The Dead Hand

by David E. Hoffman

  Weber remained on the tarmac until the last plane took off.

  When it was announced to the public at a Washington press conference on Wednesday morning, November 23, Project Sapphire caused a sensation. Defense Secretary William Perry called it “defense by other means, in a big way.” He added, “We have put this bomb-grade nuclear material forever out of the reach of potential black marketers, terrorists or a new nuclear regime.”25 With imagination and daring, Sapphire underscored what could be done. The United States had reached into another country, which was willing to cooperate, removed dangerous material and paid for it.26 But that method could not be replicated inside Russia, where there was far more uranium and plutonium, and much more suspicion. It was hard to imagine landing C5s in Moscow and emptying out Building 116 at the Kurchatov Institute.

  The U.S. government has long run a secretive intelligence committee, spanning different agencies, which studies nuclear developments overseas. In late 1994, the Joint Atomic Energy Intelligence Committee prepared a report about the extent of the Russian nuclear materials crisis. The top-secret report concluded: not a single facility storing highly-enriched uranium or plutonium in the former Soviet Union had adequate safeguards up to Western standards. Not one.

  In the White House science office, Bunn felt he had “zero power” and worked “10 tiers down from the top.” His quick-fix idea was dead on arrival. In late 1994, on advice from his staff, Clinton asked for a blueprint for action on nuclear smuggling and loose fissile material, to be written by the President’s Committee of Advisors on Science and Technology. The study was chaired by Professor John Holdren, then of the University of California at Berkeley, and Bunn was named study director. When finished in March 1995, the study, classified secret, called for a multifront war. The study identified approximately one hundred sites handling sizable quantities of weapons-usable nuclear materials in the former Soviet Union.27 Then, to drive home their point, Bunn and Holdren lobbied for, and won, permission to give a briefing to President Clinton and Vice President Gore in the Oval Office.

  They stayed up until 2 A.M. the night before preparing. On May 1, 1995, just weeks after the Oklahoma City bombing, they told Clinton and Gore the fissile material crisis was one of the gravest national security problems the country faced. Holdren described to Clinton the serious gaps: how Russian facilities had no idea, or precise records, of the amount of uranium and plutonium lying about; the weak links in buildings, fences and guard forces; and the threat that terrorists could walk off with a bag or bucket of uranium or plutonium. In a clever move, Holdren had brought an empty casing from one of the fuel pellets used at the nuclear power and engineering institute at Obninsk, south of Moscow. He tossed it on a table and told Clinton there were perhaps eighty thousand of those filled with uranium or plutonium, and not one with an inventory number on it. The institute had no monitors to stop someone from carrying one out in their pocket. Bunn thumped on the table a two-inch stack of press clippings he’d assembled, including a Time magazine cover with the headline “Nuclear Terror for Sale.” At the end of the presentation, they showed Clinton a diagram of what would happen to the White House if the Oklahoma City bomb had been set off on Pennsylvania Avenue—superficial damage. Then they showed what would happen if it was a one-kiloton nuclear “fizzle”—a bomb that didn’t work very well. In that case, the White House was at the edge of the crater.

  Clinton said he realized that security was bad, but he had no idea that the Russians didn’t even know if something had been stolen.28

  In the weeks after Clinton’s briefing, a delegation from the United States Department of Energy arrived in Ukraine, including a young logistics assistant, Erik Engling. He had landed a job in the department just the year before, doing administrative chores for the office of National Security and Nonproliferation, which required a security clearance. Engling possessed the right credentials from an earlier job working in a government library. He helped with visas, cables, and chores for government officials struggling to cope with the fissile materials crisis in the former Soviet Union. One day, he recalled, a senior policy-maker came and sat down in his office. Engling was twenty-nine years old then, a large young man, blunt-spoken and eager to learn more about the nuclear problems they were discovering. “The problem is so huge,” the senior policy-maker said, “your grandchildren won’t be able to work this out.”29

