Biohazard

17. Fort Detrick

In early December 1991, Colonel Charles Bailey, deputy commander of the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) at Fort Detrick in Maryland, gathered his senior managers together for a secret role-playing exercise.

He divided the managers into two groups. The first group was asked to pretend it was a visiting Soviet delegation; the second would answer their questions. "As Soviets, you will be skeptical of everything you hear," Bailey told the first group. "You're convinced that we are hiding a biological warfare program."

Turning to the second group, he said, "You've got to come up with plausible answers."

Within two weeks, a team from the Soviet Union would arrive at Fort Detrick on the first leg of a tour of biological research facilities in the United States. Everything connected with the tour was secret. Only a small group of USAMRIID employees — the senior officers designated as official escorts — were told of the impending arrival of the Soviet mission. There would he no press.

The Office of the Secretary of Defense, which was organizing the event, imposed a total news blackout.

When the names of the members of the Soviet delegation were first sent to the Foreign Ministry, mine wasn't on the list. Kalinin didn't want me to go. I knew my actions during the coup had made me unpopular at Samokatnaya Street, but I was irritated nevertheless. Few people at Biopreparat were more qualified to detect signs of an offensive biological weapons program. I knew all the possible ways such a program could be hidden, having directed our concealment efforts since 1988.

"I thought you weren't interested in these things anymore," Kalinin had said archly.

But when I reminded him of my service as unwilling host to the Western visitors, he reluctantly agreed to put me down as an alternate delegate. When Oleg Ignatiev of the Military-Industrial Commission bowed out because of obligations in Moscow, I found myself in the delegation as the senior-ranking representative of Biopreparat.

There were thirteen people in our mission — about the same number the Americans and British had sent in January. We were an awkwardly mixed group of scientists, army officers, diplomats, and spies.

Colonel Nikifor Vasiliev of the Fifteenth Directorate led the seven-man military contingent, which included an officer from the Defense Ministry's Arms Control Department and an interpreter. At least one member of the military group worked, by his own admission, for the Soviet intelligence agencies. He was a GRU colonel who warned us to tell anyone who asked that he was a representative of the Ministry of Health.

The Biopreparat group was smaller. Joining me were Grigory Shcherbakov, chief of our scientific directorate, Lev Sandakchiev from Vector, and General Nikolai Urakov from Obolensk. Urakov's participation in the trip was uncomfortable for both of us. He had studiously ignored me ever since I had suggested that he commit suicide. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs sent just two people.

It was not only curiosity about what our rivals were up to that drew me into the mission. I was no longer as dismissive of America's biological warfare efforts as I had been.

A few weeks before our departure, all members of our delegation were summoned to a special briefing at Soviet army headquarters. Maps and satellite surveillance photos of the United States were spread on a large table in the middle of the room. A tall GRU officer holding a wooden pointer lectured us about the four U.S. sites we were scheduled to visit: USAMRIID headquarters at Fort Derrick; Dugway Proving Ground near Salt Lake City in Utah; Pine Bluff Arsenal in Arkansas; and the Salk Center in Swiftwater, Pennsylvania.

As we stared at the maps, he pointed out suspicious structures. At USAMRIID, there was a large circular building that looked like a test chamber. At Pine Bluff, surveillance photos picked up evidence of the movement of "weapons containers."

I was stunned. Why hadn't I heard about this before? I could only conclude that someone had finally decided to mount an aggressive intelligence operation.

I didn't regret having lobbied so hard to close down our program, but I wondered whether Kalinin's efforts to preserve our capacity for weapons research and production had been justified after all.

It was going to be difficult to interpret what we saw. We had agreed to carry no special monitoring or testing equipment. I remembered with amusement the tussle over Chris Davis's flashlight.

Yet something Kalinin had said on the eve of our departure planted the seeds of doubt in my mind.

"Whatever you see there," he told Shcherbakov, who reported the comment to me, "come back with evidence that the Americans arc making weapons."

We landed in Washington on Wednesday evening, December 11, 1991. When we unpacked our bags at the Soviet embassy quarters, we learned that our country had disappeared.

American television reported that an agreement reached several days earlier by the leaders of Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine to form the Commonwealth of Independent States had been ratified by the parliaments of each republic — effectively dismembering the Soviet Union.

"This is awful," said Grigory Berdennikov, our escort from the Foreign Ministry (who would later become deputy foreign minister of the new Russia).

"It is," I agreed. "There's no hope for Gorbachev now."

Berdennikov shook his head.

"You don't understand," he said. "We're carrying passports from an extinct country. The Americans will probably tell us to go home."

Our hosts were either too polite or too guarded to mention the subject the next morning.

We were driven in a large bus through the mist-shrouded farm country of Maryland. All I could see through the windows were indecipherable highway signs and large cars whizzing past at breakneck speeds. When we reached Fort Detrick, I relaxed. The place was reassuringly familiar.

Dozens of brick and concrete buildings were spread across a two-hundred-acre site that had once housed a National Guard airfield and training camp. There were large pipes running beside some of the buildings and a tower that could have been a heating station. The configuration reminded me of a pharmaceutical production plant. We turned off a busy highway lined with gas stations and fast-food establishments to enter the main gate, where a guard waved us through. An animal hospital faced the complex on the other side of the road.

Colonel Ron Williams, commander of Fort Detrick, gave a welcoming speech and then turned the proceedings over to Charles Bailey.

As deputy commander of USAMRIID, Bailey was my American counterpart. He was an easygoing man with sandy hair and a soft Oklahoma drawl. He considered himself a scientist more than a military officer. We had a lot in common, though neither of us knew it when we faced off for the first time across a table at Fort Detrick. Within a few years, we would be colleagues at a biotechnology firm in Virginia. My first reaction was of acute discomfort: he wouldn't stop smiling at me.

Much later, Bailey told me he had interpreted the scowls I kept darting his way as evidence that I was a spy. I thought he was being disrespectful. The more they smiled, the more we were on our guard.

The Americans gave us a map of the compound and asked us to choose which buildings we wanted to visit. We held a quick caucus. The first building we chose was a large laboratory. Technicians in white coats explained that they were developing antidotes to toxins produced by certain animals and shellfish. They were friendly and open — overly so, for my tastes — answering our questions with such ease that I despaired of ever penetrating beneath the surface. I told our delegation afterward that we would have to use more aggressive tactics.

Back on the bus, Colonel Vasiliev pulled out the map and motioned one of our escorts over to his seat.

"What's this building?" he said, pointing to a circular shape located at one corner of the compound. It was the building identified as a test chamber in our briefing back in Moscow.

The American looked confused. He went over to the other members of his team, holding the map.

"There's nothing there," one said.

I smiled to myself. What fools did these people take us for?

We insisted on being driven to the "nonexistent" building. After twenty minutes, the bus pulled up in front of a tall structure shaped like an upside-down ice cream cone. A pair of bay doors stood open. Through them, we could see a pile of grayish powder.

We told our interpreter to ask Bailey what it was. When he re-turned, he was smiling.

"He says it's salt."

"Salt?"

"Yes, it's what they use to cover roads in the winter."

Vasiliev was dubious. He went to the pile, stuck his finger in, and then put it to his mouth.

"So?"

He looked embarrassed.

"It's salt," he said.

We visited another lab which, we were told, was dedicated to developing vaccines against biological agents such as anthrax. The small size of the operation made it clear that weapons production was out of the question there. The Americans had just two specialists in anthrax. We had two thousand.

In another building, one member of our military contingent impulsively decided to break protocol. Without warning, he clambered onto a lab bench and, to the horror of our hosts, started to remove tiles from the ceiling. I cringed. We were on the second story of a two-story building. I couldn't imagine what he expected to find. He had caught the Americans off guard. After that incident, Bailey's smile began to fade.

Our suspicions were not entirely unfounded. While we had no clear sense of the present state of the Americans' biological weapons program, we knew what they were capable of. In fact, we knew a lot more than they suspected.

When I collaborated on a secret history of the Soviet and American programs after my defection, I was amazed to discover how closely the research efforts of both countries dovetailed between 1945 and 1969. The same agents, even the same types of aerosols, were used in experiments occurring sometimes less than a year apart.

Bill Patrick, who was in charge of biological weapons development at Fort Detrick until 1969, was my partner in the joint history-writing project. Then in his mid-sixties, Patrick was one of the few Americans I'd met who seemed to understand the technology of bioweaponeering. An accomplished microbiologist with a dry wit, he had been responsible for groundbreaking work on plague and tularemia weapons whose formulations remain classified in government archives. He has since become one of America's foremost experts on biological defense.

Patrick noticed the parallel as well.

"When we worked on something, you seemed to be working on it a short time later," he told me. "It's amazing that two countries so far apart could undertake such similar courses."

The uncanny similarity between our programs may have been more than a coincidence. Pavel Sudoplatov, a former general of the NKVD (the precursor of the KGB), provided an unwitting clue in his memoirs, published in 1996. Sudoplatov reported almost offhandedly that classified U.S. material on bacteriological weapons research had been transmitted on a regular basis to Moscow during the 1940s and 1950s. He passed these reports to "Laboratory X," which he described as an institute directed by one of the senior members of the Soviet Academy of Sciences.

I immediately recognized Laboratory X as Laboratory 12, the unit operated by the KGB's First Main Directorate, where my friend Valery Butuzov had worked for so many years developing assassination weapons. If such information was being obtained by the KGB, it was more than likely to have been shared with other parts of our program, especially after control of biological weapons research passed from the KGB to the army in the postwar years.

We obtained significant data from material published in American and European scientific journals, but American decisions on which strains of biological agents to research, which nutrient media to use, and which aerosols to develop were highly classified. There had to be at least one informer, if not several, in the American program. Patrick told me that no one he'd worked with had ever suspected the presence of a spy inside the American biological weapons labs. But he agreed the evidence was compelling.

The United States was a relative latecomer to the field of biological weapons. Great Britain and Canada began investigating biological agents and delivery systems in 1940, but President Franklin D. Roosevelt didn't establish a program until fifteen months after the United States entered World War II, in March 1943. Based on what Patrick told me of the early history of their program, Americans knew nothing of the ambitious weapons-making drive we had launched in the 1920s.

Perhaps Washington's lack of knowledge was based on its lack of curiosity. The Americans had been skeptical of the value of biological warfare from the start — a skepticism that continues to influence policymakers today.

In 1941, before Pearl Harbor, Secretary of War Henry Stimson asked Dr. Frank Jewett, then president of the National Academy of Sciences, to put together a working group to investigate the feasibility of biological warfare. Stimson remained unconvinced after he saw the report. "Biological warfare is dirty business," he wrote to Roosevelt in 1942.

Declaring that the military advantages of germ weapons were "debatable," Stimson conceded that "any method which appears to offer advantages to a nation at war will be vigorously explored by that nation." The Americans were not fully persuaded until their British and Canadian allies noted that the Germans were suspected of having used glanders against Romanian cavalry during World War I and seemed to be amassing a larger bacteriological arsenal. The Canadians had converted an agricultural experiment station in Suffield, Alberta, into a testing area for anthrax. In southern England, an old chemical warfare proving ground at Porton Down was adapted for the same purpose.

In America, a secret biological warfare unit called the War Research Service was created to work with its British and Canadian counterparts. George W. Merck, president of Merck & Co. Inc., a leading U.S. pharmaceutical firm, was the unit's first director. Under his leadership, it soon took the leading role in planning biological weapons research for the Allied war effort.

Merck assembled a "brain trust" of scientists from universities and private industry to identify likely spots for research, production, and testing. They settled on four principal sites: a 2,000-acre tract on Horn Island near Pascagoula, Mississippi; the Dugway chemical warfare testing facility in the Utah desert; a 6,100-acre munitions manufacturing complex at Terre Haute, Indiana; and the old National Guard installation at Frederick, Maryland.

The Maryland site, renamed Camp Detrick, was to be the heart of American biological weapons research. Its purpose was kept as secret as the laboratories in Los Alamos, where Manhattan Project scientists developed the first atomic bomb. More than seventeen hundred people worked at Camp Detrick during the war years, investigating glanders, brucellosis, cholera, dysentery, plague, and typhus.

Anthrax was the largest project. Scientists built a pilot plant capable of producing anthrax in ten-thousand-gallon tanks. They were so successful that Britain placed an order for five hundred thousand anthrax bombs from the facility in September 1944.

None of the weapons developed in America was ever used in World War II. Fears that the Germans would use biological munitions in their unmanned "buzz bomb" raids over English cities, or to repel the D-Day force, never materialized. When hostilities ended in Europe, President Truman briefly flirted with the idea of using anticrop agents and antipersonnel munitions against Japan as an alternative to the new atomic bomb.

Victory in the war left America with an unused arsenal of biological weapons, a vast technological and research base, and a secret network that rivaled its nuclear weapons complex. Some facilities were phased out, but revelations about Japan's Unit 731 forestalled any serious discussion about ending the American program.

