This is one thing I did in the military that I thought was really important and it's pretty interesting. Oddly enough, I can talk about this mission.

I volunteered to get all the "biological weapons" shots and go through the BW training. The enlisted guy who was in charge of the BW Russian interpreters was Pat. He had made a name for himself as being one of the government's foremost experts on this area and for being a guy who could get things done.

This area of the government was still kind of like the Wild West as far as bureaucracies went. It was a lot of "who you knew" that mattered and missions were being defined on the fly. This kind of regulationless atmosphere attracted those government employees who had an entrpreneurial mindset. Pat had established that military interpreters were who you wanted on these missions (as opposed to civilians) and if he thought we were good enough that was all some people needed to hear.

Anyway, Stepnogorsk is a small town in Kazakhstan. After the accident the Soviets had at Sverdlovsk, they decided to move their major anthrax factory there.

When the Soviets did a factory, they did it big and the BW facility was no exception. There were ten 20,000-liter fermenters in the main hall. Later in the story, I stuck my camera inside one of them and took the picture below (which I include to get your attention):



You can click the photo to see a full-size version.

If you can imagine, ten 20,000-liter fermenters can make a lot of anthrax pretty quickly. After Kazakhstan got their independence, they found themselves with this giant problem on their hands.

Fortunately, Kazakhstan did not want to be a member of the WMD club. They were happy to get rid of their highly-enriched uranium, and they didn't want to get on anyone's list of anthrax-producing countries. On the other hand, this was quite valuable equipment that could have legitimate civilian uses.

So the Kazakhstani contingent came to Washington, DC, to discuss things. Pat and I were their traveling drivers/interpreters/minders. They were a great bunch of people and we had a good time. Although, after trying to drive two vans in downtown DC on a tight schedule, I decided that the city's official slogan should be changed to "No Left Turn."



That picture shows Pat, Gennady (who was the head guy at the time), and me as they were leaving from the airport. They gave me the hat, a tyubetejka, as a farewell gift. If I'd have known how I looked in it I wouldn't have worn it around Dulles Airport.

The talks went ok, the Kazakhstanis weren't too wild about dismantling the place completely, but they were happy to keep talking. One of the things we decided was that we would send a team on a occupational-safety sampling mission to Stepnogorsk.

So you can probably imagine the look on my face when Pat explained to me what we were doing. "So, we're going to take samples to see if it's safe to work there?" The short answer was yes, the long answer was I had been innoculated against anthrax, they had cleaned the place out with paraformaldyhide a long time ago, and most importantly we were going to be working with some experts in the field of biological safety. The team leader was a woman whom I'd met during the DC trip, Barb. She was really sharp and made a good impression on me when she said that sometimes people took safety too far and made a given situation unsafe.

So, we assembled our team at Dulles Airport and took off to Stepnogorsk, via Frankfurt and Almaty. We had a day in Almaty, which I was surprised to say is one of the most beautiful cities in the world. In the morning we had meetings at the embassy and then we were able to go to the National History Museum.

I walked round the corner and almost bumped into Dan, who was stationed with me back in DC. He was there on a separate trip. It was a pretty remarkable coincidence to run into someone I knew on the other side of the world, so we took a photo to commemorate it.



From Almaty to Akmola (now Astana) it was a terrifying three-hour plane ride (the engines were vibrating on the X-axis, the wings on the Y-axis). From Akmola to Stepnogorsk it was a three-hour bus trip.

We got with the Kazakhstani team and the blueprints and mapped out a strategy. We were going to take 1,000 samples in triplicate. That is, 1,000 times, someone was going to take three medical applicators (Q-tip type things) and take a wipe sample of a surface. Each applicator would go into its own ziploc bag, which got a serial-numbered label and then we had to note where we took the sample. That's not a big deal until you start multiplying things by big numbers, like 1,000. Anyway, we were going to take one of each sample back to the US with us and they were keeping the other two.



That's the subteam of people I worked with. I can't remember names too well, but from the right it's Misha, Kevin (US), funny Russian lady, Bob (US), me, and I can't remember the names of the people to the left of me.

Misha was a kind and gentle man who I won't forget. One of the nicest people I met in that part of the world.

Funny Russian lady - I wish I could remember her name. She was a laugh riot and mercilessly flirted with Bob. She wanted to take him away for a romantic weekend. She was also notalgic for the former Soviet Union. As she put it, they had regular pay, a place to live, vacations, and now they had nothing. She was the only person I met who thought that way whom I liked.



Normally people give me that look when I tell this story, like they don't believe me. You can check me by picking up a copy of Judith Miller's book, Germs. There's a picture in it taken from this same rooftop, I think.



To give you an idea of how big that fermenter was you saw up top and to show yet another picture of me in a funny hat, this is me standing in front of the bottom. It was about 20 meters tall.



Here's us on a break outside one of the bunkers.



This is a picture of one of the dryers that they used to transfer the dried anthrax to the artillery rounds.



So we managed to get all the samples taken. It was time consuming, but we had a system so we didn't mess anything up.

It turned out that it was safe to work there and I understand that now everything has been dismantled.

A great discovery for those
like me interested in history
of USSR biological studies.

Thanks, Mike Whitener
Cedar Rapids IA

thanks for your great work on this and for sharing the photos and your story. it really sheds a good light on history.