  In June, Engling made his first visit to the former Soviet Union, accompanying the delegation to Ukraine. The team went to the Kharkiv Institute of Physics and Technology, once a premier research institute. Engling wound his way through a labyrinthine corridor, up and down stairs and then through a door. “And we went through the door, and into that room, and there’s 75 kilos of highly-enriched uranium lying on the floor. On the floor! You’ve got it on racks, too. There’s an oversized dumbwaiter that goes up and down to one of the rooms above where they were doing experiments. The uranium is in all sorts of configurations. Some in tubes, some in boxes. And we all had this sinking feeling, like, why? Why do you guys even have this shit?” The uranium was entirely unprotected. “We walked up a couple of stairs, we’re out in a parking lot. This is where the nuclear materials are stored, and not a thing between the parking lots and these doors. The stuff was sitting just 55 feet from the back door. You could just walk in, and walk out.”30

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  FACE TO FACE WITH EVIL

  On a brilliant summer day, June 2, 1995, a chartered white and blue Yak-40 jet descended to the remote city of Stepnogorsk in northern Kazakhstan, landing on a bumpy airstrip of concrete slabs. The plane, emblazoned with the name Kazakhstan Airlines, carried Andy Weber and a team of biological weapons experts from the United States. About nine miles away stood the anthrax factory Alibek had built in the 1980s. Never before had a Westerner set foot in the secret plant, where, in the event of war, anthrax bacteria was to be fermented, processed into a thick brown slurry, dried, milled and filled into bombs—by the ton.

  Weber’s flight to Stepnogorsk was the culmination of months of careful preparation. His mission was to find a new entryway into the secret empire of Biopreparat. In Russia, attempts by American and British officials to penetrate the biological weapons program had been blocked, made even more difficult after Aldrich Ames gave the U.S. National Intelligence Estimate to the Russians in late 1993. Moreover, Yeltsin’s promises of openness had been subverted by his own generals.

  But now, there was another chance. A colossal anthrax-processing machine stood intact at Stepnogorsk, and if Weber could get inside, it might hold a key to the larger Soviet biological weapons story.

  Weber began laying the groundwork for this mission days after Project Sapphire was over. In November 1994, he started a series of inoculations against potential pathogens he might encounter at Stepnogorsk, including anthrax and tularemia. Then he lobbied the Kazakh government for permission to visit three facilities with a team of experts: the chemical weapons plant at Pavlodar, in the northeast near the Russian border; the biological weapons plant at Stepnogorsk, also in the north; and a testing grounds for germ warfare agents at Vozrozhdeniye Island, in the Aral Sea, which borders Kazakhstan in the far west. The hulking industrial works were frozen in time, equipment mothballed or rusting, the halls and laboratories monitored by Russians who remained the stewards long after the Soviet Union imploded.

  When Weber discovered the highly-enriched uranium in Ust-Kamenogorsk, he had followed a single tip on a small piece of paper. This time, he had much more information, thanks to Alibek, who was debriefed for more than a year by American intelligence and military agencies, meeting daily in a second-floor conference room in an office building in northern Virginia. Alibek sketched out the sprawling Biopreparat and military germ warfare complex: the facilities, pathogens, history, scientists, directors, structure, accomplishments and goals. While Pasechnik had done the same for the British in London, Alibek held a higher-ranking position.

  To the Ame
ricans, there were still many unknowns—not only the hidden history, but also the urgent questions about whether the Russians were actually closing down the Soviet biological weapons program, as Yeltsin had promised. The earlier visits to Obolensk, Vector and other facilities had all been frustrated by the cover-up. The Trilateral Agreement reached a dead end. The Americans wanted to know: which pathogens and laboratories could still be a proliferation threat?1

  Alibek provided a gold mine of new data about the laboratories and factories of Biopreparat. He knew a great deal about Stepnogorsk, which he had directed in the 1980s: the layout, building numbers, pipelines, processes, machinery, fermenters and bunkers. Thanks to Alibek, Weber had a road map.2

  In the last days of May 1995, Weber made final appeals to the Kazakh government. When he got the green light, the American team immediately flew in from overseas to join him. On the first leg of the journey, Weber headed to Pavlodar, the abandoned chemical weapons plant, where he was given open access and cooperation. “They showed us everything,” he recalled. The main engineer explained that Pavlodar was a war mobilization plant, designed to produce sarin and soman for bombs in a matter of weeks if the orders came from Moscow. But the factory showed signs of having been left behind years earlier. “It was a wreck,” Weber remembered.

