Biohazard

Tanks were parked on a bridge within sight of the White House. Hundreds of people had camped in front of them. Soldiers, mostly young conscripts, had unstrapped their helmets and were flirting with girls in the crowd.

The coup was crumbling before our eyes. In the afternoon, Yeltsin announced that members of the emergency committee were on their way to Vnukovo Airport in southern Moscow.

The crowd roared its delight.

"Let's arrest them now!" someone in the throng shouted.

The plotters were in fact rushing to Crimea, where Gorbachev and his family had been held incommunicado for three days. They were bent on explaining their motives to the man they had betrayed. Another jet containing Yeltsin's designated emissary, Vice President Alexander Rutskoi, took off moments later for the same destination to bring the president home.

The two missions arrived at the same time. Gorbachev refused to meet the men from the Kremlin and returned with Rutskoi. Kryuchkov was a captive at the rear of their plane.

Later that night, the shaken president of the Soviet Union stepped on the tarmac at Moscow's Vnukovo Airport, followed by his wife Raisa. Gorbachev raised his hand in a weak salute and then entered an official car to return to the Kremlin. It was over. Like thousands of other Muscovites, I went home and slept soundly for the first time in three days.

That night, Boris Pugo blew his brains out with his service pistol just as police stepped up to his door.

I went to see Kalinin the following morning. He stood up and offered me his hand. I took it.

"We can all relax now," he said.

My reply was to ask him curtly what he was going to do about Urakov. Kalinin looked uncomfortable when I told him I knew about the proclamation of support for the emergency committee issued from Obolensk. His eyes grew large when I added that Urakov could only atone for his disgraceful behavior by committing suicide.

Kalinin almost laughed.

"Kanatjan," he said in his most condescending voice. "Don't you think that is a bit drastic?"

"Well," I said, "the least you can do is demand his resignation."

"I'll think about it," Kalinin said, and turned away.

Two days later, Marshal Sergei Akhromeyev, the former chief of staff of the Soviet army and a vocal supporter of the putsch, hanged himself in his office.

Within days of the collapse of the coup, it was clear that Gorbachev was too weak to resume his former authority. Having refused in the first hours of his return from Crimea to denounce the Communist Party, he was forced by Yeltsin into a humiliating public rejection of the ideology that had nurtured his career. On August 25, he resigned his position as general secretary.

Soon afterward, I got an urgent call from Kalinin.

"Kanatjan, you must go to the Central Committee offices immediately," he said. "They want us to help them examine documents."

"Why me?" I asked.

Kalinin was defensive.

"There are things there that could embarrass a lot of people," he said. "You know what they are."

I refused. In the end, Kalinin was forced to go himself.

Over the next week, thousands of Party documents were shredded and burned at Central Committee headquarters. Panicked bureaucrats would have burned them all but for the fact that the smoke might have further incensed the mob of demonstrators surrounding the building. The mob had already pulled down the statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky, founder of the Soviet secret police, from his perch in front of the KGB's Lubyanka headquarters.

I learned later that among the documents destroyed were countless papers linking the Central Committee and the KGB to our most secret biological programs, such as Bonfire and Flute.

This was an inspiration, of sorts.

At Biomash, I asked my department chiefs to open our safes and destroy all the instructions and formulas we kept for the making of biological weapons. They did as they were told. I thought there were at least parts of the program that would be impossible to reconstruct.

I was wrong. Copies of every document we burned were held at Samokatnaya Street, where they remain, so far as I know, to this day.

FORTRESS AMERICA

Fort Detrick

Frederick, Maryland, December 1991

In early December 1991, Colonel Charles Bailey, deputy commander of the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) at Fort Detrick in Maryland, gathered his senior managers together for a secret role-playing exercise.