarantee that vaccination will cure smallpox. And in order to be effective, they must be administered before the first symptoms appear.

The smallpox weapons we developed sharply reduced this comfort period. When we exposed monkeys to an aerosol of the highly virulent India-1, they contracted smallpox within one to five days.

There are no therapeutic measures currently available to treat smallpox once symptoms develop. The most a physician can do at this stage is to provide drugs to alleviate some of the symptoms.

A virus's effectiveness as a weapon can be measured by its morbidity rate, which reflects the number of people to contract the disease after exposure. Smallpox kills between 30 and 50 percent of unvaccinated victims, a low mortality rate, but its morbidity rate ranges from 60 to 90 percent. For many people, contracting smallpox amounts to a life sentence. Some victims are permanently blinded. Others will bear scars as long as they live.

In the nearly twenty years since it issued its declaration, the World Health Organization has not modified its stance on small pox. Schoolchildren in the United States, Russia, and elsewhere around the world are not vaccinated against the disease, and in ternational travelers are no longer required to show proof of smallpox immunity.

Today there are twelve million doses of smallpox vaccine on hand in the United States — of which only seven million are fully re liable, according to the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta — a portion of the roughly two hundred million doses available in the world. This sounds like a comfortable amount to meet an emergency, until you consider the damage a smallpox attack would do in a densely populated commuter city like New York.

Viruses have attracted the attention of bioweaponeers for decades During World War II the Western allies explored the possibility of weaponizing several viral diseases, including Venezuelan equine encephalitis and smallpox. American, Canadian, and British scientists found to their frustration that viruses were far more difficult to manipulate than bacteria. Since they cannot grow on their own, they must be nurtured in living cells or tissues inside a sterile laboratory environment.

Viruses were also found to be unreliable when deployed Aerosols were still in the early stages of development in the 1940s and most of the approaches considered by the Allies for weaponizing smallpox seem strange today. One method involved grinding an Asian strain of smallpox into a fine powder to dust over letters. By the time the war ended, the Allies had largely given up on weaponizing viruses.

The Soviet Union was not deterred. Throughout the Cold War, we considered viruses to be among the most valuable munitions in our arsenal. Their ability to infect vast numbers of people with an infinitesimal number of particles made them ideal weapons for modern strategic warfare. As our technical ability to create aerosols improved, we found they could be used to greater effect than some bacteriological munitions, especially in the case of diseases spread through direct personal contact. Fewer than five viral particles of smallpox were sufficient to infect 50 percent of the animals exposed to aerosols in our testing labs. To infect the same percentage of humans with anthrax would require ten thousand to twenty thousand spores. For plague, the comparable figure is fifteen hundred cells. The differences in quantity are too minute to be discernible to the naked eye, but they are significant if you are planning attacks on a large scale. Smallpox requires almost no concentration process.

While we had clung to our egg-and-conveyor-belt method of making smallpox, Western pharmaceutical labs were manufacturing vaccines in special reactors from cultures grown in tissue cells obtained from animals or humans. This technique required expertise. The tissue has to be kept alive outside its natural habitat in cell lines and stored at precise temperatures. Some cells are better than others for viral culture, such as those taken from the kidneys of green monkeys or from the lungs of human embryos.

The nutrient media needed to cultivate tissue cultures are unlike those used to grow bacteria. A special complex of amino acids, vitamins, salts, and sera — all mixed with highly distilled and deionized water — is crucial to the processes that encourage tissue cells and ultimately viruses to grow.

The new methods being developed were far more efficient than ours, and much easier to conceal.

I was promoted to colonel for my work in Stepnogorsk. This was two years ahead of the normal military schedule, but the real reward, as far as my family was concerned, came when General Kalinin transferred me to Moscow in September 1987 to serve as deputy chief of the Biosafety Directorate at Biopreparat. He hinted I was in line for higher posts.

The transfer surprised me. Despite my achievements, Kalinin had begun to treat me with hostility. He was curt on the phone and disparaged my work to others in the program. He had even opposed my receiving a medal for the new anthrax weapon.

