Then this nightmare began.
I was feeling crazy. I was cursing my whole life. Probably even my love for Gale, who later became my wife, was not enough to calm me. I told her I probably had to leave the United States of America immediately. It had become a disgusting country, where the KGB was celebrating power. Only naïve people could believe that the spy Aldrich Ames was the only single agent working for the Soviets. Certainly his followers were trying to prevent anyone from helping the United States understand about the Russian “Novichok” program.
When they were negotiating for my assistance with these problems, they asked me to take a lie detector test. It was quite strange that I had to go through these procedures, when they supposedly wanted to get information about a whole new generation of the most deadly chemical weapons ever produced. To reconstruct any chemical agent, would probably have cost no more than a few thousand dollars. But, I think these people already knew that. Afterwards they tried to explain to me that I could devastate America financially (with misinformation), as someone had before.
I had already heard about this polygraph machine and was very curious about it. When I came into the room at the Nassau Inn, and I saw this equipment, there were no words to express my disappointment. It was so primitive and had nothing to do with my scientific background. Mechanically, I asked if Ames had passed his polygraph tests on this kind of equipment. They replied “Yes, but we have improved it since. Right now it is a very reliable machine.” Certainly it was reliable enough to produce an entirely questionable result, which could be used to compromise and control me later on.
I am still asking myself why all this happened to me, and so I am trying to put my past into some order with this story. I am sure of this though. Many people in power, both in Russia and in the US, do not want you to know about my story.
CHAPTER 2
My Background
When I try to understand what inspired me at the beginning of the 1990s to publish articles about Russian chemical weapons and the secrets of the military-industrial complex, which drastically changed my whole life, I inevitably come to the conclusion that there was nothing accidental about this. Undoubtedly many people asked, “What did this scientist – this chemist need? Surely, he lived a good life under that regime.” Were my actions an impulsive emotional outburst and recklessness?
Not at all. I look back at my life and I see that the whole chain of events in the history of my country and my people made me challenge the lies that littered the state. I became completely entwined in the fate of the country and my people….
I come from a family of village teachers. My father was born in 1902. He was the son of the village mullah, Mirzazhan, from the Kazakov clan. His grandfather and great grandfather were also mullahs, according to the archival documents. Legend has it that the Kazakovs are descendants of the Orenburg Tatars. Some members of his kin were engaged in trade, and others became Muslim clergymen. We know that one of the Kazakovs built a mosque in Kazan which was turned into a warehouse during Soviet times, and in 1975 it was demolished.
Although Muslims had no last names before the revolution, the Cossack “kushamat” (a peculiar nickname that was often added to one’s name in Tatar villages) stuck with them after they participated in the rebellion of Emeliyan Pugachev, an Orenburg Cossack, against the Tsar.
My grandfather died after returning from a pilgrimage to Mecca when he was less than 30 years old. My father was only one year old at that time, and my grandmother Minyamal was left a widow with five young children; the eldest was only seven. Still, my father’s humble origins remained a blemish for him until his last days and hindered his education and career advancement. Before and a few years after the revolution, my father studied in the madrasseh, a Muslim religious school. Following the family tradition, he was preparing to become a mullah. I think many of my father’s actions could be attributed to his efforts to prove that your origins mean nothing, when it comes to loyalty to the new regime. He was ready to be faithful to it. My father became a staunch Communist. I’m not going to blame him or excuse him, because he had no choice. It was the only way for him to survive, because in every respect he was an enemy of the regime in power. At that time, it didn’t matter that my father grew up an orphan, practically in poverty. In 1916, his older brother, 22-year-old Fazliakhmet, perished on the German front of First World War.
My father’s ancestral roots made him an outsider. His mother came from the Valitov family, whom people considered to be members of the nobility. The Valitovs, on a par with the Russian gentry, enjoyed all the rights of land ownership and property. In return, they had to serve in the Tsar Guards, reporting for duty with their own horses and equipment. As we know, during the endless wars in Europe, the Tsarist military leaders ordered Bashkir cavalrymen to attack first, which often resulted in a change for the better for the Russians. However, many of our people perished and the male population of Bashkortstan began to dwindle away. All signs point to the fact that this was the deliberate policy of the Tsarist regime, which sacrificed their age-old enemies, the Tatars and the Bashkirs. Both groups realized how desperate their situation was, and they regularly rebelled against the Tsar. However, they lost every time, since the powers were not equal. I am not going to debate historical themes here – that is not the point of this book. However, a certain sojourn back into history is still necessary to understand my path to the truth.
Nowadays, there are people who idealize the Tsarist autocracy and long for the time when Great Russian chauvinism was in fact the state policy. However, historical facts are difficult to argue with, and they completely deflate any attempt to rehabilitate Russian expansionism, which resulted in so many deaths and hindered the development of non-Russian peoples, unfortunate enough to live near the Russians.[1]
You may judge for yourself. Before Ivan the Terrible seized Kazan in 1552, the population of the Tatars and Bashkirs equaled that of the Russians, and there were about 7 million of each. Four hundred years later, the population of Russians grew by 160 million, while that of Tatars and Bashkirs remained at close to seven million. The reader can draw his own conclusions regarding the scope of assimilation and purposeful genocide of Turkic-speaking peoples in Russia.
Our people were pulled down into slavery. The Russian Tsars almost returned the Tatar and Bashkir people to the Stone Age. They prohibited all crafts connected with iron working, so that the enslaved people couldn’t arm themselves and rise up against their oppressors. Moreover, Tatars and Bashkirs were forbidden to marry each other, so that these two kindred nations couldn’t unite and become a strong body capable of struggling with their common enemy, the Russian autocracy. These prohibitions were abolished only after the February Revolution of 1917. Nevertheless, we still live with the strong echoes of that colonial regime.
1
Geoffrey Hosking,