The Dead Hand

by David E. Hoffman

  Popov and his wife, Taissia, were desperate. “I realized that all my efforts were fruitless,” he said, “and I saw no future for myself.” She feared for their daughters, then seven and seventeen. “I realized there was no money to support the children,” she said. “I was scared. I said to Sergei, we need to do something.”

  Twelve years earlier, when he had spent six months in Cambridge, England, Popov worked in the laboratory of a microbiologist, Michael Gait. In the summer of 1991, Gait came to Moscow for an international scientific conference and was delighted to see Popov again. Popov had driven all the way into the city to see Gait, and invited him to visit his home and meet his family. They headed south, driving an hour to Obolensk in Popov’s white Zhiguli car. As they approached the restricted zone around the institute, Popov warned Gait to be absolutely silent as they drove through the checkpoints. No one stopped them. They didn’t go to the institute, but to Popov’s apartment, where Gait enjoyed a meal with the family, sampling homemade brandy and listening to the Beatles. Gait recalled that the Popovs told him their money was drying up. Taissia was in tears. They asked for help in getting a postdoctoral appointment for Sergei in the United Kingdom. Gait promised to do everything he could. In the autumn, he received a letter from Sergei saying they were down to their “last sack of potatoes.”35

  Alibek finally got a chance to see America. At the last minute, he was added to the Soviet delegation making a reciprocal visit to the United States for the one in January to the Soviet Union by the British and American experts. (Davis and Kelly came, too, representing the United Kingdom.) For many years, the KGB had claimed there was a hidden U.S. germ warfare effort. Now Alibek could check for himself. The thirteen-member Soviet delegation arrived in Washington on December 11, 1991. The delegation also included Sandakhchiev, director of Koltsovo, and Urakov, director of Obolensk. They were two of the most important institute directors in the Soviet biological weapons program.

  The first stop was Fort Detrick, Maryland, where biological weapons research had been halted in 1969 by Nixon’s decision. “We didn’t believe a word of Nixon’s announcement,” Alibek recalled. “We thought the Americans were only wrapping a thicker cloak around their activities.” In the first building the Soviet team wanted to see, white-coated technicians explained that they were working on antidotes to toxins from shellfish and animals. Alibek thought they were too friendly. “I despaired of ever penetrating beneath the surface,” he wrote in his memoirs. Next, the Soviets asked to inspect a large structure on the grounds at Fort Detrick, which looked like an upside-down ice cream cone. Their bus took them there, and through a pair of open bay doors, they saw a gray powder. They asked the Americans what it was.

  “Salt,” they were told, for treating icy roads in the winter.

  One member of the Soviet delegation went up to the pile, put his finger in it and put it to his mouth. He looked embarrassed. “It’s salt,” he said.

  They went on to visit another laboratory, which they were told was developing vaccines against anthrax. “The small size of the operation made it clear that weapons production was out of the question there,” Alibek recalled. “The Americans had just two specialists in anthrax. We had two thousand.”

  They flew to Salt Lake City, Utah, to see the Dugway Proving Grounds, where germ warfare experiments were halted in 1969. On the way, Alibek said, “I stared in wonderment at the well-paved highways, the well-stocked stores, and the luxurious homes where ordinary Americans lived.” While some of the buildings at Dugway seemed similar to those used in Soviet test sites, Alibek saw “there were no animals, no cages, not even the footprint of experimental weapons activity.”

  Then they flew to Pine Bluff, Arkansas, where the United States once had a stockpile of pathogens, which were destroyed after Nixon’s decision. Alibek realized as he walked through the buildings that the facilities were now solely for civilian use. On the second day, the Soviet delegation was on a bus, passing various structures, when one of the military officers shouted, “Stop the bus! Stop the bus!” The officer pointed to a tall metal structure on a rise. “We have to check that out,” he insisted.

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Alibek replied. “It’s a water tower.”

  “I don’t think so,” the officer said, running to the tower. He climbed it all the way to the top. Alibek could hear some of the Americans stifle a laugh. “At this point,” Alibek concluded, “the absurdity of our quest was clear to me.”

