The Dead Hand

by David E. Hoffman

  ———

  On Sunday, Lepyoshkin invited Weber and his team to the plant’s dacha, an A-frame cottage on the Seleti River, for a closing feast. It was a sunny afternoon and they went fishing and swimming, ate shish kebab and enjoyed fish soup, and Lepyoshkin poured vodka. They wore baseball caps in the bright sun that glinted off the reeds and blue surface of the river. Lepyoshkin opened the feast by declaring, “Now the official meeting is over.” Weber recalled, “What he really meant was, now we can talk to you. Now we can tell you the truth. Everything we said until now has been part of a script.”

  Lepyoshkin then told them the full story of Stepnogorsk. “They were open about the whole history, the whole purpose,” Weber recalled. The anthrax factory was built after the 1979 Sverdlovsk accident. The goal was to give the Soviet Union the ability to wage biological war within a few weeks after the mobilization order was given. Pasechnik and Alibek had been right, and all those years, the Soviet and Russian generals and diplomats had lied about it. Indeed, Weber remembered, these men had lied to his face only two days before, saying the plant made vaccines.

  The teams bonded over vodka on the riverbank; the Russians were candid about their own experiences inside the system. As Weber recalled it, they told him: “At the time we didn’t know it was wrong. We didn’t know it was illegal. We didn’t know there was a Biological Weapons Convention. We just thought we were defending our country. Now we know enough to know it was wrong, and we want to work together to do positive things for the rest of our lives.” Lepyoshkin said activity at Stepnogorsk had come to a halt four years earlier with the Soviet collapse. There had been nothing, officially, from Moscow since then. They had made halting attempts on their own to convert to civilian products. He hoped they would succeed someday.

  “They just poured their souls out to us,” Weber said. “For these people to meet Americans, who they had been taught to hate, to meet their counterparts and find out that they actually liked them, I think it was a big event for them, too. There was no more isolated place in the world than Stepnogorsk, Kazakhstan. It’s this poor, little, isolated, artificial military city that was created in the middle of Kazakhstan on purpose to be as far away from life forms as possible. They knew we were the main enemy. And all of a sudden, we’re there, and we don’t have horns and we’re having fun with them. We’re laughing at their jokes and they are laughing at ours.”

  Weber had broken through the secrecy. The trip produced proof that Biopreparat and the Soviet military envisioned manufacturing germ weapons by the metric ton in the event of war. The Soviets had grossly violated the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention. He had seen, too, that the anthrax factory, while not operating, remained intact. The fermenters were still there, mothballed but ready. “By the end of that day we had gone from almost failing, the team not even being allowed in, to the exhilaration of succeeding in our mission beyond our wildest expectations,” Weber recalled.

  Weber asked Lepyoshkin if he would come with them the next day as they headed to Vozrozhdeniye Island, where the germ weapons had long been tested. Weber thought it would be useful to have Lepyoshkin as a guide. The island had been at the heart of the Soviet germ warfare program. Lepyoshkin readily agreed. In the morning, they took off together in the Yak-40. On the flight, Weber wore a plaid open-necked shirt and took a window seat. Lepyoshkin sat next to him, in a sport coat and tie with red-white-and-blue stars and stripes. They lifted a toast to cooperation, Weber holding a small American flag in one hand.

  They could not fly a fixed-wing jet to Aralsk, the closest city to the island, so they took the chartered Yak-40 to Kyzil Orda, a city to the east. Much to Lepyoshkin’s surprise, Weber, on the spot, chartered a Soviet-built Mi-8 helicopter from a medical rescue service, for $8,000, to make the flight to the testing range. Weber plunked down a stack of $100 bills for the chopper. “You’re quite a cowboy!” Lepyoshkin said, surprised at Weber’s determination and resourcefulness. “No, Gennady,” he replied, “you’re the cowboy.”

  Boarding the chopper, fitted out with stretchers and emergency medical equipment, they flew about 228 miles west to the city of Aralsk, which had once been a fishing port on the edge of the Aral Sea, where the smallpox outbreak had occurred in 1971. Since then, the sea had dramatically receded, and Aralsk was now thirty miles from the nearest shoreline.

