Biohazard

KEN ALIBEK with STEPHEN HANDELMAN BIOHAZARD The Chilling True Story of the Largest Covert Biological Weapons Program in the World — Told from the Inside by the Man Who Ran It

[We are] determined for the sake of all mankind, to exclude completely the possibility of bacteriological agents and toxins being used as weapons;

[We are] convinced that such use would be repugnant to the conscience of mankind and that no effort should be spared to minimize this risk….

— Preamble to the Biological and Toxin

PRAISE FOR BIOHAZARD

"An autobiographical tour of America's worst-case nightmare: a massive, highly capable biological warfare program in enemy hands."

— Newsday

"THIS IS A GRIPPING BOOK. The technical details are vivid and terrible even as the human story unfolds. It was fascinating— and chilling — to peer inside this awesome war machine."

— C. J. Peters, author of Virus Hunter, former deputy commander of USAMRIID, now at the CDC

"As a top scientist in the Soviet biowarfare program and the inventor of the world's most powerful anthrax, Ken Alibek has stunned the highest levels of the U.S. government with his revelations. Now, in a calm, compelling, utterly convincing voice, he tells the world what he knows. Modern biology is producing weapons that in killing power may exceed the hydrogen bomb. Ken Alibek describes them with the intimate knowledge of a top weaponeer."

— Richard Preston, author of The Hot Zone

"READ AND BE AMAZED. An important and fascinating look into a terrifying world of which we were blissfully unaware. While we all grew up with the anxiety of the threat of a nuclear winter, little did we know there was an equally horrific menace from biotechnology. Biohazard takes you behind the scenes of the Soviet Union's clandestine bioweapons program."

— Robin Cook, author of Contagion

"U.S. intelligence officials who know what Alibek said in secret debriefings after his defection in 1992 give his new account considerable credence. They have called him highly believable about the subjects he knows firsthand."

— St. Paul Pioneer Press

PROLOGUE

On a bleak island in the Aral Sea, one hundred monkeys are tethered to posts set in parallel rows stretching out toward the horizon. A muffled thud breaks the stillness. Far in the distance, a small metal sphere lifts into the sky then hurtles downward, rotating, until it shatters in a second explosion.

Some seventy-five feet above the ground, a cloud the color of dark mustard begins to unfurl, gently dissolving as it glides down toward the monkeys. They pull at their chains and begin to cry. Some bury their heads between their legs. A few cover their mouths or noses, but it is too late: they have already begun to die.

At the other end of the island, a handful of men in biological protective suits observe the scene through binoculars, taking notes. In a few hours, they will retrieve the still-breathing monkeys and return them to cages where the animals will be under continuous examination for the next several days until, one by one, they die of anthrax or tularemia, Q fever, brucellosis, glanders, or plague. These are the tests I supervised throughout the 1980s and early 1990s. They formed the foundation of the Soviet Union's spectacular breakthroughs in biological warfare.

Between 1988 and 1992, I was first deputy chief of Biopreparat, the Soviet state pharmaceutical agency whose primary function was to develop and produce weapons made from the most dangerous viruses, toxins, and bacteria known to man. Biopreparat was the hub of a clandestine empire of research, testing, and manufacturing facilities spread out over more than forty sites in Russia and Kazakhstan. Nearly every important government institution played a role in the Soviet biological weapons program: the Ministry of Defense, the Ministries of Agriculture and Health, the Soviet Academy of Sciences, the Communist Party Central Committee, and, of course, the KGB. The System, as Biopreparat was often called, was more successful than the Kremlin had ever dared to hope.