School of War - What Happened Inside Russia’s Plague Lab?

Episode Date: October 8, 2026

A young researcher in Siberia has died of the very disease her institute studies, and Russia won’t say how it happened. Marshall Billingslea, former Special Presidential Envoy for Arms Control, says Moscow has scrubbed news reports, had officials walk back talk of an outbreak, and kept the World Health Organization in the dark. He joins School of War to fill in what the Kremlin won’t, taking us inside Russia’s expanding bioweapons program and the institute at the heart of the mystery, which defectors say ran a covert effort to weaponize the disease and make it resistant to antibiotics. He also explains how Moscow thinks about using these weapons, how China is building a program of its own, and why the most frightening of them pose a risk even nuclear weapons don’t. 2:32 — Mystery at a Russian Plague Lab 5:29 — Russia’s Bioweapons Program 7:14 — Weaponizing Plague 10:39 — How Russia Would Use Bioweapons 13:01 — Smallpox and Ebola 15:07 — Controlling the Spread 16:40 — “Your Vaccines Wouldn’t Have Worked” 18:20 — A Soviet Bioweapons Defector 20:30 — Why Bioweapons Bans Are Hard to Verify 24:58 — Irkutsk and Wuhan 29:48 — Another Pandemic? 32:45 — China and North Korea This episode of School of War is brought to you by Maven Smart System, the builder platform for the American warfighter, fielded across the force and live on the frontline today. Learn more at palantir.com. This episode of School of War is also brought to you by Stratolaunch, a leading pure-play hypersonics company.  Stratolaunch helps the U.S. and its allies move new hypersonic technologies from concept to capability, faster and cheaper.  Learn more about how Stratolaunch is accelerating the future of hypersonics at Stratolaunch.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This episode of School of War is brought to you by Maven Smart System, the builder platform for the American warfighter, fielded across the force and live on the front line today. Maven Smart System isn't just software you use. It's the platform you build on. Every day, thousands of uniformed service members use AI coding agents to build their own agentic applications across all warfighting functions on top of the DOW's integrated ontology. What once took a contract in a year, now takes a warfighter in an afternoon. Administered by OSWCDAO, powered by the Palantir platform. One platform deployed everywhere at all classifications. Build at the speed of war.

If you're concerned about these reports coming out of Russia about this dead lab worker who was laboring away at a laboratory devoted to plague research in which apparently has some sort of connection to Russian bi. bio-weapons research, depending on who you talk to. Well, join the club at School of War. We're concerned about it, too. We all lived through 2020 together. And I personally have a very vivid memory of those months early in the pandemic. So today we're going to go deep on this issue with Marshall Billingsley, who has a long career in the U.S. government working on these issues. He's actually worked with defectors from Russia from their bioweapons program. We're going to talk about what we know,

what might happen next and what the United States can, if anything, do. Let's get in it. been the Special Presidential Envoy for arms control, a long career in government before that at the Department of Defense, Department of the Treasury, the Senate for Relations Committee, all in very senior and consequential roles. Marshall, thank you so much for coming on School of War. It's great to be with you, Aaron. Marshall, the reason we're talking today, I mean, there's all kinds of things we could get your take on where you would have thoughtful things to say about various challenges that the United

States faces out there in the world. But there seems to be some kind of, medical crisis in Siberia, close to the Mongolian border. There has been some, I'll characterize it as speculation. You'll characterize it however you want, that there's some sort of relationship, potential relationship between the crisis and Russian bio-weapons research. You know, all of us have kind of seen this movie before and pretty recently in the context of China in 2019 and 2020. And I have some things to say about that example. I had a close place to observe all of that from.

But Marshall, I want to ask you, because you have really interesting and relevant experience from earlier in your career working with the Russians on some of these issues that I want to get into. Where do we stand? And what is the case that what's happening in Russia may have some very concerning implications? Well, what's happening in Russia does have concerning implications because Russia has an ongoing and expanding and modernizing offensive biological warfare program. But set that aside, I don't think we're on the verge of a pandemic the way we have with the Wuhan virus.

