The long, cloudy history of Moscow’s BW program

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Notes

1 Ken Alibek with Stephen Handelman, Biohazard: The Chilling True Story of the Largest Covert Biological Weapons Program in the World—Told from the Inside by the Man Who Ran It (New York: Random House, 1999); Igor V. Domaradskij and Wendy Orent, Biowarrior: Inside the Soviet/Russian Biological War Machine (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2003).

2 Lev Fedorov, Soviet Biological Weapons: History, Ecology, Politics, trans. Multilingual Division of the Translation Bureau, Chief of Defence Intelligence, Canadian Ministry of Defence (Moscow, 2005).

3 Milton Leitenberg and Raymond A. Zilinskas, with Jens H. Kuhn, The Soviet Biological Weapons Program: A History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012); Raymond Zilinskas, “The Soviet Biological Weapons Program and Its Legacy in Today’s Russia,” Center for the Study of Weapons of Mass Destruction Occasional Paper 11, National Defense University, July 2016, <https://ndupress.ndu.edu/Portals/68/Documents/occasional/cswmd/CSWMD_OccasionalPaper-11.pdf?ver=2016-07-18-144946-743>; Raymond A. Zilinskas and Philippe Mauger, Biosecurity in Putin’s Russia (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2018).

4 US Department of State, “Adherence to and Compliance with Arms Control, Nonproliferation, and Disarmament Agreements and Commitments,” April 2022, p. 38, <https://www.state.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/2022-Adherence-to-and-Compliance-with-Arms-Control-Nonproliferation-and-Disarmament-Agreements-and-Commitments-1.pdf>. Article 1 of the BWC prohibits the development, production, or retention of biological agents and toxins for other than prophylactic, protective, or other peaceful purposes as well as weapons, equipment or means of delivery designed to use such agents or toxins for hostile purposes or in armed conflict. See <https://front.un-arm.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/BWC-text-English-1.pdf>.

5 US Department of State, “Adherence,” p. 39.

6 US Department of State, p. 40.

7 David E. Hoffman, “Genetic Weapons, You Say?” Foreign Policy, March 27, 2012, <https://foreignpolicy.com/2012/03/27/genetic-weapons-you-say/>.

8 Useful references to Putin’s use of poisons in assassinations include Heidi Blake, From Russia with Blood: The Kremlin’s Ruthless Assassination Program and Putin’s Secret War on the West (New York: Little, Brown & Co., 2019) and Amy Knight, Orders to Kill: The Putin Regime and Political Murder (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2017). Also noteworthy are a journal article by Adrian Hänni and Miguel Grossmann, “Death to Traitors? The Pursuit of Intelligence Defectors from the Soviet Union to the Putin Era,” Intelligence and National Security, Vol. 35, No. 3 (2020), <https://doi.org/10.1080/02684527.2020.1728046>, and the section of the Bellingcat website dealing with the FSB’s and GRU’s use of poisons and toxins in assassinations, <https://www.bellingcat.com/?s=assassinations>.

9 The term “military BW” is used in this article to distinguish activities controlled by the Ministry of Defense or cover entities such as Biopreparat from BW activities undertaken by intelligence agencies.

10 A notable exception is Vadim J. Birstein, The Perversion of Knowledge (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2001).

11 Leitenberg and Zilinskas, The Soviet Biological Weapons Program, pp. 16­–50.

12 Michael Smith, Six: A History of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service—Part 1: Murder and Mayhem, 1909–1939 (London: Dialogue, 2010), pp. 294–298.

13 The National Archives of the UK (TNA), WO188/760 Bacteriological Warfare (Russia), HC4329, Russia: Bacteriological Warfare, dated October 1, 1924. This file is located at the UK National Archives at Kew. The catalogue entry for the file can be found at <https://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/r/C2129987>.

14 Dr. Nikolai Aleksandrovich Semashko was the people's commissar of public health from 1918 to 1930. In that role, he was responsible for establishing the public-health system in the Soviet Union.

15 TNA: WO 188/760 Bacteriological Warfare (Russia), CX9767, Soviet Russia: Preparation of Bacteriological Bombs in SSSR, dated January 22, 1925.

16 TNA: WO 188/760 Bacteriological Warfare (Russia), CX9764/L3700, Soviet Russia: Bacteriological Bombs, November 4, 1924.

17 Rimmington claims that both were arrested after the discovery of a British espionage ring in Leningrad, implying that British intelligence had a penetration source inside the Soviet laboratory and that reporting ended with the ring’s collapse. He cites a published history of British intelligence for this material. Yet Rimmington later footnotes Valentin Bojtzov and Erhard Geissler’s reference to a separate espionage ring describing the disruptive arrests of Soviet microbiologists as part of a German spy network run by Dr. Heinrich Zeiss. See Valentin Bojtzov and Erhard Geissler, “Military Biology in the USSR, 1920–1945,” in Erhard Geissler and John Ellis van Courtland Moon, eds., Biological and Toxin Weapons: Research, Development and Use from the Middle Ages to 1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 160–161.

