The Dead Hand

————— 17 ————— A GREAT UNRAVELING

A day after the failed coup, Senator Sam Nunn, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, squeezed his way through a crowd on the streets of Moscow. He had flown there from a conference in Budapest after receiving a phone call from Andrei Kokoshin, deputy director of the Institute for the Study of the United States and Canada. They had known each other for years, and there was urgency in Kokoshin’s voice. Kokoshin wanted Nunn to come to Moscow immediately. Kokoshin “said there were big things happening in Russia,” Nunn recalled. “He said Russia about four times. Always before it had been the Soviet Union. The bells went off in my head.” In Moscow, Kokoshin picked up Nunn in his cramped little car and they drove directly to the White House. Yeltsin’s supporters thronged streets still strewn with stone slabs and construction debris hastily erected as barricades against the tanks. Kokoshin introduced Nunn to several people he described as the new leaders of Russia. The next day, Kokoshin took Nunn to listen to the debates in parliament about the breakup of the Soviet Union. When Nunn left the building, he pushed his way through a crush of people. There was an atmosphere of intense excitement. “A new country was being created,” he recalled. The crowd was shouting, “Down with the Soviet Union!”

Next, Nunn went to see Gorbachev in the Kremlin. They talked for about an hour. “I thought he looked shaken,” Nunn recalled. “Obviously, he had been through quite an experience. And we talked a good bit about what was going to happen to the Soviet Union. He was still saying it was going to stay together. He was still the president.” Nunn brought up the issue of command and control over nuclear weapons. In the back of his mind, he was worried about all the small, easily transportable tactical nuclear weapons that were spread among the republics. Gorbachev “tried to reassure me that the Soviet Union was going to remain intact, and that things were under control,” Nunn recalled.

As he was leaving, Nunn turned to Gorbachev. “Did you lose command and control while you were in captivity?” he asked.

Gorbachev would not answer the question.¹

Nunn grew up in a leading Methodist family in Perry, Georgia, population 11,000, in red dirt farm country. His father was a lawyer-farmer who was mayor of Perry when Nunn was born, and had served in the State Legislature and on the State Board of Education. After graduating from Emory University law school in 1962, Nunn went to Washington for a year, as a staff counsel on the House Armed Services Committee, returned to Georgia, served in the State Legislature and won a race for the U.S. Senate in 1972. Nunn had been mentored and influenced by powerful southern Democrats of an earlier generation, conservatives who were bulwarks of the military, among them Carl Vinson and John Stennis.² In the Senate, Nunn was a moderate-conservative, wary of Soviet intentions; he voted for Reagan’s military buildup but was also an advocate for arms control agreements, especially to reduce the dangers of accidental nuclear war. Arms control, he once said, should “take the finger of both superpowers off the hair-trigger.”³

What Nunn saw in Moscow after the coup brought back a personal memory from a Cold War flashpoint many years earlier. In 1974, when he had been in the Senate for only a year, Nunn toured NATO headquarters in Brussels and American military bases in Germany and Italy.⁴If war were to come in Europe, the first battlefield would be divided Germany. Soviet war plans called for a massive sweep of sixty divisions from East Germany and Czechoslovakia into West Germany, reaching the German-French border within thirteen to fifteen days.⁵ They would face NATO’s tactical or battlefield nuclear weapons. American scientists and engineers had created tiny warheads that could fit into small missiles and artillery shells. The firepower of these miniature nukes was an alternative to using massive numbers of troops. The West had deployed seven thousand nuclear weapons in Europe during the period when Nunn visited. A substantial number of U.S. aircraft and missiles were on five-minute alert in case of a crisis.

At a U.S. tactical nuclear weapons base in Germany, where bunkers held warheads and shells, Nunn was shown the relatively small devices, including warheads that could be easily moved by one or two men. Nunn was reassured by the commanders that all the weapons were secure. As he left the building, a sergeant shook hands with him. In his hand, Nunn felt a piece of folded paper. He slipped it into his pocket.

“Senator Nunn,” it said, “please meet me and some of my guard buddies at the barracks around 6 tonight after work. I have very important information for you.”

That night, Nunn and his staff director, Frank Sullivan, went to the barracks. The sergeant and “three or four of his fellow sergeants related a horror story to me,” Nunn later recalled. “A story of a demoralized military after Vietnam. A story of drug abuse. A story of alcohol abuse. A story of U.S. soldiers actually guarding the tactical nuclear weapons while they were stoned on drugs. The stories went on and on for over an hour.” Nunn left “thoroughly shaken,” he said.⁶

In Europe, Nunn also saw how easy it would be to stumble across the trip wire to nuclear war. In his report to the Senate, Nunn wrote, “There is a considerable danger that tactical nuclear weapons would be used at the very outset of a war, leading to possible, or even probable, escalation to strategic nuclear war.” Nunn recalled that NATO briefers had told him they would want nuclear weapons released “as soon as necessary,” but “as late as possible.” Nunn felt they didn’t put enough emphasis on as late as possible.

For many years, Nunn worried that the small, tactical nuclear weapons were even more fraught with danger than the huge intercontinental ballistic missiles. What if there was a minor skirmish over Berlin that got out of hand? “All of a sudden, bang, you’ve got a request on an American president’s desk to be able to use battlefield nuclear weapons,” Nunn said. “I was convinced nobody in the world had any idea what was going to happen after that started. You can sit around and read all the analytical stuff in the world, but once we start firing battlefield nuclear weapons, I don’t think anybody knew.” In the 1980s, Nunn added a new dimension to his concerns about accidental nuclear war. He realized the superpowers could be drawn into confrontation by gaps in the early-warning systems. A lone missile, perhaps from a third-country submarine, if mistaken for a first strike, could unleash a retaliatory onslaught before anyone would know how it began. Nunn asked the U.S. Strategic Air Command whether they could detect the origin of a submarine missile launch rapidly and accurately. After a top-secret study, they reported to Nunn that while the United States had a “fair” capability to pinpoint the origin, the Soviet Union’s warning systems were much worse. If the Soviets spotted a missile from, say, China, and thought it was really from the United States, a terrible miscalculation could follow.⁷

Now, on a crowded street in Moscow in August 1991, all of Nunn’s experience, knowledge and fears about nuclear danger came together once again. Who would protect thousands of small atomic bombs spread all over the Soviet Union? What if the Soviet Union plunged into chaos and civil conflict? Who was responsible for command and control? What if the Russian military were as demoralized as the American soldiers had been after Vietnam? As he flew home, Nunn said, “I was convinced of two things. One, that there would be no more Soviet empire. And two, that they and we had a huge, huge security problem.”

Sitting on the deck of his family home at Walker’s Point, Maine, with a sweeping view of the Atlantic Ocean, Bush pondered the aftermath of the coup at the end of his summer holiday. In a morning press conference September 2, he said he would not “cut into the muscle of defense of this country” to provide aid to the faltering Soviet Union. At lunch, alone on the deck, writing in his diary, he recalled that on this day forty-seven years before, he had been shot down in the Pacific during World War II. So much had changed. Just that morning, he had recognized the independence of the Baltics.

In these days, Bush raised with Scowcroft the possibility of a sweeping new initiative to reduce the danger of nuclear war.⁸ For all his emphasis on prudence and his characteristic caution, Bush acted boldly. Within three weeks, he launched a significant pullback of U.S. nuclear weapons, both land and sea. He did it without drawn-out negotiations, without a treaty, without verification measures and without waiting for Soviet reciprocity. Raymond L. Garthoff, the historian, called it an arms race in reverse—and downhill. In a nationally televised address from the White House on September 27, Bush said, “The world has changed at a dramatic pace, with each day writing a fresh page of history before yesterday’s ink has even dried.” Bush announced the United States would eliminate all of its ground-launched battlefield or tactical nuclear weapons worldwide, and withdraw all those on ships; stand down the strategic bombers from high-alert status; take off hair-trigger alert 450 intercontinental ballistic missiles; and cancel several nuclear weapon modernization programs.⁹ The announcement meant a pullback of 1,300 artillery-fired atomic projectiles, 850 Lance missile nuclear warheads, and 500 naval weapons. In one stroke, Bush pulled back naval surface weapons that the United States had earlier refused to even discuss as part of strategic weapons negotiations.

On October 5, Gorbachev joined the downhill arms race. He announced a pullback of all ground-based tactical nuclear weapons and removal of tactical nuclear weapons from ships and submarines, took strategic bombers off alert and removed 503 intercontinental ballistic missiles from combat readiness. Again, the world witnessed real disarmament at lightning speed. The CIA noted in a report that Gorbachev’s initiative would essentially eliminate the nuclear capability of Soviet ground forces.¹⁰ Only weeks before, in St. Vladimir’s Hall in the Kremlin, Bush and Gorbachev had signed a strategic arms treaty that took nearly a decade to negotiate and allowed seven years to implement; now they both acted immediately, without a single negotiating session. Nothing was binding, and nothing was verifiable, but it was the most spontaneous and dramatic reversal of the Cold War arms race.¹¹

On October 21, Bush wrote a note to Scowcroft, his national security adviser. “Please discuss,” he said. “Does Mil Aide need to carry that black case now every little place I go?” He was asking about the “football” with the codes for managing a nuclear war. Bush did not think it was still necessary for a military aide to shadow him with the suitcase. Scowcroft and others persuaded him it was still necessary. At the State Department, a new policy memorandum informed Baker: “The Soviet Union as we know it no longer exists. What matters now is how the breakup of the Soviet Union proceeds from this point onward. Our aim should be to make the crash as peaceful as possible.”¹²

It is hard to overstate the sense of relief, triumph and fresh possibility that arose from events in the Soviet Union that autumn. Forty-five years after George Kennan had written the Long Telegram, which laid the foundation for the Cold War strategy of containment, the protracted, draining competition that had shaped so much of the world abruptly came to an end, without cataclysm. “Today, even the most hard-eyed realist must see a world transformed,” said the CIA director, Robert Gates, who had voiced grave doubts about Gorbachev for years. “Communism has at last been defeated.”¹³

Yet even in these days of euphoria, when one could forget about the movie The Day After and the horror of nuclear winter, a danger appeared on the horizon. The threat was still masked by layers of Soviet secrecy and overshadowed by the celebratory mood. But an early hint came with Gorbachev’s pullback of tactical nuclear weapons. The warheads were hastily moved to new storage depots by train. Could a weakened Soviet military, barely able to feed hungry troops, adequately protect the nuclear charges? With so many competing power centers—republics breaking away into new nations—could the Soviet system of centralized command and control remain intact? No one knew the answers to these questions, but signs of chaos and upheaval were everywhere. The Soviet rail cars were relatively primitive, lacking sophisticated alarm systems. The warheads were deactivated before being put on the trains, but there were no armored blankets to protect them from a bullet or shrapnel. The warhead depots were filled to capacity. Sometimes the trains just stopped dead on the tracks. There was an acute shortage of containers to protect the uranium and plutonium removed from dismantled weapons. The Soviet system did not have a suitable, secure warehouse to store these dangerous materials over the long term. When a Soviet official visited Washington that autumn, he was insistent on the need for help from the West to build a secure warehouse for the plutonium from warheads. Thousands of plutonium pits, the essential chunk of material used to cause the nuclear explosion, were stored like so many boxes in a furniture warehouse. “The containers are sticking out of the windows!” he warned.¹⁴

No one was prepared for an arms race in reverse.

As he flew home, Nunn pondered what he had seen. He felt the United States had to help Russia and the other new states just emerging from the Soviet breakdown. “We could end up with several fingers on the nuclear trigger,” he thought. It was a nightmare of the nuclear age, yet concrete action was difficult to envisage. The dangers seemed pressing, but details were still scarce. One of the best-informed American experts about the Soviet system was Bruce Blair, the scholar at the Brookings Institution in Washington, who had asked many of the key questions about Soviet nuclear command and control during his research in Moscow. Although Blair felt the old Soviet system of rigid, central controls was reliable, he shared Nunn’s worry about what would happen if it broke apart.¹⁷Another informed expert was Ashton B. Carter, a physicist, professor and director of the Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University. During the 1980s, Carter had served at the Pentagon, and understood the complexity of the American nuclear command and control systems.¹⁶ Carter recalled telling Nunn that keeping a lid on nuclear weapons was not purely a technical matter. “A nuclear custodial system is only as stable as the social system in which it is embedded,” he added. “And it’s really made up of people and institutions and standard operating procedures and so forth, not just gizmos. When all of that is in the middle of a social revolution, you’ve got big trouble.”

A social revolution was just what Nunn had seen on the streets of Moscow.

Soon after his return, Nunn walked across the Capitol to the office of Representative Les Aspin, a Wisconsin Democrat, who was chairman of the House Armed Services Committee. Aspin earned a reputation when he first came to Congress as a publicity hound and a maverick who delighted in exposing wasteful Pentagon spending. In later years, he moved to the center, and, like Nunn, became an influential voice on military and defense issues. Right after the coup, on August 28, Aspin proposed a dramatic shift of guns to butter: take $1 billion from the $290 billion Pentagon budget and spend it on humanitarian assistance for the Soviet people. Two weeks later, on September 12, Aspin issued a white paper, “A New Kind of Threat: Nuclear Weapons in an Uncertain Soviet Union.” The United States should make sure that “the first winter of freedom after 70 years of communism isn’t a disaster,” Aspin declared.

When Nunn and Aspin met, the conversation was respectful, and at first, tactful. Nunn hoped to coax Aspin to change his approach. In Russia, Nunn said, the most pressing need was helping the Soviet Union dismantle its arsenal. They agreed on one bill that would provide $1 billion for transport of medicine and humanitarian aid, which was Aspin’s idea, as well as money for demilitarization, destroying warheads and converting defense factories to civilian purposes, which were Nunn’s priorities.¹⁷

Nunn and Aspin, both experienced politicians, seriously miscalculated the public mood.¹⁸ A recession was setting in at home, and voters were tired of overseas commitments. In early November, Democrat Harris Wofford upset Republican Dick Thornburgh for a Senate seat from Pennsylvania with an angry populist campaign, saying “it’s time to take care of our own people.” The Nunn-Aspin bill came at just the wrong moment. Polls showed Americans were opposed to sending direct aid to the Soviet Union. Aspin recalled, “You could feel the wind shift.”¹⁹

“It was clearly a firestorm, it wasn’t like it was mild opposition,” Nunn recalled. He was deeply frustrated. With his own eyes he had seen the chaos on the streets of Moscow, and he knew of the potential for nuclear accidents and proliferation, but the politicians in Washington seemed oblivious to the dangers. Some senators told Nunn they could not explain in one-minute sound bites why they should support his legislation, so they would not vote for it. Nunn went to the Senate floor November 13 and tried to break through the mood of indifference with a powerful speech. He said that even after the strategic arms treaty signed earlier in the year, the rapidly disintegrating Soviet Union, including the republics outside of Russia, still had fifteen thousand nuclear warheads to destroy, and needed help. “Unfortunately, nuclear weapons do not just go away when they are no longer wanted,” he said. The Soviet Union was short of storage space, transportation, dismantlement plants and equipment for radioactive materials handling. Nunn had learned these details from Viktor Mikhailov, the deputy minister of atomic energy, who had visited Washington and pleaded for help.²⁰

“Do we recognize the opportunity we have today during this period in history and the great danger we have of proliferation, or do we sit on our hands and cater to what we think people want to hear in this country?” Nunn asked.

“What are the consequences of doing nothing?”

Nunn wondered what kind of one-minute explanation his colleagues would need if the Soviet Union fell into civil war like Yugoslavia, with nuclear weapons all over. “If helping them destroy 15,000 weapons is not a reduction in the Soviet military threat, why have we been worrying about these 15,000 weapons for the last 30 years? I do not see any logic here at all,” he said. The United States had spent $4 trillion during the Cold War, so $1 billion to destroy weapons “would not be too high a price to pay to help destroy thousands and thousands of Soviet nuclear weapons,” Nunn insisted.

“We have the opportunity for an unprecedented destruction of the weapons of war,” Nunn declared. Yet he warned, “We are going to sleep—to sleep—about a country that is coming apart at the seams economically, that wants to destroy nuclear weapons at this juncture but may not in the months and years ahead.”

“Are we going to continue to sit on our hands?” Nunn then pulled back the legislation. ²¹

At this critical moment, the president was nowhere to be seen. Bush did not want to take political risks for the Nunn-Aspin legislation. But a handful of influential voices from Moscow made a difference in the Senate. Hours after Nunn pulled back the bill, Alexander Yakovlev, the architect of Gorbachev’s perestroika, spoke with senators in the Capitol at an early-evening reception, impressing on them the urgency of the crisis. Two days later, Nunn relaunched his efforts. Two top officials of the Institute for the Study of the United States and Canada—Andrei Kokoshin, who had met Nunn with his little white car in Moscow, and Sergei Rogov—were both at that moment in Washington. The institute had long been a meeting point between American and Soviet experts on defense and security issues. Nunn invited them to a small lunch, to which he also brought Senator Richard Lugar of Indiana, a leading Republican voice on foreign affairs. At the lunch, Kokoshin and Rogov warned that power was slipping away from Gorbachev by the minute, and that in a “worst-case scenario,” nuclear weapons could be caught up in the struggle for power among the Soviet republics. This was a volatile, dangerous situation, they said, urging America to “wake up.” Lugar told journalist Don Oberdorfer that the lunch with Kokoshin and Rogov was “a very alarming conversation.”²²

On November 19, Ashton B. Carter, the Harvard physicist, came to Nunn’s office for a brainstorming session, along with Lugar; William J. Perry of Stanford University, who had been examining the Soviet military-industrial complex; David Hamburg of the Carnegie Corporation of New York; and John Steinbrunner of the Brookings Institution. Carter drove home the point that a Soviet collapse, now clearly visible from the daily news reports coming out of Moscow, was an immense security threat. “This is completely unprecedented,” Carter recalled saying. “Never before has a nuclear power disintegrated.” Carter had just completed a study of the potential dangers, Soviet Nuclear Fission: Control of the Nuclear Arsenal in a Disintegrating Soviet Union, and it was a snapshot of the frightening dilemma that Nunn and others confronted at the time. The study pointed out that nobody really knew what lurked behind the curtain of Soviet secrecy on nuclear weapons. But, the study warned, there were “three cardinal dangers”: the dispersal of control over nuclear weapons to different republics; the chance that weapons, components or fissile materials “will fall into unauthorized hands;” and the possibility that outside groups, including terrorists and other nations, might seek to obtain weapons, materials or knowledge from the chaotic Soviet complex, “through theft or sale.” While Nunn feared a rogue general grabbing control of the launch system, Carter responded that the threat was “all kinds of motives, all kinds of people, the wayward general to the wayward scientist to the wayward clerk, custodian and sergeant.” The next day, November 20, Lugar announced his support for immediate action on legislation in a floor speech. He decried the “quarrelsome” mood in Congress in the face of “strategic danger” to the country. “Nuclear weapons do not simply fade away; they must be disabled, dismantled and destroyed,” he said.

On November 21, at an 8 A.M. breakfast, Nunn brought sixteen senators from both parties to the Senate Armed Services committee room, where the trillions of defense spending had been authorized over the years. He told them what he had seen in Moscow and turned the floor over to Carter, who delivered a presentation without notes. Carter said command and control over nuclear weapons could not be isolated from the troubles of society. “It’s not something that you can take for granted, that it’s all wired up in some way, and it will be okay,” Carter recalled telling the senators.²³ The clarity of his presentation had an instant impact. The addition of Lugar was critical. Within days, Nunn and Lugar had turned around the Senate and gathered the votes for new legislation to set aside $500 million to deal with the Soviet nuclear dangers. The outcome was a remarkable and rare example of foreign policy leadership by Congress. The Bush administration was indifferent. Ross, who was the State Department’s policy planning director, said he saw the need but recalled a sense of fatigue and exhaustion in the administration; they had just been through the Gulf War and the Middle East peace conference, and could not summon the energy for another major initiative. There was also a lingering Cold War mind-set, especially at the Defense Department under Secretary Dick Cheney. Carter recalled making a presentation of his concerns to Donald Atwood, deputy secretary of defense. “His position was very clear, which was that we had spent 50 years trying to impoverish these people, and we’d finally done it, and at this moment you want to assist?” Carter recalled. “In fact, Don had a phrase, which was freefall. He wanted them in freefall. And I felt that freefall was not safe. It was not a safe position given that they had nuclear weapons.”

Visiting Bush at the White House, Nunn and Lugar found him ambivalent. “I remember that he wasn’t saying no,” Nunn said. “He just was very cool to the whole idea. I think he was sensing the political dangers of it.” While Bush stood on the sidelines, Congress moved swiftly. The Senate approved the Nunn-Lugar bill by a vote of 86–8. Later, the total was reduced to $400 million, and it passed the House by a voice vote. To secure enough support, the legislation did not mandate that the United States spend the money, it only said the administration could. It did not require that it be new money, but rather funds shifted from other programs.

Bush’s cautious national security adviser, Brent Scowcroft, shrugged at the prospect that there would be more than one finger on the nuclear trigger. After all the years of the Soviet Union as the singular source of danger, he thought it wouldn’t hurt if the central command and control were broken up into several smaller nuclear powers.²⁴ But Baker, the secretary of state, was more alarmed than others about the prospect of nuclear bedlam after a Soviet crackup. “I wanted to make sure we didn’t have a proliferation of nuclear weapons states,” he recalled. “The more nuclear weapons you have, the less stability you have. The more chance of accidental launches, and all the rest of it, or just having little countries that have nukes, like Pakistan, getting pissed at India and letting loose.”²⁵

On December 1, voters in Ukraine approved a referendum on independence. Then, on December 8, at Belovezhskaya Pushcha, a hunting resort outside the city of Brest in Belarus, Yeltsin and the leaders of Ukraine and Belarus declared the Soviet Union dissolved and formed a new Commonwealth of Independent States without telling Gorbachev. The collapse of the center was accelerated by Yeltsin’s fierce determination to wrest power from Gorbachev. Back in Moscow, Yeltsin went to the Soviet defense ministry in a conspicuous effort to woo the military. Baker recalled, “These moves were the stuff of a geopolitical nightmare. Two Kremlin heavyweights, jockeying for political power, calling on the army to follow them, and raising the specter of civil war—with nuclear weapons thrown into the mix.” The situation was so unsettled that Baker, due to give a speech at Princeton on December 12, could not decide what to call the dying Soviet Union. In the end, he settled for the awkward phrase “Russia, Ukraine, the republics, and any common entities.” Baker said in the speech, “If, during the Cold War, we spent trillions of dollars on missiles and bombers to destroy Soviet nuclear weapons in time of war, surely now we can spend just millions of dollars to actually destroy and help control those same nuclear weapons in time of peace.”²⁶ Bush signed the Nunn-Lugar bill the same day.