Like us, Americans learned about Japan's germ warfare operations from captured documents and prisoners of war. Camp Detrick sent scientists to Japan to interrogate the commanders of Unit 731, who gave details of their program in return for avoiding prosecution for war crimes. Their reports convinced Washington that biological weapons could be developed in greater quantities and with far greater effectiveness than anyone had suspected. The British came to a similar conclusion and decided to upgrade their testing and research unit at Porton Down and at a test site on the Scottish island of Gruinard.

Putting aside their initial skepticism, Americans began a sophisticated program of biological weapons development that would last more than twenty years and intensify an arms race no less threatening than its more well known nuclear counterpart.

Beginning in 1951, agricultural agents were developed at Camp Detrick and other facilities to attack the Soviet wheat crop and the rice paddies of Communist China. The pathogens were stored at Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland, as well as at Rocky Mountain Arsenal near Denver, which also manufactured plutonium for nuclear weapons.

U.S. bioweaponeers went on to explore antipersonnel agents such as tularemia, Venezuelan equine encephalitis, and staphylococcal enterotoxin B. Aerosols were tested on animals at Deseret Island in the Pacific Ocean and at Dugway Proving Ground in Utah. They conducted experiments with simulated weapons, as we did, in urban areas.

Human tests took place in 1955 on a group of young Seventh Day Adventists who volunteered as an alternative to military service. The volunteers were exposed to Q fever, which is not lethal and can be treated with antibiotics, in a program called Project Whitecoat, or Operation CD-22.

By the late 1960s, twenty-two microorganisms were under study, and there were plans to weaponize hemorrhagic fevers such as the Machupo virus and Rift Valley fever. The scientists at Fort Detrick were looking into the possibilities presented by genetic engineering when their program was dealt a fatal blow.

Twenty-five years after a presidential advisory board launched America's experiment with biological warfare, a panel appointed by President Nixon recommended killing it.

American doubts about the military value of biological weapons had never completely disappeared. By the late 1960s, public anger over the development of biological as well as chemical arms had melded into the larger protests against the Vietnam War. Pickets appeared every day at Fort Detrick and other installations around the country. Nixon, convinced by his advisers that biological warfare was impractical, signed an executive order on November 25,1969, renouncing the use of lethal biological agents and weapons and promising to confine American biological research to "defensive measures" such as immunization and biosafety.

We didn't believe a word of Nixon's announcement. Even though the massive U.S. biological munitions stockpile was ordered to be destroyed, and some twenty-two hundred researchers and technicians lost their jobs, we thought the Americans were only wrapping a thicker cloak around their activities.

Nixon turned most of Camp Detrick's buildings over to the National Cancer Institute and assigned to the complex the task of finding a cure for cancer. This, in Nixon's words, would demonstrate how the United States could "beat swords into plow- shares." But we also noted that a small army medical unit had begun work at Fort Detrick. This unit, known as the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases and ostensibly dedicated to biological defense, seemed to expand in importance and strength each year. Former bioweaponeers like Bill Patrick had gone to work for it. Even if our intelligence activities couldn't come up with concrete evidence of offensive work, there could be no doubt that such work continued.

Press reports and transcripts of congressional hearings indicated that many prominent Americans believed it too. This strengthened our conviction that USAMRIID, like Biopreparat, hid its real purpose from the world. Some American experts charged that the Central Intelligence Agency, which had operated a secret unit inside Camp Detrick since 1952 to investigate "paramilitary" uses of biological weapons, continued to stockpile and develop those agents after 1969. The CIA of course denied this, but we knew the value of intelligence agency denials.

During our first days in America, we felt it would take all our ingenuity to ferret out the truth.

We flew to Salt Lake City, Utah, on a hundred-seat plane provided by Vice President Dan Quayle's office. The good food and seemingly endless supply of liquor made me recall with chagrin our trouble-plagued flight to Siberia the previous year. On our way from the airport, I stared in wonderment at the well-paved highways, the well-stocked stores, and the luxurious homes where ordinary Americans lived.

I didn't share my thoughts with other members of our delegation. Sandakchiev had been to the United States before, and he would have laughed at my naivete. There was no point in comparing travel impressions with Urakov, and our Defense Ministry comrades were too absorbed in their mission strategy to sightsee.

Colonel Frank Cox, the commander of Dugway, met us on arrival at the proving ground, eighty miles from the Utah capital. With disarming candor, he went over the history of bacteriological and chemical testing at the site, which opened in 1942. Since 1969, he said, no biological weapons had been developed or tested there.

More than six hundred buildings were spread across thousands of acres of desert. Dugway was going to be more challenging than Fort Detrick.

We were taken to a large complex designated as the Life Sciences Lab. It was a compound of ten buildings set against a stark landscape of cactus and tumbleweed, and it immediately set off alarm bells in my mind.

The configuration of the structures matched a part of our Stepnogorsk compound. There were sheds for disinfecting equipment and vehicles for transporting animals, and inside some of the buildings I could see tiny rooms similar to those we used in our sanitary passageways for donning protective suits. The largest building looked like a testing facility and, nearby, were distinctive structures with thick walls and loosely fitted roofs — a telltale sign that they had been used to store explosives. In other buildings at the complex, we saw rooms with equipment similar to that which we used to conduct animal autopsies.

But there were no animals, no cages, not even the footprint of experimental weapons activity. The door fittings on many buildings were rusty and creaked when opened. In some, paint was flaking off the walls. The dozen or so lab technicians who worked at the compound seemed lost inside the vast interiors.

Cox's assistants told us the facility was used to test simulants of biological weapons. The main mission, we were informed, was to explore methods of protecting troops and military equipment from biological and chemical attack. They showed us a lab earmarked for the development of devices to detect the presence of biological agents in the air.

Helicopters ferried us to other sites. Our escorts answered every one of our questions with no apparent hesitation. I was impressed, yet I knew that our own technicians had also been well rehearsed.

"They're doing nothing here," declared Sandakchiev. Urakov said nothing. The military contingent was annoyed. As we flew to our next stop in Arkansas, we held anxious, whispered conversations.

"This whole trip is just eyewash," Vasiliev said, who came over to my seat to share a drink. "They're not going to give anything away."

It was true. The Americans were doing a much better job of hiding evidence than I had given them credit for. But my doubts were growing.

The Pine Bluff Arsenal in Arkansas manufactured chemical munitions during World War II. In 1953 the facility expanded to produce biological warfare agents, but the installation was turned over to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 1969 for civilian research. This, at least, is what we were told by our hosts. To my discomfort, the evidence seemed to support it.

The layout of the Pine Bluff compound was once again similar to our own facilities. One building housed giant grayish blue tanks used to treat contaminated wastes. We had tanks like these in our plants. When our guides unlocked the door and brought us inside, I noticed that the floor was covered with a layer of dust. The tanks were wrapped in insulating material, cracking with age. As I wandered through the building, a black notebook on the floor caught my eye. I bent down to pick it up, blew away the dust, and quickly scanned its pages. I couldn't read the handwriting, but the year in which the entries were made was printed clearly: it was marked 1973.

We went into another facility that had once been used for assembling and filling bomblets with biological agents. It had since been reconfigured and divided into laboratories where American biologists worked alongside cages of mice and other animals.

When we found out what they were doing, the scientists in our group became enthralled. The shortage of space at Pine Bluff had forced the Americans to convert their old weapons plant into a center for medical research into immunosuppressive substances— substances capable of preventing the body from mounting a normal defense against invading bacteria.

This research is of immense importance to organ transplant surgery, as doctors must find ways of preventing the body from rejecting a transplanted heart or kidney. The technicians were busy grafting pieces of bird skin and other organs on the mice.

We spoke with the scientists for several hours, to the evident displeasure of some of the nonscientific military members of our group. Sandakchiev couldn't stop asking questions. By then, I was convinced that the Americans were no longer involved in biological weapons work.

Our military cohorts didn't agree, and the difference in perspective soon became embarrassing. On the second day of our Arkansas visit, I climbed into the bus beside one of the Defense Ministry officers, a colonel named Zukov. As our escorts pointed out various structures passing by our window, I dozed.

Suddenly Zukov began to shout. "Stop the bus! Stop the bus!" I woke up in alarm. "What's wrong?"

He pointed to a tall metal structure standing on a rise. "We have to check that out," he said. "Don't be ridiculous. It's a water tower." "I don't think so," he said.

Zukov ran to the water tower. He began to climb it, all the way to the top. Behind me, I could hear our American escorts trying to stifle their laughter. One took a picture.

At that point, the absurdity of our quest was clear to me. We could go on like this for weeks, but it would get us nowhere. Perhaps there were other sites in America where secret biological weapons work was going on, but these were the ones we'd asked to see. I remembered the conviction with which our GRU briefer had spoken of evidence of weapons work and had shown us his surveillance photos.

We were the victims of our own gullibility. I have come to believe that the most senior Soviet officials must have known all along that the Americans had no serious biological warfare program after 1969—after all, our intelligence agencies were among the best at their craft, and they had not come up with any real evidence. But the fiction had been necessary to instill in us a sense of urgency. The Soviet biological warfare program, born initially out of fear and insecurity, had long since become a hostage to Kremlin politics. This would explain why Kryuchkov had been so willing to trade it away in 1990 and why bureaucrats like Kalinin and Bykov refusal to give it up. In the city of Little Rock, thirty-five miles north of Pine Bluff, we got a taste of American politics. Shcherbakov and I were sitting at the Excelsior Hotel bar on the first evening after checking in when we became aware of a crowd streaming past us. Curious, we followed it to a large room adjacent to the lobby. There was a great deal of cheering and waving of signs. A boyish light-haired man stood on a raised platform at the front of the room, raising his hands to acknowledge the applause. Shcherbakov, who knew some English and had a passing acquaintance with U.S. affairs, told me this energetically smiling man had just announced his candidacy for president of the United States.

"He's the governor," confided Shcherbakov, "but he doesn't have a chance. No one ever became president from Arkansas."

Before we departed Pine Bluff, the director handed out diplomas certifying that we were "Arkansas Travelers." They were signed by Governor William Jefferson Clinton.

Our last stop was the Salk Center at Swiftwater in northern Pennsylvania. A research institute for the development of vaccines, it had no military past, present, or future, at least none we could discern. We returned wearily to Washington, D.C., where the approaching Christmas holiday ended all further talk of biological weapons — to the relief both of our hosts and of ourselves.

On our final afternoon in America, we were taken on a tour of the capital. Our guide was Lisa Bronson, an official from the division responsible for disarmament policy in the Department of Defense who had been in Moscow the previous fall to negotiate the terms of our visit. She had accompanied us throughout our journey across America. A sharp, brisk woman in her mid-thirties, she had gotten to know most of us well. At various stops along the way, she had challenged us about the Soviet biological weapons program. Naturally, we denied we had one. But I admired her persistence.

Standing on Pennsylvania Avenue near the White House, we steered the conversation in a different direction.

"What do scientists actually earn here?" someone asked.

There was no interpreter, and Sandakchiev, who spoke English fairly well, translated.

"That depends on your experience," she answered. "A government scientist can make between fifty thousand and seventy thousand dollars, but a scientist in the private sector could earn up to two hundred thousand dollars a year."

We looked at her in astonishment. At the time, a top-level Russian scientist could expect to earn the equivalent of about one hundred dollars a month. I screwed up the courage to ask a question of my own.

"With my experience," I said, "could I find a job here?"

She smiled. "If you know English."

"Okay," I said as Sandakchiev translated. "If I ever come here, I'll ask for your help."

Everyone started to laugh, including me.

18. Communist Prospekt

Gorbachev resigned the day we returned to Moscow, on December 25, 1991. Lena told me the news as I walked into my apartment late that evening, my arms laden with gifts from the United States. On New Year's Eve, the red hammer-and-sickle flag of the Soviet Union came down from the Kremlin. In its place rose the Russian tricolor, the flag that had waved over the Russian White House the previous August.

The new government of Russia seized the imagination of the world. It wasn't, however, my government. I was an officer of a colonial empire that no longer existed, a stranger in a country that was not my own. I was entitled to become a citizen of Russia, but in truth I was now a foreigner.

Tens of thousands of people like me were orphaned by the collapse of the Soviet Union. Whether we were Kazakhs, Ukrainians, Moldovans, or Azerbaijanis, no matter how closely we were linked to Russia by marriage or government position, and however much we welcomed the new climate of freedom, we faced the same difficult choice. Should we go "home" to countries with which we had no real connection, or live as aliens in what would from now on be an adopted homeland?

On January 13, 1992, seventeen years after I had received my junior lieutenant's commission, I left the army. My letter of resignation had been in Kalinin's safe at Samokatnaya Street since the failed coup. He was surprised when I asked him to put the resignation papers through. No sane person, he believed, would voluntarily give up the perks of military rank.

I wasn't ready to break with Russia completely. But 1 thought severing my military connections would liberate me from a program I had begun to despise. This turned out to be a futile hope.

New leaders assumed control in the army and the KGB, but the power structure in both organizations remained unchanged. The Military-Industrial Commission was attached to the newly formed Russian Ministry of Industry, with its function preserved. One by one, former Soviet institutions merged with the new government, bringing with them the cadres of apparatchiks who had ruled the old empire. The hopes of the new Russian democracy were being compromised behind the scenes even as we were promised a new way of life.