  After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Vozrozhdeniye Island was inside the borders of the newly independent nation of Uzbekistan. Weber realized he needed to get Uzbek approval for his flight to the testing ground. He and his team spent a night in a hot, miserable hotel in Aralsk, and then he worked the phones. It took hours and hours of effort. Weber also visited the former military support facility for the testing ground, based in Aralsk, which was now being used as a leper colony.

  Finally, they took off. As the blue-and-white chopper with a bright Red Cross insignia lumbered through the air, the noise was deafening. Lepyoshkin, now in a white T-shirt, sat alone, gazing out the porthole window of the chopper. Below, the island appeared to be as devoid of life as the surface of the moon, a dull gray-brown with patches of vegetation. A cluster of low-lying buildings, bleached white with the sun and heat, marked the headquarters of the testing range, but there was no sign of inhabitants, not a person, not a car. Weber did not know if anyone remained on the site—maybe it was still guarded by the Russian military? Were there Uzbek border guards? They circled once in the helicopter, slowly, to make sure. Nothing. They landed near the headquarters and residential buildings, all with windows blown out. As the chopper engines came to a quiet halt, the only thing Weber heard was a dog barking in the distance. “It was all totally abandoned,” Weber said. “Like Planet of the Apes.”

  They walked away from the chopper and toward the buildings. A rusting, abandoned truck, without wheels, lay where it last stopped. A faded Communist Party propaganda book was picked off the sidewalk. The first building they saw had a sign over the door: MEDICAL CLINIC. The door creaked open to desolate rooms, stripped, the paint peeling. Lizards skittered away in the grass. After another short chopper flight, they landed in the laboratory area. In the stifling heat, the Americans put on their white hazardous materials suits. Lepyoshkin, who had worked with pathogens for so many years, thought they were being overly cautious and did not suit up.

  In these buildings they found traces of what had gone before. Hundreds of gas masks tumbled out of a storage room. Another room held a large supply of flasks and Petri dishes. They found glove boxes for handling dangerous pathogens. Weber was surprised to discover some equipment in the labs was mothballed carefully. Placards were hung from it in Russian, saying “in conservation.” But mothballed for what? He wondered: was someone planning to come back another day?

  In earlier times, Lepyoshkin spent seventeen summers on Vozrozhdeniye Island, helping carry out tests of Soviet biological warfare agents, and he knew it even better than Alibek. The proving ground was run by the military’s 15th Main Directorate, the one in charge of germ warfare. The scientists had lived in barracks, forbidden to tell anyone, including their families, where they were going. Alibek recalled in his memoir, “Winds swirling off the desert steppes provided the only respite from the heat. There were no birds and the dust settled everywhere, getting into clothes, hair, and eyes, sweeping through the animal cages and into the food and scientists’ notebooks.

  “We used to say that the most fortunate inhabitants of the Soviet Union were the condemned monkeys” on Vozrozhdeniye Island, he added. “They were fed oranges, apples, bananas and other fresh fruits rarely seen by Soviet citizens.”

  Now, as Weber walked through the laboratories, all that remained of the monkeys were cages—hundreds of them, including one large enough for a human to stand up in. Weber found reams of blank paper forms used to record the symptoms of biological weapons agents on the monkeys. On the left of the page was an outline of the primate with key places to check, and on the right were blanks for listing data gathered from those
points. At the top of the form was written “Top Secret, When Filled In.”

  In their hazardous materials suits, Weber and his team took samples of the filters in the laboratory, hoping to find pathogens trapped in them. On the windswept proving grounds, they saw the bleak poles where animals were harnessed for outdoor tests.

