The Dead Hand

by David Hoffman

  9 Joshua Lederberg, ed., Biological Weapons: Limiting the Threat(Cambridge, Mass.: Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, 1999), “Germs as Arms: Basic Issues,” Table 1.1, p. 4.

  10 The formal title was the Interdepartmental Scientific-Technical Council for Molecular Biology and Genetics. Domaradsky said orders to begin this work were first given in 1971, the year before he came to Moscow. However, other evidence, including dates given by Alibek, suggests the decisions came later, in 1973–1974. Estimates vary on the precise size of the program. A document in Katayev estimates the main organization, Biopreparat, had thirty facilities and twenty-five thousand employees, but some of these may have been working on legitimate civilian projects. “Khim-Prom,” Katayev, Hoover, no date. Alibek, p. 43, says there were thirty thousand employees in Biopreparat, with sixty thousand in the biological weapons effort overall at the peak.

  11 Domaradsky, p. 151. The open decree was April 19, 1974. A separate secret decree May 21, 1974, established the microbiology institute at Obolensk, and the founding decree for the institute at Koltsovo came Aug. 2, 1974.

  12 Alibek, p. 41.

  13 “Iz vystupleniya predstavitelya SSSR v Komitete po razoruzhenniu A. A. Roshchina 12 iyunia 1975g” [From the appearance of the representative of the USSR at the Conference on Disarmament], Katayev, Hoover.

  14 William Beecher, “Soviets Feared Violating Germ Weapons Ban,” Boston Globe, Sept. 28, 1975, p. 1. Beecher identified facilities in Sverdlovsk, Zagorsk and Omutninsk. These were part of the older military system, not the concealed Biopreparat facilities.

  15 Robert A. Wampler and Thomas S. Blanton, eds., “U.S. Intelligence on the Deadliest Modern Outbreak,” TNSA, EBB No. 61, doc. 1. Posev, a Russian émigré journal, published an article in October 1979 about a germ warfare accident, but identified the wrong city, saying it was in Novosibirsk.

  16 Associated Press, March 21, 1980.

  17 David K. Willis, “Soviets: U.S. Double-crossed Us on Germ Warfare Charges,” Christian Science Monitor, March 28, 1980, p. 10. When the public statement was made, Willis reported, “The Soviets were furious. First they had been approached in private, and now it was around the world.”

  18 TNSA EBB No. 61, doc. 10. Willis reported the Soviets issued three separate public statements March 19–20.

  19 Jeanne Guillemin, Anthrax: The Investigation of a Deadly Outbreak (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), p. 8. Israelyan admitted it was a fabrication. Victor Israelyan, On the Battlefields of the Cold War: A Soviet Ambassador’s Confession (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003), p. 315.

  20 Final Declaration of the First Review Conference, March 21, 1980.

  21 TNSA EBB No. 61, doc. 10. The message may have been written imprecisely. An outbreak of inhalation anthrax might be expected to have fast impact, while contaminated meat could be prolonged because of transport and storage. But the larger point was that the United States believed it had been inhalation anthrax.

  22 Meselson, “Memorandum to files regarding Sverdlovsk,” 1980, 7 pages, courtesy Meselson archive. Meselson, interview, Sept. 18, 2008. Meselson worked alone with Hoptman, but his analysis was fed into a government working group. After several months of examining the intelligence, the group concluded there had been an accidental release at the Sverdlovsk facility that caused an emission of anthrax spores and resulted in the first wave of deaths, possibly followed by a second wave caused by contaminated meat that was purchased on the black market. Leslie H. Gelb, “Keeping an Eye on Russia,” The New York Times Magazine, Nov. 29, 1981. Also see Guillemin, p. 9.

  23 Alibek, Ch. 5 and 8.

  24 He was known then as Kanatjan Alibekov. He changed his name to Ken Alibek years later upon arrival in the United States.

  25 Alibek, p. 53.

  26 Alibek said 836 was a code number for a natural strain of anthrax that the Soviets had found in Kirov in the 1950s. Alibek, interview, June 18, 2007.

  27 Roger Roffey, Kristina S. Westerdahl, Conversion of Former Biological Weapons Facilities in Kazakhstan, A Visit to Stepnogorsk, July 2000, Swedish Defense Research Agency, May 2001. Report No. FOI-R-0082-SE, based on a conference held in Stepnogorsk, July 24–26, 2000. Also, Gulbarshyn Bozheyeva, Yerlan Kunakbayev and Dastan Yeleukenov, Former Soviet Biological Weapons Facilities in Kazakhstan: Past, Present, and Future, Occasional Paper No. 1, Center for Nonproliferation Studies, Monterey Institute of International Studies, June 1999.

