The Dead Hand

were harnessed for outdoor tests.

Alibek had told the Americans that the anthrax removed from Sverdlovsk, and later stored at the town of Zima, near Irkutsk in Siberia, had been buried on Vozrozhdeniye Island in 1988, but he had not said precisely where. Weber and his team extracted sample cores from the earth adjacent to the laboratory, where they thought the anthrax might be buried, and on the test grid. They didn’t find the anthrax that day; the pink powder was buried in eleven unmarked graves nearby. It would be discovered on a later expedition. But in finding the weathered buildings and discarded primate cages, in taking the samples and photographs and exploring the island, Weber had broken through the Soviet lies once again.

Weber and Lepyoshkin flew out together. They posed for a picture on the tarmac, both giving a thumbs-up. Lepyoshkin had nowhere to stay in Almaty; Weber invited him to be his houseguest in the mountains. By chance, there was a reception at the American Embassy for visiting officials from Washington. Among them was Carter, an assistant secretary of defense, who was an architect of the Nunn-Lugar legislation, and Starr, the principal director of the Pentagon’s threat reduction office, who led the “tiger team” for Project Sapphire. They met Lepyoshkin for the first time. Lepyoshkin seemed to have unmoored himself from the Soviet past. He was eager to meet the American officials. They talked in the leafy courtyard of the embassy. Lepyoshkin had only one request: he wanted them to help clean up Stepnogorsk and convert it to peaceful purposes. “I promise,” Carter told him, “we will.”

In Russia, Weber discovered the footprints of Iranians—and they were reaching for the germs.

In 1997, back from overseas, he was working at the Pentagon on the Nunn-Lugar programs, which had become known as Cooperative Threat Reduction. He was trying to find a new approach to dealing with the danger of biological weapons inside Russia. Weber’s first trip there came in June 1997, when he took a train fourteen hours from Moscow to Kirov, five hundred miles east, to attend a scientific conference, accompanied by several other American experts. In a stroke of good luck, Weber met researchers from both Obolensk and Vector, the laboratories at the heart of Biopreparat’s research on bacteria and viruses. Late one afternoon, after the formal conference sessions, a small group of scientists from Obolensk invited Weber to share some beers in the banya, a traditional Russian sauna. Joining the scientists in the steam room, with his Russian-language skills and knowledge of biological weapons and pathogens, Weber made a personal connection, as he had done earlier with Mette and Lepyoshkin. In these discussions, Weber learned that scientists from Obolensk and Vector had recently participated in an officially sponsored Russian trade fair in Tehran, and very quickly, the Iranians had shown up at the Russian institutes. The Iranians were somewhat rough-cut agents of influence, and the Russians found them off-putting, the scientists said. From this informal talk in the banya, Weber realized the Iranians were trying to scoop up know-how for biological weapons. What really alarmed him was a discussion with a senior scientist at Obolensk who had been on the trip to Tehran. “They talk about pharmaceuticals,” the scientist said, “but it’s clear their interest is in dual use equipment that can be used for biological weapons.” The scientist said the Iranians had offered him thousands of dollars to teach in Tehran. And then the scientist took a business card from his wallet, which had been given to him by the Iranians. He showed it to Weber, who immediately recognized the name and the office: a front for the military and intelligence services in their drive to procure Russia’s weapons.

A few weeks later, Weber met Lev Sandakhchiev, the compact, intense, chain-smoking director of Vector, who had once pushed to create artificial viruses for biological weapons. Sandakhchiev had come to Washington for the first time. Weber took Sandakhchiev on an hour-long drive to Fort Detrick, Maryland, once the home of the American biowarfare effort, and now headquarters of the work on defense against dangerous pathogens. In the car, Sandakhchiev revealed to Weber the Iranians had come to Vector, hunting for technology and know-how. Weber sensed that Sandakhchiev wanted to cooperate with the United States, to open the Russian system to joint projects. He also realized that conditions at Vector were increasingly desperate, with salaries unpaid and subsidies drying up.

