Biohazard

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.