  There was no American biological weapons program, as Alibek had believed for years. “It was a shock,” Alibek said. “When you spend 17 years doing something, you considered it important, and—suddenly you realize, you have been lied to for 17 years! I was really offended, and I started hating the system.” Alibek was instructed to write a report about the trip, saying he found evidence of biological weapons in the United States, the exact opposite of the truth. At this point, he decided to quit Biopreparat. He returned to Moscow on December 25. As he entered the hallway of his apartment, arms full of gifts from the United States, his wife told him some startling news about Gorbachev.36

  Gorbachev fought to hold the Soviet Union together, but could not. Soon after Baker had arrived on December 16 for meetings with Gorbachev and Yeltsin, he learned that Yeltsin had already signed decrees effectively taking over the Soviet Foreign and Interior ministries. Yeltsin went out of his way to display his preeminence, making sure he met with Baker in Saint Catherine’s Hall in the Kremlin, the gilded chamber where Baker had often held talks with Gorbachev.37 Yevgeny Shaposhnikov, the defense minister for the new commonwealth, was at Yeltsin’s side. Baker saw the end was near for Gorbachev. “I was really saddened,” he recalled.38

  Baker and Yeltsin were left alone at the end of their meeting to talk about nuclear command and control. Yeltsin gave Baker a description of how the system would work: in effect, only he and Shaposhnikov, commander of strategic forces with control over all the nuclear weapons, would possess the briefcases, the Cheget. The three other republics with nuclear weapons, Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan, would get a “hot line,” a telephone, but not a nuclear briefcase. Gorbachev still had a briefcase, but his would be taken away by the end of December, Yeltsin said. The system was one of “consultation,” Yeltsin said, “not coordination.”

  According to Baker’s notes of the conversation, Yeltsin told him the leaders of the other republics didn’t understand how nuclear command and control worked. “They’ll be satisfied with having telephones,” he said. And once Russia got all the nuclear weapons back on its soil, even the telephones would be removed. Baker wrote in his notes:

  “5 tele.—2 briefcases for now

  Only Pres. of Russia can launch—Def. Min. won’t be able to alone.”

  Later, in a private meeting with Shaposhnikov, Baker asked him to go over, once again, the nuclear command and control arrangements. Shaposhnikov confirmed what Yeltsin had told Baker.

  “Who gives you orders today?” Baker asked.

  “Gorbachev,” Shaposhnikov replied. He would not speculate about the future.

  But Baker was worried. He had written at the top of his notepad a question: “Who gives Shaposhnikov his orders?”39

  About 5 P.M. on December 25, Gorbachev called Bush, who was at Camp David celebrating Christmas morning with his family. The Soviet president said he planned to resign, stepping down as commander in chief and transferring his authority to use nuclear weapons to Yeltsin. “I can assure you that everything is under strict control,” he said. “There will be no disconnection. You can have a very quiet Christmas evening.”40

  At 6:55 P.M., Gorbachev entered the crowded Kremlin television studio, Room No. 4, crammed with network cameras and bright lights. He was carrying a briefcase with his departure speech, and a decree giving up his role as commander in chief of the armed forces. He put the decree on the small table and asked Andrei Grachev, his press secretary, for a pen. He tested it on a sheet of paper and asked for one with a smoother tip.
The head of the CNN crew reached over Grachev’s shoulder and offered his own pen to Gorbachev. With a flourish, he signed the document just before he went on the air.

  His short address reflected his long, remarkable journey. When he took office in 1985, Gorbachev said, he felt it was a shame that a nation so richly endowed, so brimming with natural resources and human talent endowed by God, was living so poorly compared with the developed countries of the world. He blamed the Soviet command system and ideology, and he blamed the “terrible burden of the arms race.” The Soviet people had “reached the limits of endurance,” he said. “All attempts at partial reform—and there were many—failed, one after another. The country was losing its future. We could not go on living like this. Everything had to be drastically changed.”

