Biohazard

"I'd like to stop this discussion," he said softly. "Nobody is going to say anything about killing here."

A chill came over the room. I think we all got the message: if an assassination was required, the KGB needed no advice from amateurs.

I don't know if any attempt was ever made on Pasechnik's life, but he remains very much alive today in the United Kingdom.

Pasechnik's defection foiled our strategy to head off mounting suspicion about our program. We were told that Americans had begun to demand entry to our labs as early as 1986, charging that we were violating the Biological Weapons Convention. Their requests unsettled Moscow. It was difficult to deny access, even though the treaty contained no explicit requirement for visits. And once knowledgeable foreign scientists set foot in one of our installations, our secret would be out. Or so we thought.

In 1988, a year before congressional hearings into biological warfare began in Washington, Gorbachev signed a decree, prepared by the Military-Industrial Commission, ordering the development of mobile production equipment to keep our weapons assembly lines one step ahead of inspectors.

When I became first deputy director in 1988 I was put in charge of inspection preparations, an assignment that soon crowded out my other duties. One of my responsibilities was to act as the agency's representative on a special commission at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The so-called Inter-Agency Commission was established to "advise" the foreign minister on arms control, but it was primarily concerned with responding to American complaints about weapons-treaty violations. Every state organization connected to the biological warfare program had a representative on the commission, including the army's Fifteenth Directorate, the Military-Industrial Commission, the Ministry of Defense, and the Soviet Academy of Sciences.

By 1989, so many charges were flying between Washington and Moscow that the commission was forced to meet almost every month.

The meetings at Smolenskaya, the foreign ministry headquarters in the capital, were chaired by Deputy Foreign Minister Vladimir Petrovsky. Neither he nor anyone else at the foreign ministry was officially told of the existence of our program. Even Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze, a full member of the Politburo and a confidant of Gorbachev's, was kept out of the loop. Although we invariably presented ourselves as "experts in biological defense questions," many of the senior bureaucrats at the foreign ministry seemed to guess what we were up to.

Nikita Smidovich, a sharp young foreign ministry department chief, sometimes sat in for Petrovsky as acting chairman. During one meeting, he brought up the latest American diplomatic dispatch.

"They claim we have a biological warfare facility in the Kirov region, at Omutninsk," he said.

General Valentin Yevstigneyev, commander of the Fifteenth Directorate, looked shocked.

"Absolute nonsense," he said. "The only facilities we have in Kirov are for developing vaccines."

They looked in my direction.

"Well," I said, "we make biopesticides in Omutninsk."

Smidovich grinned at me.

"Come on," he said. "I'm not stupid. You can at least tell us the truth."

"I don't know what you're getting at, Nikita," I insisted. "I am telling the truth."

He shook his head.

"You guys really shouldn't bullshit me," he said.

We all pretended not to understand what he meant. It was obvious that Soviet diplomats couldn't be told that they were being used to stage an elaborate coverup.

A special task force to coordinate our various deception plans was set up at the Moscow Institute of Applied Biochemistry. The institute had no connection with biochemistry: its function was to design and manufacture equipment for our labs.

The task force was given the equivalent of $400,000 to create a cover identity for our operations and to demonstrate our "civilian" character. It drew up blueprints for a fictional biodefense plant, complete with government orders mandating the highest biosafety protection. We wanted to be able to explain why Soviet installations contained ten of thousands of square meters allocated as Zone Three areas, when pharmaceutical operations in other countries rarely operated under such stringent conditions. The United States has only two facilities designed for work at Biosafety Level Four, the equivalent of our Zone Three.

If an observer happened to visit one of our civilian labs that actually produced vaccines and noticed that their protection levels were not as high as our blueprints called for, we planned to tell them that these labs had been built decades ago and that the Soviet Union had increased its safety standards to provide the best possible level of protection for workers. Who could argue with that?

To support this fiction, we created another special unit to "supervise" the construction of these phantom high-safety facilities and had blueprints prepared. We even hired dozens of civilians to serve as engineers.