Defector Claims Soviets Had Chemical Warfare Plan

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25 February 1998
Source: http://www.nytimes.com/yr/mo/day/news/world/soviet-chemwar.html

The New York Times

February 25, 1998

Defector Claims Soviets Had Chemical Warfare Plan

By TIM WEINER

WASHINGTON -- A defector from the former Soviet biological weapons program said in an interview Tuesday that Moscow's cold war plans for World War III included preparing "hundreds of tons" of anthrax bacteria and scores of tons of smallpox and plague viruses.

The defector, Dr. Kanatjan Alibekov, now known as Ken Alibek, was second-in-command of a branch of the Soviet program and defected in 1992. He said Tuesday that these bacteria and viruses could have been mounted on intercontinental ballistic missile warheads on several days' notice in the early 1980s. Alibek, a 47-year-old native of Kazakhstan, said the Russian military was still running a biological weapons program in 1991, a year after Mikhail Gorbachev ordered it halted.

Alibek, who said he has decided to speak publicly for the first time to fight the spread of biological weapons and to seek absolution for making them, was introduced to The New York Times by producers of the ABC News program "PrimeTime Live," which interviewed him last month and will broadcast the interview on Wednesday night.

Alibek, who works as a private consultant, has written a highly classified study of the Soviet biological weapons program for the U.S. government. He now is offering a unique public description of a weapons program that was for decades one of Moscow's deepest secrets.

Considered by U.S. intelligence officials to be credible about the subjects he knows firsthand -- the size and structure of the Soviet biological weapons program from 1975 to 1991 -- Alibek is thought to be less reliable on political and military issues he knew secondhand.

He said he believes a vestige of Moscow's cold war biological-weapons program is continuing under the guise of defensive research in Russia. The offensive-weapons program was officially canceled by President Gorbachev in 1990, officially canceled again by President Boris Yeltsin in 1992, and remains officially defunct in today's Russia.

Nevertheless, Alibek said, "they continue to do research to develop new biological agents; they conduct research and explain it as being for defensive purposes."

This question of whether Russia persists in the research and development of biological weapons is hotly debated in the U.S. intelligence community. No one has a hard-and-fast answer. Many analysts think some elements of the old Soviet program are continuing, but are far from certain that these include the development of offensive weapons. No official response to Alibek's interview was available Tuesday either from Moscow or from the Russian Embassy in Washington.

"We can say Russia continues research in this area to maintain its military biological potential," Alibek said. "They keep safe their personnel, their scientific knowledge. And they still have production capability."

The U.S. biological-weapons program was canceled by President Richard M. Nixon nearly 30 years ago. The United States continues to do research on programs to defend itself against biological attack, as Russia says it does.

But Alibek said the Soviets never believed that the American biological-weapons program had ended. Through the 1970s and the 1980s, they pursued their own program in a secret arms race against a perceived threat.

Alibek, a medical doctor who held the rank of colonel in the Soviet military, left the former Soviet Union in 1992, traveling by commercial airliner from Almaty, then the capital of Kazakhstan, to New York City -- not as dramatic a flight as taken by some cold war defectors, but still a risky proposition. He chooses not to discuss its details, saying friends back home would suffer.

After Alibek arrived in the United States, he was debriefed for the Central Intelligence Agency by Bill Patrick, who helped run the United States' biological-weapons program from 1948 to 1969.

"Once he decided to defect, he made a dedicated effort to tell all of the details -- the processes, the agents, the strategy, the concept of use -- to the United States to help us understand the largest and oldest biological warfare program in the world," Patrick said.

"It scared the hell out of me when I first talked to this fellow," he said.

Patrick said he learned in his talks with Alibek that the Soviet program "paralleled ours very closely" in terms of military technology, though "it took them many, many years to get past us with respect to biological agents, delivery systems and munitions."

By 1989, he and Alibek said in separate interviews, the Soviet program dwarfed the United States effort. "If we produced a pound of anything they produced a hundred to five hundred," Patrick said.

But in late 1989, Alibek said, there came "a time of severe pressure from the United States and Great Britain to stop the Soviet Union offensive programs." There also came the seeds of doubt that led to his defection.

"For a long period of time, I was proud of doing this work -- until the late 1980s, until I came to Moscow as first deputy chief of program," he said. "Then came the pressure to stop the work."

"We strongly believed the United States had an offensive program," and that the Soviet Union had to match it, he said. "I asked two high-ranking military intelligence officers if information was available about these United States offensive weapons. They asked me: 'What do you need?' I answered: 'The name, location, organization, structure, amount of personnel, what agents they possess.'

"I was told: 'We don't have this information,' " he said. "This was when I had my first doubts."

Alibek's account of the 1979 incident in which a cloud of anthrax was released into the atmosphere from a Soviet weapons plant at Sverdlovsk is dramatic. But it was challenged Tuesday by American experts who have studied the disaster, including Dr. Matthew Meselson of Harvard University and Milton Leitenberg of the Center for International and Security Studies at the University of Maryland.

Alibek said that "practically everybody who was in the footprint of that cloud has died," and that the death toll was in the hundreds. Meselson and Leitenberg said that there were tens of thousands of people in "the footprint," or the path, of the toxic cloud; there have been 62 confirmed deaths.

Alibek also said that Yeltsin, then the local Communist Party boss in Sverdlovsk, was personally and morally responsible for covering up the incident.

"Yeltsin is responsible for everything that was done to contain that information," he said. He added that he believed that Russian military leaders have used that fact to blackmail Yeltsin into continuing a secret biological weapons program.

This theory, if true, could explain the persistence of a Soviet-era program to build better biological weapons. But the former Soviet intelligence service, the KGB, not Yeltsin, is generally thought to have played the leading role in hushing up the Sverdlovsk incident, according to several intelligence analysts.

For Alibek the biological arms race that once consumed his life is now a race to stop the spread of such weapons to terrorist groups and rogue states. "We have an invisible competition between governments and these organizations," he said. "Who is faster? Who is better prepared?"

The answer, he said, may lie in the decisions of his former Soviet colleagues to work for peace or for the highest bidder. "They are everywhere today," he said. "Most are in Russia. But some are overseas, abroad. And we have lost control of them."