The Dead Hand Read online

  Pasechnik knew the people in the system, including the bosses, Alibek and Kalinin, at the Biopreparat headquarters on Samokatnaya Street. He knew the names and missions of the separate military biowarfare facilities in Kirov, Sverdlovsk and Zagorsk. He knew of the massive anthrax factory at Stepnogorsk. Pasechnik’s information showed conclusively the Soviet Union had violated the Biological Weapons Convention and deceived the outside world. The Soviets concealed their misdeeds under layers and layers of disguise, and Pasechnik peeled it away.

  The disclosures soon led to a quiet debate in British intelligence and policy circles: did Gorbachev and Shevardnadze, the Soviet reformers, know about the dangerous agents in the test tubes? Pasechnik was perplexed by the frequent questions he got from his debriefers about Gorbachev. He said Gorbachev must have known if Shevardnadze knew. That was how the system worked. And Pasechnik was certain that Shevardnadze had attended some of the high-level meetings in 1988. Davis’s assessment strongly supported this view as well.

  If Gorbachev knew, then the British had to question their assumptions about him, too. Thatcher was the first Western leader to declare that Gorbachev was a man with whom she could do business. In Washington, after nearly a year of dithering, Bush was also planning his first summit with Gorbachev. Was this a man they could do business with, or was he the leader of a country and a system that created—and was still creating—the most destructive biological weapons mankind had ever known, in violation of all treaty promises?

  In London, the revelations from Pasechnik were summarized into a quick note for the Joint Intelligence Committee. The first recipient of such reports is always Her Majesty, The Queen. The second is the prime minister, who at the time was Thatcher.

  In early November 1989, while Pasechnik was still being debriefed, the Berlin Wall crumbled. Over the previous summer, Hungary had opened its border with Austria. Thousands of East Germans had flooded West German embassies in Budapest and Prague. In October, Gorbachev had visited Berlin and signaled that the Soviet Union would not intervene, a lesson drawn from his searing visit to Prague after the Soviet invasion in 1968 and his soul-searching talks with his best friend MlynááY. In an evening torchlight ceremony on that Berlin visit, handpicked party youth activists had stunned Gorbachev by ignoring the hard-line party boss Erich Honecker on the reviewing stand and instead shouting to Gorbachev, “Perestroika! Gorbachev! Help us!”12 Gorbachev had become a beacon of change that was now shaking the very pillars of the empire he ruled. In early November, roiled by public protests, a new government in East Germany permitted travel to the West through Czechoslovakia, prompting tens of thousands of people to crowd the roads. Hastily, new rules for travel were drafted by the government, and the plan was to announce them November 10, but inadvertently the decision was read aloud at a government press conference at the end of the day November 9.13 News reports vaguely suggested that East Germans could get visas to leave the country immediately through border crossings, touching off a frenzy of excitement. Rumors spread that all travel restrictions were being lifted. Thousands of people gathered at the Berlin Wall in the evening. The guards, who had no instructions, just opened the gates, and the Berlin Wall was breached twenty-eight years after it was first erected. The long division of Europe was over.

  In Washington, reporters were summoned to the Oval Office at 3:34 P.M. Bush was nervously twisting a pen in his hands. He later recalled feeling awkward and uncomfortable. Ever cautious, he was worried that any comments he made could trigger a Soviet crackdown. The memory of the Tiananmen Square massacre was still fresh. Lesley Stahl of CBS News remarked that “this is a sort of great victory for our side in the big East-West battle, but you don’t seem elated. I’m wondering if you’re thinking of the problems.”

  “I am not an emotional kind of guy,” Bush said.14

  In Moscow, Chernyaev wrote in his diary the next day, November 10, “The Berlin Wall has collapsed. This entire era in the history of the socialist system is over.”

