Biohazard

We were as clever and resourceful as Iraq would be nearly a decade later when confronted with similar international suspicions.

Russia has had long practice in the art of deceiving outsiders, not to mention its own people. The story of the Potemkin village — in which an obsequious prince erected a string of gleaming settlements to prevent Empress Catherine from noticing the poverty of her subjects — is part of Russian folklore. And there is the legend of the hidden city of Kitezh, protected from foreigners by a cloak of invisibility.

Nevertheless, some of us worried that foreign inspectors would sec through our schemes. A report sent to me by Colonel Viktor Popov, director of the Institute of Applied Biochemistry, warned that only the most gullible visitor would accept our claim that the giant fermcnters and testing chambers in our facilities were used to make pesticides. I rejected his report. "You haven't been given all this money to tell us what can't be done," I told him. Stung by my criticism, he went back to work. It was true, however, that the most suspicious looking equipment would have to be moved to hidden storage facilities.

By 1988, a full year before Pasechnik's defection, we had produced an instruction manual for Biopreparat employees on how to answer queries posed by inspectors. Every conceivable question— What is this room for? Why is this equipment here? — was followed by a prepared reply, which workers were expected to memorize.

I was most concerned about our smallpox project. If foreign inspectors brought the right equipment to the Vector compound in Siberia, they would immediately pick up evidence of smallpox. This constituted a violation of the World Health Organization's resolution, which restricted our stocks of the virus to Moscow's Ivanovsky Institute. We considered transferring those Moscow strains to Vector to establish a plausible reason for keeping smallpox in Siberia, but the Ministry of Health, which controlled the repository, turned us down.

Meanwhile, the Foreign Ministry's Inter-Agency Commission was kept busy responding to an avalanche of American inquiries. Each response, written with the guidance of our "biological defense specialists," was precise, professional, and unequivocal — and each was a lie from top to bottom. The strain of so many lies wore some people down.

At one meeting toward the beginning of 1990, Petrovsky had a broad smile on his face. He told us that he had an important announcement to make. I thought perhaps the threat of American inspections had finally been lifted.

"Our next meeting," he said, "will be conducted by our new deputy minister, Viktor Karpov."

Petrovsky was wearing a bandage on his finger. He picked at it with the absorbed concentration of a small child. For a man who had apparently just been been fired, he seemed unduly pleased with life.

Realizing that we were staring at him in confusion, he looked up with an amused expression.

"I'm free of all this now," he said. "Thank God." Toward the end of 1989, the American and British ambassadors in Moscow presented a diplomatic demarche to Anatoly Chernyayev, foreign policy adviser to Mikhail Gorbachev. The demarche said the two governments were in possession of "new information" that suggested that the Soviet Union was violating the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention. This could only be Pasechnik.

Ambassadors Jack Matlock of the United States and Roderic Braithwaite of Great Britain were treated to an opaque reply by Gorbachev's adviser.

"There are three possibilities one could assume about the information you are giving me," Chernyayev calmly told the diplomats. "One is that the information is wrong; a second is that Gorbachev knows of this but hasn't told me; and a third is that neither he nor I know."

He promised to "look into the matter."

From that moment, events moved at breakneck speed. Kalinin called me into his office to report that a complaint had been received from Washington and London about our program. I had never seen him so upset.

"We're going to have headaches from now on," he said.

"Shevardnadze is furious. When he found out about this note, they say he went straight to Gorbachev and demanded to know what was going on. Apparently he doesn't like to learn from foreigners about what's going on in his government."

Kalinin shared the army's contempt for the foreign minister, who was then beginning negotiations that would result in the withdrawal of our forces from Eastern Europe. I could imagine Shevardnadze's outrage. A new argument with the West would undercut the steps he and Gorbachev were taking to remake the image of the Soviet Union. Gorbachev had traveled that fall to the Vatican, where he became the first Communist leader to meet the pope. He had offered scant sympathy to the besieged Communist regimes of Eastern Europe in their losing struggles against the forces of democracy.