00:00In April 1979, something went wrong inside a Soviet military building in Sverdlovsk.
00:05A small mechanical failure, a clogged filter, and within days, people started dying.
00:11They called it bad meat, contaminated sausage from a local market.
00:15The Soviet government had an answer ready before anyone even asked the question,
00:19but the deaths kept coming, mostly men, mostly from the same side of the city.
00:24All within a narrow wind corridor stretching southeast from military compound 19,
00:29a secret bioweapons facility the Soviet Union wasn't supposed to have.
00:33Soldiers in unmarked uniforms went door to door.
00:36Medical records vanished.
00:38Doctors were ordered to list causes of death as pneumonia.
00:41Autopsies were performed under military supervision,
00:44and tissue samples were taken and never returned.
00:47At least 64 people died, possibly far more.
00:51When American investigators finally gained access in the early 1990s,
00:55they found something that stopped them cold.
00:57The spores in the victim's lungs matched a weaponized strain of anthrax
01:01that no natural outbreak could explain.
01:04The Soviet Union had been caught.
01:06But by then, the evidence was almost completely gone.
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