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his is another book about KGB spying, from a former member
of Department 12 of the First Chief Directorate of the KGB (now known as the
Foreign Intelligence Service or FIS). The author, Alexander Kouzminov, claims
to have been a high-level officer who left the KGB in 1992, eventually moved
to the UK, and decided to get rich by writing a book similar to the best-seller
Biohazard by Ken Alibek.
Unfortunately, unlike Ken Alibek or Vasily Mitrokhin, Kouzminov reveals very little that is not already well-known about the KGB. At times, he seems deliberately vague about his duties, leading one to suspect that he could actually have been the KGB's janitor, and not a high level spymaster as he claims. Indeed, the story of a janitor might have been more interesting and more useful--which doors are opened by the same key, for instance, or which toilets were used to dispose of excess biological material, where the KGB buys its pencils, or what are the peccadilloes of the KGB bigshots.
As for the biological weapons themselves, what little information he gives is full of errors, distortions, and inaccuracies. To give one example, on page 153 Kouzminov discusses the outbreak of a disease on an Indian reservation in the American state of New Mexico in 1993. He fails to mention the name of the disease (hantavirus pulmonary syndrome or HPS), states inaccurately that only Navajo Indians were affected, and suggests that it might have been some sort of genetic weapon. Anyone familiar with this outbreak would know that this claim is ridiculous. HPS is caused by the Sin Nombre virus, which is a member of the well-known genus hantavirus. Contrary to Kouzminov's claim, HPS is not unique to Indians, but has been found in at least 30 states among people of a variety of ethnic backgrounds. Its source was identified by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) as a known pathogen carried by an unusually large population of deer mice. At great expense, the US government found and eliminated the source of the disease. Of course, to wacked-out conspiracy theorists, and those who pander to them, such facts only further confirm their suspicions.
The author's grasp of basic scientific information also seems to be extremely weak. I find it difficult to believe this guy has a Ph.D. in biophysics as he claims (in the book, he claims to have written a Ph.D. thesis on neuropeptides). As for his spycraft, a master Soviet spy specializing in biological weapons would surely know that the correct acronym for their chief adversary, the US Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases, is USAMRIID (not "USARMIID" as it is repeatedly spelled in the book).
Perhaps Kouzminov is feigning ignorance as a form of disinformation. By convincing us that the KGB was hopelessly incompetent, he could be trying to convince the world that Mother Russia is not a threat. More likely, though, Kouzminov just doesn't care about the facts: USAMRIID, Kouzminov disingenuously says, "has projects dealing with the cloning and expression of genes which code the synthesis of bacteria that cause anthrax." While this is undoubtedly true, sort of, it is simply more pandering to conspiracy theorists. All modern biology requires the use of cloned substances, which avoids the need to grow the deadly bacteria themselves. There is nothing sinister in cloning anthrax toxins. If the author were a real biologist, he would know this. He would also know that the phrase "code the synthesis of bacteria" is gibberish. His other information on anthrax is similarly ill-informed. His undocumented claims about Israel supposedly trying to create genetic weapons seem to be nothing more than wild speculation with more than a hint of anti-Israeli and perhaps antisemitic sentiment thrown in.
Kouzminov also dismisses the American concerns about biotech espionage, insinuating that they are up to no good. "It seems they have something to hide in their laboratories," he concludes. Kouzminov is supposed to be a master spy. Does his product really consist entirely of vague conspiracy theories copied from The Guardian? Or is he just indulging in petty politics?
Given the variety of inaccurate information in the book, one must also question the accuracy of the information he provides about Department 12. If the information in this book is representative of what the KGB knew about America, it would explain much about why their country was so far behind the West. Kouzminov says that even today the Russians are spying on the West, and the UK and USA in particular. But he also says that Russia is far ahead of the West in its biological weapons technology. If so, and given the fact that under President Nixon the USA abandoned its biological weapons program in 1969, and led the world in signing--and observing--the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention (unlike the Soviet Union), just what are all these spies expecting to learn?
Kouzminov concludes by saying that information from all gene-splicing experiments must be kept secret and be accessible only to responsible researchers whose experiments are controlled by their governments. Even our home-grown environmentalist nuts like Jeremy Rifkin abandoned this viewpoint years ago. It just shows how far Russia still has to go in becoming a free society. It would seem that you can take the man out of the totalitarian state, but you can't take the totalitarian state out of the man.