But the Russians are not being transparent about explaining to us what happened. In fact, they're behaving in a quintessential Russian manner by trying to cover everything up. They've expunged and taken down media reporting. They've caused both federal and local officials to roll back references that they were making to plague outbreak, and they have been completely non-transparent with the World Health Organization, not that the WHO is kind of the end all deal. They certainly failed us with the corruptivir. But the WHO director last night made diplomatically clear that the Russians have not been forthcoming about what's happened.

President Trump has spoken on this several times now as Secretary Rubio, but it appears that we are in a wait and sea mode to be provided firm details by the Russians on what transpired. Okay, so you assert that there's something fishy going on here with a degree of confidence. We'll come back around to the present in a bit, but I want to go back into the past. you know, Russia has been doing research into these concerning bio-weapons technologies for some time. Tell us about the history of this, but, you know, make a point of telling us your personal level of interaction with the Russians on these issues, because you have firsthand knowledge of these affairs. The Russians have done a lot more than just research. Back in the early 70s, they began a robust. biological weapons program. They, in quintessential Russian fashion, ratified the Biological

Weapons Convention, which commits them, along with pretty much every other nation on Earth, not to possess biological weapons. And yet immediately thereafter began massively expanding their program. At its peak, the Soviet Union, Russia inherited the program from, The Soviet Union had about 60,000 people working in the BW in the warfare program across 40 different locations, more than 40 actually, scattered all over the Soviet Union. And they were both researching, developing, and then weaponizing. And we're talking here about tons and tons, literally tons, of different kinds of weapons. It ranges from infectious diseases, such as the plague, hemorrhagic fevers like the Marburg virus and the Ebola virus, smallpox. They have developed and weaponized toxins and other poisonous substances, venoms, you name it.

If it can be lethal to a human being, they've even developed biological weapons that are focused on destroying crops, agricultural weapons. So this is the state of affairs. When the Russians, when the Soviet Union imploded and Russia inherited this program, they kept going. And in the past, I would say in the past four years, they have really gone on a major, major expansion, a multi-billion dollar, multi-million dollar investments, particularly at the facility outside of Moscow in Zagorsk, which is where they have the smallpox virus. They've plowed a lot of money into that site. The reason we're so concerned about this potential plague outbreak or plague release in Irkutsk, which all of us know from the Riska board game, is because multiple defectors over the years, one of whom I know and worked with back in the 90s, a guy named Ken Aliback,

he changed his name to Ken Alibek when he defected. We know that the Erkutsk laboratory that this woman who died was working in actually had a covert program focused on weaponization of plague. Not only weaponization of plague, but genetic modification of plague to be resistant to antibiotics. What they were doing was inserting the plague's DNA sequences into harmless bacteria. as a way of making it resistant to antibiotics. But worse, they were developing what they call chimeras, which is fusion of the weapon with other dangerous substances. According to Alebeck, for instance,

they had inserted plague together with a toxin-producing bacteria so that if you treated somebody who had been infected, the toxins would kick in and kill them, as just kind of a backup plan to ensure leafality. So that's kind of the nastiness that we're dealing with that the Russians have kept on going with. This episode of School of War is brought to you by Maven Smart System, administered by OSWCDAO, powered by the Palantir platform.

Maven isn't an app. It's a builder ecosystem. Right now across the joint force, thousands of uniform service members are pointing AI coding agents at their hardest problems and building the tools they need themselves, targeting workflows, intel products,

battle management. No ticket, no vendor, no wait. The warfighter closest to the fight is now the one building for it. That's how you fight at the speed of war. Now, let me ask you sort of a higher level question before we dive back into events,

which is, how would the Russians conceive of actually employing these weapons? And maybe we can draw a comparison in with nuclear weapons, which the audience will note there are such things as tactical nuclear weapons, which would be employed for battlefield effect in concert with some larger military operation. And then there are so-called strategic nuclear weapons designed to have strategic effects in and of their own right. And generally speaking, in the nuclear weapons scheme of things, the tactical weapons you would expect to be a little smaller in the explosive force.

they deliver the strategic weapons somewhat bigger. Does that sort of base, I realize that's overly reductive, but nevertheless, does that sort of basic logic map over onto biological weapons? Are there tactical employments? Are there strategic employments? Like, what are we actually talking about here when they talk amongst themselves about how they're going to use this stuff potentially? It actually isn't a bad analogy.

