Cassidy's Run (6 page)

Stephen Prior, president and CEO of DynPort, a company in Reston, Virginia, that produces all the vaccines for the Defense Department to counter a potential germ-warfare attack, explained that botulinum bacteria “can elicit seven different toxins, A through G. The strains of
Clostridium botulinum
were isolated by various scientists. Each strain produces one or more toxins.”

Scientists at Fort Detrick concentrated on the Hall strain of botulinum (named after the scientist who first isolated it), since it produces large amounts of Type A toxin, which is one of the most lethal forms of botulinum. “In animal studies,” Prior said, “type E is one of the more potent toxins but less potent than type A.”

Type E was discovered as the cause of two serious outbreaks of botulism in 1934, one in New York State that was traced to canned herring from Germany, and the other in Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine, also due to fish.
⁶
Type E is most often found lurking in the soils of Alaska, northern Europe, and Japan.

According to Benjamin Harris, Edgewood’s former technical director, the formula for yet another deadly toxin may also have been passed to the Russians. Asked whether he was aware of any deception operations during his years at Edgewood, Harris replied, “I know they were engaged in that as a matter of course. I was aware of one incident where we were asked by the intelligence people to supply information on a toxin that was not a good candidate for use as a weapon.

“It was ricin. It was considered a toxin because it was produced by a living organism, the castor-bean plant. We did not consider it a good candidate because it was difficult to come by in large quantities and had not been synthesized at that time.” Harris was never told in so many words to what use the information was put, but he said his impression was that it was passed to the Soviets.

The Edgewood scientists did not consider ricin a good weapon, but the KGB did. During the evening rush hour on September 7, 1978, Georgi I. Markov, a Bulgarian émigré, writer, and opponent of the Soviet-backed regime in Sofia, was walking in London when a man jabbed him in the back of his right thigh with the sharp tip of an umbrella. Mumbling an apology, the man disappeared into the crowds. Four days later, Markov was dead, the victim of a tiny metal pellet containing ricin toxin.

After the collapse of communism, the new government of Bulgaria admitted that its spy agency had been responsible for the famed “poison umbrella” murder of Markov. More details were provided by General Oleg Kalugin, the former chief of counterintelligence for the KGB, who said that General Sergei Mikhailovich Golubev, of the KGB’s Directorate K, was dispatched to Sofia, along with a second officer, to advise the Durzhavna Sigurnost (DS), the Bulgarian secret service, on the hit. In Sofia, the ricin was tried on a horse, which died, and a prisoner, who did not, because the pellet failed to release the toxin. The KGB also provided the umbrella and the poison pellet that were used to kill Markov. It is at least possible, therefore, that the umbrella attack employed the formula that Benjamin Harris believed had been passed to the Soviets.
⁷

Early in 1967,
as Cassidy recalls it, two unusual events occurred on one night when he met with Danilin at the bowling-alley parking lot. When Cassidy picked up Danilin, a second man was with him. “This was the only time there were two men, and there was no explanation of why a second person.” In the parking lot, “Mike asked, ‘What did you put in the rock?’ ” Cassidy briefed the GRU man on the latest batch of documents he had copied with his rollover camera.

“And then he briefed me on what they wanted me to look for. And the three of us got in my car, a blue Oldsmobile, and drove off to a residential area nearby. Mike motioned me to stop and to get out of the car, which was unusual, because normally only he got out of the car. The normal thing was, after a meeting, I would drop him off and I would stay in the car. So all three of us got out, near a streetlight.

“Joe,” Danilin said, “this is my friend Mike, he’s a real good guy, and he’ll take good care of you.”

Cassidy was startled by what happened next. “[Danilin] gave me a bear hug and released me and held my head in both hands and kissed me on the cheek.

“And he said, ‘I’ll never see you again.’ It was dark, but from the streetlight I could see tears welling up in his eyes and slowly making their way down his cheek. It was a very emotional scene, and I was truly taken aback by it.”

To the FBI, Danilin’s tears were further evidence that the GRU man completely trusted
WALLFLOWER
. Danilin was parting sorrowfully from a revered and valuable agent. And if the Soviets believed in Cassidy, they might also believe in the bogus nerve-gas formula he had given them.

C H A P T E R: 8

AND THE VOLGA TURNED WHITE

The Soviet nerve-gas
program—the equivalent of Edgewood Arsenal, Dugway, and the other facilities in the United States—was run in secret laboratories in Moscow and in equally guarded test sites and production plants located along a five-hundred-mile stretch of the Volga River.