  After the fall of the wall, even more threatening storms were on the horizon for Gorbachev. The Soviet economy plummeted in 1989; there were acute shortages of goods, along with a grain crisis and declining oil production. Perestroika had not produced better living standards. At a Politburo meeting on the day the Berlin Wall fell, Gorbachev was preoccupied not with Eastern Europe, but the possibility that the Soviet Union would disintegrate, as internal republics began to consider breaking away. The leaders of Estonia and Latvia, two tiny Baltic republics, had told Gorbachev in recent days “they have a feeling that there is no other way than to leave the USSR,” Gorbachev told the Politburo.15

  After Bush had waited almost a year to engage Gorbachev, he was now confronted by a confluence of serious troubles: the future of Germany, and indeed Europe, was up for grabs; Gorbachev was in deeper and deeper trouble at home; and arms control negotiations were going nowhere. When Bush and Gorbachev finally met in a summit December 2–3 on the Mediterranean island of Malta, severe winds and high waves lashed the harbor as they talked aboard the Soviet cruise liner Maxim Gorky. Bush reassured Gorbachev that he supported perestroika, but he also defended his words of caution when the Berlin Wall came down. “I do not intend to jump up on the Wall,” Bush said, mangling one of his favorite aphorisms, that he would not “dance on the wall” to embarrass the Soviet leader. “Well,” Gorbachev replied, “jumping on the Wall is not a good activity for a president.” They laughed. For eight hours, they talked about a ban on chemical weapons; how to accelerate negotiations on strategic nuclear weapons and reduce troop levels in Europe; the revolution in Central Europe; Nicaragua; Afghanistan; and Soviet economic and trade woes. Not once did they mention biological weapons.16

  In Moscow in late 1989, Pasechnik’s defection sent shock waves through the small group of Soviet officials who knew. On December 6, the Kremlin made an urgent decision. According to a spravka in Katayev’s files, the Ministry of the Medical Industry, which had jurisdiction over Biopreparat, was ordered by a Central Committee resolution—effectively a decision by the Politburo—to accelerate the preparation of facilities for possible foreign inspection. The order said the facilities must be ready by July 1, 1990, “to prevent undesirable consequences” from the defection of Pasechnik.17

  Alibek recalled in his memoir that “we took comfort in the fact that there were many things Pasechnik didn’t know. He had not been personally involved in weapons production, and much of what he could tell Western intelligence agencies was likely to be hearsay at best, thanks to our internal security regime. Nevertheless, Pasechnik’s interrogators would have learned the secret that had been kept hidden for so long: the real function of Biopreparat.”18

  Alibek was right that Pasechnik did not bring the British information about weapons production. But Pasechnik had spent many hours visiting the microbiology institutes and taking notes about their activities. His memory was sharp.

  In early 1990, a very modest effort inside the Soviet system at more openness about the Sverdlovsk anthrax epidemic was immediately crushed.

  By this time, Gorbachev and Shevardnadze had deeply antagonized the military. They negotiated the destruction of hundreds of the most modern Soviet nuclear warheads and missiles and slashed military spending. The Warsaw Pact was disintegrating as Soviet troops made an unceremonious and precipitous retreat. All of these actions were in keeping with Gorbachev’s intention to end the hypermilitarized state and ease the burden of defense on the economy and society, but the military took it hard, very hard. They were furious, especially at Shevardnadze.

  On January 5, Shevardnadze’s ministry tried to force a little openness about biological weapons. The ministry distributed a draft Central Committee resolution stating that the best way to deflect outside demands about biological weapons, in the wake of the defection of Pasechnik, would be to propose an exchange of data with the Americans in two areas: weapons work before the Biological Weapons Convention went into effect in 1975, and information on how any bio
logical weapons development since then was being converted to civilian purposes. The Foreign Ministry also suggested that if specific questions came up about the Sverdlovsk anthrax incident, the Americans should be told that “indeed, an accident took place,” an investigation was underway and the results might be shared with them. Shevardnadze’s deputy for arms control, Viktor Karpov, circulated this document. He sent the draft to officials at Biopreparat (Alibek was on the list), the military (including the 15th Main Directorate, which handled bioweapons), the KGB, the Health Ministry, the Academy of Sciences and others.

  Five days later, the military exploded. Dmitri Yazov, the defense minister, wrote a letter to all who had received the draft proposal. He complained the military had been left totally out of the loop. The military realized, correctly, that the offer of a data exchange would “radically contradict” previous statements that “the Soviet Union has never worked on nor produced nor possessed stockpiles of biological weapons,” Yazov said. In other words, the Foreign Ministry had proposed to open the window on the lie, and the military wanted to slam it shut before it got out.

