Elegy for Igor Kirillov

The Russian general who gave RFK Jr, Elon Musk and Tulsi Gabbard their talking points

Amos Townsend was sure that someone was poisoning the Hmong people.

The Hmong had fought with the Americans and, after the U.S. withdrawal, found themselves in the middle of a new proxy war, between the Soviet-backed Vietnamese and Chinese-backed Cambodians. In the late 1970s, the Hmong reported something strange. They started observing clouds of yellow dust falling from the sky, usually following a Vietnamese fighter jet or helicopter. This “yellow rain,” they said, was making them ill: After inhaling it, the Hmong would start bleeding from their eyes. Thousands reportedly died.¹

Townsend had served in Vietnam, as a U.S. Air Force surgeon, and had come to know the locals. It never sat right with him that America had abandoned its allies. So, after hearing these reports, Townsend returned to the region in 1980, crisscrossing the border on elephant-back, turning over rocks and leaves for samples of this sickly yellow powder.

Testing of these samples revealed the presence of mycotoxin, a naturally occurring and dangerous fungus not local to the area. In 1981, the U.S., backed up by Canada, Britain, Australia, France, China, and Thailand, declared it had 'incontrovertible evidence' that the Soviets and the Vietnamese army had weaponized the toxin.

The Soviets rejected the finding. They obfuscated by pointing to an American researcher who developed a competing theory: This yellow powder wasn’t poison at all, he argued, it was pollen. Or, more accurately, excrement, dropped by huge honey bees. Nobody was buying it.

So the Soviets tried something else. In 1983, they pointed the finger back at America. In a small New Delhi paper, covertly funded by the KGB, the Russians ran an anonymous item from a “well-known American scientist,” alleging that “the Pentagon’s experiments to develop new and dangerous biological weapons” had created a monster. He alleged that a military lab in Fort Detrick, Maryland had developed HIV.

And now, the scientist went on, America was exporting this bioweapons program to “developing nations where governments are pliable to Washington's pressures and persuasion.” The author pointed to a U.S-funded biological research lab in neighboring Lahore, Pakistan as the next “proving ground” for these pathogenic bioweapons.

This was the prelude to Operation Denver, Moscow’s active measures campaign to convince Americans — and the world — that America was responsible for the AIDS crisis.

The Soviets were by no means the first to allege that HIV was some man-made bioweapon: That belief bubbled up from the endemic distrust harbored by Queer and Black people, the groups hit hardest by the virus. They mistook the state’s criminal negligence for a purposeful eliminationist plot. As a Czech KGB official once remarked: “Every disinformation message must at least partially correspond to reality or generally accepted views.”

Moscow certainly worked to make those ideas more accepted by selling the idea that HIV was an “ethnic weapon” and a “depopulating” agent designed to kill Black people in the United States and across Africa.

Operation Denver fell apart when HIV came to the Soviet Union. As Russians fell ill, the Soviet Academy of Scientists begged the Kremlin to drop the fiction. “Not a single Soviet scientist, not a single medical or scientific institution, shares this position,” they wrote of the bioweapon lie in a state-sanctioned newspaper.

But the Soviets discovered that they had been a little too convincing. Some of the scientists who helped weave this tale had actually come to believe it. And they kept arguing that America had launched the AIDS crisis. Just as, a few years earlier, Amos Townsend came to genuinely believe that this yellow rain was a Soviet biological weapon.

But the Americans didn’t create HIV, and the Soviets didn’t develop yellow rain.

In 1989, a pair of biologists from Canada and Malaysia teamed up to visit those Hmong villages, to finally find the truth about this sickening yellow powder. To do so, they returned to that unlikely theory from almost a decade earlier: The big bee hypothesis. Sure enough, they found that when the conditions were just right, Apis dorsata, the giant honey bee, would excrete 20% of their body weight while in flight to stay cool, raining down large globs of digested pollen. The sticky powder was, in fact, bee excrement.

