INDEPTH: BIOLOGICAL WEAPONS
Red Lies: Biological warfare and the Soviet Union
CBC News Online | February 18, 2004
It was a horrible accident -- for the people who died and for what it
revealed. It would show the world the effects of anthrax on
a civilian population, and it would expose the existence of
a massive biological weapons program in the former Soviet
Union; a program, some fear, exists to this day.
"People began to die around the fifth or sixth of April," says Dr. Marguerita Ilyenko, a hospital administrator in Sverdlovsk, Russia.
"Before that, the doctors had noticed that animals were
dying, sheep, pigs. Then the people began dying. I
get in my office in the morning, and Rosa Gazeeva, who still
works as a doctor in our hospital, tells me 'Five people
died on me overnight.' So I say 'are you out of your mind?'
"I threw down my purse, rushed upstairs. It really was a
nightmare. Ambulances were constantly bringing in patients.
Some were still alive, others already dead."
 In Sverdlovsk
(now called Yekaterinburg), Russia, the faces of the
dead on dozens of tombstones bear silent witness to one of the Soviet Union's
darkest secrets: all mark one point in time;
early April, 1979.
For years, there was very little information to
explain why or how the people died. The cause of death was
explained away with lies to conceal one of the most
frightening developments of the Cold War.
While the world worried about the nuclear threat, the Soviet Union was
secretly amassing the largest biological weapons program in
global history. It involved thousands of
scientists, who spent two decades turning deadly diseases
like anthrax and smallpox into weapons of mass destruction.
There are those who fear that work continues inside Russia
today.
Sverdlovsk has a long association
with death. Czar Nicholas II and his
family were executed in Sverdlovsk. Today, if its one million citizens were
asked to choose a sister city, it might well be
Hiroshima.
In April, 1979, a horrifying accident happened at a secretive military
base called "Compound 19." Behind imposing walls, a
deadly production line turned out tonnes of anthrax powder
for the Soviet Union's biological arsenal. One April
morning, a small amount of the dust was accidentally
released through the ventilation system. The invisible plume
was blown over a working class neighbourhood and nearby
ceramics factory.
Ivan Vershinin worked at that factory. His
wife remembers the last time she saw him alive.
"By the time I got home, the ambulance was already
there. The doctors said 'put some clothes on him right away
or he'll die at home.' I said good-bye to him and the
ambulance took him away and that was it.'
The sick began pouring into hospitals all around
Sverdlovsk. Some were vomiting blood, many complained their
lungs were on fire. Most died within 48 hours, as
doctors frantically searched for the cause.
Dr. Marguerita
Ilyenko was the director at one hospital.
"I walked up to one of the patients," she remembers. "I can still
see him before my eyes, and he is talking to me, he is still
alive. But right there in front of me, I can already see
death spots forming all over his body! On his neck, on his
back, doctors know what this means. Then he began to vomit
and died. It was a very quick death."
Tamara Markova arrived at another hospital,
searching for her husband.
"I got there, but he wasn't on the list, so they went to look
for him in the morgue and they found him," Markova says. "I forgot to tell
you -- when they were conducting the autopsy, the doctor
said his lungs looked like jelly. They were completely
destroyed."
 The city's chief pathologist, Dr. Faina
Abramova, was urgently called back to work, late at night,
to observe one of the very first autopsies. She remembers one victim's brain membrane was covered with
something that looked like a hat.
 "It was red, so there was
hemorrhage," she says. "So we were wondering what could cause this? I
remembered that when I was a student, we learned that
anthrax causes lesions in the brain. When this happens, the
lesions resemble a cardinal's hat. But where could this
anthrax have come from?
" They were trying to
convince us that the illness came from meat. They said that
somewhere outside the city, an entire herd of cattle had
fallen ill and that the anthrax had come from them."
It was reasonable to suggest it had come from a
farm around Sverdlovsk. Anthrax is a spore that grows
naturally in pastures. Animals occasionally eat it when they
graze, and people can pick up the infection if their skin
comes in contact with diseased animals. It is not usually
fatal in humans. There was another important difference.
This anthrax had been inhaled, and the Soviet military
knew it.
Compound 19
Behind the walls of Compound 19, the Soviet
army was secretly coping with its own casualties. In the
aftermath of the accident, the Soviets would lie to their
own people in order to conceal what they were doing from the
outside world.
