The Dead Hand Read online

  Shevardnadze, following the script, promised Baker that the Soviet side was ready “to arrange a visit to any of the biological facilities named by the American side in the U.S. memo.” And, he said, the Soviets would even go so far as to allow American scientists to “work at the Soviet biological facilities.” In a page that was not numbered, but apparently added at the end of his presentation, Shevardnadze suggested both sides work out a program of joint scientific work on defense against biological weapons. Shevardnadze also gave Baker a written paper containing the Soviet response to his questions.

  Shevardnadze had been aware of, and participated in, discussions of the scrub-down and cover-up strategy to hide Biopreparat in 1989. In his memoir, Shevardnadze alluded to this moment. “If anything, Jim could have had some doubts about my honesty, in connection with an unpleasant story I do not intend to tell here.” He added, “Lying is always unproductive.”45

  Back at the CIA in Washington, a decision was made not to punish the Soviets but to take up their offer of visits. “We said to ourselves, about Shevardnadze, he’s lying, but let’s not decide to ram it up their ass,” MacEachin recalled. “The number one objective for U.S. national security is to eliminate, and get onsite inspections. We knew if we accused, there would be 900 meetings of finger-pointing without anything happening.”46 In the months that followed, working in total secrecy, Baker and Shevardnadze negotiated the details of the first visits to suspected Soviet biological weapons sites.47 But they had many other pressing demands to cope with.

  On August 2, while Baker and Shevardnadze were meeting privately, they were interrupted by Baker’s spokeswoman Margaret Tutwiler, who handed Baker a message saying that Iraq had invaded Kuwait. Baker enlisted Shevardnadze and Gorbachev in what became a concerted, months-long effort to build a diplomatic coalition against Iraq. Gorbachev was reluctant to see the use of force and kept hoping that Saddam could be talked into pulling out of Kuwait. Nevertheless, when Baker came to Gorbachev’s official country residence at Novo-Ogaryovo on November 7, the Soviet leader said, “What’s really important is that we stick together.”48

  In these hectic months, a treaty reducing troop levels in Europe was signed, an agreement was reached on the unification of Germany and Gorbachev won the Nobel Peace Prize. At home, Gorbachev sank. He tried to fashion a new Union Treaty to hold the restive republics together, while Yeltsin urged them to grab all the independence they could. Chernyaev observed that “Gorbachev seemed truly at a loss, the first time I’d ever seen him in that state. He could see power slipping from his hands.”49 Shevardnadze brooded over the growing strength of reactionary forces, especially the “men in epaulets,” and felt Gorbachev was abandoning their shared cause of democratic reform. “The only thing I needed, wanted, and expected from the President was that he take a clear position: that he rebuff the right-wingers, and openly defend our common policy,” Shevardnadze recalled. “I waited in vain.”

  On the morning of December 20, after a sleepless night, Shevardnadze wrote out a resignation. He called his daughter in Tbilisi and told her, then informed two of his closest aides. He left for the Kremlin.50 The Congress of People’s Deputies fell into a stunned silence as he spoke. Shevardnadze complained bitterly of a lack of support; the reformers had scattered. “Dictatorship is coming,” he warned. Gorbachev, sitting nearby, listened impassively. When the speech was over, he clutched his forehead and looked down at his papers.51

  In the autumn of 1990, another Soviet defector, a medical biochemist, sought asylum at the British Embassy in Helsinki. He had once had top-secret clearances in the Soviet system and worked at Obolensk in the very early years when it was being carved out of the forest. He later worked in the antiplague system, and described to the British how pathogens were harvested from it for use in biological weapons. The defector’s information reinforced Pasechnik’s revelations.52