But in the case of the biologic agents, there's a much broader spectrum of effects that that can be achieved, I guess, if that's the word, from employment. And certainly the Russians have, and the Soviets before them, have developed and actually thought about different agents in kind of a similar way to you describe. So, for instance, the Soviets and now the Russians definitely think of smallpox and think of the plague as kind of the big thermonuclear type weapons, strategic nuclear weapons that you referenced. Then you have sort of their thinking goes down a few runs into the more operational effects where you see them playing around with other kinds of weapons.

Anthrax is a good example. So they had an entire program designed to ensure a number of things with anthrax, but to make sure that they could put it in missile warheads. Normal anthrax that you can get out here in Virginia walking across a cowfield, you can get it on your shoes. That doesn't survive contact with sunlight. The ultraviolet rays killed anthrax pretty quickly. So obviously that was a engineering challenge that,

the Soviets had to work on to make sure that it survived contact with sunlight. You want that stuff to hover in the air for as long as you can get it because you would contract anthrax through inhalation. And you want to make sure that it's got the right micron size that it goes, gets into your lungs and embeds in your lungs and it doesn't wash back out again when you exhale. So these are the kind of challenges that the Russians conquered to ensure that they could wipe out basically an entire city with anthrax warheads. Then you have, moving on down the chain, I mentioned the weapons focused on agricultural crops, so obvious applications there. But you also have the more tactical assassination type weapons, which are the toxins and the other poisonous substances that they've

been playing with. What doesn't have a parallel in the nuclear world are the hemorrhagic fevers. And in particular, Alabeck and others told us that the Soviets and Russians were actually working on merging smallpox with Ebola. And that's the kind of thing far more than plague or anthrax or anything else. That's the kind of thing that could rapidly get out of hand and not to be too dramatic here, but that could exterminate much of humanity if that got on the loose. And unfortunately, the Russians still think it's okay to play in this area.

I think you're allowed to be dramatic about things that threaten to eradicate humanity. Let me ask you, though, I mean, this is kind of a stupid question. It's funny for all the grim things of which I am a reasonably saying, serious student. I've never really done a deep dive into, you know, the employment cases of this kind of stuff. I would have assumed that any biological weapons research program that was dealing with things that, you know, in some form are transmissible, that you would want to make them actually less transmissible because you want to be able to control your effects. So I always understood this to be a major appeal of anthrax, that it's very deadly where you drop it. And a lot of people get sick and die.

but your own troops aren't going to be infected unless they happen to wander into the hot zone, as it were, at the wrong time. But when you say get out of hand, the whole danger here is uncontrolled spread. Am I right in that presumption that anything that you're actually going to certify for battlefield effects? You're not going to want it to be super transmissible for the obvious reason that you don't want, you actually don't want it. Global pandemic isn't your goal, I think, defeating, you know, pandemic or epidemic amongst your target population is your goal and you want to be able to draw lines around that or am I just

misunderstanding or too idealistic somehow? I don't think I'm being idealistic, but what am I missing something? Well, you're you're assuming a level of humanity on the part of the Russian leadership that has never existed. The Soviets didn't care about the nuclear effects on their battlefield troops. They walked troops through radiation zones just to see what would happen post-detonation. you just look at the meat grinder that Putin's engaged in in Ukraine. They don't care about the health of their troops, and they don't care about the livelihood of their citizenship. So I really don't think that that is a consideration for them. Certainly they want to have prophylactics developed to inoculate leadership if they, for instance, were to employ smallpox.

In fact, one of the most chilling conversations I ever had, Aaron, on this topic with the Russians, was back when I was Don Rumsfeld's treaty negotiator at the Pentagon. This is under George W. Bush. And we made the decision that we were not going to do a highly symbolic and very, very stupid thing, which was we were not going to destroy the smallpox stocks that we maintain for testing and defense purposes at the Centers for Disease Control. And I went to Vienna to sit down with the Russians, the head of the Russian defense program, because they were the only other country that acknowledged possession of smallpox stocks. And one of the things in my talking points to him was to explain how we felt that because we had stopped vaccinating U.S. citizens for smallpox.

