Вил Мирзаянов - State Secrets - An Insider's Chronicle of the Russian Chemical Weapons Program

According to the “wise” plan of our bosses, all imported equipment had to be removed from the rooms where the Americans were supposed to visit. But that was all that could be done to prepare for the meeting.

Additionally, Guskov explained that Americans were also supposed to visit Workshop 34 of the Volgograd scientific industrial company “Khimprom” that had produced soman and sarin before 1987. I didn’t understand why I had to take care that there was no agent A-230 in the air around this workshop. The deputy director said that behind the fence of Workshop 34 there was a unit of the experimental plant of the Volgograd subsidiary of GOSNIIOKhT, which produced this chemical agent…

Our operations for protecting the new developments of GOSNIIOKhT didn’t correspond with the changes that were taking place in our country at that time, or with the foreign policy directed at making the world a safer place. It turned out that along with hundreds of other scientists, I had participated in a vast conspiracy against the future Chemical Weapons Convention, repeating the role played by the captive scientist from the Stalinist era.

In September of 1994, the management of GOSNIIOKhT filed a lawsuit against me and demanded 33 million rubles, claiming that my public speeches and articles in the press had caused moral and material damages to the institute. The management of the institute accused me of calling GOSNIIOKhT a “sharashka”, which is the term coined by Aleksander Solzhenitsyn to mean a jail/science-research institute. This was blatant hypocrisy on their part, as they knew quite well that during the war and even for a long time after that, there was a jail for political prisoners who were chemists at the institute. The prisoner/scientists were escorted to their work in the laboratories and experimental units from their jail cells. Often these people were selfless and very talented. [71] See ref. 10. Isn’t it the pinnacle of cynicism or even a sin of some sort to call these people “employees of GOSNIIOKhT”? Petrunin did exactly that when he included the victims of this Stalinist labor camp in the list of employees of his institute, in an article he wrote about the 80 thAnniversary of GOSNIIOKhT. [72] Victor Petrunin, “To the 80th anniversary of GNTC NII Organic Chemistry and Technology – GOSNIIOKhT”, Chemical and Biological Safety (in Russian), N 5, 2004, pp. 5-10. http://www.cbsafety.ru/rus/saf17_02.pdf .

Later on, scientists at GOSNIIOKhT continued the sad tradition established by these selfless researchers, in working conditions that were very far from safe. Speaking of “sharashka”, I have always been talking about the conditions of labor and “the regime” at that institute, and not the scientists, as among them there were and still are outstanding specialists, such as Professor Andrei Tomilov.

At the same time, it was inexplicable from the point of view of the most basic human rights, that people who were working in the field of chemical weapons in the U.S.S.R. were working outside of the law. It’s as though they didn’t exist. For example, when someone started talking about raising scientists’ salaries or pensions at least up to the level of miners or other people working in dangerous professions, the administration literally replied as follows: “You see. We don’t exist for the state. It has never admitted and it never will acknowledge that our country develops and produces chemical weapons.” As a result, the bosses concluded it was impossible to raise these questions at all.

Later I confirmed that the ruling clique in the U.S.S.R. distinguished itself with its unparalleled hypocrisy, when it came to the problem of chemical weapons. On the list of information of state secrecy, (my “case” was later fabricated on this basis), there wasn’t even a single reference to Russian chemical weapons. That is, it was more secret than the “major secrets of the U.S.S.R”. The regime of secrecy in the military-chemical complex was organized precisely to make this hypocrisy and deceit possible. The regime of the “sharashka” allowed them to do this quite brazenly.

Clearly the system of the military-chemical complex was starting to decay. The construction of a large-scale plant in Novocheboksary, for the industrial production of the Substance 33, defied all possible logic. In 1974 it was brought fully on-line. Hundreds of millions of rubles were squandered on this weapon, which was useless, even from the point of view of Russian military specialists. This happened at a time when the U.S. had completely halted the production of chemical weapons.

There were a lot of pressing questions, which needed immediate answers. In particular, detailed studies of Substance 33 demonstrated its very low level of stability. Sometimes samples were taken from shells filled with Substance 33, which had been in storage for a couple of years. Tests of these samples showed that only about half of the agent was present. No one could explain this phenomenon, because the loss of activity was much greater than expected. After a year of investigating this, the source the problem was finally discovered. The factory workers, who were filling up the shells with the chemical agent, had decided not to waste the precious ethyl alcohol that was used for swabbing the holes of the shells to be filled. Instead, they started to use hydrochloric acid for this purpose, and it is a perfect activator of the decomposition of Substance 33.

At that time, the foremost scientists and chemists started developing some elements of political consciousness, as they were certainly influenced by the words and actions of Andrei Sakharov, Aleksander Solzhenitsyn, and other outstanding leaders in science and literature. But, we could only learn about them by listening to the Western “radio-voices”. Sometimes scientists abroad displayed real civic heroism by standing up for the truth, working in the cause of preserving peace. At that time, the deeds of Daniel Ellsberg [73] Ellsberg is renowned for preparing and releasing the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times in 1971. These documents contained secret and incriminating information about US conduct in the Vietnam War. Robert Reinhold, “Ellsberg Calls Decision ‘Great,’ But Says Ruling on Vietnam Papers is not Surprising,” New York Times, 1 July 1971. Daniel Ellsberg, “Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers (New York, 2002: Penguin Putnam Inc.), pp. 498. in the U.S. and Mordechai Vanunu [74] In October 1986, Mordechai Vanunu, who had worked at the Dimona nuclear facility, told the London Sunday Times about Israel’s secret nuclear weapons program, which he had documented with photographs. Vanunu must have also been aware of the risks he was taking. Even before the story hit the press, Israeli secret agents kidnapped him and brought him back to Israel, where he was secretly sentenced to eighteen years of prison. He spent eleven and a half years in solitary confinement. Jonathan Randal, “Israeli Troops Kill 4 West Bank Palestinians; Vanunu Is sentenced to 18-Year Term for Revealing Nuclear Secrets,” Washington Post , 28 March 1988, A21. in Israel made an indelible impression on me and many people in the U.S.S.R.

In 1971 Daniel Ellsberg published the Pentagon Papers, 7000 pages of secret Pentagon documents about the Vietnam War, which the military did not want the American people to know about. The Soviet press presented this as some kind of power struggle within the American intelligence community. However, anyone familiar with our newspapers and their propaganda tricks could easily guess what had really happened. I understood that Ellsberg sacrificed himself in the name of civic truth, so that Americans could judge for themselves what the real face of President Nixon’s administration was. In accordance with American law, he was threatened with more than a hundred years of imprisonment. Nixon ordered the use of all possible secret illegal channels to investigate Ellsberg’s case, but the brave man received a fair deal after all. The judge got acquainted with the criminal case, and when he was certain that it violated the norms of the U.S. Constitution, he decided to terminate it immediately. President Nixon soon resigned from office, because he lost his base of support thanks to the Watergate scandal with its “dirty tricks”, and because of the Pentagon Papers. The case against Daniel Ellsberg was one of the supporting arguments during the impeachment of Nixon.