  Alibek had told the Americans that the anthrax removed from Sverdlovsk, and later stored at the town of Zima, near Irkutsk in Siberia, had been buried on Vozrozhdeniye Island in 1988, but he had not said precisely where. Weber and his team extracted sample cores from the earth adjacent to the laboratory, where they thought the anthrax might be buried, and on the test grid. They didn’t find the anthrax that day; the pink powder was buried in eleven unmarked graves nearby. It would be discovered on a later expedition. But in finding the weathered buildings and discarded primate cages, in taking the samples and photographs and exploring the island, Weber had broken through the Soviet lies once again.

  Weber and Lepyoshkin flew out together. They posed for a picture on the tarmac, both giving a thumbs-up. Lepyoshkin had nowhere to stay in Almaty; Weber invited him to be his houseguest in the mountains. By chance, there was a reception at the American Embassy for visiting officials from Washington. Among them was Carter, an assistant secretary of defense, who was an architect of the Nunn-Lugar legislation, and Starr, the principal director of the Pentagon’s threat reduction office, who led the “tiger team” for Project Sapphire. They met Lepyoshkin for the first time. Lepyoshkin seemed to have unmoored himself from the Soviet past. He was eager to meet the American officials. They talked in the leafy courtyard of the embassy. Lepyoshkin had only one request: he wanted them to help clean up Stepnogorsk and convert it to peaceful purposes. “I promise,” Carter told him, “we will.”

  In Russia, Weber discovered the footprints of Iranians—and they were reaching for the germs.

  In 1997, back from overseas, he was working at the Pentagon on the Nunn-Lugar programs, which had become known as Cooperative Threat Reduction. He was trying to find a new approach to dealing with the danger of biological weapons inside Russia. Weber’s first trip there came in June 1997, when he took a train fourteen hours from Moscow to Kirov, five hundred miles east, to attend a scientific conference, accompanied by several other American experts. In a stroke of good luck, Weber met researchers from both Obolensk and Vector, the laboratories at the heart of Biopreparat’s research on bacteria and viruses. Late one afternoon, after the formal conference sessions, a small group of scientists from Obolensk invited Weber to share some beers in the banya, a traditional Russian sauna. Joining the scientists in the steam room, with his Russian-language skills and knowledge of biological weapons and pathogens, Weber made a personal connection, as he had done earlier with Mette and Lepyoshkin. In these discussions, Weber learned that scientists from Obolensk and Vector had recently participated in an officially sponsored Russian trade fair in Tehran, and very quickly, the Iranians had shown up at the Russian institutes. The Iranians were somewhat rough-cut agents of influence, and the Russians found them off-putting, the scientists said. From this informal talk in the banya, Weber realized the Iranians were trying to scoop up know-how for biological weapons. What really alarmed him was a discussion with a senior scientist at Obolensk who had been on the trip to Tehran. “They talk about pharmaceuticals,” the scientist said, “but it’s clear their interest is in dual use equipment that can be used for biological weapons.” The scientist said the Iranians had offered him thousands of dollars to teach in Tehran. And then the scientist took a business card from his wallet, which had been given to him by the Iranians. He showed it to Weber, who immediately recognized the name and the office: a front for the military and intelligence services in their drive to procure Russia’s weapons.

  A few weeks later, Weber met Lev Sandakhchiev, the compact, intense, chain-smoking director of Vector, who had once pushed to create artificial viruses for biological weapons. Sandakhchiev had come to Washington for the first time. Weber took Sandakhchiev on an hour-long drive to Fort Detrick, Maryland, once the home of the American biowarfare effort, and now headquarters of the work on defense against dangerous pathogens. In the car, Sandakhchiev revealed to Weber the Iranians had come to Vector, hunting for technology and know-how. Weber sensed that Sandakhchiev wanted to cooperate with the United States, to open the Russian system to joint projects. He also realized that conditions at Vector were increasingly desperate, with salaries unpaid and subsidies drying up.

