The Dead Hand

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

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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