Long before this accident, the Soviet Union and
many other countries had signed the Biological Weapons
Convention. It was a promise to end decades of germ warfare
research by both sides in the Cold War. The Soviets had
eagerly helped write the 1972 treaty. But in the process,
they realized just how far their own research lagged behind
the West.
So at the very moment they were publicly
signing the treaty, they were secretly laying plans to break
it.
Within one year of the signing, senior Soviet
scientists, like Dr. Igor Domaradskizh, received marching
orders from the Kremlin to begin covertly advancing the
biological arms race.
The Kremlin established a biological warfare research program called Biopreparat.
 "I think one of the reasons was that it was assumed that due to
the great achievements in the area of molecular biology and
genetics in England, the States, probably Canada, that they
had likely managed to be ahead of where we were at that
stage," Domaradskizh says. "Somehow we had to make up the gap that developed
between us and those countries. And it was precisely because
the convention had already been signed by them, that all
this research was happening."
 The headquarters of Biopreparat was established down a tree-shrouded laneway not far from
the Kremlin. From behind its walls, officials coordinated
the efforts of 47 different research facilities spread
across the Soviet Union. Thousands of scientists took deadly
germs like anthrax, smallpox and plague, and studied ways of
releasing them into the air as weapons; perfected formulas
were turned over to military facilities for mass production
and stockpiling by the tonne.
 As the program continued to grow and seek out new scientific talent, one promising young
doctor was recruited right out of medical school. At the
time of the anthrax accident in Sverdlovsk, Ken Alibek was
just beginning his career at Biopreparat.
"I was, what you say,
hardliner," Alibek says. "I was a Communist, and you know I was a person
who believed this weapon was a part of the Soviet Union's
arsenal."
Alibek says he never stopped to wonder why doctors trained to cure diseases were now
using them to make weapons of mass destruction.
"Nobody considered people's life something precious.
You know for us, we didn't calculate individuals -- we
calculated millions and millions. You know when you
calculate millions, it's statistics; it's not tragedy."
So for a military that calculated deaths in
the millions, the accident was but a blip on the learning
curve. The KGB quickly descended on the city's hospitals to
confiscate all medical records and alter death certificates.
To ensure the final accident report cited food poisoning
as the cause, Moscow despatched a more compliant pathologist
named Dr. Nikiforov.
 When Nikiforov's paper
came out, it was a complete surprise -- not only for us, but
also for everyone," says Sverdlovsk pathologist Dr. Abramova. "All of the doctors who worked on
this talked to each other. After the autopsy, all
thought that this was a respiratory form of anthrax
poisoning. In other words, it occurred through breathing.
But this was just talk and it was quickly being muffled.
Why? We were being advised to talk as little as possible."
A massive clean-up operation ordered
to eliminate any trace of the military's anthrax.
The city of Sverdlovsk was placed under a dusk to dawn
curfew.
Teams of men wearing decontamination
suits began making unexplained visits to the homes of those
who died.
"An ambulance arrived and they sprayed everything
in our house," Markova says. "They took away the linen and took away
everything. They even sprayed our dishes."
Officials decided all of the dead would be
buried together in a single section of the city's cemetery.
Hospitals were ordered to look after many of the burials
because families were too frightened to retrieve the bodies
of loved ones.
"We were given instructions on how the corpse
was to be wrapped in polyethylene sheets with a chlorine
solution inside," Ilyenko says. " Teams were formed around the city, mostly
composed of police officers, but they wouldn't get close to
the coffins. They were also afraid, and stood there smiling.
They wouldn't carry the corpses, so I had to get our own
guys, carpenters, plumbers. I told them 'guys, I'll give you
a bottle of alcohol each. Just help us.' That's how,
using our own cars, we buried these people."
Some of the only records of the accident that
still exist are documents Dr. Ilyenko managed to hide
in a safe. They list the names of the those who died in
civilian hospitals, almost 70 people in all. She says
that number doesn't include the many soldiers who would have
died.
The Defectors
By the time of the 1979 accident, Compound 19 was
already the target of intense interest by Western
intelligence agencies. In London, suspicion turned to alarm
with news of the mysterious deaths in Sverdlovsk. Dr.
Christopher Davis was a biological weapons expert with
British intelligence.
"The professionals in the field were convinced
that there was a large and growing program," Davis says. "What that
program contained, where it was headed, just how complex it
was, is another issue. It's difficult to accuse large
buildings of bad things, you know. You've got to have
someone inside them walk out and say we're doing x, y and z.
