Biohazard

American doubts about the military value of biological weapons had never completely disappeared. By the late 1960s, public anger over the development of biological as well as chemical arms had melded into the larger protests against the Vietnam War. Pickets appeared every day at Fort Detrick and other installations around the country. Nixon, convinced by his advisers that biological warfare was impractical, signed an executive order on November 25,1969, renouncing the use of lethal biological agents and weapons and promising to confine American biological research to "defensive measures" such as immunization and biosafety.

We didn't believe a word of Nixon's announcement. Even though the massive U.S. biological munitions stockpile was ordered to be destroyed, and some twenty-two hundred researchers and technicians lost their jobs, we thought the Americans were only wrapping a thicker cloak around their activities.

Nixon turned most of Camp Detrick's buildings over to the National Cancer Institute and assigned to the complex the task of finding a cure for cancer. This, in Nixon's words, would demonstrate how the United States could "beat swords into plow- shares." But we also noted that a small army medical unit had begun work at Fort Detrick. This unit, known as the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases and ostensibly dedicated to biological defense, seemed to expand in importance and strength each year. Former bioweaponeers like Bill Patrick had gone to work for it. Even if our intelligence activities couldn't come up with concrete evidence of offensive work, there could be no doubt that such work continued.

Press reports and transcripts of congressional hearings indicated that many prominent Americans believed it too. This strengthened our conviction that USAMRIID, like Biopreparat, hid its real purpose from the world. Some American experts charged that the Central Intelligence Agency, which had operated a secret unit inside Camp Detrick since 1952 to investigate "paramilitary" uses of biological weapons, continued to stockpile and develop those agents after 1969. The CIA of course denied this, but we knew the value of intelligence agency denials.

During our first days in America, we felt it would take all our ingenuity to ferret out the truth.

We flew to Salt Lake City, Utah, on a hundred-seat plane provided by Vice President Dan Quayle's office. The good food and seemingly endless supply of liquor made me recall with chagrin our trouble-plagued flight to Siberia the previous year. On our way from the airport, I stared in wonderment at the well-paved highways, the well-stocked stores, and the luxurious homes where ordinary Americans lived.

I didn't share my thoughts with other members of our delegation. Sandakchiev had been to the United States before, and he would have laughed at my naivete. There was no point in comparing travel impressions with Urakov, and our Defense Ministry comrades were too absorbed in their mission strategy to sightsee.

Colonel Frank Cox, the commander of Dugway, met us on arrival at the proving ground, eighty miles from the Utah capital. With disarming candor, he went over the history of bacteriological and chemical testing at the site, which opened in 1942. Since 1969, he said, no biological weapons had been developed or tested there.

More than six hundred buildings were spread across thousands of acres of desert. Dugway was going to be more challenging than Fort Detrick.

We were taken to a large complex designated as the Life Sciences Lab. It was a compound of ten buildings set against a stark landscape of cactus and tumbleweed, and it immediately set off alarm bells in my mind.

The configuration of the structures matched a part of our Stepnogorsk compound. There were sheds for disinfecting equipment and vehicles for transporting animals, and inside some of the buildings I could see tiny rooms similar to those we used in our sanitary passageways for donning protective suits. The largest building looked like a testing facility and, nearby, were distinctive structures with thick walls and loosely fitted roofs — a telltale sign that they had been used to store explosives. In other buildings at the complex, we saw rooms with equipment similar to that which we used to conduct animal autopsies.

But there were no animals, no cages, not even the footprint of experimental weapons activity. The door fittings on many buildings were rusty and creaked when opened. In some, paint was flaking off the walls. The dozen or so lab technicians who worked at the compound seemed lost inside the vast interiors.

Cox's assistants told us the facility was used to test simulants of biological weapons. The main mission, we were informed, was to explore methods of protecting troops and military equipment from biological and chemical attack. They showed us a lab earmarked for the development of devices to detect the presence of biological agents in the air.