WHAT TO LOOK FOR
"The biggest thing," he said, "is what's inside of somebody's head in terms of their intent." What's locked inside someone's head is not entirely hidden; it can be read in the configuration of laboratories and manufacturing plants that people ring around themselves to carry out their designs. To determine whether the Soviets were devoted to the science of life or of death, he says, inspectors needed more than the most sophisticated satellite surveillance. "You actually have to go inside those facilities and verify what's going on. Certainly if they're hiding things beneath levels of secrecy, or they're trying to scale it up or figure out how to spray it behind a jet engine, or they're trying to make it resistant to antibiotics or to ultraviolet light–you're very suspicious of things like that."

In 1991 the Soviets adroitly delayed the arrival of Malinoski and the inspectors to give themselves time to sanitize their facilities. Incriminating equipment as well as microorganisms were removed, and workers were not permitted on site the day of inspection. Soviet officials accompanying the inspectors answered questions in ways that were clearly scripted and usually trivial. "Everything was couched in terms of: 'This is a defensive program, and you shouldn't worry about it,'" Malinoski said. Useless, time-consuming speeches continually held up and shortened efforts to eyeball the sites, and an onslaught of Russian hospitality with plenty of vodka, cognac and caviar was aimed at deflecting and dulling the team's attention.

"The most eye-opening part of the trip for me was the experience in Obolensk," said Malinoski. The Institute of Applied Microbiology, just south of Moscow, was a sprawling site with 30 buildings–and it was just one of Biopreparat's facilities. "We were doing a fairly good job [at biodefense] with two buildings at Fort Detrick," he said, but the Soviet complex was mindboggling. The complex was embedded in a layer of armed guards, razor wire and motion and infrared detectors.

"These facilities were the typical Russian construction, which were sort of blocks-within-blocks or rooms-within-rooms," he said of the biosafety architecture. One building at the site was an eight-story structure that covered five acres. An entire floor was devoted to plague research and to Yersinia pestis, the bacillus that wiped out a third of Europe's population in the 14th century. A few cases of plague break out each year in the Soviet Union, but this laboratory, Malinoski maintains, "had a commitment to understanding plague that was out of proportion to the epidemiological threat to the population."

The team also spotted 40 giant steel fermenters at Obolensk–two-story behemoths, veritable buildings themselves–mounted inside the biocontainment section of the edifice. They had been sterilized, but their placement and scale meant that the great caldrons were designed to brew lethal bacteria in quantities far in excess of any legitimate commercial need, according to Malinoski. "The Soviets had no way to dismantle these long rows of huge fermenters. People's jaws were hitting the ground seeing this stuff."

After a day's rest the team moved on for a two-day inspection tour of the Institute of Molecular Biology, known as Vector, in the Siberian larch forests near Novosibirsk. The mammoth compound contained 100 laboratory and administrative buildings. "Novosibirsk was even worse," he said. "This was a huge campus where they were doing virology work, and clearly they had aerosol activities."

One building housed a sophisticated computer for modeling the propagation of aerosols in diverse terrains and weather conditions. The Soviets claimed it was for optimizing the spraying of pesticides on crops, but the costly and innovative software was precisely the kind of technology that could calculate dispersal patterns for the powder-like pathogens a bioweapon unleashes.

The Vector scientists confided that they had studied the Marburg and Ebola viruses extensively and had sprayed aerosols of the microbes on animals in test chambers. "They were defensive in terms of hiding their program," said Malinoski, "but at the same time there was an arrogance about what they did. I think they were eager to actually tell us how far behind we were. . . . They said our vaccines might not protect us, which suggested that they had developed viruses that were resistant to American vaccines."