And then you can say, uh huh, well we thought so."
It would take ten long years, but that's exactly
what would happen, with the defection of Vladimir Pasechnik
in 1989. Pasechnik was the administrative head of
Biopreparat when he was whisked out of Moscow by British
agents.
"I came to the conclusion that one possible way to stop the
program will be bring the news about it to the Western side," Pasechnik says.
"He confirmed how much of a cover-up we'd been
subject to," Davis says. "I think surprise is not quite the word; it's a sort
of gulp feeling, and you think "oh dear." You've got a
very strong impression of a deliberate planned program.
We're talking, you know 25 to 30,000 people working on the
program; uh maybe more in different capacities over a large
number of years.
It is sometimes difficult to
convey the sheer magnitude and sophistication of it. And
it's easily said oh, they had a big program. It wasn't just
big, it was massive."
By the time Vladimir Pasechnik defected to
Britain, Ken Alibek had risen to become Biopreparat's chief
scientist. During a scientific exchange visit to the
United States, Alibek came to the unsettling conclusion the
U.S. was not engaging in similar biological weapons
research. With the CIA's assistance, he defected to the
West, bringing with him firsthand scientific knowledge of
the Soviet's secret program.
 "They were shocked; shocked because you know they
couldn't imagine that the Soviet Union had such an enormous,
very powerful and sophisticated offensive program," Alibek says.
In the years since the Sverdlovsk accident,
Alibek and a research team had taken the Soviet military's
anthrax and made it even more deadly. He developed a process
to take ground up anthrax spores and coat each particle in
plastic and resin. It kept the anthrax aloft four times
longer, increasing its ability to infect people.
"The main idea was just to make it more efficient.
Just, for example, using a pretty small amount of this
weapon to cover as much as possible territory, populated
territory, [ to kill as many people as possible.]" Alibek says.
 Over remote parts of the Soviet Union, Alibek's
new anthrax and other biological weapons were tested on
animals. The various substances were later placed inside
cantaloupe shaped balls that could be packed inside the
warheads of intercontinental ballistic missiles.
Richard Preston , author of books and articles on the effects of biological warfare, "It appears the Soviets had enough biowarhead material on
hand to be able to knock out the top 100 cities in the
United States."
 "It appears that the Soviet government had
developed intercontinental missile systems that were
targeted on North America. They were loaded with such
things as smallpox, black death, anthrax and the Marburg
virus, which is a close cousin of ebola, and causes this
massive hemorrhagic bleeding in human victims," Preston says.
Ken Alibek is now a consultant to the Pentagon.
He has warned a Congressional committee the U.S. still has much to fear from
the Russians.
"Until the Russians have provided a complete
accounting of the biological weapons activities, it's very
difficult to believe that they have ceased all these
activities," Alibek says.
His words fell on receptive ears. The Soviet
Union may have collapsed and Russian officials may insist all
biological weapons research has stopped, but there are fears
the Russian military may still be developing such weapons on
its own.
"I see a lot of very very suspicious signs," Alibek says. "We need
to understand we don't have to believe in everything that
Russia says. There is a Russian expression: believe, but
check. So we need to check; we need to be sure that nothing
is going on."
It's one of the ironies of this massive
biological weapons program that its only victims, so far,
have been the Russian people themselves -- offering the
world a rare human example of the horribly real effects of
biological weapons.
"What we know about the effect of nuclear weapons
is largely from studying what happened to human populations
in Hiroshima and Nagasaki," Preston says. "What we know about anthrax is
largely what we can tell from what happened in Sverdlovsk."
In an overgrown corner of the Sverdlovsk
cemetery, the forgotten shallow graves of at least some of
the soldiers who died inside Compound 19. Weather and time
have worn away the only bare reminder of their existence.
What the world cannot yet establish is whether the program
they worked for has really ended -- or continues, buried and
hidden, like its victims.
The Work Continues
In the spring of 1990, a limousine carrying
British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was on its way to
the Kremlin. A defector named Vladimir Pasechnik had just
told British intelligence the Soviets have a top secret
biological weapons program. Thatcher was ready to confront
President Mikhail Gorbachev. Publicly their meeting was a
cordial one. Privately, Thatcher accused Gorbachev of
lying to the West, while secretly violating an international
treaty. Gorbachev refused to confirm anything. It was just
another in a long series of red lies.
