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

CHAPTER 12 The Torment of Insight

Our operations for protecting the new developments of GOSNIIOKhT didn’t correspond with the changes that were taking place in our country at that time, or with the foreign policy directed at making the world a safer place. It turned out that along with hundreds of other scientists, I had participated in a vast conspiracy against the future Chemical Weapons Convention, repeating the role played by the captive scientist from the Stalinist era.

In September of 1994, the management of GOSNIIOKhT filed a lawsuit against me and demanded 33 million rubles, claiming that my public speeches and articles in the press had caused moral and material damages to the institute. The management of the institute accused me of calling GOSNIIOKhT a “sharashka”, which is the term coined by Aleksander Solzhenitsyn to mean a jail/science-research institute. This was blatant hypocrisy on their part, as they knew quite well that during the war and even for a long time after that, there was a jail for political prisoners who were chemists at the institute. The prisoner/scientists were escorted to their work in the laboratories and experimental units from their jail cells. Often these people were selfless and very talented.[71] Isn’t it the pinnacle of cynicism or even a sin of some sort to call these people “employees of GOSNIIOKhT”? Petrunin did exactly that when he included the victims of this Stalinist labor camp in the list of employees of his institute, in an article he wrote about the 80^th Anniversary of GOSNIIOKhT.[72]

Later on, scientists at GOSNIIOKhT continued the sad tradition established by these selfless researchers, in working conditions that were very far from safe. Speaking of “sharashka”, I have always been talking about the conditions of labor and “the regime” at that institute, and not the scientists, as among them there were and still are outstanding specialists, such as Professor Andrei Tomilov.

At the same time, it was inexplicable from the point of view of the most basic human rights, that people who were working in the field of chemical weapons in the U.S.S.R. were working outside of the law. It’s as though they didn’t exist. For example, when someone started talking about raising scientists’ salaries or pensions at least up to the level of miners or other people working in dangerous professions, the administration literally replied as follows: “You see. We don’t exist for the state. It has never admitted and it never will acknowledge that our country develops and produces chemical weapons.” As a result, the bosses concluded it was impossible to raise these questions at all.

Later I confirmed that the ruling clique in the U.S.S.R. distinguished itself with its unparalleled hypocrisy, when it came to the problem of chemical weapons. On the list of information of state secrecy, (my “case” was later fabricated on this basis), there wasn’t even a single reference to Russian chemical weapons. That is, it was more secret than the “major secrets of the U.S.S.R”. The regime of secrecy in the military-chemical complex was organized precisely to make this hypocrisy and deceit possible. The regime of the “sharashka” allowed them to do this quite brazenly.

Clearly the system of the military-chemical complex was starting to decay. The construction of a large-scale plant in Novocheboksary, for the industrial production of the Substance 33, defied all possible logic. In 1974 it was brought fully on-line. Hundreds of millions of rubles were squandered on this weapon, which was useless, even from the point of view of Russian military specialists. This happened at a time when the U.S. had completely halted the production of chemical weapons.

There were a lot of pressing questions, which needed immediate answers. In particular, detailed studies of Substance 33 demonstrated its very low level of stability. Sometimes samples were taken from shells filled with Substance 33, which had been in storage for a couple of years. Tests of these samples showed that only about half of the agent was present. No one could explain this phenomenon, because the loss of activity was much greater than expected. After a year of investigating this, the source the problem was finally discovered. The factory workers, who were filling up the shells with the chemical agent, had decided not to waste the precious ethyl alcohol that was used for swabbing the holes of the shells to be filled. Instead, they started to use hydrochloric acid for this purpose, and it is a perfect activator of the decomposition of Substance 33.

At that time, the foremost scientists and chemists started developing some elements of political consciousness, as they were certainly influenced by the words and actions of Andrei Sakharov, Aleksander Solzhenitsyn, and other outstanding leaders in science and literature. But, we could only learn about them by listening to the Western “radio-voices”. Sometimes scientists abroad displayed real civic heroism by standing up for the truth, working in the cause of preserving peace. At that time, the deeds of Daniel Ellsberg[73] in the U.S. and Mordechai Vanunu[74] in Israel made an indelible impression on me and many people in the U.S.S.R.

