Biohazard

Importing that many animals at one time without arousing suspicion was not as difficult as it sounds. The arrangements were made well in advance by clandestine overseas trading associations run by the Soviet Ministry of External Trade, which also supplied us with the cages and other special equipment. I don't know how we would have explained such an emergency request if we had been asked, but in the old Soviet Union, no one ever asked.

Since we were testing a vaccine-resistant weapon, all of the monkeys had to be immunized before they were exposed.

Back in the labs at Omutninsk, we filled twenty bomblets with my new tularemia weapon and prepared them for shipment to Rebirth Island.

Two senior officers were placed in charge of the tularemia test team that year: General Anatoly Vorobyov, first deputy director of Biopreparat, and General Lebedinsky of the Fifteenth Directorate. I was ordered to stay at Omutninsk to prepare an alternate formula for testing later that summer. I found it hard to concentrate on my lab work.

Information from Rebirth Island was difficult to come by. There was no telephone at the test center, and the only communication with Aralsk was through cryptograms on the army's closed-circuit communications network. I would have no idea what had really happened until my colleagues made their way back to Omutninsk.

When the coded test results filtered back the news was better than anyone had expected, including me. Nearly all the immunized monkeys died. I received a call from a very happy Kalinin.

"Kanatjan!" he shouted over the phone line from Moscow. It was one of the few times in those early days that he used my first name. "You are a great man!"

Other congratulatory calls followed from colleagues in Moscow who had heard about the results. A few weeks later I made the long trip to Moscow again, this time to receive a special military medal for "wartime services" from the gloating Kalinin.

Perplexingly, there was no word from the Fifteenth Directorate for weeks — not even an indication that a formal review was under way. Then we received a stilted letter from the Ministry of Defense.

"This weapon cannot be accepted into the arsenal," the letter said. "Our investigation has shown that preliminary testing of blood samples in affected monkeys was not done correctly."

The ministry was right. General Vorobyov had neglected a couple of established procedures in his haste to prepare the monkeys. His lapse of attention had little bearing on the success of the tests, but the military decided to put us in our place. The Fifteenth Directorate was not about to hand its rival an easy victory, particularly on a project directed by a "puppy." Kalinin was furious.

It turned out to be a minor setback. The next year we conducted new tests with an even more efficient dry variant of tularemia, following all the procedures meticulously, and the new version of weaponized tularemia entered the Soviet arsenal. The achievement launched Biopreparat as a significant force in the nation's weapons establishment. Kalinin was now safely ensconced in the backstairs club of Kremlin military politics, and I had been initiated into the fraternity.

Meanwhile, at Rebirth Island, everything connected to the tularemia test, from research notes to blood samples to the monkeys' corpses, had to be incinerated. The testing area was swept clean of all signs of human and animal occupation and then disinfected to eliminate all "footprints" of biological activity.

Open-air testing at Rebirth Island stopped in 1992. Records of what happened there no longer exist.

Military Medicine

Stalingrad, 1942

Biological warfare was the furthest thing from my mind when I entered the military faculty of the Tomsk Medical Institute in 1973 to begin graduate studies as a cadet intern. I was planning to become a military psychiatrist, until a professor gave me an assignment that changed my relationship to medicine. He asked me to analyze a mysterious outbreak of tularemia on the German-Soviet front shortly before the Battle of Stalingrad in 1942.

The assignment was for a course in epidemiology. Most students disliked the professor, the balding, stony-faced Colonel Aksyonenko, but I respected him. He didn't seem to take himself quite so seriously as the other members of our faculty, who flaunted their advanced degrees and senior ranks. I even liked his lectures. They captured my attention in a way that other courses in military medicine, field surgery, and hygiene — courses we had to take before receiving an officer's commission and a posting — never did.

At the institute library, I spent several nights leafing through the twenty-five-volume History of Soviet Military Medicine in the Great Patriotic War: 1941–1945 and pulled from the shelves dust-caked scientific journals from the wartime era. As I read, I became fascinated by what seemed an inexplicable sequence of events.