The Dead Hand

were piled nearby. The odor of cinders lingered. Harrington worked on a desktop thrown over two wooden sawhorses. She volunteered to track the “brain drain” problem because no one else was interested. “I put up my hand and said, ‘I can do that,’” she recalled. In the first weeks after the Soviet Union collapsed, Harrington met with science counselors from other Western embassies, and sent a cable back to Washington. “Is brain drain good or bad?” she wrote, adding:

Should Western countries be concerned if Russia loses its best scientists? After all, we all spent 74 years fighting the Soviet system, why should we let them maintain the capability to rebuild a threat? It was largely agreed that stripping Russia of its scientific potential is not constructive if the country is ever to stabilize. It was also agreed that nonproliferation is the major concern and that no one really worried about departing botanists. Soviet science was highly compartmentalized and there was strict control over the relatively small number of scientists whose knowledge presents a real threat.⁶

But would that “strict control” hold? It was unimaginably difficult to estimate the scope of the problem, since there were thousands and thousands of individuals, only a vague understanding in the West of the jobs they held and the institutes where they worked, porous borders and unknown temptations. One small leakage of highly skilled bomb-builders could lead to disaster. Reports surfaced of Soviet nuclear scientists traveling to Libya and Iraq. President Saddam Hussein of Iraq, just a year after the Persian Gulf War, was still trying to hold on to nuclear weapons know-how, and the specter of even a single bomb-builder making his way to Baghdad caused real concern.⁷ Iran also had nuclear ambitions. Harrington said she was well aware that Russians could easily travel through Kazakhstan or Moldova, and perhaps far beyond, without being noticed. “You could go anywhere, leave, come back, and who would be the wiser? We were critically aware of the fact that people could move around without anyone knowing where they were going.” Moreover, leaving the country was not the only proliferation threat. Knowledge could be sold to outsiders who came to Russia. Bomb or missile designers could leak their knowledge from inside the country, perhaps under the cover of giving “lectures” to eager “students” from abroad, or through business transactions. The potential disguises were almost infinite, and the secret police were no longer watching everyone. All the major defense factories and design bureaus included a Soviet internal security office, known as “the regime,” but they, too, were desperate for survival and often eager to help the scientists make business deals. By one informed estimate, a core of sixty thousand people had developed and designed weapons of mass destruction and their delivery systems. About half learned their trade in the aerospace industry, twenty thousand in nuclear and ten thousand in chemical and biological warfare. Perhaps half of these minds were located in institutes around Moscow. No one knew for sure how many could become wayward weaponeers, nor which, nor how to reach them quickly, nor how to stop them.⁸

On February 17, 1992, after a three-hour meeting in the Kremlin, Baker and Yeltsin announced formation of the International Science and Technology Center to help weapons scientists shift to civilian projects. The United States pledged $25 million.⁹ Germany also proposed to enlist aid from the European Union. Given the desperate straits of the Russian scientists, the money might have had an immediate impact had it been distributed to those who were surviving on $15 a month. But the center proved far more difficult to organize and launch than anyone expected. Soviet laws were still on the books, Soviet-era bureaucrats still in their offices and the weapons scientists were still shrouded in the secrecy and mistrust of the Cold War. The U.S. government could hardly begin distributing cash to Russian bomb designers. The State Department needed a coordinator in the Moscow embassy to work through all the bureaucratic obstacles. Harrington got the job.

As Harrington visited institutes around the capital in 1992, searching for office space to set up the new science center, she found the corridors dark for lack of lightbulbs, and stepped gingerly around gaps in the flooring. She toured the nuclear institute at Troitsk, south of the city, where Velikhov had once done pioneering laser work. “I have lots of people,” the institute director lamented. “Just no money.” Eventually, the science center offices were opened at the Scientific Research Institute of Pulse Technique.¹⁰ The science center was not ready to offer grants in 1992, nor in 1993, but as Harrington struggled with logistics and paperwork hassles, she listened patiently to the laments of the weaponeers who came to see her. “People would come in and just pour their hearts out to you about conditions in the laboratories, and what it was like trying to support their families and not knowing what they were going to do,” she recalled. “I remember one scientist, a Russian scientist, a prominent physicist, he had come to discuss a project and had to break off the meeting early. He had been paid in vacuum cleaners for that month and he had to go out and figure out how to sell the vacuum cleaners in order to get food for his family. He’s there, in his suit and tie.” Another time, at an elite aerospace institute, Harrington and a group of Americans were taken on a tour from building to building, and then to a yard full of what looked like rusting metal scrap, huge pipes and disks. The engineers explained, excitedly, that during the Persian Gulf War they had seen the Kuwaiti oil fields ablaze, and invented a way to douse the fires. They built an enormous metal disk—like a Frisbee—that would be launched by an airplane into the sand and crimp the underground oil pipe. After many failed attempts, they had finally managed to make it work, and were very proud, but the war ended before they could market the idea. Harrington recalled she and her colleagues just looked at each other in amazement. “My God,” she thought, “these people just have no idea what to do with their intellect. They have no direction whatsoever. They spent thousands of hours trying to come up with this absolutely crazy scheme to crimp oil pipes.”¹¹

