The Dead Hand

by David Hoffman

  A little more than two months after the meeting in Zaikov’s office, the Central Committee issued the resolution, ordering more cover-up activity, with an eye toward possible future inspections, according to records in Katayev’s archives. This instruction was to recall all documentation from sites “connected with manufacturing of special-purpose product,” design new means of disguising them and modernize facilities so they could appear to be manufacturing defensive biological agents, such as vaccines. The goal, according to the resolution, was to preserve “the achieved parity in the field of military biology.”32

  A very small group of intelligence officials in the United States and Great Britain worked on biological weapons. They were mainly technical specialists, and they were outnumbered in the intelligence and policy community, where vast staffs worked on nuclear and strategic weapons, and on topics such as the Soviet economy. The CIA even had a full-time analyst devoted to monitoring canned goods in Soviet stores. The germ warfare experts felt like a lonely band, warning of dangers that were often not taken seriously by others and for which they could not offer absolute proof. Christopher Davis, who served on the British Defense Intelligence staff for ten years as the senior specialist on biological weapons, said that methods that had worked for counting nuclear missile silos were virtually useless when it came to assessing a biological weapons program. The missiles and hardware could be tracked from above, but not the pathogens. “A building is a building at the end of the day,” he explained. “It might have some strange features but there is little one can conclude about its function without x-ray eyes. You can’t tell what anyone is doing inside, and that’s the key question. In intelligence terms, it’s a very hard target.”33

  The claims of the biological weapons experts met with deep skepticism by other defense, intelligence and policy officials. “The biological weapons clique inside Washington was so doomsdayish, that they tended to undermine their own credibility,” said Doug MacEachin, who had become arms control director at the CIA in March 1989. “It never had a whole lot of credibility. They went beyond the evidence too many times.” MacEachin was also influenced by his own calculation that biological weapons would have little use on the battlefield; thus no one would go to all the trouble, certainly not in the nuclear age.34

  In the autumn of 1989, Ken Alibek, deputy director of Biopreparat, recalled visiting Obolensk, south of Moscow. On the first floor of the big new building, in the auditorium, the annual review of work at the institute was held. “We were not allowed to bring briefcases or bags inside the room,” Alibek recalled. “We could take notes, but they were gathered up by security guards after each meeting. We had to get special permission to see them again.”

  The next-to-last speaker was Sergei Popov, the young researcher who had worked at both Koltsovo and Obolensk. He approached the lectern to give a report on a project that Alibek called “Bonfire.”

  “Few paid attention at first. Work on Bonfire had dragged on for some fifteen years, and most of us had given up hope of ever achieving results.”

  But Alibek added that his attention perked up when Popov announced that a suitable bacterial host had been found. This was the two-punch weapon in which one agent would be the vehicle and the attack on the immune system would be the second, deadly strike. Alibek recalled watching an experiment involving animals. Alibek wrote in his memoir they were rabbits, but Popov said later they were guinea pigs. Behind glass walls in a laboratory, a half-dozen were strapped to boards to keep them from squirming free. Each was fitted with a masklike mechanical device connected to a ventilation system. Watching from the other side of the glass, a technician pressed a button, delivering small bursts of the genetically altered pathogen to each animal. When the experiment was over, the animals were returned to their cages for examination. They all developed symptoms of one sickness, such as high temperatures. In one test, several also developed signs of another illness. “They twitched and they lay still,” Alibek recalled. “Their hindquarters had been paralyzed—evidence of myelin toxin.”

  It was Popov’s two-punch killer agent on display. “The test was a success,” Alibek recalled. “A single genetically engineered agent had produced symptoms of two different diseases, one of which could not be traced.” The room fell silent. “We all recognized the implications of what the scientist had achieved. A new class of weapons had been found.”35

  Popov vividly recalled working with the guinea pigs. By 1989, the scientists at Obolensk had reached a period of uncertainty. There was less money than before. “It was a frustrating time of disappointment and moral challenge,” he said. “And at that time, I made a commitment to myself. I committed myself to never deal with animal experiments again. The trigger was my last huge experiment with guinea pigs. Something like a few hundred guinea pigs had been held in a containment facility. I and my colleagues visited them every day. Wearing space suits, we fed the survivors and took out the dead. I was very shocked with how it went. Nothing new, but it was unpleasant. Absolutely unpleasant.

