Plague mystery revives concerns over not-to-secret Russian bioweapons program
Marshall Billingslea was a Senate Foreign Relations Committee staffer in the 1990s when he sat down with one of the highest-ranking defectors from the Soviet biological weapons program and began...
By Fox News · Fox News
Marshall Billingslea was a Senate Foreign Relations Committee staffer in the 1990s when he sat down with one of the highest-ranking defectors from the Soviet biological weapons program and began learning the extent of what Moscow had secretly built. And what he found out from Ken Alibek, the former No. 2 official in the Soviet biological weapons apparatus, is raising red flags for Billingslea over the Oct. 2, 2026, death linked to an anti-plague institute in Russia. "I think one of the most important things that Ken shed light on was the sheer scale of the Soviet program, which then Russia inherited," Billingslea told Fox News Digital. "Just mammoth." Three decades later, the mysterious death of a researcher at the Irkutsk Research Anti-Plague Institute of Siberia and the Far East has put new attention on what became of that program — and Billingslea argues the world should be demanding answers from Moscow. MYSTERY DEATH AT RUSSIAN PLAGUE LAB TRIGGERS SWEEPING PRECAUTIONS AS US WATCHES CLOSELY "It's not acceptable in this day and age for the Russians to have a biological warfare program," said Billingslea, who previously served as President Donald Trump's special presidential envoy for arms control. "They need to cut it out, and they need to tell us. They need to come clean about what they're doing at this lab and whether this lab is still involved in their warfare program." The U.S. government says Russia's offensive biological weapons program did not disappear with the Soviet Union. "Russia maintains an offensive biological weapons program and is in violation of its obligations under the BWC," a State Department official told Fox News Digital this week. BWC, or Biological Weapons Convention, is an international treaty that prohibits the development, production and stockpiling of biological weapons. State's 2025 arms control compliance report assessed that the Soviet-era program was "absorbed, not dismantled" by Russia after the collapse and has "continued and evo…