Biohazard

The assignment suited those who enjoyed enforced vacations from their wives, mistresses, or children, but for most people the blend of relentless monotony and sleepless vigilance made even the stressful conditions in our labs seem attractive. In Moscow all that counted was the steady stream of reports that gave our bureaucracy its principal justification.

At the height of the U.S. offensive biological weapons program, American scientists restricted themselves to developing armaments that could be countered by antibiotics or vaccines, out of a concern for protecting troops and civilians from potential accidents. The Soviet government decided that the best agents were those for which there was no known cure. This shaped the entire course of our program and thrust us into a never-ending race against the medical profession. Every time a new treatment or vaccine came to light somewhere, we were back in our labs, trying to figure out how to overcome its effects.

Trafficking in germs and viruses was legal then, as it is today. In the name of scientific research, our agents purchased strains from university research laboratories and biotech firms around the world with no difficulty. Representatives of Soviet scientific and trade organizations based in Europe, as well as in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, had standing instructions to look out for new or unusual diseases. It was from the United States, for instance, that we obtained Machupo, the virus that causes Bolivian hemorrhagic fever. We picked up Marburg, related to the Ebola virus, from Germany.

The KGB was our most dependable supplier of raw material. They were known within Biopreparat by the code name "Capturing Agency One." Vials arrived in Russia almost every month with exotic fluids, powders, and cultures gathered by our intelligence agents in every corner of the globe. They were then sent by diplomatic pouch to Moscow, where Biopreparat technicians cautiously repackaged them. When I worked in provincial institutes, I was often ordered to pick up these toxic dispatches with a pair of armed guards in tow.

We were never permitted to travel by air. The consequences of a crash in one of our aging Aeroflot planes was too horrible to contemplate. Instead, dressed in civilian clothes, we returned in the cramped, sweaty passenger compartments of trains, trying to be inconspicuous.

By the mid-1980s, every Biopreparat laboratory, scientific institute, and production facility was working at full capacity. There were new agents, new strains of viruses and bacteria, and new methods of dispersal to test every month. We even explored AIDS and Legionnaire's disease. Both, as it happened, proved too unstable for use on the battlefield or against civilian populations. After studying one strain of the AIDS virus collected from the United States in 1985, we determined that HIV's long incubation period made it unsuitable for military use. You couldn't strike terror in an enemy's forces by infecting them with a disease whose symptoms took years to develop.

We had greater success in our work on more traditional killers.

One of the most infectious diseases known to man, smallpox, was declared eradicated by the World Health Organization in 1980. The last naturally occurring case was reported in 1977, and the medical profession judges the minor health risk associated with a vaccine greater than forgoing inoculation. Today, it isn't possible to get a smallpox vaccination in the United States, unless you are a lab scientist or a member of the military. This was for us an excellent reason to weaponize it. Although we officially had a small amount of the virus in the Ivanovsky Institute of Virology in Moscow — matching the world's only other legal repository of the strain in the United States — we cultivated tons of smallpox in our secret lab in Zagorsk (now Sergiyev Posad), the famous Russian cathedral city a half hour's drive from the capital. At Zagorsk, we experimented with the culture until we came up with a weapons-quality variant. Smallpox was then quietly added to our arsenal.

By the 1980s, so many different varieties of unconventional weapons were being developed and tested in the Soviet Union that a complex code, arranged according to letters of the alphabet, was developed to keep track of them. Words beginning with F, for example, were assigned to chemical weapons ("Foliant") and to psychotropic, or behavior-altering, biological and chemical agents ("Flute").

The letter L covered bacterial weapons. In order to further conceal what we were working on, each disease agent carried its own subcode. Plague was L1; tularemia L2; brucellosis and anthrax were L3 and L4, respectively. Glanders was L5, melioidosis L6, and so on. Weapons based on viruses fell under the letter N. Smallpox, for instance, was described in clandestine communications as N1. Ebola was N2, Marburg N3, Machupo or Bolivian hemorrhagic fever N4.