Biohazard

In another building, one member of our military contingent impulsively decided to break protocol. Without warning, he clambered onto a lab bench and, to the horror of our hosts, started to remove tiles from the ceiling. I cringed. We were on the second story of a two-story building. I couldn't imagine what he expected to find. He had caught the Americans off guard. After that incident, Bailey's smile began to fade.

Our suspicions were not entirely unfounded. While we had no clear sense of the present state of the Americans' biological weapons program, we knew what they were capable of. In fact, we knew a lot more than they suspected.

When I collaborated on a secret history of the Soviet and American programs after my defection, I was amazed to discover how closely the research efforts of both countries dovetailed between 1945 and 1969. The same agents, even the same types of aerosols, were used in experiments occurring sometimes less than a year apart.

Bill Patrick, who was in charge of biological weapons development at Fort Detrick until 1969, was my partner in the joint history-writing project. Then in his mid-sixties, Patrick was one of the few Americans I'd met who seemed to understand the technology of bioweaponeering. An accomplished microbiologist with a dry wit, he had been responsible for groundbreaking work on plague and tularemia weapons whose formulations remain classified in government archives. He has since become one of America's foremost experts on biological defense.

Patrick noticed the parallel as well.

"When we worked on something, you seemed to be working on it a short time later," he told me. "It's amazing that two countries so far apart could undertake such similar courses."

The uncanny similarity between our programs may have been more than a coincidence. Pavel Sudoplatov, a former general of the NKVD (the precursor of the KGB), provided an unwitting clue in his memoirs, published in 1996. Sudoplatov reported almost offhandedly that classified U.S. material on bacteriological weapons research had been transmitted on a regular basis to Moscow during the 1940s and 1950s. He passed these reports to "Laboratory X," which he described as an institute directed by one of the senior members of the Soviet Academy of Sciences.

I immediately recognized Laboratory X as Laboratory 12, the unit operated by the KGB's First Main Directorate, where my friend Valery Butuzov had worked for so many years developing assassination weapons. If such information was being obtained by the KGB, it was more than likely to have been shared with other parts of our program, especially after control of biological weapons research passed from the KGB to the army in the postwar years.

We obtained significant data from material published in American and European scientific journals, but American decisions on which strains of biological agents to research, which nutrient media to use, and which aerosols to develop were highly classified. There had to be at least one informer, if not several, in the American program. Patrick told me that no one he'd worked with had ever suspected the presence of a spy inside the American biological weapons labs. But he agreed the evidence was compelling.

The United States was a relative latecomer to the field of biological weapons. Great Britain and Canada began investigating biological agents and delivery systems in 1940, but President Franklin D. Roosevelt didn't establish a program until fifteen months after the United States entered World War II, in March 1943. Based on what Patrick told me of the early history of their program, Americans knew nothing of the ambitious weapons-making drive we had launched in the 1920s.

Perhaps Washington's lack of knowledge was based on its lack of curiosity. The Americans had been skeptical of the value of biological warfare from the start — a skepticism that continues to influence policymakers today.

In 1941, before Pearl Harbor, Secretary of War Henry Stimson asked Dr. Frank Jewett, then president of the National Academy of Sciences, to put together a working group to investigate the feasibility of biological warfare. Stimson remained unconvinced after he saw the report. "Biological warfare is dirty business," he wrote to Roosevelt in 1942.

Declaring that the military advantages of germ weapons were "debatable," Stimson conceded that "any method which appears to offer advantages to a nation at war will be vigorously explored by that nation." The Americans were not fully persuaded until their British and Canadian allies noted that the Germans were suspected of having used glanders against Romanian cavalry during World War I and seemed to be amassing a larger bacteriological arsenal. The Canadians had converted an agricultural experiment station in Suffield, Alberta, into a testing area for anthrax. In southern England, an old chemical warfare proving ground at Porton Down was adapted for the same purpose.