The worst fears of Nunn, Baker and others were that loose nukes, fast money and a weak state would all come together, perhaps in some kind of proliferation-for-profit syndicate. A glimpse of this possibility materialized at 15 Ulitsa Varvarka, a pleasant street near the old Central Committee offices in the heart of Moscow. There, the International Chetek Corporation opened a makeshift but bustling one-room office in 1991. The name of the company was derived from the Russian words for man, chelovek, technologies, tekhnologii, and capital, kapital. The capital came from several leading enterprises in the military-industrial complex, including Arzamas-16, the nuclear weapons design laboratory based in the closed city of Sarov, 233 miles east of Moscow, where the Soviet Union had first developed a nuclear weapon and Andrei Sakharov had worked on the hydrogen bomb. Chetek was offering to sell a special service: underground nuclear explosions to destroy chemical and toxic industrial wastes, munitions, nuclear reactors or anything else by incinerating it with thermonuclear blasts two thousand feet underground—for a fee.²⁷

This was the first known case of Soviet weapons scientists seeking to privatize their knowledge. A frequent booster of the enterprise in 1991 was Viktor Mikhailov, the chain-smoking deputy atomic energy minister, who had visited Washington in October, warning of the need to build safe storage for nuclear warheads. Mikhailov had spent years in the Soviet nuclear-testing program. Peaceful nuclear explosions—using blasts for digging canals, mining or other purposes besides war—had been carried out by both the United States and Soviet Union, but eventually discarded, in part because of environmental hazards.²⁸ The last Soviet explosion was in 1988. What was startling about Chetek was the idea that nuclear explosions were for sale from a weapons laboratory.

In December, a group of American experts on arms control and nuclear weapons arrived in Moscow for a joint workshop with Soviet specialists on warhead verification and dismantlement. On their first night, they were surprised to find that Chetek was hosting a banquet for them at a former Communist Party training school. The toastmaster was Alexei Leonov, a commander of the joint Apollo-Soyuz missions in the 1970s and the first Soviet cosmonaut to walk in space. Mikhailov was there, too, along with officials from Arzamas-16. On entering the banquet room, each member of the delegation was handed a plastic bag containing small souvenirs and a press release, at the top of which was printed both the name of the private company and the government ministry. Mikhailov signed as deputy atomic energy minister, along with Vladimir Dmitriev, president of Chetek. The press release was defensive in tone—responding to news reports about Chetek’s activities in recent months—but it also confirmed some of the worst fears of the Americans. It said that Chetek had signed a deal with Arzamas to use nuclear explosions for the destruction of highly toxic industrial wastes. And the nuclear devices? Just to be clear, Chetek “did not have, does not have, and can not have access to nuclear devices, their components or any knowledge about them.” The press release said that “practical work” in nuclear weapons would still be done by the government.²⁹

When they entered the hall, the Americans saw right away what was happening. “Various elements of the national security establishment were maneuvering to privatize themselves and go into business,” recalled Christopher E. Paine, of the Natural Resources Defense Council, who attended. “The elements of the Soviet state that you would almost least expect to be rushing into business were in fact the ones that were doing it, and trying to earn a buck off whatever asset they had, including surplus nuclear weapons. A lot of the people we met from the weapons laboratories were kind of innocent in a strange way, innocent in the ways of the world. They lived in this bubble all of their lives, and they didn’t have an idea of business, they didn’t know what it was.”

One of the Soviet officials at the banquet was Alexander Tchernyshev, who had worked for many years with Mikhailov on Soviet nuclear tests. Tchernyshev headed an office at Arzamas-16, but also represented Chetek. It was hard to see where the government-operated nuclear weapons laboratory ended and the private company began. Tchernyshev presented the Americans with a Chetek business card that also carried his Arzamas affiliation.

When Fred Hiatt of the Washington Post went to the Chetek offices in Moscow a few weeks later, he interviewed Tchernyshev, who explained that the nuclear weapons establishment, long hidden behind barbed wire in closed cities, was falling on hard times with the collapse of the Soviet economy. “Representatives of our institute are running around the region looking for food, but everything is for barter,” he said. “Does it mean we will have to trade bombs for meat? It’s absurd.”³⁰

According to its advertising literature, Chetek planned to bring in clients and finance the research for blasting the wastes, while the government would actually handle the explosions. The first demonstration was planned for 1992 at Novaya Zemlya, the Soviet nuclear weapons testing range in the Arctic. In the end, Chetek never carried out the demonstration because of a test ban that remained in place, but it was an early and ominous example of what could happen if desperate weapons scientists went into business. It was also a harbinger of a phenomenon that would spread like wildfire in Russia in the 1990s: the hijacking of state resources and expertise for private gain.

As the Soviet economy nose-dived in the autumn of 1991, Nunn and others wondered whether the gargantuan Soviet military-industrial complex could be transformed to serve the civilian economy. This idea was known as “defense conversion” and Gorbachev once harbored great hopes for it: retooling tank factories, shipyards and missile design bureaus to churn out refrigerators, washing machines and computers. Gorbachev had first begun to push for conversion in earnest after his United Nations speech in 1988, but it proved difficult to convert swords to plowshares. The military and its complex of factories stiffly resisted. Typical was Alexander Sarkisov, chief engine designer for Soviet fighter jets. “Look, in the world market, a kilo of a modern fighter plane costs over $2,000, and a kilo of saucepans, $1.” It didn’t make sense, he added, to switch from jet fighters to saucepans. Some defense factories made shoddy civilian goods; others simply atrophied.³¹

In the end, Gorbachev ran out of time. By late 1991, the radical reformers around Yeltsin were determined to make the leap toward free markets and destroy the Soviet state. In a landmark speech October 28, Yeltsin said he would set prices free, and pledged “deep conversion,” shutting down defense enterprises altogether and converting others totally to civilian purposes. The new market system, just taking shape, injected yet another wild card into the chaos of the reverse arms race. For decades, the sprawling military-industrial complex was dependent on the state, fed subsidies from the center and protected by the Communist Party. Factory bosses did not worry about prices, markets or efficiency. But now, they had to rethink everything: not only how to reengineer themselves to construct a washing machine, but how to accomplish it in an entirely different and unfamiliar economic system, without subsidies and without the godfathers of the party. The CIA produced a classified report in early October that captured all the doubts: “Soviet Defense Industry: Confronting Ruin.”³²

On a freezing day in the remote industrial city of Perm, William F. Burns got a glimpse of the reality, and it was not promising. A retired army major general, Burns had served as an arms control negotiator, and later director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency at the State Department.³³ In December 1991, the National Academy of Sciences sent him to examine Soviet defense factories and evaluate their potential for conversion. “The whole point was to see if this was an irreversible transition, or whether it was just sort of a sideline,” he said. Burns toured a decrepit former munitions factory in Perm where the managers were trying to manufacture bicycles. Inside the U-shaped building, low-wattage electric lightbulbs hung from the ceiling, the factory floor was cold, workers were dressed in winter clothes, wearing gloves with their fingers protruding, as bicycle parts moved about on a conveyor that used to hold 203-mm artillery projectiles.

As Burns recalled later, the factory manager didn’t have a clue what would happen to the bicycles. Rather plaintively, he asked Burns if they might sell in the United States. Burns thought to himself the primitive bicycles looked like his own bike when he was eight years old in 1940. “He was trying to be a western businessman,” Burns recalled of the manager, “but he didn’t know the language.”

Burns asked what price the manager would set for the bicycles. “Three hundred eighty rubles,” he replied.

“How did you arrive at the price?” Burns asked.

“Well, I did it the capitalist way,” the manager replied. “I added up the cost of production. I added up the wages and divided by the number of bicycles. It comes to 380 rubles.” He smiled, Burns recalled, pleased with himself.

“Well, how about investment?” Burns asked.

“Investment?” the manager replied. “What is investment?”

“What about profit?” Burns asked. “If you are trying to run a business the capitalist way, then profit is a very important thing.”

“How do you calculate the profit?” the manager asked.³⁴

At Obolensk, Sergei Popov sat in his office, depressed. He had given the system years and years of his best efforts, but by 1991, government funding was running out. Salaries were paid late, or paid in kind with sugar, or eggs from a local poultry farm. Biopreparat was no longer isolated from the economic collapse in the rest of the country. The scientists were told by the government to convert to civilian research.

Popov felt fortunate that his laboratory could generate some ideas for projects beyond biological weapons, but he knew others who could not. “It was just impossible if you dealt with anthrax or plague weaponization,” he remembered. “What could you suggest would be the practical purpose?” Popov joined a cooperative, the pioneering, small private businesses created by Gorbachev’s reforms. They developed a microbial powder for veterinary use, using the facilities at Obolensk. Instead of growing plague or other pathogens, they cultivated intestinal bacteria and sold it as a supplement to cattle and chicken feed. They made a profit right away, since their overhead was free. Popov also created a new variety of interferon that could boost the immune system response against viruses. “We found it could be a good additive to chicken feed, because chickens suffered heavily from viral infections,” he said. They could even aerosolize the preparation to spray whole poultry houses, just as they had considered doing with biological weapons. Popov applied for a patent.

In the laboratories, the weapons research lapsed into a twilight zone. It wasn’t stopped, but as scientists struggled to survive, they spent less time creating agents for the military. Popov said he was “almost completely refocused” on trying to make ends meet. “We were still under serious restrictions. We could not tell anybody what we did before. We could not disclose our secrets. But the overall situation was that nobody cared very much about it anymore.” Popov and his wife planted potatoes and vegetables, picked forest mushrooms and ferns. One winter day, wolves attacked and killed rabbits being kept for biological weapons experiments at the laboratory. The wolves didn’t eat the rabbits, just killed them for sport, and left an awful scene, spattered with blood. Popov gathered them up, skinned them and put them in the freezer to feed his family.

Then the chicken feed business collapsed. “It ended very suddenly because these farms had no money to feed chickens at all,” he said. “There was no sense adding anything to the chicken feed, because there was no money. It was a time of financial crisis, cash was in short supply, nobody paid anybody. There was a bank crisis and no honest business had a chance to survive. The cooperatives and those poultry farms went bankrupt simply because there was no means to pay, and no means to get a profit.”

Popov and his wife, Taissia, were desperate. “I realized that all my efforts were fruitless,” he said, “and I saw no future for myself.” She feared for their daughters, then seven and seventeen. “I realized there was no money to support the children,” she said. “I was scared. I said to Sergei, we need to do something.”

Twelve years earlier, when he had spent six months in Cambridge, England, Popov worked in the laboratory of a microbiologist, Michael Gait. In the summer of 1991, Gait came to Moscow for an international scientific conference and was delighted to see Popov again. Popov had driven all the way into the city to see Gait, and invited him to visit his home and meet his family. They headed south, driving an hour to Obolensk in Popov’s white Zhiguli car. As they approached the restricted zone around the institute, Popov warned Gait to be absolutely silent as they drove through the checkpoints. No one stopped them. They didn’t go to the institute, but to Popov’s apartment, where Gait enjoyed a meal with the family, sampling homemade brandy and listening to the Beatles. Gait recalled that the Popovs told him their money was drying up. Taissia was in tears. They asked for help in getting a postdoctoral appointment for Sergei in the United Kingdom. Gait promised to do everything he could. In the autumn, he received a letter from Sergei saying they were down to their “last sack of potatoes.”³⁵

Alibek finally got a chance to see America. At the last minute, he was added to the Soviet delegation making a reciprocal visit to the United States for the one in January to the Soviet Union by the British and American experts. (Davis and Kelly came, too, representing the United Kingdom.) For many years, the KGB had claimed there was a hidden U.S. germ warfare effort. Now Alibek could check for himself. The thirteen-member Soviet delegation arrived in Washington on December 11, 1991. The delegation also included Sandakhchiev, director of Koltsovo, and Urakov, director of Obolensk. They were two of the most important institute directors in the Soviet biological weapons program.

The first stop was Fort Detrick, Maryland, where biological weapons research had been halted in 1969 by Nixon’s decision. “We didn’t believe a word of Nixon’s announcement,” Alibek recalled. “We thought the Americans were only wrapping a thicker cloak around their activities.” In the first building the Soviet team wanted to see, white-coated technicians explained that they were working on antidotes to toxins from shellfish and animals. Alibek thought they were too friendly. “I despaired of ever penetrating beneath the surface,” he wrote in his memoirs. Next, the Soviets asked to inspect a large structure on the grounds at Fort Detrick, which looked like an upside-down ice cream cone. Their bus took them there, and through a pair of open bay doors, they saw a gray powder. They asked the Americans what it was.

“Salt,” they were told, for treating icy roads in the winter.

One member of the Soviet delegation went up to the pile, put his finger in it and put it to his mouth. He looked embarrassed. “It’s salt,” he said.

They went on to visit another laboratory, which they were told was developing vaccines against anthrax. “The small size of the operation made it clear that weapons production was out of the question there,” Alibek recalled. “The Americans had just two specialists in anthrax. We had two thousand.”

They flew to Salt Lake City, Utah, to see the Dugway Proving Grounds, where germ warfare experiments were halted in 1969. On the way, Alibek said, “I stared in wonderment at the well-paved highways, the well-stocked stores, and the luxurious homes where ordinary Americans lived.” While some of the buildings at Dugway seemed similar to those used in Soviet test sites, Alibek saw “there were no animals, no cages, not even the footprint of experimental weapons activity.”

Then they flew to Pine Bluff, Arkansas, where the United States once had a stockpile of pathogens, which were destroyed after Nixon’s decision. Alibek realized as he walked through the buildings that the facilities were now solely for civilian use. On the second day, the Soviet delegation was on a bus, passing various structures, when one of the military officers shouted, “Stop the bus! Stop the bus!” The officer pointed to a tall metal structure on a rise. “We have to check that out,” he insisted.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Alibek replied. “It’s a water tower.”

“I don’t think so,” the officer said, running to the tower. He climbed it all the way to the top. Alibek could hear some of the Americans stifle a laugh. “At this point,” Alibek concluded, “the absurdity of our quest was clear to me.”

There was no American biological weapons program, as Alibek had believed for years. “It was a shock,” Alibek said. “When you spend 17 years doing something, you considered it important, and—suddenly you realize, you have been lied to for 17 years! I was really offended, and I started hating the system.” Alibek was instructed to write a report about the trip, saying he found evidence of biological weapons in the United States, the exact opposite of the truth. At this point, he decided to quit Biopreparat. He returned to Moscow on December 25. As he entered the hallway of his apartment, arms full of gifts from the United States, his wife told him some startling news about Gorbachev.³⁶

Gorbachev fought to hold the Soviet Union together, but could not. Soon after Baker had arrived on December 16 for meetings with Gorbachev and Yeltsin, he learned that Yeltsin had already signed decrees effectively taking over the Soviet Foreign and Interior ministries. Yeltsin went out of his way to display his preeminence, making sure he met with Baker in Saint Catherine’s Hall in the Kremlin, the gilded chamber where Baker had often held talks with Gorbachev.³⁷ Yevgeny Shaposhnikov, the defense minister for the new commonwealth, was at Yeltsin’s side. Baker saw the end was near for Gorbachev. “I was really saddened,” he recalled.³⁸

Baker and Yeltsin were left alone at the end of their meeting to talk about nuclear command and control. Yeltsin gave Baker a description of how the system would work: in effect, only he and Shaposhnikov, commander of strategic forces with control over all the nuclear weapons, would possess the briefcases, the Cheget. The three other republics with nuclear weapons, Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan, would get a “hot line,” a telephone, but not a nuclear briefcase. Gorbachev still had a briefcase, but his would be taken away by the end of December, Yeltsin said. The system was one of “consultation,” Yeltsin said, “not coordination.”

According to Baker’s notes of the conversation, Yeltsin told him the leaders of the other republics didn’t understand how nuclear command and control worked. “They’ll be satisfied with having telephones,” he said. And once Russia got all the nuclear weapons back on its soil, even the telephones would be removed. Baker wrote in his notes:

“5 tele.—2 briefcases for now

Only Pres. of Russia can launch—Def. Min. won’t be able to alone.”

Later, in a private meeting with Shaposhnikov, Baker asked him to go over, once again, the nuclear command and control arrangements. Shaposhnikov confirmed what Yeltsin had told Baker.

“Who gives you orders today?” Baker asked.

“Gorbachev,” Shaposhnikov replied. He would not speculate about the future.

But Baker was worried. He had written at the top of his notepad a question: “Who gives Shaposhnikov his orders?”³⁹

About 5 P.M. on December 25, Gorbachev called Bush, who was at Camp David celebrating Christmas morning with his family. The Soviet president said he planned to resign, stepping down as commander in chief and transferring his authority to use nuclear weapons to Yeltsin. “I can assure you that everything is under strict control,” he said. “There will be no disconnection. You can have a very quiet Christmas evening.”⁴⁰

At 6:55 P.M., Gorbachev entered the crowded Kremlin television studio, Room No. 4, crammed with network cameras and bright lights. He was carrying a briefcase with his departure speech, and a decree giving up his role as commander in chief of the armed forces. He put the decree on the small table and asked Andrei Grachev, his press secretary, for a pen. He tested it on a sheet of paper and asked for one with a smoother tip. The head of the CNN crew reached over Grachev’s shoulder and offered his own pen to Gorbachev. With a flourish, he signed the document just before he went on the air.

His short address reflected his long, remarkable journey. When he took office in 1985, Gorbachev said, he felt it was a shame that a nation so richly endowed, so brimming with natural resources and human talent endowed by God, was living so poorly compared with the developed countries of the world. He blamed the Soviet command system and ideology, and he blamed the “terrible burden of the arms race.” The Soviet people had “reached the limits of endurance,” he said. “All attempts at partial reform—and there were many—failed, one after another. The country was losing its future. We could not go on living like this. Everything had to be drastically changed.”

After the speech, Gorbachev went back to his office, where Shaposhnikov was waiting for him, along with the duty officers carrying the suitcase with the nuclear command codes and communications links. Yeltsin earlier agreed to come to Gorbachev’s office to get the Cheget. But Yeltsin was upset by something in Gorbachev’s speech and changed his mind, refusing to come, proposing instead they meet halfway, in Saint Catherine’s Hall. Gorbachev thought this was a stupid game, and brusquely decided to dispatch Shaposhnikov and the duty officers off with the suitcase without him. “They disappeared into the corridors in search of their new boss,” recalled Grachev.⁴¹

The Soviet hammer-and-sickle came down after the speech, and the Russian tricolor flag was hoisted over the Kremlin.

The collapse of the Soviet Union marked the end of seven decades of a failed ideology, hypermilitarization and rigid central controls. It left behind 6,623 nuclear warheads on land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles, 2,760 nuclear warheads on sea-based missiles, 822 nuclear bombs on planes and 150 warheads deployed on cruise missiles, as well as perhaps another 15,000 tactical nuclear warheads scattered in depots, trains and warehouses.⁴² It left behind at least 40,000 tons of chemical weapons, including millions of shells filled with nerve gas so deadly that one drop would kill a human being. It left behind tons of anthrax bacteria spores, buried on Vozrozhdeniye Island, and perhaps as much as 20 metric tons of smallpox in weapons, as well as pathogens the world had never known, stashed in the culture collections at Obolensk and Koltsovo. It left behind hundreds of thousands of workers who knew the secrets, and who were now embittered, dispirited, and, in some cases, down to their last sack of potatoes.

————— 18 ————— THE SCIENTISTS

In a televised speech on December 29, 1991, Boris Yeltsin promised to rule an entirely new country. “We are abandoning mirages and illusions,” he declared. “We are ridding ourselves of the militarization of our life, we have stopped constantly preparing for war with the whole world, and much more besides.” Yeltsin described the grim inheritance from the Soviet Union: devastated farmlands, the economy “gravely ill,” and towering external debt.¹

In a gamble with history, Yeltsin attempted to make a rapid leap from failed socialism to a market economy, setting prices free and putting the colossal stock of state property into private hands. Yeltsin believed it was the only route for Russia to become a normal country, tap into global markets, modernize aging factories and lift living standards. But there were stark, unsettling dislocations. A few tycoons, known as oligarchs, grew wealthy, while millions of workers got their wages months late, if at all, or were paid in barter goods, such as socks and jars of pickles. Even though the new capitalism featured stock markets, private banks, expensive restaurants, luxury cars and sparkling new office towers, the deeper transformation—creating a modern industrial base, building rule of law, civil society and a diversified economy—was excruciatingly difficult and did not come about at first. The sad reality of these years was that many people could not adapt to the new world, and were set adrift. The weapons scientists and workers of the sprawling Soviet defense complex were among them.

