In a brave gesture of solidarity with the beleaguered Israeli people, the American violinist Isaac Stern traveled to Jerusalem in the midst of the Gulf War to perform with the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra. During a rehearsal on February 23, the air-raid sirens blared. Stern donned his gas mask but refused to be cowed and kept on playing. A photograph of the beetle-masked violinist, defending Western culture in the face of barbarism, was published in newspapers around the world. Although none of the Scud missiles that landed in Israel carried a chemical warhead, two Israeli civilians died and nearly a thousand were hospitalized with symptoms attributable to the missile attacks, including heart attacks and severe anxiety. Three quarters of the casualties resulted from the improper use of chemical-defense equipment, such as the failure to remove the plug from a gas mask filter or the panicked self-administration of atropine, which is itself toxic in the absence of nerve agent exposure.
On February 27, coalition troops liberated Kuwait City and the Iraqi Army fled north, suffering heavy losses along what became known as the “highway of death.” Although the political imperative to hold the diverse coalition together meant that Saddam Hussein was allowed to remain in power, U.S. officials expected that his ignominious defeat would weaken his power base and lead to his overthrow in a coup d’état.
Iraq’s capitulation after exactly one hundred hours of ground combat repudiated the idea that chemical weapons were a potent deterrent, or “poor man’s atom bomb,” that could intimidate a military superpower. Not only had Iraq failed to prevent the U.S.-led invasion but the coalition forces had minimized the potential impact of Iraqi chemical attacks by conducting rapid, highly mobile ground operations and equipping themselves with personal protective gear. Iraq’s decision not to resort to its chemical arsenal during the war was attributed to several factors, including the fear of severe retaliation; the fact that the Iraqi Air Force was quickly grounded or fled across the border into Iran; the U.S. bombing of Iraq’s logistical supply lines to prevent chemical weapons from reaching the front; and the direction of the prevailing winds, which blew toward the Iraqi lines for most of the conflict. Even if Saddam had ordered the use of chemical weapons, the speed of the coalition advance would have prevented the Iraqi Army from carrying out the coordinated artillery strikes needed to employ chemical weapons effectively on the battlefield. To saturate a square kilometer of territory with a lethal concentration of Sarin, the Iraqis would have needed favorable winds, precise targeting, and enough time to fire a few hundred chemical shells.
On March 4, 1991, several days after the cease-fire, demolition units with the U.S. Army’s 37th Engineering Battalion blew up thirty-seven Iraqi munitions bunkers at the vast Khamisiyah ammunition depot in southeastern Iraq. The explosions shook the ground and sent up huge columns of smoke and dust that were carried away by the prevailing winds. Shortly after the detonations, an M8 chemical agent detector-alarm in the area went off, but subsequent tests were negative.
A destroyed munitions bunker (lower left) at the Khamisiyah Ammunition Storage Complex in southern Iraq, March 1991. U.N. weapons inspectors later determined that the bunker had contained Iraqi 122 mm rockets loaded with Sarin and Cyclosarin. The blast exposed large numbers of U.S. troops to low levels of nerve agents, with possibly harmful effects.
ON APRIL 3, 1991, the U.N. Security Council adopted Resolution 687, which set out the terms of the Gulf War ceasefire. The Iraqi regime was henceforth banned from possessing chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons, or ballistic missiles with a range of more than 150 kilometers (i.e., capable of reaching Israel). Baghdad was required to declare all of its prohibited weapons, materials, and production facilities and to cooperate with their verification and destruction. To oversee the disarmament of Iraq, the United Nations created a new corps of international inspectors called the U.N. Special Commission on Iraq, or UNSCOM.
Shortly after the adoption of Resolution 687, the Iraqi regime declared about 10,000 chemical munitions filled with mustard and nerve agents, and 1,000 tons of bulk agent in storage containers. In early June, a team of UNSCOM inspectors arrived in Baghdad to verify the accuracy of the Iraqi declarations. Dressed in gas masks and protective suits, they visited the Muthanna State Establishment, which had been heavily bombed during the air campaign. Several production buildings, storage bunkers, and the main administration building lay in ruins. In addition, hundreds of leaking chemical munitions emitted a witches’ brew of lethal gases that tainted the air several miles downwind. Fortunately, there were no populated areas nearby.