  On Sverdlovsk, Yazov insisted “there were no explosions and accidents” at the facility. The epidemic was caused by tainted meat, a government commission had determined at the time, and “at the present time there exists no new information or circumstances that would force a doubt about the correctness of the conclusions.”

  The military was so alarmed that it demanded Karpov recall all fifteen copies of the draft resolution. The documents show the military prevailed. The language in the Foreign Ministry draft was immediately changed. Karpov sent out the amended instructions the next day, January 11.19

  From October 1989 through January and February 1990, the British worked long hours to sift through the mountain of new information they received from Pasechnik. Details began to be shared with the United States. At the CIA headquarters, Doug MacEachin, the arms control director, received a file of reports coming in from London, not yet formally circulated in the CIA, summarizing the debriefings with Pasechnik, concluding that the Soviets were building strategic biological weapons. Joshua Lederberg, the Nobel Prize–winning microbiologist, went to Britain to interview Pasechnik, and came away shocked by the revelation of the smallpox program and convinced that Pasechnik was genuine. MacEachin asked the CIA’s technical teams to help him corroborate what the defector was saying, using satellite data to locate facilities and other details.

  Like the British policy staff, MacEachin had long assumed the Soviets would not build germ weapons if they had nuclear ones. “We also had authoritative information that the common view amongst the professional Soviet military, the line officers, was that biological weapons and chemical weapons are not weapons, they’re terrorism devices,” MacEachin said. “You know, they’re no good in the battlefield. How are you going to deploy a BW weapon on the battlefield?” He said that while biological weapons would cause mass casualties in a city, “bugs and gas are not the weapons that professional soldiers use. And we had plenty of evidence the Soviet military was very professional. One of the major arguments against putting a BW weapon on a SS-18 was: what a waste of time. It didn’t track.”

  MacEachin took the new information to a meeting of the key arms control policy-makers at the White House, known as the “ungroup.” Out of a fear of leaks and bureaucratic infighting over arms control, the Bush White House had decided to handle the most sensitive matters in a very small circle. The members came from the departments of State and Defense, the CIA, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency and the Energy Department as well as the National Security Council. No assistants were allowed to sit on the back benches, no leaks were tolerated and the very existence of the group was known to only a few people. It was called the “ungroup” because formally it did not exist.20

  After the Malta summit, the group had plenty to deal with: troop reductions in Europe, chemical weapons negotiations and pressure to reach a new strategic arms treaty by early June, when Bush and Gorbachev had scheduled a full summit in Washington. When all the regular business was finished at the ungroup one day in February, MacEachin asked everyone to wait. They had a frightening new problem which he described as “a turd in the punchbowl.”

  What he told them next was astounding: a high-level human source had provided the outlines of a vast, secret Soviet biological weapons program, concealed in a civilian organization, Biopreparat. For the members of the ungroup, this was a potential time bomb. Every day, Gorbachev was sinking deeper. Bush had already put U.S. diplomacy on pause for a year. MacEachin told the ungroup, referring to the defector, “If what he says turns out to be even partially corroborated, it is of sufficient significance that, if we don’t resolve this problem, we ain’t going to get a single arms control agreement.” MacEachin believed that hawks in Congress, including the conservative senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina, who was the ranking Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and was already attacking Gorbachev for violations of other treaties, would seize on the news to block any more agreements with Moscow. “Can you imagine Jesse Helms sitting up there with that in his hand?” MacEachin recalled. The senator would say, he predicted, “You can’t deal with the Soviets, they’re liars, cheaters, bums, rats, scums—and I’ve got the list right here in my hand.” MacEachin told the ungroup that the British defector was credible and “we’re going to try and make sure we corroborate. He’s given us so many details that we’ve got to be able to do some corroboration.”21

