The Dead Hand

by David Hoffman

  Just a week or two later, Sergei Popov also left Russia for the last time. Before buying his plane ticket, he exchanged his monthly salary from rubles to dollars: in his hand he held only $4. He used his savings to buy the ticket. When he arrived at Heathrow Airport in London, no intelligence agents were waiting for him. They never bothered to contact him. On October 1, Popov took up a six-month visiting postdoctoral fellowship at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology at Cambridge University, where Michael Gait was a senior staff scientist. “I had nothing with me, just a small suitcase,” he recalled. Realizing he had no money, his hosts offered a small loan. “I couldn’t tell them what I did before,” Popov recalled. “And I had no intention to tell them.” Popov knew of Pasechnik’s defection, but that role was not what he wanted. “I never contemplated defecting and disclosing secrets,” he said. “My intention was to start a new life and not talk about the past.”

  In November, the first results of the Trilateral Agreement, a new round of inspections, got underway. The target was the Institute of Ultra-Pure Biological Preparations in St. Petersburg, where Pasechnik had been director and where the United States and Great Britain feared the Russians were scaling up to manufacture super-plague. Kuntsevich, who was Yeltsin’s point man on chemical and biological weapons, appointed a Russian “Commission of Inquiry,” which met at the institute from November 18 to 21, 1992. A team of American and British observers were invited, but they soon found the whole exercise was a “pathetic setup job,” one of them recalled. The Russian participants, who were handpicked from Biopreparat, the Ministry of Public Health and the Ministry of Defense, mostly watched and listened. Rather than dig into the truth, they were apologists. They announced that there was no biological weapons work going on. The institute director said there never had been any. This was ludicrous in light of the fact that Pasechnik had pioneered such work there, and told the British about it. Among those on the visit was Christopher Davis, who had been one of the leading debriefers of Pasechnik. David C. Kelly, the British microbiologist, later recalled that “it was the American and British observers who actually asked the questions,” rather than the appointed Russian commissioners.

  During the November visit, the three buildings that made up the institute were examined again, as they had been in 1991 when Alibek attempted his clumsy cover-up. Again, American and British observers—this time accompanied by the Russian commissioners—spotted a large dynamic aerosol test chamber, a telltale sign of biological weapons research. They asked about its purpose; the answers didn’t add up. The visitors also saw Pasechnik’s milling machine, designed to produce particles of a particular size without damaging the pathogen used in the weapon. It also could not be explained. The “checkup” was over and the Russians had conceded nothing. Their denials made the American and British officials even more suspicious that weapons work was still going on—despite Yeltsin’s orders to stop it.20

  The Trilateral process dragged on. At the next stage of the visits, another team of American and British experts went to the All-Union Scientific Research Institute of Veterinary Virology in Pokrov, sixty-one miles east of Moscow, in October 1993. Kelly was among them. At Pokrov, his suspicions were rekindled that a massive Soviet—and now Russian—biological weapons program lay just beneath the surface. While Russian officials insisted they were making vaccines at Pokrov, Kelly saw telltale signs of biowarfare activity. “There were nuclear hardened bunkers and incubators for thousands of eggs. That’s the standard method for growing smallpox virus,” he said. Kelly saw that Pokrov had far more capacity than was needed for vaccines, and the hardened bunkers also seemed to be a giveaway that it was designed for wartime mobilization. But the Russians stuck by the vaccine story, and ducked questions about the past. The visitors were prevented from visiting a sister plant in Pokrov.21

  By late 1993, intelligence analysts in the United States and Britain were growing worried that the Russian biological weapons program was still ongoing in defiance of Yeltsin’s orders. One secret intelligence report quoted Yeltsin himself as complaining that the biological weapons work was continuing at three facilities despite his decree. In 1993, Alibek was also being debriefed by the intelligence agencies in the United States.

  In the autumn, the United States prepared an overview of the situation —and the evidence—in a top-secret National Intelligence Estimate, a report pulling together information from many different sources.