Less than two years later, the Soviet Union would
collapse, and with it, the elaborately constructed lies
surrounding its secret biological weapons program.
Boris Yeltsin, then President, would later admit his country had manufactured
arsenals of deadly germs and diseases in violation of the
Biological Weapons Convention. Yeltsin later tried to
reassure the international community that the program was over,
once and for all. Western governments have spent the better
part of this decade trying to verify that claim, and they
remain deeply suspicious that some kind of biological
weapons program continues inside Russia today.
The Kremlin's initial attempts to reassure the
West began with an offer to inspect its biological research
labs. A top secret facility in Obolensk, south of Moscow,
was one of the labs that had long been the target of Western
suspicion. Inside these walls, scientists spent two decades
turning deadly diseases like anthrax, smallpox and plague
into airborne weapons. It was all part of a biological
weapons empire known as Biopreparat, which, at its height,
employed roughly 35,000 people. No one from the West had
ever set foot here, but now with inspectors on their way,
the Soviets had some cleaning up to do before company
arrived.
Dr. Igor Domaradskizh was a senior scientist at
the Obolensk facility when his boss, Vladimir Paseshnik,
defected to Great Britain. He recalls how the Soviet
government temporarily suspended their research work.
 "So everything we were doing was
taken under more stringent control," Domaradskizh says. "Gradually they would
stop all our projects, because international inspection
teams would come, one after another, to Obolensk and
Koltsovo. We were forced to show these buildings and
laboratories. So Paseshnik's departure put a halt to our
project; officially, in any case."
The West was not easily misled. Former
British intelligence agent Christopher Davis inspected the
Obolensk facility. He still laughs at the excuse offered to
explain away one suspicious test chamber.
 "We
were fully aware that they had undertaken explosive
experimental work there. In other words, explosive
dissemination of agents in the closed chamber," Davis says. "Anyway, so I
said what are these marks here? You know, they look like
explosion marks and what have you, damage etcetera. They
said 'Oh no. No, that was due to one of the workmen when he
put the door on, um it wouldn't go on properly, so he hit it
with a hammer.' And I mean some of the things that came out.
I mean if it were -- if the situation were not such, you'd
have burst out laughing. I mean I think we did chuckle
to ourselves. It was so absurd."
Absurd, yes. But it was a beginning. To
eliminate Soviet suspicions of a secret U.S. biological
weapons program, Washington invited Soviet scientists to
inspect American military labs. That inspection team
included Ken Alibek, the Soviet program's chief scientist
and the man credited with inventing the deadliest form of
anthrax ever known. Alibek had spent his entire career
believing he was in a deadly biological arms race with the
U.S.
"We thought the
United States at least had such a program," Alibek says. "As a response
to the United States program, we had to develop our own
program; not just a simple program, a more powerful, more
intensive, more sophisticated program."
 The Soviets were brought to Fort Detrick
Maryland, the headquarters of the U.S. military's biological
research program. The Soviets had always suspected that this
was where the U.S. secretly researched its own biological
weapons, and once upon a time, those suspicions were
correct. Back in the 1950's, in the earliest days of the
Cold War, the U.S. not only trained its troops against
biological attack, it had its own biological weapons
program. Anthrax was the most popular weapon with the U.S.
and its allies because it was a robust, long-lasting
bacteria that killed very efficiently. The U.S., Canada and
Great Britain conducted joint experiments, using a variety
of animals, including rabbits, who were injected with
anthrax to test its lethal power.
Those allied programs all came to an end in
the early 1970's with the signing of the Biological Weapons
Convention. So by the time Ken Alibek arrived at Fort
Detrick, it housed only a handful of scientists conducting
peaceful vaccine research. Feeling deceived by his own
government, Alibek defected to the United States, providing
the CIA with its most complete picture yet of the Soviet
secret program.
Times were changing. The new Russian
government was trying to show the West that deadly research,
at labs like this one in Saratov, had come to an end. It
allowed more inspections, and Biopreparat began laying off
its highly skilled scientists. The U.S. realized those who
remained would need to be converted to peaceful work. It
came up with some money for joint vaccine research, there
was even talk of exchange programs. But just as the West was
finally beginning to trust Russia's intentions, a bombshell;
it came from the labs at Obolensk, a facility the West
thought it no longer had to worry about. While scientists
here were researching improvements to Russia's anthrax
vaccine, they created a deadly invention.