  Bush decided to keep the story of Biopreparat under wraps, just as the Soviets had themselves done for so many years. The United States and Great Britain at last possessed tangible evidence that had so long eluded the experts on Soviet biological weapons, but because of all the pressures building up on Gorbachev, because of the dramatic rush of events in Europe, the president decided not to go public. To do so would not only trigger outrage in Congress, it might also severely damage Gorbachev and Shevardnadze at a time when the Soviet leaders could ill afford it. Dennis Ross, who was director of the Policy Planning office at the State Department and a top assistant to Baker, recalled, “Gorbachev and Shevardnadze were under enormous pressure. We wondered, what can their traffic bear? And we were trying to get [a unified] Germany into NATO. Germany in NATO is a strategic architecture for the next generation. Germany is bigger than anything else. And you’re going to introduce this? There were competing objectives and we had to make a choice.”22When Baker met Gorbachev on February 9, not a word was said about biological weapons. MacEachin said that in the spring the CIA briefed only a small circle of lawmakers on Capitol Hill, and swore them to maximum secrecy. The story did not leak.

  Alibek recalled in his memoir that disclosure might have forced Gorbachev to abandon the whole biological weapons enterprise on the spot. But that is not what happened. Bush’s decision “gave us unexpected breathing space,” Alibek said. “We continued to research and develop new weapons for two more years.”

  Gorbachev’s power ebbed in the spring of 1990. Mass protests were held against his rule, the Baltic republics declared independence and Yeltsin became the chairman of the Russian parliament. The Congress of People’s Deputies, the legislature that Gorbachev’s reforms had created, repealed the Communist Party’s monopoly on political power. Chernyaev, Gorbachev’s closest adviser, was riddled with doubt. “I was deeply worried about what was happening in the country,” he said. “Most of all because nothing was working out the way Gorbachev intended, much less how it really ought to have.”23 Gorbachev wanted to save his country with his reforms, but instead it was coming apart at the seams. When Shevardnadze came to Washington April 4–6, the Americans realized the Soviet military was in a state of near rebellion against its civilian leadership. At one point, Shevardnadze retracted a concession about cruise missiles he had made to Baker in February. “I had the image of a diplomat with a political gun to his head,” Baker recalled. “Any step forward could lead to
suicide.”24

  Alibek at this point was still a company man, deputy director of Biopreparat, working at the headquarters. But he also had a change of view, and wondered how much longer they could go on covering up the biological weapons program. “Like everyone else, I was furious with Pasechnik and believed he had put our security at risk,” he said. “But where others desperately wanted to preserve the status quo, I saw no choice but to change course.” He thought they should mothball the pathogen production lines, while preserving the sample strains and research facilities. The laboratories would be easier to hide—they could be portrayed as making vaccines—than the factories mass-producing anthrax and smallpox. “If circumstances required, we could always recover our strength. So long as we had the strains in our vaults, we were only three to four months away from full capacity.”25 Alibek said that the KGB chairman, Vladimir Kryuchkov, sent a memorandum to Gorbachev recommending the “liquidation of our biological weapons production lines” because of the Pasechnik defection. The memorandum argued that the germ warfare program was no longer a secret from the West, so the Soviet Union should “cut our losses” and close down the factories.26

  But rather than shut down the biowarfare machine, the system applied more camouflage. A detailed plan to deflect American questions about biological weapons was approved at a Politburo meeting April 25, 1990. The plan was to offer what would seem to be more openness, an exchange of visits. These would not be intrusive, formal inspections, but rather choreographed visits to select Soviet laboratories that had already been well scrubbed, as well as demands to see American sites and an exchange of information about defensive work, such as vaccines. The written plan, contained in five pages of “additional directives” and three appendixes approved by the Politburo, included an assertion that the Soviet side sincerely wanted to establish more “openness” and “trust” about biological weapons. One appendix was a draft agreement for both sides to sign, titled, in part, “measures to strengthen trust and broaden openness.” But it was all doublespeak. The true intent was to take the heat off Biopreparat. To deflect questions about the 1979 anthrax accident, another appendix offered “informational material about the Sverdlovsk facility.” This three-page document claimed Sverdlovsk had worked on vaccines against anthrax. It said nothing about the 1979 accident, nor about work on offensive biological weapons.27