  Soon after the estimate was distributed in the U.S. government, it passed into the hands of Aldrich Ames, who was still spying for Russia from within the CIA. Ames’s last operational meeting with the Russians was on November 1, 1993, in Bogotá, Colombia. According to one source, either at this moment or soon thereafter, he turned over to the Russians the National Intelligence Estimate describing what the United States knew about Moscow’s biological weapons program, including specific locations. If the Russians wanted to conceal their germ warfare effort with even greater effectiveness, they had just received a helping hand: Ames delivered to them everything the Americans knew.

  There were no more visits to Russian laboratories for a long time. The Trilateral process stumbled on in 1994, when the Russians demanded two visits to facilities of the American pharmaceutical giant, Pfizer. The company was reluctant, but eventually agreed, under pressure from the White House. The Russians also demanded a visit to the Vigo plant in Indiana, where, at the end of World War II, the United States had built the capability for large-scale fermentation of anthrax and a bomb-filling line. It was now abandoned, and as Kelly put it, “the archeological evidence was clearly of 1940s vintage.” The Trilateral process ground to a halt.

  On April 7, 1994, Yeltsin abruptly dismissed Kuntsevich, the general whom he had appointed two years earlier to head his committee on chemical and biological weapons. The Kremlin press service said Kuntsevich was relieved of his duties for a “one-time gross violation of work responsibilities.” Details were not disclosed at the time, but came to light the following year when Kuntsevich ran for the lower house of parliament, the State Duma, on the party list of ultranationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky. Russian officials revealed that he was under investigation for helping arrange an illegal delivery of about seventeen hundred pounds of nerve gas precursor agents to Syria and for planning a much bigger shipment. However, Kuntsevich was never prosecuted in Russia. He insisted he had run afoul of internal politics. But the United States thought the charges were serious enough to impose sanctions on Kuntsevich for “knowingly providing material assistance” to Syria’s chemical weapons program.22

  The weapons of the Cold War had been spread around the globe by an insider who was supposed to be protecting them.

  ————— 21 —————

  PROJECT SAPPHIRE

  The United States opened eleven new embassies in the far reaches of the former Soviet Union in the year after its implosion, and a younger generation of diplomats volunteered for hardship assignments in remote outposts. Andy Weber was among them. On a long airplane flight, reading the Wall Street Journal, he saw a page-one article with the headline “Kazakhstan Is Made for Diplomats Who Find Paris a Bore.” The article described how Ambassador William Courtney was working out of a dingy hotel in the capital, Almaty, with phones so bad he often could not place a call to Washington. “America is busy,” the operators would say. It sounded like an adventure, and Weber jumped at the chance. With tours in the Middle East and Europe under his belt, he asked the State Department if his next assignment could be Kazakhstan. They signed him up on the spot. After Russian-language training, he arrived in July 1993 to take up the embassy’s political-military portfolio. He found Kazakhstan’s landscape a breathtaking tableau of steppe, lakes, forests and mountains, but Almaty was dismal. He threaded his way through fetid corridors without lightbulbs in the apartment blocks, and went to markets where pensioners stood forlornly offering to sell a vacuum tube.1

  Weber took a recently built house in the foothills of the Tien Shan Mountain
s that resembled a Swiss chalet, with a large fireplace, paneled walls and a sauna. When he needed to meet Kazakh officials, he invited them home for lunch or dinner. Weber had a cook and a few guards, and he relied on an auto mechanic and all-round fixer, Slava, at a time when everything was difficult to obtain. Slava was also an avid hunter, and Weber learned to stalk pheasant, moose and elk in the secluded wilds. One day not long after he arrived, Slava came to him and said, “Somebody wants to meet you.” Weber realized that whoever it was wanted a discreet meeting.

  He was picked up on a street corner, taken to an apartment building and shown to the door of a company that sold hunting rifles, scopes and night-vision equipment. Inside, he found a lively former Soviet navy submarine commander, Vitaly Mette, who wore a leather jacket. Mette’s thick hair was combed back from an angular face, and he carried himself with a self-confident air. Standing nearby was a large man with a polished head like a bullet, introduced as Colonel Korbator, and a very attractive blonde woman. Weber sat on a chair in the small room. The colonel left, then so did the blonde.