The biological warfare program followed the same path. Biopreparat's production capacity was destroyed under Gorbachev's orders. It should properly have been disbanded, or at least merged with the new state pharmaceutical enterprise, but Kalinin was determined to preserve his autonomy — and he enjoyed quiet support from the military bureaucracy.

Our report on the U.S. visit was crucial to his strategy. If he could demonstrate that America was conducting offensive research, he could convince the Yeltsin government that Biopreparat was essential. Yet massaging the facts couldn't make a biological warfare program out of what we had seen.

I should have realized this wouldn't deter him.

Attached to our ten-page report was a "summary" prepared by Kalinin and Grigory Shcherbakov. It claimed our observations proved the continued existence of an American weapons program.

The report was duly sent to the Kremlin along with a further recommendation from the Fifteenth Directorate that Russia's offensive research continue. This was the last straw. I wrote out a second letter of resignation from Biopreparat and took it to headquarters.

Kalinin opened my letter in exaggerated slow motion, fingering it as if it were toxic. When he finished it, he looked up with a puzzled expression.

"What do you think you will do with yourself?" he said.

"I don't know yet. Maybe I'll start a private business. Maybe I'll go to Kazakhstan. It's my motherland, after all."

"Your motherland?" He shook his head. "You swore to serve the Soviet Union, just like me."

"I lived in a country called the Soviet Union," I replied. "I served it loyally. But it doesn't exist anymore. So now I'm free."

Kalinin's face darkened.

"I always suspected you were the type who thought he was too good for Russia," he said.

"You can think what you like," I said, my temper beginning to rise. I had promised myself not to let him provoke me, but I could feel that determination ebbing.

"All right," he said, holding his hand up as a peace signal. "We don't have to fight, but be reasonable. Who around here can take your place?"

"Lots of people want the job. You can make one of them happy."

He stroked his chin and smiled. He had decided to charm me.

"You don't know how valuable you are to me, and to this organization," he said. "Maybe you should give this some more thought."

It was a strange moment. The man with whom I had argued and fought throughout the previous two years, who knew that I hated everything he stood for, now appeared anxious to keep me by his side.

"No," I said. "My decision is final."

"Well, my decision is that I'm not giving you permission to leave."

"You can do what you like, but I'm not under your command anymore," I shot back. "Whether you agree or not, I will be gone by next week."

He stiffened. "Are you giving me an ultimatum? You're the director of an institute. You're not allowed to leave."

"I don't want to work in this program any longer," I said. "Or with you."

He grabbed my letter from his desk and threw it at me.

"You are a traitor!" he shouted. "I always knew you would betray me!"

I threw the letter back.

"I haven't betrayed anyone," I said. "Think about last August before you accuse anyone of betrayal."

I turned and walked out of his office, past a startled Tatyana, who must have heard the entire argument. I went down the corridor to our personnel office and handed in my secret passes and credentials. The building was quiet. Several people poked their heads out of offices as I walked by, but no one said a word.

I walked down the marble staircase and pushed open the door. The KGB guard outside saluted as I walked through the courtyard to get my car. I had driven over in my Zhiguli. I never wanted to see an official Volga for the rest of my life.

The KGB man saluted again as I drove past him out the gate. It started to snow.

I spent the next several days clearing out my office. Kalinin didn't call. I never saw him again.

In that first year after communism it sometimes seemed as if you only had to leave your apartment to make money. Friends had pockets bulging with rubles and dollars. One handed me a sports bag so heavy I could barely lift it. "I've got one hundred thousand dollars inside," he announced proudly. I was unemployed for the first time in twenty years, but poverty was not one of my fears. Government officials everywhere, in and out of office, were regarded as prime catches for the new Russian biznesmeni.

Within a few weeks of my departure, I was working as the Moscow representative of a Kazakh bank. My brother had given them my name, and they hired me immediately to develop their overseas interests. I had no aptitude for finance, but I was soon making deals like everyone else.

The idea at the time was to make as many millions as you could, in whatever way you could, before it ended in an inevitable disaster. Corruption and crime were everywhere, and I heard ominous talk of high-flying acquaintances put "on the time-clock" by mobsters who had loaned them money and were now doubling the interest every day that the debt remained unpaid.

My phones soon started to click and crackle every time I made a call. The telephone company insisted that nothing was wrong with the line. The noise vanished when I changed the number, only to reappear after a few days. When I was away on business trips Lena would receive mystifying calls from people who introduced themselves as "general" or "colonel." They would ask when I was expected back. We wouldn't hear from them again.

In the spring of 1992,1 placed a call to a business partner during a meeting in my office. Just as I finished dialing his number, I remembered something I'd forgotten to say and put the phone back on the hook. Five minutes later, my partner, Naum, called.

"Kanatjan, something's wrong," he said.

"What's wrong?"

"My phone rang once, and when I picked it up no one was there. But I heard you talking to someone else."

"It's just a bad connection," I said.

"No, there's more. I not only heard what you were saying, I heard everybody else too. It felt like I was in the middle of the room."

Then he repeated word for word everything that had been said in my meeting.

"That's not just a poor connection," he said.

One evening a policeman appeared on the sidewalk outside our building. He was gone the next morning, but a new one showed up when I returned from work that night. From then on police made frequent appearances, jotting down in their notepads my arrivals and departures. They never came when I was out of Moscow.

On April 11, Yeltsin signed a decree banning offensive biological warfare research. I heard about it almost immediately from one of my former colleagues, and I was overjoyed. It meant, or so I thought, that Kalinin had lost his battle. The decree banned all offensive biological work and cut research into defensive programs by 50 percent. The Fifteenth Directorate was dissolved and replaced by a new army department of nuclear, biological, and chemical defense. The decree didn't mention Biopreparat, but I felt as if a huge burden had been lifted from my shoulders. My former life was no longer a military secret. Presumably no one would care what I did with my new one.

A few weeks later, I concluded a sale of oil from Kazakhstan with a business associate whom I'd been dealing with over the previous six months. The client, Mark Severinovsky, was a flamboyant character, a diamond merchant and entrepreneur who enjoyed sprinkling his conversation with the names of cities he'd visited: Tel Aviv, London, Bonn. Our discussion had never gone much beyond business, but after we finished our oil negotiations, we decided to unwind over coffee.

Halfway through our conversation, he leaned back and said, "Kanatjan, I hear that you want to leave the country."

"Who told you that?" I was stunned.

"It doesn't matter."

"And why would you care?"

"You're carrying around a lot of secret information in your head."

I considered what to say next. Finally, I told him that Yeltsin's decree had made the issue academic.

He suggested that "others" would see things differently, that I had no idea how damaging what I knew might be. Damaging to whom? I asked, but he merely smiled and said he was telling me this for my own good and returned to his coffee as if nothing had happened.

The idea of returning to Kazakhstan gradually went from a half formed notion to a desperate conviction. Kazakhstan had declared independence while I was still on my trip to America, on Decein her 16, 1991, and I considered applying for citizenship.

I was spending at least one week a month in Almaty on business, staying at my parents' apartment. As soon as I walked through the door of the old building on Communist Prospekt where I'd grown up, I escaped from the tensions of my past and present lives. My family still knew nothing about my career. My sister once confided that she thought I was involved in a secret program to clone people.

In Almaty, my mother showed me a newspaper with a decree by President Nursultan Nazarbayev offering citizenship to Kazakhs living outside the country. Nazarbayev especially welcomed scientists, doctors, and engineers, challenging them to participate in the country's transformation. In 1990, when I was still at Biopreparat, I had received a vaguely worded invitation to serve as Kazakh health minister. I had given it little thought, convinced that the burgeoning Soviet democracy would achieve more than the corrupt authoritarian clans of Central Asia. But things had changed.

In June of 1992, I received a phone call at my Moscow office from a man who introduced himself as Mikhail Safrygin, first deputy minister of defense of Kazakhstan.

"Are you by any chance planning a visit to Almaty any time soon?" he asked politely.

"Yes," I said. "I'll be there next week."

"Would you mind stopping by our ministry? We have a job in which you might be interested."

This was the opportunity I'd been waiting for. I didn't expect the job as health minister to come my way again, but the leaders of the new government obviously knew my background in military medicine. I imagined that they needed someone who could organize a health service for the new Kazakh army.

I set out for the interview in a new and expensive suit bought with my first earnings as a businessman. My enthusiasm waned as I approached the ramshackle building that housed Kazakhstan's new Ministry of Defense, recently converted from a technical college. A new country has to start with the materials it has at hand, I comforted myself. As I walked inside I saw myself as a pioneer, a founder of a new government ministry.

A young senior lieutenant, a Kazakh, met me at the entrance and told me to go upstairs to the deputy minister's office.

"You can't miss it," he said.

The informality was a relief. Safrygin greeted me warmly.

"We're honored that you could come to our tiny fortress," he said.

He offered me tea, and I relaxed on the wide sofa in his office.

The discussion started well. He asked about my work with the bank and about my family. We talked about the recent changes in Kazakhstan. Then he pulled a folder from a desk drawer.

"I'd like to show you something," he said.

The paper he spread out in front of me was a draft of an agreement between Biopreparat and the Kazakh Ministry of Defense. It outlined a plan for the joint operation of the installation we had run at Stepnogorsk.

"This is very interesting," I said at last. "But what does it have to do with me? I've left Biopreparat."

"Well," said Safrygin, "we were wondering if you would be interested in going to Stepnogorsk."

"Stepnogorsk already has a director. His name is Gennady Lepyoshkin."

"Actually, we need someone to manage the whole chain," he said.

"I'm not interested," I said.

Just then a door opened at the far end of Safrygin's office and a wiry Kazakh walked in. He looked like a soldier though he wore civilian clothes. He was about sixty years old, with thick eyebrows. Safrygin stood up. I didn't.

"Colonel Alibekov," said the visitor. "You won't mind if I join you?"

"I'm not a colonel anymore. I've left the army."

The man made a dismissive gesture. "I know that," he said.

He told me he was the chief of the defense section in the Kazakh president's administration and worked closely with Defense Minister Sagadat Nurmagambetov, who had until recently been a two-star Soviet general. He didn't give his name.

I was not pleased by the turn the conversation had taken. Nor was I pleased by the realization that this man had been listening In-hind the door.

"We know all about you," he continued, "and we know that you were a capable officer. That's why we've asked you to come here today."

My heart sank.

"If you join us, we'll return you to the rank of colonel and within two weeks you will become a major general. Of course such promotions can only be made in our Kazakh constitution through a presidential decree and parliamentary approval. But I can safely guarantee it will happen."

"You don't need a major general to run a biological facility," I said.

"We plan to set up a new directorate. We want you to be its commander."

"What kind of directorate?"

"A medical-biological directorate."

"What do you mean?"

"You know exactly what we mean."

I stood up.

"Look," I said. "A treaty was signed in 1972 by countries all over the world, including the Soviet Union, that prohibits research and development into biological weapons. If your president wants to have problems with the international community in the future, then this is exactly how to do it. I recommend you forget the idea."

He flushed.

"I don't think our president needs to receive recommendations from you," he said.

"Whether he does or not, I refuse to have anything to do with this."

Kalinin must have set this up. No one in the Kazakh army would have made such an offer without his approval. It was brilliant. If I accepted, he would not only be assured of keeping the Kazakh facilities under his supervision, but he would maintain control over me. I wondered if the president of Kazakhstan knew what offer was being made in his name.

"This is not what I came here to do," I said and turned toward the door.

Realizing that he had lost the argument, the Kazakh dropped his pretense of courtesy.

"Don't think you can fool us!" he shouted. "We know your type, with your pretty suit and your Marlboros! We know all about your consorting with foreigners."

He had used the classic Stalin-era phrase in Russian—"consorting with foreigners" — that had once sent thousands to prison.

"Are you threatening me?" I asked him, my hands trembling with anger and frustration.

"I'm warning you that you may have very serious problems in the future!"

I opened the door and walked out. Behind me, I could hear a protest from the startled Safrygin, but I didn't stop to listen.

When I returned to Moscow, I felt trapped. There would be no Kazakh citizenship, and no medical or scientific career, unless I accepted the role that had been picked out for me. I couldn't even be sure I would be able to continue in private business. By turning down Safrygin's offer, I had burned my bridges in both Russia and Kazakhstan. I no longer tried to hide my intention to get as far away from Moscow as I could.

It was Savva Yermoshin who finally showed me what I had to do.

I met my old KGB friend in a hallway of the Ministry of Medical Industry in central Moscow. It was a chance encounter. I had gone there to attend a meeting of the Russian Biological Society, a scientific group whose activities I continued to participate in.

Savva seemed glad to see me. He asked how I'd been and how my family was. We hadn't seen each other since I left the agency. After some idle chat, he punched me playfully on the shoulder.

"You know, Kan, some people are nervous about you."

"Why is that?" I said, trying to keep my tone light.