  Then, on Friday, June 2, they took off for Stepnogorsk, 261 miles to the west of Pavlodar. The Stepnogorsk plant was alerted—by someone in the Kazakh government—that an American delegation was coming to town and should be met at the airstrip. Weber was accompanied by a security official from the president’s office, in case there were any questions about his authority to be there. When he climbed down the stairs of the plane, Weber ran into trouble.

  “Remember, it’s a chartered plane, this is Stepnogorsk. The airport no longer operates. They didn’t get a lot of flights coming in. So they came right out to our plane,” Weber said. The first person he met was Gennady Lepyoshkin, director of the plant. A Soviet army colonel, Lepyoshkin had first come to Stepnogorsk in 1984 as Alibek’s deputy, and took over when Alibek went to Moscow in 1987. He was shorter than Weber, with dark hair combed straight over, and thick glasses. Lepyoshkin brought his own security man, who offered Weber a finger-crushing handshake. Lepyoshkin left no doubt about his attitude.

  “You’re not welcome in our city,” Lepyoshkin told Weber. “Leave!”3

  Weber insisted he had come at the invitation of the Kazakh government. Lepyoshkin demanded to see documents. Weber had brought none. After more back-and-forth, Lepyoshkin allowed Weber and his team to come into the town—but not the factory—and check into a guesthouse.

  They next met at the mayor’s office. Weber recalled that the Russians regarded their installation as a satellite of Moscow, not under the authority of Kazakhstan. The town was largely populated by Russians, too. “I had entered Brezhnev-era Russia,” Weber recalled. “This was going back in a time warp.” He made a forceful case for the visit, saying that Nazarbayev had approved it. “Gennady and the locals didn’t really care” about the Kazakh president, however. Weber then called Courtney, the ambassador in Almaty. “We need something on paper,” he told him, “or this visit is not going to happen.”

  The lone fax machine in the city was in the mayor’s office, and a few hours later a letter arrived from Vladimir Shkolnik, the Kazakh minister of science and new technologies, who had been the atomic energy chief at the time of Project Sapphire. Shkolnik urged Lepyoshkin to open up everything to the visitors. “When Lepyoshkin had the approval on paper, he was covered,” Weber said. “He didn’t like it but he couldn’t stop us.”

  The next morning, Weber and his team drove out to the plant from the guesthouse. First they went to Lepyoshkin’s office, where Lepyoshkin gave them a briefing. He said they were making vaccines at the plant. Weber figured it was the cover story. At this moment, both Weber and Lepyoshkin knew more than they said aloud. Lepyoshkin knew that Alibek had gone to the United States. Weber knew the details of the Alibek debriefings, in which he had described the anthrax factory. Weber then gave a brief summary of what he believed the plant had been used for in the past.

  Suddenly, Lepyoshkin’s deputy for security, Yuri Rufov, burst out, “That’s all lies! It’s a vaccine production plant! That’s all. We never had anything to do with biological weapons.”

  At this point, Lepyoshkin’s manner changed. “Let’s end this discussion,” he said. “We’ll show you everything, and you can make your own judgments.”

  On the first full day, Saturday, June 3, Weber and his team started by examining the complex from the exterior. Spanning the top of one building were letters spelling out “Progress” in Russian, the name of the civilian enterprise that served as cover for the biological weapons plant. When they alighted from a jeep they saw bunkers, with thick concrete walls, nestled deep into earthen mounds. Pipes snaked from building to building atop concrete pillars. Behind the bunkers, a crane and rail line marked the location where anthrax munitions would be loaded onto trains in the event of war. Lightning arrestors—another telltale sign of weapons work—were stacked up to one side. At the end of the first day, there were still many mysteries. At 9 P.M. that night, they spread out a schematic of the basement of the main production plant, wondering what was inside the rooms they had not yet seen.

