The Spy Who Came in From the Mold — Nikolai Mikhailovich Borodin, the First Russian Biological Scientist to Defect to the West?

Codenamed Wildcat, Borodin Provided the West with Details of Ambitious Soviet Plans for the Creation of an Antibiotics Industry and the USSR’s Capabilities for Biological Warfare

Fig. 1: Order of Lenin as Awarded to Nikolai Mikhailovich Borodin, Source: Own Work, 30 November 2007, Author: Ilich (I, the copyright holder of this work, release this work into the public domain. This applies worldwide. In some countries this may not be legally possible; if so: I grant anyone the right to use this work for any purpose, without any conditions, unless such conditions are required by law).

Introduction

In recent decades there have been several high-ranking defectors to the West from Moscow-led biological warfare programmes. Two of the most high-profile have been Vladimir Artemovich Pasechnik, who fled to the United Kingdom, and Kanatzhan Baizakovich Alibekov (better-known as “Ken Alibek”), who travelled to the United States. Both were senior scientists in the All-Union Science Production Association Biopreparat, the agency which spearheaded Moscow’s offensive BW programmes in the 1970s and 1980s. However, long before these two well-documented defections, there was the case of Dr Nikolai Mikhailovich Borodin, who, in 1948, while on a government-sponsored mission to the UK seeking to aquire the latest antibiotics production technology, wrote to the Soviet Ambassador in London, renouncing his Soviet Citizenship.