Biohazard

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.