The Dead Hand

by David Hoffman

  “It was deceptive,” Popov said. “The first wave disease would disappear or would never be an acute disease. It could be a little bit of coughing, or nothing, you don’t feel it, that’s it. And then two weeks later, the disease would be hardly treatable, actually there would be no way to effectively treat it.”

  The idea took him years to perfect. But the result was so terrible that when Popov saw what happened to guinea pigs during testing, he was overwhelmed with doubt.2

  On the bleak steppe of Kazakhstan, new workers streamed into the massive new factory at Stepnogorsk. By 1986, Ken Alibek, the chief of the anthrax assembly line, recalled that he supervised nine hundred people, and the Soviets had created “the most effective anthrax weapon ever produced.” He remembered working at a frenzied pace, spending all his days and nights in the laboratories. “I still shuddered occasionally when I looked at the bacteria multiplying in our fermenters and considered that they could end the lives of millions of people. But the secret culture of our labs had changed my outlook.”

  The pressure-cooker environment took a heavy toll, and accidents happened every week. Once, he recalled, a technician was infected with anthrax. The man’s neck began to bulge, closing off his breathing. Antibiotics did not work. Within days, death seemed inevitable. At the last minute, they injected the man with a huge dose of anthrax antiserum and saved him. “The technician’s narrow escape drove home the potency of our new weapon,” Alibek recalled in his memoir. “Our powdered and liquid formulations of anthrax were three times as strong as the weapons that had been developed at Sverdlovsk.”

  In 1987, the anthrax was tested on Vozrozhdeniye Island, according to Alibek. With the success of the tests, the old facility in Sverdlovsk, where the accident had occurred eight years earlier, was no longer needed. The massive new factory at Stepnogorsk was far superior. “Our factory could turn out two tons of anthrax a day in a process as reliable and efficient as producing tanks, trucks, cars or Coca-Cola,” Alibek said. “With the creation of the world’s first industrial-scale biological weapons factory, the Soviet Union became the world’s first—and only—biological superpower.”3

  But not everything was quite as efficient as Alibek claimed. Popov recalled that Stepnogorsk suffered “huge problems.” Among them, “People in charge were drunkards, and they didn’t care very much about what they did. The only requirement was that anthrax had to kill; they tested the product on animals. From the microbiological standpoint, they did a dirty work. As a result, the facility was very unproductive, and the results were often miserable—sometimes good, but sometimes they harvested no anthrax. The anthrax cells dissolved in the process we call phage lysis.” This is a virus that attacks the bacteria. “So, quite often the anthrax microbe just didn’t survive in those huge fermenters. And Biopreparat people often complained about it. They asked if we could help Alibek with his problem … They could not solve it. They thought the reason was the poor sterility of the components.”

  Nonetheless, Alibek recalled, the larger goal was achieved. “Stepnogorsk demonstrated our ability to wage biological warfare on a scale matched by no other nation in history. We had taken the science of biowarfare further in the previous four years than it had traveled in the four decades since World War II.”

  Alibek was promoted and transferred to Moscow in September 1987. After just a few months, he was given his first major assignment at Biopreparat headquarters. He was to supervise creation of a new smallpox weapon. He spent an afternoon reading over a top-secret document that he described as a five-year plan for biological weapons development, signed by Gorbachev in February 1986. The document carried a line for what kind of weapon, what kind of systems and when each would be tested between 1986 and 1990, he said. Among other things in the plan, Alibek saw a line for funding a 630-liter viral reactor to produce smallpox at Koltsovo. “Our military leaders,” he recalled in his memoir, “had decided to concentrate on one of the toughest challenges of bioweaponeering —the transformation of viruses into weapons of war.” He added, “Gorbachev’s Five Year Plan—and his generous funding, which would amount to over $1 billion by the end of the decade—allowed us to catch up with and then surpass Western technology.”4

  When Alibek visited Vector, the smallpox project was just getting off the ground. “Vector’s prize acquisition was the expensive new viral reactor authorized by Gorbachev’s decree,” he recalled. “Designed by one of our Moscow institutes … it was the first of its kind in the world. It stood about five feet high and was enclosed within thick stainless steel walls. An agitator at the bottom kept the mixture inside churning like clothes in a washing machine. Pipes led out in several directions, both for waste matter and weapons-ready material. A window on its convex roof allowed scientists to observe the viral culture at all times.”

