In one part of the report, the group listed dangerous insufficiencies that DARPA had to shore up at once: “Inadequate nuclear, BW, CW [biological weapon, chemical weapon] detection; inadequate underground bunker detection; limited secure, real-time command and control to lower-echelon units [i.e., getting the information to soldiers on the ground]; limited ISR [intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance] and dissemination; inadequate mine, booby trap and explosive detection capabilities; inadequate non-lethal capabilities [i.e., incapacitating agents]; inadequate modeling/simulation for training, rehearsal and operations; no voice recognition or language translation; inadequate ability to deal with sniper attacks.” The SWG proposed that DARPA accelerate work in all these areas and also increase efforts in robotics and drones, human tagging and tracking, and nonlethal weapons systems for crowd control.
DARPA had its work cut out. The agency had been leading military research and development for decades against a different enemy, one with an army of tanks and heavy weaponry. The new focus was on urban warfare. What happened in Mogadishu was a cautionary tale. “Military operations that were of little consideration a decade ago are now of major concern,” the study group warned.
The following year, DARPA asked RAND to study OOTW and write an unclassified report. The RAND report was called “Combat in Hell: A Consideration of Constrained Urban Warfare.” It began with the prescient words: “Historical advice is consistent. Sun Tzu counseled that ‘the worst policy is to attack cities.’” Accordingly, avoid urban warfare.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Biological Weapons
On December 11, 1991, a mysterious forty-one-year-old Soviet scientist named Dr. Kanatjan Alibekov arrived in Washington, D.C., one of a thirteen-man Soviet delegation. The group was part of a trilateral mission that also involved scientists from the United States and Great Britain. The purpose of this visit was allegedly to allow each delegation to inspect the other countries’ military facilities that had, decades earlier, been involved in biological weapons programs. But really there was a lot more than just that going on. Back in 1972, the Biological Weapons Convention Treaty had made germ weapons illegal, and all three countries had pledged to renounce biological warfare. But recently American intelligence officers had discovered that the Soviets had not given up bioweapons work and instead had created a far more nefarious and frightening program than any military scientist in the Western world had imagined. This information was first learned two years earlier, in October 1989, and the Americans and the British had been puzzling out what to do about it ever since. This trilateral mission was a piece of that puzzle.
In December 1991 the Soviets did not know that American and British intelligence officers were aware of their covert bioweapons program, which was called Biopreparat. Nor did the Soviets realize that American intelligence officers knew that the mysterious Dr. Kanatjan Alibekov was deputy director of Biopreparat, meaning he was second in command of a program that involved roughly forty thousand employees, working in forty facilities, twelve of which were used solely for offensive biological weapons work.
That the Soviet delegation was in the United States at all was a highly sensitive issue. Secretary of Defense Cheney did not want the details made public, and to ensure secrecy, his office issued a press blackout around the mission. The only people outside the Defense Department cleared on the Soviet scientists’ whereabouts were individuals with the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID), who served as escorts.
The group traveled to Dugway Proving Grounds, in Utah, where deadly pathogens had once been tested in the open air, but whose Cold War–era buildings had since been abandoned. They traveled to Pine Bluffs Arsenal, in Arkansas, where the United States had once manufactured biological weapons on an industrial scale, but where there was now nothing left but weedy fields and rusting railroad tracks. They went to Fort Detrick, in Frederick, Maryland, the former locus of U.S. bioweapons research and development, where USAMRIID now had its headquarters.
Years later Dr. Alibekov would write a memoir, and in it he described the 1991 trip as one on which he was less interested in what he saw at the former weapons facilities than in the lifestyle of abundance that so many Americans seemed to enjoy. He regarded with wonderment “the well-paved highways, the well-stocked stores, and the luxurious homes where ordinary Americans lived.” Democracy, he concluded, offered more to its citizens than communism ever did.
