For the next ten days Zheleznyakov remained in critical condition, oblivious to his surroundings, and only gradually regained consciousness. After another week of intensive care in Moscow, he was transferred to the Institute of Labor Hygiene and Occupational Pathology in Leningrad. This hospital had a top secret ward for the treatment of nerve agent injuries known as the Special Department for Foliant Problems. (The Leningrad institute, together with its affiliates in Volgograd and Kiev, was part of a closed system of classified medicine under the Third Main Administration of the Soviet Ministry of Health.) Unable to walk, Zheleznyakov remained at the Leningrad clinic for three months. Although he gradually improved, he suffered from chronic weakness in his arms, a toxic hepatitis that gave rise to cirrhosis of the liver, epilepsy, spells of severe depression, and an inability to read or concentrate that left him totally disabled and unable to work. He died five years later, in July 1992. The devastating consequences of Zheleznyakov’s exposure to a whiff of Novichok-5 demonstrated the extraordinary toxicity of the Foliant nerve agents.
GORBACHEV’S “PEACE OFFENSIVE” included a dramatic new initiative in the field of chemical arms control. In January 1986, the Soviet leader had agreed to all of the basic elements of the CWC, with the sole exception of “challenge” inspections of suspect sites. On August 6, 1987, Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze addressed the Conference on Disarmament in Geneva. Much to the surprise of the other delegations present, he said that the Soviet Union could now accept the principle of mandatory challenge inspections without the right of refusal. In effect, Gorbachev was calling the Reagan administration’s bluff by adopting the earlier U.S. proposal for “anywhere, anytime” inspections of suspect sites. This provision had been included in the U.S. draft treaty that Vice President Bush had presented in Geneva on April 18, 1984. Because the Pentagon refused to accept “anywhere, anytime” inspections of its own facilities, the sole purpose of the U.S. proposal had been to embarrass the Soviet Union. Now, however, Gorbachev’s act of “diplomatic jujitsu” turned the tables and put the United States in the awkward position of having to back away from its own proposal. U.S. diplomats scrambled to weaken the challenge-inspection provisions in the draft treaty, much to the irritation of Britain and other countries.
Gorbachev followed up this public relations coup with another stunning gesture. In a demonstration of the Soviet leader’s new policy of glasnost, or “transparency,” the Red Army held an “open house” at the Central Military Chemical Testing Site at Shikhany on October 3 and 4, 1987. The invited guests, including diplomats and military observers from forty-five countries, U.N. representatives, and journalists from Soviet and foreign publications, were flown to a military airfield 900 kilometers southeast of Moscow in the vast emptiness of the Russian steppe. They were then transported by bus to the nearby town of Shikhany, a cluster of modern, five-story apartment blocks that housed the five thousand people who worked at the testing site.
Foreign observers examine a static display of Soviet chemical munitions during an “open house” at the Central Military Chemical Testing Site in Shikhany, Russia, on October 4, 1987.
Soviet technicians demonstrate the operation of a mobile nerve-agent-destruction unit at the Shikhany military base in Russia on October 4, 1987. Former chemical weapons scientist Vil Mirzayanov claims that the process did not work and the demonstration was faked.
Hosting the open house were Colonel General Vladimir Karpovich Pikalov, the commander of the Soviet Chemical Troops, and his deputy, Lieutenant General Anatoly Kuntsevich. A hard-line Communist and heavy drinker, Kuntsevich was an old-school Soviet bureaucrat with a reputation for thuggishness. His face was sallow and deeply furrowed, and the sides of his mouth were turned down in a permanent frown. Like many Soviet officials of his generation, Kuntsevich was accustomed to double-dealing: at the same time that he was overseeing the development of new chemical weapons at Shikhany, he served on the Soviet delegation to the chemical disarmament talks in Geneva.
