The final phase, or “endgame,” of the CWC negotiations focused on working out detailed provisions for verification and on-site inspection, which accounted for much of the two-hundred-plus pages of the rolling text. To accelerate the process, the Australian government took the initiative of developing a “model treaty” in which all of the bracketed sections in the rolling text were replaced with compromise language that aimed to bridge the gaps among national positions on the outstanding issues. To seek American support, the Australian negotiating team flew to Washington and conducted secret talks for several days with senior U.S. officials. Although the model treaty differed from the U.S. positions on a number of important points, the Bush administration supported the Australian initiative in the hope that it would move the process forward. The Australians then made a tour of other major capitals in the fall of 1991.
On March 19, 1992, Australian Foreign Minister Gareth Evans presented the model treaty in Geneva. Although most delegations found something to criticize in the Australian draft, it marked a turning point in the negotiations. In May 1992, the chairman of the Ad Hoc Committee on Chemical Weapons, German Ambassador Adolph Ritter von Wagner, launched his own effort to seek out the delicate compromises needed to conclude the treaty. Drawing on the agreed-upon portions of the rolling text, elements of the Australian model treaty, “vision papers” prepared by informal working groups called “friends of the chair,” and a great deal of backroom consultation, Wagner prepared his own “chairman’s text” that offered compromise language on the major unresolved issues.
The introduction of the chairman’s text on June 22, 1992, led to a phase of intensive negotiations at the ambassadorial level during which some key issues—such as the monitoring of chemical industry plants and the conduct of short-notice “challenge” inspections at facilities suspected of illicit activity—were resolved or brought close to resolution by the end of June. On July 23, the U.S. delegation accepted the chairman’s text, but a number of other countries remained unsatisfied. After a major push to hammer out the details of the challenge-inspection procedure, Wagner prepared a second revised chairman’s text that was introduced on August 7, 1992. This version finally won the general approval of all delegations. Even so, the timely conclusion of the CWC was possible only through the liberal use of “creative ambiguity,” or language that could be interpreted in different ways, to paper over substantive differences among delegations. One contentious issue that was finessed in this manner was the continued existence of the Australia Group, which some developing countries opposed as discriminatory.
On September 3, 1992, the last day of the negotiating session, the Conference on Disarmament adopted the CWC and sent it on to the U.N. General Assembly in New York, which endorsed it by consensus. The treaty was then opened for signature at a formal ceremony in Paris on January 13–15, 1993, at which time 130 countries signed. In one of the last acts of the presidency of George H. W. Bush, Acting Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger signed the CWC for the United States. The timing of this event was significant because President Bush had worked hard to conclude the chemical weapons ban and considered it one of the major achievements of his administration.
At the CWC signing ceremony in Paris, the 130 initial signatories adopted a separate resolution establishing a Preparatory Commission, or PrepCom, to address twenty-three issues that had not been fully resolved during the Geneva talks and to negotiate detailed procedures for implementation where the treaty text was vague or did not provide sufficient guidance. Examples of such details included declaration formats, lists of inspection equipment, and other technical issues related to the conduct of on-site inspections. Another responsibility of the PrepCom was to establish a new international organization that would oversee the implementation of the CWC after it entered into force. Named the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), this new entity would be headquartered in The Hague, the capital of the Netherlands, and would include a Technical Secretariat with an international staff of about five hundred people, including some two hundred inspectors.
The CWC was considered a major step forward in the field of arms control because it greatly extended the Geneva Protocol’s prohibition on the use of chemical weapons in war by banning their development, production, stockpiling, and transfer. It also required member states to destroy within a decade their existing stockpiles of chemical arms and to eliminate all former chemical weapons production facilities or convert them irreversibly to peaceful purposes. Most ambitiously, the treaty included extensive verification provisions for monitoring chemical industry plants, so as to permit the peaceful applications of chemistry while preventing its exploitation for hostile purposes.
Despite the great promise of the CWC, the launch of the treaty was marred by the refusal of a number of important Arab states to sign. Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, and Iraq all argued that chemical weapons could be eliminated from the Middle East only in the context of a regional ban on all weapons of mass destruction, including Israel’s undeclared nuclear arsenal. Iran, for its part, signed the CWC but denied possessing a stockpile of chemical arms or any current chemical weapons production facilities, despite U.S. government allegations to the contrary. One week after the CWC signing ceremony in Paris, President Bush’s successor, William J. Clinton, took the oath of office. From then on, it would be his responsibility to persuade the U.S. Senate to approve the ratification of the CWC.
IN RUSSIA, MEANWHILE, the Mirzayanov case continued to spark controversy. On February 4, 1993, Vladimir Uglev, now fifty, granted an interview to the Russian magazine Novoye Vremya (New Times). Outraged by Mirzayanov’s arrest, he had decided to corroborate the chemist’s allegations and disclose his own involvement in the Foliant development program. Having discounted the security rationale for acquiring chemical weapons, he believed that the Russian military had no real concept for their use and viewed them simply as a vehicle for obtaining state prizes, perks, and research grants.