In Moscow, research and development was conducted at the State Scientific Research Institute of Organic Chemistry and Technology, at 23 Shosse Entuziastov, four and a half miles due east of the Kremlin, not far from Izmailovo Park, the site of the capital’s popular flea market. There, scientists experimented with sarin, soman, and VX and sought to create newer and deadlier forms of nerve gas as well. Some 350 miles to the east, the test sites and plants stretched almost in a straight line from north to south along the Volga River basin. In the north, in the Chuvash republic, some of the formulas created in the labs in Moscow were produced in a plant in Novocheboksarsk, a suburb of Cheboksary, the capital of the region.

About 250 miles to the south, near the city of Volsk in the Saratov region, were two Shikhany military sites where Soviet nerve gases were developed and tested. Finally, another 250 miles south in Volgograd was the Kirov Chemical Works, known as Khimprom, a major production site. Part of the facility was the Nazi nerve-gas plant captured by the Soviet army after World War II and brought back to Russia. The Moscow research institute also had a branch in Volgograd.¹

In 1949, Boris Libman, a twenty-seven-year-old Latvian-born physical chemist and chemical engineer, began work at the pilot plant in Volgograd, in the section where nerve gases were produced and tested in small amounts.² At the Volgograd plant, Libman’s work soon caught the attention of his superiors and by 1958—the year that Operation
SHOCKER
was created—he was named chief engineer. In 1960, he received the Lenin Prize for his work on both sarin and soman. The prize came with ten thousand rubles, a significant sum at the time.

Volgograd began producing sarin (GB) in the pilot plant in 1949 and went into large-scale production in 1959. It also began turning out small amounts of soman (GD) in the late fifties.

As the Soviet scientists attempted to divine what the United States was doing in its nerve-gas research and production, some of the information filtering to Libman and the officials at Volgograd had been gleaned by the espionage operations of the GRU. The intelligence data flowed to Volgograd from the Moscow research institute, which in turn received it from an arm of Soviet intelligence with the cover name of the Institute of Medical Statistics.

Additional intelligence information was provided to Volgograd directly by the chemical-intelligence unit of the GRU. The unit passed along data about U.S. research on binary nerve-gas weapons and about BZ, the incapacitant developed at Edgewood.

More important, in 1972 Soviet intelligence learned the actual formula for VX, which had been invented in Britain and shared only with the scientists at Edgewood. Full-scale Soviet production of VX started in 1972 at Novocheboksarsk.

A dozen years earlier, Soviet scientists had read in the openly available literature that the United States was gearing up to produce soman. But the information was incorrect, although production had been under consideration.

At Edgewood in the late 1950s Benjamin Harris had in fact urged his bosses to commit to large-scale production of soman. Harris, a chemical engineer, had served in the Army Chemical Corps during World War II. He had been an assistant professor at Johns Hopkins University when he began consulting at Edgewood on how to handle the sarin that had been captured from the Nazis. “I went around to storage sites and advised people on handling the GB. How to open containers safely.” In 1949, Harris left academe for full-time work at Edgewood.

At that time, the scientists at Edgewood and army officials were still debating which of the major nerve gases to choose for large-scale production. Harris did a study of soman (GD): “I came to the conclusion that [its] increased toxicity and other properties made it a more efficient chemical agent.”

There was, however, a problem. Unlike sarin, which is produced with ordinary alcohol, soman relies on pinacolyl alcohol, a much more exotic substance.³ “It was a lot more expensive to manufacture, because it is a much more complicated alcohol, for which a plant would have to be built. There was no large-scale plant available in the U.S. at that time.”

But in Harris’s view, the cost of producing the pinacolyl alcohol was outweighed by the advantages. “If one makes a cost-benefits analysis of the cost of delivery of a weapon to the target, the cost of the fill is an insignificant portion of the total. The cost of delivery is much higher.

“Everybody knew soman was more toxic, and it is also more persistent, because the heavier alcohol makes the gas more persistent. Among the gases, GD, soman, is in the middle; it lasts longer than GB, but it’s not as persistent as VX. You can make it more persistent by putting in a thickener. I urged them to make GD,” Harris said. “I made that recommendation to Sy Silver,” Edgewood’s technical director at the time.

“We didn’t do it. They decided to make GB. It was decided at a high level.”

Saul Hormats recalled the decision. “Soman was not used,” he said, “because I decided GB was better, more volatile, you get a fast cloud with it. You would have to make a new alcohol for soman, and GB used normal alcohol, already available. You can’t buy a big tank-car load of pinacolyl alcohol, but you can buy one of rubbing alcohol.”