In 1971 Daniel Ellsberg published the Pentagon Papers, 7000 pages of secret Pentagon documents about the Vietnam War, which the military did not want the American people to know about. The Soviet press presented this as some kind of power struggle within the American intelligence community. However, anyone familiar with our newspapers and their propaganda tricks could easily guess what had really happened. I understood that Ellsberg sacrificed himself in the name of civic truth, so that Americans could judge for themselves what the real face of President Nixon’s administration was. In accordance with American law, he was threatened with more than a hundred years of imprisonment. Nixon ordered the use of all possible secret illegal channels to investigate Ellsberg’s case, but the brave man received a fair deal after all. The judge got acquainted with the criminal case, and when he was certain that it violated the norms of the U.S. Constitution, he decided to terminate it immediately. President Nixon soon resigned from office, because he lost his base of support thanks to the Watergate scandal with its “dirty tricks”, and because of the Pentagon Papers. The case against Daniel Ellsberg was one of the supporting arguments during the impeachment of Nixon.

Our press wrote about Mordechai Vanunu in 1986-87. He published information in a British newspaper about Israel’s secret nuclear weapons program. Although many people wrote about that before, few believed that this information was trustworthy, because it was based on indirect evidence. Vanunu proved his claim with photos he had taken at the Israeli nuclear installation where he worked, so naturally everyone believed him. The case took a dramatic turn, when Vanunu was kidnapped by Israeli secret agents and brought back to Israel, where he was secretly sentenced to eighteen years of solitary confinement.

I was stunned by the actions of this courageous man, who had decided to let the world know the crazy plans of the Israeli military clique. I never believed those who accused Vanunu of treason to his motherland. Many of those who supported this accusation were under the same kind of propaganda hypnosis that was practiced under the Stalinist regime. The actions of Vanunu had a serious impact on me and it’s possible they subconsciously motivated my own actions later on.

Gradually it became clear to me that the chemical arms race was an important element of the Cold War that had nothing to do with boosting the defense potential of the country. It was also apparent that only a narrow circle of interested military and civilian generals benefited from this insanity. It was even difficult to imagine what other sphere they could prosper in, if they could not rely on the slavish and poorly paid labor of scientists working in hazardous conditions!

The KGB played a special role in that. In 1972, a KGB representative became Deputy Director in charge of the Department of the Security Regime. As a result, access to the institute and laboratories was tightened up. Before that all the guards were civilians, and often these were elderly women – grannies who didn’t quite know what to do with their weapons. They were replaced with military professionals from a regiment that had been transferred over from a top-secret site in Siberia. So there you have it – this was the real face of the Soviet disarmament policy, not the one that the propaganda declared in the press!

Probably the only crucial role of the KGB at the institute was to work on the problem of keeping state secrets. That is what the Chekists were necessary for. There were four secret departments with numerous personnel, but at best they could only provide for the safety and the movement of secret documents, not for the safety and movement of chemical agents, either new or old. I think instead, they had a symbolical meaning, perhaps for scaring off foreign agents. In fact, I never heard of any incident during the time I was working at GOSNIIOKhT, in which “enemy intelligence” was trying to get a hold of something in the military chemical complex, not even during my years as head of the Department for Foreign Technical Counterintelligence. There was practically no one to “struggle” with.

Still, you couldn’t say that the KGB had lost its “vigilance”. From time to time KGB representatives ran party meetings, in which some general got up and gave a report about the plots of foreign intelligence agencies, which did their best to steal of our defense secrets. However, this was pure fiction. The speakers’ own examples always refuted their allegations. One deputy director of a department of the KGB came up with a story about the deputy director of the Design Institute of the Chlorine Industry. Having allegedly become entangled in his debts and with women, he decided to cash in on “state secrets”. When he had accumulated enough “secrets”, he started looking for a buyer. Finally, he managed to get acquainted with a Swedish journalist and even agreed to a deal. However, like in the best Soviet movies, he was caught by our glorious Chekists while selling the secrets, and he was exposed as an enemy of our Socialist regime. The speaker said proudly that the “Swedish journalist” was our agent.

What could you expect from those Chekists, whose primary occupation was provocation? I used to work with a former KGB employee who told me about special troops of the NKVD which were organized in the Far East of the U.S.S.R., and trained to imitate German troops. After they finished their training, rookie Soviet agents were parachuted near those “troops”, and they quickly ended up in an encounter with the Chekists (who were disguised as German officers). The captured Soviets were tortured and some of them agreed to work for the “Germans”, which meant immediate death without any investigation or legal proceedings. However, when it was necessary to be really vigilant and resourceful, KGB employees were careless.