"We're giving Alibekov something every year," he complained to a colleague who later relayed the comment to me. "He's too young to move so fast."

Fortunately, I had powerful allies. Senior officials in the civilian hierarchy of the Military-Industrial Commission (VPK) and the Fifteenth Directorate saw my appointment to headquarters as an opportunity to exert leverage over Kalinin.

"You remind me of myself," Alexei Arzhakov, deputy chairman of the VPK, confided to me at one point during the tug-of-war that preceded my transfer. "I became director of a chemical weapons production facility at thirty-three."

But it was really Mikhail Gorbachev and his revolutionary restructuring program, perestroika, that sent me to Moscow. Gorbachev came into office in March 1986, determined to break up the corrupt bureaucratic fiefdoms of the Brezhnev era and to create a stronger, more cohesive government. He was the reformer my generation had been waiting for. Nearly everyone under forty at Biopreparat considered him our best hope.

The biological warfare establishment was an ideal candidate for reform. By the mid-1980s, it was a jumble of agencies, laboratories, and institutes constantly trying to undercut one another. The enterprise languished under the control of bureaucrats as sclerotic as those who were stifling the Soviet Union's progress in other areas.

Perestroika produced encouraging early results in our program. Biopreparat and Glavmikrobioprom, responsible for producing vaccines and medicine, were placed under the control of a new superministry, the Ministry of Medical and Microbiological Industries. Valery Bykov, a veteran apparatchik and a specialist in chemical warfare, became minister. Yury Kalinin was named deputy minister. Their combined leadership seemed like a recipe for disaster. The two men were old rivals who had sparred for control of biological warfare research during the Brezhnev and Andropov years. The quarrel was as much institutional as personal. From its inception, Biopreparat was at the center of a wrestling match between the army and civilian officials. Brezhnev had granted the Fifteenth Directorate almost complete freedom to set Biopreparat's budget and its research program, and to choose its personnel.

Under Gorbachev, the army's honeymoon came to an end. Soviet military commanders found themselves challenged by the architects of perestroika in nearly every sphere. At Biopreparat Kalinin was forced to accept greater civilian control. When Bykov decided to support my transfer to Moscow, my future was assured.

Kalinin managed to turn the situation to his advantage. Reversing his position, he soon became my greatest supporter, making it seem as if transferring me to Moscow had been his idea all along. He had his own version of perestroika in mind.

Kalinin would use me to unseat his rivals — General Lev Klyucherov, head of the scientific directorate, and General Anatoly Vorobyov, a dignified elderly scientist whom I would replace as first deputy director within the year.

In December 1987, three months after I arrived in Moscow, Kalinin presented me with my first big assignment: I was to supervise plans to create a new smallpox weapon.

I spent an afternoon inside the third-floor KGB archives at Samokatnaya Street reading my instructions, contained in a secret document setting out the goals of Soviet biological weapons development for the five-year period ending in 1990. Smallpox appeared as a "special item" among the list of diseases marked for weaponization.

The Five-Year Plan, signed in his characteristic scrawl by Mikhail Gorbachev, outlined the most ambitious program for biological weapons development ever given to our agency. It included a three-hundred-million-ruble viral production plant (then equivalent to four hundred million dollars) at Yoshkar-Ola in the autonomous republic of Mordovia. The plan established a new military facility at Strizhi, near Kirov, for the production of viral and bacterial weapons and, most significantly, it funded the construction of a 630-liter viral reactor to produce smallpox at the Russian State Research Center of Virology and Biotechnology, a facility known within The System as Vector. Our military leaders had decided to concentrate on one of the toughest challenges of bioweaponeering — the transformation of viruses into weapons of war.

Gorbachev's Five-Year Plan — and his generous funding, which would amount to over $1 billion by the end of the decade — allowed us to catch up with and then surpass Western technology.

When I went to Vector in 1987, our new smallpox project was just getting off the ground. The facility, founded by Biopreparat in the early 1970s to specialize in viral research, was located in the small Siberian town of Koltsovo. It had been left to stagnate while we focused on improving our bacterial weapons, but Gorbachev's decree gave it a new lease on life.

