The Dead Hand (51 page)

In 1987, a fresh worry arose in Moscow among the top echelons of Biopreparat and the military. For all their efforts at secrecy, a speech on chemical weapons treaty verification by Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze threatened to crack open the door to their empire. During Gorbachev’s
glasnost
, Soviet diplomats in several negotiations had expressed a willingness to allow more intrusive verification of arms control treaties, to show they were not cheating. This new openness was the spirit of a speech August 6, 1987, by Shevardnadze at the Conference on Disarmament in Geneva. In the spring, Gorbachev had announced the Soviet Union would stop manufacturing chemical weapons. Now, Shevardnadze went further and promised support for “the principle of mandatory challenge inspections without right of refusal.” This was a “vivid manifestation” of Soviet commitment to “genuine and effective verification,” he said. For years, the United States had accused the Soviet Union of violating treaties and demanded effective verification. It was the essence of Reagan’s favorite Russian slogan, “trust, but verify.” While Shevardnadze’s overture was made for chemical weapons, it dawned on Soviet biological warfare experts back in Moscow that it could easily be applied to them, too. The inspections could take unpredictable turns. If the West wanted to peek into a suspect facility—say, Obolensk or Koltsovo or Stepnogorsk—how could they refuse? Nikita Smidovich, an aide to Shevardnadze who wrote the Geneva speech, said the biological weapons chiefs realized the chemical inspections threatened their closed world. They concluded, he said, if the inspectors “can go everywhere, they will probably get to us as well, so we need to get prepared.”
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On October 2, 1987, after Shevardnadze’s speech, the Central Committee and Council of Ministers issued an order to speed up preparations for possible international inspections. The goal was not to be open, but the opposite: continue the secret germ warfare program by moving the formulas and factories to a more secret place. And do it quicker.
¹¹

The Sverdlovsk deception reached a new level of audacity April 10–17, 1988, when Burgasov, Nikiforov and a third Soviet medical official, Vladimir Sergiyev, came to the United States with a presentation of their
theory about contaminated meat and bonemeal. Meselson said he arranged the visit in hopes that the Soviet officials would be exposed to expert questioning from American scientists. The Soviets delivered their bogus story to distinguished audiences three times: at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, the Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health in Baltimore and the American Academy of the Arts and Sciences in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “It was clear to us that infectious meat was the cause,” claimed Burgasov. “The whole idea of some sort of aerosol is impossible,” he said. He dismissed the possibility of a leak of anthrax bacteria from Compound 19. “I couldn’t imagine that in the midst of the highly populated area that there could be any work on highly dangerous pathogens,” he said, although he knew that was probably what happened. Nikiforov, who also knew the truth, narrated autopsy slides that portrayed great black intestinal sores, which pointed toward contaminated meat, not inhalation. In all, the Soviet officials had addressed more than two hundred private and government medical scientists and arms control experts, delivering untruths to all of them. Afterward, summarizing the Soviet presentations, Meselson wrote that he found the Soviet explanation “plausible and consistent with what is known from previous outbreaks of human and animal anthrax in the USSR and elsewhere, including the US.” Meselson still hoped to send a group of American scientists to Sverdlovsk.
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Alibek, who had built the anthrax assembly line at Stepnogorsk and was now working in Moscow at the Biopreparat headquarters, sensed the tension over possible international inspections. “Once knowledgeable foreign scientists set foot in one of our installations, our secret would be out,” he wrote in his memoir. When Alibek became first deputy director of Biopreparat in 1988, he was put in charge of hiding the evidence. The assignment soon crowded out his other duties. A special task force for the deception plans was set up at the Moscow Institute of Applied Biochemistry. Even the name of the institute was itself a deception. “The institute had no connection with biochemistry: its function was to design and manufacture equipment for our labs,” he said. The task force was given the equivalent of $400,000 to create a cover story, or “legend,” for Biopreparat
operations and to demonstrate the “civilian” character of the work, that they were making medicines to defend against disease, or pesticides.

“Nevertheless, some of us worried that foreign inspectors would see through our schemes.” By 1988, Biopreparat had produced an instruction manual for employees on how to answer questions for inspectors, Alibek said. “Every conceivable question—What is this room for? Why is this equipment here?—was followed by a prepared reply, which workers were expected to memorize.”

“I was most concerned about our smallpox project,” he said. “If foreign inspectors brought the right equipment to the Vector compound in Siberia, they would immediately pick up evidence of smallpox.” As part of the global smallpox eradication effort, in which the Soviet Union had played a leading role, there were supposed to be only two repositories for the remaining smallpox strains, one in the United States and the other in Moscow at the Ivanovsky Institute of the Ministry of Health. This is what the Soviet Union had pledged to the World Health Organization. What the world didn’t know until years later was that the Soviet Union had broken its word.
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In 1988, worried about foreign inspections, an order was given by the Soviet military to get rid of a large supply of anthrax spores that had been removed from Sverdlovsk after the accident. This
Bacillus anthracis
had been in storage at the town of Zima, near Irkutsk, in Siberia. When the order came to destroy it, more than one hundred tons of anthrax solution, in 250-liter stainless steel containers, was taken by train, and then by ship, to Vozrozhdeniye Island, where it was mixed with hydrogen peroxide and formic acid, and then buried in eleven graves dug in the earth. The graves, four to six feet deep, were unlined, so nothing would prevent the anthrax from seeping deeper into the ground. As they lay there under the earth, the anthrax spores were not all destroyed. Some remained active for many years to come.
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One thousand miles east of Moscow, in a flatlands beyond the industrial city of Chelyabinsk, stood a nondescript rectangle-shaped compound, more than a mile long and nearly a mile wide, situated almost precisely on a north-south axis, with orderly rows of low-lying wood-plank warehouses and corrugated metal rooftops, surrounded by trees and traversed by rail lines. Inside the warehouses, berths cradled row upon row of projectiles, from 85mm artillery rounds to larger warheads for Scud missiles. They were set on racks like so many wine bottles in a dark cellar. In this one remote compound, near the town of Shchuchye in western Siberia, 1.9 million projectiles were filled with 5,447 metric tons of the nerve agents sarin, soman and a Soviet analogue of the nerve gas VX. All told, it was 13.6 percent of the Soviet chemical weapons arsenal.
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The projectiles were the legacy of a shadowy era of the arms race in which the United States, Great Britain and the Soviet Union stockpiled massive amounts of chemical weapons, while negotiations to restrict them dragged on for two decades in Geneva without result. From the beginning of his disarmament drive, Gorbachev wanted to be rid of these chemical weapons.

