Biological Weapons in Non-Soviet Warsaw Pact Countries - Deadly Cultures: Biological Weapons Since 1945 - page 161

that this tight control will continue to be maintained.” 7 Similarly, Colonel
Kanatjan Alibekov, deputy director of Biopreparat before his defection in
1992, says, “to our best knowledge, none of our East-European satellite
states worked on a BW program.” 8
Romania
Libya's interest in sciences relevant to biowarfare may be significant in
the light of a possible Romanian-Libyan cooperation to develop BW
agents from about 1980, as mentioned by J. D. Douglass. 9 The situation
in Romania was always different from that in other WP countries. It
switched sides from Germany to the USSR as soon as the front between
retreating German and advancing Soviet troops reached Romanian terri-
tory. Consequently, the Red Army left this country a few years after the
war. During the Ceausescu era (1967-1989), the “supreme leader” used
nationalism to gain independence from the USSR within the context of
Communism. He built closer relations with China and with the West.
Thus, one cannot exclude the possibility that the Soviets' BW monopoly
did not apply to Romania. Theoretically, Romanian-Libyan cooperation
could have been mutually beneficial, since Romania had an advanced
chemical industry, while Libya could provide areas for field-testing. How-
ever, we have found no information in the public domain bearing on the
existence of such a program.
Czechoslovakia
Czechoslovakia—a country under strict Soviet control, especially after
1968—was also interested in biowarfare. It possessed a collection of vi-
ral and bacterial strains that might have been established for potential
biowarfare purposes. In 1994 the newspaper Cesky Denik reported that
viral and bacterial strains remaining from the WP era were still stored
at the Immunology and Microbiology Institute of the Military Medical
Academy in Technonin, Bohemia, and in the Central Military Hospital
in Prague-Stresovice. 10 They included strains of bacteria causing plague,
cholera, tularemia, meningitis, and psittacosis, and the smallpox virus.
Former and current directors of the Technonin institute denied that any
offensive weapon research had been conducted there and noted that