Dozens of new lab and production buildings earmarked for research into viruses had been constructed by the time I arrived. More were on the drawing board. There was a large biocontainment structure designed especially for laboratory experiments with contagious viruses such as smallpox, Marburg, Lassa fever, and Machupo, as well as new explosive test chambers and facilities for breeding animals.

Vector's prize acquisition was the expensive new viral reactor authorized by Gorbachev's decree. Designed by one of our Moscow institutes and assembled at a special Biopreparat plant in western Russia, it was the first of its kind in the world. It stood about five feet high and was enclosed within thick stainless steel walls. An agitator at the bottom kept the mixture inside churning like clothes in a washing machine. Pipes led out in several directions, both for waste matter and weapons-ready material. A window on its convex roof allowed scientists to observe the viral culture at all times.

Lev Sandakchiev, Vector's director, was a garrulous Armenian biochemist who had been with Biopreparat since its inception in 1973. Sandakchiev was an expert in orthopoxviruses, the viral genus that includes smallpox. When I saw him he was at his wits' end. New scientists and technicians were arriving at Vector every month as the program began to take shape. He had to arrange their housing and set up their work programs while keeping track of the construction projects. The scholarly virologist had been leading a backwater scientific research group of several hundred people; now he found himself supervising a work force of more than four thousand workers.

"Just tell me what you need, and I'll get it for you," I said, determined to meet what I regarded as the first test of my talents as a senior executive.

Sandakchiev gave me a haughty look, as if I were one of his lab assistants.

"Time," he replied. "Can you give me time?"

I may have impressed the military and the bureaucrats in Moscow, but there was widespread skepticism inside our elite scientific community about my qualifications for the job. I felt this implicit criticism in his pointed remark.

"I can't give you time," I said with a smile. "It's the one resource we're not permitted to exploit."

As the months progressed, Sandakchiev and I developed a respectful working relationship, and I was able to unsnarl some of the bureaucratic logjams that had been making his life impossible. At first our biggest concern was safety. If even a tiny amount of smallpox were to escape into the surrounding countryside, it would cause a horrific epidemic. It would be much harder to cover up than the anthrax outbreak in Sverdlovsk.

Sandakchiev was determined to protect his employees. He repeated time and again that he would not sacrifice the health of a single worker to the pressure of a deadline. But running a biological weapons plant was not like managing a small research facility. New rules had to be enforced, and there were higher expectations. To keep the country — and our program — safe from exposure, Moscow imposed quarantine conditions on all Vector employees engaged in smallpox research. The staff was confined to special dormitories near the compound and guarded around the clock by security police. In a compromise, we granted them periodic leave to visit their families.

Considering that outsiders might be suspicious if they saw him — dreds of people with the distinctive marks of fresh smallpox inoculations on their arms years after the Soviet Union had discontinued all immunization, we decided, after some deliberation, to issue a directive that workers be inoculated on their buttocks. We assumed this part of their anatomy was safe from prying foreign eyes. Despite his laboratory expertise, Sandakchiev knew little about the technological process required to mass-produce smallpox. We needed someone who was not only a smallpox expert but who could make our new equipment and production lines work efficiently. A search of Biopreparat's personnel records turned up no one in the country who satisfied both requirements. Without such a production manager, the project was sure to falter.

I was at my desk early one morning in Moscow when Sandakchiev's excited voice came through on the phone.

"I've found the man we need," he said. "But I'm going to need your help to get him here."

I recalled with trepidation the trouble I'd gotten into at Stepnogorsk for my unorthodox hiring policies.

"I'll do my best," I said cautiously. "Who is he?"

"His name is Yevgeny Lukin. He's a colonel, works for the Fifteenth Directorate at Zagorsk. No one in the country knows more about producing smallpox. I've already spoken with him and he wants to come. We need you to do the paperwork."

I hadn't thought of the Fifteenth Directorate. The army command's jealousy and its distrust of Kalinin made personnel transfers between the directorate and Biopreparat almost impossible to arrange.

