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

Our press wrote about Mordechai Vanunu in 1986-87. He published information in a British newspaper about Israel’s secret nuclear weapons program. Although many people wrote about that before, few believed that this information was trustworthy, because it was based on indirect evidence. Vanunu proved his claim with photos he had taken at the Israeli nuclear installation where he worked, so naturally everyone believed him. The case took a dramatic turn, when Vanunu was kidnapped by Israeli secret agents and brought back to Israel, where he was secretly sentenced to eighteen years of solitary confinement.

I was stunned by the actions of this courageous man, who had decided to let the world know the crazy plans of the Israeli military clique. I never believed those who accused Vanunu of treason to his motherland. Many of those who supported this accusation were under the same kind of propaganda hypnosis that was practiced under the Stalinist regime. The actions of Vanunu had a serious impact on me and it’s possible they subconsciously motivated my own actions later on.

Gradually it became clear to me that the chemical arms race was an important element of the Cold War that had nothing to do with boosting the defense potential of the country. It was also apparent that only a narrow circle of interested military and civilian generals benefited from this insanity. It was even difficult to imagine what other sphere they could prosper in, if they could not rely on the slavish and poorly paid labor of scientists working in hazardous conditions!

The KGB played a special role in that. In 1972, a KGB representative became Deputy Director in charge of the Department of the Security Regime. As a result, access to the institute and laboratories was tightened up. Before that all the guards were civilians, and often these were elderly women – grannies who didn’t quite know what to do with their weapons. They were replaced with military professionals from a regiment that had been transferred over from a top-secret site in Siberia. So there you have it – this was the real face of the Soviet disarmament policy, not the one that the propaganda declared in the press!

Probably the only crucial role of the KGB at the institute was to work on the problem of keeping state secrets. That is what the Chekists were necessary for. There were four secret departments with numerous personnel, but at best they could only provide for the safety and the movement of secret documents, not for the safety and movement of chemical agents, either new or old. I think instead, they had a symbolical meaning, perhaps for scaring off foreign agents. In fact, I never heard of any incident during the time I was working at GOSNIIOKhT, in which “enemy intelligence” was trying to get a hold of something in the military chemical complex, not even during my years as head of the Department for Foreign Technical Counterintelligence. There was practically no one to “struggle” with.

Still, you couldn’t say that the KGB had lost its “vigilance”. From time to time KGB representatives ran party meetings, in which some general got up and gave a report about the plots of foreign intelligence agencies, which did their best to steal of our defense secrets. However, this was pure fiction. The speakers’ own examples always refuted their allegations. One deputy director of a department of the KGB came up with a story about the deputy director of the Design Institute of the Chlorine Industry. Having allegedly become entangled in his debts and with women, he decided to cash in on “state secrets”. When he had accumulated enough “secrets”, he started looking for a buyer. Finally, he managed to get acquainted with a Swedish journalist and even agreed to a deal. However, like in the best Soviet movies, he was caught by our glorious Chekists while selling the secrets, and he was exposed as an enemy of our Socialist regime. The speaker said proudly that the “Swedish journalist” was our agent.

What could you expect from those Chekists, whose primary occupation was provocation? I used to work with a former KGB employee who told me about special troops of the NKVD which were organized in the Far East of the U.S.S.R., and trained to imitate German troops. After they finished their training, rookie Soviet agents were parachuted near those “troops”, and they quickly ended up in an encounter with the Chekists (who were disguised as German officers). The captured Soviets were tortured and some of them agreed to work for the “Germans”, which meant immediate death without any investigation or legal proceedings. However, when it was necessary to be really vigilant and resourceful, KGB employees were careless.

I will always remember the case of the late chief of the Department “D” laboratory, Nikolai Ostapchuk. He was very fond of drinking, even at work. Thanks to the alcohol, or perhaps out of an excessive desire to work with secret documents, Nikolai handled them as ordinary papers and carried them home in his briefcase. The KGB didn’t take any measures, even though he fell down drunk several times and slept somewhere in the street, once in a “perehod” (pedestrian underpass) not far from GOSNIIOKhT. One day Ostapchuk suddenly died, and his wife came to GOSNIIOKhT, bearing the top-secret papers safely back to the Department for the Security Regime. Many people in the management of this department were not pleased at all. It seems it would have been better for them if those papers had just disappeared without a trace. Then it would have been possible to hush up the incident without any consequences, but Ostapchuk’s widow didn’t ask for the help of his friends from the directorate, to make up for her late husband’s blunder. This was the way she took revenge on his drinking buddies.

The control over the safety of chemical agents was organized absolutely perfunctorily. First, it was carried out by employees of the Department for the Security Regime, who didn’t have even a primitive notion about chemistry. Usually part of the staff of this department was composed of representatives of the working class, like Boris Churkov and Vyacheslav Malashkin, who in this way or otherwise became involved as KGB informers.

Secondly, control was maintained by judging the difference between how much of a substance was received and what was used up. The daily expenditure of chemicals was recorded only by the person who actually did the work. Generally speaking, he could use up nothing and later dispose of the chemicals at his own discretion. It was only important to log an entry in the registrar journal. In order to get extra compensation for working with hazardous materials, an employee had to submit a report, accounting for the number of days he or she worked with chemical agents. Often scientific assistants, who hadn’t accumulated enough hazard days, simply made false entries in their registers about the work they presumably conducted. To protect this fraud, they just destroyed the chemicals for the experiments in one go, according to procedures described in special manuals.

Controllers from the Department for the Security Regime could force the scientific assistants to weigh the ampoules with chemical agents in their presence, but it was all the same to them what was in those ampoules. So a potential plotter could do anything he or she wanted with the chemicals. Unfortunately, control at the institute is the same today as it was before.

Probably there were very few workers at GOSNIIOKhT, to whom the ensigns from the militarized security guard hadn’t offered their services. I personally knew a few of these lads, who would offer to take anything you wanted out from the territory of GOSNIIOKhT, for a few hundred milliliters of alcohol. They were very conscientious about keeping their word, carrying out different construction materials, paint, iron rods, and other items for building country houses near Moscow. These guys didn’t care what was taken out with their direct participation, although they knew that the stuff they took out had been stolen. Actually, the theft of state or collective farm property wasn’t considered a criminal offense in those days in the U.S.S.R. Only those who had nothing to steal at work didn’t do it. It was very difficult to qualify this as theft, because the Bolshevik state had been constantly robbing and plundering people for several generations, to the extent that the state made it practically impossible for people to survive without theft. So theft didn’t cause indignation, and almost no one reported it to the authorities. In this sense, the Soviet people were really united because they were entirely linked by a collective cover-up.