Plants covered in the yellow powder were no more toxic than clean ones.² Whatever made those villagers sick, it wasn’t the yellow rain. And the Reagan administration knew this, going back to 1983, but continued accusing Moscow of being responsibile. To this day, America has never retracted the allegation.

The bioweapon panic of the 1980s masked the simple fact that nature is constantly trying to kill us — and she is much better at it than even our most advanced militaries. But both sides discovered just how effective, and risky, it could be to levy the allegation of a man-made bioweapon.

Four decades on, bioweapon panic has returned. Once again weaponized by the Kremlin and adopted enthusiastically by paranoid people here at home, our constant effort to ascribe to each other what Mother Nature keeps inflicting on us has reached dizzying new heights.

This week, on a very special Bug-eyed and Shameless, the story of how one Russian general convinced America to fear the biolab.

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Act One: Biopreparat

Shortly after the Soviet Union signed the Biological Weapons Convention in 1972, pledging not to develop or stockpile biological weapons, Moscow began constructing the world’s most impressive biological weapons program.

“Through our covert program,” writes Ken Alibek, “we stockpiled hundreds of tons of anthrax and dozens of tons of plague and smallpox near Moscow and other Russian cities for use against the United States and its Western allies.”³

Alibek would know: He ran the program.

The Soviets hadn’t been responsible for the mysterious “yellow rain” in Cambodia. But it was developing some things that, if released, would be much worse. They did it under Biopreparat — the Soviet bioweapons program masquerading as a civilian pharmaceutical research operation.

“What went on in Biopreparat's labs,” Alibek, the program’s first deputy chief, writes in his memoirs, “was one of the most closely guarded secrets of the Cold War.”

And it remained, mostly, a secret until after the Berlin Wall fell.

In the new era of glasnost, Washington suggested to Moscow that they tour each others’ military installations as a confidence-building effort and in the name of non-proliferation. So, in early 1991, Alibek was tasked with hosting a delegation of American and British scientists. It was Alibek’s job to convince the Americans that there were no biological weapons being made in Russia.

But, of course, there were biological weapons being made in Russia. “I don't see how we can prevent them from learning what we've got,” Alibek told his superiors. Nevertheless, it was his job to try.

The Soviets pulled out all the stops to frustrate the Americans — long, scenic drives; unnecessarily long lunches; booze. At one point, the Russians pretended they lost a key to a room where explosive ordinances were tested. It was all for naught: American intelligence knew full well that the Soviets were making bioweapons, and where.

Later that year, just as the USSR was about to unravel, the Americans extended a reciprocal invitation to the Russians. Alibek was dispatched to Fort Detrick, and instructed to come back with firm evidence of the Americans’ bioweapons program. President Richard Nixon had signed a moratorium on biological weapons research two decades prior. But the Soviets were sure he had lied.

So Alibek and his colleagues arrived in America, armed with KGB intelligence as to where these bioweapon stockpiles and labs were hidden. They knew the location of every secret laboratory and clandestine storehouse.

One by one, the Soviet scientists discovered their intelligence was bad. A warehouse full of anthrax? It was actually full of road salt. A mysterious tower full of chemical agents? It held water.

Alibek: We were the victims of our own gullibility. I have come to believe that the most senior Soviet officials must have known all along that the Americans had no serious biological warfare program after 1969. […] But the fiction had been necessary to instill in us a sense of urgency. The Soviet biological warfare program, born initially out of fear and insecurity, had long since become a hostage to Kremlin politics.

By the time Alibek returned to Moscow, the Soviet Union was gone, and he was no longer interested in building bioweapons for this new Russian Federation, nor for the newly-independent government in his native Kazakhstan. Alibek moved to America instead.

At that exact moment, two Congressmen were coming up with a grand plan to make the world a safer place. Richard Lugar and Sam Nunn, a Republican and a Democrat, saw a crisis and an opportunity in the ashes of the Soviet Union. There was a desperate need to secure and destroy the various weapons of mass destruction held by the Soviets, which were now loose in a chaotic melee of independent states. And there was an opportunity to build bridges with these newly-independent states by helping them conduct high-level scientific research safely.