I made a few calls. Sandakchiev was right: Lukin was perfect for the job. As a young scientist at Zagorsk in the 1960s, he had been one of the luminaries of the early smallpox weaponization program. I decided to invite him to Moscow for an interview with Kalinin.

Lukin was in his early fifties but he carried himself with the military bearing of a younger man. I liked him at once.

The interview was excruciating. Kalinin fired questions relentlessly and with each passing moment Lukin seemed to sink deeper into the floor. "Yevgeny," the general drawled, "I don't remember ever hearing you stutter before. Is this a new defect?"

Suddenly, I remembered that Kalinin had spent part of his early career at Zagorsk. The two men were almost contemporaries. They obviously knew each other. Whatever relationship they had once enjoyed, Kalinin was determined not to let him forget the difference in their status.

The interview over, the terrified colonel was finally permitted to leave. I was about to follow when Kalinin motioned for me to stay behind. He had evidently enjoyed himself.

"He's not a bad guy," he said. "I don't see why he was so frightened."

"A lot of people are scared of you," I said.

Kalinin bent his head over his desk. I couldn't see the expression on his face, but I suspected my comment pleased him.

"All right," he said finally. "Sign the order and make him deputy at Vector."

Any doubts I had had about Kalinin's ability to manage the transfer soon vanished: Lukin was on his way to Siberia within a week.

From that point on, my opinion of Kalinin began to change. He had dominated my life almost from the moment I had joined Biopreparat. Like many of my colleagues, I resented his manipulative behavior and cool arrogance. But we all understood that those traits had helped secure the organization's place in our cutthroat political world. At closer range, however, they were even less attractive. I knew I owed my status to him, but as I watched him deal with his subordinates every day in the same callous manner in which he had treated Lukin, I wondered whether some day he would, at a whim, crush me too.

Lukin's transfer was one of the best decisions Biopreparat ever made. Lukin was able to create a production line to manufacture smallpox on an industrial scale, and over the next year I watched with growing satisfaction as Vector blossomed under Sandakchiev's management into a formidable weapons development complex.

In December 1990, we tested a new smallpox weapon in aerosol form inside Vector's explosive chambers. It performed well. We calculated that the production line in the newly constructed Building 15 at Koltsovo was capable of manufacturing between eighty and one hundred tons of smallpox a year. Parallel to this, a group of arrogant young scientists at Vector were developing genetically altered strains of smallpox, which we soon hoped to include in this production process.

10. Vector

The windows in the administrative offices at Vector were covered with thick sheets of ice. It was midway through the Siberian winter, and the temperature outside had plunged to minus forty degrees Celsius. The scientists crowding into the tiny room were bundled in sweaters and thick jackets. They grumbled about the cold and the peculiarities of the Soviet food-supply system.

"I don't remember the last time I saw a fresh tomato, or an orange," one called out.

"We're going to have to start stealing from our animal cages," said another, to a burst of laughter.

I smiled good-naturally. It was February 1988, and I was on one of my frequent commuting trips to the Vector institute. By then I knew the scientists well enough to enjoy their bleak sense of humor.

The man whose joke provoked so much laughter was a hardy example of our Siberian species of scientists. His name was Nikolai Ustinov. A gregarious, well-built man with an easy smile and a sharp wit, Ustinov led a research team working on Marburg, a hemorrhagic fever virus we had obtained in the 1970s. Marburg was set to become one of the most effective weapons in our biological arsenal. The project had become as important as our work with smallpox.

Ustinov loved his job. He had been at Vector for many years and was one of the most well liked members of the community. He enjoyed socializing after hours with his colleagues almost as much as spending time in the lab. His wife, Yevgenia, worked as a lab scientist in another part of the institute, and the couple had two teenage sons. He was forty-four when I met him.

Before we settled down to discuss the serious business of the morning, I made a mental note to ask Ustinov if there was anything I could do to improve the food situation. Unfortunately, I forgot to ask him.