But none of this was known at the Kirov Chemical Works in Volgograd.

Large-scale production of sarin (GB) had begun at Volgograd in 1959 but the Russian scientists considered soman the best nerve gas they had at the time. They had first learned of it when the Soviet army captured the Spandau lab, west of Berlin, at the end of the war.

“At first, the Russian military establishment was against GD,” said a former Soviet scientist who preferred not to be identified. “They were interested in VX. Then they changed their minds. If America had large-scale GD, we must have it.”

And so, by 1960, the Russians had committed to large-scale production of soman, in the mistaken belief that the United States was following the same course. But they faced the identical problem of how to extract pinacolyl alcohol. Although relatively simple to produce today—it is used in the manufacture of a number of herbicides and fungicides—at the time, pinacolyl alcohol required five stages of electrolysis to produce. Work began on construction of a separate unit of the vast Volgograd complex to perform the electrolysis and begin full-scale production of soman.

With the Lenin Prize and increasing responsibility for the Soviet nerve-gas program, Boris Libman’s star was on the rise. Then, early in February 1965, a frightening event took place that was, for Libman, a harbinger of personal disaster. A levee on the Volga was destroyed by melting snow. At the plant, there was near panic because Libman and the other scientists feared that they might have contaminated a tidal pool behind the levee. If so, there was a real danger that tens of thousands of people in the lower regions of the Volga might be poisoned.

Hurriedly, the scientists began testing the river as far as twelve miles downstream. To their immense relief, they found no traces of nerve gas. After a day and a half, the levee was repaired, and the danger passed.

For Libman, however, the reprieve was short-lived. Four months later, on June 15, he looked out at the river and was horrified at what he saw. The Volga had turned white.

That, as closer inspection revealed, was the visual effect of thousands of fish that had died and turned belly-up. The immense fish kill extended for fifty miles along the river. The nerve-gas plant was immediately suspected as the logical cause.

Libman, however, soon discovered what he believed to be the real source of the ecological disaster: The huge Volgograd hydroelectric power station had closed its gates, and the river was twelve feet lower than normal. As a result, the heat of the sun had made the water warmer. All the dead fish were sturgeon, which are more sensitive to high temperature than other fish.

Libman’s protests were to no avail. As the chief engineer at the plant, a nonethnic Russian, and a Jew, he was an obvious target. Nor was it easy for Libman to prove that pollution from the nerve-gas plant had not somehow contributed to the fish kill. Libman might also have been blamed because Moscow had begun a large-scale program of hydropower construction up and down the Volga; to admit that the power station had caused the fish kill might have brought that project to a halt.

On March 9, 1966, Boris Libman was convicted of negligence and sentenced to two years in a prison labor camp in nearby Volsky. At the time, he was forty-three years old. He was stripped of his military medals and fined ten thousand new rubles, which was ten times the value of his Lenin Prize and the equivalent of two years’ salary. Six other officials of the chemical plant were convicted and fined but not sent to prison.

In an interview with the author in Moscow in 1993, Vil Mirzayanov, a scientist who worked for years in the Soviet nerve-gas program, blamed the fish kill on the chemical plant. “Boris Libman was chief engineer of the Volgograd plant in charge of soman production. Some of the soman toxins polluted the Volga, and the fish went belly-up. [Aleksei] Kosygin, then the prime minister, ordered someone be made an example, and Libman became the scapegoat.”
⁴

In the prison camp, Libman worked first as a foreman of a construction crew, building houses. After some months, he was allowed to work in a chemical plant during the day, developing phospho-organic stabilizers for rubber. To do so, he left the prison during the day but had to be back inside by 10
P.M.
Any later than that would be considered an escape, and five more years would be added to his sentence.

Although sentenced to two years, Libman was let out after one year because nobody else could start up production of soman at the Volgograd works. The soman production plant opened, with Libman back on the job, in 1968.

In 1972, Libman was transferred to Novocheboksarsk to oversee the full-scale production of VX. The Soviets, however, were not content with mass production of soman, sarin, and VX. Two scientists, Pyotr Petrovich Kirpichev and Vladimir Uglev, were working at Shikhany 1 on a new nerve gas, the like of which the world had never seen before.

Whether the formula for GJ that was passed to Moscow in Operation
SHOCKER
inspired this Soviet effort may never be known without access to the closed archives of the GRU. But in 1973, Kirpichev and Uglev perfected the new substance, said to be eight to ten times more powerful than any nerve gas then in existence.

Its name, which means “newcomer” in Russian, was Novichok.