The Dead Hand

by David E. Hoffman

  Then, on the eighth page, in the most dramatic turn in his presentation, Wisner referred to the information that had come from the informer Temple Fortune—information that work on biological weapons was going on “over the past year,” which meant the months Yeltsin was in power.

  We have reports that the All Union Institute of Ultra-Pure Biological Preparations in St. Petersburg is constructing, equipping, and staffing a facility at Lakhta designed to do scale-up work to allow industrial production of a strain of plague—a strain developed to be resistant to cold and heat and to 16 antibiotics—for offensive purposes.

  Wisner also revealed that the United States now knew exactly how the Soviets had covered up the germ warfare activity at Ultra-Pure when the American-British team had first visited in January 1991. He said they knew that information was destroyed that would be incriminating; laboratories were cleaned to remove traces of plague bacteria; employees who knew what was going on were sent away; and microphones were installed to monitor every conversation. After the visit, the institute continued to refine the plague agents. Wisner said the United States believed that “by the spring of this year, according to the information we have been provided, research and development was completed and the question of the suitability for large-scale production resolved.” This added a note of super-urgency; Wisner was accusing the Russians of getting ready to manufacture a super-plague weapon.

  Wisner’s bill of particulars identified the cities, the programs, the institutes and the disease agents in the Soviet biological weapons program. He hoped this approach would, quietly, begin to pry open the closed doors. But the Russians didn’t flinch. They listened to his presentation stone-faced, and insisted they did not have biological weapons. Among those most recalcitrant was Yevstigneev, the general in charge of the military’s biological weapons program. “They gave not an inch in the face-to-face,” Wisner recalled. No one admitted that the Russian declaration to the United Nations was incomplete. When the Sverdlovsk incident was raised, Yevstigneev once again stuck by the cover-up of previous years. He said it may have been caused by contaminated meat, and he insisted that it was not from Compound 19. He also said that Biopreparat had nothing to do with offensive germ warfare.14

  The next day, Wisner and the Russians reached an agreement on a new round of inspections between Russia, the United States and Britain, which became known as the Trilateral Agreement. The Russians had again insisted any inspections be reciprocal, although it was Russia, and not the United States or Britain, that had violated the treaty. As they had done before, the Russian generals essentially played for time. There had already been one round of inspections in 1991 that had deepened suspicions in the West that the Russians were not telling the full story.

  Had Wisner’s indictment become fully public, it might have ignited a firestorm of demands from around the world that Russia simply close everything down at once. But Wisner believed in quiet diplomacy rather than open confrontation. “We came without believing we would get a whole loaf, and over time we got half a loaf,” he said. “Trying to force a public embarrassment, shock, confrontation wasn’t going to get you a thing, and chipping away at the internal contradictions on the Russian side, nudging, pushing along was a better strategy.”

  The Trilateral Agreement was unveiled at a press conference in Moscow September 14, 1992. In a joint statement, the three countries “reaffirmed their commitment to comply fully” with the Biological Weapons Convention and “declared their agreement that biological weapons must have no place in the armed forces.” Russia said it had taken measures to “remove concerns over compliance,” including “the cessation of offensive research,” budget cuts and closing of facilities. The statement said Yeltsin had ordered a “checkup” of Ultra-Pure in St. Petersburg “in response to expressed U.S. and British concerns.”

  At the press conference, the Russians insisted everything was just fine. Grigori Berdennikov, the deputy foreign minister who led the Russian side in the talks, said that after Yeltsin’s decree, “activities that would be running counter to the convention are not undertaken in this country.” Yevstigneev brushed aside any suggestion that plague research was conducted at Pasechnik’s institute. They were actually making “a vaccine to prevent chicken plague,” he insisted.

  The new Russia was not yet completely open, and Wisner said he realized the mission had not been a total success. “The Russians didn’t say, ‘Ah hah! You got us! We’ll comply.’” In fact, in the private meetings as well as the public the Russians had lied to the Americans repeatedly.