Yeltsin deliberately let the military-industrial complex atrophy. He viewed the old defense establishment as a relic of the hypermilitarization that had so doomed the Soviet Union, and had little faith the aging institutes and factories could ever be converted to peaceful purposes or be of much use in the new capitalism. Yeltsin and his team were determined to completely raze the Soviet system and build a new one. There were many reasons for this approach, not the least of which was that Yeltsin possessed a much stronger view of what he wanted to tear down than what he wanted to build. He sought to eliminate the overweening state that he knew at first hand, while he had no model, just instincts, for constructing a modern free-market democracy. It was an enormous task. As Yeltsin biographer Leon Aron pointed out, Yeltsin’s first revolutions were carried out against the party and the Soviet empire, both with a rising tide of popular support. This time, Yeltsin had only “the shallows and fetid waters of the ‘command economy,’ choked with decomposing and toxic debris.”²

On February 14, 1992, in a car speeding through the forests of western Siberia, James A. Baker III, the U.S. secretary of state, witnessed a breathtaking tableau: white snow, frozen lakes, birch stands and a storybook troika—a sleigh pulled by three horses—in the distance. Then he passed through several checkpoints and barbed-wire perimeter fences to arrive at the citadel of Soviet nuclear bomb builders, the All Union Scientific Research Institute of Technical Physics, Chelyabinsk-70, one of two Soviet nuclear weapons design laboratories, a facility so secret it was not on any Soviet map. Chelyabinsk-70 was established in 1955 as a competitor to the first Soviet nuclear weapon design bureau at Arzamas-16. The scientists at Chelyabinsk-70 had pioneered miniaturization of nuclear warheads for the Soviet Union, allowing many small explosives to be placed atop a giant intercontinental ballistic missile, or put inside shells so small they could be fired as artillery on the battlefields of Europe.³ The two labs were analogous to Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.

As Baker pulled up to the main building at Chelyabinsk-70, about eight stories tall, hundreds of technicians and scientists pressed against every available window, shouting and waving. Their jubilation took Baker by surprise. “I felt a bit as though I had landed from Mars,” he recalled, “an alien curiosity that these men and women just had to see with their own eyes.” The facility itself was another shock, shabby and threadbare. Whereas Livermore and Los Alamos were champions of supercomputing, there were no computer monitors in sight. When Baker was escorted to a small lecture hall to meet with twenty-five of the institute’s senior scientists, he sat with his back to a dusty chalkboard. It reminded him of a Princeton undergraduate classroom in the 1950s. He told the scientists, seated in front of him, “This is every bit as remarkable for us as it is for you.” Later, he recalled in his memoir, “As we sat down, I thought, here are the men that designed the weapons that defined the Cold War, and we’re about to discuss how we in the West can help them secure their future.”

The scientists and engineers talked openly of their deteriorating living standards. This once-insular elite was in trouble, and reaching beyond the barbed wire for help. Yevgeny Avrorin, the scientific director, standing at the end of the table by the blackboard, said the laboratory faced a “difficult, trying situation” as government subsidies dwindled. The scientists didn’t want handouts, he said; they wanted productive and challenging work. They possessed an enormous storehouse of knowledge and equipment, and felt they had much they could give back to society. The deputy director, Vladislav Nikitin, said that salaries for top scientists were no more than fifteen hundred rubles a month, or $15 at the official exchange rate. Chelyabinsk-70 employed sixteen thousand people, about nine thousand technicians and about seven thousand scientists and engineers. “We have no shortage of ideas,” Avrorin said, presenting Baker with a long list of commercial products they could produce if they had Western investors: artificial diamonds, fiber optics, food irradiation, nuclear medicine. But they had no investors, and no way to reach any. Avrorin didn’t yet have e-mail. Avrorin then handed Baker the paper he had been reading from, apologizing for a hasty translation into English.⁴

Baker appealed to them not to lose hope. “We know that right now your options at home are limited and outlaw regimes and terrorists may try to exploit your situation and influence you to build new weapons of war.” As the physicists and engineers scribbled in tiny notebooks, Baker added, “Some talk about the brain drain problem. But I think we should talk about the brain gain solution, and that is a solution of putting you to the work of peace, to accelerate reform and build democracy here, to help your people live better lives for decades to come.” He described plans by the West to establish a new center, with international funding, to support their science and technology work.

Baker’s visit offered a hint of a crisis that was gathering force and would persist for years. If Chelyabinsk-70, located 1,118 miles east of Moscow, was at all emblematic of the Soviet military-industrial complex, then the potential for disaster was greater than anyone had imagined: scientists with knowledge to build weapons of mass destruction were wanting for food and medicines.⁵

Anne M. Harrington arrived in Moscow with her family just after the August 1991 coup attempt. Her husband was a foreign service officer in the political section of the U.S. Embassy, and the State Department was starting a new program to provide more opportunity to spouses, offering them positions as analysts. Harrington, eager to help, became the science and technology analyst in the Moscow embassy. Her office was dreadful, located in an underground, windowless annex. After a recent fire in the main embassy building, sacks of wet, burned documents were piled nearby. The odor of cinders lingered. Harrington worked on a desktop thrown over two wooden sawhorses. She volunteered to track the “brain drain” problem because no one else was interested. “I put up my hand and said, ‘I can do that,’” she recalled. In the first weeks after the Soviet Union collapsed, Harrington met with science counselors from other Western embassies, and sent a cable back to Washington. “Is brain drain good or bad?” she wrote, adding:

Should Western countries be concerned if Russia loses its best scientists? After all, we all spent 74 years fighting the Soviet system, why should we let them maintain the capability to rebuild a threat? It was largely agreed that stripping Russia of its scientific potential is not constructive if the country is ever to stabilize. It was also agreed that nonproliferation is the major concern and that no one really worried about departing botanists. Soviet science was highly compartmentalized and there was strict control over the relatively small number of scientists whose knowledge presents a real threat.⁶

But would that “strict control” hold? It was unimaginably difficult to estimate the scope of the problem, since there were thousands and thousands of individuals, only a vague understanding in the West of the jobs they held and the institutes where they worked, porous borders and unknown temptations. One small leakage of highly skilled bomb-builders could lead to disaster. Reports surfaced of Soviet nuclear scientists traveling to Libya and Iraq. President Saddam Hussein of Iraq, just a year after the Persian Gulf War, was still trying to hold on to nuclear weapons know-how, and the specter of even a single bomb-builder making his way to Baghdad caused real concern.⁷ Iran also had nuclear ambitions. Harrington said she was well aware that Russians could easily travel through Kazakhstan or Moldova, and perhaps far beyond, without being noticed. “You could go anywhere, leave, come back, and who would be the wiser? We were critically aware of the fact that people could move around without anyone knowing where they were going.” Moreover, leaving the country was not the only proliferation threat. Knowledge could be sold to outsiders who came to Russia. Bomb or missile designers could leak their knowledge from inside the country, perhaps under the cover of giving “lectures” to eager “students” from abroad, or through business transactions. The potential disguises were almost infinite, and the secret police were no longer watching everyone. All the major defense factories and design bureaus included a Soviet internal security office, known as “the regime,” but they, too, were desperate for survival and often eager to help the scientists make business deals. By one informed estimate, a core of sixty thousand people had developed and designed weapons of mass destruction and their delivery systems. About half learned their trade in the aerospace industry, twenty thousand in nuclear and ten thousand in chemical and biological warfare. Perhaps half of these minds were located in institutes around Moscow. No one knew for sure how many could become wayward weaponeers, nor which, nor how to reach them quickly, nor how to stop them.⁸

On February 17, 1992, after a three-hour meeting in the Kremlin, Baker and Yeltsin announced formation of the International Science and Technology Center to help weapons scientists shift to civilian projects. The United States pledged $25 million.⁹ Germany also proposed to enlist aid from the European Union. Given the desperate straits of the Russian scientists, the money might have had an immediate impact had it been distributed to those who were surviving on $15 a month. But the center proved far more difficult to organize and launch than anyone expected. Soviet laws were still on the books, Soviet-era bureaucrats still in their offices and the weapons scientists were still shrouded in the secrecy and mistrust of the Cold War. The U.S. government could hardly begin distributing cash to Russian bomb designers. The State Department needed a coordinator in the Moscow embassy to work through all the bureaucratic obstacles. Harrington got the job.

As Harrington visited institutes around the capital in 1992, searching for office space to set up the new science center, she found the corridors dark for lack of lightbulbs, and stepped gingerly around gaps in the flooring. She toured the nuclear institute at Troitsk, south of the city, where Velikhov had once done pioneering laser work. “I have lots of people,” the institute director lamented. “Just no money.” Eventually, the science center offices were opened at the Scientific Research Institute of Pulse Technique.¹⁰ The science center was not ready to offer grants in 1992, nor in 1993, but as Harrington struggled with logistics and paperwork hassles, she listened patiently to the laments of the weaponeers who came to see her. “People would come in and just pour their hearts out to you about conditions in the laboratories, and what it was like trying to support their families and not knowing what they were going to do,” she recalled. “I remember one scientist, a Russian scientist, a prominent physicist, he had come to discuss a project and had to break off the meeting early. He had been paid in vacuum cleaners for that month and he had to go out and figure out how to sell the vacuum cleaners in order to get food for his family. He’s there, in his suit and tie.” Another time, at an elite aerospace institute, Harrington and a group of Americans were taken on a tour from building to building, and then to a yard full of what looked like rusting metal scrap, huge pipes and disks. The engineers explained, excitedly, that during the Persian Gulf War they had seen the Kuwaiti oil fields ablaze, and invented a way to douse the fires. They built an enormous metal disk—like a Frisbee—that would be launched by an airplane into the sand and crimp the underground oil pipe. After many failed attempts, they had finally managed to make it work, and were very proud, but the war ended before they could market the idea. Harrington recalled she and her colleagues just looked at each other in amazement. “My God,” she thought, “these people just have no idea what to do with their intellect. They have no direction whatsoever. They spent thousands of hours trying to come up with this absolutely crazy scheme to crimp oil pipes.”¹¹

By the time the International Science and Technology Center began funding projects in March 1994, the outlook for scientists was still bleak. The first wave of grants were aimed at those who could be the biggest proliferation risk: nuclear weapons and missile scientists and engineers.¹²Among them was Victor Vyshinsky, a specialist in fluid dynamics who worked at the Central Aerohydrodynamic Institute in Moscow, a world-renowned facility that carried out wind-tunnel tests on cruise missiles. Vyshinsky, head of a department at the institute, had been eager to make it in the new Russian economy. He searched for commercial applications for his team. “There was this feeling of huge freedom, sort of inspiration and searching. It was a wonderful time,” he recalled. They knew how to test a cruise missile in a wind tunnel, so they came up with an idea to use wind tunnels to dry timber. But they could not sell it. Then they proposed to use their mathematical models to predict the course of overflowing rivers. Again, a dead end. Soon they realized nothing was working. Vyshinsky turned to the science center, and his group of experts put together a proposal to study vortex wakes caused by airplanes at civilian airports, a project with widespread application that the science center supported. “I wanted to remain in Russia,” Vyshinsky said. But he knew others were tempted to leave, or to sell their knowledge to the highest bidder. He was aware of contracts with Iran inside his own institute. “The only thing that keeps you from doing things like that are scruples,” he said. “If someone takes it into their head to sell something, I don’t think there will be a problem.”¹³

Proliferation was a shady business. The vultures from abroad moved in to pick over the carcass of the dying military-industrial complex in the early 1990s.¹⁴ In one extraordinary case, North Korea attempted to recruit an entire missile design bureau: in 1993, the specialists at the V. P. Makeyev Design Bureau in the city of Miass, near Chelyabinsk, were invited to travel to Pyongyang. The bureau designed submarine-launched missiles, but military orders had dried up. Through a middleman, North Korea recruited the designers, who were told they would be building rockets to send civilian satellites into space. One of them, Yuri Bessarabov, told the newspaper Moscow News that he earned less than workers at a local dairy, while the Koreans were offering $1,200 a month. About twenty of the designers and their families were preparing to fly out of Moscow’s international airport in December when they were stopped by the Russian authorities and sent home. “That was the first case when we noticed the North Korean attempts to steal missile technology,” a retired federal security agent said years later in an interview. If you look at a missile, the security agent said, the North Koreans recruited a specialist to help them with every section, from nose cone to engine.¹⁵

Agents for Iran and Iraq, warring rivals in the Persian Gulf, also scoured the former Soviet Union for scientists and military technology. Iran was especially active. A special office was opened in Tehran’s embassy in Moscow to search for and acquire weapons technology. The Iranians approached the prestigious Moscow Aviation Institute, a school for missile and rocket technology. One of the professors at the school was Vadim Vorobei, a department head and an engineer, a teacher with big workingman’s arms, solid fists and balding hair, who coauthored a textbook on how to build liquid-fueled rocket engines. In his classrooms, graduate students from Iran started to appear. They enrolled to study rocket engineering. Then the students pressed Vorobei to come lecture in Tehran. It was the beginning of a larger underground railroad of Russian rocket scientists who went to Iran in the 1990s. Vorobei was among the first to go. Although the Iranians made a show of keeping the scientists apart, Vorobei said, they frequently bumped into each other at hotels and restaurants. One day, he would spot a leading Russian missile guidance specialist; the next, a well-known missile engineer from Ukraine. All had been brought to Tehran on the pretext of giving lectures on rocket technology. Vorobei did deliver the lectures, but was also often asked to examine missile blueprints and help Iran spot flaws in their plans. Vorobei eventually made ten all-expense-paid trips to Tehran starting in 1996. He was paid $50 a lecture, compared to the $100 a month he received at home. According to Vorobei, the underground railroad was a bit of a circus. The Iranians brought more scientists and engineers from the former Soviet Union than they knew what to do with. Tehran also suffered from a lack of critical raw materials and technology for rockets, which slowed their progress in building missiles. “It was a mess,” Vorobei recalled.¹⁶

Russia was a leaking sieve in these years. Iraq, seeking to build a more accurate long-range missile in defiance of the United Nations arms embargo, dispatched a thirty-two-year-old Palestinian-Jordanian hustler and middleman, Wiam Gharbiyeh, to Moscow.¹⁷ He managed to pass easily in and out of the secret military institutes, signing deals for a wide array of missile goods, technology and services. Gharbiyeh’s biggest triumph came in 1995 with the purchase of gyroscopes and missile guidance components extracted from SS-N-18 submarine-launched intercontinental ballistic missiles under the strategic arms control treaty. Gharbiyeh took ten of them as samples back to Baghdad, and had about eight hundred more packed up and delivered to Sheremetyevo, the main international airport in Moscow. The gyroscopes were then flown out of Russia on two Royal Jordanian flights to Amman. From there, at least half the gyroscopes made their way to Baghdad.¹⁸

On Wednesday evening, October 30, 1996, Vladimir Nechai returned to his office on the third floor at Chelyabinsk-70. He opened the door and locked it behind him. A square-jawed man who wore V-neck sweaters under his sport coat, Nechai was a theoretical physicist who arrived at the institute in 1959, just four years after it was founded, and became director three decades later. It had now been four years since Baker had visited the institute.

The mood inside was dark, and conditions were grim. Nechai kept notebooks on his desk with details of a desperate search for money to pay the nuclear weapons designers and keep the laboratory from falling apart. On September 9, 1996, Nechai wrote an appeal to Viktor Chernomyrdin, the Russian prime minister, saying, “At the present time, the state of the institute is catastrophic.” The government owed the facility the equivalent of $23 million for work it had already done, including $7 million for salaries, which had not been paid since May. The institute was saddled with $36 million in debts for utilities and other needs. The nuclear bomb-builders were unable to carry out orders for the government, or convert to projects for peaceful purposes, Nechai wrote. Long-Distance phone lines were cut off for failure to pay the bills. Parents could not buy basic school supplies for their children. “There isn’t even enough money to buy food,” he said. In some of the smaller departments, he added, “Lists are being put together for the distribution of bread on credit, and the enterprise isn’t in a condition to provide even this for everyone.”¹⁹

Nechai informed Chernomyrdin that he had taken matters into his own hands. He could not bear to see what was happening to a laboratory that had once been among the most prestigious in the country. In a gamble, he started borrowing money from private banks. The laboratory owed $4.6 million on these loans but could not pay them back. Boris Murashkin, a colleague who had known Nechai since they both arrived at Chelyabinsk-70, said that Nechai’s appeal for help was met with silence by Chernomyrdin. On October 3, Murashkin and other employees of the Russian nuclear complex joined a protest for back wages in Moscow outside the Ministry of Finance. “Pay the Nuclear Center of Russia!” said one of their placards. “Don’t Trifle with Nuclear Weapons!” said another. The ministry agreed to pay some of the back wages later in the month, but by the end of October, far less than promised had trickled out. Nechai told Murashkin he was sympathetic, although as director he could not join the workers in street protests.

On that Wednesday night, Nechai went to a small study off to the side of his office, with chairs, a tea table and television. He wrote that he could no longer look his people in the eye, that he could no longer bear the strain. The last thing that Nechai wrote in his notes was that he wanted to be buried on Friday.

Then he shot himself with a pistol.

Nechai was remembered at a subdued funeral service two days later. Grigory Yavlinsky, leader of the Yabloko Party, one of the pioneers of Russian democracy whose bloc included many scientists and professionals, recalled the mourners had gathered in a cafeteria that looked more like a railroad station waiting room. Not a single official of the government came, not one sent telegrams or wreaths for a man who led the designers of the nuclear shield. On the tables were boiled potatoes, blini, as well as kutiya, a traditional funeral dish of raisins and nuts, and a half-glass of vodka for each person. The scientists spoke softly, in bitterness at the hardships and the loss. “Someone else might take another way,” Yavlinsky recalled the scientists saying. “Everyone knew what that meant. It was clear to everyone what ‘another way’ could be. They were nuclear scientists, after all. Didn’t Moscow understand, they asked, how dangerous it is to drive people who hold the nuclear arsenal in their hands to this state?”

————— 19 ————— REVELATIONS

In the dawn of a new Russia, people stood up without fear to confront the lies and disinformation of the past. In acts of conscience, curiosity and determination, they began to expose secrets of the arms race. It was a haphazard process of discovery, and often did not attract the public attention of the earlier years, when Gorbachev began to fill in the “blank spots” of history, admitting the truth about Stalin’s mass repressions. But the stories that surfaced in the early 1990s were no less startling to those who heard them: nuclear reactors dumped at sea, exotic nerve gas cocktails and a mysterious machine for retaliation in the event of nuclear attack.

These were exhilarating moments that no one ever expected to see in a lifetime. Siegfried S. Hecker, the director of Los Alamos National Laboratory, flew to Arzamas-16 in late February 1992 for his first trip ever to the Soviet Union.¹ When he landed on the tarmac, a short, elderly man approached him. It was Yuli Khariton, who had designed the first Soviet atomic bomb under Igor Kurchatov, and who later became the first scientific director of Arzamas-16. Khariton extended his hand and said, “I’ve been waiting forty years for this.”

That night, at a dinner, Khariton delivered a remarkable lecture on the early days of the Soviet atom bomb. These were the deepest secrets of the Cold War, long protected by fear and hidden in vaults, now spilling out over the banquet table. Speaking in his British-accented English, which he had learned while studying at the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge University before World War II, Khariton recounted in detail the story of how physicists had designed and built the weapon. He recalled how they worked on their own design but kept a stolen American blueprint in their safe, which they had been given by the spy Klaus Fuchs. Khariton claimed the Soviet scientists designed a device that was half the weight and twice the yield of the American bomb. Hecker asked Khariton—sitting directly across from him—why did they use the American design instead of their own? Khariton reminded Hecker that the Soviet program was run by Stalin’s ruthless security chief, Lavrenti Beria. “The reason we tested yours,” he said, “is that we knew yours worked—and we wanted to live.”²

The next morning, Hecker went for a jog through the gray apartment blocks of the once-secret city. He marveled at how American and Russian weapons scientists had swapped stories and experiences, and he wondered how many billions of dollars were spent for intelligence during the Cold War to get the kind of details that were casually being exchanged now. “We were received with open arms,” Hecker said. “It was just mind-boggling to sit there and have the Russians explain their nuclear weapons program, how they actually put the pieces together, between the physics and the computational capabilities.”

The Russian scientists told Hecker they saw themselves as exact equals of the Americans and only wanted to take part in scientific cooperation on that basis. Hecker could not solve their financial plight, but he established a vital line of communications to the Soviet weaponeers, a lab-to-lab program of joint projects and an early bridge over the Cold War mistrust.

From 1959 until 1992, the Soviet Union dumped nuclear waste and reactors into the Arctic Ocean. Twelve submarine reactors, six of them containing fuel, were discarded, even though the Soviet Union had signed an international treaty that prohibited dumping waste in the oceans.³ The nuclear dumping might have remained forever concealed were it not for Alexander Zolotkov, a radiation engineer in Murmansk, the largest city on the Kola Peninsula in the Russian Far North. The rocky ice-free coastline of the peninsula harbored the Northern Fleet, with two-thirds of the Soviet navy’s nuclear-powered vessels, including 120 submarines. Zolotkov also represented Murmansk in the Congress of People’s Deputies, the parliament in Moscow.

In 1987, the environmental group Greenpeace had launched the Nuclear Free Seas campaign to challenge the arms race at sea. When the Greenpeace activists came to Murmansk and met Zolotkov, they invited him to join one of their voyages. On board the boat, he read a report from the International Atomic Energy Agency in which the Soviet Union declared it had never dumped, was not dumping and had no intention to dump nuclear wastes into the ocean. “This came as a big surprise to me,” Zolotkov said, “because I knew for sure that this had been going on for a prolonged period of time.”

He participated in one dumping shortly after he got a job in 1974 at the Murmansk Shipping Company, which operated nuclear-powered icebreakers in the Arctic. On the Lepse, an auxiliary maintenance vessel, he heaved liquid nuclear wastes into the Barents Sea. Later, he worked on two atom-powered icebreakers, the Lenin and Artika, and was working on the Imandra, a vessel that serves icebreakers, when he met the Greenpeace team.

As a member of parliament, he could ask probing questions. Zolotkov learned there were secret orders and instructions to carry out dumping of radioactive wastes in the Barents and Kara Seas, and that no one in the shipping company was bothering to monitor or control the wastes. He also talked to company workers. Then Zolotkov discovered the records of radioactive waste dumping kept aboard the Lepse. He made a map and a small graph, showing the coordinates in the sea where the dumping occurred, the number of containers and the volume of wastes.

