NEWSWEEK has learned that all through the 1970s and ’80s-and perhaps even now -the Soviets were bent on creating lethal diseases that defied cures. The secret January 1991 visit to the chamber in Obolensk, hidden in pine forests some 60 miles south of Moscow, confirmed what U.S. and British experts already knew-that the Soviets were deeply involved in covert offensive-biological-warfare research, in flagrant violation of a 1972 treaty outlawing such work. Known officially as the All-Union Research Institute of Applied Microbiology, the Obolensk facility was supposed to be developing the means to prevent, diagnose and treat scourges like anthrax, tularemia and Legionnaires disease. The aerosol chamber told a different story. So did the reinforced “explosive-test chamber,” in which germ-warfare bombs could be simulated, and the rows of giant “fermenters” capable of mass-producing biological cultures that could kill thousands-assuming they could develop a workable delivery system.
Obolensk, in fact, was one of a network of nominally civilian research institutes known as Biopreparat. Created in 1973 by the Soviet Central Committee and the Council of Ministers as a cover for an existing military program, Biopreparat was “one of the best-guarded secrets in the old Soviet Union,” says Grigory Berdennikov, a Russian deputy foreign minister. It was a vast operation, employing 25,000 people at 18 or more R&D facilities, six mothballed production plants and a major storage complex in Siberia. The goal was to take known pathogens and alter their genetic structures to make them resistant to Western drugs. Did Mikhail Gorbachev know about the program and lie to Western leaders? Or was he kept in the dark by his own military?
Until 1989 U.S. intelligence knew, but could not publicly prove, that the Soviets were violating the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention. The 1979 outbreak of anthrax in Sverdlovsk brought accusations of a germ-warfare plant upwind of the town-a charge the Soviets dismissed as propaganda. In 1986 the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency named Vozrozhdeniye Island in the Aral Sea as a biological-weapons test site, but there was no diplomatic follow-up.
Then along came Vladimir Pasechnik, a microbiologist who defected to the West in 1989 while attending a scientific conference in London-and blew Biopreparat’s cover. He had firsthand knowledge of the program. As director at the Institute of Especially Pure Biopreparations in Leningrad and a member of the Scientific and Technical Committee, composed of institute heads, Pasechnik knew how his work–mass-production techniques–was applied organizationwide. His information confirmed the worst-case fears of M.I.6 and the CIA, and more. Pasechnik maintains that a Soviet program to develop a genetically engineered, dry form of superplague, resistant to antibiotics, dates from 1984 and was a top priority of the five-year plan for Biopreparat during the second half of the 1980s, the heart of the Gorbachev era. If a plague bomb were dropped on a city of 100,000, “in a very short time … about half its population will be killed,” Pasechnik told the BBC last week on “Newsnight.” Biopreparat officials, he says, also discussed putting such weapons in subversive hands: “Terrorists might introduce it and then deny it.”
Faced with such damning information, George Bush and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher forced a showdown with Gorbachev. Following a joint demarche presented to the Soviet government in April 1990, Bush and Thatcher each met with Gorbachev in June, telling him of the West’s detailed knowledge of the germ-warfare program. “We said we had no desire to embarrass him or the Soviet Union,” recalls a senior U.S. official. “We just wanted the program to end. But Gorbachev was warned that the West would go public if that was what it took.” The Soviet president conceded nothing but said he would question those in charge.
His answer came in August via Eduard Shevardnadze, the then Soviet foreign minister. It was a shameless evasion: the West’s charges were groundless, went the formal government paper, because there were no current activities in the Soviet Union that contravened the Biological Weapons Convention. That simply wasn’t so. Thanks to Pasechnik, U.S. intelligence could now track Biopreparat’s continuing activities. But going public risked undermining an already politically weakened Gorbachev-on whom the West was relying for a series of crucial negotiations, from reunifying Germany to slashing conventional forces in Europe. “Here we had the highest levels of the Soviet government lying to us, and we’re trying to conclude a START treaty with them,” says a senior U.S. official. Still, Washington and London decided to go slow. A U.S.-U.K. team of germ-warfare experts accepted an invitation by Moscow to visit four facilities in early 1991.
The Soviets continued to cover up. Along with the telling evidence of the aerosol chambers and the explosive-test facility, the team saw “a lot of empty labs” and “women washing beakers and bottles, but not much sign of the higher scientific staff,” Edward Lacey, who led the U.S. side, reported to Washington. Throughout the first half of 1991, Gorbachev continued to stall. In September, just after the aborted coup, British Prime Minister John Major saw a shaken Gorbachev, who still insisted that his country was not producing biological weapons. “We’ve got the goods on you!” Major practically shouted, according to a U.S. source who was briefed on the meeting. Weeks later Gorbachev decided to end the program-but was then shoved from power. The task fell to Boris Yeltsin, who was eager to end an era of distrust. “Some of our experts did everything possible to keep the truth from me,” he told Bush at a Feb. 1, 1992, meeting. “It was not easy, but I outsmarted them.”
Yeltsin signed a decree ordering the shutdown of the germ-warfare program last April. But is it being obeyed? Overseeing the destruction is Gen. Anatoly Kuntsevich, who for years headed the Soviets’ chemical-weapons program. “He may yet turn out to be a brilliant choice-a poacher turned gamekeeper,” says a senior U.S. official. The prime testing site, Vozrozhdeniye Island, has been dismantled. The “civilian” institutes are another story. Early last summer a second official higher in Biopreparat than Pasechnik defected to the United States. He testified, NEWSWEEK has learned, that offensive-biological-weapons work continued inside the Biopreparat system even after Yeltsin’s edict. Diplomatic pressure from Washington and London exacted a promise to open all Russian facilities to inspection. And so the slow process of shutting down the world’s most dangerous renegade weapons program continues-as long as Russians put up with Yeltsin.