  “I just couldn’t stand any more the conditions the animals were held in. We saw animals dying, awfully, starving, experiencing paralysis and convulsions in conditions neglecting the very sense of life. The agent paralyzed half of the animal’s body. I did not want to be involved in this any more.”36

  ————— 15 —————

  THE GREATEST BREAKTHROUGH

  Vladimir Pasechnik was reserved, diffident and modest, but his face brightened when talk turned to science. In a photograph taken in the 1980s, when he was an institute director in Leningrad, he was wearing a corduroy jacket, glancing up from his desk, creases across his forehead, his hair receding, eyes inquiring, one hand holding down a notebook or journal. Born in 1937, Pasechnik lost both his parents in the siege of Stalingrad. He had overcome many obstacles to study as a physicist, and graduated at the top of his class at the Leningrad Polytechnic Institute. But the sacrifices of the war left a deep scar on Pasechnik, and he was determined to use his science for peaceful purposes. After graduation, he became a researcher at the Institute of Higher Molecular Compounds in Leningrad, attracted by the chance to create new antibiotics and treat diseases like cancer.1 In 1974, one of Pasechnik’s professors was asked to recommend a young researcher for a special assignment. Pasechnik was selected to set up a new scientific research facility, the Institute of Ultra Pure Biological Preparations in Leningrad.2 It seemed a promising opportunity—the new institute would have resources for the best equipment and could attract the finest talent. He took the job, and in the years that followed he demonstrated ability as a talented and strong-willed manager. By 1981, the institute had become one of the most advanced microbiology facilities in the Soviet Union. It was also part of Biopreparat, the secret Soviet biological weapons machine. Pasechnik later told people that it was about this time that he realized the research could not be just for defensive purposes, as he originally believed, but was for offensive weapons.

  While Domaradsky and Popov attempted to modify the genetic makeup of pathogens, Pasechnik’s mission was more practical: to optimize the pathogens for use in combat, and to build superefficient industrial methods to produce them. If anthrax or other agents were to be deployed in wartime, they needed to be manufactured in large batches, remain stable, survive dissemination into the air and be effectively dispersed. Pasechnik’s job was to find ways to prepare and manufacture the pathogens so they could be weaponized without losing effectiveness and virulence. Working with models of the deadly agents, he sought to master the complex process of how to concentrate the pathogens and turn them into aerosols.3

  Soviet biological weapons builders were bedeviled with complications. Before being deployed as an aerosol, a pathogen must be mixed in a proper “formulation,” with the addition of chemicals and other substances, specific for each germ. If done correctly, it will maintain the pathogen’s virulence or toxicity while in storage or in the weapon. But if done incorrectly, the agents may die or lose thei
r power. They can also clog nozzles or clump up inside a weapon, which would make it ineffective, or they can be neutralized by the environment once disseminated. Also, they can face other complications that render them ineffective, such as the anthrax spores killed by phage lysis bacteria in Stepnogorsk. Moreover, it was essential to keep the particles small, to penetrate deep into the lungs of the victims. According to U.S. estimates, the ideal size is one to five microns; a micron is one-millionth of a meter. If larger, they would be filtered out by the upper respiratory tract before reaching the lungs; larger particles also settle out of the air more quickly. However, Biopreparat and the Soviet military produced agents up to twelve microns, knowing that, even if they did not reach the lungs, they would still infect the victim once trapped inside the body in the upper respiratory tract.4

  One of Pasechnik’s most important inventions was a “milling” machine that used a powerful blast of air to turn batches of dried agent into a fine powder. He also developed new methods of microencapsulation—covering the tiny particles containing the infectious agents in polymer capsules to preserve and protect them from ultraviolet light. Pasechnik frequently accompanied the officers from the 15th Main Directorate of the Defense Ministry when they visited the research institutes. Popov recalled that Pasechnik sat in the front row, writing everything down in his notebooks.