At the Shikhany testing site, the international guests were escorted through a series of military checkpoints to the demonstration area, where they toured a static display of the nineteen types of chemical munitions in service with the Soviet Chemical Troops. The exhibit included mockups of artillery shells and rockets, missile warheads, bombs, aircraft spray tanks, and even chemical hand grenades. As the foreign diplomats and journalists filed past the display, Soviet military briefers calmly described the specifications and function of each munition, including caliber, chemical fill, and detonator type. According to an article in International Defense Review, “the visit was very carefully orchestrated and the visitors were shown a well arranged array of hardware and given precisely measured amounts of information. All supplementary questions were greeted with a polite but firm refusal to add any further detail.” Despite the tightly controlled nature of the event, some of the Soviet officers were visibly uncomfortable with the presence of foreigners and journalists at the formerly top secret facility. One general admitted to a reporter that the experience was “rather like taking one’s trousers off in public.”
When General Pikalov was asked whether the static display included every type of munition in the Soviet chemical arsenal, he replied, “We displayed all our toxic agents and all our chemical munitions, with the exception of certain modified types that are not fundamentally different in terms of apparatus or armament from those that were shown.” He also insisted that the Soviet Union did not possess “American-type binary” munitions and that Moscow had never transferred chemical weapons to other states. Despite the claims of full transparency, however, the Soviets concealed several aspects of their chemical arsenal. No mention was made during the open house of the Foliant nerve agents or the Novichok binary formulations then under development. Moreover, although only four types of V-agent munitions were displayed at Shikhany, the Novocheboksarsk factory actually manufactured at least fourteen different types, and the display of Soman-filled weapons was also incomplete.
The open house at Shikhany included the demonstration of a new Soviet technique for the chemical neutralization of nerve agents that had been developed for use at a planned chemical weapons destruction facility in Chapayevsk, near Moscow. Inside an airtight enclosure, chemical troops wearing gas masks and protective suits opened the filling port in the side of a 250-kilogram bomb containing thickened Sarin. One soldier carefully drew a small amount of the nerve agent into a syringe and injected it into a laboratory rabbit. Several minutes later, the animal went into convulsions and died. The soldier then removed a larger sample of Sarin, placed it in a chemical reaction vessel, and added a neutralizing solution. After two hours, the vessel was opened and a sample of the mixture injected into a second rabbit. This time the animal remained unharmed, indicating that the nerve agent had been destroyed. Because the Soviet neutralization method did not work effectively, however, the second part of the demonstration had reportedly been faked.
ON DECEMBER 16, 1987, the United States began to manufacture the various hardware and liquid components of the M687 binary Sarin artillery shell. For logistical and safety reasons, the production process involved facilities in three different states. At Pine Bluff Arsenal in Arkansas, the Integrated Binary Production Facility was under construction. The first element to become operational was an open-air plant for the conversion of dichlor into difluor (DF). Because no commercial chemical company was willing to supply dichlor to the Army, a contract was awarded in January 1988 to build a dedicated production facility for this key intermediate at Pine Bluff. Until the dichlor plant went on line, enough of the chemical had been stockpiled at Rocky Mountain Arsenal to meet the Army’s immediate DF production needs.
This manufacturing plant for the binary Sarin component DF was part of the Integrated Binary Production Facility at Pine Bluff Arsenal in Arkansas, which operated from December 1987 to the end of 1990.
In Van Nuys, California, the Marquardt Corporation manufactured two types of pl
astic-lined steel canisters designated M20 and M21, which were each about the size of a coffee can. The M20 canisters were shipped to Pine Bluff Arsenal, where they were filled with DF and stored on-site. Meanwhile, Marquardt loaded the M21 canisters with the second binary component, code-named “OPA”—a mixture of isopropyl alcohol, a stabilizer, and a catalyst—and shipped the filled canisters to the Louisiana Army Ammunition Plant near Shreveport, which manufactured the steel artillery projectiles. There the M687 shell bodies were packed with only the M21 canisters installed, and shipped to Tooele Army Depot in Utah and Umatilla Army Depot in Oregon. Filling and storing the M20 and M21 canisters separately precluded the accidental mixing of the binary precursors.
In wartime, the artillery shells and the binary canisters would be airlifted directly from their storage sites in the United States to deployment areas in Western Europe for possible use. To prepare the M687 projectile for firing, the M21 OPA canister would be removed from its storage position inside the shell and the two canisters reinserted in the correct sequence: the M20 DF canister in front and the M21 OPA canister behind, with the thin steel burst discs in contact. Then a soldier would seal the back of the artillery shell and screw an impact fuse into the nose. When the projectile was fired from a howitzer, the intense setback forces would rupture the burst discs between the canisters, allowing DF and OPA to mix and react to form Sarin during the several seconds it took for the shell to fly to the target. The nerve agent would then be dispersed explosively on impact.