18 Bojtzov and Geissler, “Military Biology in the USSR,” pp. 153–167.

19 TNA: WO 188/760 Bacteriological Warfare (Russia), CX9767, Bacteriological Bombs, dated December 1, 1924.

20 Zilinskas, “The Soviet Biological Weapons Program,” p. 5.

21 TNA: WO 188/760 Bacteriological Warfare (Russia), CX9767, Bacteriological Warfare, dated December 2, 1924.

22 Vladimir Nikolayevich Ipatiev (1867–1952) was a leading Russian chemist in prerevolutionary Russia and later went on to lead development of the Soviet chemical industry after the Bolshevik seizure of power. Ipatiev held senior positions in the Soviet scientific community until, fearing arrest, he and his wife fled the USSR for the United States.

23 TNA: WO 188/760 Bacteriological Warfare (Russia), CX9767, Bacteriological Warfare, dated December 2, 1924.

24 Fedorov, Soviet Biological Weapons, p. 19.

25 Dorian Blair and C. H. Dand, Russian Hazard: The Adventures of a British Secret Service Agent in Russia (London: R. Hale & Co., 1937).

26 Domaradskij and Orent, Biowarrior, p. 127.

27 Zilinskas, “The Soviet Biological Weapons Program and Its Legacy,” pp. 16–18.

28 Raymond L. Garthoff, “Polyakov’s Run,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Vol. 56, No. 5 (September 2000), pp. 37–40. See also Leitenberg and Zilinskas, “The Soviet Biological Weapons Program,” pp. 397–406. As described by Garthoff, a GRU general, Dmitri Polyakov, working as an FBI/CIA double agent (along with other disinformation sources), provided the Soviets with false information that the United States was undertaking a clandestine BW program despite President Nixon’s renunciation of BW and termination of the US offensive BW program. Coincidentally with the receipt of the disinformation, the Soviet leadership in January 1973 intensified Soviet work on BW.

29 Yuri Anatolievich Ovchinnikov (1934–1988) was a prominent biochemist, member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, and a candidate member of the CPSU Central Committee. Rimmington claims that Ovchinnikov was “the most brilliant Soviet scientist of his generation with regard to the newly emerging genetic engineering technology” (p. 226).

30 David Wise, Cassidy's Run: The Secret Spy War Over Nerve Gas (New York: Random House, 2000).

31 Milton Leitenberg, “The Biological Weapons Program of the Soviet Union,” prepared statement, “Assessing the Biological Weapons Threat: Russia and Beyond; Hearing before the Subcommittee on Europe, Eurasia, and Emerging Threats of the Committee on Foreign Affairs, House of Representatives,” 113th Cong., 2nd sess., May 7, 2014, pp. 41–44, <https://docs.house.gov/meetings/FA/FA14/20140507/102195/HHRG-113-FA14-Transcript-20140507.pdf >.

32 Zilinskas, “The Soviet Biological Weapons Program and Its Legacy,” p. 2.

33 Leitenberg and Zilinskas, “The Soviet Biological Weapons Program,” pp. 153–164.

34 Alibek, Biohazard, pp. 140–145.

35 Leitenberg and Zilinksas, “The Soviet Biological Weapons Program,” p. 9.

36 I.V. Domaradskij and W. Orent, “Achievements of the Soviet Biological Weapons Programme and Implications for the Future,” Revue Scientifique et Technique de l’Office International des Epizooties, Vol 25, No.1 (2006), pp. 157–158; Kenneth Alibek, “The Soviet Union's Anti-Agricultural Biological Weapons,” in Thomas W. Frazier and Drew C. Richardson, eds., Food and Agricultural Security: Guarding Against Natural Threats and Terrorist Attacks Affecting Health, National Food Supplies, and Agricultural Economics (proceedings of an international conference in Washington DC, September 28–30, 1998), Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, Vol. 894 (1999), pp. 18–19, <https://nyaspubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/toc/17496632/894/1>.

37 Paul Maddrell, “Operation Matchbox and the Scientific Containment of the USSR,” in Peter Jackson and Jennifer Siegel, eds., Intelligence and Statecraft: The Use and Limits of Intelligence in International Society (Westport, CO: Praeger, 2005), p. 194.

38 Maddrell, “Operation Matchbox.”

39 Erhard Geissler, “Biological Warfare Activities in Germany,” in Geissler and van Courtland Moon, Biological and Toxin Weapons, pp. 99–100.

40 Klaus Reinhardt, “The Entomological Institute of the Waffen-SS: Evidence for Offensive Biological Warfare Research in the Third Reich,” Endeavour, Vol. 37, No. 4 (December 2013), pp. 220–227. See also Geissler, “Biological Warfare Activities in Germany,” p. 124.

41 Geissler, pp. 109–110.

42 Geissler, pp. 99–102.

43 Leitenberg and Zilinskas, The Soviet Biological Weapons Program, p. 699.

44 Leitenberg and Zilinskas, p. 3.

45 Leitenberg and Zilinskas, p. 66.

46 Leitenberg and Zilinskas, pp. 58–62.