  After the speech, Gorbachev went back to his office, where Shaposhnikov was waiting for him, along with the duty officers carrying the suitcase with the nuclear command codes and communications links. Yeltsin earlier agreed to come to Gorbachev’s office to get the Cheget. But Yeltsin was upset by something in Gorbachev’s speech and changed his mind, refusing to come, proposing instead they meet halfway, in Saint Catherine’s Hall. Gorbachev thought this was a stupid game, and brusquely decided to dispatch Shaposhnikov and the duty officers off with the suitcase without him. “They disappeared into the corridors in search of their new boss,” recalled Grachev.41

  The Soviet hammer-and-sickle came down after the speech, and the Russian tricolor flag was hoisted over the Kremlin.

  The collapse of the Soviet Union marked the end of seven decades of a failed ideology, hypermilitarization and rigid central controls. It left behind 6,623 nuclear warheads on land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles, 2,760 nuclear warheads on sea-based missiles, 822 nuclear bombs on planes and 150 warheads deployed on cruise missiles, as well as perhaps another 15,000 tactical nuclear warheads scattered in depots, trains and warehouses.42 It left behind at least 40,000 tons of chemical weapons, including millions of shells filled with nerve gas so deadly that one drop would kill a human being. It left behind tons of anthrax bacteria spores, buried on Vozrozhdeniye Island, and perhaps as much as 20 metric tons of smallpox in weapons, as well as pathogens the world had never known, stashed in the culture collections at Obolensk and Koltsovo. It left behind hundreds of thousands of workers who knew the secrets, and who were now embittered, dispirited, and, in some cases, down to their last sack of potatoes.

  ————— 18 —————

  THE SCIENTISTS

  In a televised speech on December 29, 1991, Boris Yeltsin promised to rule an entirely new country. “We are abandoning mirages and illusions,” he declared. “We are ridding ourselves of the militarization of our life, we have stopped constantly preparing for war with the whole world, and much more besides.” Yeltsin described the grim inheritance from the Soviet Union: devastated farmlands, the economy “gravely ill,” and towering external debt.1

  In a gamble with history, Yeltsin attempted to make a rapid leap from failed socialism to a market economy, setting prices free and putting the colossal stock of state property into private hands. Yeltsin believed it was the only route for Russia to become a normal country, tap into global markets, modernize aging factories and lift living standards. But there were stark, unsettling dislocations. A few tycoons, known as oligarchs, grew wealthy, while millions of workers got their wages months late, if at all, or were paid in barter goods, such as socks and jars of pickles. Even though the new capitalism featured stock markets, private banks, expensive restaurants, luxury cars and sparkling new office towers, the deeper transformation—creating a modern industrial base, building rule of law, civil society and a diversified economy—was excruciatingly difficult and did not come about at first. The sad reality of these years was that many people could not adapt to the new world, and were set adrift. The weapons scientists and workers of the sprawling Soviet defense complex were among them.

  Yeltsin deliberately let the military-industrial complex atrophy. He viewed the old defense establishment as a relic of the hypermilitarization that had so doomed the Soviet Union, and had little faith the aging institutes and factories could ever be converted to peaceful purposes or be of much use in the new capitalism. Yeltsin and his team were determined to completely raze the Soviet system and build a new one. There were many reasons for this approach, not the least of which was that Yeltsin possessed a much stronger view of what he wanted to tear down than what he wanted to build. He sought to eliminate the overweening state that he knew at first hand, while he had no model, just instincts, for constructing a modern free-market democracy. It was an enormous task. As Yeltsin biographer Leon Aron pointed out, Yeltsin’s first revolutions were carried out against the party and the Soviet empire, both with a rising tide of popular support. This time, Yeltsin had only “the shallows and fetid waters of the ‘command economy,’ choked with decomposing and toxic debris.”2

  On February 14, 1992, in a car speeding through the forests of western Siberia, James A. Baker III, the U.S. secretary of state, witnessed a breathtaking tableau: white snow, frozen lakes, birch stands and a storybook troika—a sleigh pulled by three horses—in the distance. Then he passed through several checkpoints and barbed-wire perimeter fences to arrive at the citadel of Soviet nuclear bomb builders, the All Union Scientific Research Institute of Technical Physics, Chelyabinsk-70, one of two Soviet nuclear weapons design laboratories, a facility so secret it was not on any Soviet map. Chelyabinsk-70 was established in 1955 as a competitor to the first Soviet nuclear weapon design bureau at Arzamas-16. The scientists at Chelyabinsk-70 had pioneered miniaturization of nuclear warheads for the Soviet Union, allowing many small explosives to be placed atop a giant intercontinental ballistic missile, or put inside shells so small they could be fired as artillery on the battlefields of Europe.3 The two labs were analogous to Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.