Zolotkov was asked to speak at a seminar being set up by Greenpeace in Moscow. John Sprange, one of the Greenpeace activists, recalled being uncertain whether Zolotkov would dare to take such a step, which could wreck his career, get him arrested or worse. All the documents Zolotkov had examined were labeled secret—he was taking a big risk. The night before the seminar, Zolotkov and the Greenpeace people gathered in the kitchen of a Moscow apartment and drank a lot of vodka. Zolotkov hesitated. He was deeply worried about going public. But the next day, September 23, 1991, he did not disappoint. The seminar, held in a long and narrow conference room that Greenpeace had rented, was packed with journalists, environmentalists and more than a few military and defense people. Zolotkov showed them a map of harbors and marine regions where dumping took place between 1964 and 1986. He revealed that when the waste barrels sometimes floated to the surface, workers shot holes in them. They sank, unprotected. Zolotkov spoke out against the secrecy that hid the reckless dumping for so many years. “The Chernobyl experience shows that all attempts to hide the truth are doomed to failure,” he said.⁴

Yeltsin appointed a commission to investigate, chaired by Alexei Yablokov, a prominent environmentalist who had become one of Yeltsin’s advisers. The commission, digging into the official records, confirmed there had been decades of dumping, and found the greatest hazards were the reactor cores, tossed overboard into the shallow inlets of Novaya Zemlya in the Kara Sea. No monitoring had been done in the disposal areas for twenty-five years.⁵ When the report was finished, the commission members assumed it would be labeled “top secret,” locked up and forgotten, as was the practice in earlier times. Yablokov appealed to Yeltsin. “I said, let’s disclose all the data. It is not Russia’s fault. This is a dirty practice typical of the Soviet Union, this is a convenient time to say, our hands are clean, we are not going to do it any longer.” Yeltsin agreed. The report was published in 1993. The military was furious, Yablokov recalled.

One day not long afterward, Josh Handler, research director for the Greenpeace campaign, came by Yablokov’s office to see if he could obtain the report. Yablokov said yes—but he had no photocopier.

Could Handler make him five more copies?⁶

On Friday, March 1, 1992, William Burns, the retired major general who had inspected the bicycle factory in Perm a few months earlier, took a phone call at home in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, where he was teaching at the Army War College. The caller, from the State Department, asked Burns to drop everything and take charge of the faltering American efforts to help Russia with the dismantlement of nuclear weapons. He was told he would have to leave for Moscow in just a few days.

Burns agreed, but his task was formidable. The Russians were swamped with nuclear warheads and wanted financial help, but suspicion and hostility ran strong through the military, bureaucracy and nuclear weapons establishment, where officials had been conditioned by decades of service to the secretive Soviet state. Whenever the discussion turned to the most basic details about nuclear weapons—such as how many and how quickly they would be dismantled—the Russians went silent.⁷ After eight days of meetings in January 1992, one U.S. official cabled back to the State Department and the White House: “The Russians refused to tell us the locations of their dismantlement facilities or their rates of dismantlement. They said everything was fine with these plants and no help was needed.” The official quoted a Russian proverb, “We have been talking about how to share the skin of a bear that is still loose in the forest.”⁸

At the State Department, Burns was handed seven short memos describing areas where the Russians needed assistance. One said the Russians wanted one hundred secure rail cars for transporting nuclear warheads. The Soviet Union had always used rail to move their nuclear bombs, but now the pace was quickening as the warheads were returned to Russia from the periphery. The United States had twenty-five surplus secure cars in storage, but no one knew whether they could operate on Russian rails, or how quickly. Russia had pledged to complete the pullout of tactical nuclear warheads from other republics by July 1. There wasn’t much time left.⁹

As soon as Burns arrived in Moscow, he ran headlong into the wall of mistrust. Across the table sat Lieutenant General Sergei A. Zelentsov, who commanded the 12th Main Directorate of the Ministry of Defense, custodian of the nuclear weapons. Zelentsov told Burns he believed the Americans had come to spy and learn secrets about Russian weapons. “All you want to do is get out and see our stuff. I’m not sure you really want to help us at all,” Burns recalled the general told him. In fact, what Zelentsov suspected was partially true. The American delegation of sixty-four people included a fair number from the intelligence agencies. The Russian side had their share of security people, too. “We met for a period of about two and a half weeks, and got nowhere,” Burns recalled.

In an attempt to break through the mistrust, Burns arranged for a Russian delegation to visit Sandia National Laboratory in Albuquerque, New Mexico, from April 28 to May 1, 1992. The visitors were given two briefings that described how the United States had reacted to nuclear weapons emergencies, including a 1966 accident over Spain in which a B-52 lost four nuclear bombs. “They were really taken aback that we were so frank and open in explaining how we screwed up, and here are the lessons learned,” Burns said.¹⁰ Zelentsov softened. The Russians were impressed at how motivated the Americans were, and how dispirited their own people were.¹¹

A few weeks later, Burns brought U.S. railroad experts to Moscow to examine one of the Russian nuclear weapons rail cars, under control of the Ministry of Defense. When the American experts arrived at a remote siding outside of Moscow, the nuclear transport car, model VG-124, was surrounded by a platoon of infantry, raising fixed bayonets. The Americans were told: not one step closer! Burns placed a phone call, and when the Americans returned the next day, the bayonets were down. Inside, the experts saw the rail cars were vulnerable. There was flammable insulation that might burn and threaten the weapons; the bombs were mounted on a movable platform that might come loose; the rail car had no structural reinforcement and would provide little protection. The warheads were being moved in what was essentially a modified but basic cargo boxcar, with only primitive communications. Burns realized it would take too long to adapt the American rail cars. With approval from Moscow, the United States quietly grabbed a single Russian nuclear weapon transport car, without the wheel sets, and shipped it by sea from St. Petersburg to Houston, and then overland to Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico. There, specialists built an upgrade to improve the security of the rail car and shipped it back to Russia.

Given the mistrust that Burns had faced, and the deep secrecy about nuclear weapons, it was another extraordinary moment of cooperation.¹²

Vil Mirzayanov had witnessed the suffering of his colleague, Andrei Zheleznyakov, who was poisoned by nerve gas in an accident in 1987 at the chemical weapons research institute in Moscow. Mirzayanov had worked at the institute for many years. Behind the high walls, the Soviet Union and later Russia secretly developed and tested a new binary nerve gas known as novichok, or the “new guy.” Binary weapons are those in which two nonlethal chemicals are mixed together at the last minute to become a deadly agent.

Mirzayanov had heard the lofty disarmament speeches about chemical weapons. Gorbachev pledged in April 1987 that the Soviet Union would no longer produce them. Yeltsin, in one of his first announcements as the new Russian president in January 1992, promised to support the global treaty then under negotiation in Geneva that would outlaw chemical weapons.¹³

Yet Mirzayanov knew that the Soviet Union—and Russia after it—had never given up work on the new binary weapon. He discovered the truth one day when he noticed a new poster in the hallway of the institute in Moscow. The poster proclaimed that scientists had invented a “pesticide” for use in agriculture, and it presented the chemical formula. Mirzayanov recognized immediately that it was actually the formula for something else—a novichok agent. The pesticide was a cover story. Despite all the promises of disarmament, Mirzayanov realized there was a plan to conceal the new generation of chemical weapons in ordinary industrial and agricultural compounds. This way, the Kremlin could sign the global ban on chemical weapons while keeping a hidden arsenal at the ready. Mirzayanov decided he had to tell the world.¹⁴

A lean, compact man who gestured often with his hands when he talked, Mirzayanov landed a job in 1965 at the State Scientific Research Institute of Organic Chemistry and Technology, located on the Highway of the Enthusiasts in Moscow. He was a specialist in chromatography, a laboratory technique for the separation of mixtures, and he became an expert in detecting tiny traces of chemicals in nature.

During his many years there, Mirzayanov came to have profound doubts about the military usefulness of chemical weapons. Nevertheless, in 1985, at fifty years old, he was given a sensitive job as chief of the department of foreign technical counterintelligence, responsible for checking the air and water at all the facilities for telltale leaks and, more broadly, protecting them from foreign spies. Mirzayanov had a rebellious streak, so the job was an odd fit, but he hoped to stick to the technical side. It could mean he would get scarce hard-currency resources to purchase new equipment. In his position, Mirzayanov was told the secrets of the novichok agents. He saw field tests at first hand. He was put on the scientific councils and allowed to read the piles of reports.

As the Gorbachev revolution took hold, Mirzayanov found himself drawn into the democracy protests, especially Yeltsin’s call for radical change. “From the very first days, I went to the streets,” he recalled. He quit the Communist Party on May 4, 1990, and became still more active in the pro-democracy movement. As a result, he was kicked out of his counterintelligence post.

His indignation about the novichok deception erupted in April 1991. He learned of a banquet to celebrate the award of the Lenin Prize to the institute director, Viktor Petrunin, and to Anatoly Kuntsevich, a general who had been in charge of a chemical weapons test installation at Shikhany. The prize was for creating a binary chemical weapon—long after the Soviet Union had promised to halt the chemical weapons production.¹⁵

Mirzayanov hoped Yeltsin’s growing prominence and power in 1991 would bring a new direction. He read newspapers every day, but saw nothing about chemical weapons. He knew the institute was still functioning. “I was suffering from the agonizing burden I carried,” he recalled, “feeling personal responsibility for participating in the criminal race of chemical weapons.

“I decided, I was ready to speak openly.”

He sat down at home one night and typed out an essay, pouring out criticism of the whole chemical weapons enterprise. The next day he hand-carried his essay to the editor of a popular Moscow weekly newspaper, Kuranty, which published the article on October 10, 1991. Mirzayanov titled the essay “Inversion,” referring to the process by which a chemical unnoticeably changes from one form into another without changing its chemical formula. He meant it as a commentary on the duplicity of the generals and their determination to continue building chemical weapons.

In the article, Mirzayanov disclosed that the chemical weapons chiefs were “busy developing a more modern type of chemical weapon, and its testing was carried out at an open test site in one of the most ecologically unsafe regions.” He did not call it novichok but had spilled the beans. And he hinted that the generals were trying to hide their misdeeds. “The question is: why are we misleading the West again?” he wrote.

Mirzayanov called the essay a “cry from the heart,” but there was little public reaction. Mirzayanov knew people were preoccupied with survival through a difficult winter. Inside the institute, his bosses were furious. They fired Mirzayanov on January 5, 1992. He was soon struggling to make a living selling Snickers and jeans in a Moscow open-air market. “It wasn’t very good for a professor with a Ph.D.,” he recalled.

Yet he could not forget about the novichok agents. He decided to speak out again, and wrote another essay. On September 16, 1992, it was published in Moscow News, a progressive weekly tabloid.¹⁶ The article, headlined “A Poisoned Policy,” was accompanied by photographs of the administration building of the institute on the Highway of Enthusiasts that had never before been identified in public. Mirzayanov revealed more about the dark secrets of the novichok generation of weapons. He said “a new toxic agent” had been developed at the institute, more lethal than the American VX gas. Injury from the new agent is “practically incurable,” he said. He disclosed that the toxic agent was the basis for a brand-new binary chemical weapon, and that field tests of the new binary agent were being carried out in Uzbekistan as recently as the first three months of 1992—after Yeltsin’s pledges in January.

Instead of destroying chemical weapons, Mirzayanov said the generals were developing new ones. The people of Russia “have no reason whatsoever to entrust the destruction of chemical weapons to those who developed them,” he insisted. The promises of Gorbachev and Yeltsin to the West were completely betrayed by work going on inside the country. Who was in charge?

Mirzayanov was arrested October 22, 1992, for revealing three state secrets: the new toxic agent that was more deadly than VX gas; the development of the binary weapon; and the recent field tests. On October 30, he was indicted. Mirzayanov pleaded not guilty, was imprisoned and then released as his case dragged on.¹⁷

On January 13, 1993, the global treaty banning the development, production, stockpiling and use of chemical weapons was signed in Paris—with Russia among the signatories.¹⁸

In the legal proceedings, Mirzayanov and his lawyer were entitled to see the record of the investigation, including top-secret documents. Mirzayanov painstakingly copied documents in his own hand, took the notes home and typed them up. As a precaution, he faxed some of the documents to Gale Colby, an environmental activist in Princeton, New Jersey, who was organizing Western support for him.¹⁹ One day, prosecutors put in the record a document that described the development, manufacture and delivery of Novichok 5 for field tests. Mirzayanov copied it. According to the document, the field tests were scheduled for 1991–1992, well after Gorbachev and Yeltsin had pledged to stop making chemical weapons.

Only in 1994, after he had been twice imprisoned, did the case against Mirzayanov fall apart.²⁰ At great personal risk, Mirzayanov had revealed the duplicity of the generals and the development of the novichok generation of chemical weapons.

Bruce Blair, the Brookings Institution scholar, finished his second book, The Logic of Accidental Nuclear War, and it was published early in 1993. Blair’s research in Moscow had paid off—he was able to write a detailed account of the Soviet nuclear command and control system. But one small detail eluded him. In Moscow, he had been told by his sources that the Soviet Union created a special system of command rockets that would fly across the country in the event of a nuclear attack, and issue launch orders to the intercontinental ballistic missiles. But when he checked the U.S. data on flight tests for these command rockets, in some thirty examples, nothing seemed to happen when they flew. No large ballistic missiles rose out of their silos as a result of the presumed commands. Blair wrote in his book, that what the Soviets told him could not be corroborated by evidence.

Still, he wondered: what were the rockets for, if the commands were not followed?²¹

Blair sent a copy of his new book to Valery Yarynich, the nuclear command and control specialist whom he had met in Moscow nearly two years before. Back then, Yarynich had impressed Blair with his knowledge, and Blair had been careful not to write down Yarynich’s name, out of an abundance of caution. Yarynich had given Blair a clue about the control rockets, but Blair didn’t quite grasp it.

When Blair’s book was published, he invited Yarynich to Washington.²² Yarynich believed strongly in openness. He brought with him to Washington a typewritten document, single-spaced, dated February 24, 1993. One page was titled, at the top, “Reserve commanding rockets system.” Under this, Blair saw a half-page, hand-drawn diagram, Figure 1. The drawing was labeled “Emergency Rocket Command System.” It depicted satellites in the air, missiles in silos, submarines, command centers and strategic bombers. Blair tried to figure out, what did it all mean?

Under the diagram was a half-page of text. As Blair read on, it dawned on him. Yarynich had told him earlier that there was no automatic Dead Hand in the Russian system, but there was a semiautomatic system of some kind.

And here it was, on the typewritten page: the Doomsday Machine.

Yarynich, who had personally worked on the system in 1984, had been very careful not to write down any technical data, nor numbers or locations of the system, and did not use the real name, Perimeter, in the document. Rather, he sketched its broad principles. Blair examined the paper closely. It outlined how the “higher authority” would flip the switch if they feared they were under nuclear attack. This was to give the “permission sanction.” Duty officers would rush to their deep underground bunkers, the hardened concrete globes, the shariki. If the permission sanction were given ahead of time, if there were seismic evidence of nuclear strikes hitting the ground, and if all communications were lost, then the duty officers in the bunker could launch the command rockets. If so ordered, the command rockets would zoom across the country, broadcasting the signal “launch” to the intercontinental ballistic missiles. The big missiles would then fly and carry out their retaliatory mission.

In May 1993, Blair visited Yarynich again in Moscow. This time, Yarynich gave him an eleven-page, single-spaced review of Blair’s book. It was a thoughtful document, and near the end of it, Yarynich mentioned a few errors he had found in the book, and thus helped Blair resolve the riddle. Yarynich told Blair the reason the command rocket test flights were not followed by launches of the huge intercontinental ballistic missiles was this: the Soviets knew that the Americans were watching. So they waited, delaying launches by forty minutes or up to twenty-four hours to fool the Americans, and hide Perimeter.

Blair took notes. When he got home, he called his sources and checked the U.S. flight test data again. He was especially interested in the test of November 13, 1984, right after Reagan’s election.

Sure enough, Yarynich was right. The heavy missiles did fly, just forty minutes after the command rockets.

Yarynich believed Perimeter had a positive role. If it were turned on, the leaders in the Kremlin would feel less pressure to make a dangerous, hair-trigger decision to launch on receipt of the first warning. They could wait. It might help them avoid a terrible, impulsive mistake. But Blair had a different view. He knew from his own experience that in the American system of command and control, people were the essential firewall. People ruled machines. The Soviet Union seemed to have built a Doomsday Machine by removing all but a few people. Blair was uneasy that it put launch orders in the hands of so few, and with so much automation.

Blair revealed the amazing system in an op-ed published in the New York Times on October 8, 1993, headlined “Russia’s Doomsday Machine,” describing “a fantastic scheme in which spasms of the dead hand of the Soviet leadership would unleash a massive counter-strike after it had been wiped out by a nuclear attack.”

“Yes,” Blair wrote, “this doomsday machine still exists.”

Blair was inundated with phone calls from around the world. The very next day he was visited by Larry Gershwin, the national intelligence officer for Soviet strategic weapons, who was the man most responsible in the intelligence community for tracking Soviet missiles, bombers and submarines. Gershwin was intensely interested in what Blair had discovered. American intelligence had known some pieces of the puzzle, but they had not understood the command and control aspects of the Doomsday Machine.

Blair had connected the dots.²³

————— 20 ————— YELTSIN’S PROMISE

After he became Russian president, Yeltsin quickly and privately admitted the truth about Soviet biological weapons. On January 20, 1992, he met the British foreign secretary, Douglas Hurd, in Moscow. The British ambassador, Rodric Braithwaite, passed a note to Hurd during the meeting, suggesting he ask Yeltsin about germ warfare. For nearly two years, Braithwaite had been demanding answers about the program. He had been stonewalled. This time, Yeltsin said something “spectacular,” Braithwaite recalled.

“I know all about the Soviet biological weapons program,” Yeltsin told Hurd.

It’s still going ahead, even though the organizers claim it’s merely defensive research. They are fanatics, and they will not stop voluntarily. I know those people personally, I know their names, and I know the addresses of the institutes where they’re doing the work. I’m going to close down the institutes, retire the director of the program, and set the others to work designing something useful, such as a cow with a yearly yield of 10,000 liters. When I’ve checked for myself that the institutes have in fact stopped work, I’m going to ask for international inspection.

“Those people,” Yeltsin said, expressing disgust, “can even make a cow grow an extra leg.”

“We were stunned,” Braithwaite recalled. “We could do no more than thank him.”¹

When Yeltsin met Baker in Moscow on January 29, the American secretary of state was equally impressed. Yeltsin proposed another major leap in the downhill arms race, reducing strategic weapons still further. “I saw a different Yeltsin from the man I’d seen before,” Baker recalled. “Whereas in the past he had often seemed vague and rather glib, now he spoke at greater length, with no notes, about highly technical issues.” Yeltsin admitted a Soviet biological weapons program had existed, and he promised to dismantle it “within a month.” He repeated his pledge to British Prime Minister John Major in London on January 30, and to President Bush at Camp David on February 1. Celebrating his sixty-first birthday at Camp David, Yeltsin said, “There has been written and drawn a new line, and crossed out all of the things that have been associated with the Cold War.” Neither Yeltsin nor Bush said anything in public about biological weapons, but Dmitri Volkogonov, the historian, who was advising Yeltsin then, relayed word to reporters during the Camp David summit that they had discussed it. This didn’t make the headlines, which were dominated instead by word of deeper cuts in strategic arms and pledges of cooperation in other areas, but it was noted in news accounts that day. Volkogonov said that Yeltsin promised “a number of centers and a number of programs dealing with this issue have been closed,” and “from 1992 there will be no budget allocations to that program.”²

Sergei Popov, who had carried out some of the most ambitious experiments in genetic engineering at Vector and Obolensk, saw the economic despair all around him. He wasn’t interested in selling his knowledge, he just wanted to escape the hardship. “When it started to collapse,” he said, “people started selling everything from the shelves in the labs. So what we ended up with was almost empty labs. Whatever we had, reagents, equipment, everything had been sold.”

His friend in Cambridge, Michael Gait, sent him an application for a postdoctoral fellowship in England. Popov carefully completed all the paperwork. On his résumé, he stated that in Obolensk, among other things, he was working on “microbiology of pathogens,” but he didn’t say more. He identified himself as a “department chief” who was carrying out studies “on recombinantly produced proteins.” He was careful not to say he was genetically engineering pathogens for weapons. Popov worried that if he mailed the application from Obolensk, the KGB would intercept it, so he drove to Moscow and mailed it from the main post office, figuring it would not be noticed. The letter got through; Gait then wrote back with the news—a grant was awaiting him from the Royal Society.

Popov needed KGB permission to travel out of the country, even temporarily. He told the Obolensk director, Urakov, that he had a grant from the Royal Society, and that he was going to England “to set up connections” for possible business deals. Privately, Popov knew that Urakov wanted to get his son out of Russia. When Popov promised to help with the son, the director did not decline. Urakov turned to the KGB boss in his office. Shall we let him go? Urakov asked.

The KGB man nodded yes. They gave Popov his travel documents.³

Ken Alibek decided to quit the military after the eye-opening visit to the United States in December 1991. “The last straw,” he said, came when a ten-page “summary” of the trip, prepared by Kalinin, the Biopreparat boss, was attached to Alibek’s trip report. Kalinin’s summary falsely claimed the visit “proved the continued existence of an American offensive weapons program.” Alibek now realized that the generals hoped to continue their offensive weapons research, even after the Soviet collapse and the discovery that the United States did not have a program. Alibek took his letter of resignation, dated January 13, 1992, to Kalinin.

“I lived in a country called the Soviet Union,” Alibek recalled telling him. “I served it loyally. It doesn’t exist anymore. So now I’m free.” Kalinin grew angry, and they quarreled. Kalinin accused Alibek of betrayal. Alibek recalled he stalked out of Kalinin’s office. The building was quiet. He went to the personnel office and turned in his badge. He cleaned out his office and never saw Kalinin again.⁴

Yeltsin had told Bush the truth about the existence of the Soviet biological weapons program, but back in Moscow, the high-ranking generals did not want to tell the whole truth. In words, Yeltsin had finally come clean; but in deeds, what happened next was something else entirely.

