During the inspection a technician let slip that the lab had been working on smallpox. "He probably didn't realize how much he was supposed to be hiding," Malinoski said.

Since antiquity, smallpox has been one of the great scourges of the human species. The virus preys only on humans, and Variola major kills about half of those it attacks and tends to infect nearly everyone else nearby. The World Health Organization (WHO) set up an eradication program that tracked down and choked off with vaccination campaigns every naturally occurring outbreak. The last case was isolated and treated in 1979, and the prodigious killer was declared eradicated the following year. By agreement, samples of the virus should have been alive only at official repositories in Atlanta and Moscow under the control of WHO.

The disclosure that Vector had possession of the virus was profoundly disturbing. Variola is an ideal weapon, especially now, when the world medical community has let down its guard. "Smallpox is a very hardy organism and can cause a devastating plague," Malinoski explained. "A whole generation is not immunized and is susceptible. . . . Everyone understood this was extremely serious." When the inspectors departed, their worst suspicions had been confirmed.

BIOPREPARAT
Founded by a Kremlin order in 1973, Biopreparat had set up the largest and most advanced bioweapons infrastructure the world has ever seen. Top students from the best scientific schools were recruited and offered unheard-of salaries, elite status and other perks. Most did not understand they were to work on biological weapons until they were already ensconced within the system. Dr. Ken Alibek, the first deputy chief of Biopreparat (1988 to 1992) and a colonel, was among them. Having pioneered innovations for a more lethal anthrax formula, he was an accomplished and ambitious bioweaponeer who worked his way up to become second in command. In his memoir, Biohazard, he writes, "Biopreparat, we believed, was our Manhattan Project."

Like many, he was raised to believe that the U.S. was in the vanguard of a world capitalist conspiracy and would stop at nothing, including the breaking of treaties, to overthrow socialism. The Soviet Union, he believed, should likewise stop at nothing to defend itself. A "staunch patriot," Alibek oversaw an enterprise whose deadly teeth included weapons-grade anthrax, Black Death, Marburg, smallpox and other scourges. Biopreparat created mountains of engineered pestilence, including a 20-ton stockpile of freeze-dried smallpox. Technology for mounting it on missiles had been perfected. The most efficient dispersal techniques were determined, and customized bioparticles were molded to maximize virulence. Biopreparat had delivered into the hands of the Soviet state the machinery to reap a harvest of death comparable to the grimmest nuclear war scenarios.

Alibek defected in 1992 after a reciprocal inspection tour of U.S. facilities (including USAMRIID) convinced him America had no offensive program. "Throughout my career," he wrote, "I had worried that American scientists would surpass us. Now I found myself struggling to persuade them how far the science of germ warfare had come."

That same year President Yeltsin admitted what the West by then already knew, and he ordered the weapons program dismantled. From that point on, a downsized Biopreparat would be a privatized commercial venture–at least officially. The current Russian president, Vladimir Putin, has made no public pronouncements on the matter, but experts are skeptical that the civilian leadership has full control over the military. Four research institutes under the Ministry of Defense remain shrouded in secrecy, according to Dr. Jonathan Tucker, director of the Chemical and Biological Weapons Nonproliferation Program at the Monterey Institute: "The Russian military has refused repeated Western requests for confidence-building visits, raising suspicions that offensive research and development may be continuing there."