The Dead Hand

by David Hoffman

  Mirzayanov had heard the lofty disarmament speeches about chemical weapons. Gorbachev pledged in April 1987 that the Soviet Union would no longer produce them. Yeltsin, in one of his first announcements as the new Russian president in January 1992, promised to support the global treaty then under negotiation in Geneva that would outlaw chemical weapons.13

  Yet Mirzayanov knew that the Soviet Union—and Russia after it—had never given up work on the new binary weapon. He discovered the truth one day when he noticed a new poster in the hallway of the institute in Moscow. The poster proclaimed that scientists had invented a “pesticide” for use in agriculture, and it presented the chemical formula. Mirzayanov recognized immediately that it was actually the formula for something else—a novichok agent. The pesticide was a cover story. Despite all the promises of disarmament, Mirzayanov realized there was a plan to conceal the new generation of chemical weapons in ordinary industrial and agricultural compounds. This way, the Kremlin could sign the global ban on chemical weapons while keeping a hidden arsenal at the ready. Mirzayanov decided he had to tell the world.14

  A lean, compact man who gestured often with his hands when he talked, Mirzayanov landed a job in 1965 at the State Scientific Research Institute of Organic Chemistry and Technology, located on the Highway of the Enthusiasts in Moscow. He was a specialist in chromatography, a laboratory technique for the separation of mixtures, and he became an expert in detecting tiny traces of chemicals in nature.

  During his many years there, Mirzayanov came to have profound doubts about the military usefulness of chemical weapons. Nevertheless, in 1985, at fifty years old, he was given a sensitive job as chief of the department of foreign technical counterintelligence, responsible for checking the air and water at all the facilities for telltale leaks and, more broadly, protecting them from foreign spies. Mirzayanov had a rebellious streak, so the job was an odd fit, but he hoped to stick to the technical side. It could mean he would get scarce hard-currency resources to purchase new equipment. In his position, Mirzayanov was told the secrets of the novichok agents. He saw field tests at first hand. He was put on the scientific councils and allowed to read the piles of reports.

  As the Gorbachev revolution took hold, Mirzayanov found himself drawn into the democracy protests, especially Yeltsin’s call for radical change. “From the very first days, I went to the streets,” he recalled. He quit the Communist Party on May 4, 1990, and became still more active in the pro-democracy movement. As a result, he was kicked out of his counterintelligence post.

  His indignation about the novichok deception erupted in April 1991. He learned of a banquet to celebrate the award of the Lenin Prize to the institute director, Viktor Petrunin, and to Anatoly Kuntsevich, a general who had been in charge of a chemical weapons test installation at Shikhany. The prize was for creating a binary chemical weapon—long after the Soviet Union had promised to halt the chemical weapons production.15

  Mirzayanov hoped Yeltsin’s growing prominence and power in 1991 would bring a new direction. He read newspapers every day, but saw nothing about chemical weapons. He knew the institute was still functioning. “I was suffering from the agonizing burden I carried,” he recalled, “feeling personal responsibility for participating in the criminal race of chemical weapons.

  “I decided, I was ready to speak openly.”

  He sat down at home one night and typed out an essay, pouring out criticism of the whole chemical weapons enterprise. The next day he hand-carried his essay to the editor of a popular Moscow weekly newspaper, Kuranty, which published the article on October 10, 1991. Mirzayanov titled the essay “Inversion,” referring to the process by which a chemical unnoticeably changes from one form into another without changing its chemical formula. He meant it as a commentary on the duplicity of the generals and their determination to continue building chemical weapons.

  In the article, Mirzayanov disclosed that the chemical weapons chiefs were “busy developing a more modern type of chemical weapon, and its testing was carried out at an open test site in one of the most ecologically unsafe regions.” He did not call it novichok but had spilled the beans. And he hinted that the generals were trying to hide their misdeeds. “The question is: why are we misleading the West again?” he wrote.