I don't have, I've never had the vaccination. Perhaps you did as a Marine. But because of that, we felt that populations were highly, highly vulnerable to smallpox. And the Russian general sat across from me and said, your vaccines wouldn't have worked anyway. And I thought to myself, you son of a, you know, it's just that kind, I mean, just that kind of malevolence. just radiating from the head of their defense program. So needless to say, we did not eliminate the smallpox stocks. At the time when we made that decision, it was because we were very worried about this chimera kind of stuff

and genetic modification of smallpox to improve virality. For instance, at that time, so this would have been shortly before 9-11, actually, maybe the spring of that year. Australian researchers had been experimenting with mousepox. And they had infected, they were trying to control mice populations in Australia that were ravaging fields and crops. And what they did by modifying the mousepox virus and then exposing the mice to, they were trying to stop fertility, right? Instead, they wound up killing every mouse that they exposed. And so the same logic, the smallpox virus is a very close analog to many of the other poxes that are out there.

Tell me what it was like to work with this guy, Ken Albeck, the defector. What were the circumstances of his defection? How did you actually meet him? What was your role at the time? Just paint a bit of a picture of this kind of interesting figure in this whole story. Yeah, he's a very important figure. And I don't want to talk as though we were, you know, thick as thieves. But he was important to me as a source of information.

He defected CIA got him out. He defected to the United States. He at the time had been the number two in their weapons program, a program called biopreparat. And so he had visibility across basically the entire enterprise. He himself had researched and developed a number of weapons. weapons. So I was on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee staff, and he had, once he'd finished sort of his debriefings with our intelligence community and others, he was free to speak. And he published a book called Biohazard. I had an autographed copy of it from him at one point. I think I lent it to

somebody and never got it back. Those people are the worst. Whoever did that to you should be exiled. that's the worst kind of friend who takes a loan book and doesn't return it. And some of my friends who may be listening know who they are. Yeah, exactly. So he was kind of on a book tour, but he was also spending a lot of time testifying in front of Congress, both House and Senate, providing details. And so some of the details I've mentioned here are drawn from him, such as the role of the so-called civilian agencies.

These were agencies or laboratories under the responsibility of the Ministry of Health that actually had these covert research and development programs, of which Erkutsk was one. There were about six of those labs. So that was very important to us because also at the time, and this carries through to today, we were wrestling with the challenge of, though we have the biological weapons convention, there's no verification provisions, and it's not terribly enforceable. And we were struggling with the question of whether you could devise a verification regime. Ultimately, we came to the conclusion, and I still am of the conclusion,

that it's not possible to verify a biological weapons ban because countries have these pathogens for defensive purposes and because many of these pathogens occur naturally, well, they all occur naturally. or the non-genetically modified ones occur naturally making very difficult to do sampling or the other kinds of things that we try to do so far pretty unsuccessfully under the chemical weapons convention. So all of this takes us back to the present day and Irkutsk and the shores of scenic Lake Baikal, which, you know, is basically the middle of nowhere. But the way these things work, of course, is once you have uncontrolled spread, you have

uncontrolled spread. We don't, based on what I'm seeing, we don't seem to have that right now. And I should say, I mean, Marshall, feel free to push back, obviously on any of this you don't agree with. But I had vivid memories of the start of the flu-like illness that was suddenly spreading in Wuhan, in China. I will pat myself on the back a little bit and say that where I was working in the government at the time, which was on Senator Cotton's staff in the Senate, I think our policy team, which I led, may have been the first entity within the U.S. government at Senator Cotton's direction to sort of focus on this issue more or less full time. And I remember it came across my desk for the first time in the last week of December, 2019. And it was actually the great

he has a phenomenal newsletter, this guy, John Ellis, the first place I saw it and anything out there in the media was that his news items newsletter. He had a piece from some, you know, English language Asian newspaper saying that there was an outbreak of some kind in Wuhan. But the point I want to make about that there may be similarities and, you know, there seems to be an extremely strong circumstantial case that that epidemic, which became a pandemic, originated in the Wuhan Institute of Virology somehow related to research there. By the time we became aware of it in the United States, and I was pretty early to that, it was already done. It was already done. That is to say, I remember speaking to a prominent epidemiologist first or second week of January

and asking this person, you know, what should we do? Should we shut down travel with China? Like, you know, we're thinking of all these things to kind of protect the American people. What should we be advocating for here? And the guy just said to me, shut down whatever you want, man, it's done. The bomb has gone off. And we are all going to have to live in the fallout now. And I sort of dismissed it in the moment, shows the, you know, the arrogance of the Senate staffer.

but because the numbers were still pretty low and it was really still a Wuhan phenomenon primarily in those days. Right. But his point was that this is already done. There will be a pandemic now and we are just going to have to figure out what the nature of the pandemic is going to be.