  The collapse of the Soviet Union opened a door for Matthew Meselson, the microbiologist at Harvard University, to further investigate the Sverdlovsk anthrax epidemic. He had been consulted about it by the CIA in 1980, visited Moscow to inquire in 1986 and brought the Soviet officials to the United States in 1988, when they claimed contaminated meat had been the cause. But Meselson had never been allowed to go to the scene of the epidemic.

  In the autumn of 1991, a local legislator in Sverdlovsk, Larissa Mishustina, demanded that Yeltsin organize a new investigation. Mishustina represented families of the deceased; she said they had received only fifty rubles each, and the military continued to deny any responsibility for the deaths. “I think you know not less than I do that the death of 70 people was the consequence of a leak of bacteriological weapons,” she wrote to Yeltsin. Following her appeal, on December 6, 1991, Alexei Yablokov, the prominent environmentalist whom Yeltsin had appointed to be his counselor on ecology and health care, wrote out a spravka, or information memorandum, on the situation and then a separate letter to Yeltsin, saying the official version of events had hidden the truth about the military’s role. Beyond a doubt, Yablokov wrote, the epidemic was linked to Compound 19. Yablokov also said he had learned that the primary official documents had been destroyed by the KGB a year earlier.15

  When Meselson heard of Yablokov’s interest, he sent a letter January 22, 1992, offering to help any investigation. Yablokov replied February 5, saying he had doubts “that after all these years you can find scientific evidence” of what happened at Sverdlovsk. Meselson pressed him again. On March 23, Yablokov responded, referring to the case as “skeletons” in the closet. By coming to Sverdlovsk to investigate, “You can only catch some rumors and visit cemetery with 64 graves,” he wrote. Nevertheless, Yablokov helped pave the way for a visit, writing letters of introduction for Meselson.

  Meselson led an expedition that included Jeanne Guillemin, a medical sociologist, and other experts.16 They arrived in the city—now back to its original name, Yekaterinburg—in June 1992. They were able to examine the slides and samples from the victims, hidden in 1979 by Grinberg and Abramova. The two pathologists had written a scientific paper, based on their preserved materials on the forty-two cases, which concluded that “these patients died because of inhalation of aerosols containing B. anthracis.”17

  The expedition made important discoveries. Mishustina, the local legislator, had obtained from the KGB a list of sixty-four people who were killed in the outbreak, and was able to locate eleven who had survived. Guillemin, assisted by colleagues at the Ural State University, then interviewed relatives and friends of the victims, walking the streets of the area where they were exposed, examining headstones in the cemetery, and investigating medical records. Using this data, she and Meselson mapped where the anthrax victims worked and lived at the time of the epidemic. They also plotted on the map the direction of the wind on Monday, April 2, 1979, using meteorological records. The results were revealing: most of the people who contracted anthrax in those days either worked, lived or attended daytime military reserve classes in a narrow zone downwind from Compound 19 and stretching southward about 2.5 miles. And for another thirty miles or so beyond, sheep and cows died of anthrax.

  More than a decade earlier, when he was first called in to consult by the CIA, Meselson had written a question in his notes: “How many persons might have been present within an ellipse fitted
to the facility and the various sites where early cases were presumably exposed? How many of those became ill? Where did later cases reside and/or work?”

  Now he had answers. The people were inside the ellipse. The victims were under the plume. Meselson, Guillemin and their team had not gone inside Compound 19 nor identified the precise reason for the outbreak, but they peeled away the secrecy that the U.S. government could not penetrate in years of official diplomatic protests to the Soviet and Russian leaders. They found solid evidence that anthrax spores had come from the military facility at Compound 19.18

  Alibek, leaving Biopreparat behind, worked for a while as the Moscow representative of a Kazakh bank. But he felt the security services were watching his every move. “My phones soon started to click and crackle every time I made a call,” he said.