  Alibek, then first deputy director of Biopreparat, recalled in his memoir how he had once spent a long, tiring day in Leningrad with Pasechnik, going over projects at the institute. “Pasechnik seemed sad and a bit depressed as he drove me to the railway station, where I planned to catch the overnight train back to Moscow. I asked him if anything was wrong. Posing such a personal question to a man like Pasechnik was risky. He was one of our senior scientists, twelve years older than me, and he had always been somewhat aloof. I worried that he might take offense.”

  “Can I be honest with you,” Pasechnik replied. “It’s like this. I am fifty-one years old, and I am going through a strange time in my life. I don’t know if I have accomplished what I want to. And they’re going to make me retire soon.” Alibek knew that fifty-five was the mandatory retirement age in Biopreparat, but recalled that he clapped Pasechnik on the shoulder and told him not to worry. “Four years is a long time, and they could be your best years!”

  Pasechnik smiled thinly, Alibek said.5

  But this conversation did not even begin to reveal the depth of Pasechnik’s despair. According to those who knew him and later spoke with him, Pasechnik had found it increasingly difficult to justify his work devoted to weapons. Each year, the tasks assigned to him by the military were more demanding, as they sought still more virulent and effective agents and ever-larger industrial capacity for producing them.

  Foremost among his tasks, Pasechnik worked on creating models of a plague agent that would be resistant to antibiotics. If the models worked, they could easily be adapted for the real Yersinia pestis. His dream of working on a cure for cancer was fading. His promise to himself to use science for peaceful goals was unfulfilled. His personal crisis was profound. Pasechnik felt trapped, and began to plan an escape.

  In October 1989, Pasechnik went to France on a business trip to purchase laboratory equipment. Alibek had approved the trip and forgotten about it. While in France, Pasechnik received a message to return for an urgent meeting of all Biopreparat institute directors in a few days’ time. Pasechnik told a colleague traveling with him to go on ahead, he would follow the next day. When the colleague arrived back in Moscow, alone, he found Pasechnik’s wife waiting at the airport—and she was surprised Pasechnik was not on the plane. In Paris, Pasechnik walked to the Canadian Embassy, knocked on the door and announced that he was a scientist at a secret biological weapons laboratory in the Soviet Union and wanted to defect. The Canadians shut the door in his face. Pasechnik felt desperate. He feared going to the United States or Britain, thinking either country might force him to go back to work on biological weapons. But with few options left, he reluctantly called the British Embassy from a phone booth and repeated that he was a Soviet germ weapon specialist and wanted to defect.

  The British Secret Intelligence Service responded with alacrity. He was picked up in a car, flown to Heathrow on a British Airways shuttle flight and taken to a remote safe house on the English coast.6

  It was a rather miserable, cold and wet Friday afternoon in London, October 27, 1989. The workday was nearly over and dark had fallen. Christopher Davis, a surgeon commander in the Royal Navy, educated at Oxford and London universities, and the senior biological warfare specialist on the Defense Intelligence Staff, recalled that he was looking forward to the weekend. He had cleared his desk. There was not a piece of paper on it, everything locked away, as required. Then his phone rang around 5 P.M., and his boss, Brian Jones, was on the line.

  “Chris, you better come to my office,” Jones said. Davis went to the small office, not much larger than his own. Jones handed Davis a one-page document, a message from the British Secret Intelligence Service, known as MI6, describing the arrival of a Soviet defector, and a brief summary of what the defector was telling them.

  “Oh, shit,” Davis said. His eyes were riveted on one word on the page, “plague.” He immediately realized the significance. He told Jones, “The Soviet Union is developing strategic biological weapons. Plague is not a battlefield weapon!”7

  In Moscow, Alibek’s secretary rushed into his office on Monday morning. Pasechnik’s deputy, Nikolai Frolov, was on the line from Leningrad and needed to talk to Alibek immediately. Alibek recalled he was so overworked, he felt like putting his head on his desk and going to sleep.