  28 Alibek says overall the Soviet capacity was five thousand tons a year, but the actual military mobilization plans were less. A plant in Kurgan was to make one thousand tons, Penza five hundred tons and Stepnogorsk three hundred tons, for a total of eighteen hundred a year.

  CHAPTER 6: THE DEAD HAND

  1 Mikhail Gorbachev, Memoirs (New York: Doubleday, 1996), p. 152.

  2 Angus Roxburgh, The Second Russian Revolution (London: BBC Books, 1991), p. 17; and Archie Brown, The Gorbachev Factor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 67–68. By Volsky’s account, Andropov flew into a rage at the deletion, and Gorbachev was sent to calm him down. Gorbachev claimed in his memoirs that neither Chernenko, Andropov nor Volsky ever talked to him about it.

  3 Margaret Thatcher, The Downing Street Years (New York: HarperCollins, 1993), p. 458.

  4 Don Oberdorfer, From the Cold War to a New Era (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), p. 80.

  5 Gorbachev, p. 155.

  6 Anatoly Chernyaev, My Six Years with Gorbachev (University Park, Pa.: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), p. 8.

  7 Valery E. Yarynich, C3: Nuclear Command, Control Cooperation (Washington: Center for Defense Information, 2003), pp. 140–141; and Yarynich interviews and correspondence, 1998–2009.

  8 Yarynich, pp. 142–145.

  9 Yarynich, p. 146.

  10 TV Center, Moscow, revealed the “Grot” code name, long a secret, in a broadcast Oct. 10, 2008. Also see GlobalSecurity.org. Bruce Blair, president of the Center for Defense Information, wrote in the Washington Post on May 25, 2003, that at Kosvinsky, Russian commanders can communicate to strategic forces using very-low-frequency (VLF) radio signals. He added, “The facility is the critical link to Russia’s ‘dead hand’ communications network, designed to ensure semi-automatic retaliation to a decapitating strike.”

  11 The decision was dated August 30, 1974, according to a history of Yuzhnoye, S. N. Konyukhov, ed., “Prizvany vremenem: Rakety i kosmicheskiye apparaty konstruktorskogo buro ‘Yuzhnoye’” [Called up for service by the time: Missiles and spacecraft of the “Yuzhnoye” Design Bureau] (Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine: ART-PRESS, 2004).

  12 A document from the Katayev archive dated February 1982 confirms that the system was under construction then but not yet tested. The Katayev records also show six SS-17 missiles brought on duty in 1984 as Perimeter. See Podvig, “The Window of Vulnerability That Wasn’t,” International Security, vol. 3, no. 1, Summer 2008.

  13 Further confirmation of plans for a fully automatic retaliatory system is contained in an internal Soviet defense document in Katayev, Hoover. Oleg Belyakov, who worked in Katayev’s department, complained in a 1985 memo that not enough attention had been paid “to a proposal, extremely important from the military and political point of view, to create a fully-automated retaliatory strike system that would be activated from the top command levels in a moment of crisis (with a notification to the adversary).” The comment about a “super-project” is from Katayev, Some Facts. Hines quotes Viktor M. Surikov, who had spent thirty years in building, designing and testing missiles, as saying the Dead Hand was designed by his team and approved by the Central Committee, but a fully automatic system was later rejected by Marshal Sergei Akhromeyev, chief of the General Staff. Hines et al., Soviet Intentions 1965–1985, BDM Federal Inc., vol. 2, pp. 134–135.

  14 This description is from Yarynich interviews with the author, as well as C3, p. 156; Korobushin interview, Hines, vol. 2, p. 107; Bruce Blair, Global Zero Alert f
or Nuclear Forces, Brookings Occasional Papers (Washington: Brookings Institution, 1995), pp. 43–56.

  15 The United States was the chief adversary, but Western European or other targets might also have been included. China had a relatively small nuclear force.

  16 Yarynich details the test on p. 170 in C3. The delay was described in an interview with the author.

  CHAPTER 7: MORNING AGAIN IN AMERICA

  1 Reagan, An American Life, p. 589.

  2 Massie first met with Reagan January 17, 1984, before the trip. She reports meeting him twenty-two times in his second term, and taught him the Russian proverb Doveryai no proveryai, or “Trust, but Verify.” See http://www.suzannemassie.com. Also see Deborah Hart Strober and Gerald S. Strober, The Reagan Presidency: An Oral History of the Era (Washington, D.C.: Brassey’s, 2003), pp. 222–228. Reagan’s diary, March 1, 1984.

