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

Skipping ahead a little, I would like to explain why I underlined my words in the passage from the transcript of the interrogation. In answering the investigator’s question, I responded that “No, I am absolutely not guilty of the charges brought against me in the indictment.” I said the same at the interrogation on October 30, 1992. However, when I came to the U.S. several years later and saw the English translations of these transcripts made by Andrei Arnold, at the request of Gale Colby, I was literally shocked. My answer to the interrogator’s question in both transcripts was translated as “I plead partially guilty.” This translation was used to report my case in the U.S. to the State Department, senators and others. The reader can draw his own conclusions. However, the fact that some people in the U.S. were extremely dissatisfied with an audacious Tatar and were trying to compromise me is quite obvious to me. Otherwise, why did CIA use its disgraceful and provocative tactics against me?

It was time for me to look through my case materials. According to the Procedural Code, I had to become familiarized with my case and to confirm this before it was brought to court. Day after day I was planning to copy down everything that could be used to expose the methods of the Chekists. Enough material had accumulated in my case, that I could understand the plans of the leaders of the military-chemical complex for carrying out their implementation of the Chemical Weapons Convention.

I believed that the day would come when I would be able to present all this to the general public. Of course, I wasn’t at all certain that the court wouldn’t send me to jail for many years to come. However, that was already not so important to me, since I got the chance to publish the secrets of the military-chemical complex and the KGB. That is why I concentrated fully on the mind-numbing activity of copying these lengthy transcripts and materials stamped “Secret” and “Top Secret”, right under the nose of Investigator Shkarin. He was powerless to do anything about it, and could only resign himself to tolerating my impertinence. Still, I wasn’t quite certain that the KGB could forgive my conduct. Even so, I had made up my mind and this meant that I would carry on to the end, and put my decision into action.

Every day, after the long and tiresome job of copying my case materials at the Lefortovo Investigation Department, I went home to my apartment in the “Ivanovskoe” residential housing complex. That summer my family was in the village Baranovskoe near Moscow. Until late at night, I typed up what I had copied during the day. I was completely alone and open to anyone who might have wanted to get rid of me. However, strange as it may seem, I was not afraid at all, and I calmly accepted whatever was to come. Just in case though, I tried to hide the typed texts and, whenever possible I sent them by the fax of the Moscow Greenpeace organization to Gale Colby in Princeton, New Jersey.

By that time the situation in Russia had become very tense. A struggle was in full swing between the supporters of Democracy and the Communists, whose puppets at that time were the Chairman of the Supreme Soviet, Ruslan Khasbulatov, and Vice President Aleksandr Rutskoi. The latter was a former pilot who had served in Afghanistan and received the title of “hero” after he was shot down and taken prisoner three times. Rutskoi was exchanged each time for weapons, which the Mujahedeen then used to kill our soldiers. Even at the very beginning of his political career, when he nominated himself as a candidate for the U.S.S.R. Congress of People’s Deputies, this “hero” demonstrated his undisguised contempt for people. Once when it was his turn to speak at a meeting near one of the Moscow cinemas, he remarked to his assistants, “Now I will say a few words to this herd of animals!” Rutskoi didn’t notice that the microphone was switched on, and all the people around heard very well how this adventurer appraised them. As a result, the “fighter” for people’s happiness was an ignominious failure in the elections. Unfortunately, people in his hometown, where his mother was running a brisk beer trade, later came to believe that the “soldier from Afghanistan” had become a reformer, and they elected him deputy, to their own detriment.

When he became Vice President of Russia after the elections in 1991, Rutskoi managed to cheat not only his friends the Communist deputies, but even Boris Yeltsin. By spring of 1992, the Communists decided that the right moment had come, and they doggedly started attacking the supporters of democracy and market reforms in Russia. When I heard incoherent, hysterical statements from the mustachioed pilot attacking reforms, I couldn’t get rid of the thought that the “Evil One” had appeared in Russia.

Every day they showed a different demagogue on TV, the specialist in Marxism, Ruslan Khasbulatov. His unnaturally glittering eyes gave away his addiction to drugs, and I felt disgust and great alarm when I watched him. I saw that no moral barriers existed for this person. Looking straight into the television camera, he could assure people that he was more Russian than any of them. The only little problem was that he was a Chechen, according to his passport. He was fishing for compliments which non-Russian citizens would find insulting: “You don’t say so, Ruslan Ivanovich! You don’t look like a member of a national minority at all.” Unfortunately, all the Bolsheviks, like the Fascists, are the same – they are “international.” I felt almost sick listening to the speeches of the frenzied Communists. I clearly saw that they were preparing for a new civil war.

At that time, I felt uncomfortable distracting people by asking them to solve my problems. Inadvertently my case played out against the supporters of Boris Yeltsin, because a lot of people saw not the plots of the KGB in it, but an error in reckoning of the modern reformers. To be honest, if I hadn’t prudently linked my fate to the ruling elite of that time, the idea of the Communists coming to power would have been even worse for me. While Yeltsin was at the helm, a hope still flickered under the pressure from the international community, especially from the democratic countries, that the authorities in Russia could listen to common sense and concede. However, if the Bolsheviks returned, it would undoubtedly mean many years in jail for me. I did my best trying to help the democratic forces hold up in this brutal struggle, emphasizing in my numerous interviews and articles published in Moscow, Bashkortstan, and Tatarstan, that the development of democracy in our country was a necessary condition for the fight against chemical weapons.

In the spring of 1993, a referendum was scheduled to take place on the people’s confidence in the policy of democratic and economic reforms in the country. At that time a broad range of ecological organizations in Udmurtiya, Chuvashiya, and the Saratov region were actively protesting the planned barbaric destruction of chemical weapons stockpiles in their regions. The local populations were very anxious about this prospect and felt that it meant that the authorities were unwilling to consider the interests of ordinary people.

The policy of the Presidential Conventional Committee for Problems of Biological and Chemical Weapons was provocative and played into the hands of the Communists. Under these circumstances, it was extraordinarily convenient from everyone’s point of view to fire General Anatoly Kuntsevich, the odious chairman of that committee, in disgrace. Then the people from the affected regions could decide to vote for the policy of President Yeltsin, because they would see this gesture as a portent for the safe destruction of the chemical weapons stockpiles. I expressed this idea to the democratic leaders in the RF Supreme Soviet, Sergei Yushenkov and Valery Menshikov. Unfortunately, they couldn’t or didn’t want to take resolute action.