Meanwhile, the threat of Iraqi chemical warfare during the Persian Gulf War gave strong impetus to the ongoing Chemical Weapons Convention negotiations in Geneva. On May 13, 1991, President Bush announced a new set of steps to improve prospects for the successful conclusion of the CWC. First, the United States would formally forswear the use of chemical weapons against any state for any reason, including retaliation, effective when the CWC entered into force, provided that the Soviet Union was also a party to the treaty. Second, Washington would drop its earlier demand for a “security stockpile” and commit itself unconditionally to the destruction of all of its stocks of chemical weapons within ten years of the CWC’s entry into force. Bush also called for setting a target date to conclude the negotiations and recommended that that Conference on Disarmament remain in continuous session if necessary to meet the deadline. A few months later, on July 15, 1991, the United States, Britain, Australia, and Japan tried to break the logjam over procedures for “challenge” inspections of suspect sites by jointly presenting a draft proposal that included provisions for “managed access” to protect confidential business and national-security information unrelated to CWC compliance.
THE WEAPONS INSPECTIONS in Iraq posed a unique organizational challenge for the United Nations, which had never before conducted an operation of this type. UNSCOM Executive Chairman Rolf Ekéus, a veteran Swedish diplomat, recruited a team of experienced scientific and technical experts from the United States, Australia, Canada, the Soviet Union, and Western and Eastern Europe to account for and eliminate Iraq’s prohibited chemical, biological, nuclear, and missile capabilities in a verifiable manner. Once UNSCOM certified that Iraq had been disarmed, the inspectors would continue to monitor the country’s “dual-use” factories for an extended period to preclude any future Iraqi effort to rebuild its banned arsenals. Because of the unprecedented nature of this task, UNSCOM officials faced a steep learning curve.
In June 1991, British chemical defense specialist Ron Manley was at work in his laboratory at Porton Down when he received a call from the director, Dr. Graham Pearson, ordering him to attend an important meeting the following week at U.N. Headquarters in New York. Although Manley was about to leave with his wife, Jean, on a long-planned vacation in the Canadian Rockies, Pearson told him to postpone the trip. When Manley protested that the plane tickets were nonrefundable, the director arranged to have a refund check issued to him by the end of the day. Even so, Manley had to go home and break the news to his wife. Resigned, she asked whether they should reschedule the holiday or simply cancel it. He told her to wait and see; the meeting in New York was only supposed to last a week.
At the United Nations, Manley met with Brian Barrass, the British commissioner of UNSCOM, and John Gee of Australia, the commissioner responsible for chemical and biological weapons. Gee asked Manley, “How do you fancy chairing an advisory panel on destroying Iraq’s chemical weapons?” When Manley tried to turn down the offer, Gee became insistent. “We have a problem,” he explained. “For political reasons, the chair can’t be an American or a Russian. The Swede and the Frenchman aren’t acceptable, and the only other possibility is the Canadian, but his government won’t let him do it.” Manley finally gave in and agreed to chair the Destruction Advisory Panel. For the next two years, he commuted between London, New York, and Baghdad, while still running his division at Porton Down. Much to his regret, the vacation in the Canadian Rockies was put off ind
efinitely.
Because many of Iraq’s chemical munitions were damaged and leaking, they could not be shipped out of the country. The Destruction Advisory Panel decided to consolidate them at the Muthanna State Establishment where they had been manufactured. Thousands of chemical bombs, rockets, and artillery shells were recovered from various depots and airfields around Iraq and transported to Muthanna, where they were lined up on the desert floor in front of the ruined factories. Early in 1992, Manley established a Chemical Destruction Group (CDG), responsible for the day-today supervision of the Iraqi personnel who would do the actual work of destroying the chemical munitions. To staff this oversight body, Gee and Manley persuaded UNSCOM to hire about a hundred military personnel from twenty-five countries who had training in chemical defense and agreed to serve in Iraq for tours of six to nine months. Many of these experts were seconded by their governments. Whenever a new phase of the destruction operation began or a technical problem arose, one or two members of the Destruction Advisory Panel flew to Baghdad to solve the problem. They then left and allowed the local Iraqi staff to continue their work under CDG supervision.
United Nations chemical weapons experts seal dozens of leaking Iraqi 122 mm rockets containing nerve agents to prepare them for destruction after the 1991 Gulf War.