Weber and Sandakhchiev met again in October 1997 at a NATO conference in Budapest, and this time, in a hotel room, they had a knockdown, drag-out argument over Iran, as Sandakhchiev ate sausage and drank vodka. Sandakhchiev wanted to know: why was Iran such a bugaboo to the Americans? Weber replied, “You have to understand, they kept our Embassy and our diplomats hostage for 444 days!” Sandakhchiev looked puzzled. When was that? Weber reminded him it was 1979. Sandakhchiev, sounding sincere, told Weber that, isolated in his laboratory in Siberia, he had never heard of the Iran hostage-taking. Weber thought to himself it was an astonishing example of how closed the world of biowarfare had been in Soviet times, apparently so tight that not even the news of the hostage crisis had penetrated. Weber implored Sandakhchiev to stop the cooperation with Iran. Sandakhchiev was reluctant to give up the big money the Iranians had offered, but the Iranians were also very unpleasant partners—they made promises up front, but delivered money late, and constantly tried to bargain for less. Weber and Sandakhchiev went back and forth, arguing for hours. Weber found that Sandakhchiev was open with him, and Weber learned that in addition to work at Vector, there was probably a large, separate stockpile of Variola major virus at the military laboratory at Zagorsk. Later, on a tour in Budapest, they walked past the confessional in an old church, and Sandakhchiev turned to Weber and joked, in Russian, “Andy, let’s go in there and I’ll confess all my sins about biological weapons!”

Back in Washington, Weber searched for a way to act, to offer Sandakhchiev something to preempt the Iranians. But up to this point, the Nunn-Lugar program was largely devoted to nuclear materials and strategic weapons, and there was tremendous resistance in the U.S. government, especially in the intelligence agencies, to using any of it to stop the spread of biological weapons. The long history of Soviet and Russian deception about germ warfare had left a deep reservoir of mistrust in Washington. “There was this real fear of our funds being misused by these clearly dangerous, bad actors,” Weber recalled. At a meeting at the White House one day in late 1997, a decision was made to engage Vector, as Weber had urged. After the meeting, he walked to the State Department with Anne M. Harrington, who had helped establish the International Science and Technology Center in Moscow, and was now working on nonproliferation issues at the department. Harrington shared Weber’s goal of reaching out to the scientists at Vector. She knew they were in financial trouble; a few years earlier, the science center held workshops at Vector and Obolensk for possible grant recipients, and scientists at Obolensk said they hadn’t been paid for months. Many just stayed home to grow food or find other ways to support their families; to produce enough income to cover minimal salaries, Obolensk boasted a brewery and an assembly line for men’s suits, and was planning to start a vodka distillery. Harrington thought the beleaguered germ warfare scientists should get as much attention as had the nuclear engineers.⁵

When they reached the office, Weber and Harrington decided to take a chance and reach out to Sandakhchiev on their own. They would not go through the usual bureaucratic channels: embassies, cables, government ministries. On Harrington’s office computer, they tapped out an e-mail to Sandakhchiev. It was brief, noncommittal, but inviting, suggesting closer cooperation and asking if Weber could visit Vector. They didn’t know what would happen. “What are your employment options if this doesn’t work?” Harrington asked Weber.

But the gamble paid off. Sandakhchiev responded with an invitation. Weber made several visits to Vector, and on one of them, Weber asked to see Buildings 6 and 6A, where the research on smallpox had been done years earlier, and about which Sandakhchiev had earlier deceived the British and American visitors. This time, Weber was allowed a close look at the building, and to take photographs. “It was clear the place was just a wreck, crap all over the floors, the equipment was in terrible shape,” Weber recalled.

He went to Frank Miller, then acting assistant secretary of defense for international security policy, a longtime civil servant working on threat reduction. “I think we can break Vector’s ties with Iran,” Weber said. “They’re desperate for limited cooperation and investment.” Miller asked him how much money it would take. “Three million dollars,” Weber replied. Miller went to work and eventually found the money. They persuaded Sandakhchiev to curtail the deals with the shady agents of Tehran.

On each trip and with each passing year, it was more and more apparent to the Americans who visited the former Soviet Union that the Cold War legacy of danger far exceeded what anyone had imagined at first. Years had gone by since the Soviet collapse, yet pathogens in flasks, unguarded fissile materials, idle weapons scientists and marooned defense factories were still being discovered for the first time in the late 1990s.

In a lightly guarded building at the Anti-plague Institute in Almaty, Kazakhstan, Weber once discovered a clutch of test tubes, with plague strains, stored in an empty tin can of peas. In 1997, in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, Weber and another U.S. official were scouting out weapons specialists for the International Science and Technology Center. They explained to a group of institute directors at the Uzbek Academy of Sciences that grants were