  As Baker pulled up to the main building at Chelyabinsk-70, about eight stories tall, hundreds of technicians and scientists pressed against every available window, shouting and waving. Their jubilation took Baker by surprise. “I felt a bit as though I had landed from Mars,” he recalled, “an alien curiosity that these men and women just had to see with their own eyes.” The facility itself was another shock, shabby and threadbare. Whereas Livermore and Los Alamos were champions of supercomputing, there were no computer monitors in sight. When Baker was escorted to a small lecture hall to meet with twenty-five of the institute’s senior scientists, he sat with his back to a dusty chalkboard. It reminded him of a Princeton undergraduate classroom in the 1950s. He told the scientists, seated in front of him, “This is every bit as remarkable for us as it is for you.” Later, he recalled in his memoir, “As we sat down, I thought, here are the men that designed the weapons that defined the Cold War, and we’re about to discuss how we in the West can help them secure their future.”

  The scientists and engineers talked openly of their deteriorating living standards. This once-insular elite was in trouble, and reaching beyond the barbed wire for help. Yevgeny Avrorin, the scientific director, standing at the end of the table by the blackboard, said the laboratory faced a “difficult, trying situation” as government subsidies dwindled. The scientists didn’t want handouts, he said; they wanted productive and challenging work. They possessed an enormous storehouse of knowledge and equipment, and felt they had much they could give back to society. The deputy director, Vladislav Nikitin, said that salaries for top scientists were no more than fifteen hundred rubles a month, or $15 at the official exchange rate. Chelyabinsk-70 employed sixteen thousand people, about nine thousand technicians and about seven thousand scientists and engineers. “We have no shortage of ideas,” Avrorin said, presenting Baker with a long list of commercial products they could produce if they had Western investors: artificial diamonds, fiber optics, food irradiation, nuclear medicine. But they had no investors, and no way t
o reach any. Avrorin didn’t yet have e-mail. Avrorin then handed Baker the paper he had been reading from, apologizing for a hasty translation into English.4

  Baker appealed to them not to lose hope. “We know that right now your options at home are limited and outlaw regimes and terrorists may try to exploit your situation and influence you to build new weapons of war.” As the physicists and engineers scribbled in tiny notebooks, Baker added, “Some talk about the brain drain problem. But I think we should talk about the brain gain solution, and that is a solution of putting you to the work of peace, to accelerate reform and build democracy here, to help your people live better lives for decades to come.” He described plans by the West to establish a new center, with international funding, to support their science and technology work.

  Baker’s visit offered a hint of a crisis that was gathering force and would persist for years. If Chelyabinsk-70, located 1,118 miles east of Moscow, was at all emblematic of the Soviet military-industrial complex, then the potential for disaster was greater than anyone had imagined: scientists with knowledge to build weapons of mass destruction were wanting for food and medicines.5

  Anne M. Harrington arrived in Moscow with her family just after the August 1991 coup attempt. Her husband was a foreign service officer in the political section of the U.S. Embassy, and the State Department was starting a new program to provide more opportunity to spouses, offering them positions as analysts. Harrington, eager to help, became the science and technology analyst in the Moscow embassy. Her office was dreadful, located in an underground, windowless annex. After a recent fire in the main embassy building, sacks of wet, burned documents were piled nearby. The odor of cinders lingered. Harrington worked on a desktop thrown over two wooden sawhorses. She volunteered to track the “brain drain” problem because no one else was interested. “I put up my hand and said, ‘I can do that,’” she recalled. In the first weeks after the Soviet Union collapsed, Harrington met with science counselors from other Western embassies, and sent a cable back to Washington. “Is brain drain good or bad?” she wrote, adding: