Newspaper Article

The Geniuses of Germ Warfare

Laurie Garrett. Laurie Garrett, author of "The Coming Plague," won a 1996 Pulitzer Prize for her Newsday coverage of Zaire's Ebola epidemic

1999

Overview

BIOHAZARD: The Chilling True Story of the Largest Covert Biological Weapons Program in the World - Told From Inside by the Man Who Ran It, by Ken Alibek with Stephen Handelman. Random House, 319 pp., $24.95. The VECTOR death factory was nearly deserted when I visited. Siberia's wind blew mercilessly against its untended buildings, which had greeted the subzero challenge by cracking, shedding, shattering and peeling, leaving gaping holes from which sprung weeds or freed steel cables and rebar. Russian soldiers lazed about, barely acknowledging the buildings' test tubes full of enough lethality to obliterate humanity. I felt a shudder of goosebumps as our driver passed through the security gates of VECTOR and couldn't help wonder why the biological warfare scientists of the former Soviet Union's premier virus laboratory had agreed to meet with an American journalist, Romanian photographer and Russian physician-translater. The reader will experience the same sensation from every page of Ken Alibek's \"Biohazard.\" Based on hours of interviews conducted with the Kazakhstani scientist formerly known as Kantijan Alibekov, Time magazine columnist Stephen Handelman has skillfully crafted an autobiographical tour of America's worst-case nightmare: a massive, highly capable biological warfare program in enemy hands. From 1975 until his defection to the U.S. in 1992, Alibek worked inside Biopreparat, the USSR's 60,000-scientist-and-technican-strong biological warfare program. He was the program's deputy director from 1988 to 1992, privy to Kremlin decisions under both Gorbachev and Yeltsin.

• Publisher: Newsday LLC