When he got home from Camp David in February 1992, Yeltsin appointed a government commission to oversee the disarmament of chemical and biological weapons. Inexplicably, he put two generals from the old guard in charge of it. Anatoly Kuntsevich, a retired lieutenant general who had devoted his entire career to chemical weapons, was named chairman, and Valentin Yevstigneev, the general who was head of the 15th Main Directorate of the Defense Ministry—the biowarfare directorate—was appointed deputy chief. For ten years Kuntsevich had been boss of the Shikhany chemical weapons complex, where, in 1987, reporters and international experts were given the show of chemical weapons. Yevstigneev was directly in charge of the military biological weapons program, which took pathogens from the Biopreparat laboratories and turned them into weapons. Yeltsin had put men of the past in charge of the future.

Yeltsin was a revolutionary and a populist. He enjoyed making a dramatic flourish, but left the hard work of governing to others. When he received the American and British ambassadors in Moscow on April 4, 1992, he was in a confident and expansive mood. On biological weapons, Braithwaite made this notation in his journal of the meeting:

Yeltsin says he is determined to fulfill the promise he made to the Prime Minister in January. He has already retired the general in charge, and will be closing down the production facilities and test sites, and retraining the scientists. I remark that I started badgering the previous government two years ago, but nothing happened: perhaps Gorbachev found the politics too intractable. Yeltsin says with a grin that he has had a lot of trouble with his generals: but they find it difficult to stand up to him.⁵

What happened next was that the generals stood up to Yeltsin. Russia faced an important deadline on April 15, 1992, for disclosing its past offensive biological weapons program to the United Nations. All parties to the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention—including the Soviet Union—had agreed to make a full declaration by that date as a “confidence building measure.”⁶ Just four days before the deadline, Yeltsin signed a presidential decree, No. 390, making it illegal to work on biological weapons in violation of the 1972 treaty. Yeltsin instructed his commission within a month to prepare measures for “strengthening openness, trust and broadening international cooperation in the framework of the convention.”⁷ But then Russia missed the deadline for submitting a declaration about past activity to the United Nations. On April 22, a British diplomat was summoned to the Foreign Ministry and offered a copy of the draft Russian declaration. Looking at the draft, Braithwaite was pleased that it acknowledged an offensive biological weapons program had existed from 1946 to March 1992. “The programme is now closed by Presidential decree, and the sites will be open to inspection. It is at least as much as we could have hoped for,” Braithwaite wrote in his diary. At the same time, Braithwaite worried that experts in London and Washington “will find loopholes in the small print.”⁸

The gaps were enormous. The draft declaration did not mention Biopreparat, nor the Sverdlovsk anthrax outbreak, nor the genetic engineering of pathogens. The generals had subverted Yeltsin’s promise of full openness.⁹ On May 5, Braithwaite and an American diplomat, James Collins, delivered a private protest to the Russian Foreign Ministry. On May 7, Braithwaite again badgered a Kremlin official about the biological weapons. According to Braithwaite’s journal, the official acknowledged that Yeltsin was having a hard time “because of the degree of secrecy” in the program “and the number of ‘fanatics’ involved who have a vested interest in keeping it going.”¹⁰

On May 27, Yeltsin took another stab toward openness in an interview with the mass-circulation newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda. The interviewer stated that Yeltsin had known biological weapons were being developed in Sverdlovsk, and only mentioned it in public recently. Why? “First,” Yeltsin replied, “nobody asked me about it. And, second, when I learned these developments were under way, I visited Andropov… when there was an anthrax outbreak, the official conclusion stated that it was carried by some dog, though later the KGB admitted that our military development was the cause.”¹¹

Yeltsin’s six words—“our military development was the cause”—were as close as the Soviet Union or Russia had ever come to a formal acknowledgment that the 1979 epidemic was caused by the military.

When he appeared June 17 before a joint session of Congress in Washington, Yeltsin was once again bold and unequivocal. “We are firmly resolved not to lie any more,” Yeltsin declared, to applause. “There will be no more lies—ever.” This also applied to “biological weapons experiments,” he said.¹² After their summit meeting, Yeltsin and Bush also announced agreement on still-deeper cuts in strategic nuclear weapons.

Yet even as Yeltsin promised “no more lies,” the deception went on. A fresh jolt came when a junior scientist from Pasechnik’s institute began talking to the British in the spring or early summer. The scientist was given the code name Temple Fortune. What alarmed the British was that the scientist described a biological weapons program continuing even after Yeltsin had promised to shut it down. The defector said that Pasechnik’s old facility, the Institute of Ultra-Pure Biological Preparations in the former Leningrad, now St. Petersburg, had continued to develop an antibiotic-resistant Yersinia pestis, the plague agent. Moreover, the defector said all the research and development was completed by the spring, and the agent was being prepared for large-scale production. The factory would be located about two miles north of the institute in Lakhta. The defector said a cover story was being prepared that it was for making civilian pharmaceuticals. Once again, it appeared that Yeltsin was not in control.

The question of Russia’s honesty about biological weapons was important not only because of the past violations of an international treaty but also for the future of the Nunn-Lugar legislation to clean up the legacy of the Cold War. If Russia was found to be violating the biological weapons treaty, under the provisions of the law it could not qualify for money from Nunn-Lugar. The money was flowing already, but a violation of the treaty would be seized upon by critics to turn off the spigot.

In meetings in June with British and American officials, the Russians offered three different drafts of their proposed United Nations declaration. Kuntsevich, the general Yeltsin had put in charge of compliance, insisted the declaration met all the legal requirements. But all three drafts were woefully incomplete. It was clear to American officials that the Russians were divided: Yeltsin wanted nothing to do with the germ weapons, but his powerful generals protected their empire, as they had done successfully in the Soviet years.¹³

At meetings in London on August 25, Douglas Hurd, the British foreign minister, and Lawrence Eagleburger, the acting U.S. Secretary of State, delivered yet another strong and private protest about the biological weapons to Russia’s foreign minister, Andrei Kozyrev, a soft-spoken career diplomat who shared Yeltsin’s ideals. Faced with this, Kozyrev invited American and British officials to come to Moscow, perhaps hoping if they laid out their evidence it might help Yeltsin overcome the generals. The Americans accepted, also hoping a high-level mission might pry open some doors. The U.S. delegation was led by an experienced diplomat, Undersecretary of State Frank Wisner. When he arrived at the Foreign Ministry September 10, 1992, Wisner carried a meticulous, ten-page, double-spaced brief. It was one of the most direct and forceful protests the West had ever made to Moscow on biological weapons. The mood was tentative and tense in the conference room as Wisner began to tell the Russians what was known. Kuntsevich was not present, but Yevstigneev, his deputy and head of the military biowarfare directorate, was there.

Wisner correctly identified the massive operation of Biopreparat, the genetic engineering research at Obolensk and Koltsovo, and the critical link played by Pasechnik’s institute in preparing pathogens for delivery. Wisner pointed out the huge manufacturing plants ready to spring into action, including Stepnogorsk, the anthrax factory—none of which were in the draft declaration. He identified the secret role of antiplague institutes in helping the offensive weapons program. And he told the Russians that the official explanations for the Sverdlovsk outbreak were untrue.

Then, on the eighth page, in the most dramatic turn in his presentation, Wisner referred to the information that had come from the informer Temple Fortune—information that work on biological weapons was going on “over the past year,” which meant the months Yeltsin was in power.

We have reports that the All Union Institute of Ultra-Pure Biological Preparations in St. Petersburg is constructing, equipping, and staffing a facility at Lakhta designed to do scale-up work to allow industrial production of a strain of plague—a strain developed to be resistant to cold and heat and to 16 antibiotics—for offensive purposes.

Wisner also revealed that the United States now knew exactly how the Soviets had covered up the germ warfare activity at Ultra-Pure when the American-British team had first visited in January 1991. He said they knew that information was destroyed that would be incriminating; laboratories were cleaned to remove traces of plague bacteria; employees who knew what was going on were sent away; and microphones were installed to monitor every conversation. After the visit, the institute continued to refine the plague agents. Wisner said the United States believed that “by the spring of this year, according to the information we have been provided, research and development was completed and the question of the suitability for large-scale production resolved.” This added a note of super-urgency; Wisner was accusing the Russians of getting ready to manufacture a super-plague weapon.

Wisner’s bill of particulars identified the cities, the programs, the institutes and the disease agents in the Soviet biological weapons program. He hoped this approach would, quietly, begin to pry open the closed doors. But the Russians didn’t flinch. They listened to his presentation stone-faced, and insisted they did not have biological weapons. Among those most recalcitrant was Yevstigneev, the general in charge of the military’s biological weapons program. “They gave not an inch in the face-to-face,” Wisner recalled. No one admitted that the Russian declaration to the United Nations was incomplete. When the Sverdlovsk incident was raised, Yevstigneev once again stuck by the cover-up of previous years. He said it may have been caused by contaminated meat, and he insisted that it was not from Compound 19. He also said that Biopreparat had nothing to do with offensive germ warfare.¹⁴

The next day, Wisner and the Russians reached an agreement on a new round of inspections between Russia, the United States and Britain, which became known as the Trilateral Agreement. The Russians had again insisted any inspections be reciprocal, although it was Russia, and not the United States or Britain, that had violated the treaty. As they had done before, the Russian generals essentially played for time. There had already been one round of inspections in 1991 that had deepened suspicions in the West that the Russians were not telling the full story.

Had Wisner’s indictment become fully public, it might have ignited a firestorm of demands from around the world that Russia simply close everything down at once. But Wisner believed in quiet diplomacy rather than open confrontation. “We came without believing we would get a whole loaf, and over time we got half a loaf,” he said. “Trying to force a public embarrassment, shock, confrontation wasn’t going to get you a thing, and chipping away at the internal contradictions on the Russian side, nudging, pushing along was a better strategy.”

The Trilateral Agreement was unveiled at a press conference in Moscow September 14, 1992. In a joint statement, the three countries “reaffirmed their commitment to comply fully” with the Biological Weapons Convention and “declared their agreement that biological weapons must have no place in the armed forces.” Russia said it had taken measures to “remove concerns over compliance,” including “the cessation of offensive research,” budget cuts and closing of facilities. The statement said Yeltsin had ordered a “checkup” of Ultra-Pure in St. Petersburg “in response to expressed U.S. and British concerns.”

At the press conference, the Russians insisted everything was just fine. Grigori Berdennikov, the deputy foreign minister who led the Russian side in the talks, said that after Yeltsin’s decree, “activities that would be running counter to the convention are not undertaken in this country.” Yevstigneev brushed aside any suggestion that plague research was conducted at Pasechnik’s institute. They were actually making “a vaccine to prevent chicken plague,” he insisted.

The new Russia was not yet completely open, and Wisner said he realized the mission had not been a total success. “The Russians didn’t say, ‘Ah hah! You got us! We’ll comply.’” In fact, in the private meetings as well as the public the Russians had lied to the Americans repeatedly.

The collapse of the Soviet Union opened a door for Matthew Meselson, the microbiologist at Harvard University, to further investigate the Sverdlovsk anthrax epidemic. He had been consulted about it by the CIA in 1980, visited Moscow to inquire in 1986 and brought the Soviet officials to the United States in 1988, when they claimed contaminated meat had been the cause. But Meselson had never been allowed to go to the scene of the epidemic.

In the autumn of 1991, a local legislator in Sverdlovsk, Larissa Mishustina, demanded that Yeltsin organize a new investigation. Mishustina represented families of the deceased; she said they had received only fifty rubles each, and the military continued to deny any responsibility for the deaths. “I think you know not less than I do that the death of 70 people was the consequence of a leak of bacteriological weapons,” she wrote to Yeltsin. Following her appeal, on December 6, 1991, Alexei Yablokov, the prominent environmentalist whom Yeltsin had appointed to be his counselor on ecology and health care, wrote out a spravka, or information memorandum, on the situation and then a separate letter to Yeltsin, saying the official version of events had hidden the truth about the military’s role. Beyond a doubt, Yablokov wrote, the epidemic was linked to Compound 19. Yablokov also said he had learned that the primary official documents had been destroyed by the KGB a year earlier.¹⁵

When Meselson heard of Yablokov’s interest, he sent a letter January 22, 1992, offering to help any investigation. Yablokov replied February 5, saying he had doubts “that after all these years you can find scientific evidence” of what happened at Sverdlovsk. Meselson pressed him again. On March 23, Yablokov responded, referring to the case as “skeletons” in the closet. By coming to Sverdlovsk to investigate, “You can only catch some rumors and visit cemetery with 64 graves,” he wrote. Nevertheless, Yablokov helped pave the way for a visit, writing letters of introduction for Meselson.

Meselson led an expedition that included Jeanne Guillemin, a medical sociologist, and other experts.¹⁶ They arrived in the city—now back to its original name, Yekaterinburg—in June 1992. They were able to examine the slides and samples from the victims, hidden in 1979 by Grinberg and Abramova. The two pathologists had written a scientific paper, based on their preserved materials on the forty-two cases, which concluded that “these patients died because of inhalation of aerosols containing B. anthracis.”¹⁷

The expedition made important discoveries. Mishustina, the local legislator, had obtained from the KGB a list of sixty-four people who were killed in the outbreak, and was able to locate eleven who had survived. Guillemin, assisted by colleagues at the Ural State University, then interviewed relatives and friends of the victims, walking the streets of the area where they were exposed, examining headstones in the cemetery, and investigating medical records. Using this data, she and Meselson mapped where the anthrax victims worked and lived at the time of the epidemic. They also plotted on the map the direction of the wind on Monday, April 2, 1979, using meteorological records. The results were revealing: most of the people who contracted anthrax in those days either worked, lived or attended daytime military reserve classes in a narrow zone downwind from Compound 19 and stretching southward about 2.5 miles. And for another thirty miles or so beyond, sheep and cows died of anthrax.

More than a decade earlier, when he was first called in to consult by the CIA, Meselson had written a question in his notes: “How many persons might have been present within an ellipse fitted to the facility and the various sites where early cases were presumably exposed? How many of those became ill? Where did later cases reside and/or work?”

Now he had answers. The people were inside the ellipse. The victims were under the plume. Meselson, Guillemin and their team had not gone inside Compound 19 nor identified the precise reason for the outbreak, but they peeled away the secrecy that the U.S. government could not penetrate in years of official diplomatic protests to the Soviet and Russian leaders. They found solid evidence that anthrax spores had come from the military facility at Compound 19.¹⁸

Alibek, leaving Biopreparat behind, worked for a while as the Moscow representative of a Kazakh bank. But he felt the security services were watching his every move. “My phones soon started to click and crackle every time I made a call,” he said.

In September 1992, Alibek decided to flee to the United States. He got in touch with a Defense Department official whom he had met while on the U.S. inspection tour the year before. In September he and his family left Russia through a third country, and he defected to the United States. It wasn’t a classic defection, since the Soviet Union had collapsed and Russia was still in the first year of its rebirth. But Alibek’s arrival was an intelligence coup for the United States. He was the highest-ranking official of Biopreparat ever to come out.¹⁹

Just a week or two later, Sergei Popov also left Russia for the last time. Before buying his plane ticket, he exchanged his monthly salary from rubles to dollars: in his hand he held only $4. He used his savings to buy the ticket. When he arrived at Heathrow Airport in London, no intelligence agents were waiting for him. They never bothered to contact him. On October 1, Popov took up a six-month visiting postdoctoral fellowship at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology at Cambridge University, where Michael Gait was a senior staff scientist. “I had nothing with me, just a small suitcase,” he recalled. Realizing he had no money, his hosts offered a small loan. “I couldn’t tell them what I did before,” Popov recalled. “And I had no intention to tell them.” Popov knew of Pasechnik’s defection, but that role was not what he wanted. “I never contemplated defecting and disclosing secrets,” he said. “My intention was to start a new life and not talk about the past.”

In November, the first results of the Trilateral Agreement, a new round of inspections, got underway. The target was the Institute of Ultra-Pure Biological Preparations in St. Petersburg, where Pasechnik had been director and where the United States and Great Britain feared the Russians were scaling up to manufacture super-plague. Kuntsevich, who was Yeltsin’s point man on chemical and biological weapons, appointed a Russian “Commission of Inquiry,” which met at the institute from November 18 to 21, 1992. A team of American and British observers were invited, but they soon found the whole exercise was a “pathetic setup job,” one of them recalled. The Russian participants, who were handpicked from Biopreparat, the Ministry of Public Health and the Ministry of Defense, mostly watched and listened. Rather than dig into the truth, they were apologists. They announced that there was no biological weapons work going on. The institute director said there never had been any. This was ludicrous in light of the fact that Pasechnik had pioneered such work there, and told the British about it. Among those on the visit was Christopher Davis, who had been one of the leading debriefers of Pasechnik. David C. Kelly, the British microbiologist, later recalled that “it was the American and British observers who actually asked the questions,” rather than the appointed Russian commissioners.

During the November visit, the three buildings that made up the institute were examined again, as they had been in 1991 when Alibek attempted his clumsy cover-up. Again, American and British observers—this time accompanied by the Russian commissioners—spotted a large dynamic aerosol test chamber, a telltale sign of biological weapons research. They asked about its purpose; the answers didn’t add up. The visitors also saw Pasechnik’s milling machine, designed to produce particles of a particular size without damaging the pathogen used in the weapon. It also could not be explained. The “checkup” was over and the Russians had conceded nothing. Their denials made the American and British officials even more suspicious that weapons work was still going on—despite Yeltsin’s orders to stop it.²⁰

The Trilateral process dragged on. At the next stage of the visits, another team of American and British experts went to the All-Union Scientific Research Institute of Veterinary Virology in Pokrov, sixty-one miles east of Moscow, in October 1993. Kelly was among them. At Pokrov, his suspicions were rekindled that a massive Soviet—and now Russian—biological weapons program lay just beneath the surface. While Russian officials insisted they were making vaccines at Pokrov, Kelly saw telltale signs of biowarfare activity. “There were nuclear hardened bunkers and incubators for thousands of eggs. That’s the standard method for growing smallpox virus,” he said. Kelly saw that Pokrov had far more capacity than was needed for vaccines, and the hardened bunkers also seemed to be a giveaway that it was designed for wartime mobilization. But the Russians stuck by the vaccine story, and ducked questions about the past. The visitors were prevented from visiting a sister plant in Pokrov.²¹

By late 1993, intelligence analysts in the United States and Britain were growing worried that the Russian biological weapons program was still ongoing in defiance of Yeltsin’s orders. One secret intelligence report quoted Yeltsin himself as complaining that the biological weapons work was continuing at three facilities despite his decree. In 1993, Alibek was also being debriefed by the intelligence agencies in the United States.

In the autumn, the United States prepared an overview of the situation —and the evidence—in a top-secret National Intelligence Estimate, a report pulling together information from many different sources.

Soon after the estimate was distributed in the U.S. government, it passed into the hands of Aldrich Ames, who was still spying for Russia from within the CIA. Ames’s last operational meeting with the Russians was on November 1, 1993, in Bogotá, Colombia. According to one source, either at this moment or soon thereafter, he turned over to the Russians the National Intelligence Estimate describing what the United States knew about Moscow’s biological weapons program, including specific locations. If the Russians wanted to conceal their germ warfare effort with even greater effectiveness, they had just received a helping hand: Ames delivered to them everything the Americans knew.

There were no more visits to Russian laboratories for a long time. The Trilateral process stumbled on in 1994, when the Russians demanded two visits to facilities of the American pharmaceutical giant, Pfizer. The company was reluctant, but eventually agreed, under pressure from the White House. The Russians also demanded a visit to the Vigo plant in Indiana, where, at the end of World War II, the United States had built the capability for large-scale fermentation of anthrax and a bomb-filling line. It was now abandoned, and as Kelly put it, “the archeological evidence was clearly of 1940s vintage.” The Trilateral process ground to a halt.

On April 7, 1994, Yeltsin abruptly dismissed Kuntsevich, the general whom he had appointed two years earlier to head his committee on chemical and biological weapons. The Kremlin press service said Kuntsevich was relieved of his duties for a “one-time gross violation of work responsibilities.” Details were not disclosed at the time, but came to light the following year when Kuntsevich ran for the lower house of parliament, the State Duma, on the party list of ultranationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky. Russian officials revealed that he was under investigation for helping arrange an illegal delivery of about seventeen hundred pounds of nerve gas precursor agents to Syria and for planning a much bigger shipment. However, Kuntsevich was never prosecuted in Russia. He insisted he had run afoul of internal politics. But the United States thought the charges were serious enough to impose sanctions on Kuntsevich for “knowingly providing material assistance” to Syria’s chemical weapons program.²²

The weapons of the Cold War had been spread around the globe by an insider who was supposed to be protecting them.

————— 21 ————— PROJECT SAPPHIRE

The United States opened eleven new embassies in the far reaches of the former Soviet Union in the year after its implosion, and a younger generation of diplomats volunteered for hardship assignments in remote outposts. Andy Weber was among them. On a long airplane flight, reading the Wall Street Journal, he saw a page-one article with the headline “Kazakhstan Is Made for Diplomats Who Find Paris a Bore.” The article described how Ambassador William Courtney was working out of a dingy hotel in the capital, Almaty, with phones so bad he often could not place a call to Washington. “America is busy,” the operators would say. It sounded like an adventure, and Weber jumped at the chance. With tours in the Middle East and Europe under his belt, he asked the State Department if his next assignment could be Kazakhstan. They signed him up on the spot. After Russian-language training, he arrived in July 1993 to take up the embassy’s political-military portfolio. He found Kazakhstan’s landscape a breathtaking tableau of steppe, lakes, forests and mountains, but Almaty was dismal. He threaded his way through fetid corridors without lightbulbs in the apartment blocks, and went to markets where pensioners stood forlornly offering to sell a vacuum tube.¹

Weber took a recently built house in the foothills of the Tien Shan Mountains that resembled a Swiss chalet, with a large fireplace, paneled walls and a sauna. When he needed to meet Kazakh officials, he invited them home for lunch or dinner. Weber had a cook and a few guards, and he relied on an auto mechanic and all-round fixer, Slava, at a time when everything was difficult to obtain. Slava was also an avid hunter, and Weber learned to stalk pheasant, moose and elk in the secluded wilds. One day not long after he arrived, Slava came to him and said, “Somebody wants to meet you.” Weber realized that whoever it was wanted a discreet meeting.

