Biohazard

When I returned to the room, the officers had closed their files. We agreed that there was nothing more to say, and I coolly thanked them for their trouble. Inside, I was shaken.

It was impossible to believe that our most important military rival wasn't pursuing an active biological warfare program.

As part of my duties at Biopreparat I reviewed our budget regularly with Gosplan, the state economic planning agency. Every time I visited the block-long building on Gorky Street, the resources available to us seemed to increase. General Roman Volkov, the balding, scholarly official in charge of funding Ministry of Defense programs, practically begged me to look for ways to spend money. "I've got three hundred million rubles for you in this year's budget," he told me in 1990. "You still haven't supplied me with programs on which to spend them."

When I suggested civilian medical projects, he brushed me off irritably.

"If you give me more suggestions like that, you'll never get any money," he said.

This made little sense to me. Our health-care system was getting worse every day, and conditions in our hospitals were abysmal. The previous year, Biopreparat had shipped boxes of disposable plastic syringes to medical facilities around the country in response to an AIDS scandal in Elista, a small city on the northern steppes of the Caspian Sea. Two hundred and fifty children at the city's main pediatric hospital had been diagnosed with HIV after having been infected by contaminated syringes. Nurses complained that shortages of equipment and staff prevented them from employing adequate sterilization methods. Stories like these were rife throughout the country.

In February 1990, Valery Ganzenko, the head of the medical directorate, came to my office with a bagful of dirty vaccine vials.

"These are being produced at our facility in Georgia," he complained. "Hospitals in the area are sending them back to us because they're not sterile. When I ask the Georgians what's going on they can't explain it, but we just sent them a big grant to upgrade their equipment."

I was responsible for the civilian institutes operating within Biopreparat as well as for our military research program. The supervision of vaccine production and antibiotic development for our state health system occupied almost 50 percent of our official functions. Kalinin paid almost no attention to this part of our agency, and neither did others in the senior staff. We gave civilian managers free rein, and inevitably much of our equipment ended up on the black market. No one seemed to care. But I found myself increasingly drawn to our medical programs and allocated time to them whenever I could.

"Maybe we should take a special trip down to Tbilisi," I suggested to Ganzenko.

He was pleasantly surprised.

"I didn't think anyone around here wanted to spend time on this kind of thing," he said. We were met at the Tbilisi airport by the director of the facility, who drove up in a black Volga. A pompous man with a thick Georgian mustache, he was determined to treat Ganzenko and me as VIPs. Before I could protest, he had swept us off on a grand tour of the capital, a city of steep streets and elegant wrought-iron balconies.

"Why don't we go to your lab?" I said.

"Later," he said. "You must first enjoy Georgian hospitality." On our first night he took us to a restaurant where he'd reserved a private room. The table was laden with meat, cheese, fish, and bottles of wine — all in short supply at ordinary food stores in Moscow.

The poverty of the lab we visited the following morning seemed grimmer by comparison. Some of the equipment was over forty years old. Workers used tiny ovens to culture vaccines. Our host was unapologetic, insisting that Biopreparat's funds were being spent on wages and operating costs.

I knew he was lying as soon as I began talking to the staff. Most of the three hundred employees were women. They told me they were earning such pitiful salaries that they couldn't even afford lunch.

At a general meeting later that day, I announced that the lab would have to be closed.

"The medicine you produce is not acceptable," I said. "It cannot be used to treat people. We have made plans to reassign your production quotas to our laboratories in Ufa and Leningrad."

Everyone began to shout at once. Some of the women sobbed. In broken Russian they complained there was no other place to find work: their husbands were gone, they had hungry children. I was stunned by their despair. I had not witnessed this level of destitution since leaving Kazakhstan.

"I'll give you another chance," I finally conceded. "We'll keep the lab open to see if things improve, but one thing will have to change now."

I pulled out a sheet of paper and began writing.

"With this paper," I said, "I'm firing your director and replacing him with his deputy."