The trip to America in 1991 was Dr. Alibekov’s first. He spoke not a word of English and had met just thirteen Westerners in his lifetime, all members of this same trilateral mission who had visited the Soviet Union earlier that same year. During that visit, Dr. Alibekov had acted as one of the tour guides. The Soviets were producing germ weapons, and it was Alibekov’s job to make sure that the Western scientists were steered clear of any sights that might belie the Soviets’ illegal weapons work.
Born in Kazakhstan in 1950, Alibekov had trained as an infectious disease physician, specializing in microbiology and epidemiology. At the age of twenty-four, he joined the military faculty at the Tomsk Medical Institute in Siberia and began working inside what he later described as “a succession of secret laboratories and installations in some of the most remote corners of the Soviet Union.” With each job came financial privilege, which was unusual for a non-Russian. Kazakhs were generally considered second-class citizens during the Cold War. But Alibekov was a talented microbiologist and a hard worker, which served him well and paid off. By the 1990s, “with the combined salary of a senior bureaucrat and high-ranking military officer,” he wrote, “I earned as much as a Soviet government minister.”
As the tour of the American facilities was taking place, Russia was in a state of pandemonium. The Berlin Wall had come down two years earlier, but the red flag of the Soviet Union still flew over the Kremlin. The geopolitical landscape between the superpowers was in flux. “It wasn’t so clear the [Soviet leaders] weren’t going to re-form,” remembers Dr. Craig Fields, DARPA’s director at the time. “There was a lot of anxiety about the fact that they might re-form.” The two nations had been moving toward normalized relations, but for the Pentagon this was a time of great instability. While the world rejoiced over the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Defense Department had been coping with a myriad of national security unknowns. Would a unified Germany join NATO? How to handle troop reductions throughout Europe? What about all the nuclear weapons the Soviets possessed? The Soviet Union had spent the past five decades building up its weapons of mass destruction, in a shoulder-to-shoulder arms race with the United States. Who, now, would control the Soviet arsenals of WMD? At any given moment the Russians had more than eleven thousand nuclear warheads aimed at carefully selected targets inside the United States, as well as an additional fifteen thousand nuclear warheads stored in facilities across the sprawling Russian countryside, including mobile systems fitted onto railway cars.
One person uniquely familiar with these kinds of questions, numbers, and threats was Lisa Bronson, the Pentagon official leading the delegation of Soviet scientists on their tour. Still in her thirties, Bronson was a lawyer and a disarmaments expert. As deputy director for multilateral negotiations with the Office of the Secretary of Defense, Bronson had helped conceive and design the visit by the Soviet team. She had also accompanied the U.S. and British scientists on their tour around Soviet facilities earlier in the year. She was one of the thirteen Westerners Dr. Alibekov had met before this trip. Now, with the facilities visited and the mission coming to a close, Lisa Bronson took the Russian scientists on a walking tour of the nation’s capital.
It was during this part of the trip that a fortuitous exchange of words between Dr. Alibekov and Lisa Bronson occurred. Alibekov recalled the conversation in his memoir. “At various stops along the way, she had challenged us about the Soviet biological weapons program,” he wrote. “Naturally, we denied we had one. But I admired her persistence.”
Standing on Pennsylvani
a Avenue, just down the road from the White House, one of Alibekov’s colleagues asked Bronson how much money an American scientist could earn in a year.
“That depends on your experience,” she answered. “A government scientist can make between fifty thousand and seventy thousand dollars, but a scientist in the private sector could earn up to two-hundred thousand dollars a year,” about $350,000 in 2015.
Alibekov was astonished. Throughout the trip he remained impressed by how much better everything was in America, from public infrastructure to personal living conditions. He thought of his own life in Moscow. How hard he worked and how little he had to show for it in comparison. And most of all how grim the future looked now that the wall was down. “At the time,” he wrote, “a top-level Russian scientist could make about one hundred dollars a month.” Emboldened, Alibekov decided to speak up. Through an interpreter he asked Bronson a question of his own.