  3 Jack F. Matlock Jr., Reagan and Gorbachev: How the Cold War Ended (New York: Random House, 2004), p. 88.

  4 Reagan diary, March 2, 1984.

  5 Reagan, An American Life, pp. 594–597.

  6 Christopher Andrew and Oleg Gordievsky, KGB: The Inside Story (New York: HarperCollins, 1990), p. 602.

  7 Andrew and Gordievsky, pp. 603–604.

  8 NSDD 119, Jan. 6, 1984. Christopher Simpson, National Security Directives of the Reagan and Bush Administrations: The Declassified History of U.S. Political and Military Policy, 1981–1991 (Boulder: Westview Press, 1995), pp. 374–378.

  9 Peter Grier, “The Short Happy Life of the Glick-Em,” Air Force magazine, Journal of the Air Force Association, vol. 85, no. 7, July 2002.

  10 Anatoly Chernyaev, My Six Years with Gorbachev (University Park, Pa.: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), p. 9.

  11 Herbert E. Meyer, vice chairman, National Intelligence Council, “What Should We Do About the Russians?” June 28, 1984, NIC 03770-84.

  12 Matlock, p. 95.

  13 Reagan diary, April 9, 1984.

  14 David Hoffman, “Chernenko ‘Disappointed’ White House,” Washington Post, April 10, 1984, p. 9.

  15 Reagan, An American Life, p. 602. Also see SNIE 11-9-84, Soviet Policy Toward the United States in 1984, Aug. 9, 1984.

  16 Seweryn Bialer, The Soviet Paradox: External Expansion, Internal Decline (New York: Knopf, 1986), see Ch. 6.

  17 George Shultz, Turmoil and Triumph: My Years as Secretary of State (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1993), p. 480.

  18 Shultz, p. 484. Gromyko recounted the moment to Dobrynin as if it had been more an exchange of slogans. Anatoly Dobrynin, In Confidence: Moscow’s Ambassador to America’s Six Cold War Presidents (New York: Times Books, 1995), p. 556.

  19 Shultz, p. 484; Andrei Gromyko, Harold Shukman, trans., Memories(London: Hutchison, 1989), p. 307.

  20 Don Oberdorfer, From the Cold War to a New Era (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), p. 93.

  21 Steve Coll, Ghost Wars(New York: Penguin Books, 2004), p. 102.

  22 Andrew and Gordievsky, p. 604.

  23 Shultz, p. 477. Andropov had proposed a unilateral moratorium on space weapons the previous year, just before the KAL shoot-down.

  24 Nigel Hey, The Star Wars Enigma: Behind the Scenes of the Cold War Race for Missile Defense (Dulles, Va.: Potomac Books, 2006), p. 136.

  25 The New York Times raised questions Aug. 18, 1993, about whether the test was rigged. The General Accounting Office found no evidence that it was, though the playing field was slightly tilted by heating the target so it would be easier for the interceptor to discover and turning the target sideways. The investigation revealed that the United States had also devised a deception program that would have exploded the target regardless to spook the Soviets. However, the deception program was not used in the June 1984 test. It had been readied in the first two experiments, but the interceptor and rocket missed by such a wide margin that the deception explosion was not used. “Ballistic Missile Defense: Records Indicate Deception Program Did Not Affect 1984 Test Results,” United States General Accounting Office, GAO/NSIAD-94-219, July 1994.

  26 George Raine, “Creating Reagan’s Image; S.F. Ad Man Riney Helped Secure Him a Second Term,” San Francisco Chronicle, June 9, 2004, p. C1.

  27 Shultz, p. 478.

  CHAPTER 8: “WE CAN’T GO ON LIVING LIKE THIS”

  1 Except where otherwise noted, Margaret Thatcher’s recollections are from her memoir, The Downing Street Years (New York: HarperCollins, 1993), pp. 452–453, and 459–463. Mikhail Gorbachev’s recollections are chiefly from his Memoirs in English and in Russian, Zhizn’ i reformi, two vols. (Moscow: Novosti, 1995). In some cases, as noted, Gorbachev’s comments are from the author’s interview in 2006; and Conversations with Gorbachev, transcribed interviews with himself and Zdeněk MlynááY (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002). Raisa Gorbachev mentioned the Chernenko permission in her memoir I Hope: Reminiscences and Reflections (New York: HarperCollins, 1991), p. 125.

  2 Geoffrey Howe, interview with BBC’s “The Westminster Hour,” May 2005.

  3 Archie Brown, The Gorbachev Factor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 77.

  4 Gordievsky, interview, August 29, 2005; and Next Stop, pp. 305–313.

  5 Gorbachev told a British official during the visit that the first modern English novel he read was Snow’s Corridors of Power. Archie Brown, Seven Years That Changed the World: Perestroika in Perspective (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 46. Also, The Observer, London, Dec. 23, 1984, p. 4; “The Westminster Hour,” BBC series Power Eating, by Anne Perkins, May 2005.