 In the December 1997, issue of the medical journal Vaccine, the Obolensk
scientists claimed to have 'inadvertently' developed a new
genetically altered strain of anthrax. Its most frightening
attribute, this new strain overpowers Russia's anthrax
vaccine, rendering it completely useless. North America's
vaccine is different. But if this new anthrax defeats one
vaccine, there's a fear it could defeat the other. At Fort
Detrick, the study set off alarm bells.
"The idea of genetically engineered weapons has been
of concern for some time," says : Dr. Arthur Friedlander, the U.S. military's top
anthrax expert. He is concerned by the implications of Russia's
newly developed anthrax.
'It raises a concern that such an organism
could be resistant to the U.S. vaccine if someone were to
weaponize it," he says.
Fort Detrick's chief scientist, Dr. Peter
Jahrling, has trouble assessing Russia's scientific motives.
"That's the problem with all these biotechnology questions, is that
for every offensive use, you can also cite a defensive use. It's possible to mount an offensive program under the
cover of a defensive one."
If American scientists have difficulty
assessing Russia's intent, Ken Alibek does not. The Russian
scientists conducting this research were once his underlings
at Biopreparat.
 "I know them perfectly, all of them experts in
developing biological weapons," Alibek says. "When they published an
article regarding development of a new strain that would
overcome immune system after vaccination with existing
vaccines. For me the purpose of that work is clear…to develop a new agent to be used in biological weapons."
Igor Domaradskizh knows the scientists still at Bioprearat
and questions their motivation. The current lead scientist was
once Domadardskizh's protogee. "I don't know what can be
done with anthrax so as to make the vaccine ineffective,
change its genetic structure?" he says. "Maybe that's what he did, but
what for? Then his work was of a military character. Such
work isn't needed for peaceful goals."
After scientists at Biopreparat created their new "super
anthrax," the U.S. government asked for a sample to test it
against the North American vaccine. The Russians turned the
request down flat.
By 2001, the U.S. had still not received a sample. But on September 4, The New York Times reported
that the U.S. government was launching its own program to create
genetically modified anthrax, at a laboratory of the Battelle Memorial Institute
in West Jefferson, Ohio.
Obolensk
The Obolensk facility is concealed within miles
of pine forest. "Corpus One" is the facility's
biocontainment lab centrepiece. All around it are the other
rundown buildings where Biopreparat scientists spent two
decades secretly developing biological weapons. It was
inside these labs that scientists recently created a new
genetically altered strain of anthrax that may defeat the
world's vaccines; renewing suspicions that Russia
continues to develop biological weapons. When we were there in 1998, our requests
for interviews were rebuffed at every turn.
For a
facility with nothing to hide, our arrival at Corpus One
provoked a tense confrontation.
"Is it possible for us to speak with anyone from
the institute about the research that goes on here?" reporter Michael Mcauliffe asked.
 It began with polite denials from the facility's
chief of security. Minutes later the police arrived, followed
by agents of the First Security Bureau, the former KGB. Then armed
soldiers emerged and surrounded our van, their presence at a
peaceful civilian research facility was never explained. We
were taken into custody, questioned for several hours and
our cameras were seized. We managed to conceal our tapes.
"Of course it leaves us in highly suspicious," Christopher Davis says. "There
was a point, in perhaps the early part of 1992, where we
really thought we were going to move ahead into a new
relationship, but it slid back, and retrenched attitudes in
Russia. If you ask me the straight question, which I think
is what you're leading to, do you think the program
continues today? My answer would have to be yes."
Author Richard Preston has written several best-
selling books about biological weapons, and he says
Biopreparat's labs are by no means the only concern.
 "There is the big question about the closed military labs in
Russia; the ones that the television people will never see," Preston says.
Some of them are located near the city of Kirov, not far
from Moscow. These are biological facilities that are
absolutely controlled by the Russian military. Is genetic
engineering taking place there with scientists who are not
in contact with the West? Nobody knows."
More questions
Compound 19 is on the outskirts of Sverdlovsk, now called
Ekaterinburg. It is one of the many secretive military
complexes where deadly biological weapons were actually
produced. For years, this facility churned out tonnes of
lethal anthrax powder for the Soviet's secret arsenal.
Unlike Russia's scientific facilities, military
facilities like Compound 19 remain top secret and
closed to inspectors. No one from the West has ever been
through the iron gates, so no one knows whether the
production lines are still active or whether the underground
vaults still contain stockpiles of biological agents.
