factory—none of which were in the draft declaration. He identified the secret role of antiplague institutes in helping the offensive weapons program. And he told the Russians that the official explanations for the Sverdlovsk outbreak were untrue.
Then, on the eighth page, in the most dramatic turn in his presentation, Wisner referred to the information that had come from the informer Temple Fortune—information that work on biological weapons was going on “over the past year,” which meant the months Yeltsin was in power.
We have reports that the All Union Institute of Ultra-Pure Biological Preparations in St. Petersburg is constructing, equipping, and staffing a facility at Lakhta designed to do scale-up work to allow industrial production of a strain of plague—a strain developed to be resistant to cold and heat and to 16 antibiotics—for offensive purposes.
Wisner also revealed that the United States now knew exactly how the Soviets had covered up the germ warfare activity at Ultra-Pure when the American-British team had first visited in January 1991. He said they knew that information was destroyed that would be incriminating; laboratories were cleaned to remove traces of plague bacteria; employees who knew what was going on were sent away; and microphones were installed to monitor every conversation. After the visit, the institute continued to refine the plague agents. Wisner said the United States believed that “by the spring of this year, according to the information we have been provided, research and development was completed and the question of the suitability for large-scale production resolved.” This added a note of super-urgency; Wisner was accusing the Russians of getting ready to manufacture a super-plague weapon.
Wisner’s bill of particulars identified the cities, the programs, the institutes and the disease agents in the Soviet biological weapons program. He hoped this approach would, quietly, begin to pry open the closed doors. But the Russians didn’t flinch. They listened to his presentation stone-faced, and insisted they did not have biological weapons. Among those most recalcitrant was Yevstigneev, the general in charge of the military’s biological weapons program. “They gave not an inch in the face-to-face,” Wisner recalled. No one admitted that the Russian declaration to the United Nations was incomplete. When the Sverdlovsk incident was raised, Yevstigneev once again stuck by the cover-up of previous years. He said it may have been caused by contaminated meat, and he insisted that it was not from Compound 19. He also said that Biopreparat had nothing to do with offensive germ warfare.14
The next day, Wisner and the Russians reached an agreement on a new round of inspections between Russia, the United States and Britain, which became known as the Trilateral Agreement. The Russians had again insisted any inspections be reciprocal, although it was Russia, and not the United States or Britain, that had violated the treaty. As they had done before, the Russian generals essentially played for time. There had already been one round of inspections in 1991 that had deepened suspicions in the West that the Russians were not telling the full story.
Had Wisner’s indictment become fully public, it might have ignited a firestorm of demands from around the world that Russia simply close everything down at once. But Wisner believed in quiet diplomacy rather than open confrontation. “We came without believing we would get a whole loaf, and over time we got half a loaf,” he said. “Trying to force a public embarrassment, shock, confrontation wasn’t going to get you a thing, and chipping away at the internal contradictions on the Russian side, nudging, pushing along was a better strategy.”
The Trilateral Agreement was unveiled at a press conference in Moscow September 14, 1992. In a joint statement, the three countries “reaffirmed their commitment to comply fully” with the Biological Weapons Convention and “declared their agreement that biological weapons must have no place in the armed forces.” Russia said it had taken measures to “remove concerns over compliance,” including “the cessation of offensive research,” budget cuts and closing of facilities. The statement said Yeltsin had ordered a “checkup” of Ultra-Pure in St. Petersburg “in response to expressed U.S. and British concerns.”
At the press conference, the Russians insisted everything was just fine. Grigori Berdennikov, the deputy foreign minister who led the Russian side in the talks, said that after Yeltsin’s decree, “activities that would be running counter to the convention are not undertaken in this country.” Yevstigneev brushed aside any suggestion that plague research was conducted at Pasechnik’s institute. They were actually making “a vaccine to prevent chicken plague,” he insisted.
The new Russia was not yet completely open, and Wisner said he realized the mission had not been a total success. “The Russians didn’t say, ‘Ah hah! You got us! We’ll comply.’” In fact, in the private meetings as well as the public the Russians had lied to the Americans repeatedly.
The collapse of the Soviet Union opened a door for Matthew Meselson, the microbiologist at Harvard University, to further investigate the Sverdlovsk anthrax epidemic. He had been consulted about it by the CIA in 1980, visited Moscow to inquire in 1986 and brought the Soviet officials to the United States in 1988, when they claimed contaminated meat had been the cause. But Meselson had never been allowed to go to the scene of the epidemic.
In the autumn of 1991, a local legislator in Sverdlovsk, Larissa Mishustina, demanded that Yeltsin organize a new investigation. Mishustina represented families of the deceased; she said they had received only fifty rubles each, and the military continued to deny any responsibility for the deaths. “I think you know not less than I do that the death of 70 people was the consequence of a leak of bacteriological weapons,” she wrote to Yeltsin. Following her appeal, on December 6, 1991, Alexei Yablokov, the prominent environmentalist whom Yeltsin had appointed to be his counselor on ecology and health care, wrote out a
When Meselson heard of Yablokov’s interest, he sent a letter January 22, 1992, offering to help any investigation. Yablokov replied February 5, saying he had doubts “that after all these years you can find scientific evidence” of what happened at Sverdlovsk. Meselson pressed him again. On March 23, Yablokov responded, referring to the case as “skeletons” in the closet. By coming to Sverdlovsk to investigate, “You can only catch some rumors and visit cemetery with 64 graves,” he wrote. Nevertheless, Yablokov helped pave the way for a visit, writing letters of introduction for Meselson.
Meselson led an expedition that included Jeanne Guillemin, a medical sociologist, and other experts.16 They arrived in the city—now back to its original name, Yekaterinburg—in June 1992. They were able to examine the slides and samples from the victims, hidden in 1979 by Grinberg and Abramova. The two pathologists had written a scientific paper, based on their preserved materials on the forty-two cases, which concluded that “these patients died because of inhalation of aerosols containing B. anthracis.”17
The expedition made important discoveries. Mishustina, the local legislator, had obtained from the KGB a list of sixty-four people who were killed in the outbreak, and was able to locate eleven who had survived. Guillemin, assisted by colleagues at the Ural State University, then interviewed relatives and friends of the victims, walking the streets of the area where they were exposed, examining headstones in the cemetery, and investigating medical records. Using this data, she and Meselson mapped where the anthrax victims worked and lived at the time of the epidemic. They also plotted on the map the direction of the wind on Monday, April 2, 1979, using meteorological records. The results were revealing: most of the people who contracted anthrax in those days either worked, lived or attended daytime military reserve classes in a narrow zone downwind from Compound 19 and stretching southward about 2.5 miles. And for another thirty miles or so beyond, sheep and cows died of anthrax.
More than a decade earlier, when he was first called in to consult by the CIA, Meselson had written a question in his notes: “How many persons might have been present within an ellipse fitted to the facility and the various sites where early cases were presumably exposed? How many of those became ill? Where did later cases reside and/or work?”
Now he had answers. The people were