As part of this work, America established the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) and housed it in the Pentagon.

The DTRA, and its predecessor, helped destroy nearly 10,000 nuclear missiles, upgraded security at a number of chemical facilities, and shut down biological weapons factories in the former Soviet states — including many that Alibek had helped set up. By the 2010s, the DTRA’s biological threat reduction program was active in 30 nations, including a lab in Odesa, Ukraine, which was upgraded to improve its biosecurity protocols in order to safely study the naturally occurring plague bacteria; and another in Almaty, Kazakstan which used its American investment to improve how it keeps tabs on tick-borne illnesses. A lab in Tbilisi, Georgia was opened in 2013 and named for the man who made it possible: The Richard Lugar Center for Public Health Research.

None of this was a secret. In fact, America tried desperately to publicize this work. It was a clear indication of how international collaboration in the new world order could get nations working together to turn swords into ploughshares.

At first, Russia was a big fan of this work. And then it wasn’t.

In 2018, a dour-looking Russian general emerged in Moscow to make a startling accusation. “It's highly likely that the U.S. is building up its military biological potential under the cover of studying protective means and conducting other peaceful research, flouting international agreements," General Igor Kirillov told a room of loyal stenographers.⁴

The general released a slew of documents. They claimed that infectious diseases spreading through Russia had been the work of the Americans, that the United States was developing specialized drones capable of dispersing infectious mosquitos, and that a lab in Georgia was stockpiling American-made biological weapons.

There is, Kirillov said, “reason to believe that the Lugar Center was researching a highly toxic and highly lethal chemical or biological agent.”

Act Two: Biolabs

Jacob Creech had been managing a wine bar in rural Virginia when the pandemic hit.

Like many others who suddenly found themselves locked down and anxious, Creech turned to the internet to make it all make sense. He found solace in the world-building mythos of QAnon, the fantastical meta-theory which pitches an epic battle of good-vs-evil to rival the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

QAnon is a fundamentally decentralized, anonymized movement. It makes for many anons, as they call themselves, and few leaders.

In the salmagundi of QAnon’s general paranoia, only a few figures have defined themselves as influencers — and they have names like Praying Medic, RedPill78, and X-22 Report (Dispatch #81). After Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, in early 2022, Creech posted a tweet that secured his spot on that exclusive list.

Under the pseudonyms @WarClandestine and then @BioClandestine, Creech posted a map overlaying Russian missile strikes in Ukraine and “US biolabs in Ukraine.” He had discovered, he told his followers, the real reason behind the invasion: Russia wanted to destroy American bioweapons facilities.

The only thing he had discovered, of course, was that Russian airstrikes overwhelmingly hit Ukrainian cities, where most of their biological research facilities are located. There weren’t many airstrikes on Ukraine’s expansive farmland and beaches, which house few secure labs. Nevertheless, he found validation in his theory from the Kremlin.

“I didn’t know this until today,” Creech wrote, “but Russia has been accusing US of creating ‘bio-weapons’ at their border. WHAT!” He linked to a Newsweek story where a Kremlin apparatchik suggests that America created COVID-19.

Creech’s theory took off immediately: On Twitter, until he got suspended; then on Telegram and elsewhere. For those primed to distrust any mention of biological research, still convinced that mad scientists had given us COVID-19, this was all to shocking. Before his Twitter thread, I imagine few, if any, of them knew about the DTRA, Sam Nunn and Richard Lugar, Ken Alibek, Nixon’s ‘69 moratorium, or any of this other history. Now they were convinced it was all part of a 40-year clandestine operation to make them sick.

“The Russians have been accusing the US of conducting sinister activities at Biolabs, strategically placed close to their border, for years,” Creech posted in late February. He linked to that 2018 video of Igor Kirillov, where the general warned of the “highly toxic and highly lethal” biological agents being developed at the Lugar Center for Public Health Research.

Creech had earned a powerful fan halfway across the world. Less than two weeks after Creech began spinning this yarn, Kirillov emerged from semi-obscurity to deliver a new press conference.

