Biohazard

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.