  Popov also knew of the five-year plan for biological weapons and was certain it had been approved at the highest levels. “We didn’t have any doubt the Central Committee was behind all of this. Not a single doubt,” he said. Once, in Moscow, Popov also read a top-secret document in a folder that described the long-term program. “I remember that I misplaced the document and took it somewhere as I was walking through Biopreparat offices, and they chased me because it was a top-secret document. I had it in my folder, it wasn’t even a briefcase, they gave it to me in a folder, there was a special table I had to sit at. I don’t know how it happened, maybe I went to the restroom or something.” The guards grabbed him and returned him to the table.

  In all of Gorbachev’s struggle for disarmament—his determination to push back the military and its powerful designers, his willingness to abandon the doctrine of two blocs inexorably at odds, his rhetoric about a world free of nuclear destruction and danger—there was one unexplained gap. Hidden in secret institutes, referred to obliquely even in the Kremlin as “works on special problems,” the biological weapons drive was going at full speed at the same moment that Gorbachev reached the apex of his cooperation with Reagan. Gorbachev abhorred nuclear weapons, and he declared his intention to eliminate chemical weapons. Did he also fear the pathogens?

  One key question is how much Gorbachev knew about the program. The record suggests that some members of the Politburo knew in great detail what kinds of horrors were being cooked up at Obolensk and Vector. Lev Zaikov, the Politburo member in charge of the military-industrial complex, who was Katayev’s boss, certainly knew. Gorbachev must have become aware of the program when he became general secretary in 1985, and perhaps before. There is a document in Katayev’s files that lists a Central Committee resolution on biological weapons on November 18, 1986. This was in effect an order from the Politburo that Gorbachev certainly would have known about. Three sources—Alibek, who built the anthrax assembly line; Popov, who worked at both Koltsovo and Obolensk; and Vladimir Pasechnik, a well-informed institute chief in the system who later defected to Britain—claim that Gorbachev and the Politburo were kept abreast of the program in the late 1980s. Alibek claims to have seen the specific five-year plan signed by Gorbachev. Chernyaev, perhaps the closest aide to Gorbachev, also confirmed in an interview that Gorbachev knew the Soviet Union was in violation of the biological weapons treaty. Chernyaev insisted that Gorbachev wanted to end the biological weapons program, but the military misled him, promising to shut it down, although they did not.5 “Not even Gorbachev was fully informed about the activities of our military-industrial complex,” Chernyaev wrote in his memoirs.

  It is also not known what intelligence Gorbachev received from the KGB. The United States had abandoned offensive biological weapons in 1969, but scientists in the Soviet program have insisted they were told by the KGB for many years that the American offensive germ warfare program did exist; it was just well hidden.

  If Gorbachev knew of the Soviet program, and if he was so determined to slow the arms race in missiles, why did he not take stronger action to slow the arms race in test tubes? He had done so much else with glasnost to unearth the misdeeds of the Sov
iet past—admitting the mass repressions of Stalin, for example—why could he not expose or stop the dangerous germ warfare efforts that began long before he came to power? This is difficult to answer.

  One explanation may be that the biological weapons program was so entrenched that Gorbachev might have decided it was impossible to tackle, or at the very least, as a tactical matter, that he should wait until later to deal with it. In other cases it took Gorbachev years to bring about a change in course and overturn past errors and deep secrecy involving military affairs.

  Also, Gorbachev might have felt himself unable to challenge the authority of those who ran the biological weapons empire. The Chernobyl experience was relevant—it showed him how hard it was to confront the nuclear priesthood, and surely the biological weapons scientists and generals could be just as difficult. In Gorbachev’s last two years, as his power waned, he may simply have lacked the willpower or stature to take on a new power struggle. “He didn’t know how to exercise his control,” Chernyaev said. Gorbachev may have been reluctant to admit the full scope of Soviet violations out of fear of what it could do to his public image and that of his “new thinking” all over the world. He may have opted to avoid the whole subject because he had no idea how to handle the impact of such a damaging disclosure.