"It's not really important. I keep telling them they have nothing to worry about. I tell them it's true that Kanatjan travels a lot, but he would never live in another country without his family — and o! course he would never get permission to leave with them."

I said nothing.

Yermoshin laughed again. "So, are you a millionaire yet?"

"When I become one, I'll let you know," I said, matching In-. breezy manner.

We shook hands and I walked away. It couldn't have been easy for him to deliver that message. I had always understood that our friendship would never be placed ahead of his job.

Yermoshin suffered for that friendship. When I left he was transferred to a post outside Moscow and forced to leave the KGB. But his career wasn't hurt in the long run. He became a general in the federal tax police in a large Russian city where, I've heard, he has become a very rich man.

I owed him a debt of gratitude. I had been wondering whether to apply for passports for Lena and the children as a first step in settling abroad. Yermoshin made it clear I would never get them. The only way I could leave Russia with my family was to sneak out, like a criminal.

I thought I knew how it could be done. Over the previous months, I'd become friendly with a Russian businesswoman who lived in New York. She often traveled back and forth to Moscow, and we'd occasionally discussed business prospects in the United States. A few weeks after my return from Kazakhstan, I ran into her again at a private gathering.

I pulled her aside and quietly asked if she could do me a favor when she returned to America. I drew from my wallet the business card and telephone number given to me in December by Lisa Bron-son, the U.S. Department of Defense official who had accompanied us on our trip.

I asked her to call the number from New York and to find out whether Bronson would be willing to help me emigrate to America. I had not forgotten the conversation we'd held outside the White House in December. I hoped she hadn't either.

My friend looked surprised and slightly uneasy. But she had an adventurous spirit.

"I'm planning to be in Malta in July on business," I told her when she agreed to help. "I'll call you when I get there."

I left for Malta a few weeks later. As soon as I checked into my hotel room, I picked up the phone and called New York.

I was greeted warmly.

"I spoke to your friends," she said. "They are very interested, and they say you would be welcome in the U.S."

"Thank you," I said. "Please tell them I'm coming to New York for a business trip in September. I'll call you then."

I knew my U.S. hosts would expect to hear everything I could tell them about the Soviet program in return for their help. Some of my colleagues might consider this a betrayal. But I had come to believe that my real betrayal was to have pursued a career that violated the oath I had taken as a doctor.

Back in Moscow, I told Lena what I had done. She agreed without hesitation that we should go. She was angry about my treatment in Kazakhstan and feared for my safety in Moscow.

In September I arrived in New York with my friend Naum. We had planned to spend a week in the city talking to Russian emigres about trade possibilities, and we'd booked a double room in a hotel at Thirtieth Street and Broadway.

As soon as we arrived I called my friend. She offered to meet me anywhere, but I decided the hotel was the best place. I was nervous about venturing alone into the streets of a strange city where I couldn't speak the language and where I knew the KGB had agents. I pulled Naum aside.

"I have a favor to ask you," I said.

"Go ahead. Ask."

"I'm not sure how to put this, but there's a friend here in New York I need to see," I said awkwardly. "She's kind of an old girlfriend, and I thought we could get together for old time's sake, you know, so if you wouldn't mind staying clear of our room this afternoon…"

Naum winked.

"Of course. Anything to oblige."

My friend arrived a few hours later. She was nervous and spoke quickly. Lisa Bronson had given her the names of some people in Washington to call.

"They're ready whenever you are," she said. "They'll set you up so you can get paid as a consultant in biological defense. But there's one thing."

"What?"

"They want you to do it now. They think that if you go back, there's a risk you'll never be allowed to leave. They can arrange r<> get your wife and children out later." I told her this was impossible. She smiled faintly.

"They thought you might not agree, but they felt they had to ask."

She gave me precise instructions for the arrangements I would have to make. The instructions involved officials in Kazakhstan, Russia, and other countries, all of whom would be compromised if their efforts could be traced. The details of my escape to America are the only secrets I have resolved to keep.

A week later I was back in Moscow. On the night of my return, I asked Lena to join me for a walk and explained the plan. I could take no risk of being overheard by KGB bugs. We decided to tell Mira but not the boys. Mira was fifteen, old enough to keep a secret, but Alan was twelve and Timur barely seven. The boys wouldn't have been able to resist bragging to their friends about a trip to America.

Discreetly, we began to prepare for our departure. I sold a few books and keepsakes, but decided to leave most of our furniture in the apartment to avoid arousing our neighbors' suspicions. I arranged with a relative for the sale of our household goods after we left. The money would be used to pay off our debts. I wanted no one to say I had left Russia to avoid creditors.

In the final weeks of September, we tried to lead as normal a life as possible. We told the boys that we would soon be going on holiday to Almaty.

The day before we were supposed to leave, we got a call from the KGB. The caller introduced himself as Captain Zaitsev of the Moscow Region KGB. He spoke in a low and pleasant voice.

"We'd like to have a talk with you," he said. "Would you mind coming down to our office?"

"I've got no time today," I said.

"How about tomorrow?" "Ah," I said. "I'm flying to Almaty tomorrow."

"It really is urgent."

"Couldn't it wait until my return?"

"When is that?"

"Two weeks or so," I said.

He sounded unsure.

"Could I call you tomorrow, anyway?" "Go ahead," I said.

I didn't wait for his call. The following day, we flew to Kazakhstan.

As I walked into the old apartment on Communist Prospekt I wondered if I would ever see it again.

My father had gone completely deaf, so I had to write my plans out on a pad of paper and show it to him. The old soldier read carefully. We stared at each other for a few moments, then he reached over and took my hand. He said nothing, but I understood I had his approval.

Later, I sat in the kitchen with my mother and brother. We spoke in Kazakh and Russian.

My mother asked me why I was leaving.

I told her about the surveillance, the phone taps, the great difficulty of finding the kind of work I wanted to do. And I told her about my encounter with the Kazakh Defense Ministry. Her voice was firm when she finally answered.

"You have no choice for yourself, or for your family. You have my blessing."

My experiences had touched a chord. As my brother and His tened in awestruck silence, my mother began telling us a story about the family we had never heard before. She had been a girl of ten when her father, my grandfather, was arrested by the security police on a trumped-up political charge. In prison, he contracted a fatal illness. My grandmother was allowed into the prison hospital with her two children — my mother and my uncle — to pay him a last visit.

It was a difficult moment. My grandparents had had a marriage of opposites: he was a staunch Communist and she was a member of the old Kazakh nobility, a descendant of Teuke Khan, who had unified the country in the seventeenth century and created its first legal code. My grandmother, who used to take me as a child to the mosque to imbue me with the religion of my forebears, had never been reconciled to the Socialist regime — and it was now about to kill her husband. "He looked over at your uncle and me, and then he looked at my mother, and he told her to take us to an orphanage," she said, biting her lip. "My mother started to cry, and then I cried also because I thought that was a terrible thing to say.

"My mother asked why and he said it was the only way to save our lives. Otherwise they would soon come to arrest her too.

"But your grandmother didn't follow his advice. She took us home and hid us for months. And every night she would hear the cars coming down the street to take more people away. Each time she heard a car, she would say, There goes another person who killed your father."

My mother had tears in her eyes.

"You always have to do what you think is right."

The next evening we flew from Almaty to Moscow, where we were to board another plane and fly out of Russia. We landed a few hours before midnight. The connecting flight was not until the next morning, which presented me with a difficult decision.

Flights from Almaty arrived at Domodedovo Airport, south of Moscow. Our next flight left from Sheremetevo, the main international terminal north of the capital. The drive between the two airports was nearly two hours, and it would take us through the heart of the capital. To go directly to Sheremetevo might give our plan away to the KGB, who were sure to be watching. Our apartment was in northern Moscow, close to the highway leading to Sheremetevo. It made sense to go home first and wait.

If we were lucky, we would fool the KGB into believing we had returned as promised from our vacation.

A friend picked us up at Domodedovo. It was dark and cold, and there were few cars on the highway leading into the city.

I noticed a car following us. Its headlights glared in our rear window. When we changed a lane to let it pass it changed lanes with us. But when we turned off into our street, our tail disappeared. I took a deep breath. The first part of the plan had worked.

I paced back and forth in our apartment while the rest of my family napped. I peered out the window to check if the KGB had posted someone to wait for us. Finally, before daybreak, I woke everyone up. My friend's car was outside, puffs of white smoke trailing from the exhaust pipe.

We crept downstairs, hoping not to wake our neighbors. I held the doors open as Lena and the children bundled into the car and looked up and down the street. I couldn't see anyone.

No one followed us to Sheremetevo. My stomach continued to churn until we finally stood up in the waiting room to join the passengers boarding the plane.

It was hard to believe that we had tricked the KGB. When we settled in our seats, the stewardess's smile struck me as the most wonderful thing I had ever seen.

19. Debriefing

One month before I came to America, Russia signed an agreement with the United States and Great Britain putting an end to its biological weapons program. In September 1992, the three countries agreed to work together to convert former weapons-making facilities into centers for peaceful scientific research, to encourage scientific exchanges, and to establish procedures for reciprocal visits to military and civilian installations. The biological arms race was on its way to becoming a closed chapter of cold war history. Or so it seemed to the Americans who took charge of my debriefing.

Nearly every weekday morning during my first year in the United States, I drove to an office building in a small city in Virginia, twenty minutes' drive on Route 66 from Washington, D.C. In a second-floor room with comfortable chairs and a large table, I answered questions put to me by senior officials from intelligence agencies and various branches of government, including the Department of Agriculture, the State Department, the Department of Defense, and the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. They generally introduced themselves, but after the fourth or fifth introduction I would lose track of who they were and which agency they came from.

At first I felt detached, but gradually I began to look forward to the debriefings. I felt a certain relief in speaking for the first time about the things I had kept secret for so long.

Lena remarked on the change in my demeanor. The tense government official she had lived with in Moscow was gone, replaced by a more relaxed stranger. I would try to tell her about the day's session after the children went to bed, but she seemed uninterested. She wanted to forget the past.

I had expected the debriefings to be surrounded by an atmosphere of espionage and intrigue, but they were more like academic seminars. They were sometimes frustrating, especially when it came to strategic questions, which seemed to interest my interrogators not at all.

"We're only interested in what you know," one U.S. defense analyst told me, "not what you think could happen."

I understood their logic — I was an administrator and a scientist, not a military or political strategist — but their attitude seemed to reveal a profound misunderstanding of biological weapons. My interrogators wanted to know how much of our stockpiles and production capacity had been shut down and which of our labs and facilities had been destroyed. They expressed little curiosity about the potential of the weapons we had made. Few asked me about the specific capabilities of our anthrax, tularemia, and plague weapons or paid more than cursory attention to our genetic work. The emphasis on our shrinking arsenal made it clear to me that Americans believed Russia's biological weaponry no longer constituted a significant threat.

Slowly and reluctantly, I came to believe they were wrong.

In early 1994 I came across an article published the previous year by Sergei Netyosov, deputy scientific director of the Vector complex. He reported that a team of scientists had successfully inserted foreign genetic material into vaccinia, a nonpathogenic virus re-lated to smallpox. My heart sank. This experiment was part of a secret plan I'd authorized five years earlier to create a powerful new smallpox weapon.

I first met Netyosov in February 1989. A promising virologist in his early thirties, he was introduced to me by Lev Sandakchiev during one of my inspection trips to Siberia.

"Netyosov is one of our best people," Sandakchiev had boasted as I shook the young scientist's hand. "I'm recommending him for a promotion."

Netyosov, who held a Ph.D. in virology, belonged to an impressive new generation of civilian scientists recruited by Biopreparat in the 1980s. Sandakchiev told me he was on the verge of a breakthrough that would have as large an impact on our weapons program as the genetic experiments performed with bacteria and toxins at Obolensk.

"We believe we can create a chimera virus," he said, elliptically.

A chimera is an imaginary monster with the head of a lion, the body of a goat, and a serpent's tail. Biologists use the word to describe an organ composed of tissues of diverse genetic material. I'd never heard it applied to viral organisms before.

Netyosov's work was inspired by Western research. He had read accounts in foreign journals of a successful experiment in which scientists had inserted the gene of Venezuelan equine encephalitis (VEE), a virus that attacks the brain, into vaccinia. The experiment was part of continuing research into the viral genome, the collection of genes that code the peculiarities of every living organism, and it had significant medical implications. Understanding the genetic differences between closely related strains of viruses could help explain why some strains caused disease and others didn't. Researchers also believed that vaccines capable of immunizing people against several diseases at once could be produced by introducing the genes of one virus into another. An altered vaccinia virus, for example, could reproduce VEE cells as well as its own. The research required months, sometimes years, of painstaking work. A host virus will reject alien genes until lab technicians find a compatible place in the genome to introduce the new material.

Vaccinia's genetic structure was almost identical to the smallpox virus. If VEE could be combined with vaccinia, Netyosov observed, perhaps it could also be joined to Variola major, creating a "double agent," a superweapon capable of triggering both diseases at once.

Persuaded by Sandakchiev of the project's importance, I granted him permission to promote Netyosov from lab chief to deputy scientific director of the facility. Back in Moscow, I authorized a special grant of one hundred thousand rubles for the Chimera project.