  Very early in the morning on Monday, January 8, 1991, Davis and Kelly stood in Moscow in the bone-chilling cold. Seven American and five British representatives—experts on biotechnology, microbiology, virology, arms control verification and the structure of the Soviet program— were about to begin the very first visit to suspected biological weapons sites. Davis, usually sharp and no-nonsense, was a bit groggy. It was deep winter, absolutely frigid, and he had uncharacteristically overslept. The British-American team had arrived in total secrecy; Davis had not even told his wife where he was going or why. Standing in front of an aging yellow bus, Davis was introduced for the first time to Alibek, who was put in charge of the visit. Alibek, smoking a cigarette, wore a brown wool sweater while everyone else on the Soviet side was in suits and ties. Alibek spoke no English and had never met an American or Briton. He recalled his surprise that the Westerners “knew a lot about us,” and one asked why “Biopreparat chief Kalinin” wasn’t present. Alibek lied, “Unfortunately, Mr. Kalinin is extremely busy.” Kalinin had instructed him never to even mention his name.53

  The bus set off for the Institute of Immunology at Lyubuchany, 35 miles south of the Kremlin, which did support work for Obolensk. The bus crawled in a snowstorm, and suddenly Davis heard a loud bang. The bus windshield shattered from the cold. “It was bloody awful,” Davis recalled. “This is the big game. This is day one. We haven’t even reached the place yet, and we have to slow down because we can’t keep going at speed, or we’d all die of exposure. We’re shivering now, probably doing 15 miles per hour, and we arrive late, frozen to death.” Alibek said the Soviet strategy for the visits, worked out over the previous weeks, was to hide as much as possible, and “waste as much time as possible” with meals, drinks and official speeches, to limit time for the visitors to carry out inspections. Vodka and cognac were ordered up at every stop. Popov said “there was a huge training program” before the visits so that every employee knew to repeat the “legend” that they were working only on defense against pathogens. “Every department and every lab had several meetings,” Popov recalled. The first stop was easy—the institute had no dangerous pathogens on hand.

  Next came Obolensk, the compound in the woods that had played such a central role in the work of Domaradsky and Popov. When they arrived January 10, Davis noted that, although thousands of people worked there, the halls were eerily empty. Urakov, the stern director who had clashed with Domaradsky, welcomed them with a long speech, sandwiches and drinks. When the Westerners pressed to get to work, Urakov warned them that if they wanted access to the floor containing Yesenia pestis, they would have to be quarantined for nine days on site. The point was to discourage the visitors from asking for access. Alibek had actually given orders the previous weekend for Obolensk and Vector to be totally disinfected, so the risk of exposure to dangerous pathogens was very low. Still, Urakov’s threat worked, and they did not ask to go there.54

  The Westerners had brought their own plan of action for the visit to the complex, which had more than thirty buildings, and they split up into small teams. Davis was the person on the delegation with the most complete knowledge, and he needed to be in several places at once. He went with one team to Korpus 1, the large cubelike modern building in which each floor was dedicated to a different pathogen. But when another team in the older part of the complex found something interesting, he was asked to come over, and was driven there by the Russian hosts.

  Davis happened upon an unmarked door that, he recalled, looked like that of a restroom. This opened into a shower changing room, and eventually a high-ceiling room containing a large freestanding hexagonal steel chamber, which Pasechnik had told them about. Biological bombs would be exploded inside the chamber, and animals, pinned down at one end, were exposed to the pathogens. Pasechnik had said the facility was used to test whether pathogens remained effective after being released by an explosive device.

  They climbed inside the chamber. It was dark.

  “Can we turn the lights on, I can’t see,” Davis asked. The Soviets said the bulb was burned out.

  Davis reached for a small
flashlight held by his trusted friend and deputy, Major Hamish Killip. Before Davis could turn the flashlight on, a Soviet official accompanying them grabbed his wrist and stopped him, saying it was a prohibited electronic device. They struggled back and forth. Davis protested strongly that he was on an officially sanctioned mission by the president of the Soviet Union. “We are your guests,” he insisted. “This is not the way to behave!”

  “I wasn’t letting go of the flashlight, and he has ahold of me, and we’re in a standoff here. It was tense. They didn’t know what to do, and I wasn’t going to back off.” Eventually, the laboratory officials relented and managed to turn on the overhead light.55 Davis noticed the steel walls appeared to have been recently burnished, to erase any marks that would indicate explosive fragments. But when Davis looked at the door, which seemed to be double-skinned and made of a softer metal, he saw the telltale dents. What’s this? he asked.

