BLACK MARKET SCIENCE
When the Soviet empire dissolved into its constituent states not long after Malinoski departed, the socialist economy fell apart too. Once among the most privileged members of their society, many bioweaponeers found themselves without financial support. The U.S. estimates conservatively that there are about 7,000 scientists whose knowledge and skill would bring a handsome price on the black market–10,500 if you count expertise in chemical weapons. Some governments have set aside funds to help stanch "brain drain" by supporting peaceful research for cast-off weapons specialists, but most of the grants have gone to nuclear scientists and engineers.

In the fall of 1999 employees at Obolensk went without government pay for months. A director of another surviving institute remarked: "Now it is possible [for anyone] to buy strains because the scientists are working without bread." The Iranians are known to have trolled those waters, bringing along a truckload of bread.

Dr. Amy Smithson, a senior associate at the Henry L. Stimson Center, has interviewed Russian bioweaponeers. She reports, "it's an open secret" that many have traveled to Syria, Iraq, Libya, China, North Korea and elsewhere, "but they're not making confessions about doing weapons work. . . . Knowledge and seed cultures have definitely leaked, but we don't know where or what." Given the complexities of devising workable bioweapons, she adds, "this is the most genuine shortcut I know of for terrorists."

In the end, the Soviet Matryoshka doll could not contain its secret bioweapons empire. "I would describe it as scary," Malinoski said of his experience. "My role has been as an early observer of these gross violations of treaties and horrendous aberrations of good science. I think you have to be diligent about this kind of thing, just as you have to be with genetic engineering and research on the human genome. There is a dark side, if you will, to all of these things."

Still, he pronounces Alibek and Pasechnik, despite their achievements as bioweaponeers, "the real heroes who put their lives and careers on the line telling the true story." The villains, he declares, are those in "the Soviet, now Russian, military-industrial complex" who knowingly deceived their brightest scientists and convinced them that work on offensive biological weapons was "justified."

"It wouldn't be true to say that I thought I was doing something wrong," Alibeck has said of his own research. "The anthrax was one of my scientific results." He had perfected an anthrax strain with four times the death-dealing potency of standard weapons-grade. He tells of a high-level meeting he once attended with senior military officials who were looking for assurances that Biopreparat could produce sufficient quantities of his more vicious anthrax. They wanted to be able to load SS-18 missiles for a biological attack on major American and European cities. Recalling his physician's oath to do no harm and feeling a need to atone, he confessed: "All I cared about was ensuring that our weapons would do the job they were designed for. . . . I don't remember giving a moment's thought to the fact that we had just sketched out a plan to kill millions of people."