And it doesn't seem based on the reporting that that's where we are in Erkutsk at the moment. We have this one woman who has died. It's not entirely clear what the mechanism of death was. It's striking, I mean, the initial reports that it was the pneumonic plague was very striking to me because, this is a silly reason, but as a kid,

there was some made-for-tivor-tTV movie about a pneumonic plague outbreak in the United States. I'll have to look it up because it's vivid. Like, I can even picture scenes from it right now. So for me, the pneumonic plague has always been, you know, the pandemic entity par excellence. But now that seems to be in question as to what the pathogen actually is that got her. But if we're going to draw a comparison back to COVID, it seems to me, Marshall,

we're not in January of 2020 or even December of 2019. We're probably back in like the October time frame, which is by simple math, when patient zero would have had to have been affected somewhere in October, which, by the way, it's out there in the media. You can look it up. There was a strange drop in cell phone service

at the Wuhan Institute of Virology right around that time in October where apparently people stopped going in and out of the institute all of a sudden. Right. No, you guys and Senator Cotton were absolutely ahead of the curve, so to speak, in flagging the issue. I drove the issuance of the State Department fact sheet on the virus and on Wuhan against fierce opposition from the deep state, particularly the CIA. I've never seen a group of people more determined to challenge the assertion that it came out of the laboratory than that.

crowd and they were wrong. And we had numerous indicators to suggest that they had been doing gain of function work on the coronavirus to improve its transmissibility and that the individuals at that laboratory had a military role that they did not disclose and so on and so on and so forth. So there are some parallels here, right? You've got an Ruktsk laboratory that is supposedly anti-plague. It's in their name. but we know from their publishing that they also have been doing gain of function research. Surprise, surprise. We also know from multiple defectors and other sources that that particular laboratory had a clandestine role,

had a covert role in both the Soviet and presumably the ongoing Russian biological program. This is why it's very, very important that the Russians handover the details on what pathogen actually killed this lab worker. They're not going to do that because I think they won't do it. And here's why. I think we'll discover that it was a bioengineered plague bacteria. I think that, you know, they will have done the sequencing. They will probably have samples. They could be transparent and provide the information to the WHO and to us.

I suspect we've already asked for it. I know the WHO has. but they if I'm right and it was a genetically modified bacteria, there's no chance on earth that they'll provide it because that opens the whole Pandora's box of questions about what exactly is Russia today doing with bio weapons? You know, on this theme of official reluctance or official resistance to what at the time seemed like an accumulating amount of information that at the very least we should be asking questions about, for example, the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

I remember it being about even more basic issues. So this is later, this is late January, this is possibly even early February 2020 that this story comes from. But I remember we had a whole host of experts come through the office to brief the senator, really just sometimes just brief us, brief the staffs about what they knew so we could get smart on various aspects of the issue. And a very, very senior physician, worked at Rand. came through the office.

And I'll never forget Marshall. Her general posture, as was the posture of many in, you know, positions of responsibility at the time, but sort of downplayed the whole thing. And I wasn't, you know, I've been talking to a lot of people who thought that way, so I wasn't shocked by that. And I really didn't know fundamentally myself what was going to happen. I feared the worst, and it turned out to be closer to the worst than not.

But we were this woman saying there in the conference room. And she looks me in the eye and she says, there is a zero percent chance that more people will die this year from this virus than from the flu. And I remember she left the room and I turned to my staff, you know, several of them are quite young. And, you know, it's not like I'm an expert in this stuff myself, you know, like we're all trying to figure this out as we go along. And I said, we got to prepare for the worst because I can't trust anything else that woman said now that you're going to sit there and say a zero percent chance. that's the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard. And to me, it just sort of spoke to the arrogance of the institutional arrogance in some ways

that we were encountering on so many aspects of the issue. Now, by the same token, I also don't want to be unduly alarmist now, which is kind of one of the reasons why I draw the comparison is because there was uncontrolled spread in Wuhan. It did prove to be something that killed a lot of people and upend the world. You know, we don't really know what's going to happen now. We don't even know what's happened. And Marshall, like, forgive me, because there's really no way. for you to field this besides engage in some speculation, but you are among the most informed