“With my experience could I find a job here?” he asked.
Bronson gently told Dr. Alibekov that he would have to learn English first.
Through the translator, Alibekov thanked his Pentagon host. Then he made a joke. “Okay,” he said, “if I ever come here, I’ll ask for your help.”
Lisa Bronson just smiled.
“Everyone started to laugh,” Alibekov recalled, “including me.”
Dr. Kanatjan Alibekov returned to Moscow with the Soviet delegation. Just a few days later, on December 25, 1991, President Mikhail Gorbachev resigned. On New Year’s Eve, the red flag of the Soviet Union, with its iconic hammer and sickle beneath a gold star, was taken down from the flagpole at the Kremlin. The tricolored flag of the newly formed Russian Federation was raised in its place. The Soviet Union ceased to exist.
Two weeks later, Dr. Alibekov handed the director of Biopreparat, General Yury Kalinin, his resignation papers in Moscow. Then, using an intermediary, Alibekov reached out to Lisa Bronson to let her know that he wanted to defect to the United States. This was a military intelligence coup for the Pentagon. For two years now, all the intelligence on Biopreparat—including the revelation that it existed in the first place—had come from a single source, a former senior-level Soviet scientist named Vladimir Pasechnik, now in British custody. The Pentagon wanted its own high-level defector. Soon they would have Dr. Kanatjan Alibekov.
As for Vladimir Pasechnik, his defection had come out of the blue. In October 1989 Pasechnik had been sent to France on an official business trip, to purchase laboratory equipment. Instead, he called the British embassy from a phone booth and said he was a Soviet germ warfare scientist who wanted to defect to England. British Secret Intelligence Service agents picked him up in a car, flew him to England, and took him to a safe house in the countryside.
The handler assigned to Pasechnik was a senior biological warfare specialist on Britain’s defense intelligence staff named Christopher Davis. Pasechnik stunned Davis with a legion of extraordinary facts. The fifty-one-year-old Pasechnik had worked under Dr. Alibekov in a Biopreparat facility in Leningrad called the Institute of Ultra-Pure Biological Preparations. As a senior scientist at Ultra-Pure, Pasechnik had made such significant contributions that he was given the honorary military title of general. At Biopreparat, scientists weaponized classic pathogens like anthrax, tularemia, and botulinum toxin, standard operating procedure in a bioweapons program. But at Ultra-Pure, scientists had been working to genetically modify pathogens so they were resistant to vaccines and antibiotics. Pasechnik told Davis that at Ultra-Pure, he had been assigned to work on a strategic antibiotic-resistant strain of the mother of all pathogens, bubonic plague.
The Soviets called their laboratory-engineered version of history’s most prolific killer Super Plague. In the thirteenth century, the bubonic plague killed off roughly every third man, woman, and child in Europe; but it lost its potency in the twentieth century, when scientists discovered that the antibiotic streptomycin was effective against the infectious disease. When Christopher Davis learned that the Soviets were developing a genetically modified, antibiotic-resistant strain of plague, he interpreted it to mean one thing. “You choose plague because you’re going to take out the other person’s country,” Davis said. “Kill all the people, then move in and take over the land. Full stop. That’s what it is about.”
For months, Christopher Davis and an MI6 colleague spent long hours debriefing Pasechnik. The information was then shared with American intelligence counterparts. In the first month alone, Vladimir Pasechnik provided the British government with more information about the Soviet biological weapons program than all the British and American intelligence agencies combined had been able to piece together without him over a period of more than twenty-five years. The United States’ vast network of advanced sensor technology had proved useless in detecting biological weapons. Bioweapons can be engineered inside laboratories hidden in buildings or underground. Unlike work on missiles, which require launch tests from proving grounds that are easily observable from overhead satellites or aircraft, biological weapons work can continue for decades undetected. And at Biopreparat it did.