  The laboratory officials said it was poor workmanship with a hammer when the door was installed. “They knew that we knew this was laughable rubbish,” Davis said. Alibek remembered that Davis spoke up directly, saying, “You have been using explosives here.” Davis said the visit to the chamber was “pay dirt” showing the Soviets had an offensive biological weapons program, as Pasechnik had so painstakingly described. “It was quite chilling,” he said. The size of the equipment at Obolensk was a tip-off to the American and British experts that offensive weapons work was underway, and not just vaccines or defensive research. “You’ve got this gigantic building. You’re brewing up large quantities. You’re beginning to smell a rat here.”

  Next, on January 14, the team went to Vector, the facility at Koltsovo where Popov had first experimented with genetic engineering. Sandakhchiev, the driven, chain-smoking Armenian who had once dreamed of creating a new artificial virus every month, began to give the foreigners a dull lecture on the latest advances in Soviet immunology, but the visitors, now alert to the Soviet delay strategy, cut him off. Davis and Kelly wanted to see the laboratories. “I could see their eyes widen with astonishment as we took them past enormous steel fermenters, larger than what any Western pharmaceutical firm would ever use for the mass-production of vaccines,” said Alibek. They were not permitted, however, to enter the most sensitive floors where virus research was being done.

  At one point, a midlevel researcher let slip to Kelly that the laboratory was working on smallpox. Kelly asked him, quietly, through the interpreter, to repeat what he had just said. The researcher repeated it three times: Variola major. Kelly was speechless. The World Health Organization had eradicated smallpox, and samples were supposed to exist in only two official repositories, at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta and at the Ivanovsky Institute of Virology, a Ministry of Health facility in Moscow. Vector was not supposed to be working with smallpox; it was not supposed to have any smallpox. When Kelly later confronted Sandakhchiev, the director denied that offensive work was being carried out, and then refused to answer any more questions.

  Alibek knew that one of Vector’s prize possessions was the 630-liter smallpox reactor, standing five feet tall, which could manufacture great quantities of the virus. The visitors took note of the reactor and other equipment, including the most advanced aerosol-testing capability any of them had ever seen. There could be no justifiable explanation other than an offensive biological weapons program, they concluded.

  At the last stop, Pasechnik’s institute in Leningrad, Alibek thought he could relax. “The worst was behind us,” he later wrote. “Nothing at Pasechnik’s old institute would pose a threat. Or, so I thought.” All the incriminating equipment had been moved, and the laboratories scrubbed down.

  Then, during the tour, one of the visitors stopped by an imposing machine and asked, “What’s this?”

  “I groaned inwardly,” Alibek said. “I had forgotten about Pasechnik’s jet-stream milling equipment. It had been too heavy to move.” This was the machine that used a powerful blast of air to turn agents into a fine powder. An institute official proffered an explanation. “For salt,” he said. “That’s where we mill salt.”

  The visitors saw machinery for preparing biological aerosols that would be the perfect size for sticking in the human upper respiratory system. And they saw equipment Pasechnik had alerted them about for disseminating pathogens from a low-flying craft, such as a cruise missile.

  After the visitors left, Alibek felt victorious. Although the Westerners had suspicions, he recalled, “they could prove nothing, and we had given nothing away.”

  The delegation knew they did not get a full view of Biopreparat, but they had seen enough. They wrote in their report: the sheer size and scope of the program, the configuration of the facilities, the nature and extent of the work on pathogens, the guards and physical security and the large aerosol experiments—all of it pointed to an offensive germ warfare effort that was far beyond anything needed for civilian purposes.

  Pasechnik had told them the truth.

  ————— 16 —————

  THE YEAR OF LIVING DANGEROUSLY

  In the winter months of early 1991, nearly six years after the Politburo had chosen him as a younger, energetic standard-bearer who could save the party and state, Gorbachev, approaching his sixtieth birthday, felt exhausted. His attempt to create real, competitive politics gave rise to a potent rival, Boris Yeltsin, who became a rallying point for many who opposed Gorbachev, the establishment and the party. Nationalities long suffocated inside the Soviet Union began to awaken, with aspirations for independence, something Gorbachev had never foreseen.