He was picked up on a street corner, taken to an apartment building and shown to the door of a company that sold hunting rifles, scopes and night-vision equipment. Inside, he found a lively former Soviet navy submarine commander, Vitaly Mette, who wore a leather jacket. Mette’s thick hair was combed back from an angular face, and he carried himself with a self-confident air. Standing nearby was a large man with a polished head like a bullet, introduced as Colonel Korbator, and a very attractive blonde woman. Weber sat on a chair in the small room. The colonel left, then so did the blonde.

When they were alone, Mette turned serious. He said he wanted to discuss the possibility of selling uranium to the U.S. government.

Mette was vague about the nature of the uranium, except that it was stored at the Ulba Metallurgical Plant, an enormous industrial complex that fabricated reactor fuel in the grimy city of Ust-Kamenogorsk, in Kazakhstan’s northeast. Mette was the factory director. As he listened, Weber was curious, but his training told him not to rush. He wanted to talk to Courtney, the ambassador, an experienced foreign service officer who knew something about the Soviet military-industrial complex. That night, Weber and Courtney drove together to see Mette at a guesthouse in Almaty. Courtney asked questions about the material Mette was offering, but Mette just said “uranium.”

Then Mette turned to Weber. Please come hunting with us, he asked.

Kazakhstan, the second largest of the former Soviet republics, suffered as a Cold War proving ground and arms depot. In the remote steppe, the Soviet Union built test sites and factories for nuclear, chemical and biological weapons. The most spectacular was Semipalatinsk in the northeast, where 456 nuclear blasts were carried out from 1949 until 1989. Eighty-six of them were exploded in the air, 30 at the surface, and 340 underground in tunnels and boreholes.² Contamination poisoned the population.³ Fallout from a 1956 explosion drifted over Ust-Kamenogorsk. Also in the north, at Stepnogorsk, anthrax was weaponized at the mammoth factory Alibek once led. A third facility in the north, built at Pavlodar on the banks of the Irtysh River, was a dualpurpose plant to make chemicals for civilian use and, if needed upon war mobilization, for weapons.⁴ Farther to the west, missiles were launched from the Soviet space complex at Scientific Research Test Range No. 5, at Tyuratam, later named Baikonur. And in the southwest was the Aral Sea, where the Soviet biological weapons testing site was built on Vozrozhdeniye Island. When the Soviet Union collapsed, Kazakhstan inherited the world’s fourth-largest nuclear arsenal, including 104 SS-18 intercontinental ballistic missiles with ten warheads each.⁵

Richly endowed with natural resources, Kazakhstan’s greatest treasure was 70 trillion cubic feet of natural gas and 16.4 billion barrels of oil reserves. But despite this wealth, as author Martha Brill Olcott has observed, the new Kazakhstan was a fragile state, crippled by history and geography and born entirely out of the collapse of an empire, without a cohesive national identity.⁶ About 37 percent of the population was Russian, concentrated in the north, and 40 percent Kazakh, among a total of nearly one hundred ethnic groups and nationalities. In Soviet times, the Russians were the elite, but after the collapse many felt shipwrecked there. The newly minted country was ruled by Nursultan Nazarbayev, a onetime steelworker whom Gorbachev had named Communist Party leader of the republic. An ethnic Kazakh, Nazarbayev gradually transformed himself after the Soviet collapse into a Central Asian potentate, mixing authoritarianism, oil wealth and crony capitalism. Now Nazarbayev wanted to be rid of the scourge of weapons that had so disfigured the landscape. He had no use for the uranium at Ust-Kamenogorsk.⁷

A few weeks after their first meeting, Weber flew to join Mette for a hunting expedition. They drove in a jeep for hours to a base camp in the Altai Mountains of eastern Kazakhstan, near the borders of Russia and China, an ideal territory for hunting. Weber enjoyed the banya steam baths, chewed on smoked pork fat and shivered in the early-morning cold with the Russians, speaking their language, hunting with them and earning their trust. He also shot a moose. He did not ask them about the uranium then. At the end of the trip, returning to the city, Mette volunteered to show Weber the plant in Ust-Kamenogorsk. They drove him around the gargantuan factory, fenced off, dark and brooding. Mette’s workers were making fuel for Russian nuclear power plants. If they weren’t exactly thriving, Weber saw they were not starving either. The entire town seemed to be a “little Russia”—Weber saw no Kazakhs there. Just before leaving, Weber inquired gently about the uranium. “If it is not a secret,” he asked, “do you have any highly-enriched uranium?” Highly-enriched uranium could be used for nuclear weapons. Mette was still evasive.

The former Soviet Union was brimming with highly-enriched uranium and plutonium. Viktor Mikhailov, the Russian atomic energy minister, revealed in the summer of 1993 that Russia had accumulated much more highly-enriched uranium, up to twelve hundred metric tons, than was previously thought.⁸ Outside of Russia, in the other former republics, less was known about stockpiles, but much was feared about the Iranians and the Iraqis hunting for material to build nuclear bombs. “We knew that Iran was all over Central Asia and the Caucasus with their purchasing agents,” recalled Jeff Starr, who was principal director for threat reduction policy at the Pentagon.

At the same time, all the former Soviet lands were awash in scams and deceptions—people offering to sell MiGs, missile guidance systems or fissile material, real and imagined. There was such a frenzy to strike gold that it was hard to detect what offer was genuine. “A lot of people thought it was a scam,” Weber recalled of the initial reaction to his reports of finding enriched uranium.

He went back to Mette. “Look,” he remembered saying, “for us to take this seriously, you have to tell me what the enrichment level is, and how much of it there is.”

In December 1993, Weber was extremely busy. Vice President Al Gore visited Kazakhstan in the middle of the month. During the bustle, Slava, the mechanic, came to Weber and said, “Colonel Korbator wants to meet you.” Weber quickly agreed. On a snowy day, he went back to the same small office where he had first seen Mette and Korbator a few months earlier.

Korbator said, “Andy, I want to talk to you. Let’s take a walk.”

They walked through the snowy, dim courtyard of the apartment complex. Korbator spoke first. “Andy, I have a message for you from Vitaly,” he said. “This is the answer to your question.”

Korbator handed Weber a piece of paper. Weber unfolded it. On the paper was written:

U²³⁵

90 percent

600 kilos

Weber calculated that was 1,322 pounds of highly-enriched uranium, enough to make about twenty-four nuclear bombs. Weber closed the piece of paper and put it in his pocket. He said, “Thank you very much. Please tell him, thank you. This is very important.”

Weber sent a cable to Washington, with very limited distribution. Then for a few days he was preoccupied by the Gore visit. Immediately after Gore departed on December 14, Weber was awakened after midnight by the embassy communications officer, who called saying a night action cable from Washington had arrived, requiring his immediate attention. Weber drove back to the embassy. The cable asked a thousand questions about the uranium. What was Mette’s motivation? They wanted to make sure Weber was confident of his source. Weber answered the questions as best he could.

Nothing happened for about a month. Weber’s response languished in the State Department until one day in January 1994, when it came up as an afterthought at a White House meeting. Ashton B. Carter, who had helped frame the Nunn-Lugar legislation in 1991 and was now an assistant secretary of defense, volunteered to take over the issue. Shortly after the meeting, he called Starr into his office. “Your job is to put together a team and go get this stuff out of Kazakhstan,” Carter said. “Whatever you need—do it.” Carter said to get the uranium out within a month. Starr quickly put together a top-secret “tiger team,” an ad hoc group of action-oriented officials from different agencies.⁹

On February 14, 1994, Nazarbayev made his first visit to see President Bill Clinton. In a White House ceremony, Clinton praised Nazarbayev’s “great courage, vision and leadership,” and announced that American aid to Kazakhstan would be tripled to over $311 million. In their public remarks, neither Clinton nor Nazarbayev, nor the official who briefed reporters that day, used the word “uranium.” But when Nazarbayev was at Blair House, the guest residence across the street from the White House, Weber and Courtney quietly paid him a visit. They asked Nazarbayev if the United States could send an expert to verify the composition of the uranium at Ust-Kamenogorsk. He agreed, but insisted it be kept under wraps.¹⁰

Starr’s tiger team was uncertain of conditions at the plant in Kazakhstan. They needed someone who could quickly lay “eyes on target,” as Starr put it, and know exactly what was stored there, and how vulnerable it was. They couldn’t be sure if they could take samples, or photographs, so it had to be someone who could mentally absorb everything, who would know about canisters and metals. The job went to Elwood Gift of the National Security Programs Office at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. A chemical-nuclear engineer, Gift had experience in most of the nuclear fuel cycle, including uranium enrichment.

Gift arrived in Kazakhstan March 1 amid swirling snowstorms, and for several days holed up at Weber’s house. When the weather cleared, they boarded an An-12 turboprop for Ust-Kamenogorsk. The Kazakh government purchased tickets in false names to hide their identity. Fuel was scarce. Just ten minutes after takeoff, they unexpectedly landed again—the tanks were almost empty and the pilot attempted to coax more fuel from a military airfield. Gift and Weber spotted old Soviet fighter jets parked on the tarmac. After an hour or so, they took off again for the 535-mile flight north.

By this time, Weber had come to know Mette better. As plant director, Mette was perhaps the most powerful person in Ust-Kamenogorsk. Weber found him charismatic, gutsy and intelligent, the opposite of an old Soviet bureaucrat. When Weber and Gift showed up the first morning and proposed to take samples of the uranium, Mette consented, knowing that they had Nazarbayev’s approval, and he told them the story of how it got there. The Soviet Union had designed and built a small attack submarine, known as Project 705, given the code name Alfa by NATO. The sub was distinguished by a sleek design, titanium hull and relatively small crew. The most futuristic part of Project 705 was the nuclear power plant, which used an unusual liquid lead-bismuth alloy to moderate heat from the reactor. The subs were completed in the late 1970s, but the reactors proved troublesome—the lead-bismuth alloy had to be kept molten at 275 degrees Fahrenheit—and designers scrambled to build a new reactor. The uranium at Mette’s factory was to be used to make the fuel for the new reactor, but Project 705 was scrapped altogether in the 1980s. Mette was left with the highly-enriched uranium.¹¹

When they approached the building where the uranium was stored, Weber saw the doors were protected by what he later described as a Civil War padlock. The doors swung open into a large room with concrete walls, a dirt floor and high windows. Knee-high brick platforms stretched from one end to the other. On top of the platforms, sheets of plywood were laid out, and resting on the wood, about ten feet apart, were steel buckets and canisters holding the highly-enriched uranium, separated to avoid a chain reaction. Each container had a small metal dog tag stating the contents and quantity. Weber and Gift, working with plant technicians, randomly selected a few containers and took them to a small laboratory area. They weighed them to verify the dog tag was correct. In one canister they found uranium rods wrapped in foil, like so many ice packs in a picnic cooler. From another container, they took a rod-shaped ingot, and Weber hefted it, surprised at how heavy the uranium felt. Gift wanted to break off a piece and bring it back as a sample. He asked a technician to take a wood-handled hammer and a chisel to it, but the ingot would not break.

Weber went off with another worker to watch him file off some shavings they could take as samples. At first, the technicians handled the uranium in a glove box, but one of them took it out and placed it on an open table in the center of the room. The technician slid a piece of paper under it and began to file the ingot. Sparks flew, like a child’s holiday sparkler.

“My eyes are lighting up, because I’ve had this chunk of metal in my hand,” Weber recalled. “I know it is bomb material. This uranium metal would require nothing—just being banged into the right shape and more of it to make a bomb. It didn’t need any processing. This is 90 or 91 percent enriched uranium 235, in pure metal form. And I remember thinking that dozens of nuclear weapons could be fabricated from this, easily fabricated from this material, and how mundane it is. It was just a piece of metal. And just looking at these buckets, how could something this mundane have such awesome power and potential for destruction? So, as he started filing, and sparks are coming off, you can imagine what’s going through my head. What is this bomb material going to do?”

Gift was on the other side of the room, dealing with another sample. When he saw the sparks, Weber said, “Elwood! It’s sparking!” Gift didn’t realize they had taken the uranium out of the glove box, but he didn’t look up. “Don’t worry,” he said, “that’s just normal oxidation.”

Gift collected eight samples of highly-enriched uranium while at the plant. Portions of four samples were dissolved in acid and analyzed by mass spectrograph while Gift and Weber were still there, and they confirmed it was 90 percent enriched uranium. Three of the dissolved samples and the eight original samples were taken by Gift for further analysis.¹²

Gift carried a miniature dosimeter in his shirt pocket while they were inside. He and Weber wore face masks to protect against dust with beryllium, which is highly toxic and carcinogenic. Weber felt comfortable that they were protected—the dosimeter didn’t issue any alarms. Mette reassured them that the uranium was fabricated from natural sources, not reprocessed, so in its present state, although highly enriched, it was not very radioactive. After they finished taking the samples, Weber cheerfully suggested that Gift show the little dosimeter in his pocket to Mette. Gift took it out and discovered that he had forgotten to turn it on. “I thought, oh great!” Weber recalled. In his briefcase, Gift placed the small glass vials that held the eleven samples into holes cut in foam cushioning and snapped it shut. When they walked away from the uranium warehouse, Gift, carrying the briefcase, suddenly slipped and fell hard on the ice. Weber and Mette helped him to his feet but looked at each other. “Both of us, our initial reaction was, Oh my God, the samples!” Weber said. Both Gift and the samples were fine. Back in Almaty, they told the ambassador they had verified the uranium was highly enriched. Courtney immediately sent a cable to Washington, noting the ancient padlock on the door. The cable, Weber recalled, “hit Washington like a ton of bricks.” Starr, who was in Washington, said the cable “established there was a potentially serious proliferation issue.”

Weber thought there was only one thing to do. “In my mind it was a no-brainer,” he said. “Let’s buy this stuff as quickly as we can and move it to the United States.” He knew there was a risk Iran might buy it. Later, it was discovered the plant had a shipment of beryllium, which is used as a neutron reflector in an atomic bomb, packed in crates. Stenciled on the side was an address: Tehran, Iran. Apparently a paperwork glitch was the only thing that had kept the shipment from being sent.¹³

Gift could not carry the samples on a commercial flight—orders from Washington had arrived saying it was too risky. Weber locked the samples in his safe and waited for instructions. Soon, three boxes came addressed to him on the embassy’s regular resupply flight. Weber put Gift’s briefcase with the samples in his jeep and drove out to greet the arriving C-130. He opened the first two boxes and carefully packed the samples in them, and resealed them to be shipped back home. Then he opened the third box: it was the gloves, dosimeter and protective gear he was supposed to have worn while packing the first two boxes.

When the samples got back to the United States, an analysis confirmed the uranium was 90 percent enriched. The tiger team went into high gear, and Starr looked at all the possible options. One was to do nothing, but that was quickly rejected. Another was to secure the uranium in place; that too was rejected on grounds that no one knew what would happen at the plant, or to Kazakhstan, in a few years. A third option was to turn the uranium over to Russia. A tense debate unfolded on this point. The Pentagon representatives wanted nothing to do with the Russians. The State Department people thought it would be an opportunity to show some goodwill and make a point about nonproliferation. A few low-level queries were sent to Moscow. The first went unanswered. A second triggered a reply that Russia would, naturally, want millions of dollars from the United States. After more internal arguments, a decision was made to have Gore raise the issue at his next meeting with Russian Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin, in June. Gore carried with him a set of talking points that did not ask, but informed, the Russians that the United States would take the uranium out of Kazakhstan. Everyone held their breath, but Chernomyrdin did not object. Nazarbayev at one point picked up the phone and called Yeltsin, who agreed not to interfere. The tiger team wrestled with other difficult issues over the summer, such as how much to pay Kazakhstan, and how to prepare an environmental impact statement for the arrival of uranium at Oak Ridge. They went over every detail to make sure the mission would succeed. Weber, waiting for action in Almaty, was frustrated by the delays. “It was absurd because the Iranians probably would have paid a billion dollars for just one bomb’s worth of uranium, and we were talking about dozens of bombs’ worth,” he recalled.

By early 1994, there were signs of progress in the struggle to avert a nuclear nightmare. Russia managed to bring its tactical nuclear weapons back from Eastern Europe and the outlying former Soviet republics. The rail cars carrying warheads were upgraded. Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan were moving toward giving up their strategic nuclear weapons. The United States announced plans to buy 500 tons of highly-enriched uranium from Russia and blend it down into reactor fuel. In the first year of his presidency, Clinton appointed several architects of the Nunn-Lugar legislation to high-level policy positions. He named Les Aspin his first defense secretary. William Perry, the Stanford professor, was appointed deputy defense secretary, and became secretary in February 1994. Carter was appointed assistant secretary of defense for international security policy, overseeing the Nunn-Lugar legislation.¹⁴ In Russia, after a violent confrontation with hard-liners in October 1993, Yeltsin won a new constitution giving him broad powers and a new legislature.

Nonetheless, what Andy Weber had seen in one factory in Kazakhstan existed across Russia. Kenneth J. Fairfax, an officer in the environment, science and technology section of the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, had arrived in July 1993, assigned to work on improving nuclear power plant safety. He soon discovered the Russian nuclear establishment was showing the same signs of deterioration as the rest of the country. Some of the worst conditions were at facilities that Russia considered civilian, but which held large quantities of weapons-usable uranium and plutonium. The materials were so poorly protected as to be up for grabs. Fairfax sent a series of startling cables from Moscow to the State Department describing what he saw.

Fairfax reported that almost everyone in the atomic sector, from maintenance workers to world-class scientists, was in distress. He started a personal effort to help nuclear scientists link up with American firms. “I would try to get scientists to show me what they could do, to really display their most outstanding talents,” he said. Then he would seek out American companies that could pay for their skills. “I had no big program or budget,” he said. “Just a rolodex and a head for business.” When a few early efforts succeeded, scientists who had been receiving a paltry $7 a month soon were bringing in $3,000 or $4,000. They told colleagues, leading to new contacts, and Fairfax was soon a welcome visitor at the once-secret nuclear cities across Russia. He was even granted an official security pass to enter Minatom’s headquarters in Moscow, the nerve center of the nuclear empire. More than once he recalled waltzing into Minatom while frustrated bureaucrats from Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs were stuck at the security desk at the entrance.

While looking for jobs for nuclear scientists, Fairfax began to notice security standards for some nuclear materials were at times “shockingly poor,” he recalled. One of his early visits in Moscow was to the Kurchatov Institute, the prestigious nuclear research facility led by Velikhov. While on the grounds one day, looking at reactor research, he was shown Building 116, which held a research reactor powered by highly-enriched uranium. The building was surrounded by overgrown trees and bushes. “It was literally a wooden door, with a wax seal on it, with a piece of string. You break the wax seal and open it,” he recalled. Inside, the Kurchatov workers brought out the highly-enriched uranium in the shape of large heavy washers. Fairfax picked up some of them. It was the first time he had ever held highly-enriched uranium in his hands.

Fairfax received “lots of scary information” from technicians and scientists in laboratories and from the security people—including sources in the 12th Main Directorate of the Defense Ministry, responsible for guarding the nuclear arsenal. Fairfax wrote cables describing what he witnessed: holes in fences, storerooms full of materials for which there was no proper inventory, heaps of shipping and receiving documents that had never been reconciled.

Fissile material was scattered across thousands of miles and tucked inside hundreds of institutes and warehouses, much of it in ingots, pellets and powder, held in canisters and buckets, poorly accounted for by longhand entries in ledger books, or not accounted for at all. Fairfax wrote in his cables that the weakest security was often found for highly-enriched uranium and plutonium, usable for weapons but intended for civilian use or basic scientific research. Since it was not headed for warhead assembly, it got less protection. Large quantities of weapons-usable material was stored in rooms and warehouses easy for an amateur burglar to crack: unguarded windows, open footlockers, doors with a single padlock, casks with a wax seal and a near-total absence of sophisticated monitors and equipment.

In Soviet times, the nuclear security system depended on closed fences, closed borders, a closed society, as well as the surveillance and intimidation of everyone by the secret police. In the Soviet system, people were under stricter control than the fissile materials. When the material was weighed or moved, it was tracked in handwritten entries in ledger books. If material was lost, it was just left off the books; no one wanted to get in trouble for it. And factories would often deliberately keep some nuclear materials off the books, to make up for unforeseen shortfalls.¹⁵

One of Russia’s leading nuclear scientists at the Kurchatov Institute told a group of visiting U.S. officials in March 1994 that many facilities had never completed a full inventory of their bomb-grade materials, so they might not know what was missing.¹⁶ The single greatest obstacle to building a bomb—whether for a terrorist or an outlaw state—was obtaining enough fissile material. Now it was evident from the Fairfax cables that in some places the former Soviet Union was turning into a Home Depot of enriched uranium and plutonium, with shoppers cruising up and down the aisles.

The same month as the Kurchatov briefing, three men were arrested in St. Petersburg trying to sell 6.7 pounds of weapons-usable highly-enriched uranium. The material was smuggled out of a facility in an oversized laboratory glove. Separately, two navy officers and two guards used a crowbar to rip off the padlock on a nuclear fuel storage facility on the Kola Peninsula, stole two fuel assemblies, fled to an abandoned building, and used a hacksaw to open one—and extract the core of uranium.¹⁷

Although many of Fairfax’s sources were clearly working outside official channels and taking risks in talking to him, Fairfax felt none of them were spies or traitors; most were scientists, police and even a few former KGB agents who understood the nuclear dangers. Fairfax recalled that one officer in the 12th Main Directorate of the Defense Ministry explained his motives by saying he had worked on nuclear weapons his entire life to defend the Soviet Union, and by helping to point out the deficiencies in Russia, he was still keeping the country safe.¹⁸

When the Fairfax cables landed in Washington, Matthew Bunn read them with fascination. “It was just incredible stuff,” Bunn recalled. He was a staff member at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. While the cables were distributed to the White House and elsewhere in Washington, not everyone recognized the warning signs. But Bunn was totally floored. The cables, plus a string of nuclear smuggling cases in 1994, showed him that a crisis was coming, and he was standing at the bow.

