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

The response of the military 188didn’t leave any doubt as to what their attitude toward my actions was.

This document became eloquent evidence of how “originally” our military leaders interpreted the Convention for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. Probably there is a general style of stating the objectives of the Convention that escapes me. But still, I couldn’t get rid of the thought: our military people are certain that the prohibition of the development of chemical weapons is not subject to any control – not only for them, but also, as they expressed, for other countries involved in the development of chemical weapons. I don’t know what other people would say, but I think this is more than alarming! Still, I felt slightly better because I knew that, to a considerable extent I had helped to prevent this perversion of the Convention, which hadn’t yet been ratified and or entered into force.

General Kolesnikov’s attempt to insert his overall contribution into the substance of my indictment proved less fruitful, except for exposing himself with the military’s “flexible” interpretation of the Convention.

The investigation asked the general whether I had damaged the defensive capabilities of Russia, which is the primary concern of the Head of the General Staff Headquarters. However, in response, the general refers to politics and some strange “military damage” without deciphering what it involved. Kolesnikov was openly deceitful when he accused me of disclosing the “…conventional names of these new substances and the overall development programs.” I have tried to cite all my articles in this book, so that the reader can independently judge what I wrote. It is very easy to see that there was no trace of “conventional names,” and even more so no “overall development programs.”

The answer of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs put everything into its proper place. 192In its response, it precisely indicated that the factor which precipitated the Mirzayanov case and all the ensuing scandal, was the dangerous actions of the Russian military-chemical complex.

On May 13, 1993, I was summoned for the last interrogation, at which Senior Prosecutor Buivolov from the Attorney General’s Office, was present. The investigator showed me and my lawyer a resolution to drop the charges against me for my part in “disclosing information about the system of organizing promising applied scientific research work, carried out in the interests of the defense of the country, and about the cooperation of specific designers and the producers of chemical weapons…”

Evidently this clause was too absurd, even from the investigator’s point of view, because at that time there was enough information in the press regarding this, even without my articles. However, all the charges that I mentioned above, which the expert commission had obligingly rubber-stamped as expected, still stood in force. They were just reformulated in a new indictment. The interrogation that followed, after I was shown this new indictment, was a rather formal procedure. However, it didn’t prevent the investigator from sticking to his line and asking questions that had already become stereotypical. Such as the following excerpt from the transcript of the interrogation of May 13, 1993: [193] Transcript of interrogation of accused V.S. Mirzayanov, May 13 1993, Investigation Department of Ministry of Security of RF, Case 62, v. 1, p. 223-224. Top Secret.

“Question: Do you plead guilty to the charges filed against you in the indictment?

Answer: No, I am absolutely not guilty of the charges brought against me in the indictment .[bold type and italics by me—V.M.].

Question: What explanations can you give concerning the indictment that was shown to you?

Answer: The charge I was shown today appears to be an exact copy of the ones I was shown before, and I regard it as a political provocation performed by the Attorney General’s Office and the RF Ministry of Security with the goal of discrediting the democratic transformation in our country. This is an attempt to scare democratically minded scientists by my example. The indictment is a crime against the country that signed the Convention for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. This is an attempt to undermine the trust of the whole world community in Russian foreign policy. I think that as neither the form, nor the essence of the indictment corresponds to the current Temporary List of Information of State Secrecy, this fact discredits this criminal case. I am not going to give any explanations regarding the indictment.”

On that day the investigator decided to record one more transcript of an interrogation to fulfill some kind of plan he had. He was interested in my attitude toward the General Staff Headquarters. In particular, he wanted to know what I thought about the assertion that the term “ammunition” also covered chemical weapons. He asked what I thought about the additional clarifications of the “experts” Gabov and Kochetkov.

Here are my answers to these questions:

“I looked though the transcripts of the experts’ interrogation and the letter, and I am claiming that the experts didn’t answer the essence of the question I had posed, because neither of them referred to any special purpose program, the results of which I had allegedly disclosed. Let each of them show me a specific program and point out the statements in my articles that are completely identical with the wording of the results of the aforementioned program. Then I will consider that the experts did their job conscientiously. Otherwise, I will have to consider the conclusion of these experts biased and unscrupulous. For this reason I request an additional expert commission. I think that the answer of G. Funygin, Deputy Head of Department Eight of the Administration of the General Staff Headquarters, is incompetent. It discredits the policy of our country after we have signed the Convention for the Prohibiting of Chemical Weapons. This answer means that the new list adopted on January 1, 1993 provides for the protection of secrets in the area of the development and testing of chemical weapons.

On these grounds I request that the RF government, which issued an addendum to the aforementioned List for protecting secret information in the area of chemical weapons, N 256-16 of March 30, 1993, answer my petition submitted previously, in which I asked that they clarify which clauses from all of the three lists protect the development and testing of chemical weapons.” 193

Naturally, the investigation rejected this petition too, because it was obvious that the adoption of the above-mentioned government amendment confirmed, as clearly as could be, that there was nothing specific about chemical weapons on the above-mentioned lists. Therefore, the indictment had absolutely no legal basis to it. Of course, this wasn’t a problem for Captain Shkarin alone. It was the product of the hypocritical policy of the ruling elite of the U.S.S.R., which didn’t want to admit, even in the lists of top secrets, that it developed and produced chemical weapons. A perfect analysis was given by Valeri Rudnev of all these aspects of my case. [194] Valeri Rudnev, “The Secrets of Chemical Weapons in the Materials of a Criminal Case and the International Conference Reports”, Izvestia , May 20, 1993.

However, I didn’t think then and I don’t think now that the investigator failed to understand all this. Of course he understood it, but it was important for him to formulate the indictment, and the judges were supposed to do the dirty work. In the course of their lives, the judges had their reliability tested many times by various district and city committees of the C.P.S.U. They always knew what they were doing, and the overwhelming majority of them faithfully served Lenin’s party, and still serves it, even though that party no longer exists. Many have convictions that are so steadfast that judicial reform in Russia is unlikely to occur in the foreseeable future.