To the Americans, there were still many unknowns—not only the hidden history, but also the urgent questions about whether the Russians were actually closing down the Soviet biological weapons program, as Yeltsin had promised. The earlier visits to Obolensk, Vector and other facilities had all been frustrated by the cover-up. The Trilateral Agreement reached a dead end. The Americans wanted to know: which pathogens and laboratories could still be a proliferation threat?1
Alibek provided a gold mine of new data about the laboratories and factories of Biopreparat. He knew a great deal about Stepnogorsk, which he had directed in the 1980s: the layout, building numbers, pipelines, processes, machinery, fermenters and bunkers. Thanks to Alibek, Weber had a road map.2
In the last days of May 1995, Weber made final appeals to the Kazakh government. When he got the green light, the American team immediately flew in from overseas to join him. On the first leg of the journey, Weber headed to Pavlodar, the abandoned chemical weapons plant, where he was given open access and cooperation. “They showed us everything,” he recalled. The main engineer explained that Pavlodar was a war mobilization plant, designed to produce sarin and soman for bombs in a matter of weeks if the orders came from Moscow. But the factory showed signs of having been left behind years earlier. “It was a wreck,” Weber remembered.
Then, on Friday, June 2, they took off for Stepnogorsk, 261 miles to the west of Pavlodar. The Stepnogorsk plant was alerted—by someone in the Kazakh government—that an American delegation was coming to town and should be met at the airstrip. Weber was accompanied by a security official from the president’s office, in case there were any questions about his authority to be there. When he climbed down the stairs of the plane, Weber ran into trouble.
“Remember, it’s a chartered plane, this is Stepnogorsk. The airport no longer operates. They didn’t get a lot of flights coming in. So they came right out to our plane,” Weber said. The first person he met was Gennady Lepyoshkin, director of the plant. A Soviet army colonel, Lepyoshkin had first come to Stepnogorsk in 1984 as Alibek’s deputy, and took over when Alibek went to Moscow in 1987. He was shorter than Weber, with dark hair combed straight over, and thick glasses. Lepyoshkin brought his own security man, who offered Weber a finger- crushing handshake. Lepyoshkin left no doubt about his attitude.
“You’re not welcome in our city,” Lepyoshkin told Weber. “Leave!”3
Weber insisted he had come at the invitation of the Kazakh government. Lepyoshkin demanded to see documents. Weber had brought none. After more back-and-forth, Lepyoshkin allowed Weber and his team to come into the town—but not the factory—and check into a guesthouse.
They next met at the mayor’s office. Weber recalled that the Russians regarded their installation as a satellite of Moscow, not under the authority of Kazakhstan. The town was largely populated by Russians, too. “I had entered Brezhnev-era Russia,” Weber recalled. “This was going back in a time warp.” He made a forceful case for the visit, saying that Nazarbayev had approved it. “Gennady and the locals didn’t really care” about the Kazakh president, however. Weber then called Courtney, the ambassador in Almaty. “We need something on paper,” he told him, “or this visit is not going to happen.”
The lone fax machine in the city was in the mayor’s office, and a few hours later a letter arrived from Vladimir Shkolnik, the Kazakh minister of science and new technologies, who had been the atomic energy chief at the time of Project Sapphire. Shkolnik urged Lepyoshkin to open up everything to the visitors. “When Lepyoshkin had the approval on paper, he was covered,” Weber said. “He didn’t like it but he couldn’t stop us.”
The next morning, Weber and his team drove out to the plant from the guesthouse. First they went to Lepyoshkin’s office, where Lepyoshkin gave them a briefing. He said they were making vaccines at the plant. Weber figured it was the cover story. At this moment, both Weber and Lepyoshkin knew more than they said aloud. Lepyoshkin knew that Alibek had gone to the United States. Weber knew the details of the Alibek debriefings, in which he had described the anthrax factory. Weber then gave a brief summary of what he believed the plant had been used for in the past.
Suddenly, Lepyoshkin’s deputy for security, Yuri Rufov, burst out, “That’s all lies! It’s a vaccine production plant! That’s all. We never had anything to do with biological weapons.”