  Mirzayanov called the essay a “cry from the heart,” but there was little public reaction. Mirzayanov knew people were preoccupied with survival through a difficult winter. Inside the institute, his bosses were furious. They fired Mirzayanov on January 5, 1992. He was soon struggling to make a living selling Snickers and jeans in a Moscow open-air market. “It wasn’t very good for a professor with a Ph.D.,” he recalled.

  Yet he could not forget about the novichok agents. He decided to speak out again, and wrote another essay. On September 16, 1992, it was published in Moscow News, a progressive weekly tabloid.16 The article, headlined “A Poisoned Policy,” was accompanied by photographs of the administration building of the institute on the Highway of Enthusiasts that had never before been identified in public. Mirzayanov revealed more about the dark secrets of the novichok generation of weapons. He said “a new toxic agent” had been developed at the institute, more lethal than the American VX gas. Injury from the new agent is “practically incurable,” he said. He disclosed that the toxic agent was the basis for a brand-new binary chemical weapon, and that field tests of the new binary agent were being carried out in Uzbekistan as recently as the first three months of 1992—after Yeltsin’s pledges in January.

  Instead of destroying chemical weapons, Mirzayanov said the generals were developing new ones. The people of Russia “have no reason whatsoever to entrust the destruction of chemical weapons to those who developed them,” he insisted. The promises of Gorbachev and Yeltsin to the West were completely betrayed by work going on inside the country. Who was in charge?

  Mirzayanov was arrested October 22, 1992, for revealing three state secrets: the new toxic agent that was more deadly than VX gas; the development of the binary weapon; and the recent field tests. On October 30, he was indicted. Mirzayanov pleaded not guilty, was imprisoned and then released as his case dragged on.17

  On January 13, 1993, the global treaty banning the development, production, stockpiling and use of chemical weapons was signed in Paris—with Russia among the signatories.18

  In the legal proceedings, Mirzayanov and his lawyer were entitled to see the record of the investigation, including top-secret documents. Mirzayanov painstakingly copied documents in his own hand, took the notes home and typed them up. As a precaution, he faxed some of the documents to Gale Colby, an environmental activist in Princeton, New Jersey, who was organizing Western support for him.19 One day, prosecutors put in the record a document that described the development, manufacture and delivery of Novichok 5 for field tests. Mirzayanov copied it. According to the document, the field tests were scheduled for 1991–1992, well after Gorbachev and Yeltsin had pledged to stop making chemical weapons.

  Only in 1994, after he had been twice imprisoned, did the case against Mirzayanov fall apart.20 At great personal risk, Mirzayanov had revealed the duplicity of the generals and the development of the novichok generation of chemical weapons.

  Bruce Blair, the Brookings Institution scholar, finished his second book, The Logic of Accidental Nuclear War, and it was published early in 1993. Blair’s research in Moscow had paid off—he was able to write a detailed account of the Soviet nuclear command and control system. But one small detail eluded him. In Moscow, he had been told by his sources that the Soviet Union created a special system of command rockets that would fly across the country in the event of a nuclear attack, and issue launch orders to the intercontinental ballistic missiles. But when he checked the U.S. data on flight tests for these command rockets, in some thirty examples, nothing seemed to happen when they flew. No large ballistic missiles rose out of their silos as a result of the presumed commands. Blair wrote in his book, that what the Soviets told him could not be corroborated by evidence. />
  Still, he wondered: what were the rockets for, if the commands were not followed?21

  Blair sent a copy of his new book to Valery Yarynich, the nuclear command and control specialist whom he had met in Moscow nearly two years before. Back then, Yarynich had impressed Blair with his knowledge, and Blair had been careful not to write down Yarynich’s name, out of an abundance of caution. Yarynich had given Blair a clue about the control rockets, but Blair didn’t quite grasp it.

  When Blair’s book was published, he invited Yarynich to Washington.22 Yarynich believed strongly in openness. He brought with him to Washington a typewritten document, single-spaced, dated February 24, 1993. One page was titled, at the top, “Reserve commanding rockets system.” Under this, Blair saw a half-page, hand-drawn diagram, Figure 1. The drawing was labeled “Emergency Rocket Command System.” It depicted satellites in the air, missiles in silos, submarines, command centers and strategic bombers. Blair tried to figure out, what did it all mean?