  One reason that has been suggested by Soviet officials for Gorbachev’s inaction is that biological weapons may have been seen as some kind of military asset, to be held in reserve, perhaps to compensate for other shortcomings in defense. But it is doubtful Gorbachev preserved the pathogens out of any sense of their strategic or military value. Gorbachev was clearly determined to ease the threat of war, not build new weapons of such comparable power and danger.

  Still, it remains a puzzle why, given Gorbachev’s dedication to glasnost and his enormous effort at disarmament in the nuclear field, he did not do more to stop the dangerous biological weapons program. In all the years of Gorbachev’s drive for change and openness, the Soviet Union continued to cover up Biopreparat and all it encompassed.

  One of the most elaborate deceptions involved the 1979 Sverdlovsk anthrax leak, the worst disaster of the Soviet biological weapons program. Through the decade of the 1980s, the Soviets fabricated details about the outbreak to suggest it had explicable, natural causes, such as tainted meat. Soviet officials spread these falsehoods around the world. They lied in international meetings, to other scientists and to themselves. They misled the distinguished Harvard molecular biologist Matthew Meselson, who had been called in by the CIA to puzzle over the early reports about the Sverdlovsk accident in 1980.

  Meselson had been trying through the 1980s to answer the questions he first raised when studying the intelligence reports. An effort in 1983 to organize an expedition to Sverdlovsk fell apart after the Korean airliner shoot down that year. In 1986, he was invited to come to Moscow by officials at the Ministry of Health. On that visit, Meselson met with several top Soviet health officials, including Pyotr Burgasov, the deputy health minister who, at the time of the outbreak, spread the story that contaminated meat was the cause of the anthrax epidemic. Burgasov probably knew better; he had been involved with the Soviet biological weapons program since the 1950s and had served in the Sverdlovsk facility from 1958 to 1963. In the meetings in Moscow with Meselson, August 27–30, 1986, Burgasov repeated that contaminated meat was the cause and added that contaminated bone meal had been fed to cattle and caused the epidemic. Meselson also met with Vladimir Nikiforov, chief of the infectious diseases department at the Central Postgraduate Institute, located within the Botkin Hospital in Moscow, and Olga Yampolskaya, a specialist in infectious diseases there, who had been present during the Sverdlovsk epidemic. Nikiforov was the courtly scientist who had courageously told the Sverdlovsk pathologists to hide and preserve their autopsy results in 1979. But now he was advancing the official line. Nikiforov showed Meselson fourteen photographic slides from the autopsies that, he insisted, supported the argument that anthrax had been ingested by eating the contaminated meat. The lungs of the victims, he claimed, were “undamaged and free of hemorrhage.” Before leaving Moscow on August 29, Meselson told the chargé d’affaires at the U.S. Embassy what he found in his discussions. The Soviet officials had insisted victims had died from intestinal anthrax; Meselson said he had no way of knowing if the story was true, but it “did seem to hang together.”6

  In September 1986, the Soviet officials offered the same false explanation in Geneva at the Second Review Conference for the Biological Weapons Convention. Soviet officials prepared a briefing for Gorbachev warning him that suspicions were deepening in the West that the Soviet Union had something to hide. Nonetheless, the cover-up continued at the conference and afterward.7 On October 10–12, 1986, Joshua Lederberg, president of Rockefeller University, who was chairman of the Committee on International Security and Arms Control of the National Academy of Sciences, visited Moscow. Lederberg was a pioneering microbiologist, recipient of the 1953 Nobel Prize for the discovery that bacteria engage in a form of sexual reproduction and thus possess a genetic mechanism similar to those of higher organisms. Lederberg was presented with the story that anthrax bacteria had been spread by contaminated meat from cattle fed a bonemeal supplement that was improperly sterilized, and produced from naturally infected carcasses. Like Meselson, Lederberg was deceived. “My personal conclusion,” Lederberg later wrote, “is that the present Soviet account of the epidemic is plausible on its face and internally consistent.” The Soviet explanations are “very likely to be true.”8