The Ukrainians and Americans, Kirillov declared, had been caught red-handed making bioweapons in Ukraine, and were now racing to destroy containers of anthrax and the bubonic plague. If only Russian troops could get access to these labs, he said, they could prove that America was working in Ukraine "to enhance the pathogenic properties of microorganisms using synthetic biology methods.”⁵

Creech was elated by the news. He begged his followers to ignore the Western propaganda and listen to the Kremlin. And he had a receptive audience — on podcasts like RedPill78, in Alex Jones’ Infowars conspiracy empire, and with Tucker Carlson.

Tulsi Gabbard, former Democratic member of Congress, posted a video to Twitter claiming that “there are 25+ US-funded biolabs in Ukraine which if breached would release & spread deadly pathogens to US/world.” She called for an immediate ceasefire, accused the White House of trying to “cover up” the fact that “the US funds around 300 biolabs around the world.”

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. had helped write the COVID-19-as-bioweapon fiction. And now the biolabs fit into it. Kennedy believes, of course, that Fauci helped concoct the AIDS crisis. (Dispatch #108) Even since then, he argues, Fauci and the U.S. scientific establishment have worked to develop new ways of making people sick in order to charge them for the cure. When people like Kennedy exposed this horrific scheme, Kennedy says, Fauci was forced to move this dangerous work out of the United States. But those dangerous gain-of-function research projects didn’t end, he says, they “ended up mostly in Wuhan Lab [...] and many of them went to Ukraine."

Glenn Greenwald, Representative Thomas Massie, Donald Trump Jr., and so on. All endorsed the conspiracy theory that these labs are secret, nefarious, and engaged in risky research.

The whole theory is easy to sell because, at its core, it’s true: America does fund useful biological research around the world, and there’s a particular reason why it does. None of this is secret. But, devoid of context, it looks nefarious to someone who is already sold on the idea that COVID-19 was designed in a Chinese lab. And that initial misconception fuses with this new misconception and thus every bit of support for one becomes a support for the other. The theory becomes bigger and sturdier.

Any evidence to the contrary is summarily rejected, or drowned out. Debunks and fact-checks become further proof that the all-power-yet-perpetually-inept deep state was trying to force the cover-up.

Or the evidence simply never reaches those who need to see it. I have, for example, the 2018 agreement between the DTRA and the Government of Ukraine. In it, the Pentagon agency actually required the Ukrainian lab to be more aggressive in destroying virological and bacterial samples, unless they were absolutely necessary.

But any evidence in support of this widening idea can be immediately made canon. When leaked emails from Hunter Biden’s laptop connected him to public health surveillance firm Metabiota — which does work in Ukraine — it became evidence that the Biden family was financing bioweapons research.

Russia could not have asked for a better remix of its initial disinformation.

Up until this point, Kirillov had been just a bit player in the Russian media — trotted out only to levy a half-hearted accusation of bioweapons labs in Georgia and the occasional allegation that the Syrian rebels had gassed themselves. But suddenly he was a fixture of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which was in the midst of going sideways.

Kirillov’s briefings were tailored, in every way, to appeal to his newfound American fandom, complete with these sprawling narratives and twine-and-corkboard approach. It was very QAnon.

Kirillov was just repeating their own ideas back at them — which had, originally, been Kirllov’s ideas — but he was doing it in a uniform and in front of a 500-foot screen. So they treated him as legitimate.

For two years, this lie grew.

Act Three: Biological Speculation

In early December 2024, Igor Kirillov took a break from warning about American biowarfare efforts to celebrate his own team.

At a military ceremony, Kirillov came out to pin shiny medals onto the chests of those who work at Moscow’s 27th Scientific Center. These men, he said, were the front line of defense in protecting Russia from biological and chemical threats.

The 27th Scientific Center, according to U.S. intelligence, also helped produce the nerve agent that poisoned Alexei Navalny in 2020. Kirillov was celebrating a biolab which actually weaponized biology to kill Russian dissidents.