In the New Times interview, Uglev described the development of A-232 by Kirpichev and himself. He warned that unless the charges against Mirzayanov were dropped, he would disclose the chemical formulas of the Novichok agents, which could easily be manufactured by other countries once their molecular structures were known. Because Uglev was a people’s deputy from Volsk and Shikhany township, he enjoyed immunity from prosecution. Infuriated by Uglev’s remarks, his superiors at GITOS locked him out of the laboratory and asked the Volsk City Council to strip him of legal protections so that he could be put on trial for revealing state secrets.
The Russian government also tried to crack down on the journalists and periodicals involved in the Mirzayanov and Uglev exposés. On April 8, 1993, FSB officials interrogated Baltimore Sun reporter Will Englund and tried unsuccessfully to intimidate him into testifying against Mirzayanov. Then in June, an FSB colonel from Saratov District arrived at the Moscow offices of New Times and Moscow News, which had published interviews with Uglev, and demanded all tapes, notes, or original documents pertaining to the scientist. Both newspapers provided copies of their published articles but courageously refused to hand over any source materials.
Despite the ongoing controversy, GosNIIOKhT continued to develop the Novichok binary agents. In the fall of 1993, Professor Georgi Drozd discovered a new formulation called Novichok-7, which had a volatility similar to that of Soman but was about ten times more potent. A few dozen tons of Novichok-7 were produced for experimental testing at Nukus and Shikhany. In addition, two more binary agents, Novichok-8 and Novichok-9, were in the development pipeline.
As Mirzayanov’s case worked its way through the Russian legal system, he was featured repeatedly on national television and in the press. His plight also attracted the attention of scientific and human rights organizations in Germany, Britain, the Netherlands, Canada, Italy, Sweden, and the United States. Two human rights activists in Princeton, New Jersey, Gale M. Colby and Irene Goldman, decided to devote themselves to Mir
zayanov’s case and tirelessly lobbied journalists, opinion leaders, and members of Congress on his behalf. They persuaded two senior members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Senators Bill Bradley (D.–New Jersey) and Jesse Helms (R.–North Carolina), to write letters of protest to President Yeltsin. Finally, acting under instructions, U.S. Ambassador Tom Pickering held a news conference in Moscow in which he defended Mirzayanov for “telling the truth about an activity which is contrary to treaty obligations.”
Despite the growing international protests, the Russian Office of the Prosecutor General moved forward with Mirzayanov’s closed trial, which began in Moscow City Court on January 24, 1994. If convicted of revealing state secrets, the chemist faced up to eight years in prison. Six weeks into the trial, however, the Yeltsin government realized that a conviction would confirm Mirzayanov’s allegations, and on March 11, the acting prosecutor general dismissed the case for “lack of evidence.” Although the People’s Court ordered GosNIIOKhT to pay Mirzayanov 30,000 rubles in financial and emotional damages, the institute refused to pay and instead filed a counter-suit for 33 million rubles. Vil’s lawyer urged him to continue the legal battle for compensation, but as a divorced father of two young sons, he decided to abandon the struggle.
On February 16, 1995, Mirzayanov traveled to Atlanta, Georgia, to speak at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and receive the organization’s Scientific Freedom and Responsibility Award. During the ceremony, he met Gale Colby, the Princeton woman who had campaigned for his release. After his return to Moscow, the two began a correspondence, and several months later, Mirzayanov, then sixty-three, moved to Princeton and married Colby. Following his arrival in the United States, the Russian chemist was debriefed extensively by the CIA and offered a research position at Edgewood. As a condition of his employment, he had to undergo a security background investigation and a polygraph exam. During the lie detector test, the CIA examiner asked him repeatedly, “Are you a spy?” Mirzayanov was outraged by this question. “Why do you ask me that?” he shouted. “You can judge for yourself whether or not my information is correct.” Deeply insulted, he withdrew his application.
Over the next few years, Mirzayanov wrote his memoirs and continued to follow developments in Russia. Much as he had feared, the toxic contamination caused by nerve agent production at Volgograd and Novocheboksarsk had left a bitter legacy of chronic illness, birth defects, and environmental damage. In February 1995, the chairman of the Union of Khimprom Workers at Novocheboksarsk wrote an open letter to the international community that read in part, “Our health has been ruined. Many of us see that our work in V-gas production affected [the] health of our children as well. Ecology of our town has been undermined. . . . Our health steadily deteriorates [and] the nervous system (central and peripheral) collapses, as does the liver, the heart fails.”
IN RESPONSE to Mirzayanov’s revelations about the Novichok program, the Clinton administration conducted a behind-the-scenes dialogue with the Russian government about the accuracy of Moscow’s declarations under the 1989 Wyoming MOU. The second phase of the data exchange had been delayed for several years by the collapse of the Soviet Union and the ensuing disarray in the Russian government. In January 1994, Presidents Bill Clinton and Boris Yeltsin had held a summit in Moscow at which they agreed to implement a scaled-down version of Phase II of the Wyoming MOU. The two sides had exchanged data in April and May 1994 and then conducted five “practice” inspections at declared government chemical weapons facilities in each country between August and December. Subsequently, both Washington and Moscow raised questions about the completeness of the data submitted by the other.
