Biohazard

"We haven't been looking hard enough at new drugs being developed in the U.S., Great Britain, and Germany," he said. "Remember, our work for the Motherland is never finished."

The First Main Directorate

Moscow, 1990

Samokatnaya Street felt at times like a cloister. Our secrets cut us off from political life in the capital, and we could not take the risk of making close friends outside the program. In our isolation, we forged relationships among ourselves. We visited one another's homes, gossiped about office politics, exchanged stories about our wives and children, and complained about Kalinin.

One man never joined our circle. His name was Valery Butuzov. A tall, gangly fellow in his early forties with a short military haircut, Butuzov gave no one any reason to dislike him. He always had a cheerful greeting ready when you met him in the hallway and smiled easily. Yet he seemed to retreat from closer contact. Butuzov held a Ph.D. in pharmacology. In our organizational charts he was listed as an engineer, but no one understood what he did. Sometimes he disappeared for days at a time.

General Anatoly Vorobyov, Kalinin's deputy in 1987, complained about him all the time.

"The guy doesn't do anything," Vorobyov once grumbled. "I've never seen anyone so lazy."

I was reviewing with him a list of assignments for new personnel, which required approval from the Central Committee.

"Why don't you fire him?" I asked. "We've got plenty of people to fill his place."

The general was silent for a few moments.

"I can't," he said.

"Why not?"

Vorobyov began to shuffle papers on his desk. He looked annoyed.

"That's really no business of yours, Kanatjan," he said. "Don't you have work to do?"

I took the hint and didn't raise the subject again. But I wondered why Vorobyov, the second most powerful manager in our organization, couldn't fire this man.

When I replaced Vorobyov as first deputy chief, I discovered who Valery Butuzov was. He was not an engineer but a colonel in the First Main Directorate, the foreign intelligence unit of the KGB. His Biopreparat position was a cover for activities too secret even for senior management to know. Yermoshin, our KGB head, knew Butuzov's real identity, but he couldn't tell me his function.

"I have no authority over those guys from the First Directorate," he shrugged. "I'm not even supposed to know he's here. You figure it out — the guy's a pharmacological genius."

Butuzov wasn't much older than I was. I started to engage him in conversation whenever we met. At first he tolerated my attentions — he couldn't exactly be impolite to Kalinin's new deputy— but over time, we discovered we had interests in common. We could discuss the latest books and movies and that great ice-breaking subject for men: sports.

He skillfully deflected questions about his work. Still, he was more open about his background with me than he had ever been with Vorobyov. He once told me he had worked as a younger man in the Ministry of Health, within a facility he called the Institute of Pharmacology, in some sort of intelligence capacity.

After one of his prolonged absences, I asked him where he'd been. He looked drawn, as if he hadn't slept for days.

"They wanted me at the lab at Yasenovo again," he said, shaking his head. "Those guys are idiots sometimes."

My interest was piqued. Yasenovo was the KGB's ostentatious modern spy palace, built in a forested enclave on the outskirts of Moscow to house the First Directorate. Yermoshin spoke of it with envy. The rest of the KGB apparatus, including his own Second Directorate (for counterintelligence and internal security), was confined to the gray-walled Lubyanka building in central Moscow. Yasenovo, which some said was modeled on CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, had been the private kingdom of Vladimir Kryuchkov, who spent fourteen years there as foreign intelligence chief before becoming KGB chairman in 1988. Its cafeteria served black caviar and smoked salmon, and senior officers could forget the daily strains of running the world's largest espionage agency in an elaborate sports complex and swimming pool. A monument to the "unknown intelligence officer" stood in its central courtyard. But I had never heard of a pharmacological lab at Yasenovo.

In 1989, Kalinin and I went together to a meeting at a covert division of the Soviet Ministry of Health. This division, known as the Third Directorate, was located far from the ministry's downtown headquarters in a pink office building on Leningradsky Prospekt, in northern Moscow. Its director, a scientist named Sergeyev, held the rank of deputy health minister but seemed to have no contact with his superiors at the ministry. We met with him frequently, but I could never understand why. Most questions relating to vaccines and immunization were dealt with by other departments.