people who could possibly speculate on this. But what are some possible roads ahead? You've already said the Russians, there's no way the Russians are very unlikely the Russians are going to share what this was. What needs to be done as a policy matter on the party in the United States, WHO and others? And, you know, what could happen here in the road ahead? I don't think we're at the onset of another pandemic, although rumors about a second infection, which haven't been confirmed, a second death, I should say, which haven't been confirmed, are worrisome. But there's a lot of aspects of the story that just don't add up. Apparently, this lab worker told people that she broke a test tube full of the bacteria and got infected. That doesn't make

sense to me, if you're handling a pathogen of that nature, you would be in a full protective sort of hazmat-type suit in a laboratory area, highly secured laboratory area, a BL3 or BL4-type lab, where there's all kinds of additional protective measures, including pressurization to ensure that if there's a rupture in the... the skin of the lab, the pathogens, the air pressure keeps the pathogens bottled in, as an example of what distinguishes those kinds of facilities. What also doesn't make a lot of sense to me is that if this were just, and the Russians of course have said she died of respiratory failure, of pneumonia, which is not inconsistent with what the plague does to you when it gets into

your lungs, but they have categorically refused to discuss it as being the plague. For the FSB, the Russian Internal Security Service, to descend in forts, in hazmat suits, all over the city, to round up and sequester, to quarantine the entire lab population, to quarantine five different hospitals, and then begin going home to home to home, that also, one could look at that and one could look at that in. say, well, that's just, you know, prudent reaction to a potentially dangerous pathogen leaking. Or one could say that they're there to put the clamps down and to block out coverage on this. And as I have worked with the Russians in so many different contexts, you know, they have, they have a almost a cultural instinct to try to cover things up. And it's usually because they're they've done something so terribly disasters that they need to actually cover it up. Teenage Aaron often covered up some stuff from his parents and it's because he was guilty as

health. He's right. And one last question for you, Marshall. We've been talking about the Russians for obvious reasons this whole time in the context of the present and the Chinese only in terms of what happened back in 2019, 2020. What about the Chinese today? You know, what, if anything, should we be paying attention to on this issue there? We have a lot of concerns about the Chinese and what they're up to in this field.

We know, for instance, that China has been working on maritime toxins, but they've never acknowledged that. Under the Biological Weapons Convention, countries are obligated to send in confidence building measures, confidence building measures, declarations, in essence, of what they've been up to. and they haven't included toxin research. I think we're also very, very worried about what they're, what exactly are they doing in the pharmaceuticals space? So here think about fentanyl or other type things. So a lot of unanswered questions. The annual State Department compliance report, the most recent version of this 2025, put together under the Biden administration and issued under the Trump administration, raises these concerns. If you have a look at that report, you'll also see that we absolutely believe that North Korea maintains a massive biological weapons program as well.

So these are all matters that bear monitoring. You know, there are days, Marshall, where I wonder, why didn't I go with, like, school of food or something? Like, why did I have to be the war guy? Because this is getting pretty grim. Yeah. Well, when the Russians are possessing pathogens that can wipe out your food stocks, you know. There's no escape is what you're telling me. All right.

Marshall, thanks so much for coming on School of War. Hopefully the next time we have you on won't be about this issue because if that's the case that means that this situation has only gotten worse. But I would love to have you back to talk about other things sometime soon. Come in. It's great to be with you, Aaron. This episode of School of War is also presented by Strato Launch, a leading pure play. Hypersonics company. Hypersonic weapons systems travel five times faster than the speed of sound, making them difficult to predict, track, and defeat. America's advantage in Hypersonics depends

on delivering testing, targets, data, and systems at pace. Stratolunch is built for that mission. Stratel launch's reusable and autonomous Talon A testbed exceeds Mach 5 speeds, enabling customers is to evaluate advanced hypersonic technologies under true hypersonic flight conditions while collecting critical flight data. Together with its expendable hypersonic targets and weapons subsystems, strato launch helps the U.S. and its allies move new hypersonic technologies from concept to capability, faster and cheaper. Learn more about how strato launch is accelerating the future of hypersonics at stradolonch.com.