The chemical weapons destruction operation at Muthanna had two prongs: the construction of an incinerator to burn mustard agent, and the conversion of the Sarin pilot plant into a neutralization facility that transformed nerve agents into relatively nontoxic liquid waste. This material was then sun-dried in large pans or shallow trenches with an impervious lining and mixed with concrete into large blocks, which were permanently sealed in underground munitions bunkers. In some cases, the design of the weapons or their deteriorating condition made it necessary to find expedient solutions for destruction, while managing safety and environmental risks. For example, because 122 mm rockets filled with nerve agents were considered too dangerous to dismantle, the Destruction Advisory Panel instructed the Iraqis to dig deep holes in the desert, place an open-topped storage tank filled with diesel fuel at the bottom of each hole, and lay twenty rockets carefully across the top of the tank. Small explosive charges served to puncture the rocket warheads, allowing the nerve-agent fill to drain into the diesel fuel, which was ignited a few seconds later by an additional small charge. The resulting fireball had a temperature of about 2,000 degrees Celsius—hot enough to break down the molecules of Sarin and Cyclosarin into harmless by-products.
Over the three-year duration of the chemical weapons destruction program in Iraq, UNSCOM inspectors found and eliminated more than 46,000 filled chemical munitions, 30 ballistic missile warheads, and 5,000 tons of bulk agent and precursor chemicals. Even so, the U.N. inspectors were unable to account for the entirety of Iraq’s chemical arsenal, and telltale bits of evidence suggested that the Iraqi officials were not telling the whole truth. For example, the inspectors confiscated an Iraqi Air Force document indicating that fewer chemical weapons had been consumed during the Iran-Iraq War than Baghdad had declared. The Iraqis also claimed that during the summer of 1991, they had secretly begun the unilateral destruction of selected filled chemical munitions and bulk agents. Over a period of a few months, they had purportedly eliminated more than 28,000 filled and unfilled munitions, 30 metric tons of bulk precursor chemicals for Sarin and Cyclosarin, and more than 200 metric tons of precursors for VX. Yet Iraqi officials refused to provide documentary or physical evidence to back up the claimed destruction activities, insisting that all of the relevant documents had been destroyed. Given the regime’s meticulous record keeping in other areas, this statement did not ring true. The gaps in the evidence prevented UNSCOM from concluding definitively that the missing weapons had not been hidden rather than destroyed. These discrepancies were left to fester until, several years later, they became part of the rationale for the second U.S.-led war against Iraq.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
WHISTLE-BLOWER
AFTER MUCH PERSONAL anguish and soul-searching, Vil Mirzayanov finally decided to go public with his concerns about the Soviet nerve agent development program. The precipitating event came in April 1991, when President Mikhail Gorbachev secretly awarded the Lenin Prize, the Soviet Union’s highest honor, to GosNIIOKhT director Petrunin, General Kuntsevich, and General Igor Yevstavyev for their successful development and pilot-scale production of the Novichok agents. Mirzayanov was convinced that the Kremlin intended to conceal the existence of the Soviet binary program so that it would not have to be declared and eliminated under the future Chemical Weapons Convention. On October 10, 1991, he published an article titled “Inversion” in the Moscow newspaper Kuranty in which he exposed the duplicity of the Soviet military-chemical complex. Despite Gorbachev’s claim in 1987 to have halted all manufacture of chemical weapons, Mirzayanov wrote, the Soviet Union was continuing in secret to develop a new class of nerve agents of extraordinary potency.
The article’s publication in Kuranty was overshadowed by the tumultuous political events leading to the breakup of the Soviet Union. On December 8, 1991, the presidents of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus signed a treaty creating the Commonwealth of Independent States. Most of the other former Soviet republics joined two weeks later, and on December 25, President Gorbachev resigned as president of the USSR and turned the powers of his office over to Boris Yeltsin, the leader of the Russian Federation. At midnight, the hammer-and-sickle flag was pulled down from the dome of the Kremlin and replaced with the Russian tricolor. Yeltsin had won Russia’s first presidential election on June 12 and become world-famous on August 18 by standing defiantly atop an armored personnel carrier and challenging a hard-line coup against Gorbachev that had ultimately failed. Now, as the president of independent Russia, Yeltsin was responsible for the aging Soviet stockpile of chemical weapons, which were stored at seven depots on Russian soil.