The killing power of chemical weapons is monstrous. Less than ten milligrams of the American nerve agent VX—a small drop of fluid on the skin—could kill a grown man in fifteen minutes or less. A liter of such an agent contains enough lethal doses, theoretically, to kill one million people.
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Such nerve agents serve no peaceful purpose—they are solely agents of death. The author Jonathan Tucker described them as colorless, odorless liquids that enter the body through the lungs or skin and attack the nervous system. The victim falls to the ground, convulses and loses consciousness, after which inhibition of the breathing center of the brain and paralysis of the respiratory muscles cause death by asphyxiation within minutes.

The Soviets had amassed at least forty thousand tons of chemical agents, and the United States thirty-one thousand tons. While silent about biological weapons, Gorbachev openly sought to get rid of the chemical arms. He announced in Prague on April 13, 1987, that the Soviet Union would stop manufacturing them. He mothballed the Soviet factories for making the chemicals and filling the munitions.

After his speech on surprise inspections in Geneva, Shevardnadze invited foreign observers to a top-secret Soviet chemical weapons testing facility at Shikhany, on the Volga River 560 miles southeast of Moscow.
Shevardnadze said he wanted to “build an atmosphere of trust.” On October 3–4, 1987, a delegation of 110 experts from 45 countries and 55 journalists were flown there in four airplanes. At the facility, on a freshly poured concrete slab, the delegation saw nineteen projectiles and containers, including hand grenades, rocket and artillery rounds, and a nine-foot-tall chemical warhead for the Scud.
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The visit seemed to be another sign of the Gorbachev
glasnost
. Yuri Nazarkin, the Soviet representative at arms control talks, declared, “We have nothing to hide.”
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This was not quite true. Missing from the lineup on the concrete pad was a new type of chemical weapon Soviet scientists were desperately trying to develop to keep pace with the United States.

Until the 1980s, both the United States and Soviet Union built chemical weapons that contained a single agent that would be dispersed when detonated. This was called a unitary chemical weapon. The agents tended to degrade over time. The United States stopped manufacturing them in 1969, when potential hazards were discovered in the U.S. arsenal. In 1985, Congress approved destroying the older weapons while authorizing the creation of a new type of chemical weapon, known as a binary. It would have two parts, each a stable ingredient that, when combined at the last minute in the shell or bomb, would turn into a toxic cocktail. This was a tricky engineering feat, but a binary weapon might have a longer shelf life. Reagan approved production of the new binary weapon right after the December 1987 summit with Gorbachev. “Maybe that will get the Soviets to join us in eliminating chemical warfare,” he wrote in his diary.
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The Soviets were already rushing—in secret—to create the same thing. They experimented with binary weapons in the 1970s, but failed to come up with a successful model. Then, in the 1980s, they launched another quest. One part of this new drive was to create a binary weapon out of ordinary chemicals that might be used in fertilizer or pesticides. These were called the
novichok
generation of agents, or the “new guy.”

Vil Mirzayanov was a witness to the potential power of these deadly nerve agents. He had worked for many years at the headquarters of chemical weapons research in Moscow. In May 1987, one of his friends, an experienced military chemist, Andrei Zheleznyakov, suffered an accident. He was a test engineer whose job was to check finished products. He was working on a binary weapon, one of the
novichok
generation.
According to Mirzayanov, there was a chemical reactor under a fume hood, and then a pipe carrying the substance to a spectrometer, which was too big to put under the hood. It was in the room, with ventilation on the ceiling, but not protected by the hood.

The pipe somehow broke, and the poison leaked into the air. Zheleznyakov quickly sealed the leak, but it was too late. He felt the impact immediately—myosis, the constriction of the pupil of the eye. “I saw rings before my eyes—red, orange,” he later recalled. “Bells were ringing inside my head. I choked. Add to this the feeling of fear—as if something was about to happen at any moment. I sat down and told the guys: I think it has ‘got’ me. They dragged me out of the room—I was still able to move—and took me to the chief. He looked at me and said, ‘Have a cup of tea, everything will be fine.’ I drank the tea and immediately threw up.

“They took me to the medical unit,” he added, “where I was injected with an antidote. I felt a little better. The chief told me: ‘Go home and lie down. Come back tomorrow.’ They assigned me an escort, and we walked past a few bus stops. We were already passing the church near Ilyich Square, when suddenly I saw the church lighting up and falling apart. I remember nothing else.”

His escort dragged Zheleznyakov back to the medical unit. They called an ambulance and took him to the hospital, accompanied by KGB agents, who told doctors he had suffered food poisoning from eating contaminated sausage. The KGB agents made the doctors sign a pledge never to discuss the case. After eighteen days in intensive care, doctors managed to save his life.