  “We’ve got a problem,” Frolov said, sounding strained. “Pasechnik hasn’t come.”

  Alibek replied reassuringly, saying it was no problem if Pasechnik was a little late to the meeting of institute directors. “No! No!” Frolov nearly yelled into the phone. “I mean, he hasn’t come back from France!”

  Frolov’s account of what happened spilled out in a torrent of excited words, Alibek recalled. In France, Pasechnik had been up all night, lying in bed, fully dressed, before telling his colleague to go on ahead without him. When the colleague got ready to leave for the airport, Pasechnik hugged him and said proshchai, or farewell, rather than the usual do svidaniya, or until we meet again.

  “I listened to the entire story with a knot tightening in my stomach,” Alibek said. He went down the hall to see Kalinin, the director of Biopreparat. When told of Pasechnik’s disappearance, Alibek said, it was as if Kalinin had just heard about the death of a close relative. Kalinin went pale. He told Alibek he would call Gorbachev immediately.8

  In the days after he defected, Pasechnik was constantly nervous. He had left his family behind. He was frightened that he would be tried as a war criminal, or pilloried in public, or forced to go back to work on the pathogens, or returned to the Soviet Union. He knew volumes about the research at Biopreparat and was terrified of the British reaction. “It must have been like walking the plank and not knowing if the waters are going to be shark infested or you are going to make it to shore and be okay,” recalled Davis. “That’s what made it all the more brave, I think, in making the decision he could no longer do what he was doing. It was an exceptional move.”

  The case was given a code name, Truncate. Davis became one of the two main debriefers, along with a man from MI6, and periodically they were joined by David Kelly, who was head of microbiology at Porton Down, the British chemical and biological defense research facility. Davis was among the small band of allied biological weapons experts who had puzzled for years over Soviet activities. When Pasechnik was interviewed, an invented name was always used, such as “Michael,” but Davis knew Pasechnik’s real identity. They spoke English, although sometimes Davis had to ask for a translation, as when Pasechnik tried to describe a hamadryas baboon. When he wasn’t speaking about the Soviet system, Pasechnik was curious about Britain, asking questions about family life and communities
, and marveling, for example, that Kelly had a personal computer at home.

  What Davis and his colleague learned from Pasechnik was more revealing than all the fragments of information they had accumulated over the years. “It was an extraordinary moment,” Davis said. “If you’re an intelligence officer, this doesn’t happen but once in a lifetime. Maybe never in a lifetime. It was just one of those exceptional moments. Prior to the time when he came, there were no defections of any note. Neither were there any good, high-level human intelligence sources in place.” He added, “The fact that Vladimir defected was one of the key acts of the entire ending of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. It was the greatest breakthrough we ever had.”

  What Pasechnik told them was remarkable. The Soviet Union had not only weaponized classic pathogens, but was seeking to create new agents designed to be resistant to antibiotics and to break down the defenses of the victim. The Soviets were also working on vaccines that would shield their germ warfare operators from harm, and they were developing detectors to sense a possible attack. Not only was there a large program devoted to battlefield weapons, which were for short-range attacks, but the emphasis on plague and smallpox suggested a focus on long-range, strategic weapons. Pasechnik noted that the Soviets had not yet achieved one of their prime goals, the creation of a new biological warfare agent completely resistant to treatment, but the work was still underway.

  Pasechnik also revealed how the Soviet program might ultimately be concealed, perhaps with small, mobile laboratories that could never be found. Pasechnik told them about the sprawling network of laboratories and production facilities hidden in Biopreparat that had cost in excess of 1.5 billion rubles over fifteen years and employed tens of thousands of scientists and support workers. He told them how the Interbranch Scientific and Technical Council, where Domaradsky had once worked, was responsible for coordinating and administering the germ warfare effort with money from the military. He revealed that the Soviets had created a system of false financial plans for the institutes, purporting to show they were working on innocent civilian biotechnology projects, in order to cover up the actual military biological weapons work.