The Dead Hand

by David Hoffman

  In Washington, the Central Intelligence Agency turned to experts, including Matthew Meselson, the Harvard molecular biologist who had earlier urged Nixon to outlaw biological weapons. Meselson got a call from Julian Hoptman, the CIA’s longtime analyst of biological weapons. For a week, Meselson stayed at Hoptman’s home, and, with secret clearances, worked at Hoptman’s office at CIA headquarters. They pored over the raw intelligence reports, but the evidence was ambiguous. Hoptman had located the practicing surgeon from Sverdlovsk mentioned in the DIA report, who had emigrated to Israel, and interviewed him. But other sources traveling through Sverdlovsk heard nothing about an epidemic. It turned out the report of an explosion was not correct, but there were many unanswered questions, especially about the diagnosis. In notes he made from that week, Meselson wrote, “The main technical question in my mind at this point concerns the diagnosis of respiratory anthrax.” Was the anthrax inhaled by the victims, which might point to biological weapons dispersed in an aerosol, or was it ingested by them, which could be explained by distribution of bad meat? Or was it some other respiratory disease altogether?

  A related puzzle was why the cases continued for seven weeks. The textbooks Meselson consulted had suggested the incubation period for anthrax was a few days. If there was a single cloud of spores, there should have been a rapid fall-off of new cases. Instead, people kept getting sick for quite some time. In his work in Hoptman’s office, Meselson concluded that they needed to know much, much more before they could reach a conclusion. Where did the victims work when they were exposed? Where did they live? Which direction were the winds blowing? What would they learn if they plotted all the victims on a map, and then drew an ellipse from Compound 19—how many would be inside that ellipse? And what was going on at Compound 19? Did the local authorities respond with drug therapy, and if they did, was it effective? Why were there so many fatalities if they had drugs readily available? At this early stage, Meselson was cautious, and probing. Meselson also learned that a Northwestern University physicist, Donald Ellis, had been on an academic exchange program with his family in Sverdlovsk at the time. He tracked down Ellis, who recalled he heard nothing about the epidemic. This added to Meselson’s sense of caution.22

  Biological weapons were the ultimate challenge for spies, soldiers and scientists. From space, satellites could photograph intercontinental ballistic missile silos, and they could be counted. But germs were another matter. A satellite might spot an unusual building compound, like the one in Sverdlovsk, but seeing flasks in laboratories proved nearly impossible. That is why understanding Sverdlovsk was so important. It was a tantalizing bit of genuine evidence. With Sverdlovsk, the enormity of the Soviet germ warfare program had been glimpsed, but was still not proven.

  After the Sverdlovsk accident, Soviet officials shipped a large supply of anthrax bacteria out of the city to a distant storage facility at Zima, near Irkutsk in Siberia. They wanted to get anthrax production running again, but they needed a new location. They knew Compound 19 would be suspect. Compound 19 was a military facility; now the Soviet officials wanted to hide the anthrax production more carefully. The best cover was Biopreparat, the supposedly civilian pharmaceutical enterprise. In 1981, Brezhnev approved relocating the Sverdlovsk facility. The destination was a remote desert town, Stepnogorsk, in northern Kazakhstan. This was a Biopreparat operation, and Ken Alibek was chosen to run it.23

  Alibek was an ethnic Kazakh. After graduation from the Tomsk Medical Institute as a military doctor, he was assigned to a biopesticide factory at Omutninsk in western Russia, a training ground for those who would work on biological weapons.24 From the start, he recalled, “there were no orientation lectures or seminars, but if we had any doubts as to the real purpose of our assignment, they were quickly dispelled.” They were asked to sign a pledge of secrecy, then called in one by one to meet their KGB instructors.

  “You are aware that this isn’t normal work,” the officer told Alibek as he sat down, more a declaration than a question.

  “Yes,” Alibek replied.

  “I have to inform you that there exists an international treaty on biological warfare, which the Soviet Union has signed,” the officer said. “According to that treaty no one is allowed to make biological weapons. But the United States signed it too, and we believe the Americans are lying.”