His father, George Bunn, had been a pioneer in arms control and nuclear nonproliferation, helping to negotiate the nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty of 1968, and serving as the first general counsel of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. Matthew graduated from MIT and followed in his father’s footsteps in Washington during the 1980s. He became editor of a magazine, Arms Control Today. Then, just as the Soviet Union was collapsing, he took on a new assignment at the National Academy of Sciences, to direct an in-depth study of the dangers of excess plutonium coming from dismantled Cold War nuclear weapons. Bunn concluded the risks were not only plutonium, but also the much larger supply of highly-enriched uranium. Bunn broadened his study, and the two-volume report recommended that, to the extent practical, every kilogram of the uranium and plutonium should be locked up as securely as the nuclear warheads.¹⁹

With the research project complete, in January 1994 Bunn was recruited to come to the White House by Frank von Hippel, the Princeton physicist. Von Hippel, a self-described citizen-scientist, had joined the new Clinton administration, working in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. Bunn saw there was little he could do to influence arms control, so he decided to devote almost all his time, with von Hippel, to fighting the leakage of uranium and plutonium in the former Soviet Union.

Bunn’s early days in the White House were discouraging. The government was moving at a glacial pace. The plans at the time were to build one or two pilot projects in Russia over several years to show how to secure fissile material, and hope Russian specialists would learn from the experience. The pilot projects were for low-enriched uranium facilities that didn’t even pose a proliferation risk. Bunn practically shouted his impatience. “We haven’t got several years,” he said, “the thefts are happening now!” The U.S. government was typically caught up in its own maddening budget and turf wars. Should the Defense Department or the Energy Department deal with nuclear materials policy? What about the national laboratories, such as Los Alamos, which were building their own bridges to the laboratories in Russia with some success?

To make matters worse, suspicions from the Cold War still ran deep on both sides. The Russians steadfastly refused to give the Americans access to facilities handling highly-enriched uranium or plutonium. Russia and the United States were prisoners of their old habits. “As long as you approach this from the point of view of arms control—let’s negotiate for 20 years and make sure everything is reciprocal and bilateral—then you are left with a situation when you can’t get anything done,” Fairfax recalled. He suggested, radically, that they simply work together immediately, since neither would benefit from a nuclear bomb in the wrong hands. “My attitude was: does a fence make us more secure?” he said. “If so, build the fence.” In a similar mind-set in Washington, Bunn came up with a scheme he called “quick fix.” The idea was to ask the Russians to identify five to ten of their most vulnerable or broken-down facilities, rush in and improve the security, then identify the next worst, attack those, and so on. But the Russian response was: no way. “They were just not at all interested,” Bunn said. The chief obstacle was the Ministry of Atomic Energy, known as Minatom, the nuclear empire lorded over by Mikhailov.²⁰

On May 10, 1994, in the small town of Tengen-Wiechs, near Stuttgart, police searching the home of a businessman, Adolf Jaekle, unexpectedly discovered in the garage a cylinder containing 56.3 grams of powder. On testing, about 10 percent was extraordinarily pure plutonium. Jaekle was arrested and jailed, and the source of the plutonium never identified. Then, on August 10, Bavarian criminal police at Munich’s Franz Joseph Straus Airport confiscated a black suitcase being unloaded from a Lufthansa flight arriving from Moscow. Inside was a cylinder containing 560 grams of mixed-oxide fuel that included 363.4 grams of plutonium-239, 87.6 percent pure. The suitcase also included a plastic bag with 201 grams of nonradioactive lithium-6, a metallic element used in making tritium, a nuclear weapons component. Bavarian authorities arrested the apparent owner of the suitcase, Justiniano Torres Benitez, and two Spaniards, one of whom came to meet Benitez at the airport. The arrest was the culmination of a sting operation set up by the Bavarian police and the German federal intelligence service, the BND, and had a huge impact on thinking about fissile material in Russia, seeming to confirm that it was leaking, badly. “We were going crazy worrying about this stuff though much of 1994,” Bunn recalled.²¹ Fairfax, writing from Moscow, sent a message to Washington that pointed to four Russian nuclear facilities as “my best guesses on where to look” to find the origins of the material.²²

A month after the Munich arrests, Fairfax drove von Hippel to the Kurchatov Institute. Again, they visited Building 116, where Kurchatov employees poured out onto a tray some of their seventy kilos of highly-enriched uranium, pressed into washer shapes. Von Hippel noticed it was stored in what looked like high school lockers. “I was dumbfounded,” von Hippel said. There were no motion detectors, no guards. Anyone could have walked off with the uranium.

In October, von Hippel returned to Mayak, near Chelyabinsk, which he had visited five years earlier on Velikhov’s glasnost tour. The facility was one of those on the Fairfax list of possible sources of the material seized in Munich. On this visit, von Hippel was taken to a building he had not seen before, No. 142, a single-story warehouse, originally built in the 1940s. A lone Interior Ministry guard held a key. Inside the building were stored 10,250 containers, each about the size of a hotel coffeepot. Each held 2.5 kilos of plutonium oxide. They were lined up in trenches. The cans were double-sealed to avoid leaks, but the warehouse was so hot with radioactivity that employees were allowed inside for only short periods each week. Moreover, the building was an easy target for theft. There were no security cameras; a ventilation shaft would have made an escape route. The building “would not offer much resistance to penetration,” von Hippel wrote after the visit. “The walls have multiple windows and doors and the roof is lightweight. The plutonium containers within are easily accessible by simply cutting the sealing wire, removing a 20-kg cover, and reaching down and pulling out the canisters. The seals are easily defeated lead seals. The guards do not have radios…” After the containers are put in the trenches, he added, “no inventories are made to check that the canisters are still there.” Von Hippel figured there was enough plutonium in the warehouse to make several thousand bombs.

By autumn 1994 it was clear the entire former Soviet Union was awash in fissile material, and the United States had yet to do much about it. Von Hippel noted in a memorandum, “progress in gaining cooperation from the Russian side has been extremely slow” although “scores of facilities and hundreds of tons of weapons-usable material” were at risk.²³

After months of preparation, the covert mission to remove the uranium in Kazakhstan was almost ready in October. The winter snows were coming. “I kept pressing and pressing to get this thing going, knowing full well that winter comes early in this part of the world,” Weber said. “It would get messy if we didn’t get it finished before the first snowfall.” A small group of Americans slipped unnoticed into Ust-Kamenogorsk during the summer to check whether the airport runway could handle C5 Galaxy airlifters, and to examine the containers inside the Ulba warehouse. The Oak Ridge Y-12 laboratory built a mobile processing facility. A team of twenty-nine men and two women were recruited for the mission, including Elwood Gift, who made the first visit. On October 7, President Clinton signed a classified presidential directive approving the airlift, and the final briefing was held at Oak Ridge. The next day, three C5 aircraft, among the largest planes in the world, lifted off from Dover Air Force Base, Delaware, carrying the team and their processing facility. They flew to Turkey, and then, after some delays, to Ust-Kamenogorsk. Weber was waiting for them in the control tower of the small airport. “This was one of those bizarre post–Cold War experiences you have to live through to believe, but I’m in the control tower, nobody in the control tower speaks English,” Weber recalled. “So they said, ‘Andy, can you talk to the planes and guide them in?’” The C5s needed a six-thousand-foot runway, and landed like a “bucking bronco,” in the words of one pilot, on the bumpy eight-thousand-foot strip at Ust-Kamenogorsk. The planes were unloaded, and flew off to bases elsewhere until it was time to return.

On the ground, at the Ulba factory, the team began its arduous work. Twenty-five members were from Oak Ridge; the others were a communications technician, a doctor and four military men, including three Russian-speaking interpreters. Each day, they left their hotel before dawn and returned after dark, spending twelve hours packaging all the uranium into special containers suitable for flying back to the United States. The total material to be packed up was 4,850 pounds, of which approximately 1,322 pounds was the highly-enriched uranium. There were seven different types of uranium-bearing materials in the warehouse, much of it laced with beryllium.²⁴ Altogether, the team discovered 1,032 containers in the warehouse, and each had to be methodically unpacked, examined and repacked for transport into quart-sized cans that were then inserted into 448 shipping containers—55-gallon drums with foam inserts—for the flight. Laborious checking was necessary, each can compared with the Ulba handwritten logs. In the end, the Americans discovered several canisters lying in the warehouse without dog tags. Some of the uranium had to be heated in special ovens to remove water to facilitate the repacking. The entire process required precision, endurance and secrecy. If word leaked, the whole effort might have to be aborted. The tiger team in Washington had worked out a cover story—if the Americans were discovered, they were to say they were helping Kazakhstan prepare declarations for the International Atomic Energy Agency. Working conditions were stressful; many of the team members had never been outside the United States. Some were so homesick they broke the rules and called home from local telephones. From a distance, Kazakh special forces troops kept a watchful eye to protect the Americans inside the plant.

By November 11, the job was finished and the 448 barrels loaded onto trucks. The team was determined to get home for Thanksgiving, but then winter weather set in. The original air force order was for five C5s to evacuate the uranium and the team. But only three planes were ready when the right moment came. Mechanical problems and bad weather caused delays. Finally, on November 18, one plane left Turkey for Kazakhstan. While it was in the air, at 3 A.M., the uranium was driven from the Ulba plant to the airport, with Weber in the lead security car, a Soviet-era Volga. “It was black ice conditions,” Weber said. “And these trucks were sliding all over the place, and I’m thinking, I don’t want to make the call to Washington saying one of the trucks with highly-enriched uranium went off the bridge into the river, and we’re trying to locate it. But somehow, miraculously, we made it all safely to the airport.”

The plane took three hours to load. But before it could take off, the runway had to be cleared of snow. A pilot recalled the airfield was being pummeled by sleet, ice and rain. There were no snowplows to be seen. Then the local airport workers brought out a truck with a jet engine mounted on the back. They fired up the engine and blasted the runway free for takeoff. The Galaxy heaved itself into the sky. The next day, two more C5s flew out the remaining uranium, the gear and the team. The enormous transports, operating in total secrecy, flew twenty hours straight through to Dover with several aerial refuelings, the longest C5 flights in history. Once on the ground, the uranium was loaded into large, unmarked trucks specially outfitted to protect nuclear materials and driven by different routes to Oak Ridge.

Weber remained on the tarmac until the last plane took off.

When it was announced to the public at a Washington press conference on Wednesday morning, November 23, Project Sapphire caused a sensation. Defense Secretary William Perry called it “defense by other means, in a big way.” He added, “We have put this bomb-grade nuclear material forever out of the reach of potential black marketers, terrorists or a new nuclear regime.”²⁵ With imagination and daring, Sapphire underscored what could be done. The United States had reached into another country, which was willing to cooperate, removed dangerous material and paid for it.²⁶ But that method could not be replicated inside Russia, where there was far more uranium and plutonium, and much more suspicion. It was hard to imagine landing C5s in Moscow and emptying out Building 116 at the Kurchatov Institute.

The U.S. government has long run a secretive intelligence committee, spanning different agencies, which studies nuclear developments overseas. In late 1994, the Joint Atomic Energy Intelligence Committee prepared a report about the extent of the Russian nuclear materials crisis. The top-secret report concluded: not a single facility storing highly-enriched uranium or plutonium in the former Soviet Union had adequate safeguards up to Western standards. Not one.

In the White House science office, Bunn felt he had “zero power” and worked “10 tiers down from the top.” His quick-fix idea was dead on arrival. In late 1994, on advice from his staff, Clinton asked for a blueprint for action on nuclear smuggling and loose fissile material, to be written by the President’s Committee of Advisors on Science and Technology. The study was chaired by Professor John Holdren, then of the University of California at Berkeley, and Bunn was named study director. When finished in March 1995, the study, classified secret, called for a multifront war. The study identified approximately one hundred sites handling sizable quantities of weapons-usable nuclear materials in the former Soviet Union.²⁷ Then, to drive home their point, Bunn and Holdren lobbied for, and won, permission to give a briefing to President Clinton and Vice President Gore in the Oval Office.

They stayed up until 2 A.M. the night before preparing. On May 1, 1995, just weeks after the Oklahoma City bombing, they told Clinton and Gore the fissile material crisis was one of the gravest national security problems the country faced. Holdren described to Clinton the serious gaps: how Russian facilities had no idea, or precise records, of the amount of uranium and plutonium lying about; the weak links in buildings, fences and guard forces; and the threat that terrorists could walk off with a bag or bucket of uranium or plutonium. In a clever move, Holdren had brought an empty casing from one of the fuel pellets used at the nuclear power and engineering institute at Obninsk, south of Moscow. He tossed it on a table and told Clinton there were perhaps eighty thousand of those filled with uranium or plutonium, and not one with an inventory number on it. The institute had no monitors to stop someone from carrying one out in their pocket. Bunn thumped on the table a two-inch stack of press clippings he’d assembled, including a Time magazine cover with the headline “Nuclear Terror for Sale.” At the end of the presentation, they showed Clinton a diagram of what would happen to the White House if the Oklahoma City bomb had been set off on Pennsylvania Avenue—superficial damage. Then they showed what would happen if it was a one-kiloton nuclear “fizzle”—a bomb that didn’t work very well. In that case, the White House was at the edge of the crater.

Clinton said he realized that security was bad, but he had no idea that the Russians didn’t even know if something had been stolen.²⁸

In the weeks after Clinton’s briefing, a delegation from the United States Department of Energy arrived in Ukraine, including a young logistics assistant, Erik Engling. He had landed a job in the department just the year before, doing administrative chores for the office of National Security and Nonproliferation, which required a security clearance. Engling possessed the right credentials from an earlier job working in a government library. He helped with visas, cables, and chores for government officials struggling to cope with the fissile materials crisis in the former Soviet Union. One day, he recalled, a senior policy-maker came and sat down in his office. Engling was twenty-nine years old then, a large young man, blunt-spoken and eager to learn more about the nuclear problems they were discovering. “The problem is so huge,” the senior policy-maker said, “your grandchildren won’t be able to work this out.”²⁹

In June, Engling made his first visit to the former Soviet Union, accompanying the delegation to Ukraine. The team went to the Kharkiv Institute of Physics and Technology, once a premier research institute. Engling wound his way through a labyrinthine corridor, up and down stairs and then through a door. “And we went through the door, and into that room, and there’s 75 kilos of highly-enriched uranium lying on the floor. On the floor! You’ve got it on racks, too. There’s an oversized dumbwaiter that goes up and down to one of the rooms above where they were doing experiments. The uranium is in all sorts of configurations. Some in tubes, some in boxes. And we all had this sinking feeling, like, why? Why do you guys even have this shit?” The uranium was entirely unprotected. “We walked up a couple of stairs, we’re out in a parking lot. This is where the nuclear materials are stored, and not a thing between the parking lots and these doors. The stuff was sitting just 55 feet from the back door. You could just walk in, and walk out.”³⁰

————— 22 ————— FACE TO FACE WITH EVIL

On a brilliant summer day, June 2, 1995, a chartered white and blue Yak-40 jet descended to the remote city of Stepnogorsk in northern Kazakhstan, landing on a bumpy airstrip of concrete slabs. The plane, emblazoned with the name Kazakhstan Airlines, carried Andy Weber and a team of biological weapons experts from the United States. About nine miles away stood the anthrax factory Alibek had built in the 1980s. Never before had a Westerner set foot in the secret plant, where, in the event of war, anthrax bacteria was to be fermented, processed into a thick brown slurry, dried, milled and filled into bombs—by the ton.

Weber’s flight to Stepnogorsk was the culmination of months of careful preparation. His mission was to find a new entryway into the secret empire of Biopreparat. In Russia, attempts by American and British officials to penetrate the biological weapons program had been blocked, made even more difficult after Aldrich Ames gave the U.S. National Intelligence Estimate to the Russians in late 1993. Moreover, Yeltsin’s promises of openness had been subverted by his own generals.

But now, there was another chance. A colossal anthrax-processing machine stood intact at Stepnogorsk, and if Weber could get inside, it might hold a key to the larger Soviet biological weapons story.

Weber began laying the groundwork for this mission days after Project Sapphire was over. In November 1994, he started a series of inoculations against potential pathogens he might encounter at Stepnogorsk, including anthrax and tularemia. Then he lobbied the Kazakh government for permission to visit three facilities with a team of experts: the chemical weapons plant at Pavlodar, in the northeast near the Russian border; the biological weapons plant at Stepnogorsk, also in the north; and a testing grounds for germ warfare agents at Vozrozhdeniye Island, in the Aral Sea, which borders Kazakhstan in the far west. The hulking industrial works were frozen in time, equipment mothballed or rusting, the halls and laboratories monitored by Russians who remained the stewards long after the Soviet Union imploded.

When Weber discovered the highly-enriched uranium in Ust-Kamenogorsk, he had followed a single tip on a small piece of paper. This time, he had much more information, thanks to Alibek, who was debriefed for more than a year by American intelligence and military agencies, meeting daily in a second-floor conference room in an office building in northern Virginia. Alibek sketched out the sprawling Biopreparat and military germ warfare complex: the facilities, pathogens, history, scientists, directors, structure, accomplishments and goals. While Pasechnik had done the same for the British in London, Alibek held a higher-ranking position.

To the Americans, there were still many unknowns—not only the hidden history, but also the urgent questions about whether the Russians were actually closing down the Soviet biological weapons program, as Yeltsin had promised. The earlier visits to Obolensk, Vector and other facilities had all been frustrated by the cover-up. The Trilateral Agreement reached a dead end. The Americans wanted to know: which pathogens and laboratories could still be a proliferation threat?¹

Alibek provided a gold mine of new data about the laboratories and factories of Biopreparat. He knew a great deal about Stepnogorsk, which he had directed in the 1980s: the layout, building numbers, pipelines, processes, machinery, fermenters and bunkers. Thanks to Alibek, Weber had a road map.²

In the last days of May 1995, Weber made final appeals to the Kazakh government. When he got the green light, the American team immediately flew in from overseas to join him. On the first leg of the journey, Weber headed to Pavlodar, the abandoned chemical weapons plant, where he was given open access and cooperation. “They showed us everything,” he recalled. The main engineer explained that Pavlodar was a war mobilization plant, designed to produce sarin and soman for bombs in a matter of weeks if the orders came from Moscow. But the factory showed signs of having been left behind years earlier. “It was a wreck,” Weber remembered.

Then, on Friday, June 2, they took off for Stepnogorsk, 261 miles to the west of Pavlodar. The Stepnogorsk plant was alerted—by someone in the Kazakh government—that an American delegation was coming to town and should be met at the airstrip. Weber was accompanied by a security official from the president’s office, in case there were any questions about his authority to be there. When he climbed down the stairs of the plane, Weber ran into trouble.

“Remember, it’s a chartered plane, this is Stepnogorsk. The airport no longer operates. They didn’t get a lot of flights coming in. So they came right out to our plane,” Weber said. The first person he met was Gennady Lepyoshkin, director of the plant. A Soviet army colonel, Lepyoshkin had first come to Stepnogorsk in 1984 as Alibek’s deputy, and took over when Alibek went to Moscow in 1987. He was shorter than Weber, with dark hair combed straight over, and thick glasses. Lepyoshkin brought his own security man, who offered Weber a finger-crushing handshake. Lepyoshkin left no doubt about his attitude.

“You’re not welcome in our city,” Lepyoshkin told Weber. “Leave!”³

Weber insisted he had come at the invitation of the Kazakh government. Lepyoshkin demanded to see documents. Weber had brought none. After more back-and-forth, Lepyoshkin allowed Weber and his team to come into the town—but not the factory—and check into a guesthouse.

They next met at the mayor’s office. Weber recalled that the Russians regarded their installation as a satellite of Moscow, not under the authority of Kazakhstan. The town was largely populated by Russians, too. “I had entered Brezhnev-era Russia,” Weber recalled. “This was going back in a time warp.” He made a forceful case for the visit, saying that Nazarbayev had approved it. “Gennady and the locals didn’t really care” about the Kazakh president, however. Weber then called Courtney, the ambassador in Almaty. “We need something on paper,” he told him, “or this visit is not going to happen.”

The lone fax machine in the city was in the mayor’s office, and a few hours later a letter arrived from Vladimir Shkolnik, the Kazakh minister of science and new technologies, who had been the atomic energy chief at the time of Project Sapphire. Shkolnik urged Lepyoshkin to open up everything to the visitors. “When Lepyoshkin had the approval on paper, he was covered,” Weber said. “He didn’t like it but he couldn’t stop us.”

The next morning, Weber and his team drove out to the plant from the guesthouse. First they went to Lepyoshkin’s office, where Lepyoshkin gave them a briefing. He said they were making vaccines at the plant. Weber figured it was the cover story. At this moment, both Weber and Lepyoshkin knew more than they said aloud. Lepyoshkin knew that Alibek had gone to the United States. Weber knew the details of the Alibek debriefings, in which he had described the anthrax factory. Weber then gave a brief summary of what he believed the plant had been used for in the past.

Suddenly, Lepyoshkin’s deputy for security, Yuri Rufov, burst out, “That’s all lies! It’s a vaccine production plant! That’s all. We never had anything to do with biological weapons.”

At this point, Lepyoshkin’s manner changed. “Let’s end this discussion,” he said. “We’ll show you everything, and you can make your own judgments.”

On the first full day, Saturday, June 3, Weber and his team started by examining the complex from the exterior. Spanning the top of one building were letters spelling out “Progress” in Russian, the name of the civilian enterprise that served as cover for the biological weapons plant. When they alighted from a jeep they saw bunkers, with thick concrete walls, nestled deep into earthen mounds. Pipes snaked from building to building atop concrete pillars. Behind the bunkers, a crane and rail line marked the location where anthrax munitions would be loaded onto trains in the event of war. Lightning arrestors—another telltale sign of weapons work—were stacked up to one side. At the end of the first day, there were still many mysteries. At 9 P.M. that night, they spread out a schematic of the basement of the main production plant, wondering what was inside the rooms they had not yet seen.