  In September 1992, Alibek decided to flee to the United States. He got in touch with a Defense Department official whom he had met while on the U.S. inspection tour the year before. In September he and his family left Russia through a third country, and he defected to the United States. It wasn’t a classic defection, since the Soviet Union had collapsed and Russia was still in the first year of its rebirth. But Alibek’s arrival was an intelligence coup for the United States. He was the highest-ranking official of Biopreparat ever to come out.19

  Just a week or two later, Sergei Popov also left Russia for the last time. Before buying his plane ticket, he exchanged his monthly salary from rubles to dollars: in his hand he held only $4. He used his savings to buy the ticket. When he arrived at Heathrow Airport in London, no intelligence agents were waiting for him. They never bothered to contact him. On October 1, Popov took up a six-month visiting postdoctoral fellowship at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology at Cambridge University, where Michael Gait was a senior staff scientist. “I had nothing with me, just a small suitcase,” he recalled. Realizing he had no money, his hosts offered a small loan. “I couldn’t tell them what I did before,” Popov recalled. “And I had no intention to tell them.” Popov knew of Pasechnik’s defection, but that role was not what he wanted. “I never contemplated defecting and disclosing secrets,” he said. “My intention was to start a new life and not talk about the past.”

  In November, the first results of the Trilateral Agreement, a new round of inspections, got underway. The target was the Institute of Ultra-Pure Biological Preparations in St. Petersburg, where Pasechnik had been director and where the United States and Great Britain feared the Russians were scaling up to manufacture super-plague. Kuntsevich, who was Yeltsin’s point man on chemical and biological weapons, appointed a Russian “Commission of Inquiry,” which met at the institute from November 18 to 21, 1992. A team of American and British observers were invited, but they soon found the whole exercise was a “pathetic setup job,” one of them recalled. The Russian participants, who were handpicked from Biopreparat, the Ministry of Public Health and the Ministry of Defense, mostly watched and listened. Rather than dig into the truth, they were apologists. They announced that there was no biological weapons work going on. The institute director said there never had been any. This was ludicrous in light of the fact that Pasechnik had pioneered such work there, and told the British about it. Among those on the visit was Christopher Davis, who had been one of the leading debriefers of Pasechnik. David C. Kelly, the British microbiologist, later recalled that “it was the American and British observers who actually asked the questions,” rather than the appointed Russian commissioners.

  During the November visit, the three buildings that made up the institute were examined again, as they had been in 1991 when Alibek attempted his clumsy cover-up. Again, American and British observers—this time accompanied by the Russian commissioners—spotted a large dynamic aerosol test chamber, a telltale sign of biological weapons research. They asked about its purpose; the answers didn’t add up. The visitors also saw Pasechnik’s milling machine, designed to produce particles of a particular size without damaging the pathogen used in the weapon. It also could not be explained. The “checkup” was over and the Russians had conceded nothing. Their denials made the American and British officials even more suspicious that weapons work was still going on—despite Yeltsin’s orders to stop it.20

  The Trilateral process dragged on. At the next stage of the visits, another team of American and British experts went to the All-Union Scientific Research Institute of Veterinary Virology in Pokrov, sixty-one miles east of Moscow, in October 1993. Kelly was among them. At Pokrov, his suspicions were rekindled that a massive Soviet—and now Russian—biological weapons program lay just beneath the surface. While Russian officials insisted they were making vaccines at Pokrov, Kelly saw telltale signs of biowarfare activity. “There were nuclear hardened bunkers and incubators for thousands of eggs. That’s the standard method for growing smallpox virus,” he said. Kelly saw that Pokrov had far more capacity than was needed for vaccines, and the hardened bunkers also seemed to be a giveaway that it was designed for wartime mobilization. But the Russians stuck by the vaccine story, and ducked questions about the past. The visitors were prevented from visiting a sister plant in Pokrov.21

  By late 1993, intelligence analysts in the United States and Britain were growing worried that the Russian biological weapons program was still ongoing in defiance of Yeltsin’s orders. One secret intelligence report quoted Yeltsin himself as complaining that the biological weapons work was continuing at three facilities despite his decree. In 1993, Alibek was also being debriefed by the intelligence agencies in the United States.