The techniques used to manipulate viral genes are more complicated than those for bacteria. Some viruses, like Venezuelan equine encephalitis, are made of RNA, or ribonucleic acid, an inverted version of ordinary DNA. The gene sequences of RNA viruses must be transposed before genetic experiments can be performed. Once this has been done, the viral genome is sliced with special enzymes called restrictases and knit together with the foreign genes to create what is called recombinant DNA.

Within six months, in the spring of 1990, Netyosov reported that he had successfully inserted a DNA copy of VEE into vaccinia. Space had been found for the transplanted material in a gene of vaccinia called thymidine kinase, and it multiplied along with its new host. Netyosov's team immediately began similar genetic manipulations with Variola major.

At the time, I was not confident of their success. Western geneticists had discovered that when VEE and vaccinia were combined, the vaccinia appeared to lose its virulence. This was a problem for us: we did not want to weaken our smallpox weapon.

By 1990, as my attention was drawn to preparations for the foreign inspectors, I lost track of Netyosov's work. But the research continued.

Two years later, in 1996, the same team published an article in Molecular Biology, a journal published by the Russian Academy of Sciences. The scientists reported that they had found a space in the vaccinia genome where foreign genetic material could be inserted without affecting virulence. They claimed the purpose of this it search was entirely peaceful — to explore different properties of the vaccinia virus. But what medical reason could there be for experiments aimed at preserving its virulence?

The Vector scientists had used a gene for beta-endorphin, a regulatory peptide, in their experiments. Beta-endorphin, capable in large amounts of producing psychological and neurological disorders and of suppressing certain immunological reactions, was one of the ingredients of the Bonfire program. It was synthesized by the Soviet Academy of Sciences.

In 1997, the same team reported in the Russian publication Questions of Virology that they had successfully inserted a gene for Ebola into the genome of vaccinia. Once again, a benign scientific explanation was put forward: they said it was an important step toward creating an Ebola vaccine. But we had always intended vaccinia to be our surrogate for further smallpox weapons research. There was no doubt in my mind that Vector was following our original plan.

One of our goals had been to study the feasibility of a smallpox-Ebola weapon.

Vector has been the official repository for Russia's smallpox stocks since they were moved from the Ivanovsky Institute in Moscow in 1994. Sandakchiev and I first tried to transfer the strains from Ivanovsky to Vector in 1990, hoping that these "legal stocks" would serve to cover up Vector's smallpox work. The Ministry of Health turned us down at the time, but four years later the Russian parliament approved the same plan with no public explanation. The transfer aroused little international attention.

The research at Vector was by no means an isolated case. In 1997 scientists at Obolensk reported in the British scientific journal Vaccine that they had developed a genetically altered strain of Bacillus antbracis capable of resisting anthrax vaccines. In earlier articles, they claimed to have developed a multi-drug-resistant strain of glanders. Both projects were initiated in the 1980s.

My American interlocutors were skeptical of my concerns. Some doubted a combined weapon was possible. Scientists whom I respect wondered why anyone would want to make such a weapon. Smallpox and Ebola, they pointed out, were each sufficiently lethal on their own. Dr. Peter Jahrling of USAMRIID, who was present at some of my early debriefing sessions, has called the concept "sheer fantasy."

I have no way of knowing whether a combined Ebola-smallpox agent has been created, but it is clear that the technology to produce such a weapon now exists. To argue that these weapons won't be developed simply because existing armaments will do a satisfactory job contradicts the history and the logic of weapons development, from the invention of machine guns to the hydrogen bomb.

I told my debriefers that Russia's biological labs should be as carefully monitored as its nuclear arsenal. I was told in turn that it is wrong to conclude intentions from the nature of scientific research, and that the work being conducted in Russia should be accepted as peaceful until there is a compelling reason to think otherwise.

Throughout my career, I had worried that American scientists would surpass us. Now I found myself struggling to persuade them how far the science of germ warfare had come. It wasn't until Bill [Patrick walked through the door two months after my first debriefing that I felt someone understood what I was trying to say.

Patrick handed me his business card as soon as we were introduced. I couldn't read a word, but when I saw the skull and cross-bones over his name, I started to laugh. The card, I later found out, identified his occupation with a single word: "bioweaponeer."

Patrick, then in his late sixties, had retired from Fort Detrick, where he had made a smooth transition from supervising the U.S. Army's biological warfare "product development" division to formulating methods for the protection of soldiers from the weapons he and his associates had made. He had become a consultant on biodefense, participating in the first United Nations team of arms monitors sent to Iraq in 1992. The difference in our ages and back grounds evaporated as we shared the secrets of our former profession. We had tackled many of the same scientific problems. When I gave him details of the recipes for our weapons, he buried his head in his hands.

Patrick knew as well as I did that improvements in the cultivation, concentration, and delivery of biological agents since the closure of the U.S. program presented Americans with a grave security risk.

Despite the Kremlin's pledge, Russian military commanders neither opened their biological facilities to foreign inspection nor disavowed their commitment to biological warfare.

"We are restoring what was destroyed between 1986 and 1989," declared Major General Anatoly Khorechko, who now runs Compound 19 in Yekaterinburg (Sverdlovsk), in an interview in 1997 with the base's internal newspaper. His remark was reprinted in Top Secret, one of Russia's best-informed investigative journals, as part of a lengthy report on the facility. The article noted that Compound 19 had also purchased reactors and other pharmaceutical equipment from Japan.

Signals have come from other facilities. The vice governor of the Penza region declared in 1997 that his area "will soon have biological weapons."

I am convinced that a large portion of the Soviet Union's offensive program remains viable despite Yeltsin's ban on research and testing. Assembly lines were destroyed at Omutninsk, Berdsk, Stepnogorsk, Kurgan, and Penza as a result of Gorbachev's decree. These facilities were transformed into pharmaceutical and pesticide plants, but only a few alterations would be required for them to serve as weapons-assembly lines again. In some cases, it would only take a few months. Stepnogorsk is the only facility at which weapons production has been foreclosed. In 1998, the Kazakhstan government agreed to dismantle the entire facility in exchange for millions of dollars from the United States as part of a broader initiative to dismantle the old Soviet nuclear and biological weapons complexes.

Vector, Obolensk, and the Institute of Ultra-Pure Biopreparations in Leningrad remain under state control. Equipment design and manufacturing plants such as the Precision Machinery Bureau outside Leningrad, the Bureau of Instrument Controls and Automation at Yoshkar-Ola, and the branches of the giant Biomash conglomerate have been retooled for civilian work. Some of these have biodefense contracts with the army.

Offensive research at institutes run by the Academy of Sciences and Ministries of Health and Agriculture has ended, and our stockpiles of plague, tularemia, and smallpox have been destroyed. Nonetheless, there is persistent evidence that Russia continues to place a high value on its old biological warfare infrastructure.

The commanders of the three principal military biological facilities — in Yekaterinburg (Sverdlovsk), Sergiyev Posad (Zagorsk), and Kirov — were promoted from colonel to general between 1992 and 1994. The Yeltsin government claimed this was a recognition of the importance of biodefense work, but if the plants are only making vaccines, why are they sealed off from the public? The U.S. has one comparable military facility — USAMRIID — and it regularly grants permission for visits.

Many former commanders and bureaucrats in the Soviet biological war machine continue to hold important government positions. General Valentin Yevstigneyev, who led the Fifteenth Directorate during my last year in Biopreparat, is deputy director of the Russian army's Nuclear, Biological and Chemical Arms Control Directorate. Hard-liners who were once passionate advocates of biological weapons are regaining influence in Moscow, among them Yury Maslyukov, the former military-industrial chief, now deputy prime minister of Russia. Yeltsin's successors may be less inclined to accept Western curbs on the country's military potential.

Not long ago an American official who had just returned from a visit to Moscow showed me a brochure celebrating the twenty-fifth anniversary of the founding of Biopreparat. Prominently featured on the brochure was a photo of Yury Kalinin, who was also celebrating his sixtieth birthday. To my surprise, I learned that Kalinin was still a general, five years past the normal retirement age for Russian officers. How, I wondered, could Russia maintain that Biopreparat was solely devoted to peaceful research when its director continued to hold a military rank?

As if to emphasize the point, my old boss recently decided to send me a message.

On a muggy Friday evening last August, a man in a charcoal gray suit walked into the lobby bar of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Pentagon City, a few miles from where I now live. Hesitating at the doorway, he peered at the crowd like a passenger dropped off in a strange port.

I felt a twinge of nervousness as he threaded his way toward my table. He was the director of a Biopreparat research facility — the first person from my former circle to cross my path in five years.

A State Department acquaintance had told me he was visiting Washington to raise funds for his institute. On an impulse, I decided to call him at his hotel and suggested we meet for a drink. He was reluctant, but he called back several hours later and agreed to meet me at the Ritz-Carlton bar.

I was told by friends in Moscow that the KGB opened an intensive investigation immediately after I left. The United States did not publicize my defection, choosing instead to comply with the secrecy demanded by Moscow under the terms of the trilateral agreement negotiated after Pasechnik's defection. There were reports in 1993 and 1994 about a "second biological defector," but my identity was never revealed. Nevertheless, the breadth of the KGB investigation suggested Moscow was preparing a dossier to discredit me, should it ever become necessary. Nearly everyone I had known or worked with in my entire career at Biopreparat was interrogated, and some of my colleagues had suffered from their association with me.

The jazz band was beginning a new set when we shook hands. My friend looked at me with what I took to be amusement. I was wearing the summertime uniform of suburban America: a sports shirt and casual slacks. He was in a dark, ill-fitting suit, too heavy for the heat.

"So," he said, glancing at the faces nearby as he took a seat. "Which ones are yours and which are ours?"

I laughed. It was a line whose black humor only two ex-Soviet bureaucrats could appreciate. But he'd drawn a line between us: I was now one of "them."

I had a glass of wine. He ordered a martini and we settled into what I hoped would be a conversation about old times. It wasn't until I asked about his current projects that he grew animated. He began to tell me about a "biological defense project" funded by the Ministry of Defense. I started to talk about about my own work when he put his hand on my arm.

"You don't have to explain yourself," he said. "I know why you came to America. You've made your decision, and I've got no problems with that. I'm not someone who thinks you're a traitor."

He let the statement hang in the air, as if to remind me that others did. Then he gave a dismissive shrug and tried to smile.

"Kan," he said, "I hope you don't mind if I inform Kalinin that we have spoken?"

I couldn't hide my astonishment. Until that moment, I'd assumed that Kalinin had retired. My friend's initial hesitation about seeing me, followed by his decision to come to the hotel, now seemed ominous. Had he requested permission to meet with the "traitor"? There would have been enough time for him to call Kalinin before coming to the Ritz-Carlton.

"Of course I don't mind," I said uneasily. "How is the general anyway? I thought he would have left Biopreparat by now."

My friend shook his head.

"He's the same."

We fell into an awkward silence.

"You know," I said at last, "I'd love to go back some day, maybe after I get my U.S. citizenship."

"That wouldn't be a good idea," he said at once.

"Why not?"

He stared at his glass.

"Kalinin has been telling people that if you ever return to Moscow you won't be leaving," he said.

"What is that supposed to mean?"

"He says you betrayed our secrets."

"So he'll have me arrested?"

"Worse."

I was beginning to regret the whole encounter.

"What can he do?"

My friend concentrated on his martini.

"It would be no problem to find someone to kill you," he said.

"This is ridiculous."

"It's not ridiculous," he said stubbornly. "You don't know what it's like in Moscow these days. You can get someone killed for ten thousand dollars."

My dubious look only served to increase his agitation. He took out his handkerchief and wiped his face.

"Okay," I said finally. "Thanks for the advice."

He rose from the table, saying he had an early flight the next morning. I stood up to shake his hand. We promised to stay in touch and I watched with relief tinged with irritation as he disappeared into the crowd.

I wondered if I would ever be free of my past. The idea of Kalinin contracting a mafia hit man for my murder seemed ludicrous. Five years was a long time to nurse a grudge. Why would anyone in Moscow care about my knowledge of a program that supposedly no longer existed?

Then it came to me. My old colleagues were not worried about what I could tell Americans about the past; they feared my knowledge of the present.

Kalinin is not the only Russian aggravated by the role I've played since coming to America. Oleg Ignatiev, the former chief of biological warfare at the Military-Industrial Commission and now member of a Russian presidential committee on arms control, told one of his American guests that he had bought two pet monkeys.

"I've named one of them Pasechnik and the other Alibekov," he said, "and when I'm in a bad mood, I beat one or the other."

My formal debriefing sessions were over by the end of 1993. I continued to meet with senior officials who asked to see me from time to time, and gradually my concerns about Russia gained greater acceptance in the intelligence and defense communities. Yet even those who shared my doubts that Russia had completely abandoned biological warfare research believed the risk of a revived program remained small.

They argued that Moscow placed too much value on its burgeoning partnership with the United States to risk alienating Washington. Besides, they added, there was no reason for the Kremlin to waste its scarce resources on biological weaponry when the only threats Moscow faced from Europe and the United States were the insistent demands of creditors. My response was that some of Moscow's principal security concerns today could best be addressed with biological weapons.