Two months later, in mid-April, I was sitting in my Moscow office one morning when a call came in from Lev Sandakchiev, Ustinov's boss and the head of Vector.

"Something terrible has happened," he said.

"An accident?"

"Yes. It's Ustinov. He injected Marburg into his thumb." Sadness and frustration were palpable in his voice.

"Right into his thumb," he repeated. "He was in the lab working with guinea pigs when it happened."

"Wait," I interrupted him. "You know the regulations. Send me a cryptogram. Don't say any more."

I felt heartless ordering Sandakchiev to stop talking, but the mere mention of Marburg was too sensitive for an open line.

Marburg was the most dangerous virus we were working with at that time — dangerous because we knew so little about it as well as because of its terrible impact on humans.

The first recorded outbreak of the virus occurred in 1967 at the Behring pharmaceutical works in Marburg, an old university town seventy miles north of Frankfurt. An animal keeper died two weeks after he contracted a mysterious illness from green monkeys sent to the Behring lab from central Africa. The lab was culturing vaccines in kidney cells extracted from the monkeys. Other workers soon fell sick, and similar cases were reported at laboratories in Frankfurt and Belgrade, both of which had received shiploads of green monkeys from central Africa at the same time.

Twenty-four lab technicians came down with the unknown disease, along with six of the nurses caring for them. Of the thirty-one people infected, seven died. This kind of undiagnosed outbreak would be alarming enough, but it was the horror of their deaths that caught the attention of biologists and tropical disease specialists around the world.

The mysterious virus appeared to liquefy body organs. One of the survivors went mad after the organism chewed away his brain cells. Before the victims died, every inch of their bodies was wet with blood.

Following tradition, the virus was named after the place where it was first identified. It would alter forever the image of a city that has been a center of European philosophy, science, and religion for centuries.

Some of the world's greatest bacteriologists and biochemists have studied at Marburg — including Albrecht Kossel, whose research laid the groundwork for the discovery of DNA, and Alexandre Yersin, a codiscoverer of the plague bacterium (named Yersinia pestis after him). The lab in which Marburg was first smeared on a glass slide was itself named after the man credited with founding the science of immunology — Emil von Behring.

A similar virus surfaced nine years later on the banks of the Ebola River in Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of Congo. By the time that epidemic died out, 430 people were dead in Zaire and nearby Sudan. The virus responsible for that outbreak was called Ebola, after the site where it was isolated. Ebola struck again in the same area in 1995.

The viruses isolated in Africa differed slightly in genetic composition from the strain found in Germany, but they were closely related. Under an electron microscope, both organisms seemed to proliferate by shooting out tiny filament-like threads, like the lines cast by fishermen, from the cells they had already scoured for the food they needed to grow. The threads were often bent at the top, like fishing hooks, and as they prepared to invade a new cell they curled into rings, like microscopic Cheerios. Marburg and Ebola were deemed to belong to a new family of viral organisms. They were called filoviruses.

We still know very little about where filoviruses come from and how they are transmitted to humans. In some cases an animal or insect bite has delivered the organism into the bloodstream. In others, sexual contact has been a source of infection, and some scientists believe the virus may even be located in plants. Both Ebola and Marburg can spread from one person to another with no direct physical contact. Some victims in Germany and in Africa had merely been in the same room with infected patients. Ebola's mortality rate is between 70 and 90 percent.

The natural reservoirs of filoviruses are unknown. Although recent research suggests that they have been lurking on the fringes of human activity for centuries, Marburg and Ebola joined a new category of "emerging viruses" threatening to eclipse more familiar infectious diseases.

A strain of Marburg arrived in the Soviet Union a decade after it was first isolated, during one of our periodic global searches for promising material. It wasn't clear from the records whether we obtained it from the United States or directly from Germany, but it was immediately added to our growing collection of viral warfare agents. We were already investigating a number of microorganisms that weaken blood vessels and cause hemorrhagic fevers, such as Junin from Argentina and Machupo from Bolivia. Marburg quickly proved to have great potential.

