Finally, the KGB confiscated all medical records associated with the outbreak. That was the end of his explanation, but an authoritative report published later in the U.S. journal Science described the illnesses in Russia's fourth-largest city as the biggest documented outbreak of a disease known as human inhalation anthrax. And the source was not meat, the report concluded, but anthrax spores that had escaped into the air from a military microbiology laboratory known locally as Compound 19. Today Compound 19, a classified and closely guarded town of 7,000 people with its own school, police station, post office, apartment blocks and shops, is still functioning. In fact, it may actually be getting a face-lift.
Security is tight.
Its 90 hectares are surrounded by a barbed wire-topped concrete fence 2.5 m high. Credentials must be shown at three checkpoints from the front gate through the residential area and into the work zones. Guards with rotweilers patrol the site. But many specialists, both Western and Russian, suspect that the Russian military is quietly continuing B.W. work in contravention of an international treaty banning the production or stockpiling of such weapons. So does retired Lieut.