  In Moscow, on November 18, 1986, the Central Committee and the Council of Ministers approved a measure, proposed by the Defense Ministry, to move the secret formulas for biological weapons and the manufacturing plants away from the military. Specifically, the measure called for action by 1992—in the course of the next six years—to eliminate “the stockpile of biological recipes and industrial capacities for production of biological weapons located at the sites of this ministry.” This appears to mean that over the next six years, the Defense Ministry would transfer the formulas and production facilities to the better-concealed Biopreparat complex. Such a move was already undertaken with the anthrax facility at Sverdlovsk, which was moved to Stepnogorsk. The reason for the move, according to the documents, was to meet the goal “of insuring openness of work in conditions of international verification.” This was code for the fact that Soviet leaders wanted to keep the program alive—and well hidden—at a time when international inspectors might be nosing around. It seems extremely likely that such a high-level action by the Central Committee, which was led by members of the Politburo, would have come to Gorbachev’s attention.9

  In 1987, a fresh worry arose in Moscow among the top echelons of Biopreparat and the military. For all their efforts at secrecy, a speech on chemical weapons treaty verification by Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze threatened to crack open the door to their empire. During Gorbachev’s glasnost, Soviet diplomats in several negotiations had expressed a willingness to allow more intrusive verification of arms control treaties, to show they were not cheating. This new openness was the spirit of a speech August 6, 1987, by Shevardnadze at the Conference on Disarmament in Geneva. In the spring, Gorbachev had announced the Soviet Union would stop manufacturing chemical weapons. Now, Shevardnadze went further and promised support for “the principle of mandatory challenge inspections without right of refusal.” This was a “vivid manifestation” of Soviet commitment to “genuine and effective verification,” he said. For years, the United States had accused the Soviet Union of violating treaties and demanded effective verification. It was the essence of Reagan’s favorite Russian slogan, “trust, but verify.” While Shevardnadze’s overture was made for chemical weapons, it dawned on Soviet biological warfare experts back in Moscow that it could easily be applied to them, too. The inspections could take unpredictable turns. If the West wanted to peek into a suspect facility—say, Obolensk or Koltsovo or Stepnogorsk—how could they refuse? N
ikita Smidovich, an aide to Shevardnadze who wrote the Geneva speech, said the biological weapons chiefs realized the chemical inspections threatened their closed world. They concluded, he said, if the inspectors “can go everywhere, they will probably get to us as well, so we need to get prepared.”10

  On October 2, 1987, after Shevardnadze’s speech, the Central Committee and Council of Ministers issued an order to speed up preparations for possible international inspections. The goal was not to be open, but the opposite: continue the secret germ warfare program by moving the formulas and factories to a more secret place. And do it quicker.11

  The Sverdlovsk deception reached a new level of audacity April 10–17, 1988, when Burgasov, Nikiforov and a third Soviet medical official, Vladimir Sergiyev, came to the United States with a presentation of their theory about contaminated meat and bonemeal. Meselson said he arranged the visit in hopes that the Soviet officials would be exposed to expert questioning from American scientists. The Soviets delivered their bogus story to distinguished audiences three times: at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, the Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health in Baltimore and the American Academy of the Arts and Sciences in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “It was clear to us that infectious meat was the cause,” claimed Burgasov. “The whole idea of some sort of aerosol is impossible,” he said. He dismissed the possibility of a leak of anthrax bacteria from Compound 19. “I couldn’t imagine that in the midst of the highly populated area that there could be any work on highly dangerous pathogens,” he said, although he knew that was probably what happened. Nikiforov, who also knew the truth, narrated autopsy slides that portrayed great black intestinal sores, which pointed toward contaminated meat, not inhalation. In all, the Soviet officials had addressed more than two hundred private and government medical scientists and arms control experts, delivering untruths to all of them. Afterward, summarizing the Soviet presentations, Meselson wrote that he found the Soviet explanation “plausible and consistent with what is known from previous outbreaks of human and animal anthrax in the USSR and elsewhere, including the US.” Meselson still hoped to send a group of American scientists to Sverdlovsk.12