IN LATE 1987, Saddam Hussein launched a brutal military campaign against the Kurdish minority of northern Iraq. The 3.5 million Iraqi Kurds belonged to a nation of some 20 million people who inhabited a broad swath of territory in the Middle East, including portions of Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Iran. Long victims of military and political repression in their host countries, the Kurds dreamed of an independent homeland that they called “Kurdistan.” During the Iran-Iraq War, groups of Kurdish guerrillas known as peshmerga formed a loose alliance with Iran to fight against the Iraqi regime in Baghdad.
Saddam Hussein gave the task of putting down the Kurdish rebellion to his cousin Ali Hassan al-Majid, the commander of the northern region of Iraq. With Saddam’s blessing, Ali Hassan launched a program of violent repression against the Iraqi Kurds. Called the Anfal campaign, it involved mass executions and attacks with chemical weapons against hundreds of Kurdish villages, with the aim of terrorizing and depopulating the rural areas controlled by the rebel groups. At a meeting of the ruling Ba’ath Party in Baghdad, Ali Hassan—later nicknamed “Chemical Ali”—was tape-recorded discussing the anti-Kurd campaign. “I will kill them all with chemical weapons,” he boasted. “Who is going to say anything? The international community? F—— them!”
The most devastating Iraqi chemical attack against the Kurds took place in mid-March 1988 in the city of Halabja, about 150 miles northeast of Baghdad. (This operation was not technically part of the Anfal campaign, which focused on repressing Kurds in rural areas of northern Iraq.) A bustling market town whose population had been swollen by an influx of refugees to some 50,000 inhabitants, Halabja was a warren of flat-topped buildings and unpaved streets the color of dried mud, set in the green foothills of a snowcapped mountain range. The city’s residents had the misfortune of living about eleven miles west of the Iranian border, on the edge of the war zone. In the spring of 1988, they were trapped between the Iraqi forces defending Darbandikhan Lake (whose dam controlled part of the water supply for Baghdad) and the Iranian forces attacking down from the mountains.
On March 13, 1988, a joint force of Iranian Revolutionary Guards (Pasdaran) and Kurdish peshmerga guerrillas launched an offensive near Halabja in an attempt to penetrate deep into Iraqi-held territory. Over the next three days, the Pasdaran forces advanced to the eastern edge of Darbandikhan Lake, causing the Iraqi defenders to withdraw to the opposite shore. Heavy Iranian shelling also forced the evacuation of several Iraqi military posts between the border and Halabja, enabling Pasdaran soldiers to infiltrate the city. At this point, Saddam Hussein, seeking to repel the Iranian advance and strike a crushing psychological blow against the Kurdish peshmerga and their civilian supporters, authorized a “special strike” against Halabja.
The Iraqi counterattack began on the morning of March 16 with an artillery barrage on the city. Then waves of Iraqi Mirage fighter-bombers flew over Halabja, dropping high-explosive and incendiary munitions that shattered windows and darkened the sky with roiling clouds of black smoke. Thousands of city residents crowded into government air-raid shelters and private basements to wait out the attacks. The air raids continued for several more hours, each new wave of fighter-bombers following immediately upon the last.
After a brief period of calm in early afternoon, six warplanes returned at about 3:00 p.m., flying so low that observers on the ground could make out the Iraqi flags painted on the undersides of the wings. This time the aircraft dropped bombs that burst with a muffled thump and spewed dirty white clouds reeking of garlic, sweet apples, perfume, and gasoline. As the lethal mist spread rapidly through the city streets, birds fell out of trees, livestock collapsed, and families hiding in basements and air-raid shelters began to choke, vomit, and struggle for breath. According to an eyewitness account in the Human Rights Watch report Genocide in Iraq:
In the shelters, there was immediate panic and claustrophobia. Some tried to plug the cracks around the entrance with damp towels, or pressed wet cloths to their faces, or set fires. But in the end they had no alternative but to emerge into the streets. It was growing dark and there were no streetlights; the power had been knocked out the day before by artillery fire. In the dim light, the people of Halabja could see nightmarish scenes. Dead bodies—human and animal—littered the streets, huddled in doorways, slumped over the steering wheels of their cars. Survivors stumbled around, laughing hysterically, before collapsing. Iranian soldiers flitted through the darkened streets, dressed in protective clothing, their faces concealed by gas masks. Those who fled could barely see, and felt a sensation “like needles in the eyes.”