I will always remember the case of the late chief of the Department “D” laboratory, Nikolai Ostapchuk. He was very fond of drinking, even at work. Thanks to the alcohol, or perhaps out of an excessive desire to work with secret documents, Nikolai handled them as ordinary papers and carried them home in his briefcase. The KGB didn’t take any measures, even though he fell down drunk several times and slept somewhere in the street, once in a “perehod” (pedestrian underpass) not far from GOSNIIOKhT. One day Ostapchuk suddenly died, and his wife came to GOSNIIOKhT, bearing the top-secret papers safely back to the Department for the Security Regime. Many people in the management of this department were not pleased at all. It seems it would have been better for them if those papers had just disappeared without a trace. Then it would have been possible to hush up the incident without any consequences, but Ostapchuk’s widow didn’t ask for the help of his friends from the directorate, to make up for her late husband’s blunder. This was the way she took revenge on his drinking buddies.

The control over the safety of chemical agents was organized absolutely perfunctorily. First, it was carried out by employees of the Department for the Security Regime, who didn’t have even a primitive notion about chemistry. Usually part of the staff of this department was composed of representatives of the working class, like Boris Churkov and Vyacheslav Malashkin, who in this way or otherwise became involved as KGB informers.

Secondly, control was maintained by judging the difference between how much of a substance was received and what was used up. The daily expenditure of chemicals was recorded only by the person who actually did the work. Generally speaking, he could use up nothing and later dispose of the chemicals at his own discretion. It was only important to log an entry in the registrar journal. In order to get extra compensation for working with hazardous materials, an employee had to submit a report, accounting for the number of days he or she worked with chemical agents. Often scientific assistants, who hadn’t accumulated enough hazard days, simply made false entries in their registers about the work they presumably conducted. To protect this fraud, they just destroyed the chemicals for the experiments in one go, according to procedures described in special manuals.

Controllers from the Department for the Security Regime could force the scientific assistants to weigh the ampoules with chemical agents in their presence, but it was all the same to them what was in those ampoules. So a potential plotter could do anything he or she wanted with the chemicals. Unfortunately, control at the institute is the same today as it was before.

Probably there were very few workers at GOSNIIOKhT, to whom the ensigns from the militarized security guard hadn’t offered their services. I personally knew a few of these lads, who would offer to take anything you wanted out from the territory of GOSNIIOKhT, for a few hundred milliliters of alcohol. They were very conscientious about keeping their word, carrying out different construction materials, paint, iron rods, and other items for building country houses near Moscow. These guys didn’t care what was taken out with their direct participation, although they knew that the stuff they took out had been stolen. Actually, the theft of state or collective farm property wasn’t considered a criminal offense in those days in the U.S.S.R. Only those who had nothing to steal at work didn’t do it. It was very difficult to qualify this as theft, because the Bolshevik state had been constantly robbing and plundering people for several generations, to the extent that the state made it practically impossible for people to survive without theft. So theft didn’t cause indignation, and almost no one reported it to the authorities. In this sense, the Soviet people were really united because they were entirely linked by a collective cover-up.

Even in the prewar years, people were dying at GOSNIIOKhT from chemical agents. Healthy young men left home from the villages which were subject to total collectivization, escaping for the cities, including Moscow. According to one veteran, these poor devils were ready for any work, even at the chemical “sharashka”. The strongest and healthiest ones were urged to participate in testing the effects of chemical agents. For a few dozen rubles, some careless sturdy youngsters agreed to become guinea pigs. They didn’t suspect what kind of torture they would have to endure, before they went to a better world or became hopeless lifelong cripples, for the sake of the crazy reckless plots of the bosses of the military-chemical complex.

After my presentations about the dangerous concentrations of chemical agents in Volgograd to Victor Petrunin in October 1988, the Council on Technical Counterintelligence of the Ministry of Chemical Industry invited me to a meeting. Sergei Golubkov was the chairman of this council. I presented my report there, with all the data collected in the Volgograd NPO “Khimprom” about my findings of the unacceptable concentrations of sarin and soman in the nearby “White Sea” and in the air. After that there was a profound silence. No questions and no comments. Only GOSNIIOKhT’s Deputy Director Konstantin Guskov replied, “Vil Sultanovich did this entire job without the endorsement of GOSNIIOKhT, and his presentation is purely an unfinished scientific experiment, which should be checked and verified.” After that Golubkov gave a long speech about the importance of technical counterintelligence work, and then he lectured the audience about how to determinate traces of our newly developed substances in waste water and air, with the help of advice given by Academician Nikolai Enikolopov who had never worked a single day in this area in his life.

Some people tried to comfort me after that meeting, saying “Be happy, Vil Sultanovich! Ten years ago, they would have sent you to the camps for that, not quietly home.” It was true, but I understood entirely that my work with foreign technical counterintelligence was fiction. It was just one of a variety of Soviet deceptions, because you could easily find soman near the plant in Volgograd. That is, if you were not too lazy to look for it. Moreover, it made me feel like I was sitting at same table with ne’er-do-wells, who were incapable of doing any scientific work. I felt like I was there just to provide them with cover for their crimes against innocent people.