Although few people read Mirzayanov’s article in Kuranty, it came to the attention of the directors of GosNIIOKhT, who summarily fired him on January 6, 1992. With few prospects of finding another job, Vil tried to make ends meet by selling some of his possessions at the Moscow flea market. Several weeks later, many of his former colleagues also became unemployed when the GosNIIOKhT budget was slashed and roughly half of the scientific staff was laid off.
In mid-1992, Mirzayanov met Lev Fedorov, a professor of organic chemistry at the Vernadsky Institute of Geochemistry and Analytical Chemistry in Moscow. Although Fedorov had no ties to GosNIIOKhT and had never done classified research, he had a strong personal interest in the history of the Soviet chemical warfare program. The two men agreed to collaborate on an article for the weekly newspaper Moskovskiye Novosti (Moscow News), which was published on September 16, 1992, under the headline A POISONED POLICY. The article alleged that because of inadequate safety systems, GosNIIOKhT was venting toxic fumes into the Moscow air that threatened the health and safety of city residents. In the event of a major fire or explosion at the institute, Mirzayanov and Fedorov wrote, eight to ten kilograms of superlethal nerve agents might be released into the atmosphere, giving rise to a humanitarian disaster that could rival the 1986 nuclear accident at Chernobyl.
Mirzayanov also granted an interview to journalist Will Englund, the Moscow correspondent for the Baltimore Sun, who subsequently wrote two detailed articles on the Foliant program. The first, published on September 15, was titled “Ex-Soviet Scientist Says Gorbachev’s Regime Created New Nerve Gas in ’91.” Four days after the second Englund article appeared on October 18, the Russian authorities moved into action. At seven in the morning of October 22, agents from the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB), the successor to the Soviet KGB, hammered on the door of Mirzayanov’s two-room apartment in Moscow. While his wife and two young sons looked on in terror, the secret police arrested Vil and searched the apartment for classified documents. Mirzayanov was then taken to Lefortovo, the infamous prison for political dissidents in downtown Moscow. Although no s
ensitive materials had been found in his home and the newspaper articles had not revealed any technical details about the Foliant nerve agents, Mirzayanov was charged with divulging state secrets in violation of Article 75 of the Russian criminal code. The FSB also arrested and interrogated Federov, but he was released because he did not have access to secret information.
Mirzayanov was imprisoned at Lefortovo for eleven days without access to a lawyer. His first two days were spent in solitary confinement and the other nine sharing a cell with two other prisoners. Finally he was granted a hearing before a judge. Mirzayanov argued that because he posed no danger to society and had two young children, he should be released from prison and kept under house arrest. The judge agreed, on the condition that Vil remain in Moscow and report daily to FSB headquarters for interrogation. After a struggle, Mirzayanov was granted permission to retain counsel, but neither he nor his lawyer was allowed to review the secret law under which he was being charged or the prosecutor’s list of counts. Paradoxically, the FSB gave Mirzayanov access to dozens of top secret Foliant documents to help him prepare his defense. The chemist suspected that the Russian government intended to make an example of him and that his chances of getting a fair trial were slim. Indeed, GosNIIOKhT deputy director Alexander Martinov vowed that Mirzayanov would be convicted and sent to prison for the rest of his life.
AT THE SAME TIME that the Mirzayanov drama was playing out in Moscow, the CWC negotiations at the Conference on Disarmament were reaching a critical stage. The discovery of Iraq’s massive chemical arsenal in the aftermath of the Persian Gulf War had injected a new sense of urgency into the Geneva talks. Although Saddam Hussein had fortunately not resorted to his stockpile of chemical weapons, the possibility of their use against coalition forces had highlighted the fact that chemical proliferation posed a clear and present danger to international security. The CWC negotiators recognized that they had a narrow window of opportunity to conclude the treaty before political interest waned and consensus again became elusive. To make the best use of this momentum, the CWC Working Group set the end of 1992 as the deadline for completing its work and the participating states agreed to remain in continuous session until then. In August 1991, the French government also made an important symbolic gesture by formally canceling the ACACIA binary weapons program and committing to join the future treaty.
War of Nerves Page 37
