The Dead Hand

23 Anatoly Chernyaev, My Six Years with Gorbachev (University Park, Pa.: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), pp. 225–226.

24 Baker, interview with author, Sept. 4, 2008. See Baker, Politics of Diplomacy, pp. 144–152. The Bush administration remained deeply divided over Gorbachev. On October 16, Baker gave a policy speech to the Foreign Policy Association in New York, saying the United States and Soviet Union should find “points of mutual advantage.” The next day, Vice President Dan Quayle rejected the idea of helping Soviet reform and said “let them reform themselves.” Baker then squelched a pessimistic speech that Gates, then deputy national security adviser, intended to give. Baker, pp. 156–157; Robert M. Gates, From the Shadows: The Ultimate Insider’s Story of Five Presidents and How They Won the Cold War (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), p. 480.

25 The origin of this trip was the work that Velikhov had done with Cochran of the NRDC on seismic monitoring. The other scientists were Steve Fetter, University of Maryland; Lee Grodzins, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Harvey Lynch, Stanford Linear Accelerator; and Martin Zucker, Brookhaven National Laboratory. “Fact Sheet: The Black Sea Experiment,” Natural Resources Defense Council, Washington, D.C. Frank von Hippel came as an observer. Others who also participated included George Lewis of the Center for International Security and Arms Control at Stanford University; Valerie Thomas, Princeton University; William Arkin, the Institute of Policy Studies; Barry Blechman, of Defense Forecast; John Adams, executive director of the NRDC; S. Jacob Scherr and Robert S. (Stan) Norris of the NRDC; and Christopher E. Paine of Senator Edward Kennedy’s staff.

26 Sergei Kortunov, a Foreign Ministry official, said the KGB was unhappy about showing the warhead to foreigners, and tried to block him from participating in preparatory meetings. Kortunov interview, Aug. 30, 2004.

27 Three groups of experiments were conducted. See Steve Fetter et al., “Gamma-Ray Measurements of a Soviet Cruise-Missile Warhead,” Science, vol. 248, May 18, 1990, pp. 828–834; Thomas B. Cochran, “Black Sea Experiment Only a Start,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (November 1989), pp. 13–16. Robert S. (Stan) Norris of the NRDC distributed copies of Soviet Nuclear Weapons, a groundbreaking 433-page book that had more open information about Soviet weapons systems than was available inside the country at the time. Norris, communication with author, June 19, 2008.

28 Velikhov, interview, Sept. 2, 2004.

29 Von Hippel, interview, Jan. 24 and June 1, 2004. Also, Cochran interview, Aug. 19, 2004.

30 Shevardnadze was among the “Big Five” officials who signed the Nov. 21, 1987, document. The speech was Oct. 23, 1989. Later, Akhromeyev wrote in his memoir that he had told Shevardnadze the truth in 1985. Akhromeyev claimed that the military had not misled the political leadership—in fact, it was the political leaders who ordered the station built in the wrong location in order to save money. Akhromeyev, p. 255.

31 Katayev, Hoover.

32 The decision of Oct. 6, 1989, is recorded in Katayev’s spravka titled “On Improvement of Organization of Works on Special Problems,” no date, Hoover. The reference to “parity” really means to preserve what the Soviet system had built; the United States had none.

33 Davis, interview, May 19 and August 11, 2005.

34 MacEachin, interview, July 25, 2005.

35 Ken Alibek with Stephen Handelman, Biohazard: The Chilling True Story of the Largest Covert Biological Weapons Program in the World—Told from Inside by the Man Who Ran It (New York: Random House, 1999), pp. 153–164. He said the vehicle was Yersinia pseudotuberculosis, but Popov said it was Legionella.

