After the Malta summit, the group had plenty to deal with: troop reductions in Europe, chemical weapons negotiations and pressure to reach a new strategic arms treaty by early June, when Bush and Gorbachev had scheduled a full summit in Washington. When all the regular business was finished at the ungroup one day in February, MacEachin asked everyone to wait. They had a frightening new problem which he described as “a turd in the punchbowl.”
What he told them next was astounding: a high-level human source had provided the outlines of a vast, secret Soviet biological weapons program, concealed in a civilian organization, Biopreparat. For the members of the ungroup, this was a potential time bomb. Every day, Gorbachev was sinking deeper. Bush had already put U.S. diplomacy on pause for a year. MacEachin told the ungroup, referring to the defector, “If what he says turns out to be even partially corroborated, it is of sufficient significance that, if we don’t resolve this problem, we ain’t going to get a single arms control agreement.” MacEachin believed that hawks in Congress, including the conservative senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina, who was the ranking Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and was already attacking Gorbachev for violations of other treaties, would seize on the news to block any more agreements with Moscow. “Can you imagine Jesse Helms sitting up there with that in his hand?” MacEachin recalled. The senator would say, he predicted, “You can’t deal with the Soviets, they’re liars, cheaters, bums, rats, scums—and I’ve got the list right here in my hand.” MacEachin told the ungroup that the British defector was credible and “we’re going to try and make sure we corroborate. He’s given us so many details that we’ve got to be able to do some corroboration.”21
Bush decided to keep the story of Biopreparat under wraps, just as the Soviets had themselves done for so many years. The United States and Great Britain at last possessed tangible evidence that had so long eluded the experts on Soviet biological weapons, but because of all the pressures building up on Gorbachev, because of the dramatic rush of events in Europe, the president decided not to go public. To do so would not only trigger outrage in Congress, it might also severely damage Gorbachev and Shevardnadze at a time when the Soviet leaders could ill afford it. Dennis Ross, who was director of the Policy Planning office at the State Department and a top assistant to Baker, recalled, “Gorbachev and Shevardnadze were under enormous pressure. We wondered, what can
Alibek recalled in his memoir that disclosure might have forced Gorbachev to abandon the whole biological weapons enterprise on the spot. But that is not what happened. Bush’s decision “gave us unexpected breathing space,” Alibek said. “We continued to research and develop new weapons for two more years.”
Gorbachev’s power ebbed in the spring of 1990. Mass protests were held against his rule, the Baltic republics declared independence and Yeltsin became the chairman of the Russian parliament. The Congress of People’s Deputies, the legislature that Gorbachev’s reforms had created, repealed the Communist Party’s monopoly on political power. Chernyaev, Gorbachev’s closest adviser, was riddled with doubt. “I was deeply worried about what was happening in the country,” he said. “Most of all because nothing was working out the way Gorbachev intended, much less how it really ought to have.”23 Gorbachev wanted to save his country with his reforms, but instead it was coming apart at the seams. When Shevardnadze came to Washington April 4–6, the Americans realized the Soviet military was in a state of near rebellion against its civilian leadership. At one point, Shevardnadze retracted a concession about cruise missiles he had made to Baker in February. “I had the image of a diplomat with a political gun to his head,” Baker recalled. “Any step forward could lead to suicide.”24
Alibek at this point was still a company man, deputy director of Biopreparat, working at the headquarters. But he also had a change of view, and wondered how much longer they could go on covering up the biological weapons program. “Like everyone else, I was furious with Pasechnik and believed he had put our security at risk,” he said. “But where others desperately wanted to preserve the status quo, I saw no choice but to change course.” He thought they should mothball the pathogen production lines, while preserving the sample strains and research facilities. The laboratories would be easier to hide—they could be portrayed as making vaccines—than the factories mass-producing anthrax and smallpox. “If circumstances required, we could always recover our strength. So long as we had the strains in our vaults, we were only three to four months away from full capacity.”25 Alibek said that the KGB chairman, Vladimir Kryuchkov, sent a memorandum to Gorbachev recommending the “liquidation of our biological weapons production lines” because of the Pasechnik defection. The memorandum argued that the germ warfare program was no longer a secret from the West, so the Soviet Union should “cut our losses” and close down the factories.26
But rather than shut down the biowarfare machine, the system applied more camouflage. A detailed plan to deflect American questions about biological weapons was approved at a Politburo meeting April 25, 1990. The plan was to offer what would seem to be more openness, an exchange of
At one point, Alibek recalled, he was given the job of getting a signature on the document about an exchange of visits from Karpov, the Foreign Ministry official for arms control. “I headed through the midday Moscow traffic to Smolenskaya,” the square where the ministry, in one of the distinctive Stalin-era wedding-cake towers, looms over the city.
“I didn’t need an armed guard, since there were no state secrets in my briefcase,” Alibek said. “Just a portfolio of lies.”
Karpov read the papers, then looked up at Alibek, he recalled. “You know, young man, I see a troubled future ahead of you.”
“I was taken aback,” Alibek recalled in his memoir. He protested that others had signed the documents. “I am just the courier.”
Karpov shook his head wearily, Alibek recalled.
“I know who you are and I know what you do,” Karpov said. “And I know that none of what is written here is true.” He signed.
Alibek persuaded his boss, Kalinin, that they should mothball some of the pathogen-making industrial plants and preserve the research laboratories. Alibek recalled he drafted a decree for Gorbachev to sign. There were just four paragraphs. The decree said Biopreparat would cease to function as an offensive biological weapons agency and would be made into an independent organization. A few weeks later, on May 5, Alibek said the decree came back from the Kremlin. “We’ve got it,” Kalinin told him. When Alibek looked at the document Gorbachev had sent back, however, “I went numb.” He explained, “Every paragraph I had drafted was there, but an additional one had been tacked on at the end. It instructed Biopreparat ‘to organize the necessary work to keep all of its facilities prepared for further manufacture and development.’”
The first part ended Biopreparat’s functioning as an offensive biological warfare organization, Alibek recalled in his memoir. The last part resurrected it.
Alibek protested, but Kalinin dismissed his worries with a flutter of his hand. “With this paper,” Kalinin said, “everyone gets to do what he wants to do.”
Using the Gorbachev order, Alibek said he sent a message to Stepnogorsk, the anthrax factory, and ordered
