Biohazard

The only other items in my office to suggest my training were books on microbiology, biochemistry, and medicine.

Sitting in a corner was a Western computer. I never used it, but it was another sign of "special" status in a regime that prohibited its citizens from owning a copier. I would have preferred a television or radio, but the KGB had banned them from the offices of senior personnel. Our security chiefs claimed that Western electronic surveillance was so good that foreign agents could decipher our deepest secrets by analyzing the vibrations of our conversations on glass. It made little sense to me: why not then ban the computer as well?

The KGB was thorough, and it lived by its own impenetrable logic. Once a month, security officers shooed all the lab chiefs and division heads out of their offices to check for bugs. Some believed that they were really checking on equipment they had themselves installed In record our conversations.

We all knew that we were being watched, but no one questioned the security precautions. We were engaged in secret combat against enemies who, we were told, would stop at nothing. The Americans had hidden behind a similar veil of secrecy when they launched the Manhattan Project to develop the first atomic bomb. Biopreparat, we believed, was our Manhattan Project.

Marina came in with a stack of messages. "Someone from Yermoshin's office is here to see you," she said.

A young KGB officer stepped in after her and waited for her to leave.

"Yes?" I said. But I knew what would happen next.

Since we operated under the fiction that none of the secretaries knew what we did, they could not be allowed in our presence when our "secrets" were discussed.

The officer handed me a folder with a note from Yermoshin. "Stuff from the third floor," I read in his hurried scrawl.

The third floor was home to our "First Department," the unit responsible for maintaining our secret files and all communications with Biopreparat facilities around the country. The only people allowed in, besides security personnel, were Kalinin and myself. It was administered by the KGB.

Sometimes I went upstairs myself. For one thing, it was the only place in the building where you could copy documents. The First Department was the sole custodian of our copier machine. It also offered a good opportunity to gossip with Yermoshin. Our families had spent time together a few weekends earlier.

I riffled through the papers in front of me while the officer stayed in the room, as he was obliged to do.

There were requests for supplies from one of our lab chiefs in Siberia; a notice of an "urgent" meeting at the Kremlin later that afternoon; a minor accident at one of our labs in western Russia which had sparked a debate between physicians at the Ministry of Health, who wanted to isolate the infected workers, and a general at the lab, who didn't. The general, typically, argued that isolation was unnecessary and would only stir up the staff. And there were the latest reports of a field test in the Aral Sea.

Rebirth Island

Aral Sea, 1982

Ten centuries ago, according to Russian legend, there was a mysterious kingdom on the shores of the Black Sea called Tmu Tarakan. Its name was variously translated as the "Place of Darkness" or the "Kingdom of Cockroaches." Modern-day Muscovites use the phrase whenever they want to describe a destination that is as loathsome as it is remote.

Every April during the 1980s and early 1990s a team of Biopreparat scientists set off for a place we jokingly referred to as Tmu Tarakan. Located twenty-three hundred miles south of Moscow, its name was Rebirth Island. Our teams would spend four or five months there, living in army barracks and testing that year's supply of biological weapons.

Rebirth Island is a tear-shaped speck in the Aral Sea, which divides the Central Asian countries of Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. Languishing fifty miles off the Kazakh shoreline in waters so polluted by the runoff of agricultural fertilizers that nothing could possibly live in them anymore, it was the antithesis of its name. The only year-round inhabitants as far as anyone could see were lizards.

Open discussion of the island's seasonal activities was strictly forbidden. Scientists couldn't tell their families where they were going, or why.