  6 Geoffrey Howe, Conflict of Loyalty (New York: St. Martin’s, 1994), pp. 358–360.

  7 The ad appeared Feb. 22, 1984. On the first page, which Gorbachev used for his prop, were the boxes and dots. On the second page, in bold headline, the advertisement asked “COULD THIS BE EARTH’S LAST CHART?” It was sponsored by a businessman, Harold Willens, who had spelled out his hopes to stop the arms race in a book, The Trimtab Factor: How Business Executives Can Help Solve the Nuclear Weapons Crisis (New York: William Morrow and Co., Inc., 1984). Willens, chairman of the California bilateral nuclear freeze initiative campaign of 1982, attributed his antinuclear views to his experiences in the Pacific as a marine. He visited Hiroshima and Nagasaki weeks after the World War II bombing and was horrified at what he saw. Willens had fled the Soviet Union with his parents when he was eight years old and settled in Los Angeles, where he became a successful businessman.

  8 See “Memorandum of Conversation,” meeting with British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, Dec. 22, 1984, Camp David. http://www.margaretthatcher.org.

  9 Gorbachev, interview, June 30, 2006.

  10 In the Dec. 23, 1983, issue of Science, two articles by teams of scientists argued that a nuclear war would have devastating environmental and ecological effects on the globe. In January 1984, a Vatican working group issued a report describing nuclear winter. “Nuclear Winter: A Warning,” Pontificiae Academiae Scientiarvm Docvmenta, 11, Jan. 23–25, 1984. Among the scientists who participated was Yevgeny Velikhov, who became a key adviser to Gorbachev.

  11 Thatcher interview with John Cole, BBC, Dec. 17, 1984.

  12 See www.margaretthatcher.org.

  13 Memorandum of conversation, Dec. 22, 1984.

  14 Gorbachev’s maternal grandfather had become a supporter of the Bolsheviks because the family was given the land they worked on after the revolution. “In the oral history of our family, it was constantly repeated: the revolution gave our family land,” he said. Conversations, p. 14.

  15 David Remnick, “Young Gorbachev,” Washington Post, p. B1, Dec. 1, 1989.

  16 The Soviet Union was not a rule-of-law state in the Western sense. But the law faculties were often used to groom future recruits for service in diplomacy, security services and party work.

  17 Gorbachev and MlynááY, Conversations, p. 18.

  18 The full title was History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks), Short Course, 1939.

 
; 19 Brown, p. 39.

  20 In the Soviet system, the procuracy was more than just a prosecutor. The office also had an accountant’s auditing function and served as a watchdog for the party.

  21 Ever since the Bolshevik revolution, the Communist Party leadership strove to keep the restiveness of youth in check through Komsomol. See Steven L. Solnick, Stealing the State: Control and Collapse in Soviet Institutions (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999).

  22 Raisa Gorbachev, pp. 93–99.

  23 Gorbachev, Conversations, p. 38.

  24 Robert G. Kaiser, Why Gorbachev Happened: His Triumphs and His Failure (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991), p. 41.

  25 Time magazine editors, Mikhail S. Gorbachev: An Intimate Biography (New York: Time Inc., 1998), p. 98.

  26 Brown, p. 45.

  27 Gorbachev, Conversations, p. 47.

  28 Gorbachev, Conversations, pp. 42–43.

  29 Gorbachev succeeded Fedor Kulakov, who died July 17, 1978. Kulakov, who was previously first secretary in Stavropol, had been a mentor. Gorbachev delivered a eulogy for him in Red Square. However, the delay between his death in July and Gorbachev’s elevation in November may have meant internal wrangling over the appointment.

  30 Volkogonov, p. 446, notes that Gorbachev’s assignment was doomed; decrees were never going to solve agricultural problems that dated back to Stalin’s disastrous campaign against the peasants.

  31 The most significant source of unorthodox thinking was in Novosibirsk, Siberia, where an outspoken reform economist, Abel Aganbegyan, had come up with a candid and devastating critique of the Soviet economy. A colleague, Tatyana Zaslavskaya, a sociologist, prepared a landmark internal paper challenging the entire structure of the Soviet economy, which was debated at a 1983 conference in Novosibirsk. See Tatyana Zaslavskaya, The Second Socialist Revolution: An Alternative Soviet Strategy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990).

  32 Robert D. English, Russia and the Idea of the West: Gorbachev, Intellectuals and the End of the Cold War (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), pp. 172–173.