Russia's army is demoralized. The disastrous war in Chechnya exposed the shortcomings of conscript troops, and officers have gone without pay for months at a time. Yet the weakened Russian military machine confronts a greater variety of challenges than it ever faced during the cold war. These include armed separatist movements in the Caucasus, civil wars in central Asia, the spread of Muslim fundamentalism from Iran and Afghanistan, and pressure from a resurgent China. The late-twentieth-century specter of "total war" has been replaced by the growth of ethnic, nationalist, and religious conflicts. Biological weapons can play an important part in such conflicts, often compensating for the weakness or ineffectiveness of conventional forces.

Several months before Soviet forces withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989, I was told by a senior officer in the Fifteenth Directorate that the Soviet Union used biological weapons during its protracted struggle with the mujaheddin. He said that at least one attack with glanders took place between 1982 and 1984, and there may have been others. The attack, he claimed, was launched by Ilyushin-28 planes based in military airfields in southern Russia.

It was a casual remark, but the officer was evidently proud of the operation, and of the fact that he could tell me a secret about a project I knew nothing about.

When I mentioned this conversation during one of my debriefing sessions, an American intelligence official in the room was visibly startled. She told me there had been periodic reports of disease outbreaks among guerrilla groups in Afghanistan during the war. No one had ever come up with an explanation.

I grew more convinced after reading an April 1998 article in Top Secret that disclosed that the army facility in Sverdlovsk had manufactured "anti-machinery" biological weapons in the 1980s for use in Afghanistan. I knew of no projects involving such agents when I became deputy director of Biopreparat, but one of the bacterial strains investigated in the 1970s for its corrosive properties came from a bacterial genus known as Pseudoinonas. The source for Top Secret's report could have unwittingly, or intentionally, confused it with glanders, which was then classified by biologists as part of the same genus. Although it has subsequently been given a different scientific name, glanders was known at the time as Pseudomonas mallei. The pathogen is not usually lethal to humans, but we considered it an excellent battlefield weapon. Sprayed from a single airplane flying over enemy lines, it could immobilize an entire division or incapacitate guerrilla forces hiding in rugged terrain otherwise inaccessible to regular army troops — precisely the kind of terrain our soldiers faced in Afghanistan.

I was cautioned by government officials against speaking out too bluntly against Russia. Even if I was right, they argued, there was no point in pushing Moscow further than it was willing or able to go.

"Perhaps there are questionable activities going on," one conceded, "but for the moment, diplomacy requires us to keep silent."

20. Buyers and Sellers

In the summer of 1995, I received a call from a man who introduced himself as a representative of the government of South Korea. Explaining that he had been given my name by a mutual friend, he said he needed my help urgently. We met at a crowded open-air cafe in Bethesda, Maryland.

He was courteous and friendly and came to the point at once.

"Your knowledge is extremely valuable to us," he said. "You could make a lot of money telling us what we need to know. We would like to invite you to Seoul."

When I asked him what "knowledge" he was interested in, he told me his government had evidence of a biological warfare program under way in North Korea, which has been trying to destroy its southern neighbor for the past four decades.

"We've had to worry about their army and their nuclear weapons and their saboteurs," he said. "Now we need to learn how to defend ourselves against this biological threat. You can be certain your help will be well rewarded. The South Korean minister of defense is a close personal friend."

I suggested he apply for my services through official channels in Washington, pointing out that I was still under some obligation to those who had helped me escape from Russia. He shrugged this off. Seoul and Washington were close allies, he said. No one would mind. I insisted, and never heard from him again.

South Korea was not the only country to ask for my help. I was approached by a member of the French embassy after delivering a lecture in Boston in mid-199 8. He invited me to lunch with embassy officials in Washington to discuss "biodefense issues." I told him it was a sensitive subject and asked him to send a formal letter to the research and development company where I now work. No letter appeared. A similar request came from a friend with connections to the government of Israel.

Growing fears of a biological attack by a hostile neighbor or a terrorist group have created a booming mini-industry of biodefense consultants. Biodefense requires knowledge of the capabilities of pathogenic agents, their means of delivery, and potential effects. This knowledge is also the key to developing offensive weapons. I evaded these requests in part because I didn't want to turn into an unwitting conduit for new bioweapons work. Fortunately, I had an alternative — a job I liked — and my family was well taken care of. But the monetary rewards for cooperation would have been high.

The services of an ex-Biopreparat scientist would be a bargain at any price. The information he could provide would save months, perhaps years, of costly scientific research for any nation interested in developing, or improving, a biological warfare program. It is impossible to know how many Russians have been recruited abroad, but there is no doubt that their expertise has been attracting bidders. At least twenty-five former specialists in the Soviet Union's biological warfare program are now in the United States. Many more have gone to Europe and Asia or have simply dropped out of sight. I've heard that several went to Iraq and North Korea. A former colleague, now the director of a Biopreparat institute, told me that five of our scientists are in Iran. The New York Times reported in December 1998 that the Iranian government dispatched a "scientific advisor" attached to the office of I he presidency to Moscow to recruit former scientists from our program. In May 1997, more than one hundred scientists from Russian laboratories, including Vector and Obolensk, attended a Biotechnology Trade Fair in Tehran. Sandakchiev told me soon after that Iranians had visited Vector a number of times and were actively promoting scientific exchanges. Last year, Top Secret reported that a Biopreparat official turned up at the Chinese embassy in Moscow to offer his services.

The disastrous economic conditions in Russia have driven many of our brightest scientists and technicians to seek work wherever they can get it. In some labs, scientists haven't been paid for months. I know of one leading researcher who sold flowers on the Arbat Mall in Moscow to feed his family.

The West is worried, with good reason, about lax security at Soviet nuclear installations. The vulnerability of our biological arsenal should also raise concern. A vial of freeze-dried powder takes up less space than a pack of cigarettes and is easy to smuggle past an inattentive guard. It happened when I was at Biopreparat, when security was at its peak. Biological agents once kept secure in government facilities are rumored to be circulating freely in the Russian criminal underworld.

Every agent developed in our labs came with a detailed set of instructions outlining the production process from seed culture to drying and assembly. The complete recipe for our anthrax weapon filled twelve volumes. To save storage space, the Fifteenth Directorate decreed in 1991 that all final formulations be microfilmed and sent to military facilities at Sergiyev Posad, Kirov, and Yekaterinberg. Those facilities are closely guarded, but a military scientist in desperate economic straits might find it hard to resist the temptation to smuggle out a tiny roll of microfilm.

The Kremlin has revived travel restrictions for those considered privy to state secrets, but our scientists don't always have to leave home to find a market for their talents. Not long ago, I obtained a copy of an advertising flyer printed by a Moscow-based company called Bioeffekt Ltd. It offered, by mail order, three genetically engineered strains of tularemia. According to Nikolai Kislichkin, identified in the flyer as company president, the strains contained genes responsible for increasing the virulence of tularemia and melioidosis. Boasting that they wore produced by "technology unknown outside Russia," Kislichkin said they would be useful for the creation of vaccines. He was well aware that they could also be used for less benign purposes. Kislichkin had been a scientist at Obolensk.

Dozens of small privately owned pharmaceutical companies like Bioeffekt have flourished in Russia since the Soviet collapse. They represent another channel through which the techniques, the knowledge, and even the strains we developed have spread beyond the borders of the old Soviet Union, contributing to an alarming proliferation of biological weapons since the end of the cold war.

When I became deputy director of Biopreparat, secret reports on the global state of biological weapons research were sent to me twice a month. They were prepared by a number of intelligence agencies, including the KGB, the GRU, and Medstatistika, a covert research institute at the Ministry of Health.

To our knowledge, none of our satellites in Eastern Europe ran biological weapons programs, though some of our fermenting and drying equipment was manufactured in East Germany. Espionage reports provided evidence of a biowarfare program in Iraq as of 1988 and identified a large biological warfare research complex near Pyongyang, the capital of North Korea. In northwestern China, satellite photos detected what appeared to be a large fermenting plant and a biocontainment lab close to a nuclear testing ground. Intelligence sources found evidence of two epidemics of hemorrhagic fever in this area in the late 1980s, where these diseases were previously unknown. Our analysts concluded that they were caused by an accident in a lab where Chinese scientists were weaponizing viral diseases. A "BW related" facility was identified in Germany (in Münster) and two in France, but much slipped by unnoticed by our intelligence gatherers.

When Yury Ovchinnikov died in 1987, I joined a group of Biopreparat scientists at his funeral services in Moscow. The conversation eventually turned to Cuba's surprising achievements in genetic engineering. Someone mentioned that Cuban scientists had successfully altered strains of bacteria at a pharmaceutical facility just outside of Havana.

"Where did such a poor country get all of that knowledge and equipment?" I asked.

"From us, of course," he answered with a smile.

As I listened in astonishment, he told me that Castro had been taken, during a visit to the Soviet Union in February 1981, to a laboratory where E. coli bacteria had been genetically altered to produce interferon, then thought a key to curing cancer and other diseases. Castro spoke so enthusiastically to Brezhnev about what he had seen that the Soviet leader magnanimously offered his help. A strain of E. coli containing the plasmid used to produce interferon was sent to Havana, along with equipment and working procedures. Within a few years, Cuba had one of the most sophisticated genetic engineering labs in the world — capable of the kind of advanced weapons research we were doing in our own.

General Lebedinsky visited Cuba the following year, at Castro's invitation, with a team of military scientists. He was set up in a ten-room beach-front cottage near Havana and boasted of being received like a king. An epidemic of dengue fever had broken out a few months earlier, infecting 350,000 people. Castro was convinced that this was the result of an American biological attack. He asked Lebedinsky and his scientists to study the strain of the dengue virus in special labs set up near the cottage compound. All evidence pointed to a natural outbreak — the strain was Cuban, not American — but Castro was less interested in scientific process than in political expediency.

Shortly after Lebedinsky returned to Moscow, Castro accused America of attacking Cuba with biological agents. A public outcry ensued, but evidence was unpersuasive. Lebedinsky was asked by the KGB to keep his work to himself. This was not the first time Castro had made such a claim; nor was it the last. Cuba has accused the United States twelve times since 1962 of staging biological attacks on Cuban soil with antilivestock and anticrop agents. The latest claim, filed with the United Nations in 1997, was the first ever submitted to the United Nations under Article 5 of the Biological Weapons Convention. It accused the United States of disseminating Thrips palmi, a plant-destroying insect, with crop spraying planes. The United States countered that the planes were ferrying ordinary pesticides to coffee plantations in Colombia. Kalinin was invited to Cuba in 1990 to discuss the creation of a new biotechnology plant ostensibly devoted to single-cell protein. He returned convinced that Cuba had an active biological weapons program.

The situation in Cuba illustrates the slippery interrelation between Soviet support of scientific programs among our allies and their ability to develop biological weapons. We spent decades building institutes and training scientists in India, Iraq, and Iran. For many years, the Soviet Union organized courses in genetic engineering and molecular biology for scientists from Eastern Europe, Cuba, Libya, India, Iran, and Iraq, among others. Some forty foreign scientists were trained annually. Many of them now head biotechnology programs in their own countries. Some have recruited the services of their former classmates.

In July 1995, Russia opened negotiations with Iraq for the sale of large industrial fermentation vessels and related equipment. The model was one we had used to develop and manufacture bacterial biological weapons. Like Cuba, the Iraquis maintained the vessels were intended to grow single-cell protein for cattle feed. What made the deal particularly suspicious was an additional request for exhaust filtration equipment capable of achieving 99.99 percent air purity — a level we used only in our weapons labs.

Negotiations were called off by the time reports of the deal surfaced in the Western press, but a United Nations employee told me Iraq obtained the equipment it needed elsewhere. United Nations Special Commission inspection teams, established after the Gulf War to monitor the dismantlement of Iraq's chemical and biological weapons program, had not been able to find this equipment by the time they were ejected from Iraq in late 1998. Many similar deals have gone ahead undetected.

One of the Russian officials involved in negotiations with Iraq was Vilen Matveyev, formerly of the Fifteenth Directorate and later a senior deputy at Biopreparat. Matveyev specialized in developing weapons-manufacturing equipment. He is still working as a technical adviser to the Russian government.

In 1997 Russia was reported to be negotiating a lucrative deal with Iran tor the sale of cultivation equipment including fermenters, reactors, and air purifying machinery. The equipment was similar to that which was offered to Iraq.

I have tried in this book to show how the Soviet Union developed a sophisticated biological warfare program and hid it from the world, but the extent of our achievement shouldn't lead anyone to assume that biological warfare is beyond the grasp of poorer nations.

In 1989, I visited New Delhi with a large Soviet delegation to conclude an agreement on the exchange of pharmaceutical equipment. The atmosphere had been cordial on both sides, reflecting the deepening alliance between Mikhail Gorbachev and India's leader, Rajiv Gandhi. Scientific exchanges with India were not uncommon. As early as the 1960s, Lev Telegin, who later became First Deputy Minister of Medical Industry, oversaw a project to build a huge production plant for vaccines and antibiotics four hours by car outside of Ahmadabad. The Soviet Union had been supporting India both militarily and scientifically ever since.