  When they were alone, Mette turned serious. He said he wanted to discuss the possibility of selling uranium to the U.S. government.

  Mette was vague about the nature of the uranium, except that it was stored at the Ulba Metallurgical Plant, an enormous industrial complex that fabricated reactor fuel in the grimy city of Ust-Kamenogorsk, in Kazakhstan’s northeast. Mette was the factory director. As he listened, Weber was curious, but his training told him not to rush. He wanted to talk to Courtney, the ambassador, an experienced foreign service officer who knew something about the Soviet military-industrial complex. That night, Weber and Courtney drove together to see Mette at a guesthouse in Almaty. Courtney asked questions about the material Mette was offering, but Mette just said “uranium.”

  Then Mette turned to Weber. Please come hunting with us, he asked.

  Kazakhstan, the second largest of the former Soviet republics, suffered as a Cold War proving ground and arms depot. In the remote steppe, the Soviet Union built test sites and factories for nuclear, chemical and biological weapons. The most spectacular was Semipalatinsk in the northeast, where 456 nuclear blasts were carried out from 1949 until 1989. Eighty-six of them were exploded in the air, 30 at the surface, and 340 underground in tunnels and boreholes.2 Contamination poisoned the population.3 Fallout from a 1956 explosion drifted over Ust-Kamenogorsk. Also in the north, at Stepnogorsk, anthrax was weaponized at the mammoth factory Alibek once led. A third facility in the north, built at Pavlodar on the banks of the Irtysh River, was a dualpurpose plant to make chemicals for civilian use and, if needed upon war mobilization, for weapons.4 Farther to the west, missiles were launched from the Soviet space complex at Scientific Research Test Range No. 5, at Tyuratam, later named Baikonur. And in the southwest was the Aral Sea, where the Soviet biological weapons testing site was built on Vozrozhdeniye Island. When the Soviet Union collapsed, Kazakhstan inherited the world’s fourth-largest nuclear arsenal, including 104 SS-18 intercontinental ballistic missiles with ten warheads each.5

  Richly endowed with natural resources, Kazakhstan’s greatest treasure was 70 trillion cubic feet of natural gas and 16.4 billion barrels of oil reserves. But despite this wealth, as author Martha Brill Olcott has observed, the new Kazakhstan was a fragile state, crippled by history and geography and born entirely out of the collapse of an empire, without a cohesive national identity.6 About 37 percent of the population was Russian, concentrated in the north, and 40 percent Kazakh, among a total of nearly one hundred ethnic groups and nationalities. In Soviet times, the Russians were the elite, but after the collapse many felt shipwrecked there. The newly minted country was ruled by Nursultan Nazarbayev, a onetime steelworker whom Gorbachev had named Communist Party leader of the republic. An ethnic Kazakh, Nazarbayev gradually transformed himself after the Soviet collapse into a Central Asian potentate, mixing authoritarianism, oil wealth and crony capitalism. Now Nazarbayev wanted to be rid of the scourge of weapons that had so disfigured the landscape. He had no use for the uranium at Ust-Kamenogorsk.7

  A few weeks after their first meeting, Weber flew to join Mette for a hunting expedition. They drove in a jeep for hours to a base camp in the Altai Mountains of eastern Kazakhstan, near the borders of Russia and China, an ideal territory for hunting. Weber enjoyed the banya steam baths, chewed on smoked pork fat and shivered in the early-morning cold with the Russians, speaking their language, hunting with them and earning their trust. He also shot a moose. He did not ask them about the uranium then. At the end of the trip, returning to the city, Mette volunteered to show Weber the plant in Ust-Kamenogorsk. They drove him around the gargantuan factory, fenced off, dark and brooding. Mette’s workers were making fuel for Russian nuclear power plants. If they weren’t exactly thriving, Weber saw they were not starving either. The entire town seemed to be a “little Russia”—Weber saw no Kazakhs there. Just before leaving, Weber inquired gently about the uranium. “If it is not a secret,” he asked, “do you have any highly-enriched uranium?” Highly-enriched uranium could be used for nuclear weapons. Mette was still evasive.