  In the autumn, the United States prepared an overview of the situation —and the evidence—in a top-secret National Intelligence Estimate, a report pulling together information from many different sources.

  Soon after the estimate was distributed in the U.S. government, it passed into the hands of Aldrich Ames, who was still spying for Russia from within the CIA. Ames’s last operational meeting with the Russians was on November 1, 1993, in Bogotá, Colombia. According to one source, either at this moment or soon thereafter, he turned over to the Russians the National Intelligence Estimate describing what the United States knew about Moscow’s biological weapons program, including specific locations. If the Russians wanted to conceal their germ warfare effort with even greater effectiveness, they had just received a helping hand: Ames delivered to them everything the Americans knew.

  There were no more visits to Russian laboratories for a long time. The Trilateral process stumbled on in 1994, when the Russians demanded two visits to facilities of the American pharmaceutical giant, Pfizer. The company was reluctant, but eventually agreed, under pressure from the White House. The Russians also demanded a visit to the Vigo plant in Indiana, where, at the end of World War II, the United States had built the capability for large-scale fermentation of anthrax and a bomb-filling line. It was now abandoned, and as Kelly put it, “the archeological evidence was clearly of 1940s vintage.” The Trilateral process ground to a halt.

  On April 7, 1994, Yeltsin abruptly dismissed Kuntsevich, the general whom he had appointed two years earlier to head his committee on chemical and biological weapons. The Kremlin press service said Kuntsevich was relieved of his duties for a “one-time gross violation of work responsibilities.” Details were not disclosed at the time, but came to light the following year when Kuntsevich ran for the lower house of parliament, the State Duma, on the party list of ultranationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky. Russian officials revealed that he was under investigation for helping arrange an illegal delivery of about seventeen hundred pounds of nerve gas precursor agents to Syria and for planning a much bigger shipment. However, Kuntsevich was never prosecuted in Russia. He insisted he had run afoul of internal politics. But the United States thought the charges were serious enough to impose sanctions on Kuntsevich for “knowingly providing material assistance” to Syria’s chemical weapons program.22

  The weapons of the Cold War had been spread around the globe by an insider who was supposed to be protecting t
hem.

  ————— 21 —————

  PROJECT SAPPHIRE

  The United States opened eleven new embassies in the far reaches of the former Soviet Union in the year after its implosion, and a younger generation of diplomats volunteered for hardship assignments in remote outposts. Andy Weber was among them. On a long airplane flight, reading the Wall Street Journal, he saw a page-one article with the headline “Kazakhstan Is Made for Diplomats Who Find Paris a Bore.” The article described how Ambassador William Courtney was working out of a dingy hotel in the capital, Almaty, with phones so bad he often could not place a call to Washington. “America is busy,” the operators would say. It sounded like an adventure, and Weber jumped at the chance. With tours in the Middle East and Europe under his belt, he asked the State Department if his next assignment could be Kazakhstan. They signed him up on the spot. After Russian-language training, he arrived in July 1993 to take up the embassy’s political-military portfolio. He found Kazakhstan’s landscape a breathtaking tableau of steppe, lakes, forests and mountains, but Almaty was dismal. He threaded his way through fetid corridors without lightbulbs in the apartment blocks, and went to markets where pensioners stood forlornly offering to sell a vacuum tube.1

  Weber took a recently built house in the foothills of the Tien Shan Mountains that resembled a Swiss chalet, with a large fireplace, paneled walls and a sauna. When he needed to meet Kazakh officials, he invited them home for lunch or dinner. Weber had a cook and a few guards, and he relied on an auto mechanic and all-round fixer, Slava, at a time when everything was difficult to obtain. Slava was also an avid hunter, and Weber learned to stalk pheasant, moose and elk in the secluded wilds. One day not long after he arrived, Slava came to him and said, “Somebody wants to meet you.” Weber realized that whoever it was wanted a discreet meeting.