  Weber and Sandakhchiev met again in October 1997 at a NATO conference in Budapest, and this time, in a hotel room, they had a knockdown, drag-out argument over Iran, as Sandakhchiev ate sausage and drank vodka. Sandakhchiev wanted to know: why was Iran such a bugaboo to the Americans? Weber replied, “You have to understand, they kept our Embassy and our diplomats hostage for 444 days!” Sandakhchiev looked puzzled. When was that? Weber reminded him it was 1979. Sandakhchiev, sounding sincere, told Weber that, isolated in his laboratory in Siberia, he had never heard of the Iran hostage-taking. Weber thought to himself it was an astonishing example of how closed the world of biowarfare had been in Soviet times, apparently so tight that not even the news of the hostage crisis had penetrated. Weber implored Sandakhchiev to stop the cooperation with Iran. Sandakhchiev was reluctant to give up the big money the Iranians had offered, but the Iranians were also very unpleasant partners—they made promises up front, but delivered money late, and constantly tried to bargain for less. Weber and Sandakhchiev went back and forth, arguing for hours. Weber found that Sandakhchiev was open with him, and Weber learned that in addition to work at Vector, there was probably a large, separate stockpile of Variola major virus at the military laboratory at Zagorsk. Later, on a tour in Budapest, they walked past the confessional in an old church, and Sandakhchiev turned to Weber and joked, in Russian, “Andy, let’s go in there and I’ll confess all my sins about biological weapons!”

  Back in Washington, Weber searched for a way to act, to offer Sandakhchiev something to preempt the Iranians. But up to this point, the Nunn-Lugar program was largely devoted to nuclear materials and strategic weapons, and there was tremendous resistance in the U.S. government, especially in the intelligence agencies, to using any of it to stop the spread of biological weapons. The long history of Soviet and Russian deception about germ warfare had left a deep reservoir of mistrust in Washington. “There was this real fear of our funds being misused by these clearly dangerous, bad actors,” Weber recalled. At a meeting at the White House one day in late 1997, a decision was made to engage Vector, as Weber had urged. After the meeting, he walked to the State Department with Anne M. Harrington, who had helped establish the International Science and Technology Center in Moscow, and was now working on nonproliferation issues at the department. Harrington shared Weber’s goal of reaching out to the scientists at Vector. She knew they were in financial trouble; a few years earlier, the science center held workshops at Vector and Obolensk for possible grant recipients, and scientists at Obolensk said they hadn’t been paid for months. Many just stayed home to grow food or find other ways to support their families; to produce enough income to cover minimal salaries, Obolensk boasted a brewery and an assembly line for men’s suits, and was planning to start a vodka distillery. Harrington thought the beleaguered germ warfare scientists should get as much attention as had the nuclear engineers.5

  When they reached the office, Weber and Harrington decided to take a chance and reach out to Sandakhchiev on their own. They would not go through the usual bureaucratic channels: embassies, cables, government ministries. On Harrington’s office computer, they tapped out an e-mail to Sandakhchiev. It was brief, noncommittal, but inviting, suggesting closer cooperation and asking if Weber could visit Vector. They didn’t know what would happen. “What are your employment options if this doesn’t work?” Harrington asked Weber.

  But the gamble paid off. Sandakhchiev responded with an invitation. Weber made several visits to Vector, and on one of th
em, Weber asked to see Buildings 6 and 6A, where the research on smallpox had been done years earlier, and about which Sandakhchiev had earlier deceived the British and American visitors. This time, Weber was allowed a close look at the building, and to take photographs. “It was clear the place was just a wreck, crap all over the floors, the equipment was in terrible shape,” Weber recalled.

  He went to Frank Miller, then acting assistant secretary of defense for international security policy, a longtime civil servant working on threat reduction. “I think we can break Vector’s ties with Iran,” Weber said. “They’re desperate for limited cooperation and investment.” Miller asked him how much money it would take. “Three million dollars,” Weber replied. Miller went to work and eventually found the money. They persuaded Sandakhchiev to curtail the deals with the shady agents of Tehran.

  On each trip and with each passing year, it was more and more apparent to the Americans who visited the former Soviet Union that the Cold War legacy of danger far exceeded what anyone had imagined at first. Years had gone by since the Soviet collapse, yet pathogens in flasks, unguarded fissile materials, idle weapons scientists and marooned defense factories were still being discovered for the first time in the late 1990s.