Biohazard

To manage the vast outlay of funds, a special department was created within Gosplan, the state economic planning committee. The operating and capital budget, considered too secret to keep in the hands of the civilian apparatchiks who ran every other sector of the Soviet economy, was administered by a high-ranking general.

Our program paralleled the Soviet nuclear complex in organization and secrecy. Both generated a sprawl of clandestine cities, manufacturing plants, and research centers across the Soviet Union. The atomic weapons network controlled by the Ministry of Medium Machine Building was much larger, but the production of microbes doesn't require uranium mines or a massive work force. When our biological warfare program was operating at its peak level, in the late 1980s, more than sixty thousand people were engaged in research, testing, production, and equipment design throughout the country. This included some thirty thousand Biopreparat employees.

Money was never a problem. As late as 1990, when Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev was promising the world major cutbacks in our arsenals, I was authorized to spend the equivalent of $200 million, including $70 million for new buildings. The total figure spent that year on biological weapons development was close to a billion dollars.

Biopreparat was the "brains" of the weapons program, supplying the scientific and engineering expertise for the projects commissioned by the army command. A special council, the Inter-Agency Scientific and Technical Council, acted as an advisory board.  leaded by a government minister, the commission comprised twenty five members from the principal scientific organizations of the country. Before I left Biopreparat in 1992, I served as deputy chief, with Kalinin. The chairman was Valery Bykov, then minister of medical industry.

Yury Ovchinnikov lived long enough to see his original ideas bear fruit. He died of cancer in 1987, when still in his fifties. I saw Ovchinnikov only once, at a large meeting in the Biopreparat offices. He was tall, charismatic, and elegant, very much like Kalinin. The two men knew each other well, and Ovchinnikov's quiet patronage was probably the deciding factor in transferring Kalinin, then an ambitious and relatively unknown officer in the Army Chemical Corps, into the coveted new agency when it was established in 1973.

Ovchinnikov had rescued Soviet biology from the morass of ideological politics, only to harness it to Soviet militarism. Although his name now graces a prominent Moscow science institute, he is remembered by many of us as the father of our modern biological warfare program. As Ovchinnikov recognized, such a program can only be as good as its scientists. The challenge was to find scientists willing to lead secret lives.

In April 1975, two months before I graduated from the Tomsk Medical Institute, a polite white-haired man in civilian clothes came from Moscow to the drab industrial town in Siberia where I had spent the previous two years in graduate study.

He wanted to meet several of the students who had specialized in epidemiology and infectious diseases. By then, I was one of them. In the intervening years, I had attended lectures on all forms of weapons of mass destruction and learned methods of protecting troops against nuclear, biological, and chemical attacks. No one ever suggested that we had a biological weapons program of our own. Instead, we were warned that as our enemies had them, it was vital for us to understand how they worked.

As I had learned from my brief foray into the Battle of Stalingrad, biological warfare was not the sort of thing you discussed openly. But I was fascinated by this area of military medicine. The romantic image of medics saving lives amidst the smoke and drama of a battlefield had appealed to me since I was a young boy. It struck me that military physicians were soldiers after their own fashion, waging a private war against an enemy that knew how to exploit every human weakness. The only weapons available to us were our skills in identifying symptoms and in applying the correct treatment.

My interests in epidemiology and in laboratory research were an ideal combination for the secret agency created two years earlier. This enthusiasm impressed my teachers. Aksyonenko must have passed my name on to the mysterious government recruiter, along with other students who showed the same passion for exploring the behavior of diseases.

Our visitor was soft-spoken and courteous. We were impressed that he had been given a special office to meet each one of us privately. I eventually learned he was a colonel from the human resources division of Biopreparat. He died several months after our meeting in Tomsk. I will never forget that meeting.

He was dressed in a dark suit and tie, but he carried himself erect, like a military man. He shook my hand with a firm grip.