  “I told him, earnestly, that I believed it too,” Alibek recalled. “We had been taught as schoolchildren and it was drummed into us as young military officers that the capitalist world was united in only one aim: to destroy the Soviet Union. It was not difficult for me to believe that the United States would use any conceivable weapon against us, and that our own survival depended on matching their duplicity.”

  The officer nodded at Alibek’s comment. He was satisfied. “You can go now,” he said. “And good luck.”

  Many years later, Alibek remembered those five minutes as the first and last time any official brought up a question of ethics for the rest of his career.25

  Alibek was sent to Stepnogorsk in 1983. The new germ warfare plant was attached to a civilian facility, the Progress Scientific and Production Association, which made pesticides and fertilizer and provided a cover story. Within a few weeks of his assignment, Alibek was summoned to Moscow for briefings. Biopreparat had moved to a headquarters at No. 4a Samokatnaya Street, an elegant building with tall, arched windows, once the home of the nineteenth-century vodka merchant Pyotr Smirnoff. Inside, Alibek was shown a secret decree Brezhnev had signed in 1982. “An intelligence officer pulled the decree from a red folder tied with a string, placed it gravely on a desk, and stood behind me while I read,” he recalled. “I already knew the gist of the order: we were to transform our sleepy facility in northern Kazakhstan into a munitions place that would eventually replace Sverdlovsk.”

  The weapon was to be the “battle strain,” known as Anthrax 836. “Once I’d worked out the technique for its cultivation, concentration, and preparation, I was to develop the infrastructure to reproduce it on a massive scale—a goal that had eluded our military scientists for years. This meant assembling batteries of fermenters, drying and milling machines, and centrifuges, as well as the equipment required for preparing and filling hundreds of bombs.”26

  “My job in Stepnogorsk was, in effect, to create the world’s most efficient assembly line for the mass production of weaponized anthrax.”

  Officially, Alibek was deputy director of Progress, the civilian enterprise, but he had a secret title as “war commander” of the entire installation. “I was expected to take control of the factory during what the army called ‘special periods’ of rising tensions between the superpowers. Upon receipt of a coded message from Moscow, I was to transform Progress into a munitions plant. Strains of virulent bacteria would be pulled from our vaults and seeded in our reactors and fermenters. Anthrax was our main agent at Stepnogorsk, but we also worked with glanders and were prepared to weaponize tularemia and plague.” The pathogens would be poured into bomblets and spray tanks and loaded onto trucks for shipment to a railroad station or airfield. “I was to maintain production until I received an order from Moscow to stop, or until our plant was destroyed.”

  Alibek said he took seriously the prospect of a Cold War confrontation with the United States. Reagan’s election and military buildup were alarming. “Our soldiers were dying in Afghanistan at the hands of U.S.-backed guerrillas, and Washington was about to deploy a new generation of cruise missiles in Western Europe, capable of reaching Soviet soil in minutes. Intelligence reports claimed that Americans envisioned the death of at least sixty million Soviet citizens in the case of a nuclear war.

  “We didn’t need hawkish intelligence briefings to persuade us of the danger,” he added. “Our newspapers chafed over Reagan’s description of our country as an evil empire, and the angry rhetoric of our leaders undermined the sense of security most of us had grown up with during the détente of the 1970s. Although we joked among ourselves about the senile old m
en in the Kremlin, it was easy to believe that the West would seize upon our moment of weakness to destroy us.”

  On a plain nine miles from Stepnogorsk, an old uranium-mining town, the Progress enterprise was lined with high gray walls and an electric-wire fence. The surrounding land had been stripped of all vegetation, partly as a safeguard in the event of a leak. The barren space served as a security zone to stop intruders. Motion sensors were everywhere. Inside, dozens of buildings were arranged on a grid of narrow streets. New buildings rose off the desert floor. Building 221 was the main production facility; building 231 for the drying and milling of agents. Building 600 was the research center and housed the largest indoor testing facility built in the Soviet Union up to that time.27 It had two giant stainless steel testing chambers hidden inside. One was to test the decay rate and dissemination capacities of aerosol mixtures contained in Soviet germ bombs. The second one was for testing animals.

