The Dead Hand

strength of reactionary forces, especially the “men in epaulets,” and felt Gorbachev was abandoning their shared cause of democratic reform. “The only thing I needed, wanted, and expected from the President was that he take a clear position: that he rebuff the right-wingers, and openly defend our common policy,” Shevardnadze recalled. “I waited in vain.”

On the morning of December 20, after a sleepless night, Shevardnadze wrote out a resignation. He called his daughter in Tbilisi and told her, then informed two of his closest aides. He left for the Kremlin.⁵⁰ The Congress of People’s Deputies fell into a stunned silence as he spoke. Shevardnadze complained bitterly of a lack of support; the reformers had scattered. “Dictatorship is coming,” he warned. Gorbachev, sitting nearby, listened impassively. When the speech was over, he clutched his forehead and looked down at his papers.⁵¹

In the autumn of 1990, another Soviet defector, a medical biochemist, sought asylum at the British Embassy in Helsinki. He had once had top-secret clearances in the Soviet system and worked at Obolensk in the very early years when it was being carved out of the forest. He later worked in the antiplague system, and described to the British how pathogens were harvested from it for use in biological weapons. The defector’s information reinforced Pasechnik’s revelations.⁵²

Very early in the morning on Monday, January 8, 1991, Davis and Kelly stood in Moscow in the bone-chilling cold. Seven American and five British representatives—experts on biotechnology, microbiology, virology, arms control verification and the structure of the Soviet program— were about to begin the very first visit to suspected biological weapons sites. Davis, usually sharp and no-nonsense, was a bit groggy. It was deep winter, absolutely frigid, and he had uncharacteristically overslept. The British-American team had arrived in total secrecy; Davis had not even told his wife where he was going or why. Standing in front of an aging yellow bus, Davis was introduced for the first time to Alibek, who was put in charge of the visit. Alibek, smoking a cigarette, wore a brown wool sweater while everyone else on the Soviet side was in suits and ties. Alibek spoke no English and had never met an American or Briton. He recalled his surprise that the Westerners “knew a lot about us,” and one asked why “Biopreparat chief Kalinin” wasn’t present. Alibek lied, “Unfortunately, Mr. Kalinin is extremely busy.” Kalinin had instructed him never to even mention his name.⁵³

The bus set off for the Institute of Immunology at Lyubuchany, 35 miles south of the Kremlin, which did support work for Obolensk. The bus crawled in a snowstorm, and suddenly Davis heard a loud bang. The bus windshield shattered from the cold. “It was bloody awful,” Davis recalled. “This is the big game. This is day one. We haven’t even reached the place yet, and we have to slow down because we can’t keep going at speed, or we’d all die of exposure. We’re shivering now, probably doing 15 miles per hour, and we arrive late, frozen to death.” Alibek said the Soviet strategy for the visits, worked out over the previous weeks, was to hide as much as possible, and “waste as much time as possible” with meals, drinks and official speeches, to limit time for the visitors to carry out inspections. Vodka and cognac were ordered up at every stop. Popov said “there was a huge training program” before the visits so that every employee knew to repeat the “legend” that they were working only on defense against pathogens. “Every department and every lab had several meetings,” Popov recalled. The first stop was easy—the institute had no dangerous pathogens on hand.

Next came Obolensk, the compound in the woods that had played such a central role in the work of Domaradsky and Popov. When they arrived January 10, Davis noted that, although thousands of people worked there, the halls were eerily empty. Urakov, the stern director who had clashed with Domaradsky, welcomed them with a long speech, sandwiches and drinks. When the Westerners pressed to get to work, Urakov warned them that if they wanted access to the floor containing Yesenia pestis, they would have to be quarantined for nine days on site. The point was to discourage the visitors from asking for access. Alibek had actually given orders the previous weekend for Obolensk and Vector to be totally disinfected, so the risk of exposure to dangerous pathogens was very low. Still, Urakov’s threat worked, and they did not ask to go there.⁵⁴

The Westerners had brought their own plan of action for the visit to the complex, which had more than thirty buildings, and they split up into small teams. Davis was the person on the delegation with the most complete knowledge, and he needed to be in several places at once. He went with one team to Korpus 1, the large cubelike modern building in which each floor was dedicated to a different pathogen. But when another team in the older part of the complex found something interesting, he was asked to come over, and was driven there by the Russian hosts.