Ustinov had been conducting a series of experiments with guinea pigs and rabbits to monitor the effects of increasingly higher concentrations of Marburg. The injection of such a highly concentrated dose directly into his thumb meant that he now had hundreds, perhaps thousands of times more particles of the virus coursing through his body than any of the victims in Germany. I thought his chances of survival were near zero.

I called our biosafety department and asked them to send technicians at once to the viral center of the Ministry of Defense in Zagorsk, where scientists had isolated a Marburg antiserum. Then I instructed the Ministry of Health to send a team of physicians to Siberia with the serum.

It was a shot in the dark. Koltsovo was four hours away by plane and the next flight from Moscow wasn't until later that night. Even if they made the flight, they would arrive nearly two days after the initial infection — an eternity for Marburg. Zagorsk had only a few hundred milliliters of antiserum on hand.

Kalinin was in a meeting when I asked to see him. Tatyana took one look at me and hurried me into his office. He dismissed his visitors, and I gave him the scanty details I had of what had happened.

"I'm waiting for a cryptogram from Vector, but it looks to me like we have a dead person on our hands," I said.

Kalinin turned pale.

"You don't think he can be saved?" he asked.

"I can't be too optimistic."

"We'll have to tell the higher levels," he said with a grimace.

I couldn't blame him for being as preoccupied with our superiors' reaction as with Ustinov's well-being. We both knew that any major accident would put Biopreparat at risk. Memories of the Sverdlovsk catastrophe's effect on the army's program were still vivid. This was less than two years after Chernobyl; the Soviet Union was in no mood for a new disaster.

Yet the state shared the blame for Ustinov's accident. My visits to Vector had shown me under what pressure we were placing our best scientists. Sandakchiev had never ceased to complain about the inhuman pace at which his workers were being driven. It was dangerous, as well as scientifically unsound. No technician should have worked long hours with such a contagious organism. People tired easily in the heavy protective suits required for Zone Three. Their reflexes slowed down, and it was easy to become careless. Adding to our problems, Marburg research had begun at Vector before a supply of antiserum was on hand.

Ustinov's illness lasted nearly three weeks. Throughout that time, none of his colleagues was allowed to stop working.

Sandakchiev's cryptogram arrived early that afternoon. It was long, detailed, and bleak.

Ustinov had been injecting Marburg into guinea pigs with the help of a lab technician, working through a glove box. He was not in a full space suit and was wearing two thin layers of rubber gloves instead of the thick mitts normally required for such work in Zone Three. The gloves provided the flexibility to control the laboratory animals, who will otherwise squirm and try to wriggle out of a technician's grip.

Our rules required that animals targeted for injection be strapped to a wooden board to hold them securely in place. That day, Ustinov wasn't following procedure. He decided to steady the guinea pigs with his gloved hand. Perhaps he thought it would help calm them. Or perhaps he was in too much of a hurry.

The technician became distracted and nudged him accidentally. Ustinov's hand slipped just as he was pressing down on the syringe. The needle went through the guinea pig and punctured his thumb, drawing blood.

The needle went in no farther than half a centimeter, but the faint spot of blood indicated that liquid Marburg had entered his bloodstream. As soon as he realized what had happened, Ustinov called the duty supervisor from the telephone inside the lab.

From then on, the procedures established for such emergencies were followed to the letter. Doctors and nurses dressed in protective suits were waiting for him as he emerged from the disinfectant shower. They rushed him to the small hospital in the Vector compound, a twenty-bed isolation facility sealed off from the outside with thick walls and pressure-locked doors.

Physicians did what they could to make Ustinov feel comfortable while waiting for the antiserum to arrive from Moscow. He was in no doubt of the danger he faced, but there were periods when he believed he could escape alive. He was lucid enough to describe what had happened in precise scientific detail and to calculate the exact amount of Marburg coursing through his veins. His wife hurried over from her lab, but neither she nor their children were permitted inside the hospital. She was later allowed a few private visits, until the sight of her suffering husband became too much to bear. Every day for the next fourteen days the cryptograms arriving at my office in Moscow described the evolution of Ustinov's disease in dry, clinical language. Attending physicians and colleagues later supplied the human details.

