Biohazard

For the good of our biological warfare program, Chernyshov's mistake had to be kept quiet. A thorough investigation of what had happened in Compound 19 would raise too many awkward questions even inside our own government about our activities. This was further proof that secrecy was valued above all else in our system — even if it endangered our own safety. In the West, an accident of such magnitude would have been investigated ad nauseam and its lessons distributed, however quietly, to those working in similar areas. Our coverup virtually guaranteed further disasters.

A few months later I ran into another veteran of Sverdlovsk, Lieutenant Colonel Boris Kozhevnikov. In the year following the accident, he told me, a work crew was ordered to take a boxload of 250-liter containers filled with dried anthrax to storage bunkers inside Compound 19. Kozhevnikov had been assigned to escort the workers as they rolled the containers on carts toward the bunker a few hundred feet away. One cart hit a bump, and a container fell open.

I was aghast. "What did you do?" I asked him.

"I just closed it." He shrugged.

Hastily, he added that he had ordered disinfectant poured everywhere. No one had fallen sick. And, of course, his superiors were not informed.

Nine years after the Sverdlovsk accident, a group of Soviet medical experts arrived in the United States to reveal the "truth" about what happened in 1979. Invited by Dr. Matthew Meselson, a noted Harvard professor, they toured Washington, Baltimore, and Cambridge with a stack of reports and photographs purporting to show that all the victims had contracted either intestinal or cutaneous anthrax. Pyotr Burgasov, who led the original Ministry of Health team into Sverdlovsk, headed the delegation.

Burgasov had by then retired as deputy health minister to become a government adviser. With a rueful smile, he acknowledged that a public explanation was long overdue. He blamed the delay on the Soviet government's reluctance to reveal embarrassing deficiencies in its public health system. The West's fascination with perestroika and glasnost helped persuade most of his listeners.

"Sverdlovsk's 'mystery epidemic' of 1979 lost much of its mystery this month," declared the respected U.S. journal Science in an April 1988 account of the Soviet doctors' trip. "For eight years, U.S. officials have voiced suspicions about an unprecedented outbreak of anthrax that occurred in April 1979 among the people of Sverdlovsk; [but the Soviets claimed] people had become sick... from eating bad meat they bought from 'private' butchers.

"Three Soviet officials came to visit the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C., on 11 April… [they] gave the same explanation as in 1980, but provided many more details, convincing some long-time doubters that the account was true."

A few months before Burgasov and the other officials left for the United States, a copy of the paper that he was to present in America landed on my desk in Moscow. I was asked, as Biopreparat's scientific chief, to rubber-stamp his conclusions.

At the time, it didn't matter to me whether Americans were told the truth or not, but I thought Burgasov's account would never pass muster with any self-respecting epidemiologist. How could anyone believe that people would go on eating "contaminated" meat for weeks after the first victims fell sick? The story might explain a few deaths, but not an epidemic. And how could they explain that the majority of the victims were adult males? Didn't women and children eat meat?

The man who had asked for my comments was General Lebedinsky. When I returned to his office at army headquarters, I handed the paper back to him.

"Can you tell me, General," I said, "what the real cause of the Sverdlovsk accident was?"

"Contaminated meat, of course," he said at once.

I reminded him of the afternoon in Omutninsk, years earlier, where he had been reprimanded by the man from the Central Committee.

He looked surprised.

"You remember that?" he said. He flashed one of his paternal smiles.

"Listen," he said. "If you think you know what caused this thing that's your business, but never ask me what happened. Each time you ask, my answer will always be 'contaminated meat.' "

I refused to sign off on the paper, believing it would make us look foolish abroad. Burgasov was furious.

"Tell that young man to write his own paper," he fumed at Kalinin, who impolitically passed the remark on to me.

Burgasov took his version of events to America, and I was astonished to hear that his visit was a success.

The truth about Sverdlovsk, or at least some of it, finally emerged in Russia during an interview granted by Boris Yeltsin to a Komsomolskaya Pravda reporter, published on May 27, 1993.