It was a well known fact that these people were really corrupted criminals. Even though Arvid Pelshe was a member of the Politbureau of the Central Committee of the CPSU, he published a report in the party magazine “Party Life” in December of 1987 about the investigation of the criminal actions of these people.[75]

At the same time, these people were continuing with their deceptive games, pretending that they were the real protectors of secrets of Soviet military complex. I already wrote about how they ordered me to develop super-sensitive methods for the determination of Novichok agents in waste water and air. Meanwhile, all the wastes from the destruction of chemical agents (including A-230 and A-232) that were used in laboratory experiments, were packaged in steel barrels, which were shipped by railway to Shikhany. There they were dumped into a hole in an open area next to the forest, where people gathered berries and mushrooms. Wasn’t it ironic that my department was ordered to determinate traces of these substances at the level of 1 ppt (part per trillion) within two months?

I tried to explain the real situation and sent Director Petrunin an official report, but there was no logic working in the system. There was a real threat that I would lose my job, on the pretext that I had ruined the State Plan for securing the military chemical complex. I don’t think that Petrunin, Guskov and the others were so stupid that they did not to understand the elementary scientific realities. It was trap set against me.

My young senior scientist Vladimir Buzaev came up with a plan to write a fictitious method, in order to placate the bosses, but I categorically refused to accept this machination, because it was impossible for me to cooperate in the destruction of my scientific integrity and personal honor. “That’s fine,” he replied. “You’ll see how they ruin you.” He was right. Petrunin called a meeting exactly two months later in late December 1988, when I sent my report to the Directorate of GOSNIIOKhT that my department couldn’t fulfill its order.

Right at the beginning, Guskov declared that I had ruined such an important governmental order on the protection our defense capabilities, so our leadership right now was in a very bad situation. There would be severe consequences for all of GOSNIIOKhT.

Deputy Director Aleksander Martynov exploded in response: “Didn’t I ask you not to appoint Mirzayanov as the chief of Foreign Technical Counterintelligence Department? You didn’t listen to me so you are picking up the harvest!”

Compared with Guskov and Martynov, Director Petrunin knew the real situation with my assignment. He was changing colors – getting red and white without any verbal reaction. Then he asked me how long it would take me to develop this method. I answered that if the entire global scientific community couldn’t do that then there would be no time period for it at all. On that note, Petrunin closed the meeting. My assistants and many people were sure that swift retaliation would come, but nothing like that happened. Nevertheless I clearly understood that I was not their man – someone who could play their games, joining in the cheating and manipulations. For them I was the ultimate stranger…

Once in 1988, in the third year of Gorbachev’s Perestroika, Petrunin was lecturing to us “stupid” scientists at one of the introductory sessions, “Any Perestroika is purely the internal business of the country. You can’t forget for a minute that the nature of capitalism hasn’t changed, and imperialism, as before, is still our most evil enemy. That is why our task is to fortify the defense power of our country. Any other attitude plays into the hands of our enemies and is criminal.”

By that time there were already many democratically minded scientists and engineers at GOSNIIOKhT. Some of them formed an organization to support Yeltsin’s democrats, and they were regulars at meetings and demonstrations against the C.P.S.U. and the opponents of Perestroika. I was one of organizers of these meetings, and this pained the Directorate greatly. Although neither the department I headed nor I were directly subordinate to the KGB, we were considered to be in its domain to a certain extent. That is why my behavior was so provocative to the Chekists. Some well-wishers from the Directorate reproached me for my excessive idealism and my impractical approach to life. However, I had already made the decision to struggle against the reigning system, particularly against the military-chemical complex. It goes without saying that I didn’t even allow myself to think about neglecting the regime of secrecy at my job.

By that time I had managed to equip my department with modern imported laboratory instruments. There were some real scientific successes as well. Among them were the preservation of chemical agents intact in solid materials such as brick, concrete, sand and others, and the development of chromatomass-spectrometric methods of analysis of these agents, as well as my special methods of extraction of these agents from solid media.

Since I moved to the U.S., I have answered many questions posed by correspondents on subject of the Gulf War veterans.[76] Many of them are currently ill with an unknown disease, accompanied by symptoms consistent with poisoning by chemical agents. Official statements say that Iraq didn’t use the chemical weapons it possessed against the US Army. At the same time we know that Iraq had experience in using chemical weapons in the war against Iran and also against its own Kurdish citizens, shortly before the events in the Persian Gulf. I have no reason not to trust this version because the open use of chemical weapons against the well-equipped US Army could not have passed unnoticed.