At this point, Lepyoshkin’s manner changed. “Let’s end this discussion,” he said. “We’ll show you everything, and you can make your own judgments.”
On the first full day, Saturday, June 3, Weber and his team started by examining the complex from the exterior. Spanning the top of one building were letters spelling out “Progress” in Russian, the name of the civilian enterprise that served as cover for the biological weapons plant. When they alighted from a jeep they saw bunkers, with thick concrete walls, nestled deep into earthen mounds. Pipes snaked from building to building atop concrete pillars. Behind the bunkers, a crane and rail line marked the location where anthrax munitions would be loaded onto trains in the event of war. Lightning arrestors—another telltale sign of weapons work—were stacked up to one side. At the end of the first day, there were still many mysteries. At 9 P.M. that night, they spread out a schematic of the basement of the main production plant, wondering what was inside the rooms they had not yet seen.
The second day, Sunday, June 4, 1995, they returned and probed deeper inside. Most of the equipment had been mothballed but looked well preserved. Pipes and valve handles were color-coded blue, green and red. Storage tanks stood silent, connected by miles of tubes and wires. The whole complex seemed to be waiting to spring to life. While the interior was in good order, outside the facility had gone to seed. Roads were potholed and junk strewn everywhere. Sheep fed from a trough outside one building. A stiff wind blew across the steppe.
From what he saw, Weber realized that Alibek’s descriptions matched everything they found. One of the most important discoveries was in Building 600, the main laboratory. They located the pad where Alibek recalled there had been a giant stainless steel aerosol chamber for testing the most dangerous agents, such as anthrax, Marburg and Ebola on monkeys and other animals. The high-ceilinged hall was painted an institutional green, eerily empty save for pipes and wires around the periphery, disconnected from the bulbous experimental chamber that once filled up the middle. A crane loomed overhead—maybe to lift the stainless steel ball? In the center of the pad they found a drainage hole. Weber and his team carefully swabbed it for samples. Then they found what looked like a latched, plastic traveling cage for a pet dog, with a handle on top. But it wasn’t for traveling. A hole was cut in the front, and two V-shaped supports protruded from the hole. Here was where the dog’s head would be strapped down during biological weapons experiments.
They combed Building 211, the facility to prepare nutrient media for growing bacteria, with a capacity of thirty thousand metric tons a year. They checked out underground bunkers with reinforced concrete walls two meters thick for weaponization of the agents. The bunkers contained compressors and refrigerators to store agents, and special lines where the pathogens would be filled into bombs and sealed. They swabbed Building 231, where the anthrax bacteria would be dried and milled before being put into the bombs. It appeared never to have been operational.
The most important discovery was the main production facility, Building 221. Several stories tall, on the inside it resembled a scene from a very old science fiction movie, crammed full of pipes, tanks, valves, coils and wires. Most was not active, just standing in place. The building contained a high-level containment facility for handling dangerous pathogens. In a three-day production cycle, the facility could make 1.5 tons of bacteria. The nutrient media was pumped from Building 211 to the upper floors of Building 221, where small fermenters were inoculated with anthrax bacteria. After a period of growth, the content of the small chambers was drained downward into ten massive fermenters, each four stories tall. After further fermentation, the mixture was spun in centrifuges to remove culture medium and waste. The bacterial slurry was then pumped to Building 231 for drying and milling, and then to the bunkers for munitions filling or storage. The finished weapons would then be loaded onto waiting railway wagons for transport.
Of all the amazing discoveries, Weber recalled the day he saw the large fermenters as one of the most disturbing of his life.
“This is a plant that could produce and load onto weapons—targeted at the United States—300 metric tons of anthrax during a war-time mobilization period,” he said. “It looked like a plant right out of the 1930s. There was nothing high-tech about it. It was like when I held the uranium ingot in my hand. It was just metal. These were just big vessels that looked like something out of a 1930s movie. Yet we knew it had the capability of wiping out a big portion of population. It was just scary to think that you didn’t need some super-high sophisticated technology to produce these horrible weapons in massive quantities.”
In Building 221, Weber climbed to the top of one of the twenty-thousand-liter fermenters and looked down
