Some experts question Alibek's characterizations of the threats.
Dr. Philip K. Russell, a retired Army major general and physician who joined the Bush administration from 2001 to 2004 to confront the perceived threat of smallpox, said he was convinced that Alibek had solid firsthand information about the former Soviet Union's production of anthrax. But regarding other threats, such as genetically engineered smallpox, Russell said he "began to think that Ken was more fanciful than precise in some of his recollections."
"He would claim that certain things had been done, and then when you came right down to it, he didn't have direct knowledge of it -- he'd heard it from somebody. For example, the issue of putting Ebola genes into smallpox virus. That was viewed, at least in many of our minds, as somewhat fanciful. And probably not true."
Alibek told The Times that the comments in question were based on articles he read in Russia's "scientific literature."
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Big transition
Alibek, 56, is now a player in the multibillion-dollar business that has sprouted around the U.S. war on terrorism.
It's been a stark transformation for the former Communist military man.
Alibek grew up in Almaty, the capital of the then-Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic. After entering the Tomsk Medical Institute in Siberia, he studied the 1942-43 battle of Stalingrad.
As he described in a 1999 memoir, "Biohazard," Alibek concluded that the Soviets had waged biological warfare against the Germans and that "large numbers" of the invaders fell ill with tularemia, a deadly infectious disease also known as rabbit fever.
But Alibek also described a lesson he learned about the risk of waging germ warfare: Because of a wind shift, the Soviets had inadvertently infected their own troops and civilians, causing perhaps thousands of casualties.
When Alibek emerged with a medical degree, he was recruited by the Soviet government and climbed in military rank while earning a doctorate in microbiology. In 1987, he was promoted to a top position in Biopreparat, the civilian agency that ran the Soviets' secret biological-weapons program.
Alibek has said he worked with numerous lethal agents -- including Marburg virus, plague, smallpox and a virulent "battle strain" of anthrax. The Soviets assumed that the U.S., which began developing germ weapons during World War II, maintained its program despite the 1972 international ban.