Despite hundreds of billions of dollars spent by U.S. military and intelligence agencies on high-tech reconnaissance and surveillance systems, on the ground, in the air, and in space, collecting SIGINT, MASINT, OSINT, GEOINT, and other forms of technology-based intelligence, a single human being had delivered so much that was unknown simply by opening his mouth. Pasechnik provided HUMINT, human intelligence.
“The fact that Vladimir [Pasechnik] defected was one of the key acts of the entire ending of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War,” says Davis. “It was the greatest breakthrough we ever had.” Once Davis briefed his U.S. counterparts on Pasechnik’s information, things moved quickly. The United States sent the Nobel Prize–winning microbiologist Dr. Joshua Lederberg to England on a secret mission to interview Pasechnik. Lederberg came home unnerved. That the Soviets were working on Super Plague was shocking. But Lederberg also learned that scientists at Biopreparat had been working to weaponize smallpox, which was duplicitous. In the late 1970s the international health community, including doctors from the Soviet Union, had worked together on a worldwide effort to eradicate the killer virus. In 1980 the World Health Organization declared smallpox dead. That the Soviets would weaponize smallpox by the ton was particularly nefarious.
Lederberg confirmed for the Pentagon that Vladimir Pasechnik was credible, level-headed, and blessed with an impeccable memory. “He never, ever stretched things,” says Christopher Davis. Using classified CIA satellite data, including photographs going back decades, the Pentagon located, then confirmed, the multiple biological weapons facilities revealed in Pasechnik’s debriefings. Many of the key photographs were from ARPA satellites that had been sent aloft in the earliest days of the technology. With confirmation in place, it was now time to tell President George H. W. Bush about the Soviets’ prodigious, illegal biological weapons program.
The wall had been down for only a few months, and from the perspective of the Pentagon, it was a precarious time as far as international security was concerned. There was a growing worry that President Mikhail Gorbachev was losing control of the Russian military. With this in mind, in the winter of 1990, President Bush decided it was best to keep the Soviets’ biological weapons program a secret. To reveal it, Bush decided, would make Gorbachev appear weak. Gorbachev was being hailed internationally as a reformer. He needed credibility to keep moving his country out of a Cold War mentality and into the twentieth century. The world could not allow Russia to fall into chaos. The revelation of the Soviet bioweapons program could backfire. It needed to stay hidden, at least for now.
The single greatest unknown at this juncture was how much, if anything, did President Gorbachev actually know? Vladimir Pasechnik could not say with authority. The Pentagon needed a second source. Back in the fall of 1989 and the winter of 1990, no such second source existed. Pasechnik had been reticent at first but gradually became more comfortable
with his British handlers. Then he started to name names, including that of Dr. Kanatjan Alibekov, deputy director of Biopreparat.
The Pentagon got to work setting in motion the trilateral mission—which is how Alibekov and twelve colleagues wound up at Fort Detrick in December 1991. After the U.S. trip, Alibekov had been back in Russia for just three weeks when he made up his mind to defect to the United States. Arrangements were made. In the dead of night, Alibekov left Russia with his wife and children, never to return.
By the time Gorbachev was set to leave office, U.S. intelligence had confirmed that he had in fact been aware of the Soviet bioweapons program. Gorbachev had received classified memos regarding operations, including how to deceive U.S. inspectors during trilateral mission facilities tours. The CIA also confirmed that Russia’s new president, Boris Yeltsin, had been made aware of the program—and that he was allowing it to move forward. On January 20, 1992, British ambassador Rodric Braithwaite and Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd met with President Yeltsin in Moscow. Since Pasechnik’s defection, Ambassador Braithwaite had been trying, to no avail, to get the Russians to admit that they had a biological weapons program, which would be the first step toward its safe dissolution. This time, when the subject was brought up, Yeltsin stunned the British diplomats by acknowledging that he knew about Biopreparat.