Negotiations took place at the State Department of Biotechnology, an agency responsible for coordinating the research and production of vaccines, not far from the main government complex. One of the two administrators was a military officer who came to Vector on an official visit the following year. Heavily armed soldiers were stationed inside the facility. As we were shown through the building, I noticed several sections were closed off with coded locks.

I rose to go to the bathroom and was followed by one of the plainclothes guards sitting behind us at the conference table. I could hear his footsteps echoing in the corridor. As I reached the bathroom, he followed me inside. I found it hard to understand why an official of a friendly nation couldn't be trusted to go to the bathroom on his own. I was outraged at first, but eventually 1 calmed down. We went to similar lengths, after all, to protect our facilities from outsiders.

My colleagues agreed that the unusually tight security and ubiquitous military presence suggested biowarfare activity. From then on, I paid closer attention to the facilities we were shown.

On a subsequent trip to complete our negotiations, we were taken to a small biological complex at Mukteswar, a remote village in the Himalayan Mountains close to the border with Nepal. Security there was even tighter than in New Delhi. We were asked not to enter any of the buildings on our own. One member of our delegation asked why.

"It's too dangerous," we were told. "We're studying viruses there. Besides, most of the equipment is old. There's nothing interesting to see."

Nations engaged in chemical or nuclear weapons programs almost invariably add biological weapons to their inventory. This is particularly true in cases when a country is bent on doing everything possible to protect itself against its neighbors. India faces two hostile neighbors on its borders — China and Pakistan — with whom it has fought repeatedly over the last fifty years. Its decision to conduct nuclear tests in May 1988 showed it was willing to defy international opinion for the sake of national security.

A report submitted by the U.S. Office of Technological Assessment to hearings at the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations in late 1995 identified seventeen countries believed to possess biological weapons — Libya, North Korea, South Korea, Iraq, Taiwan, Syria, Israel, Iran, China, Egypt, Vietnam, Laos, Cuba, Bulgaria, India, South Africa, and Russia. More have joined the list since.

Ordinary intelligence and surveillance techniques cannot prove the existence of a biological warfare program. Even the highest resolution satellite imagery can't distinguish between a large pharmaceutical plant and a weapons complex. The only conclusive evidence comes from firsthand information. Western suspicions about the Soviet program were only confirmed with Pasechnik's defection. South Africa's efforts to develop biological assassination agents were first revealed when the program's director testified before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, a government-appointed panel investigating the abuses of the apartheid era. It was not until Saddam Hussein's son-in-law, Hussein Kamel, defected in 1995 that the West came to know the extent of Iraq's germ warfare program. Kamel confirmed that Iraq had begun its program a decade earlier at the Muthamia State Establishment, eighty miles northwest of Baghdad, where researchers were cultivating anthrax, botulinum toxin, ricin, and aflatoxin, a poison that can be found in corn, pistachio nuts, and other crops. By the time the United Nations inspectors identified and destroyed Iraq's principal germ warfare facility at Al Hakun in 1996, Iraq had amassed hundreds of thousands of gallons of liquid anthrax and many other pathogens. Iraq is still suspected of harboring germ weapons and continues to resist all attempts to probe further.

Some Western analysts maintain that evidence of biological warfare research is not proof that viable weapons are being produced. They argue that countries with "low-tech" scientific establishments often can't make weapons or delivery systems matching their ambitions. But even the most primitive biological weapons lab can produce enough of an agent to cripple a major city.

On March 20, 1995, members of the Aum Shinrikyo cult sprayed sarin gas in the Tokyo subway. Twelve people were killed and over fifty-five hundred were injured. Subsequent testimony at the cult leaders' trial revealed that Aum Shinrikyo had tried nine times between 1990 and 1995 to spread botulinum toxin and anthrax in the streets of Tokyo and Yokohama. Seiichi Endo, a onetime graduate student in genetic engineering who headed the cult's "Ministry of Health and Welfare," testified that their delivery methods — spraying the agents from a rooftop or from the back of a van — had proven faulty, and their strains were not sufficiently virulent. But it is not difficult to find better strains.

Viruses and bacteria can be obtained from more than fifteen hundred microbe banks around the world. The international scientific community depends on this network for medical research and for the exchange of information vital to the fight against disease. There are few restrictions on the cross-border trade in pathogens.

I was told by American biowarfare experts that Iraq obtained some of its most lethal strains of anthrax from the American Type Culture Collection in Rockville, Maryland, one of the world's largest "libraries" of microorganisms. Iraqi scientists, like ours, discovered which strains to order by reviewing American scientific journals. For thirty-five dollars they also picked up strains of tularemia and Venezuelan equine encephalitis once targeted for weaponization at Fort Detrick.

Six weeks after the Aum Shinrikyo attack, Larry Harris, a member of a white supremacist group in Ohio, ordered three vials of plague from the American Type Culture Collection catalog. Requests must be made on the letterhead of a university or laboratory, so Harris designed his own stationery. The order was being processed when he phoned less than two weeks later to ask why it was taking so long. Company officials grew suspicious — legitimate medical researchers would have known it normally takes more than a month to fill an order — and eventually turned him in.

Partly as a result of this incident, Congress passed a law in April 1996 requiring germ banks and biotech firms in the United States to check the identity of all prospective buyers. This is a useful deterrent, but it has not closed off opportunities for trade. Whether cultured by state-run organizations, terrorist groups, or crazed individuals, biological weapons have moved from a closely held secret of the cold war to the international marketplace.

On December 27, 1998, in Pomona, California, a suburb of Los Angeles, 750 people were quarantined after police received a call claiming that anthrax had been released in the Glass House nightclub. It turned out to be a hoax, but the men and women in the club were quarantined for four hours. This was the last in a series of anthrax hoaxes — more than a dozen over the previous two weeks, the last two weeks of December 1998. How much worse will things be in December 1999?

21. Biodefense

We may not realize until too late that we have become the victims of a biological attack. It is not until days or weeks after such an attack has taken place — after the first wave of deaths — that we will most likely recognize its occurrence. Few terrorists will choose to warn us of their activities. A small amount of Marburg or Ebola released in the subway system of Washington, D.C., Boston, or New York, or in an airport, shopping mall, or financial center, could produce hundreds of thousands of victims.

In the past twenty years, scientists have created antibiotic-resistant strains of anthrax, plague, tularemia, and glanders. Biopreparat research proved that viruses and toxins can be genetically altered to heighten their infectiousness, paving the way for the development of pathogens capable of overcoming existing vaccines. The arsenal of a determined state or terrorist group could include weapons based on tularemia, anthrax, Q fever, epidemic typhus, smallpox, brucellosis, VEE, botulinum toxin, dengue fever, Russian spring-summer encephalitis, Lassa fever, Marburg, Ebola, Bolivian hemorrhagic fever (Machupo), and Argentinean hemorrhagic fever (Junin), to name a few of the diseases studied in our labs. It could also extend to neurological agents, based on chemical substances produced naturally in the human body.

It is easier to make a biological weapon than to create an effective system of biological defense. Based on our current level of knowledge, at least seventy different types of bacteria, viruses, rickettsiae, and fungi can be weaponized. We can reliably treat no more than 20 to 30 percent of the diseases they cause.

Few Americans are aware that they are living under a state of national emergency relating to weapons of mass destruction. On November 14, 1994, President Clinton issued Executive Order 12938, asserting that the potential use of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons by terrorist groups or rogue states represented "an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security, foreign policy, and economy of the United States." The order made it illegal for Americans to help any country or entity to acquire, design, produce, or stockpile chemical or biological weapons and placed the country in a state of emergency. It has been renewed every year since. In 1998, it was amended to include penalties for trafficking in equipment that could indirectly contribute to a foreign germ warfare program.

In June 1995, Clinton outlined a new policy against "super terrorism" — terrorism involving weapons of mass destruction. Today, as a result of that policy, the Departments of Defense, Energy, and State, together with the FBI and the CIA, oversee a wide network of military and civilian agencies dedicated to identifying biological or chemical attacks and to coping with their consequences. Among those agencies are USAMRIID, the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, the Department of Agriculture's Exotic Disease Laboratory, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, and the Sandia National Laboratory in New Mexico. Meanwhile, existing military units such as the Marine Corps Chemical and Biological Incident Response Force (CBIRF), the army's Technical Escort Unit, and the Department of Energy's Nuclear Emergency Search Team (NEST) have been upgraded.

In 1997 the government authorized a $52.6 million Domestic Preparedness Program for emergency response teams or "first responders" in 120 selected cities across the United States. Police, fire department, and public health officials in those cities will receive special training and equipment to help them contain and combat biological and chemical terrorism. Denver was the first city chosen for the pilot program. New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Washington, Philadelphia, San Diego, and Kansas City were added to the list in 1998 and are expected to be fully operational by the end of 1999. Parallel efforts are under way to explore methods of strengthening the security of public buildings with tamper-proof ventilation systems and improved air filtration units.

On May 22, 1998, in a speech to the graduating class at the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis, President Clinton proposed a five-year $420-million initiative to create a reserve stockpile of vaccines and antibiotics to protect Americans against biological attacks. The initiative was intended to broaden an immunization program introduced five years earlier to safeguard American troops on the battlefield. Since then, biological terrorism has become one of America's principle security concerns. In January 1999, after a year in which the American military attacked Sudan, Afghanistan, and Iraq and dozens of anthrax scares were reported throughout the country, Clinton unveiled a new plan for combating bioterrorism at home. "The fight against terrorism is far from over," he said in a speech at the National Academy of Sciences, "and now terrorists seek new tools of destruction. The enemies of peace realize they cannot defeat us with traditional military means, so they are working on new forms of attacks."

Clinton announced new government spending of $1.4 billion in fiscal year 2000 to create and strengthen urban emergency response teams, protect government buildings, improve the nation's ability to detect and diagnose disease outbreaks linked to biological agents, and increase national stockpiles of vaccines and antibiotics. Close to $400 million would be spent on detection technology and research into new vaccines.

Donna Shalala, the secretary of health, spoke after Clinton. "This is the first time in American history in which the public health system has been integrated directly into the national security system," she said. The President warned Americans not to panic. He insisted that new intelligence needs would not infringe on civil liberties.

America has done more than any other nation to protect civilians from biological weapons. But it is not clear, for all of its efforts, that its citizens are any safer.

No one can seem to agree on the best approach to biodefense. The First Responders Program has already encountered criticism. "This approach merely displaces risk, and forces the terrorist, who is often flexible, to select a 'softer' target, in this case a city which did not receive the needed training and equipment," Frank Cilluffo, director of the Terrorism Task Force at Washington's Center for Strategic and International Studies, said in testimony before Congress on October 2, 1998. The real problem is that it assumes an identifiable scene of attack; biological weapons will most likely be deployed in secret and leave no trace.

Early biodefense exercises revealed serious flaws and a general confusion as to how to coordinate local and federal efforts. In a simulated attack staged in New York City in 1998, nearly all of the members of an emergency unit dispatched to the scene "died" because they were insufficiently protected. "They did all the right things," a federal official who watched the exercise told The New York Times. "But the scenario utterly defeated them." The emergency teams were hampered by their inability to identify which biological agents had been used.

Early detection is a key element of biological defense. Depending on the agent and the manner of its dissemination, physicians and emergency rescue teams may have as little as an hour to figure out how to contain a looming medical catastrophe.

The United States has been investigating detection systems with varying degrees of success since World War II. Most methods involve the exposure of vials or petri dishes containing laboratory-grown cultures to air samples from a suspected target area. This can be a laborious process. A field monitoring device used during the Gulf War took between thirteen and twenty-four hours to make a positive identification. For botulinum toxin, one of the staples of Iraq's arsenal, this would already be too late. Technology has improved since then. The Biological Integrated Detection System (BIDS) cut the time to only thirty minutes, but it can so far only determine the presence of anthrax, plague, botulinum toxin, and staphylococcus enterotoxin B.

In September 1998, Clinton and Yeltsin agreed in Moscow on a program of "accelerated negotiations" to strengthen the Biological Weapons Convention. The United States has taken the lead in efforts to bring the treaty up to date. A so-called ad hoc group of countries met four times in 1998 to draft an amendment for mandatory inspections in countries suspected of developing or harboring biological weapons. Other measures discussed include requiring countries to open their biological facilities to regular visits from international inspectors and setting up a unit to investigate suspicious outbreaks of disease. Five more meetings of the ad hoc group are scheduled for 1999. Areas of discussion will broaden to include methods of blocking the transfer of sensitive technology on the Internet, at scientific conferences, and through student ex change programs.