  The second day, Sunday, June 4, 1995, they returned and probed deeper inside. Most of the equipment had been mothballed but looked well preserved. Pipes and valve handles were color-coded blue, green and red. Storage tanks stood silent, connected by miles of tubes and wires. The whole complex seemed to be waiting to spring to life. While the interior was in good order, outside the facility had gone to seed. Roads were potholed and junk strewn everywhere. Sheep fed from a trough outside one building. A stiff wind blew across the steppe.

  From what he saw, Weber realized that Alibek’s descriptions matched everything they found. One of the most important discoveries was in Building 600, the main laboratory. They located the pad where Alibek recalled there had been a giant stainless steel aerosol chamber for testing the most dangerous agents, such as anthrax, Marburg and Ebola on monkeys and other animals. The high-ceilinged hall was painted an institutional green, eerily empty save for pipes and wires around the periphery, disconnected from the bulbous experimental chamber that once filled up the middle. A crane loomed overhead—maybe to lift the stainless steel ball? In the center of the pad they found a drainage hole. Weber and his team carefully swabbed it for samples. Then they found what looked like a latched, plastic traveling cage for a pet dog, with a handle on top. But it wasn’t for traveling. A hole was cut in the front, and two V-shaped supports protruded from the hole. Here was where the dog’s head would be strapped down during biological weapons experiments.

  They combed Building 211, the facility to prepare nutrient media for growing bacteria, with a capacity of thirty thousand metric tons a year. They checked out underground bunkers with reinforced concrete walls two meters thick for weaponization of the agents. The bunkers contained compressors and refrigerators to store agents, and special lines where the pathogens would be filled into bombs and sealed. They swabbed Building 231, where the anthrax bacteria would be dried and milled before being put into the bombs. It appeared never to have been operational.

  The most important discovery was the main production facility, Building 221. Several stories tall, on the inside it resembled a scene from a very old science fiction movie, crammed full of pipes, tanks, valves, coils and wires. Most was not active, just standing in place. The building contained a high-level containment facility for handling dangerous pathogens. In a three-day production cycle, the facility could make 1.5 tons of bacteria. The nutrient media was pumped from Building 211 to the upper floors of Building 221, where small fermenters were inoculated with anthrax bacteria. After a period of growth, the content of the small chambers was drained downward into ten massive fermenters, each four stories tall. After further fermentation, the mixture was spun in centrifuges to
remove culture medium and waste. The bacterial slurry was then pumped to Building 231 for drying and milling, and then to the bunkers for munitions filling or storage. The finished weapons would then be loaded onto waiting railway wagons for transport.

  Of all the amazing discoveries, Weber recalled the day he saw the large fermenters as one of the most disturbing of his life.

  “This is a plant that could produce and load onto weapons—targeted at the United States—300 metric tons of anthrax during a war-time mobilization period,” he said. “It looked like a plant right out of the 1930s. There was nothing high-tech about it. It was like when I held the uranium ingot in my hand. It was just metal. These were just big vessels that looked like something out of a 1930s movie. Yet we knew it had the capability of wiping out a big portion of population. It was just scary to think that you didn’t need some super-high sophisticated technology to produce these horrible weapons in massive quantities.”

  In Building 221, Weber climbed to the top of one of the twenty-thousand-liter fermenters and looked down into it with a flashlight. The cylinder was made of specialty steel with a resin lining. He could see the impellers attached to a central rod that would stir the anthrax spores. He could not see the bottom in the dark, four floors below, but he got a full sense of the incredible volume, the trillions of spores of anthrax bacteria that would be swirling inside the chamber, enough to wipe out entire populations. Weber, taciturn, methodical and careful, felt a chill run up and down his spine. “I think more than any other day in my life,” he said, “this was my introduction to two things. First, to biological weapons. I had read about them. I had taken courses. But this was the real thing. And second, to the Soviet Union. I had never bought into Reagan’s ‘Evil Empire’ thing. I was a product of liberal eastern schools, I went to Cornell, but there it was. I was face to face with evil.”4