  Gorbachev’s perestroika, or restructuring—which began with a goal of rejuvenating socialism, and later was aimed at creating a hybrid of socialism and capitalism—was never a full-throated drive to free markets. Gorbachev had experimented with capitalism, and given permission for the first private entrepreneurs to set up their own businesses, known as the cooperatives. But shortages, disruption and hardship spread across the country. A catastrophic drop in oil extraction, along with low oil prices, took a heavy toll; foreign currency reserves were almost exhausted, and a lack of commercial credits made imports almost impossible. Flour was rationed. Gorbachev announced at a meeting of the Security Council one day in the spring that, in two or three months, the government would no longer be able to feed the country.1 And his halting half-steps away from the centrally planned economy led to demands, championed by Yeltsin, for a more radical leap to the free market.

  “There were already bread lines in Moscow like those for sausage two years before,” Chernyaev recalled. “I took a car on Saturday and drove all around Moscow. Bread stores were closed or absolutely empty—not figuratively, but literally!”2 He wrote in his diary on March 31, “I don’t think Moscow has seen anything like this in all its history—even in the hungriest years.” And, he added, “on that day, certainly, nothing remained of the image of Gorbachev.”3

  The aggrieved losers in this vortex of change began to resist. They included the military, which felt humiliated as soldiers and tanks retreated from Europe, only to discover they were almost destitute at home; the party elite, which lost its monopoly on power; and the security agencies, primarily the KGB, who saw themselves as guardians of a power structure under siege and a country near disintegration. Gorbachev attempted to buy time. He tried to satisfy the disillusioned old guard while hanging on to the allies of perestroika, the progressive intellectuals, but he could not do both, and succeeded at neither. The progressives abandoned him for Yeltsin, a more promising agent of change. The hard-liners pushed Gorbachev to use force, and declare a state of emergency to reassert control in the old Soviet tradition. A coterie of the hardliners, from the KGB, the military and the party, would soon take matters into their own hands.

  In earlier years, Gorbachev and Reagan, in a courageous break with the past, managed to slow the speeding locomotive of the Cold War arms race. After some hesitation, Bush also realized Gorbachev was a man to do business with
, a negotiating partner, an anchor in a stormy sea.

  Then the anchor broke loose. Gorbachev lost control.

  Very early on the morning of Sunday, January 13, Soviet tanks, led by members of Alpha Group, an elite KGB special forces unit, attacked pro-independence demonstrators at the television tower in Vilnius, Lithuania. The troops opened fire and killed more than a dozen people in a massacre that caused a wave of apprehension and revulsion. The assault had been secretly orchestrated in Moscow by the hardliners around Gorbachev, perhaps in expectation that Gorbachev would have no choice but to order a crackdown and state of emergency. On the night of the assault, Kremlin records showed the hard-liners met in the office of Gorbachev’s chief of staff, Valery Boldin, from 7:15 P.M. until 2:30 A.M., shortly after the shooting began.4

  The day after the Vilnius massacre, speaking to parliament, Gorbachev insisted he had known nothing about the violence until it was over, “when they woke me up.” He blamed independence leaders in Lithuania for provoking it. His comments didn’t answer the central question: either Gorbachev, as commander in chief, was in control of his own security forces or he wasn’t. Both were disturbing possibilities. Liberals who had been at Gorbachev’s side, appalled by the use of force, quit the party, including the entire editorial board of Moscow News, a leading voice of perestroika, which published a devastating joint statement from the intellectuals. Chernyaev wrote in his diary on January 14 that Gorbachev’s address to parliament was “a disorganized, confusing speech full of rambling digressions…”5

  “I was in complete despair,” said Chernyaev, perhaps Gorbachev’s most loyal adviser. He wrote a letter of resignation, admonishing Gorbachev that “…you chained yourself to policies that you can only continue by force. And so you contradict your own philosophy.” The hard-liners were “pathetic and shameful,” Chernyaev said. “They discredit you, making the center look ridiculous. And you’re following their logic, which is basically the code of the streets—you beat me up… so now I’ll call my big brother and you’ll get it!”