The United States had three areas of concern about the Russian declarations. First, the total size of the declared Russian stockpile, at 40,000 metric tons (80 percent nerve agents, 20 percent blister agents), appeared too low to be consistent with other evidence. Second, given the scale of the Soviet chemical weapons program, the Russians had listed very few development facilities. Under the terms of the Wyoming MOU, both countries were supposed to identify all buildings that devoted more than 50 percent of their manpower, floor space, or funding to chemical weapons development. Although the United States had declared more than a hundred such buildings, Russia had declared only one—despite reports in the Russian press that at least three clandestine chemical weapons development centers existed in the Moscow region alone.
Finally, the Russian government had provided no information in its Wyoming MOU declarations to clarify the allegations by Mirzayanov and Uglev about the development and production of the Novichok agents. During discussions with U.S. officials, the Russians did not dispute the facts that Mirzayanov had disclosed—only their interpretation. They admitted having conducted research on a new class of nerve agents but maintained that the Wyoming MOU and the BDA required declaring only stockpiled weapons, not small amounts of agent produced for development and testing purposes. Although some members of the U.S. intelligence community suspected that the Russians had manufactured significant quantities of the Novichok agents, the evidence was not clear-cut. Despite several rounds of discussions with Russian officials, the open questions were never resolved to Washington’s satisfaction.
Although Mirzayanov no longer had direct contacts with GosNIIOKHT, he believed that secret work on the Novichok agents continued. He had learned, for example, that Pyotr Kirpichev, now in his early fifties, was working at a secret military research institute in Shikhany, about a mile and a half from GITOS. Mirzayanov worried that the Novichok agents posed a serious proliferation risk because their production could be concealed within commercial chemical plants, greatly complicating the verification of the CWC.
Meanwhile, Lieutenant General Anatoly Kuntsevich was facing some legal problems of his own. On April 7, 1994, President Yeltsin dismissed him from the post of senior adviser on chemical and biological arms control for “gross violation of his duties” and replaced him with his former deputy, Pavel Pavlovich Syutkin. It appeared that Kuntsevich had signed an agreement with the Syrian government in 1992 to create a Syrian Center for Ecological Protection and had supplied it with laboratory equipment and materials. In October 1995, the general was aboard a government aircraft preparing to depart Moscow on an official visit to Damascus when the flight was halted and FSB agents took him into custody. Kuntsevich was charged with having shipped 800 kilograms of V-agent precursors to Syria in 1993 and the attempted smuggling of an additional 5.5 tons in 1994. At the time, Kuntsevich was running as a right-wing candidate for the Russian State Duma (the lower house of Parliament) and claimed that the charges against him were politically motivated. Several months later, however, the charges were dropped under mysterious circumstances, and Kuntsevich retained his prestigious post of academician with the Institute of Chemical Physics of the Russian Academy of Sciences until his death in September 2002. Reportedly, he was on a plane en route from Moscow to Damascus when he suffered a fatal heart attack.
IN APRIL 1994, more than three years after the end of the Persian Gulf War, the UNSCOM Chemical Destruction Group overseeing the elimination of Iraq’s stockpile of chemical weapons finally completed its work. Ron Manley led a small team of inspectors to the Muthanna State Establishment in June to certify that the facility was “clean” and handed the keys back to the Iraqi authorities. Despite this milestone, UNSCOM’s work was far from over. From then on, the U.N. inspectors would monitor Iraq’s chemical manufacturing plants with air-sampling systems, closed-circuit video cameras, and surprise on-site inspections to ensure that Saddam Hussein did not secretly reconstitute his chemical arsenal. UNSCOM would also continue to restrict imports of chemical precursors and dual-use production equipment, and attempt to clarify several remaining uncertainties and discrepancies, particularly with respect to the production of VX.
Beyond the specific case of Iraq, the U.S. government was increasingly concerned that chemical weapons would fall into the hands of so-
called rogue states that sponsored terrorism and were hostile to the United States. Officials at the Departments of State and Defense distinguished between two types of proliferation: “horizontal,” meaning the spread of basic chemical warfare capabilities to additional countries; and “vertical,” meaning the acquisition of more advanced agents and delivery systems by states with established chemical warfare programs, such as Iran and Syria. There was also the phenomenon of “secondary” proliferation, in which a country with an established weapons program transferred relevant equipment, materials, and know-how to other states.
Governments had various motives for pursuing chemical arms, including the search for status and prestige, the need for a low-cost “force multiplier” to enhance the effectiveness of their conventional forces, and the desire to deter attack from a hostile neighbor or to balance an unconventional threat. General Mamdouh Hamed Ateya, the former head of Egypt’s Chemical Warfare Directorate, argued in 1989 that Arab countries were justified in acquiring chemical weapons as a counterweight to Israel’s undeclared nuclear arsenal. Another factor promoting proliferation was the worldwide diffusion of chemical production technology and know-how. For many poor nations, acquiring a domestic chemical industry was vital to their economic and social development, giving them the ability to manufacture agricultural chemicals and essential drugs. Yet any nation with a moderately advanced chemical industry was potentially capable of producing blister and nerve agents.
War of Nerves Page 38