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

Izvestia responded to this episode in the Attorney General’s Office with Valeri Rudnev’s article “The Scientist Who was Selling His Motherland Finally has a Defender.” [104] Valeri Rudnev,” The Scientist who was Selling his Motherland Finally has a Defender”, Izvestia , 17 November 1992.

The journalist remarked that his newspaper was closely following the Mirzayanov case, which, in his opinion, finally started following normal juridical procedure. He characterized Asnis as a highly qualified lawyer, who was concerned with the approaching selection of the qualified experts, specialists in the areas of state secrecy and chemical production. He thought that my lawyer could, as a last resort, invoke the “dire necessity” defense in my case, stipulated by Article 14 of the RF Criminal Code, which releases the accused from criminal responsibility.

I was skeptical about this approach because the successful accomplishment of such tactics required getting evidence from the so-called “responsible people.” And in the end, the “responsible people” cowardly brushed me aside.

With the goal of misleading public opinion in Russia and abroad, a briefing was held in the Ministry of Security chaired by Colonel Kandaurov, who would soon become Lieutenant General Kandaurov. He was entrusted with the job of conducting dull and irresponsible briefings, at which he would lie about the events in Chechnya. TV viewers who watched this person work, during the time of the freeing of the hostages in Dagestan in the winter of 1996, could appreciate the true worth of this Chekist’s “art” of presenting false information. Finally, he would be forced to retire in disgrace, and ultimately he found his true place as a deputy in the State Duma.

On November 5, 1992, Colonel Kandaurov did his best to rationalize the illegal actions of his colleagues who didn’t allow my lawyer to participate in my case. [105] Press Briefing in the RF Security Ministry, Federal News Service, Kremlin Package, 5 November 92. Then the floor was given to General Demin, head of Legal Services at MB RF, who expressed his dissatisfaction with the press, which had allegedly distorted information about the Chekists who were working on my case. Of course, this general didn’t expect the degree of scrutiny that the public and the press paid to my case, because he and the service that he headed had been accustomed to doing their business under the cover of secrecy. He was the man who had persistently persuaded Minister Barannikov about the expediency of my arrest. This is why the juridical general at the briefing did his best to justify his failure, by referring to lists of secrets that had never been published, but which I had allegedly disclosed.

His reference to the practice of law in Western countries, concerning this problem, was especially comical. The point is that the lists of these secrets are clearly defined abroad and are published openly in the press. The general tried to explain to ignorant TV viewers that the 1989 resolution of the Committee of Constitutional Supervision didn’t touch upon lists of state secrets, because they have nothing to do with human rights. This inquisitorial interpretation of human rights doesn’t hold up under any scrutiny or criticism. If someone could be arrested based on these secret lists, and criminal proceedings could be instituted against him, and then he had no right to freely leave the country, what kind of documents would these be? This was a real model of absurdity.

At the conference “KGB Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow” organized by Sergei Grigoriyants in February of 1993, I asked Sergei Alekseev, former chairman of this committee and one of the authors of the new Constitution of Russia, if the resolution passed by his committee abolished the aforementioned lists. Surrounded by many journalists, the professor of law answered simply and unequivocally, “Yes, it does, because they hadn’t been published in time.”

General Demin, the head of Legal Services of the MB RF, found himself in a funny situation when Aleksei Lukiyanov, a correspondent from Radio Station Vozrozhdenie , reminded him of his reference to American laws about secrets and asked about a similar case that had taken place in the U.S. in 1971. Daniel Ellsberg [106] See ref. 73. had used the newspaper The New York Times to disclose secret Pentagon Papers about the war in Vietnam. The judge had ruled he wasn’t guilty. Demin didn’t expect such a question and could only awkwardly “explain it” by a difference in laws, a difference in historical periods, and so on. He categorically objected to allowing lawyer Asnis access to my case. As for the law, the general recognized only the illegal “sub-legal norms” about secrets. That was it.

Another colonel from the chemical troops, Aleksander Gorbovsky, who was the son of the former head of the research center in Shikhany and the Military Academy of Chemical Defense, represented the Committee for Conventional Problems under the President of Russia at the briefing. His task was to try and justify the irresponsible actions of leaders of the military-chemical complex. He claimed that military chemists had never violated anything; they had always acted in accordance with international agreements. Listening to Gorbovsky, you would think that saving people from chemical weapons had always been the only priority of the military. But this propaganda didn’t work. The journalist Likhanov wasn’t a babe in the woods. He caught Gorbovsky with his own words. The colonel asserted that the draft of the Chemical Weapons Convention contained no traps or loopholes. Then the journalist asked him to explain why not one of the components of our binary weapons was included on the list of controlled precursors.

This was a situation that required intelligence and honesty, but the colonel from the committee gave in, and mumbled something about the future and about perspectives. It’s a pity that the mass media at this time completely forgot about Resolution N 508-RP of the Russian government, dated September 16, 1992, about the licensing of precursors of chemical weapons, which was signed by President Yeltsin. This resolution was published in the September 30, 1992 issue of Rossiskaya Gazetta . Colonel Gorbovsky was one of the authors of this document, and he certainly remembered it during his tirades at the briefing about adherence to international agreements.

This resolution, adopted on the threshold of the signing of the CWC, prohibited the export of precursors of military chemical agents from Russia, according to an attached list. The list included all known precursors for producing chemical agents: soman, sarin, mustard gas, lewisite, and VX gas. However, there were no precursors for agents A-230 and A-232 on the list. The first one, as I wrote above, had been successfully tested and added to the arsenal of the Soviet Army. The situation was the same with Substance 33. However, our country had never produced either VX gas or its precursors. Why did our president end up on the same team with the liars? It was simply because the leaders of the military-chemical complex were certain that no one in the country would ever dare to expose their true faces. This is why all the technical documentation of the Novocheboksary Plant, which produced Substance 33 but not the notorious American VX gas, was re-written. The generals were glad that the Americans really believed their “canard”, that the U.S.S.R. allegedly produced VX gas and not something else.

Why was this fraud so important for them? It was because they cared a great deal about the problems involved with stockpiling Substance 33.

After Substance 33 was successfully tested and binary weapons based on it were added to the arsenal of the Soviet Army, the problem of stockpiling and, consequently the related flaws of this chemical agent were magically eliminated.