Davis happened upon an unmarked door that, he recalled, looked like that of a restroom. This opened into a shower changing room, and eventually a high-ceiling room containing a large freestanding hexagonal steel chamber, which Pasechnik had told them about. Biological bombs would be exploded inside the chamber, and animals, pinned down at one end, were exposed to the pathogens. Pasechnik had said the facility was used to test whether pathogens remained effective after being released by an explosive device.

They climbed inside the chamber. It was dark.

“Can we turn the lights on, I can’t see,” Davis asked. The Soviets said the bulb was burned out.

Davis reached for a small flashlight held by his trusted friend and deputy, Major Hamish Killip. Before Davis could turn the flashlight on, a Soviet official accompanying them grabbed his wrist and stopped him, saying it was a prohibited electronic device. They struggled back and forth. Davis protested strongly that he was on an officially sanctioned mission by the president of the Soviet Union. “We are your guests,” he insisted. “This is not the way to behave!”

“I wasn’t letting go of the flashlight, and he has ahold of me, and we’re in a standoff here. It was tense. They didn’t know what to do, and I wasn’t going to back off.” Eventually, the laboratory officials relented and managed to turn on the overhead light.⁵⁵ Davis noticed the steel walls appeared to have been recently burnished, to erase any marks that would indicate explosive fragments. But when Davis looked at the door, which seemed to be double-skinned and made of a softer metal, he saw the telltale dents. What’s this? he asked.

The laboratory officials said it was poor workmanship with a hammer when the door was installed. “They knew that we knew this was laughable rubbish,” Davis said. Alibek remembered that Davis spoke up directly, saying, “You have been using explosives here.” Davis said the visit to the chamber was “pay dirt” showing the Soviets had an offensive biological weapons program, as Pasechnik had so painstakingly described. “It was quite chilling,” he said. The size of the equipment at Obolensk was a tip-off to the American and British experts that offensive weapons work was underway, and not just vaccines or defensive research. “You’ve got this gigantic building. You’re brewing up large quantities. You’re beginning to smell a rat here.”

Next, on January 14, the team went to Vector, the facility at Koltsovo where Popov had first experimented with genetic engineering. Sandakhchiev, the driven, chain-smoking Armenian who had once dreamed of creating a new artificial virus every month, began to give the foreigners a dull lecture on the latest advances in Soviet immunology, but the visitors, now alert to the Soviet delay strategy, cut him off. Davis and Kelly wanted to see the laboratories. “I could see their eyes widen with astonishment as we took them past enormous steel fermenters, larger than what any Western pharmaceutical firm would ever use for the mass-production of vaccines,” said Alibek. They were not permitted, however, to enter the most sensitive floors where virus research was being done.

At one point, a midlevel researcher let slip to Kelly that the laboratory was working on smallpox. Kelly asked him, quietly, through the interpreter, to repeat what he had just said. The researcher repeated it three times: Variola major. Kelly was speechless. The World Health Organization had eradicated smallpox, and samples were supposed to exist in only two official repositories, at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta and at the Ivanovsky Institute of Virology, a Ministry of Health facility in Moscow. Vector was not supposed to be working with smallpox; it was not supposed to have any smallpox. When Kelly later confronted Sandakhchiev, the director denied that offensive work was being carried out, and then refused to answer any more questions.

Alibek knew that one of Vector’s prize possessions was the 630-liter smallpox reactor, standing five feet tall, which could manufacture great quantities of the virus. The visitors took note of the reactor and other equipment, including the most advanced aerosol-testing capability any of them had ever seen. There could be no justifiable explanation other than an offensive biological weapons program, they concluded.

At the last stop, Pasechnik’s institute in Leningrad, Alibek thought he could relax. “The worst was behind