 Russia's most senior generals know the answer,
and one of them has publicly suggested the military is
maintaining some form of biological program. Alexandre Lebed
is now a politician, but until recently, he was a prominent
Russian general who rose to become Boris Yeltsin's security
council chief. Answering a question once about the state of
Russia's nuclear and biological arsenals, Lebed agreed "they
are the weapons of wimps, but we have to preserve it; we
have nothing else."
James Woolsey, former CIA director says "Russia is a chaotic
place. The military often gets involved in things that they
don't fully share with their political leadership." He finds the
Russian military's continuing secrecy alarming.
"There has not been a long tradition of anything
approaching civilian control of the military in Russia," Woolsey says.
"The Russian military, historically, has not really been involved
in coups and the like, but it has had a great deal of
autonomy. It's difficult to assess how much of the
information about what was going on with the offensive
biological work had filtered up to someone like President
Yeltsin or his immediate advisors. One just doesn't know."
Dr. Peter Jahrling knows that at least some of
Biopreparat's former scientists are now working for the
Russian military.
 "Biopreparat did some cutting edge research,' Jahrling says. "They
clearly had great capability and they continue to have great
capability. It's very clear that some of that capability
was transferred over to the ministry of defense, which was
the side of the house that developed these weapons
for offensive use and the delivery systems and what have
you. That whole side of the house is a black box. We still
have not penetrated that and I don't know that we ever will."
The prospect of Russia's military launching a
biological attack on the Western world seems extremely
remote these days. With the country's deepening economic
crisis, Russia's leaders clearly have more important things
on their mind than world domination.
Poverty poses its
own threat. There are reports that some of Biopreparat's
scientists haven't been paid for six months, and thousands
more have been laid off, with no hope of finding jobs
elsewhere.
"Certainly with the decline of Biopreparat, a lot
of very capable scientists lost their jobs and some have
disappeared off the screen," Jahrling says. "Where they might have surfaced
and what they might be doing, is a real concern.
In the nuclear arena some of their nuclear
scientists have surfaced in rogue states, and there's no
reason to believe that similar things have not occurred with
their with their former offensive biological warfare
scientists."
 That potential migration is worrying Western
militaries, particularly in places like the Persian Gulf.
Earlier this year, Canada despatched HMCS Toronto and
other military personnel to the Gulf, as the world prepared
for another showdown with Saddam Hussein. Concern over his
biological weapons program prompted anthrax vaccinations for
all Canadian military personnel. If Russia has in fact
developed a new anthrax strain capable of defeating that
vaccine, how long before Saddam buys either the formula or
the scientists necessary to make it a weapon?
"We would be in bad shape if we were faced with a
genetically altered strain that we had not yet been able to
vaccinate our military personnel against," Woolsey says.
It hasn't happened yet, but former CIA Chief
James Woolsey knows it's not out of the question.
"We're not really talking rocket science here. The
information, in and of itself, might be enough for someone
who had reasonably capable lab techniques and so forth.
An experienced individual would be even more troubling, if
he or she went to work with some Mideast government, say
that was supporting terrorism."
The spectre of thousands of either unemployed or
unpaid Biopreparat scientists selling their know-how to
rogue states sends chills through the Western intelligence
community. Even though the U.S. doesn't yet fully trust the
Russians, it has recently taken the controversial step of
giving Biopreparat even more money, to keep at least some
of those scientists employed in peaceful research. It is
only two million dollars.
 Author Richard Preston fears it is
too little too late. "Take one of the biggest virus laboratories in
Russia, Vector, which is in Siberia," he says. "At its height, it was
clearly a biowarfare lab; at its height, there must have
been 4,500 scientists and technicians working there. Today,
maybe a thousand. Where have the other thousands gone?
Some have gone into other jobs in the Russian economy. But
many of them have not been employed, and it's obvious that
many of them have left Russia."
"When scientists in Russia don't have an opportunity
to feed their children, when they sell flowers on Moscow
streets, when they don't have an opportunity to buy
sometimes food for their families, of course if they've got
an opportunity to sell such results, nothing would stop
them," Alibek says.
^TOP
|
|
 |
 MENU |
|
|
| EXTERNAL LINKS: |
|
|
| MORE: |
|
|
|
CBC does not endorse and is not responsible for the content of external sites. Links will open in new window.