  Under the diagram was a half-page of text. As Blair read on, it dawned on him. Yarynich had told him earlier that there was no automatic Dead Hand in the Russian system, but there was a semiautomatic system of some kind.

  And here it was, on the typewritten page: the Doomsday Machine.

  Yarynich, who had personally worked on the system in 1984, had been very careful not to write down any technical data, nor numbers or locations of the system, and did not use the real name, Perimeter, in the document. Rather, he sketched its broad principles. Blair examined the paper closely. It outlined how the “higher authority” would flip the switch if they feared they were under nuclear attack. This was to give the “permission sanction.” Duty officers would rush to their deep underground bunkers, the hardened concrete globes, the shariki. If the permission sanction were given ahead of time, if there were seismic evidence of nuclear strikes hitting the ground, and if all communications were lost, then the duty officers in the bunker could launch the command rockets. If so ordered, the command rockets would zoom across the country, broadcasting the signal “launch” to the intercontinental ballistic missiles. The big missiles would then fly and carry out their retaliatory mission.

  In May 1993, Blair visited Yarynich again in Moscow. This time, Yarynich gave him an eleven-page, single-spaced review of Blair’s book. It was a thoughtful document, and near the end of it, Yarynich mentioned a few errors he had found in the book, and thus helped Blair resolve the riddle. Yarynich told Blair the reason the command rocket test flights were not followed by launches of the huge intercontinental ballistic missiles was this: the Soviets knew that the Americans were watching. So they waited, delaying launches by forty minutes or up to twenty-four hours to fool the Americans, and hide Perimeter.

  Blair took notes. When he got home, he called his sources and checked the U.S. flight test data again. He was especially interested in the test of November 13, 1984, right after Reagan’s election.

  Sure enough, Yarynich was right. The heavy missiles did fly, just forty minutes after the command rockets.

  Yarynich believed Perimeter had a positive role. If it were turned on, the leaders in the Kremlin would feel less pressure to make a dangerous, hair-trigger decision to launch on receipt of the first warning. They could wait. It might help them avoid a terrible, impulsive mistake. But Blair had a different view. He knew from his own experience that in the American system of command and control, people were the essential firewall. People ruled machines. The Soviet Union seemed to have built a Doomsday Machine by removing all but a few people. Blair was uneasy that it put launch orders in the hands of so few, and with so much automation.

  Blair revealed the amazing system in an op-ed published in the New York Times on October 8, 1993, headlined “Russia’s Doomsday Machine,” describing “a fantastic scheme in which spasms of the dead hand of the Soviet leadership would unleash a massive counter-strike after it had been wiped out by a nuclear attack.”

  “Yes,” Blair wrote, “this doomsday machine still exists.”

  Blair was inundated with phone calls from around the world. The very next day he was visited by Larry Gershwin, the national intelligence officer for Soviet strategic weapons, who was the man most responsible in the intelligence community for tracking Soviet missiles, bombers and submarines. Gershwin was intensely interested in what Blair had discovered. American intelligence had known some pieces of the puzzle, but they had not understood the command and control aspects of the Doomsday Machine.

  Blair had connected the dots.23

  ————— 20 —————

  YELTSIN’S PROMISE

  After he became Russian president, Yeltsin quickly and privately admitted the truth about Soviet biological weapons. On January 20, 1992, he met the British foreign secretary, Douglas Hurd, in Moscow. The British ambassador, Rodric Braithwaite, passed a note to Hurd during the meeting, suggesting he ask Yeltsin about germ warfare. For nearly two years, Braithwaite had been demanding answers about the program. He had been stonewalled. This time, Yeltsin said something “spectacular,” Braithwaite recalled.

  “I know all about the Soviet biological weapons program,” Yeltsin told Hurd.

  It’s still going ahead, even though the organizers claim it’s merely defensive research. They are fanatics, and they will not stop voluntarily. I know those people personally, I know their names, and I know the addresses of the institutes where they’re doing the work. I’m going to close down the institutes, retire the director of the program, and set the others to work designing something useful, such as a cow with a yearly yield of 10,000 liters. When I’ve checked for myself that the institutes have in fact stopped work, I’m going to ask for international inspection.

