The Dead Hand

under the birch trees,” Von Hippel remembered. Boris Brokhovich, the seventy-three-year-old director of Chelyabinsk-40, stripped naked and plunged into the lake. Several of the Americans then followed him. Not far from the lake was the scene of a devastating accident more than three decades earlier, when a storage tank exploded, throwing 70–80 metric tons of waste containing 20 million curies of radioactivity over the surrounding area. The total release of long-lived fission products, almost comparable to Chernobyl, had contaminated thousands of square kilometers. The accident, September 29, 1957, was hushed up for decades, but revealed after the Soviet collapse.

The last stop on Velikhov’s glasnost tour was the most daring, the one he had first suggested to the Central Committee, and which they had rejected: the Sary Shagan laser test site. This was the facility the Reagan administration claimed “could be used in an anti-satellite role” and might also be used for missile defense. It was the subject of the ominous illustration in Soviet Military Power showing a beam shooting straight up into the heavens. The Soviet leadership knew the claims were untrue but had been embarrassed to admit it. Velikhov brought the Americans to see for themselves on July 8. Von Hippel quickly realized the U.S. claims had been vastly exaggerated. “It was sort of a relic,” he said of the lasers he saw there, which were the equivalent of industrial lasers, easily purchased in the West. There was no sign of the war machine the Reagan administration had conjured up. “These guys had been abandoned, a backwater of the military- industrial complex. It was from an earlier time. It was really pitiful.” The one “computer” consisted of transistor boards wired together—built before the personal computer. “They had been trying to see whether they could get a reflection off a satellite,” he recalled. “They never succeeded.”²⁹

Velikhov’s campaign for openness paid one of its most surprising dividends in 1989, when the Soviet leadership finally admitted that the Krasnoyarsk radar was a violation of the ABM treaty, as Katayev’s candid internal spravka had indicated in 1987. Shevardnadze acknowledged the treaty violation in a speech to the Soviet legislature, and claimed, “It took some time for the leadership of the country to get acquainted with the whole truth and the history about the station.” This was a dubious claim, since Shevardnadze had signed a document laying out the issues two years before. The larger point was clear, however. Gorbachev was coming clean.³⁰

The glasnost championed by Velikhov did not extend to Biopreparat. On July 27, 1989, the masters of biological weapons met in Moscow at the office of Lev Zaikov, the Politburo member who oversaw the military-industrial complex. According to minutes and handwritten notes in Katayev’s files, the meeting began at 6:30 P.M. and was attended by sixteen other officials in addition to Zaikov. The meeting was a Politburo “commission,” a formal high-level committee of members of the ruling body of the Soviet Union, and although Gorbachev was not present, he must have known about the discussions. Among those present were Yuri Kalinin, the head of Biopreparat; Valentin Yevstigneev, the head of the military’s 15th Main Directorate, which oversaw biological weapons; Foreign Minister Shevardnadze; Vladimir Kryuchkov, head of the KGB, and his predecessor, Viktor Chebrikov, who remained a member of the Politburo; Mikhail Moiseev, chief of the General Staff; and others. Akhromeyev was originally on the list, but his name was crossed out.³¹

The first item on the agenda was listed as “About measures for modernizing the organization of work on special problems.” The term “special problems” was a euphemism for biological weapons. The officials were once again worried about the arrival of international inspectors and how to cover up the illegal work. The goal of the meeting was to prepare a Central Committee resolution, which would be a major policy instruction.

Katayev’s notes of the meeting are fragmentary and leave unanswered questions. But they also open a window on high-level discussions about the illicit germ warfare program—evidence of a remarkable back-and-forth discussion that was kept utterly secret.

Kalinin opened the meeting, suggesting that biological weapons were cheap.

The Katayev notation:

Per 1	conventional	2,000 doll.
-	Nuclear	800 ?
-	Chem	60 ?
-	Bio	1 ?

The unit of measurement is not stated, but apparently was dollars. Experts in nonproliferation had worried about the same thing for many years—biological weapons could be the poor man’s atomic bomb.

Then, according to Katayev’s handwritten notes, Kalinin complained that the United States had concealed the location of work on biological weapons.

Next, Kalinin reported to the group on the status of preparations for international arms inspections. Some facilities were being modified so they could be displayed as centers for civilian medicines. According to Katayev’s notes, Kalinin said the cleanup would have to remove any speck of evidence that would point to a weapons program. “Today we are not finding spores,” Katayev wrote. “But possibly in pockets.”

If inspectors came, Kalinin said, they would be given the explanation “these are for manufacturing vaccines.”

Kalinin said he needed eighteen months to bring two more sites into order, and appeared to be seeking permission.

Shevardnadze, who had endorsed the idea of surprise inspections in his speech in Geneva, interjected. “Violation or not?” he demanded, according to Katayev’s notes. “What is the purpose of legends?” or cover stories. “There will be a convention in a year’s time—any enterprise will be under verification.” This was a reference to a chemical weapons treaty, or international convention, which would include provisions for surprise inspections as a verification measure. It was being hammered out by negotiators.

Zaikov asked why Kalinin needed the eighteen months. Couldn’t he be ready sooner?

Kalinin said something about “secret designs,” perhaps hinting that more time was needed to hide the true purpose of the facilities. Katayev noted, cryptically, and without specifying which facilities were being discussed: “All recipes are destroyed. Stockpiles liquidated… Equipment is multi-purpose—remains. It serves to manufacture medications. We are going to preserve the equipment for the time being.”

Zaikov wanted the equipment taken down, too. He was also worried about documents, and wanted them destroyed. At one point he suggested all the documents be “liquidated” in three months. Katayev wrote another cryptic line in his notes, quoting Shevardnadze: “What we violate and what we don’t.”

A little more than two months after the meeting in Zaikov’s office, the Central Committee issued the resolution, ordering more cover-up activity, with an eye toward possible future inspections, according to records in Katayev’s archives. This instruction was to recall all documentation from sites “connected with manufacturing of special-purpose product,” design new means of disguising them and modernize facilities so they could appear to be manufacturing defensive biological agents, such as vaccines. The goal, according to the resolution, was to preserve “the achieved parity in the field of military biology.”³²