Biohazard

A bioweapons lab leaves its mark on a person forever. But this was all in the distant future when I stepped off the train in a desolate corner of western Russia on a wet midsummer's night in 1975. The East European Scientific Branch of the Institute of Applied Biochemistry was tucked away in a forest carpeted with mushrooms just outside the old Russian city of Omutninsk. It was almost a city of its own. More than ten thousand people lived and worked there, nearly a third of the population of the nearby town. Some thirty wrafherbeaten brick buildings, including dormitories, labs, schools, and a heating plant, dotted the grounds. The working area was surrounded by a concrete wall and an electric fence, but the entire complex could have been mistaken for any of the self-sufficient civilian industrial enterprises built by the dozens in equally remote areas of the country. Trucks lumbered in and out every day. Schoolchildren played in one section of the compound. The guards at the front gate never wore uniforms.

Omutninsk housed one of Russia's newest biological warfare facilities. A chemical plant that had been producing biopesticides in the compound since the 1960s was expanded by the Fifteenth Directorate to serve as a reserve "mobilization" plant for wartime production of biological weapons. In the 1970s, construction began on a new complex of buildings. When I arrived, two years after Brezhnev's secret decree, Biopreparat was in the process of turning Omutninsk into a major center of biological weapons production.

In organizational charts the compound was designated as the "Omutninsk Scientific and Production Base," but we referred to it in our coded cables by its post office box number: B-8389. Officially, Omutninsk manufactured pesticides and other agricultural chemicals. Unofficially it served as a training ground for the next generation of Soviet bioweaponeers.

Some ten or fifteen of us, all in our twenties, arrived that summer. Freshly commissioned officers, we came from military graduate institutes around the Soviet Union. Several had been trained, as I had, in medicine, but our group also included engineers, chemists, and biologists — picked after mysterious interviews followed by long background checks to ascertain that no hint of subversion lurked in our families.

From the very first night when I arrived, soaking wet, to report to my new commanding officer only to be chastised for wearing my military uniform, I knew I had entered into a new world. There were no orientation lectures or seminars, but if we had any doubts as to the real purpose of our assignment, they were quickly dispelled. We were given a paper with a list of regulations for behavior at the plant. At the bottom we were made to sign off on a pledge never to reveal what we were told or what we did.

Our "instructors" came from the KGB. They handed us more forms explaining that we would be doing top-secret research in biotechnology and biochemistry for defensive purposes. Then we were called, one by one, for individual sessions.

"You are aware that this isn't normal work," the officer told me as I sat down. It was a declaration, not a question.

"Yes," I replied.

"I have to inform you that there exists an international treaty on biological warfare, which the Soviet Union has signed," he went on. "According to that treaty no one is allowed to make biological weapons. But the United States signed it too, and we believe that the Americans are lying."

I told him, earnestly, that I believed it too. We had been taught as schoolchildren and it was drummed into us as young military officers that the capitalist world was united in only one aim: to destroy the Soviet Union. It was not difficult for me to believe that the United States would use any conceivable weapon against us, and that our own survival depended on matching their duplicity.

"Good," he said with a satisfied nod. "You can go now — and good luck."

The five minutes I spent with him represented the first and last time any official would bring up a question of ethics for the rest of my career.

Bacteria are cultivated identically whether they are intended for industrial application, weaponization, or vaccination. Working first with harmless microorganisms, we were taught how to make nutrient media, the broths in which they multiply. Making these potions is an art in itself. Bacteria require highly specialized mixtures of proteins, carbohydrates, and salts — often culled from plant or animal extracts — to achieve the most efficient growth rate.