  “Bioweapons are not rocket launchers,” Alibek explained in his memoir. “They cannot be loaded and fired. The most virulent culture in a test tube is useless as an offensive weapon until it has been put through a process that gives it stability and predictability. The manufacturing technique is, in a sense, the real weapon, and it is harder to develop than individual agents.”

  To weaponize anthrax, Alibek and his workers began with freeze-dried spores in stoppered vials, stored in metal trays in a refrigerated vault, each positioned over a soft towel soaked in disinfectant, labeled with its own tag identifying the strain. No one was allowed into the vault alone; at least two people, a lab technician and a scientist, had to be present when a vial was taken down from the shelf, checked against a list and wheeled on a metal cart into the laboratory. There, the scientist put nutrient media into the vial, and then drew the mixture out and transferred it to larger bottles, which were left in heated boxes to incubate for one or two days. The liquid culture was then siphoned off into large flasks, which were connected to air-bubbling machines, turning it into a light froth. The oxygen allowed the bacteria to grow more efficiently. At this stage, it looked translucent and light brown, like Coca-Cola, Alibek said. “Each new generation of bacteria is transferred into progressively larger vessels, until there is enough anthrax to pipe under vacuum pressure into a room containing several fermenters,” he recalled. The giant fermenters incubated the substance for one or two days longer, and the bacteria continued to multiply before being put into centrifuges and concentrated. In the end, after mixing with stabilizing substances, the mixture would be loaded into munitions. The grounds were dotted with underground bunkers for storage and filling the bombs, and laced by rail lines to haul them away. If the order were given, Stepnogorsk was to make 300 tons of anthrax a year.28

  ————— 6 —————

  THE DEAD HAND

  In the final weeks of his life, Andropov had few visitors. One of them was Mikhail Gorbachev, the youngest member of the Politburo, who had been Andropov’s protégé. They met for the last time in December 1983. “When I entered his room he was sitting in an armchair and made a weak attempt to smile,” Gorbachev recalled. “We greeted each other and embraced. The change since my last meeting with him was striking. I saw a totally different person in front of me. He was puffy-faced and haggard; his skin was sallow. His eyes were dim, he barely looked up, and sitting was obviously difficult. I exerted every effort to glance away, to somehow disguise my shock.”1

  Within days of this meeting, Andropov prepared remarks he was scheduled to give to a Central Committee plenum. The text was typed up as usual, but Andropov was too ill to appear in person. He wrote an additional note of six paragraphs in his own hand. He called one of his top assistants, Arkady Volsky, to his bedside December 24 and gave him the note. Andropov had written in the last paragraph: “For reasons which you will understand, I will not be able to chair meetings of the Politburo and Secretariat in the near future. I would therefore request members of the Central Committee to examine the question of entrusting the leadership of the Politburo and Secretariat to Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev.” Volsky was stunned. He consulted two other aides, and they, too, were taken aback. Until then, Konstantin Chernenko had been considered the number two leader in the party. Andropov was proposing to skip Chernenko and go right to Gorbachev to lead the country. The aides took the precaution of photocopying Andropov’s note, and then submitted it to the Central Committee apparat to be typed and included with Andropov’s other remarks for distribution before the meeting.

  Two days later, at the plenum, Volsky opened the red-leather-covered portfolio and discovered the last paragraph written by Andropov was missing. When he protested, he was told to keep quiet. The aging dinosaurs at the helm of the Soviet Union—Chernenko, Defense Minister Dmitri Ustinov, and Chairman of the Council of Ministers Nikolai Tikhonov—had quietly blocked Andropov’s attempt to name Gorbachev his successor. The old guard had kept their grip on power.2

  Andropov died February 9, 1984, and the ailing Chernenko was chosen as his successor. British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher flew to Moscow for the funeral, arriving on February 13 in the bitter cold. On the day of the funeral, she met Chernenko for a short, private meeting. He read rapidly from a text, stumbling over his words from time to time. Thatcher recalled that she had been urged to wear fur-lined boots; at the Andropov funeral, guests had to stand for a long period in the cold. The boots had been expensive, she said. “But when I met Mr. Chernenko, the thought crossed my mind that they would probably come in useful again soon.”3