The second day, Sunday, June 4, 1995, they returned and probed deeper inside. Most of the equipment had been mothballed but looked well preserved. Pipes and valve handles were color-coded blue, green and red. Storage tanks stood silent, connected by miles of tubes and wires. The whole complex seemed to be waiting to spring to life. While the interior was in good order, outside the facility had gone to seed. Roads were potholed and junk strewn everywhere. Sheep fed from a trough outside one building. A stiff wind blew across the steppe.

From what he saw, Weber realized that Alibek’s descriptions matched everything they found. One of the most important discoveries was in Building 600, the main laboratory. They located the pad where Alibek recalled there had been a giant stainless steel aerosol chamber for testing the most dangerous agents, such as anthrax, Marburg and Ebola on monkeys and other animals. The high-ceilinged hall was painted an institutional green, eerily empty save for pipes and wires around the periphery, disconnected from the bulbous experimental chamber that once filled up the middle. A crane loomed overhead—maybe to lift the stainless steel ball? In the center of the pad they found a drainage hole. Weber and his team carefully swabbed it for samples. Then they found what looked like a latched, plastic traveling cage for a pet dog, with a handle on top. But it wasn’t for traveling. A hole was cut in the front, and two V-shaped supports protruded from the hole. Here was where the dog’s head would be strapped down during biological weapons experiments.

They combed Building 211, the facility to prepare nutrient media for growing bacteria, with a capacity of thirty thousand metric tons a year. They checked out underground bunkers with reinforced concrete walls two meters thick for weaponization of the agents. The bunkers contained compressors and refrigerators to store agents, and special lines where the pathogens would be filled into bombs and sealed. They swabbed Building 231, where the anthrax bacteria would be dried and milled before being put into the bombs. It appeared never to have been operational.

The most important discovery was the main production facility, Building 221. Several stories tall, on the inside it resembled a scene from a very old science fiction movie, crammed full of pipes, tanks, valves, coils and wires. Most was not active, just standing in place. The building contained a high-level containment facility for handling dangerous pathogens. In a three-day production cycle, the facility could make 1.5 tons of bacteria. The nutrient media was pumped from Building 211 to the upper floors of Building 221, where small fermenters were inoculated with anthrax bacteria. After a period of growth, the content of the small chambers was drained downward into ten massive fermenters, each four stories tall. After further fermentation, the mixture was spun in centrifuges to remove culture medium and waste. The bacterial slurry was then pumped to Building 231 for drying and milling, and then to the bunkers for munitions filling or storage. The finished weapons would then be loaded onto waiting railway wagons for transport.

Of all the amazing discoveries, Weber recalled the day he saw the large fermenters as one of the most disturbing of his life.

“This is a plant that could produce and load onto weapons—targeted at the United States—300 metric tons of anthrax during a war-time mobilization period,” he said. “It looked like a plant right out of the 1930s. There was nothing high-tech about it. It was like when I held the uranium ingot in my hand. It was just metal. These were just big vessels that looked like something out of a 1930s movie. Yet we knew it had the capability of wiping out a big portion of population. It was just scary to think that you didn’t need some super-high sophisticated technology to produce these horrible weapons in massive quantities.”

In Building 221, Weber climbed to the top of one of the twenty-thousand-liter fermenters and looked down into it with a flashlight. The cylinder was made of specialty steel with a resin lining. He could see the impellers attached to a central rod that would stir the anthrax spores. He could not see the bottom in the dark, four floors below, but he got a full sense of the incredible volume, the trillions of spores of anthrax bacteria that would be swirling inside the chamber, enough to wipe out entire populations. Weber, taciturn, methodical and careful, felt a chill run up and down his spine. “I think more than any other day in my life,” he said, “this was my introduction to two things. First, to biological weapons. I had read about them. I had taken courses. But this was the real thing. And second, to the Soviet Union. I had never bought into Reagan’s ‘Evil Empire’ thing. I was a product of liberal eastern schools, I went to Cornell, but there it was. I was face to face with evil.”⁴

On Sunday, Lepyoshkin invited Weber and his team to the plant’s dacha, an A-frame cottage on the Seleti River, for a closing feast. It was a sunny afternoon and they went fishing and swimming, ate shish kebab and enjoyed fish soup, and Lepyoshkin poured vodka. They wore baseball caps in the bright sun that glinted off the reeds and blue surface of the river. Lepyoshkin opened the feast by declaring, “Now the official meeting is over.” Weber recalled, “What he really meant was, now we can talk to you. Now we can tell you the truth. Everything we said until now has been part of a script.”

Lepyoshkin then told them the full story of Stepnogorsk. “They were open about the whole history, the whole purpose,” Weber recalled. The anthrax factory was built after the 1979 Sverdlovsk accident. The goal was to give the Soviet Union the ability to wage biological war within a few weeks after the mobilization order was given. Pasechnik and Alibek had been right, and all those years, the Soviet and Russian generals and diplomats had lied about it. Indeed, Weber remembered, these men had lied to his face only two days before, saying the plant made vaccines.

The teams bonded over vodka on the riverbank; the Russians were candid about their own experiences inside the system. As Weber recalled it, they told him: “At the time we didn’t know it was wrong. We didn’t know it was illegal. We didn’t know there was a Biological Weapons Convention. We just thought we were defending our country. Now we know enough to know it was wrong, and we want to work together to do positive things for the rest of our lives.” Lepyoshkin said activity at Stepnogorsk had come to a halt four years earlier with the Soviet collapse. There had been nothing, officially, from Moscow since then. They had made halting attempts on their own to convert to civilian products. He hoped they would succeed someday.

“They just poured their souls out to us,” Weber said. “For these people to meet Americans, who they had been taught to hate, to meet their counterparts and find out that they actually liked them, I think it was a big event for them, too. There was no more isolated place in the world than Stepnogorsk, Kazakhstan. It’s this poor, little, isolated, artificial military city that was created in the middle of Kazakhstan on purpose to be as far away from life forms as possible. They knew we were the main enemy. And all of a sudden, we’re there, and we don’t have horns and we’re having fun with them. We’re laughing at their jokes and they are laughing at ours.”

Weber had broken through the secrecy. The trip produced proof that Biopreparat and the Soviet military envisioned manufacturing germ weapons by the metric ton in the event of war. The Soviets had grossly violated the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention. He had seen, too, that the anthrax factory, while not operating, remained intact. The fermenters were still there, mothballed but ready. “By the end of that day we had gone from almost failing, the team not even being allowed in, to the exhilaration of succeeding in our mission beyond our wildest expectations,” Weber recalled.

Weber asked Lepyoshkin if he would come with them the next day as they headed to Vozrozhdeniye Island, where the germ weapons had long been tested. Weber thought it would be useful to have Lepyoshkin as a guide. The island had been at the heart of the Soviet germ warfare program. Lepyoshkin readily agreed. In the morning, they took off together in the Yak-40. On the flight, Weber wore a plaid open-necked shirt and took a window seat. Lepyoshkin sat next to him, in a sport coat and tie with red-white-and-blue stars and stripes. They lifted a toast to cooperation, Weber holding a small American flag in one hand.

They could not fly a fixed-wing jet to Aralsk, the closest city to the island, so they took the chartered Yak-40 to Kyzil Orda, a city to the east. Much to Lepyoshkin’s surprise, Weber, on the spot, chartered a Soviet-built Mi-8 helicopter from a medical rescue service, for $8,000, to make the flight to the testing range. Weber plunked down a stack of $100 bills for the chopper. “You’re quite a cowboy!” Lepyoshkin said, surprised at Weber’s determination and resourcefulness. “No, Gennady,” he replied, “you’re the cowboy.”

Boarding the chopper, fitted out with stretchers and emergency medical equipment, they flew about 228 miles west to the city of Aralsk, which had once been a fishing port on the edge of the Aral Sea, where the smallpox outbreak had occurred in 1971. Since then, the sea had dramatically receded, and Aralsk was now thirty miles from the nearest shoreline.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Vozrozhdeniye Island was inside the borders of the newly independent nation of Uzbekistan. Weber realized he needed to get Uzbek approval for his flight to the testing ground. He and his team spent a night in a hot, miserable hotel in Aralsk, and then he worked the phones. It took hours and hours of effort. Weber also visited the former military support facility for the testing ground, based in Aralsk, which was now being used as a leper colony.

Finally, they took off. As the blue-and-white chopper with a bright Red Cross insignia lumbered through the air, the noise was deafening. Lepyoshkin, now in a white T-shirt, sat alone, gazing out the porthole window of the chopper. Below, the island appeared to be as devoid of life as the surface of the moon, a dull gray-brown with patches of vegetation. A cluster of low-lying buildings, bleached white with the sun and heat, marked the headquarters of the testing range, but there was no sign of inhabitants, not a person, not a car. Weber did not know if anyone remained on the site—maybe it was still guarded by the Russian military? Were there Uzbek border guards? They circled once in the helicopter, slowly, to make sure. Nothing. They landed near the headquarters and residential buildings, all with windows blown out. As the chopper engines came to a quiet halt, the only thing Weber heard was a dog barking in the distance. “It was all totally abandoned,” Weber said. “Like Planet of the Apes.”

They walked away from the chopper and toward the buildings. A rusting, abandoned truck, without wheels, lay where it last stopped. A faded Communist Party propaganda book was picked off the sidewalk. The first building they saw had a sign over the door: MEDICAL CLINIC. The door creaked open to desolate rooms, stripped, the paint peeling. Lizards skittered away in the grass. After another short chopper flight, they landed in the laboratory area. In the stifling heat, the Americans put on their white hazardous materials suits. Lepyoshkin, who had worked with pathogens for so many years, thought they were being overly cautious and did not suit up.

In these buildings they found traces of what had gone before. Hundreds of gas masks tumbled out of a storage room. Another room held a large supply of flasks and Petri dishes. They found glove boxes for handling dangerous pathogens. Weber was surprised to discover some equipment in the labs was mothballed carefully. Placards were hung from it in Russian, saying “in conservation.” But mothballed for what? He wondered: was someone planning to come back another day?

In earlier times, Lepyoshkin spent seventeen summers on Vozrozhdeniye Island, helping carry out tests of Soviet biological warfare agents, and he knew it even better than Alibek. The proving ground was run by the military’s 15th Main Directorate, the one in charge of germ warfare. The scientists had lived in barracks, forbidden to tell anyone, including their families, where they were going. Alibek recalled in his memoir, “Winds swirling off the desert steppes provided the only respite from the heat. There were no birds and the dust settled everywhere, getting into clothes, hair, and eyes, sweeping through the animal cages and into the food and scientists’ notebooks.

“We used to say that the most fortunate inhabitants of the Soviet Union were the condemned monkeys” on Vozrozhdeniye Island, he added. “They were fed oranges, apples, bananas and other fresh fruits rarely seen by Soviet citizens.”

Now, as Weber walked through the laboratories, all that remained of the monkeys were cages—hundreds of them, including one large enough for a human to stand up in. Weber found reams of blank paper forms used to record the symptoms of biological weapons agents on the monkeys. On the left of the page was an outline of the primate with key places to check, and on the right were blanks for listing data gathered from those points. At the top of the form was written “Top Secret, When Filled In.”

In their hazardous materials suits, Weber and his team took samples of the filters in the laboratory, hoping to find pathogens trapped in them. On the windswept proving grounds, they saw the bleak poles where animals were harnessed for outdoor tests.

Alibek had told the Americans that the anthrax removed from Sverdlovsk, and later stored at the town of Zima, near Irkutsk in Siberia, had been buried on Vozrozhdeniye Island in 1988, but he had not said precisely where. Weber and his team extracted sample cores from the earth adjacent to the laboratory, where they thought the anthrax might be buried, and on the test grid. They didn’t find the anthrax that day; the pink powder was buried in eleven unmarked graves nearby. It would be discovered on a later expedition. But in finding the weathered buildings and discarded primate cages, in taking the samples and photographs and exploring the island, Weber had broken through the Soviet lies once again.

Weber and Lepyoshkin flew out together. They posed for a picture on the tarmac, both giving a thumbs-up. Lepyoshkin had nowhere to stay in Almaty; Weber invited him to be his houseguest in the mountains. By chance, there was a reception at the American Embassy for visiting officials from Washington. Among them was Carter, an assistant secretary of defense, who was an architect of the Nunn-Lugar legislation, and Starr, the principal director of the Pentagon’s threat reduction office, who led the “tiger team” for Project Sapphire. They met Lepyoshkin for the first time. Lepyoshkin seemed to have unmoored himself from the Soviet past. He was eager to meet the American officials. They talked in the leafy courtyard of the embassy. Lepyoshkin had only one request: he wanted them to help clean up Stepnogorsk and convert it to peaceful purposes. “I promise,” Carter told him, “we will.”

In Russia, Weber discovered the footprints of Iranians—and they were reaching for the germs.

In 1997, back from overseas, he was working at the Pentagon on the Nunn-Lugar programs, which had become known as Cooperative Threat Reduction. He was trying to find a new approach to dealing with the danger of biological weapons inside Russia. Weber’s first trip there came in June 1997, when he took a train fourteen hours from Moscow to Kirov, five hundred miles east, to attend a scientific conference, accompanied by several other American experts. In a stroke of good luck, Weber met researchers from both Obolensk and Vector, the laboratories at the heart of Biopreparat’s research on bacteria and viruses. Late one afternoon, after the formal conference sessions, a small group of scientists from Obolensk invited Weber to share some beers in the banya, a traditional Russian sauna. Joining the scientists in the steam room, with his Russian-language skills and knowledge of biological weapons and pathogens, Weber made a personal connection, as he had done earlier with Mette and Lepyoshkin. In these discussions, Weber learned that scientists from Obolensk and Vector had recently participated in an officially sponsored Russian trade fair in Tehran, and very quickly, the Iranians had shown up at the Russian institutes. The Iranians were somewhat rough-cut agents of influence, and the Russians found them off-putting, the scientists said. From this informal talk in the banya, Weber realized the Iranians were trying to scoop up know-how for biological weapons. What really alarmed him was a discussion with a senior scientist at Obolensk who had been on the trip to Tehran. “They talk about pharmaceuticals,” the scientist said, “but it’s clear their interest is in dual use equipment that can be used for biological weapons.” The scientist said the Iranians had offered him thousands of dollars to teach in Tehran. And then the scientist took a business card from his wallet, which had been given to him by the Iranians. He showed it to Weber, who immediately recognized the name and the office: a front for the military and intelligence services in their drive to procure Russia’s weapons.

A few weeks later, Weber met Lev Sandakhchiev, the compact, intense, chain-smoking director of Vector, who had once pushed to create artificial viruses for biological weapons. Sandakhchiev had come to Washington for the first time. Weber took Sandakhchiev on an hour-long drive to Fort Detrick, Maryland, once the home of the American biowarfare effort, and now headquarters of the work on defense against dangerous pathogens. In the car, Sandakhchiev revealed to Weber the Iranians had come to Vector, hunting for technology and know-how. Weber sensed that Sandakhchiev wanted to cooperate with the United States, to open the Russian system to joint projects. He also realized that conditions at Vector were increasingly desperate, with salaries unpaid and subsidies drying up.

Weber and Sandakhchiev met again in October 1997 at a NATO conference in Budapest, and this time, in a hotel room, they had a knockdown, drag-out argument over Iran, as Sandakhchiev ate sausage and drank vodka. Sandakhchiev wanted to know: why was Iran such a bugaboo to the Americans? Weber replied, “You have to understand, they kept our Embassy and our diplomats hostage for 444 days!” Sandakhchiev looked puzzled. When was that? Weber reminded him it was 1979. Sandakhchiev, sounding sincere, told Weber that, isolated in his laboratory in Siberia, he had never heard of the Iran hostage-taking. Weber thought to himself it was an astonishing example of how closed the world of biowarfare had been in Soviet times, apparently so tight that not even the news of the hostage crisis had penetrated. Weber implored Sandakhchiev to stop the cooperation with Iran. Sandakhchiev was reluctant to give up the big money the Iranians had offered, but the Iranians were also very unpleasant partners—they made promises up front, but delivered money late, and constantly tried to bargain for less. Weber and Sandakhchiev went back and forth, arguing for hours. Weber found that Sandakhchiev was open with him, and Weber learned that in addition to work at Vector, there was probably a large, separate stockpile of Variola major virus at the military laboratory at Zagorsk. Later, on a tour in Budapest, they walked past the confessional in an old church, and Sandakhchiev turned to Weber and joked, in Russian, “Andy, let’s go in there and I’ll confess all my sins about biological weapons!”

Back in Washington, Weber searched for a way to act, to offer Sandakhchiev something to preempt the Iranians. But up to this point, the Nunn-Lugar program was largely devoted to nuclear materials and strategic weapons, and there was tremendous resistance in the U.S. government, especially in the intelligence agencies, to using any of it to stop the spread of biological weapons. The long history of Soviet and Russian deception about germ warfare had left a deep reservoir of mistrust in Washington. “There was this real fear of our funds being misused by these clearly dangerous, bad actors,” Weber recalled. At a meeting at the White House one day in late 1997, a decision was made to engage Vector, as Weber had urged. After the meeting, he walked to the State Department with Anne M. Harrington, who had helped establish the International Science and Technology Center in Moscow, and was now working on nonproliferation issues at the department. Harrington shared Weber’s goal of reaching out to the scientists at Vector. She knew they were in financial trouble; a few years earlier, the science center held workshops at Vector and Obolensk for possible grant recipients, and scientists at Obolensk said they hadn’t been paid for months. Many just stayed home to grow food or find other ways to support their families; to produce enough income to cover minimal salaries, Obolensk boasted a brewery and an assembly line for men’s suits, and was planning to start a vodka distillery. Harrington thought the beleaguered germ warfare scientists should get as much attention as had the nuclear engineers.⁵

When they reached the office, Weber and Harrington decided to take a chance and reach out to Sandakhchiev on their own. They would not go through the usual bureaucratic channels: embassies, cables, government ministries. On Harrington’s office computer, they tapped out an e-mail to Sandakhchiev. It was brief, noncommittal, but inviting, suggesting closer cooperation and asking if Weber could visit Vector. They didn’t know what would happen. “What are your employment options if this doesn’t work?” Harrington asked Weber.

But the gamble paid off. Sandakhchiev responded with an invitation. Weber made several visits to Vector, and on one of them, Weber asked to see Buildings 6 and 6A, where the research on smallpox had been done years earlier, and about which Sandakhchiev had earlier deceived the British and American visitors. This time, Weber was allowed a close look at the building, and to take photographs. “It was clear the place was just a wreck, crap all over the floors, the equipment was in terrible shape,” Weber recalled.

He went to Frank Miller, then acting assistant secretary of defense for international security policy, a longtime civil servant working on threat reduction. “I think we can break Vector’s ties with Iran,” Weber said. “They’re desperate for limited cooperation and investment.” Miller asked him how much money it would take. “Three million dollars,” Weber replied. Miller went to work and eventually found the money. They persuaded Sandakhchiev to curtail the deals with the shady agents of Tehran.

On each trip and with each passing year, it was more and more apparent to the Americans who visited the former Soviet Union that the Cold War legacy of danger far exceeded what anyone had imagined at first. Years had gone by since the Soviet collapse, yet pathogens in flasks, unguarded fissile materials, idle weapons scientists and marooned defense factories were still being discovered for the first time in the late 1990s.

In a lightly guarded building at the Anti-plague Institute in Almaty, Kazakhstan, Weber once discovered a clutch of test tubes, with plague strains, stored in an empty tin can of peas. In 1997, in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, Weber and another U.S. official were scouting out weapons specialists for the International Science and Technology Center. They explained to a group of institute directors at the Uzbek Academy of Sciences that grants were intended for those who had worked on Soviet weapons programs. How many in the room thought they might qualify? One by one, they stood up. Among them, Weber met the director of an institute that, in Soviet times, worked on plant pathogens intended to wipe out the entire American wheat supply. The director invited Weber to visit, and Weber found, to his amazement, they were also working on how to grow crops after a nuclear holocaust. Weber brought back to Washington a whole new list of dangerous pathogens to worry about.⁶

In 1998, Weber made contacts at the Research Center for Molecular Diagnostics and Therapy in Moscow. The institute, which worked with dangerous pathogens in the Soviet years, had fallen on hard times in the 1990s. A scientist from the institute confided to Weber he had just received an e-mail from a postdoctoral student in Tehran who wanted to come work there. Weber told him: don’t reply. Within weeks, Weber helped arrange grants from the International Science and Technology Center for some of the hard-pressed researchers to begin working on civilian projects.

Over the next few years, more secrets of Biopreparat spilled into the open. In 1998, Alibek published his memoir, describing his career in the germ warfare system. In May 2000, Nikolai Urakov, the director of Obolensk, hosted a conference cosponsored by the International Science and Technology Center. In an extraordinary day, journalists were shown around parts of Korpus No. 1, where Sergei Popov and Igor Domaradsky had worked on genetic engineering. Urakov complained the laboratory was receiving only 1 percent of the government budget of Soviet times—the rest they had to earn on their own. Urakov, director of the largest facility for developing bacteria for biological weapons in the old days, announced a new mission: “We have to protect humans from diseases.”⁷

Over and over again, Weber found the key was forging relationships with scientists, respecting their dignity, their desire to carry out useful research, and building their trust. Governments and agreements had their purpose, but the real success started when they could look you in the eye and speak directly. The banya talks worked wonders.

For Weber and many of those Westerners who went to the former Soviet Union to staunch the threats, there was also a frustrating unknown. They could tally up the success stories, measure the number of fences built and grants given, but could only guess at what had slipped through their fingers. It was the nature of threat reduction that it was always risky business, devilishly challenging, often defying a chance to declare absolute success. In trying to prevent something, the most consequential and terrifying metric was failure.