Alibek, leaving Biopreparat behind, worked for a while as the Moscow representative of a Kazakh bank. But he felt the security services were watching his every move. “My phones soon started to click and crackle every time I made a call,” he said.
In September 1992, Alibek decided to flee to the United States. He got in touch with a Defense Department official whom he had met while on the U.S. inspection tour the year before. In September he and his family left Russia through a third country, and he defected to the United States. It wasn’t a classic defection, since the Soviet Union had collapsed and Russia was still in the first year of its rebirth. But Alibek’s arrival was an intelligence coup for the United States. He was the highest-ranking official of Biopreparat ever to come out.19
Just a week or two later, Sergei Popov also left Russia for the last time. Before buying his plane ticket, he exchanged his monthly salary from rubles to dollars: in his hand he held only $4. He used his savings to buy the ticket. When he arrived at Heathrow Airport in London, no intelligence agents were waiting for him. They never bothered to contact him. On October 1, Popov took up a six-month visiting postdoctoral fellowship at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology at Cambridge University, where Michael Gait was a senior staff scientist. “I had nothing with me, just a small suitcase,” he recalled. Realizing he had no money, his hosts offered a small loan. “I couldn’t tell them what I did before,” Popov recalled. “And I had no intention to tell them.” Popov knew of Pasechnik’s defection, but that role was not what he wanted. “I never contemplated defecting and disclosing secrets,” he said. “My intention was to start a new life and not talk about the past.”
In November, the first results of the Trilateral Agreement, a new round of inspections, got underway. The target was the Institute of Ultra-Pure Biological Preparations in St. Petersburg, where Pasechnik had been director and where the United States and Great Britain feared the Russians were scaling up to manufacture super-plague. Kuntsevich, who was Yeltsin’s point man on chemical and biological weapons, appointed a Russian “Commission of Inquiry,” which met at the institute from November 18 to 21, 1992. A team of American and British observers were invited, but they soon found the whole exercise was a “pathetic setup job,” one of them recalled. The Russian participants, who were handpicked from Biopreparat, the Ministry of Public Health and the Ministry of Defense, mostly watched and listened. Rather than dig into the truth, they were apologists. They announced that there was no biological weapons work going on. The institute director said there never had been any. This was ludicrous in light of the fact that Pasechnik had pioneered such work there, and told the British about it. Among those on the visit was Christopher Davis, who had been one of the leading debriefers of Pasechnik. David C. Kelly, the British microbiologist, later recalled that “it was the American and British observers who actually asked the questions,” rather than the appointed Russian commissioners.
During the November visit, the three buildings that made up the institute were examined again, as they had been in 1991 when Alibek attempted his clumsy cover-up. Again, American and British observers—this time accompanied by the Russian commissioners—spotted a large dynamic aerosol test chamber, a telltale sign of biological weapons research. They asked about its purpose; the answers didn’t add up. The visitors also saw Pasechnik’s milling machine, designed to produce particles of a particular size without damaging the pathogen used in the weapon. It also could not be explained. The “checkup” was over and the Russians had conceded nothing. Their denials made the American and British officials even more suspicious that weapons work was still going on— despite Yeltsin’s orders to stop it.20
The Trilateral process dragged on. At the next stage of the visits, another team of American and British experts went to the All-Union Scientific Research Institute of Veterinary Virology in Pokrov, sixty-one miles east of Moscow, in October 1993. Kelly was among them. At Pokrov, his suspicions were rekindled that a massive Soviet— and now Russian—biological weapons program lay just beneath the surface. While Russian officials insisted they were making vaccines at Pokrov, Kelly saw telltale signs of biowarfare activity. “There were nuclear hardened bunkers and incubators for thousands of eggs. That’s the standard method for growing smallpox virus,” he said. Kelly saw that Pokrov had far more capacity than was needed for vaccines, and the hardened bunkers also seemed to be a giveaway that it was designed for wartime mobilization. But the Russians stuck by the vaccine story, and ducked questions about the past. The visitors were prevented from visiting a sister plant in Pokrov.21
By late 1993, intelligence analysts in the United States and Britain were growing worried that the Russian biological weapons program was still ongoing in defiance of Yeltsin’s orders. One secret intelligence report quoted Yeltsin himself as complaining that the biological weapons work was continuing at three facilities despite his decree. In 1993, Alibek was also being debriefed by the intelligence agencies in the United States.
In the autumn, the United States prepared an overview of the situation —and the evidence—in a top-secret National Intelligence Estimate, a report pulling together information from many different sources.
Soon after the estimate was distributed in the U.S. government, it passed into the hands of Aldrich Ames, who was still spying for Russia from within the CIA. Ames’s last operational meeting with the Russians was on November 1, 1993, in Bogota, Colombia. According to one source, either at this moment or soon thereafter, he turned over to the Russians the National Intelligence Estimate describing what the United States knew about Moscow’s biological weapons program, including specific locations. If the Russians wanted to conceal their germ warfare effort with even greater effectiveness, they had just received a helping hand: Ames delivered to them
There were no more visits to Russian laboratories for a long time. The Trilateral process stumbled on in 1994, when the Russians demanded two visits to facilities of the American pharmaceutical giant, Pfizer. The company was reluctant, but eventually agreed, under pressure from the White House. The Russians also demanded a visit to the Vigo plant in Indiana, where, at the end of World War II, the United States had built the capability for large-scale fermentation of anthrax and a bomb-filling line. It was now abandoned, and as Kelly put it, “the archeological evidence was clearly of 1940s vintage.” The Trilateral process ground to a halt.
On April 7, 1994, Yeltsin abruptly dismissed Kuntsevich, the general whom he had appointed two years earlier to head his committee on chemical and biological weapons. The Kremlin press service said Kuntsevich was relieved of his duties for a “one-time gross violation of work responsibilities.” Details were not disclosed at the time, but came to light the following year when Kuntsevich ran for the lower house of parliament, the State Duma, on the party list of ultranationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky. Russian officials revealed that he was under investigation for helping arrange an illegal delivery of about seventeen hundred pounds of nerve gas precursor agents to Syria and for planning a much bigger shipment. However, Kuntsevich was never prosecuted in Russia. He insisted he had run afoul of internal politics. But the United States thought the charges were serious enough to impose sanctions on Kuntsevich for “knowingly providing material assistance” to Syria’s chemical weapons program.22
The weapons of the Cold War had been spread around the globe by an insider who was supposed to be protecting them.
————— 21 —————
PROJECT SAPPHIRE
The United States opened eleven new embassies in the far reaches of the former Soviet Union in the year after its implosion, and a younger generation of diplomats volunteered for hardship assignments in remote outposts. Andy Weber was among them. On a long airplane flight, reading the