After the first wave of Iraqi chemical attacks, thousands of survivors began to flee the city under a freezing rain, following roads that led to the highlands and the Iranian border. Many had lost their shoes and walked barefoot through the snow and mud. Every ten minutes or so, another wave of Iraqi planes flew over, strafing the refugees with machine-gun fire and dropping bombs. Those who had been exposed to sublethal doses of mustard or nerve agent suffered from blurred vision and shortness of breath, and their symptoms continued to worsen. Groups of refugees who had lost their eyesight formed human chains with belts and ropes so that no one would get lost. During the night, many children died of exposure, and their grieving parents abandoned their small bodies by the side of the road.
At dawn, fearing more air raids, the Kurdish refugees left the main roads and dispersed into the mountains despite the grave danger of land mines. When a group of Halabja survivors finally reached the swift-moving river that marked the border with Iran, the Iraqi air attacks continued. As the panicked refugees crossed a narrow pontoon bridge spanning the river, the pressure of the crowd caused dozens of people to fall into the ice-cold water, and the raging current swept several young children away to their deaths. At another point along the Iranian border, some six thousand refugees from Halabja congregated near two ruined Kurdish villages. Iranian doctors arrived in helicopters and administered atropine to the survivors before ferrying them across to safety. The victims were given medical attention and then transported to two refugee camps, where they would remain until the end of the Anfal campaign.
The Iraqi chemical attacks on Halabja killed between two thousand and five thousand people and injured another ten thousand, many of whom suffered chronic medical symptoms and deep psychological trauma. When news of the attack reached the outside world, Iraqi officials blamed Iran for the atrocity, but the evidence pointed clearly to Saddam Hussein. In the course of routine
electronic surveillance, U.S. signals-intelligence satellites had intercepted radio communications between Iraqi fighter-bombers and ground controllers coordinating the chemical attack.
The Iraqi Army did not attempt to recapture Halabja immediately, leaving the city under de facto Iranian occupation for about five months. Seeking to exploit the chemical attack for propaganda purposes, the Iranian authorities bused dozens of foreign journalists, photographers, and television crews from Tehran to the stricken city. As artillery fire continued to echo around the hills, the silent streets of Halabja were filled with the sickly sweet odor of decomposing bodies. Scores of corpses—of men, women, children, livestock, and pets—lay sprawled on the earthen streets and sidewalks where they had fallen, sometimes clustered into piles, with no visible wounds. David Hirst, the Mideast correspondent for The Guardian of London, filed the following eyewitness report:
The skin of the bodies is strangely discolored, with their eyes open and staring where they have not disappeared into their sockets, a grayish slime oozing from their mouths and their fingers still grotesquely twisted. Death seemingly caught them almost unawares in the midst of their household chores. They had just the strength, some of them, to make it to the doorways of their homes, only to collapse there or a few feet beyond. Here a mother seems to clasp her children in a last embrace, there an old man shields an infant from he cannot have known what.
Many unanswered questions remained. Journalists who went to Halabja found no fragments of chemical munitions, presumably because they had been confiscated by Iraqi or Iranian troops. Moreover, some photos of the dead that appeared in the world press gave the impression that the corpses had been arranged to create a more horrific impression. Also puzzling was the fact that many of the dead had blood running from their ears and noses (normally a sign of blast impact) and bright blue lips suggestive of hydrogen cyanide poisoning. A possible explanation of the latter was that the Iraqis had employed impure nerve agent that was heavily contaminated with cyanide. One of the reaction steps in the manufacture of Tabun involves sodium cyanide, and Iraqi military chemists reportedly had difficulty removing the excess cyanide from the final product. Given the nearly instantaneous lethality of the chemical attack, however, some experts believed that the Iraqis had used a more volatile and fast-acting nerve agent, such as Sarin.
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