Europe was over.
In Washington, reporters were summoned to the Oval Office at 3:34 P.M. Bush was nervously twisting a pen in his hands. He later recalled feeling awkward and uncomfortable. Ever cautious, he was worried that any comments he made could trigger a Soviet crackdown. The memory of the Tiananmen Square massacre was still fresh. Lesley Stahl of CBS News remarked that “this is a sort of great victory for our side in the big East-West battle, but you don’t seem elated. I’m wondering if you’re thinking of the problems.”
“I am not an emotional kind of guy,” Bush said.14
In Moscow, Chernyaev wrote in his diary the next day, November 10, “The Berlin Wall has collapsed. This entire era in the history of the socialist system is over.”
After the fall of the wall, even more threatening storms were on the horizon for Gorbachev. The Soviet economy plummeted in 1989; there were acute shortages of goods, along with a grain crisis and declining oil production.
After Bush had waited almost a year to engage Gorbachev, he was now confronted by a confluence of serious troubles: the future of Germany, and indeed Europe, was up for grabs; Gorbachev was in deeper and deeper trouble at home; and arms control negotiations were going nowhere. When Bush and Gorbachev finally met in a summit December 2–3 on the Mediterranean island of Malta, severe winds and high waves lashed the harbor as they talked aboard the Soviet cruise liner
In Moscow in late 1989, Pasechnik’s defection sent shock waves through the small group of Soviet officials who knew. On December 6, the Kremlin made an urgent decision. According to a
Alibek recalled in his memoir that “we took comfort in the fact that there were many things Pasechnik didn’t know. He had not been personally involved in weapons production, and much of what he could tell Western intelligence agencies was likely to be hearsay at best, thanks to our internal security regime. Nevertheless, Pasechnik’s interrogators would have learned the secret that had been kept hidden for so long: the real function of Biopreparat.”18
Alibek was right that Pasechnik did not bring the British information about weapons production. But Pasechnik had spent many hours visiting the microbiology institutes and taking notes about their activities. His memory was sharp.
In early 1990, a very modest effort inside the Soviet system at more openness about the Sverdlovsk anthrax epidemic was immediately crushed.
By this time, Gorbachev and Shevardnadze had deeply antagonized the military. They negotiated the destruction of hundreds of the most modern Soviet nuclear warheads and missiles and slashed military spending. The Warsaw Pact was disintegrating as Soviet troops made an unceremonious and precipitous retreat. All of these actions were in keeping with Gorbachev’s intention to end the hypermilitarized state and ease the burden of defense on the economy and society, but the military took it hard, very hard. They were furious, especially at Shevardnadze.
On January 5, Shevardnadze’s ministry tried to force a little openness about biological weapons. The ministry distributed a draft Central Committee resolution stating that the best way to deflect outside demands about biological weapons, in the wake of the defection of Pasechnik, would be to propose an exchange of data with the Americans in two areas: weapons work before the Biological Weapons Convention went into effect in 1975, and information on how any biological weapons development since then was being converted to civilian purposes. The Foreign Ministry also suggested that if specific questions came up about the Sverdlovsk anthrax incident, the Americans should be told that “indeed, an accident took place,” an investigation was underway and the results might be shared with them. Shevardnadze’s deputy for arms control, Viktor Karpov, circulated this document. He sent the draft to officials at Biopreparat (Alibek was on the list), the military (including the 15th Main Directorate, which handled bioweapons), the KGB, the Health Ministry, the Academy of Sciences and others.
Five days later, the military exploded. Dmitri Yazov, the defense minister, wrote a letter to all who had received the draft proposal. He complained the military had been left totally out of the loop. The military realized, correctly, that the offer of a data exchange would “radically contradict” previous statements that “the Soviet Union has never worked on nor produced nor possessed stockpiles of biological weapons,” Yazov said. In other words, the Foreign Ministry had proposed to open the window on the lie, and the military wanted to slam it shut before it got out.
On Sverdlovsk, Yazov insisted “there were no explosions and accidents” at the facility. The epidemic was caused by tainted meat, a government commission had determined at the time, and “at the present time there exists no new information or circumstances that would force a doubt about the correctness of the conclusions.”
The military was so alarmed that it demanded Karpov recall all fifteen copies of the draft resolution. The documents show the military prevailed. The language in the Foreign Ministry draft was immediately changed. Karpov sent out the amended instructions the next day, January 11.19
From October 1989 through January and February 1990, the British worked long hours to sift through the mountain of new information they received from Pasechnik. Details began to be shared with the United States. At the CIA headquarters, Doug MacEachin, the arms control director, received a file of reports coming in from London, not yet formally circulated in the CIA, summarizing the debriefings with Pasechnik, concluding that the Soviets were building strategic biological weapons. Joshua Lederberg, the Nobel Prize–winning microbiologist, went to Britain to interview Pasechnik, and came away shocked by the revelation of the smallpox program and convinced that Pasechnik was genuine. MacEachin asked the CIA’s technical teams to help him corroborate what the defector was saying, using satellite data to locate facilities and other details.
Like the British policy staff, MacEachin had long assumed the Soviets would not build germ weapons if they had nuclear ones. “We also had authoritative information that the common view amongst the professional Soviet military, the line officers, was that biological weapons and chemical weapons are not weapons, they’re terrorism devices,” MacEachin said. “You know, they’re no good in the battlefield. How are you going to deploy a BW weapon on the battlefield?” He said that while biological weapons would cause mass casualties in a city, “bugs and gas are not the weapons that professional soldiers use. And we had plenty of evidence the Soviet military was very professional. One of the major arguments against putting a BW weapon on a SS-18 was: what a waste of time. It didn’t track.”
MacEachin took the new information to a meeting of the key arms control policy-makers at the White House, known as the “ungroup.” Out of a fear of leaks and bureaucratic infighting over arms control, the Bush White House had decided to handle the most sensitive matters in a very small circle. The members came from the departments of State and Defense, the CIA, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency and the Energy Department as well as the National Security Council. No assistants were allowed to sit on the back benches, no leaks were tolerated and the very existence of the group was known to only a few people. It was called the “ungroup” because formally it did not exist.20
