Biohazard

Bulgak possessed a country policeman's dim awe of science. He resented anyone who made him conscious of his ignorance. When I came to know him better, I understood that he was terrified of what went on in our labs. Whenever he suspected a worker of pilfering, or protested one of our security procedures, I would invite him to don a biological protective suit and come with me into Zone Two so as to investigate for himself, but he would back off, hastily insisting he would join me "some other time" when he wasn't busy.

A knock on the door broke the silence. It was one of my lab chiefs, with a problem demanding immediate attention. Bulgak rose to his feet and smirked.

"You can't do this without my help," he said. "Try it, you'll see."

He sidled past my visitor without acknowledging his presence and walked out. I caught a faint look of distaste in the lab chief's eyes as we watched him go.

Bulgak was easy to dislike. He was a bland-featured man in his mid-thirties with shrewd eyes and an unpleasant demeanor. Every element of his personality appeared calculated to impress others. The clothes he favored — padded ash gray suits and dark shoes— seemed to have been chosen from a catalog for secret policemen. He had been transferred to Stepnogorsk from a rural KGB office in southern Kazakhstan six months before my arrival.

But Bulgak was smaller than the sum of his parts. While plant workers feared him in person, they mocked him behind his back. I didn't need to know much about him to understand the power he commanded in our institution. The KGB operated a counterintelligence unit in every biological weapons research lab in the Soviet Union. Its chief automatically served as a deputy director of the facility, but he reported through his KGB superiors to Lubyanka, the massive building in central Moscow that had served as the nation's secret police headquarters since the early years of Soviet power.

Every director had to accept this alternative chain of command without complaint. The KGB devoted as much energy to watching Biopreparat's senior managers as it did to lower-ranking employees. Avoiding intelligence scrutiny was impossible: although fewer than ten or fifteen KGB employees were assigned to each facility, the units relied on informers to keep us in line.

Savva Yermoshin used to boast that "one out of every ten Soviet citizens" unofficially reported to the security organs, insinuating that the same ratio held true in our agency. I never tried to dispute him. He had probably already discovered from my personnel file that I nearly became a KGB informer myself. My bitter memory of that experience no doubt influenced my handling of Anatoly Bulgak.

It was in 1978, five years before I arrived at Stepnogorsk, when I was a junior scientist at Berdsk. I had just completed my first major assignment, the development of a lab technique for weaponizing brucellosis. The task had been authorized by Lev Klyucherov, who was then a colonel and Biopreparat's scientific chief, and in a burst of youthful exuberance I fired off a triumphant report to Moscow. I was sure Klyucherov would want to know the results immediately.

I received no answer. This should have been a warning.

A few days later, the commander of the KGB's counterintelligence unit at Berdsk, Colonel Filipenko, walked into my office holding a copy of my report.

"What does this mean?" he asked.

Flattered that even the KGB was interested in my work, I launched into a description of the steps I had taken to manufacture the weapon prototype. I was in the midst of a lengthy recital of the composition of the nutrient medium when Filipenko cut me off.

"I don't think you understand me," he said. "What I'm asking you is who told you to do this?"

Surprised, I said it was an assignment from Colonel Klyucherov.

"That can't be true," he snapped. "I just spoke to him in Moscow, and he knows nothing about it."

"But he gave…" I stopped in mid-sentence.

With a sinking feeling, I suddenly realized I had overlooked a regulation requiring us to inform the KGB detachment at our labs of all "special projects." This was a legacy of the prewar era, when the secret police, under Lavrenty Beria, were the coordinators of all biological warfare activity. Before the Sverdlovsk accident, most people ignored such minor security precautions, but the regulation was there to be enforced, and I had landed my superiors in a mess.

My supervisor at Berdsk was not sympathetic when I called him.

"You know you weren't supposed to create anything, just to analyze whether it could be done," he said coolly. "You went beyond your orders."

It was futile to argue. I realized that the KGB would seize on my indiscretion to charge that a Biopreparat scientist was developing weapons on his own. A good manager might have made excuses for my inexperience, but Klyucherov and the supervisor were more interested in protecting themselves and shielding Biopreparat.