State Secrets: An Insider's Chronicle of the Russian Chemical Weapons Program

CHAPTER 1 Who Am I?

“Are you a spy?”

“Are you working for foreign intelligence?”

These questions struck me like lightning. Never in my life had anybody asked me questions like these. Even my KGB interrogator, Captain Viktor Shkarin, was never so brazen as to insult me in this way. I couldn’t understand it. Where was I? What was I doing there?

Slowly it came back to me. I was sitting in a big second floor suite of the Nassau Inn, which is next to Princeton University. Some people were standing around, looking at the signals put out by some kind of a primitive polygraph. My translator, who assaulted me with these horrible words, was someone I had met once before at a meeting with a very respectable and world-renowned scientist, in the Radisson Hotel in Moscow in 1994.

“Go fuck yourself! Just fuck off!” I kept repeating in Russian. No one tried to calm me down. Slowly I became aware there was a door in the room, and I pulled myself through it.

My translator followed me and asked me why I was insulted. All these questions and procedures are routine, he said, for anyone who is trying to get a government job, including the Secretary of Defense.

“I am not going to be the Secretary of Defense! I am sad that I was trying to help the American people. Probably you don’t know me,” I replied.

“Right now we know who you are,” he calmly replied.

Even in my worst nightmares, I couldn’t have imagined that someone could insult me some day in this nasty way, in this paradise of liberty. I asked myself – why didn’t even one of the famous American scientists or statesmen I had met warn me that in order to serve humanity, I had to go through this humiliating process?

Before that I was in very high spirits, first when I became the first foreigner to receive the 1993 Cavallo Foundation Special Award for Moral Courage. Then in 1994, George Soros personally presented me with the Heinz R. Pagels Human Rights of Scientists Award of the New York Academy of Sciences. In 1995, I was awarded the Scientific Freedom and Responsibility Award of the AAAS, a professional association of more than 100,000 members, at its annual meeting in Atlanta. This very special award was presented to me by the renowned scientist Dr. Francisco J. Ayala. Later that year, I testified at a special hearing on terrorism and the Aum Shinrikyo cult, held by the U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. After my testimony, Senator Sam Nunn told me respectfully that I should call him directly, if I had any problems.

Then this nightmare began.

I was feeling crazy. I was cursing my whole life. Probably even my love for Gale, who later became my wife, was not enough to calm me. I told her I probably had to leave the United States of America immediately. It had become a disgusting country, where the KGB was celebrating power. Only naïve people could believe that the spy Aldrich Ames was the only single agent working for the Soviets. Certainly his followers were trying to prevent anyone from helping the United States understand about the Russian “Novichok” program.

When they were negotiating for my assistance with these problems, they asked me to take a lie detector test. It was quite strange that I had to go through these procedures, when they supposedly wanted to get information about a whole new generation of the most deadly chemical weapons ever produced. To reconstruct any chemical agent, would probably have cost no more than a few thousand dollars. But, I think these people already knew that. Afterwards they tried to explain to me that I could devastate America financially (with misinformation), as someone had before.

I had already heard about this polygraph machine and was very curious about it. When I came into the room at the Nassau Inn, and I saw this equipment, there were no words to express my disappointment. It was so primitive and had nothing to do with my scientific background. Mechanically, I asked if Ames had passed his polygraph tests on this kind of equipment. They replied “Yes, but we have improved it since. Right now it is a very reliable machine.” Certainly it was reliable enough to produce an entirely questionable result, which could be used to compromise and control me later on.

I am still asking myself why all this happened to me, and so I am trying to put my past into some order with this story. I am sure of this though. Many people in power, both in Russia and in the US, do not want you to know about my story.