  At seventy-two years old, Chernenko had never been more than a shadow of Brezhnev as his chief of staff and a party apparatchik. Suffering from an advanced stage of emphysema, Chernenko faltered during his televised inaugural speech from a podium atop Lenin’s tomb, running out of breath in the middle of sentences. He was unable to hold a salute to the military parade as it passed before him in Red Square. At one point during Andropov’s funeral, Gromyko turned to Chernenko and instructed him in a whisper—loud enough to be picked up by microphones—“Don’t take off your hat.”4 Two weeks later, in another televised address, Chernenko stumbled, lost his breath, paused for half a minute and, when he resumed, skipped an entire page of his text. Chernenko was a transitional figure, and his colleagues sensed it. “Whom did we acquire in the post of General Secretary?” asked Gorbachev. “Not merely a seriously sick and physically weak person but, in fact, an invalid. It was common knowledge, and immediately visible with the naked eye. It was impossible to disguise his infirmity and the shortness of breath caused by emphysema.”5

  Anatoly Chernyaev, who was then deputy director of the International Department in the Central Committee, recalled that when Chernenko was to meet the king of Spain, aides wrote out his main points on small cards, with no long sentences, so that Chernenko would seem to be talking and not reading. “That was in the beginning,” Chernyaev said. “Later, Chernenko couldn’t even read the notes anymore, but just stumbled through them with no idea what he was saying.”6

  What if the ailing Chernenko had to make a decision about nuclear attack? For the Soviet leadership, the ultimate catastrophe would be a bolt-from-the-blue first strike that would destroy the Kremlin in minutes. There was a special underground train out of the Kremlin to the war bunkers—but what if they were facing sudden death, if the missiles were only minutes away, a decapitation? With the leaders gone, who would order retaliation? Who would transmit the orders? How would they communicate to the remote missile command posts and submarines? If decapitation were swift and powerful, perhaps they would not be able to retaliate; and if so, they were vulnerable. Soviet fears of decapitation were real, fed by actions in the United States. The directive signed by President Carter in 1980 for protracted nuclear war, P.D. 59, had deliberately singled out the Soviet leadership as a target. The deployment of Pershing II and ground-launched cruise missiles in late 1983 seemed to further reinforce the threat of weapons that could reach the Soviet Union in a matter of minutes.
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br />   In early 1984, just as Chernenko took power, Valery Yarynich, then forty-seven, a colonel in the elite Strategic Rocket Forces, was quietly transferred to a new position as a deputy department chief in the Main Rocket Armaments Directorate. Yarynich was a master of communications channels and methods who had worked for two decades setting up cables, radio systems and satellites which linked the rockets, troops, commanders and the political leaders in Moscow. He had a serious demeanor and a sense of purpose. When there was a break in a vital communications link for the Strategic Rocket Forces, Yarynich was the one they trusted to fix it quickly. He was transferred to a sensitive, ultra-secret new project for decision making and communications in the event of nuclear war.

  In the early days of the Soviet nuclear weapons program, communications were primitive. Getting word to the troops—and the missiles—was time-consuming. Yarynich witnessed the cumbersome procedures. Born in 1937 to the family of a Soviet naval officer at Kronshtadt, near Leningrad, Yarynich graduated from the Leningrad Military Academy of Communications in 1959, two years after Sputnik. That December, the Strategic Rocket Forces was established as a separate service, and the giant, cumbersome R-7 liquid-fueled intercontinental missiles were put on combat duty. Khrushchev was boasting that the Soviet Union was turning out missiles like sausages. Yarynich served in the first Soviet division of intercontinental ballistic missiles, at Yurya, north of Kirov. They were just building the rocket base when he arrived, carving it out of the forest. At the end of 1960, Yarynich moved up to the corps headquarters in Kirov, where five new missile divisions were being formed.