Ustinov at first maintained his sense of humor, joking with nurses and occasionally planning his next experiments aloud. Within a couple of days he was complaining of a severe headache and nausea. Gradually, he became passive and uncommunicative, as his features froze in toxic shock. On the fourth day his eyes turned red and tiny bruises appeared all over his body: capillaries close to his skin had begun to hemorrhage.

Ustinov twitched silently in his bed while the virus multiplied in his system. Too tired to speak, or to turn over, or to eat, he would drift in and out of consciousness, staring for long periods of time at nothing. Occasionally, lucidity would return. He called for paper during those brief moments to record the progress of the virus as it foraged through his body. Sometimes he burst into tears.

On the tenth day, his fever subsided and he stopped retching. As brilliant a scientist as he was, Ustinov began to entertain the delusion that he was improving. He started smiling again and asked about his family.

The cryptograms describing the disease's remission inspired some in our office in Moscow to hope for the impossible. But I was matching the progression of Ustinov's symptoms with clinical reports of the 1967 Marburg outbreak, and nothing in those reports gave me any reason for confidence.

I gave a daily briefing on Ustinov's condition to Kalinin. He passed the information on to senior officials in the Kremlin.

By the fifteenth day, the tiny bruises on Ustinov's body had turned dark blue, and his skin was as thin as parchment. The blood pooling underneath began oozing through. It streamed from his nose, mouth, and genitals. Through a mechanism that is still poorly understood, the virus prevents normal coagulation: the platelets responsible for clotting blood are destroyed. As the virus spreads, the body's internal organs literally begin to melt away.

Shuddering bouts of diarrhea left rivers of black liquid on his sheets. The scraps of paper on which he had been scribbling his symptoms and which the nurses had gingerly carried out to trailscribe each day no longer littered the floor. There was nothing more to write. Everything was unfolding before his doctors' eyes.

The filoviruses were already multiplying by the billions inside Ustinov's tissues, sucking out their nutrients in order to clone copies of themselves. Each viral particle, or virion, forms a brick that pushes against the cell walls until they burst. The cells then sprout wavering hair-like antennae that home in on their next target, where the process of foraging and destruction blindly repeats itself.

Ustinov lapsed into long periods of unconsciousness. When he was awake, some say he exhibited uncharacteristic signs of rage. According to some witnesses, he complained about his heavy workload. Others insist this never happened. While it is true that viruses can affect certain characteristics usually associated with personality, it is possible that Ustinov's behavior was magnified to send a message of protest to Moscow. How else could such a message be delivered without fear of retribution?

The doctors from the Ministry of Health arrived early in the first week with the antiserum. To no one's surprise, it proved useless. Antiviral drugs such as ribavirin and interferon were also tried. Hemorrhagic fevers can sometimes be treated with whole-body blood transfusions, but the medical team concluded that it would in this case be ineffective.

A long cryptogram arrived in my office on April 30, describing Ustinov's condition that day. As I read through it, I noticed that the symptoms appeared worse than usual. I sat up in my chair when I reached the final line: "The patient died. Request permission to conduct an autopsy."

Though I had been expecting it, the news came as a shock. I walked into Kalinin's office and told him the ordeal was over.

"They want to conduct an autopsy," I added.

Kalinin was expressionless.

"I'll inform everyone," he said, and turned back to the file he was reading. He didn't ask after Ustinov's widow or his colleagues at Vector. It was time to move on.

I don't know how the senior levels of our bureaucracy reacted to Ustinov's death, but no condolence letter was ever sent to his widow. Sandakchiev asked us for ten thousand rubles as special compensation for his family in addition to the normal pension survivors were entitled to. It was a princely sum in those days, and Kalinin balked at first, but he finally approved the request.

Even after death, Ustinov was imprisoned by the virus that had killed him. The risk of contagion made normal interment impossible, so his corpse was covered with chloramine disinfectant and wrapped in plastic sheeting. The remains were placed inside a metal box, welded shut, and fitted into a wooden coffin. Only then was it safe to lay him in the ground.