36 Popov, interview, March 31, 2005.

CHAPTER 15: THE GREATEST BREAKTHROUGH

1 Pasechnik had specialized in the separation and concentration of radiochemicals in this period. I have drawn on confidential sources for this chapter. For published accounts, see James Adams, The New Spies: Exploring the Frontiers of Espionage (London: Hutchinson, 1994), Ch. 20, “The Weapon of Special Designation.” Adams interviewed Pasechnik in September 1993. Also, Simon Cooper, “Life in the Pursuit of Death,” Seed, issue 4, January–February 2003, p. 68. Pasechnik died Nov. 21, 2001, in Salisbury, England, after a stroke.

2 The Soviet system created larger industrial enterprises and nestled the BW institutes inside them. In this case, the industrial organization was NPO Farmpribor, of which Pasechnik was general director.

3 Davis, the chief biological weapons specialist on the U.K. Defense Intelligence Staff, offered a detailed description of Biopreparat’s scope in an article in 1999, “Nuclear Blindness: An Overview of the Biological Weapons Programs of the Former Soviet Union and Iraq,” Emerging Infectious Diseases, vol. 5, no. 4, July—August 1999, pp. 509–512.

4 U.S. Congress, Office of Technology Assessment, Technologies Underlying Weapons of Mass Destruction OTA-BP-ISC-115 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, December 1993), p. 96. See W. Seth Carus, Bioterrorism and Biocrimes: The Illicit Use of Biological Agents Since 1900 (Amsterdam: Fredonia Books, 2002), pp. 17 and 23.

5 Ken Alibek with Stephen Handelman, Biohazard: The Chilling True Story of the Largest Covert Biological Weapons Program in the World—Told from Inside by the Man Who Ran It (New York: Random House, 1999), pp. 139–140.

6 Cooper, p. 105; and Adams, Ch. 20, pp. 270–283.

7 Davis, interviews.

8 Alibek, interview, June 18, 2007, and Alibek, pp. 137, 143.

9 Jones interview by Glenn Frankel of the Washington Post in London, August 10, 2004.

10 Alibek confirmed this. “Plague and smallpox were considered strategic weapons” by the Soviet Union, he told the author. In 1992, Davis was honored by Queen Elizabeth, who recognized his contribution to proving that the Soviet Union had a massive strategic biological weapons program.

11 Pasechnik described Soviet research into three key areas: characteristics of each pathogen, susceptibility of targets and vulnerability of users. They tried to improve the production rates and the yield of viable, live microorganisms; increase virulence; boost resistance to antibiotics; maximize viability of the germs during and after dissemination; degrade defenses of the human target; protect the person who launched the pathogens by vaccination; and come up with better detection systems to warn the user.

12 Gorbachev, Memoirs, p. 524.

13 The press conference by Guenter Schabowski at the GDR International Press Center took place just before 7 P.M. Cold War International History Project, translated by Howard Sargent.

14 25 Weekly Comp. Pres. Docs. 1712, Nov. 9, 1989. Bush said Gorbachev sent him a message that day asking the United States not to overreact. George Bush and Brent Scowcroft, A World Transformed (New York: Knopf, 1998), pp. 148–151.

15 Masterpieces, p. 242.

16 A U.S. participant told the author BW issues were not included in the staff papers for the summit, nor mentioned by Bush to Gorbachev.

17 “On Improvement of Organization of Works on Special Problems,” Katayev, Hoover.

18 Alibek, p. 150.

19 This account is based on documents from Katayev, Hoover, including Yazov’s protest, “On the draft resolution of the Tsk KPSS ‘On directives to the USSR delegation at the Soviet-American consultations on issues of banning bacteriological and toxin weapons,’” signed by Yazov January 10, 1990; Karpov’s response, January 11, 1990, in a letter to Lazarev, V. F.; and a separate spravka signed by N. Shakhov, deputy head of Katayev’s department, outlining the official position on the Sverdlovsk accident.

20 MacEachin’s job was to synthesize the intelligence from several agencies for the ungroup, as well as describing how the agencies differed, and to seek data from the agencies when the ungroup needed it.