Numerous UN inspections in the defeated territory of Iraq showed that there were no more stockpiles of chemical weapons. They stated that they were partially destroyed before the American intervention in Kuwait and the invasion of Iraq in 1991. Ultimately it seems clear that the American military chemists carelessly destroyed a large arsenal of Iraqi chemical weapons in the open air with crude explosions. Such a barbaric way of destroying chemical weapons is not effective, and a considerable fraction of the chemical agents would have remained intact. When chemical agents are exploded in this way, what remains mixes with solid particles (dust, sand, and products of combustion), and results in the strong contamination of the affected area. Adsorbed chemical agents can “live” on the surface of solid particles indefinitely, without changing their chemical composition. Moreover, highly toxic yet very stable pyrophosphonates are produced, at the high temperatures of the explosions of phosphoorganic agents. Given the climatic peculiarities of the Persian Gulf with its dry air, and its plentiful sand and dust which could be carried a long distance from the place of chemical destruction, we may presume that the American troops could have been exposed to the remnants of the “destroyed” chemical agents.

Finally, I would like to note that Human Rights Watch conducted an expedition in 1993 to the Kurdish village where the Iraqi regime had used sarin against peaceful inhabitants. There, they took some samples two years after the gas attack, and almost a year after samples had been taken from the graves of the victims. It was proven that micro-concentrations of sarin were found there. For the first time in the world and in the practice of scientific research, it was demonstrated that even such a relatively unstable chemical compound as O-isopropylmethyphosphonfluaridiate (sarin) could remain intact under the ground for a long time.[77]

Determination of adsorbed compounds is extraordinarily difficult, and it requires special laboratory research. I don’t know whether or not such analyses were conducted in the field laboratories of the US Army or what their results might have been. If an ion mobility spectrometer was used, which was the main field instrument of the US Army, it is probable that chemical agents were not discovered in solid micro-particles. This device is designated for the determination of chemical agents in the gaseous phase. It has a relatively low sensitivity and can’t record those small concentrations which don’t kill people, but still are hazardous to the health.

Additionally, this device has very low selectivity. That means it is difficult to determine which molecule it has finally registered. That is why it had to be preliminarily adjusted for registering known compounds, which appear some time after the device starts operating, if they are present in the analyzed air. Each compound has its characteristic time of display. If the device gives a signal with a characteristic time that doesn’t correspond to the time for which it is adjusted, the signal is discarded as interference.

I think that during the Persian Gulf conflict, these spectrometers were adjusted for detecting mustard gas, sarin, and VX gas because there was information that Iraq possessed these kinds of chemical agents. Unfortunately, the US intelligence didn’t take into consideration the fact that Iraq couldn’t produce the American agent VX gas. It is highly likely that Iraq had the Soviet agent Substance 33, which is analogous to VX gas, but has different physical and chemical properties. It is also important to point out that Substance 33 has a different characteristic time of display on an ion mobility spectrometer. This means that if American soldiers were exposed to Substance 33, chemical specialists from US intelligence agencies couldn’t register it in the air. I can’t claim with confidence that Iraq had Substance 33, but I do know that modern Soviet chemical weapons were delivered to the Middle East in the 1980s. A retired colonel who participated in this operation told me about it. It is not difficult to guess where these weapons could have been shipped to, especially if we take into consideration which friends the Soviet Union had in this region, at that time.

Another serious problem that the American soldiers who have been to the Middle East may have been subjected to is the possibility of a deferred effect of low level exposure of chemical agents. When concentrations are low, the effect of these substances won’t be discovered during immediate exposure, as there are no immediate symptoms consistent with exposure to large concentrations.

The bosses of the military-chemical complex in Soviet Union were constantly pushing their scientists, aggressively giving the impression that chemical war could break out any day. The more successful were the negotiations in Geneva, the more intensive became the testing of new weapons carried out at the test site near Nukus. As a result, the Soviet army officially accepted “Novichok” as a weapon. This means that for the first time in the history of the chemical arms race, the Soviet Union took possession of its own chemical weapon, instead of borrowing one from a probable opponent. By that time the major parameters of the CWC had already been determined, and naturally “Novichok” wasn’t on the list of prohibited and controlled substances. If we consider those circumstances, we can better understand Director Petrunin’s boastful statement of about the “epoch-making success”.

Those were the circumstances under which I finally had to make a decision regarding my future.

And I made a resolute step…