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 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...