A set of Matryoshka dolls is lined up along the window sill above the desk of Dr. Frank J. Malinoski '76, M.D., Ph.D., assistant vice president of Wyeth-Ayerst Global Pharmaceuticals in suburban Philadelphia. The Russian dolls are nesting figures, and the biggest depicts Boris Yeltsin, with Gorbachev, Brezhnev, Stalin and Lenin in descending order.

Malinoski bought the dolls on the black market when he traveled on a secret mission to the former Soviet Union in 1991. It was before Yeltsin had come to power, so that dour-looking souvenir was a declaration of preference, a bold political statement. Malinoski was charmed by the growing temerity of the Soviet people, but, under the circumstances of his visit, the stacking figures may have called to mind Churchill's quip, as the Cold War got underway, about Britain's ally turned enemy: "It is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma." Malinoski was in the Soviet Union in 1991 as part of a top-secret American-British team that journeyed to the heart of the "evil empire" on a 10-day inspection tour of facilities thought to be turning malign viruses and bacteria into biological weapons. When he left home to go looking for evidence of bioweapons research, Malinoski was not permitted to tell even his family where he was headed.

SUSPICIOUS
There were reasons for suspicion: a 1979 outbreak of anthrax in the city of Sverdlovsk, which killed nearly 70, and the chilling testimony of a Soviet biochemist who defected a decade later had convinced many in the diplomatic and intelligence communities that the Soviets had put together a bioweapons program in violation of the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention. At that convention they had promised "never in any circumstance to develop, produce, stockpile or otherwise acquire or retain" weapons or agents intended for biowarfare. But with no provision for verification, the treaty had no teeth.

In the late 1980s the biochemist defector Dr. Vladimir Pasechnik had reported a clandestine empire of research institutes, production plants and storage bunkers in the U.S.S.R.–more than 47 sites scattered across the vast nation. The network, dedicated to understanding and perfecting biological weapons, was funded and directed by the Ministry of Defense but was nested inside a civilian business conglomerate called Biopreparat. "The System," as it was known to insiders, had more than 40,000 employees, including 9,000 scientists who often carried both civilian and military identity cards.