Biohazard

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 The late-twentieth-century specter of "total war" has been replaced by the growth of ethnic, nationalist, and religious conflicts.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.