The Dead Hand

in which two nonlethal chemicals are mixed together at the last minute to become a deadly agent.

Mirzayanov had heard the lofty disarmament speeches about chemical weapons. Gorbachev pledged in April 1987 that the Soviet Union would no longer produce them. Yeltsin, in one of his first announcements as the new Russian president in January 1992, promised to support the global treaty then under negotiation in Geneva that would outlaw chemical weapons.¹³

Yet Mirzayanov knew that the Soviet Union—and Russia after it—had never given up work on the new binary weapon. He discovered the truth one day when he noticed a new poster in the hallway of the institute in Moscow. The poster proclaimed that scientists had invented a “pesticide” for use in agriculture, and it presented the chemical formula. Mirzayanov recognized immediately that it was actually the formula for something else—a novichok agent. The pesticide was a cover story. Despite all the promises of disarmament, Mirzayanov realized there was a plan to conceal the new generation of chemical weapons in ordinary industrial and agricultural compounds. This way, the Kremlin could sign the global ban on chemical weapons while keeping a hidden arsenal at the ready. Mirzayanov decided he had to tell the world.¹⁴

A lean, compact man who gestured often with his hands when he talked, Mirzayanov landed a job in 1965 at the State Scientific Research Institute of Organic Chemistry and Technology, located on the Highway of the Enthusiasts in Moscow. He was a specialist in chromatography, a laboratory technique for the separation of mixtures, and he became an expert in detecting tiny traces of chemicals in nature.

During his many years there, Mirzayanov came to have profound doubts about the military usefulness of chemical weapons. Nevertheless, in 1985, at fifty years old, he was given a sensitive job as chief of the department of foreign technical counterintelligence, responsible for checking the air and water at all the facilities for telltale leaks and, more broadly, protecting them from foreign spies. Mirzayanov had a rebellious streak, so the job was an odd fit, but he hoped to stick to the technical side. It could mean he would get scarce hard-currency resources to purchase new equipment. In his position, Mirzayanov was told the secrets of the novichok agents. He saw field tests at first hand. He was put on the scientific councils and allowed to read the piles of reports.

As the Gorbachev revolution took hold, Mirzayanov found himself drawn into the democracy protests, especially Yeltsin’s call for radical change. “From the very first days, I went to the streets,” he recalled. He quit the Communist Party on May 4, 1990, and became still more active in the pro-democracy movement. As a result, he was kicked out of his counterintelligence post.

His indignation about the novichok deception erupted in April 1991. He learned of a banquet to celebrate the award of the Lenin Prize to the institute director, Viktor Petrunin, and to Anatoly Kuntsevich, a general who had been in charge of a chemical weapons test installation at Shikhany. The prize was for creating a binary chemical weapon—long after the Soviet Union had promised to halt the chemical weapons production.¹⁵

Mirzayanov hoped Yeltsin’s growing prominence and power in 1991 would bring a new direction. He read newspapers every day, but saw nothing about chemical weapons. He knew the institute was still functioning. “I was suffering from the agonizing burden I carried,” he recalled, “feeling personal responsibility for participating in the criminal race of chemical weapons.

“I decided, I was ready to speak openly.”

He sat down at home one night and typed out an essay, pouring out criticism of the whole chemical weapons enterprise. The next day he hand-carried his essay to the editor of a popular Moscow weekly newspaper, Kuranty, which published the article on October 10, 1991. Mirzayanov titled the essay “Inversion,” referring to the process by which a chemical unnoticeably changes from one form into another without changing its chemical formula. He meant it as a commentary on the duplicity of the generals and their determination to continue building chemical weapons.

In the article, Mirzayanov disclosed that the chemical weapons chiefs were “busy developing a more modern type of chemical weapon, and its testing was carried out at an open test site in one of the most ecologically unsafe regions.” He did not call it novichok but had spilled the beans. And he hinted that the generals were trying to hide their misdeeds. “The question is: why are we misleading the West again?” he wrote.