The funeral was over quickly. Sandakchiev delivered a brief eulogy beside a marble gravestone, which, in the Russian tradition, bore an engraved image of Ustinov and the dates of his birth and death. The small group of mourners included Ustinov's immediate family, his closest colleagues, and a cordon of KGB agents who had worked frantically to keep the circumstances of his illness secret. No one came from Moscow.

Regulations prohibited the circulation of any reports about accidents, fatal or otherwise, but news of the tragedy spread quickly through The System. An investigation by the Ministry of Health and the KGB concluded that the principal person at fault was the victim himself, who had not followed proper safety rules.

A flood of administrative decrees began to inundate Biopreparat facilities around the country with urgent safety warnings. Managers were ordered to upgrade biocontainment facilities and to report on their progress within ten days, just as they had been following the accident at Sverdlovsk. Like Sverdlovsk, no connection was made between the warnings and the incident that caused them.

Ustinov was not the last victim. A pathologist from the Ministry of Health on the team conducting Ustinov's autopsy fell sick after pricking himself with the syringe he had used to extract bone marrow. The pathologist, identified in our archives as "V," went through the same agonies as Ustinov, though it was reported that he had received a much smaller dose of Marburg. After a month and a half in the Vector isolating hospital, his condition improved. When he suddenly took a turn for the worse, he was transported to Moscow. Biopreparat was never informed of his fate, but I learned through unofficial channels that he died soon afterward.

A virus grown in laboratory conditions is liable to become more virulent when it passes through the live incubator of a human or an animal body. Few were surprised, therefore, when samples of Marburg taken from Ustinov's organs after his autopsy differed slightly from the original strain. Further testing showed that the new variation was much more powerful and stable.

No one needed to debate the next step. Orders went out immediately to replace the old strain with the new, which was called, in a move that the wry Ustinov might have appreciated, "Variant U."

At the end of 1989, a cryptogram from Sandakchiev arrived in my office with the terse announcement that Marburg Variant U had been successfully weaponized. He was asking for permission to test it.

Construction at Vector was running far behind the schedule set out in Gorbachev's last decree, and test chambers were still not ready. There were only three other spots where Marburg could be tested: Omutninsk, Stepnogorsk, and a special bacteriological facility at Obolensk, in the Moscow region. Obolensk had to be ruled out because it was too close to the capital, and Omutninsk was just embarking on tests for a new plague weapon. That left Stepnogorsk.

The facility had never been used to test viral agents before. Colonel Gennady Lepyoshkin, who had replaced me as the director of Stepnogorsk, reminded me of that heatedly when I ordered him to prepare the facilities for a Marburg test run.

"It's just too dangerous," he insisted.

The man who had once joked about Nikolai Chernyshov as the "guy who killed a lot of people" in Sverdlovsk was now a sober-minded manager. I respected his views, but orders were orders.

"Don't argue with me," I said. "It has to be done, so do it."

A brace of bomblets filled with Marburg and secured in metal containers was sent on the long journey by train and truck from Siberia to Kazakhstan, accompanied by scientists and armed guards. It took nearly twenty-seven hours for the shipment to reach Stepnogorsk. Another caravan with twelve monkeys followed shortly afterward.

I went to Stepnogorsk twice to supervise the test preparations. It was less than two years since I'd left there for Moscow, but the facility had expanded so much that it was almost unrecognizable.

After testing the weapon in explosive chambers, we applied it to the monkeys. Every one of the twelve monkeys contracted the virus. They were all dead within three weeks.

In early 1990, Marburg Variant U was ready for approval by the Ministry of Defense.

Our scientist had found it more difficult to cultivate Ebola than Marburg — they were not able to reach the necessary concentration — but by the end of 1990, the long-term problem of cultivation had been solved and we were close to developing a new Ebola weapon. Meanwhile, at Zagorsk (Sergiyev Posad) military scientists were putting the finishing touches on new Lassa fever and monkey pox biological weapons.