  “Those people,” Yeltsin said, expressing disgust, “can even make a cow grow an extra leg.”

  “We were stunned,” Braithwaite recalled. “We could do no more than thank him.”1

  When Yeltsin met Baker in Moscow on January 29, the American secretary of state was equally impressed. Yeltsin proposed another major leap in the downhill arms race, reducing strategic weapons still further. “I saw a different Yeltsin from the man I’d seen before,” Baker recalled. “Whereas in the past he had often seemed vague and rather glib, now he spoke at greater length, with no notes, about highly technical issues.” Yeltsin admitted a Soviet biological weapons program had existed, and he promised to dismantle it “within a month.” He repeated his pledge to British Prime Minister John Major in London on January 30, and to President Bush at Camp David on February 1. Celebrating his sixty-first birthday at Camp David, Yeltsin said, “There has been written and drawn a new line, and crossed out all of the things that have been associated with the Cold War.” Neither Yeltsin nor Bush said anything in public about biological weapons, but Dmitri Volkogonov, the historian, who was advising Yeltsin then, relayed word to reporters during the Camp David summit that they had discussed it. This didn’t make the headlines, which were dominated instead by word of deeper cuts in strategic arms and pledges of cooperation in other areas, but it was noted in news accounts that day. Volkogonov said that Yeltsin promised “a number of centers and a number of programs dealing with this issue have been closed,” and “from 1992 there will be no budget allocations to that program.”2

  Sergei Popov, who had carried out some of the most ambitious experiments in genetic engineering at Vector and Obolensk, saw the economic despair all around him. He wasn’t interested in selling his knowledge, he just wanted to escape the hardship. “When it started to collapse,” he said, “people started selling everything from the shelves in the labs. So what we ended up with was almost empty labs. Whatever we had, reagents, equipment, everything had been sold.”

  His friend in Cambridge, Michael Gait, sent him an application for a postdoctoral fellowship in England. Popov carefully completed all the paperwork. On his résumé, he stated that in Obolensk, among other things, he was working on “microbiology of pathogens,” but he didn’t say more. He identified hi
mself as a “department chief” who was carrying out studies “on recombinantly produced proteins.” He was careful not to say he was genetically engineering pathogens for weapons. Popov worried that if he mailed the application from Obolensk, the KGB would intercept it, so he drove to Moscow and mailed it from the main post office, figuring it would not be noticed. The letter got through; Gait then wrote back with the news—a grant was awaiting him from the Royal Society.

  Popov needed KGB permission to travel out of the country, even temporarily. He told the Obolensk director, Urakov, that he had a grant from the Royal Society, and that he was going to England “to set up connections” for possible business deals. Privately, Popov knew that Urakov wanted to get his son out of Russia. When Popov promised to help with the son, the director did not decline. Urakov turned to the KGB boss in his office. Shall we let him go? Urakov asked.

  The KGB man nodded yes. They gave Popov his travel documents.3

  Ken Alibek decided to quit the military after the eye-opening visit to the United States in December 1991. “The last straw,” he said, came when a ten-page “summary” of the trip, prepared by Kalinin, the Biopreparat boss, was attached to Alibek’s trip report. Kalinin’s summary falsely claimed the visit “proved the continued existence of an American offensive weapons program.” Alibek now realized that the generals hoped to continue their offensive weapons research, even after the Soviet collapse and the discovery that the United States did not have a program. Alibek took his letter of resignation, dated January 13, 1992, to Kalinin.

  “I lived in a country called the Soviet Union,” Alibek recalled telling him. “I served it loyally. It doesn’t exist anymore. So now I’m free.” Kalinin grew angry, and they quarreled. Kalinin accused Alibek of betrayal. Alibek recalled he stalked out of Kalinin’s office. The building was quiet. He went to the personnel office and turned in his badge. He cleaned out his office and never saw Kalinin again.4