  The former Soviet Union was brimming with highly-enriched uranium and plutonium. Viktor Mikhailov, the Russian atomic energy minister, revealed in the summer of 1993 that Russia had accumulated much more highly-enriched uranium, up to twelve hundred metric tons, than was previously thought.8 Outside of Russia, in the other former republics, less was known about stockpiles, but much was feared about the Iranians and the Iraqis hunting for material to build nuclear bombs. “We knew that Iran was all over Central Asia and the Caucasus with their purchasing agents,” recalled Jeff Starr, who was principal director for threat reduction policy at the Pentagon.

  At the same time, all the former Soviet lands were awash in scams and deceptions—people offering to sell MiGs, missile guidance systems or fissile material, real and imagined. There was such a frenzy to strike gold that it was hard to detect what offer was genuine. “A lot of people thought it was a scam,” Weber recalled of the initial reaction to his reports of finding enriched uranium.

  He went back to Mette. “Look,” he remembered saying, “for us to take this seriously, you have to tell me what the enrichment level is, and how much of it there is.”

  In December 1993, Weber was extremely busy. Vice President Al Gore visited Kazakhstan in the middle of the month. During the bustle, Slava, the mechanic, came to Weber and said, “Colonel Korbator wants to meet you.” Weber quickly agreed. On a snowy day, he went back to the same small office where he had first seen Mette and Korbator a few months earlier.

  Korbator said, “Andy, I want to talk to you. Let’s take a walk.”

  They walked through the snowy, dim courtyard of the apartment complex. Korbator spoke first. “Andy, I have a message for you from Vitaly,” he said. “This is the answer to your question.”

  Korbator handed Weber a piece of paper. Weber unfolded it. On the paper was written:

  U235

  90 percent

  600 kilos

  Weber calculated that was 1,322 pounds of highly-enriched uranium, enough to make about twenty-four nuclear bombs. Weber closed the piece of paper and put it in his pocket. He said, “Thank you very much. Please tell him, thank you. This is very important.”

  Weber sent a cable to Washington, with very limited distribution. Then for a few days he was preoccupied by the Gore visit. Immediately after Gore departed on December 14, Weber was awakened after midnight by the embassy communications officer, who called saying a night action cable from Washington had arrived, requiring his immediate attention. Weber drove back to the embassy. The cable asked a thousand questions about the uranium. What was Mette’s motivation? They wanted to make sure Weber was confident of his source. Weber answered the questions as best he could.

  Nothing happened for about a month. Weber’s response languished in the State Department until one day in January 1994, when it came up as an afterthought at a White House
meeting. Ashton B. Carter, who had helped frame the Nunn-Lugar legislation in 1991 and was now an assistant secretary of defense, volunteered to take over the issue. Shortly after the meeting, he called Starr into his office. “Your job is to put together a team and go get this stuff out of Kazakhstan,” Carter said. “Whatever you need—do it.” Carter said to get the uranium out within a month. Starr quickly put together a top-secret “tiger team,” an ad hoc group of action-oriented officials from different agencies.9

  On February 14, 1994, Nazarbayev made his first visit to see President Bill Clinton. In a White House ceremony, Clinton praised Nazarbayev’s “great courage, vision and leadership,” and announced that American aid to Kazakhstan would be tripled to over $311 million. In their public remarks, neither Clinton nor Nazarbayev, nor the official who briefed reporters that day, used the word “uranium.” But when Nazarbayev was at Blair House, the guest residence across the street from the White House, Weber and Courtney quietly paid him a visit. They asked Nazarbayev if the United States could send an expert to verify the composition of the uranium at Ust-Kamenogorsk. He agreed, but insisted it be kept under wraps.10

  Starr’s tiger team was uncertain of conditions at the plant in Kazakhstan. They needed someone who could quickly lay “eyes on target,” as Starr put it, and know exactly what was stored there, and how vulnerable it was. They couldn’t be sure if they could take samples, or photographs, so it had to be someone who could mentally absorb everything, who would know about canisters and metals. The job went to Elwood Gift of the National Security Programs Office at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. A chemical-nuclear engineer, Gift had experience in most of the nuclear fuel cycle, including uranium enrichment.