A week later, Kirillov stepped out of an apartment building in Moscow with an aide. He walked past an electric scooter on his way into the cold early-morning twilight. Just as he passed the bike, it exploded into a ball of fire, sending Kirillov flying face-first into the snow. His assassins had, apparently, livestreamed the hit from the dashcam in a nearby rental car. They helped the world watch the general’s ignoble end.

The Ukrainian security services were quick to take responsibility for Kirillov’s assassination. Russia spun a wider tale, claiming it was the work of Islamic extremists from the Caucasus, working hand-in-glove with Kyiv.

While Kirillov may have gotten his just deserts, the others who advanced the biolabs conspiracy theory were measuring the drapes for their new offices.

Kennedy was confirmed as Secretary of Health and Human Services. Gabbard is now Director of National Intelligence. Pete Hegseth is now Secretary of Defense, responsible for the DTRA. Creech is back on Twitter, and now boasts 670,000 followers, and posts regularly here on Substack to nearly 50,000 subscribers.

“I was banned from social media and smeared by the entire left-wing MSM, for reporting on the US-funded biolabs in Ukraine,” Creech wrote earlier this month. “I called Reps, Senators, public figures etc., seeking legal help. You know who the ONLY person to respond to me was? Tulsi Gabbard.”

Creech also mourned Kirillov, his source for new research and talking points: “They killed him because he is exposing the Deep State’s deepest darkest secret.”

The Republican Party seems keen to avenge his death.

In January, the DTRA received a subpoena from Senator Rand Paul, demanding it hand over evidence that the agency was doing secretive bioweapons research. The evidence doesn’t exist. It doesn’t matter. It is likely the opening salvo in what will be a broader propaganda effort to invent an American bioweapons program out of whole cloth.

Kirillov, in the end, was just a bit player in this whole ordeal. He learned, as the Russians always do, that foreign disinformation and propaganda can never be as good at exploiting our own paranoia, divisions, and inclination towards conspiratorial thinking as our fellow countrymen.

I imagine he learned, too, the power of self-delusion. Maybe he came to genuinely believe that America was running a bioweapons lab in Ukraine. It doesn’t matter, because Creech certainly does.

And now, the U.S. government is being run by a cadre of true believers, grifters, ideologues, opportunists, and radicals. They believe, or pretend to believe, that America has been running a clandestine bioweapons program right under our noses. That America, under the guise of internationalism and global security, has really been trying to kill us all. They believe, in essence, that the Soviets were right all along.

Kirillov wouldn’t live long enough to fully appreciate the fruits of his labor. On Wednesday, America signaled its intent to pull the rug out from under Ukraine — suggesting the U.S. would abandon Ukraine in exchange for favorable terms on Russian oil and gas. The president emerged to castigate Zelensky for instigating the invasion of Ukraine, whitewashing Russia’s genocidal intent.

“Volodymyr Zelenskyy,” Trump wrote on Truth Social, “talked the United States of America into spending $350 Billion Dollars, to go into a War that couldn’t be won.”

On the contrary, Zelensky has spent the past three years trying to fight an information war on top of a kinetic one.

America, once a dependable ally, has just switched sides.

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That’s it for this week.

If you missed it, I strongly recommend listening to my fascinating conversation with

Dan Gardner

about the state of play in the Western alliance.

This past week, I also published a deep dive for WIRED about how COVID-19 conspiracy theories are setting up a witch hunt in the U.S. civil service.

Meanwhile, in Foreign Policy, I’ve got a story about Canada’s efforts to increase its presence in the Arctic — and how Trump may yet screw it up.

And for those of you in Ontario, my Star column this past week is a plea to vote for anybody, anybody, other than Doug Ford’s Conservatives.

Until next time.

1. Tulsa World, January 9, 1983

2. Honeybees and ‘yellow rain,’ Makhdzir Mardan and Peter Kevan. (Nature, 1989)

3. Biohazard, Ken Alibek (1999)

4. The Hamilton Spectator, October 05, 2018

5. TASS, March 7, 2022