Mirzayanov called the essay a “cry from the heart,” but there was little public reaction. Mirzayanov knew people were preoccupied with survival through a difficult winter. Inside the institute, his bosses were furious. They fired Mirzayanov on January 5, 1992. He was soon struggling to make a living selling Snickers and jeans in a Moscow open-air market. “It wasn’t very good for a professor with a Ph.D.,” he recalled.

Yet he could not forget about the novichok agents. He decided to speak out again, and wrote another essay. On September 16, 1992, it was published in Moscow News, a progressive weekly tabloid.¹⁶ The article, headlined “A Poisoned Policy,” was accompanied by photographs of the administration building of the institute on the Highway of Enthusiasts that had never before been identified in public. Mirzayanov revealed more about the dark secrets of the novichok generation of weapons. He said “a new toxic agent” had been developed at the institute, more lethal than the American VX gas. Injury from the new agent is “practically incurable,” he said. He disclosed that the toxic agent was the basis for a brand-new binary chemical weapon, and that field tests of the new binary agent were being carried out in Uzbekistan as recently as the first three months of 1992— after Yeltsin’s pledges in January.

Instead of destroying chemical weapons, Mirzayanov said the generals were developing new ones. The people of Russia “have no reason whatsoever to entrust the destruction of chemical weapons to those who developed them,” he insisted. The promises of Gorbachev and Yeltsin to the West were completely betrayed by work going on inside the country. Who was in charge?

Mirzayanov was arrested October 22, 1992, for revealing three state secrets: the new toxic agent that was more deadly than VX gas; the development of the binary weapon; and the recent field tests. On October 30, he was indicted. Mirzayanov pleaded not guilty, was imprisoned and then released as his case dragged on.¹⁷

On January 13, 1993, the global treaty banning the development, production, stockpiling and use of chemical weapons was signed in Paris—with Russia among the signatories.¹⁸

In the legal proceedings, Mirzayanov and his lawyer were entitled to see the record of the investigation, including top-secret documents. Mirzayanov painstakingly copied documents in his own hand, took the notes home and typed them up. As a precaution, he faxed some of the documents to Gale Colby, an environmental activist in Princeton, New Jersey, who was organizing Western support for him.¹⁹ One day, prosecutors put in the record a document that described the development, manufacture and delivery of Novichok 5 for field tests. Mirzayanov copied it. According to the document, the field tests were scheduled for 1991–1992, well after Gorbachev and Yeltsin had pledged to stop making chemical weapons.

Only in 1994, after he had been twice imprisoned, did the case against Mirzayanov fall apart.²⁰ At great personal risk, Mirzayanov had revealed the duplicity of the generals and the development of the novichok generation of chemical weapons.

Bruce Blair, the Brookings Institution scholar, finished his second book, The Logic of Accidental Nuclear War, and it was published early in 1993. Blair’s research in Moscow had paid off—he was able to write a detailed account of the Soviet nuclear command and control system. But one small detail eluded him. In Moscow, he had been told by his sources that the Soviet Union created a special system of command rockets that would fly across the country in the event of a nuclear attack, and issue launch orders to the intercontinental ballistic missiles. But when he checked the U.S. data on flight tests for these command rockets, in some thirty examples, nothing seemed to happen when they flew. No large ballistic missiles rose out of their silos as a result of the presumed commands. Blair wrote in his book, that what the Soviets told him could not be corroborated by evidence.

Still, he wondered: what were the rockets for, if the commands were not followed?²¹

Blair sent a copy of his new book to Valery Yarynich, the nuclear command and control specialist whom he had met in Moscow nearly two years before. Back then, Yarynich had impressed Blair with his knowledge, and Blair had been careful not to write down Yarynich’s name, out of an abundance of caution. Yarynich had given Blair a clue about the control rockets, but Blair didn’t quite grasp it.