The amendments, if approved, would provide a useful curb against future proliferation. But a determined state is likely to find ways to circumvent them. Consider Iraq, where the United Nations Special Commission has been given virtually unlimited authority to monitor every aspect of the disarmament program imposed by the U.N. Security Council since the Gulf War. These measures are far tougher than any contemplated under the ad hoc process and constitute an intrusion into national sovereignty that would not be tolerated by most countries. Yet despite the periodic threat (and implementation) of military strikes, Iraq has defied U.N. inspections at will. How likely are we then to impose a similar degree of compliance on larger and less isolated world powers, such as China, India, or Russia?

In America, the loudest protests have come from commercial biotechnology companies, who argue that open-ended inspections of their labs and production facilities will leave them vulnerable to industrial espionage. Biotechnology is a multi-million-dollar industry. Between 1989 and 1996 the number of firms in the United States developing new-generation drugs soared from 45 to 113. Today's medical, industrial, and agricultural research often involves work with the same pathogens used in the development of weapons.

Some of these objections have been answered by a proposal for "managed access," which would allow the host country to negotiate the manner in which commercially sensitive labs are visited. Notified in advance of an inspection, facility managers would be allowed to partially reconfigure computers and production equipment with proprietary information. New techniques are also being developed to disrupt secret DNA sequences while allowing inspectors to detect the presence of suspicious microorganisms. Sophisticated chip-based biosensors capable of "nonintrusive" gene probes are also now on the market, but all of these have shortcomings. Nothing prevents a state from concealing a weapons program under the guise of protecting commercial secrets.

Arms treaties are important. They set standards of international behavior regarding the acquisition and use of weapons of mass destruction. But they are almost invariably ignored when countries believe their national security is at stake.

The American plan to stockpile and develop vaccines against known agents is the most comprehensive of its kind in the world. Yet as parts of that plan have been implemented, its limitations have become clear. Mandatory immunization of troops has been official Pentagon policy since 1993. All 2.3 million American soldiers have begun to receive shots against anthrax, currently regarded as the principal threat because of its documented presence in Saddam Hussein's arsenal. But no vaccines are contemplated against other agents believed to be in that arsenal, such as afla-toxin, botulinum, and smallpox. The extra cost would be enormous (the six-year anthrax vaccine program alone will cost the military an estimated $130 million) and vaccines are not without side effects. Injecting soldiers against dozens of diseases would not protect them from the agents we don't know about, or from those for which there are no known vaccines.

Vaccines work by inducing the creation of antibodies that fight specific diseases. Some are given orally, but most are injected into the muscle to insure maximum efficacy. Vaccines made of live but weakened microorganisms are generally more effective than those made of nonliving cellular or subcellular components. Both types are usually benign, but in rare cases they can trigger significant changes in the blood and endocrine systems. Some have been known to affect the functioning of the heart, lungs, kidneys, and other organs. It is not medically advisable to combine too many different courses of vaccination.

There are currently no known vaccines for brucellosis, glanders, and melioidosis or for many viral diseases, such as Ebola and Marburg. The plague vaccine was found to be ineffective against aerosol dissemination in animal studies. The tularemia vaccine is difficult to culture and potentially dangerous. Of the four possible strains available for viral encephalitis, the first and most potent (a live vaccine) produces adverse reactions in 20 percent of all cases and is ineffective in 20 percent. The second is of restricted effectiveness (it only works against three subtypes of the disease), and the third and fourth are poorly immunogenic and require multiple immunizations. The smallpox vaccine, only available in the United States to lab workers and military personnel, can be administered either before or after infection. It requires periodic boosters and wears out after ten years, though revaccination is required after three years in case of infection. Skin testing is recommended for Q fever and botulinum toxin. The anthrax vaccine used in the United States has to be administered six times before it becomes effective (three times in two-week intervals and three times in six-month intervals) with annual boosters thereafter. Anthrax vaccines produced in other countries require different courses of inoculation. American experts maintain that annual boosters are safe — the live vaccine we used in Russia was associated with some risks — but scientists generally agree that excessive vaccination can create complications in the immune system, leading in rare cases to the formation of tumors.

Repeated vaccinations has been known to trigger or aggravate allergies. Thirty minutes after I received my last vaccination against anthrax in 1987, my face became swollen, and I developed a rash and had trouble breathing. I took Dimidrol, a powerful anti-allergy medication available in Russia (though not in the United States) and felt better again in a few hours. For the next ten days I received intravenous preparations at a hospital — a form of allergy treatment we called desensibilization therapy. Several colleagues had been forbidden from anthrax work after similar reactions. I knew this was a sign that I was genetically susceptible to large quantities of specific foreign proteins, and that my immune system had been stretched to its limit. I received my first anthrax vaccination in 1979 and began a course of annual vaccinations in 1982. I was also vaccinated against smallpox once, twice against tularemia, and four times against plague. The chronic allergies I have suffered throughout my adult life are a direct consequence of repeated exposure to live vaccines, and to other biological substances I worked with.

Vaccines provide excellent protection against specific diseases, but the characteristic that makes them so effective — that specificity — is also the source of their limitations. Smallpox antibodies offer no protection against plague. A typhoid vaccine will not lower the risk of measles. Combined vaccines are possible, such as the diphtheria-pertussis-tetanus shot given to children, but most of these go straight to the metabolism of specific organisms. A vaccine works against a single pathogen, or occasionally several similar ones, but an all-purpose antidote does not exist.

The use of vaccines for biodefense makes sense when we know what agent is likely to be used and when we can identify a specific target population — troops, for instance, within range of a known arsenal. But the protection they confer must be measured against a shifting threat. An adversary who knows that his opponents' troops have been inoculated against anthrax can switch his battle plans to smallpox or plague — or to an agent for which no vaccine exists. We can vaccinate our soldiers against a minimal combination of the most likely threats, but we will still not know whether an opponent has developed a weapon virulent enough to overcome existing antidotes.

Despite American efforts and expenditures, vaccines have limited value for the protection of civilians. Who would be deemed vulnerable? And which agents should they be protected against? A crash program to increase the available doses of smallpox vaccine in the United States (currently seven million) might deter a country or a terrorist group from launching a smallpox attack, but there are plenty of other options. And who would get those seven million doses if several cities are attacked at once? The city of New York alone has a population of over seven million. Will each city have its own stockpile?

I am not suggesting we should drop vaccines from our biodefense plan, only that we should keep their effectiveness in perspective. Even if we could afford the expensive and lengthy process of development, testing, and approval currently required for the introduction of new vaccines in the United States and most Western countries, the continued advances in weapons-making knowledge will always put us a step behind.

Over the past two decades, scientists have vastly expanded our understanding of how the immune system works. This knowledge can be exploited to provide a new form of medical defense against biological agents. In the simplest terms, the immune system works by distinguishing our cells from the alien microorganisms that invade our bodies every day. We have at our disposal a network of agents programmed to make such distinctions and report on their findings. New antibodies are continuously being formed to recognize specific threats and eliminate them before they cause damage. These antibodies and the agents that code for their formation arc endowed with what we call memory — the ability to recognize a previous invader. This subcellular capacity lies at the heart of the success of vaccines. For years immunologists focused exclusively on vaccines and the antibodies they produced — the most visible elements of specific immunity — ignoring the processes that have come to be grouped together under the general rubric of nonspecific immunity.

One of the first researchers to observe nonspecific immunity in action was a Russian microbiologist named Ilya Mechnikov, who identified the first cellular components of immunology. Working in Italy between 1882 and 1886, he noticed that a collection of cells would migrate to the site of infection, where they would surround, swallow, and destroy foreign particles. Mechnikov called these cells phagocytes (they are now also referred to as macrophages or monocytes). His work, which earned him the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1908, laid the foundation for the modern science of immunology.

It was not until the 1960s that scientists began to focus on the cells and molecules responsible for coordinating the body's nonspecific immune response against invaders. These include macrophages and granulocytes, as well as special proteins in the blood that interact to defeat foreign microorganisms in what is called a complement cascade. Another important component of nonspecific immunity is a remarkable group of molecules called cytokines, through which cells communicate to one another and pass on vital marching orders.

Cytokines form a bridge between specific and nonspecific immune systems. They are produced in response to viruses or bacteria, or to a general stimulus in the blood. Their function is primarily regulatory: they direct the magnitude of an immune response. They can suppress or stimulate the secretion of antibodies and macrophages, induce fever and inflammation, and prompt the growth and activation of a host of essential immune cells. Most cannot kill viruses or bacteria on their own, but they have been found to boost the immune system and to enable patients to respond to previously unproductive treatments. They have also been shown to increase the effectiveness of T and B lymphocytes including natural killer cells, which destroy pathogenic bacteria and cells invaded by viruses.

In 1957, European scientists identified the first cytokine. It was named interferon, because it appeared to interfere with the progress of viral infections. Three major types have been identified. Interferon took years to isolate, but by 1979 scientists at an American pharmaceutical firm had managed to reproduce one type — interferon alpha — artificially. Touted as the "antiviral penicillin," interferon entered the medical lexicon as a powerful tool for the treatment of illnesses ranging from hepatitis to Kaposi's sarcoma, a frequent symptom of AIDS. Scientist have since become more cautious in their claim, as interferon produced mixed results in lab tests and was found to cause side effects when taken in large doses. Nevertheless, it is widely used today.

The discovery of cytokines and other elements of nonspecific immunity represent an important step forward for medicine. Scientists in America have developed a treatment for AIDS that includes interleukin-2, another cytokine, and research into the effects of cytokines on tuberculosis and other diseases is under way in the Netherlands, Great Britain, Japan, France, and Canada. At least eighteen interleukins are well known to scientists today, and each year more are discovered.

Nothing will replace the long-term protection provided by vaccines against specific diseases, but boosting our nonspecific immune system may offer at least temporary protection from pathogenic agents and possibly could go even further. If administered in the crucial first hours after an attack — when authorities are still trying to identify which agent was used and organize a medical response — such a booster could help contain the crisis. It is a long shot, but everything I know about biological weapons tells me that this is far more promising than attempts to rig office buildings and public monuments with detection devices or to stockpile vaccines.

Ten years, almost to the day, after I was called to army headquarters in Moscow to brief Soviet colonels on how to load intercontinental missiles with anthrax and plague, I met with two U.S. Marine colonels in the fifth-floor conference room of an office building in Virginia.

The marines had driven up from their training base at Quantico, where they operate a think tank called the War-Fighting Lab. Despite the name of their lab, the marines came to discuss defense: how to protect troops against biological warfare and terrorism. Often the first on the scene in a military emergency, marines are exposed to the kinds of unconventional threats not faced by other branches of the armed forces.

On May 20, 1998,I had presented to the U.S. Congress a proposal for developing nonspecific immunological defense against biological weapons. At the time, national efforts were devoted almost exclusively to detection and vaccination — a week later President Clinton would propose a reserve stockpile of vaccines — and this unconventional approach was greeted with widespread skepticism. But things changed dramatically over the next six months.

In December 1998, a committee of scientists appointed by the National Research Council's Institute of Medicine and chaired by Peter Rosen, director of the emergency medicine residency program at the University of California's school of medicine in San Diego, proposed that new research be undertaken into "broad-spectrum anti-bacterial and anti-viral compounds" to counter biological and chemical terrorism — in other words, nonspecific protection against a variety of biological weapons. This recommendation was only one of sixty projects identified by the committee, but it was singled out as a high priority. Endorsed by a panel of twelve prominent U.S. scientists, including Dr. Donald Henderson, one of the architects of the worldwide campaign against smallpox, and the Nobel prize-winning biologist Joshua Lederberg, it represented the first time such an idea had received professional review anywhere in the world.

The marines learned of my proposal before the panel delivered its findings. A congressional aide told them about my testimony before the Joint Economic Committee hearing on terrorism, and a meeting was arranged at the offices of the scientific research and development company where I now work. The two colonels took notes as I went over my ideas. I couldn't help but notice the irony of the situation. To these men I was just another civilian, a scientist with an interesting proposal.

A month later, in November, the marines called my office to report that they had received preliminary approval from their superiors to test a program of nonspecific immunity. Plans for a pilot project are under way.

In helping my adopted country create a new system of defense against the weapons I once made, I often remember Russia, which I loved and continue to love. I want this country to have a different fate. In an interview with a Russian paper, one of my friends called me a betrayer. I am certain he is not alone in thinking this. As I return to this question again and again, I have come to the conclusion that I did not betray Russia so much as it has betrayed its people. As long as it makes heroes of the people who create prohibited weapons, as long as it continues to help foreign dictators who murder civilians and to wage wars against its own people, as long as it trains its physicians and teachers to kill and considers as criminals those who try to speak against this — to call what is immoral by its name — as long as this continues, there can be no hope for a better future. We talk about economic and structural reform, but what is needed in Russia is moral reform, and until that happens, Russia will not change.

As a young boy in Kazakhstan I once came across a book about a doctor who risked his life and health to heal his patients. He was the physician I dreamed of becoming. I cannot unmake the weapons I manufactured or undo the research I authorized as scientific chief of the Soviet Union's biological weapons program; but every day I do what I can to mitigate their effects. The realization that even today, in Iraq or China, another father of three may be sitting down at a conference table to plot the murder of millions of people is what spurs me on. This is my way of honoring the medical oath I betrayed for so many years.