Ken Alibek

They're plowing huge amounts of money into new facilities, uh, at Zagorsk, which I didn't mention yet, but Zagorsk is a site outside of, outside of Moscow, I've been there, uh, where th- it's a military research site, and that's where they were doing a lot of their smallpox work.

And we have-- And I don't know if I necessarily believe some of these allegations from defectors, but we do have defectors, including, uh, Ken Alibek, who is the number two in their-- in, in that civilian program that I mentioned, Biopreparat.

Uh, he was the second in command.

Uh, he defected, and he had a lot to say about, uh, the dangerous stuff that the Russians were doing, uh, including in the, uh, he claimed the, uh, merger of smallpox with Ebola virus.

It's not the plague bacteria as we thought.

It's not the plague bacteria from that institute, and it's even not the enhanced plague from that institute because people should know it's not that surprising if we heard, "Oh, back to Soviet Union period, um, later you guys have had some, uh, half-made or totally success new version of plague bacteria with some kind of, uh, drug resistance characters." 'Cause we have the defector who, uh, was in charge of the whole Soviet Union bioweapon project named Ken Alibek.

He was in the US since 1990s, and he wrote the books, and he came to the Congress for hearings.

He told people that Soviet Union definitely tried to develop such bioweapon.

The Siberian Plague Institute wasn't opened for inspection or transparency.

So whether it holds semi-finished plague research or even classified finished products, it's hard to say.

What we know now about Soviet bioweapon secrets mostly come from limited opening of major bioweapon labs and the revelations from defected Soviet bioweapon experts in books and interviews, like Ken Alibek.

The CCP has always eyed Soviet bioweapon research tech and results, going to g- great lengths to acquire them.

The Soviet bioweapons program, Biopreparat, was run under c- the cover of civilian science.

Ken Alibek, its former deputy director, had thirty-two thousand scientists and staff working under him.

Plague was on their list.

Alibek described Soviet work to make antibiotic-resistant plague into a weapon.

That fills I don't know how many swimming pools, but it's like, it's enough plague to kill a large fraction of humanity, depending on the lethality of the s- particular strain and things like that.

So one, one of the defector, the deputy directors of Biopreparat, this gentleman, Dr. Ken Alibek, defected from the Soviet Union in the '90s, and in 1999 he wrote a book saying, "Here's what happened in Biopreparat." The book is called Biohazard.

It's worth reading to kinda understand, I guess, the reality of what that program looks like from this gentleman's lens.

And, um, in it, he has, for instance, a map of all the different research and production facilities and the whole process of Soviet bioweapons research development, production, and preparation for deployment.

Well, it's kind of darkly funny, but you're like [chuckles] you said i- in your one piece, you said, "If it makes you feel any better, the, the FSB, the successor to the KGB," like, "If they suspect there are people running around with plague, they will not hesitate to just kill those people and, like, you know, get rid of them and prevent the spread." And I was like, "Yeah, I guess," you know.

[chuckles]

Yeah, you know, I mean, Ken Alibek in his book talks about one of these, um, leaders in the Biopreparat who wanted to, who wanted out, and he wants to go to this charming small town.

And then one of the KGB people says, "Oh no, the poor guy, you know, he had a lot to drink and went for a swim, and that's all I know.