By the time the International Science and Technology Center began funding projects in March 1994, the outlook for scientists was still bleak. The first wave of grants were aimed at those who could be the biggest proliferation risk: nuclear weapons and missile scientists and engineers.¹²Among them was Victor Vyshinsky, a specialist in fluid dynamics who worked at the Central Aerohydrodynamic Institute in Moscow, a world-renowned facility that carried out wind-tunnel tests on cruise missiles. Vyshinsky, head of a department at the institute, had been eager to make it in the new Russian economy. He searched for commercial applications for his team. “There was this feeling of huge freedom, sort of inspiration and searching. It was a wonderful time,” he recalled. They knew how to test a cruise missile in a wind tunnel, so they came up with an idea to use wind tunnels to dry timber. But they could not sell it. Then they proposed to use their mathematical models to predict the course of overflowing rivers. Again, a dead end. Soon they realized nothing was working. Vyshinsky turned to the science center, and his group of experts put together a proposal to study vortex wakes caused by airplanes at civilian airports, a project with widespread application that the science center supported. “I wanted to remain in Russia,” Vyshinsky said. But he knew others were tempted to leave, or to sell their knowledge to the highest bidder. He was aware of contracts with Iran inside his own institute. “The only thing that keeps you from doing things like that are scruples,” he said. “If someone takes it into their head to sell something, I don’t think there will be a problem.”¹³

Proliferation was a shady business. The vultures from abroad moved in to pick over the carcass of the dying military-industrial complex in the early 1990s.¹⁴ In one extraordinary case, North Korea attempted to recruit an entire missile design bureau: in 1993, the specialists at the V. P. Makeyev Design Bureau in the city of Miass, near Chelyabinsk, were invited to travel to Pyongyang. The bureau designed submarine-launched missiles, but military orders had dried up. Through a middleman, North Korea recruited the designers, who were told they would be building rockets to send civilian satellites into space. One of them, Yuri Bessarabov, told the newspaper Moscow News that he earned less than workers at a local dairy, while the Koreans were offering $1,200 a month. About twenty of the designers and their families were preparing to fly out of Moscow’s international airport in December when they were stopped by the Russian authorities and sent home. “That was the first case when we noticed the North Korean attempts to steal missile technology,” a retired federal security agent said years later in an interview. If you look at a missile, the security agent said, the North Koreans recruited a specialist to help them with every section, from nose cone to engine.¹⁵

Agents for Iran and Iraq, warring rivals in the Persian Gulf, also scoured the former Soviet Union for scientists and military technology. Iran was especially active. A special office was opened in Tehran’s embassy in Moscow to search for and acquire weapons technology. The Iranians approached the prestigious Moscow Aviation Institute, a school for missile and rocket technology. One of the professors at the school was Vadim Vorobei, a department head and an engineer, a teacher with big workingman’s arms, solid fists and balding hair, who coauthored a textbook on how to build liquid-fueled rocket engines. In his classrooms, graduate students from Iran started to appear. They enrolled to study rocket engineering. Then the students pressed Vorobei to come lecture in Tehran. It was the beginning of a larger underground railroad of Russian rocket scientists who went to Iran in the 1990s. Vorobei was among the first to go. Although the Iranians made a show of keeping the scientists apart, Vorobei said, they frequently bumped into each other at hotels and restaurants. One day, he would spot a leading Russian missile guidance specialist; the next, a well-known missile engineer from Ukraine. All had been brought to