Later I confirmed that the ruling clique in the U.S.S.R. distinguished itself with its unparalleled hypocrisy, when it came to the problem of chemical weapons. On the list of information of state secrecy, (my “case” was later fabricated on this basis), there wasn’t even a single reference to Russian chemical weapons. That is, it was more secret than the “major secrets of the U.S.S.R”. The regime of secrecy in the military-chemical complex was organized precisely to make this hypocrisy and deceit possible. The regime of the “sharashka” allowed them to do this quite brazenly.
Clearly the system of the military-chemical complex was starting to decay. The construction of a large-scale plant in Novocheboksary, for the industrial production of the Substance 33, defied all possible logic. In 1974 it was brought fully on-line. Hundreds of millions of rubles were squandered on this weapon, which was useless, even from the point of view of Russian military specialists. This happened at a time when the U.S. had completely halted the production of chemical weapons.
There were a lot of pressing questions, which needed immediate answers. In particular, detailed studies of Substance 33 demonstrated its very low level of stability. Sometimes samples were taken from shells filled with Substance 33, which had been in storage for a couple of years. Tests of these samples showed that only about half of the agent was present. No one could explain this phenomenon, because the loss of activity was much greater than expected. After a year of investigating this, the source the problem was finally discovered. The factory workers, who were filling up the shells with the chemical agent, had decided not to waste the precious ethyl alcohol that was used for swabbing the holes of the shells to be filled. Instead, they started to use hydrochloric acid for this purpose, and it is a perfect activator of the decomposition of Substance 33.
At that time, the foremost scientists and chemists started developing some elements of political consciousness, as they were certainly influenced by the words and actions of Andrei Sakharov, Aleksander Solzhenitsyn, and other outstanding leaders in science and literature. But, we could only learn about them by listening to the Western “radio-voices”. Sometimes scientists abroad displayed real civic heroism by standing up for the truth, working in the cause of preserving peace. At that time, the deeds of Daniel Ellsberg[73] in the U.S. and Mordechai Vanunu[74] in Israel made an indelible impression on me and many people in the U.S.S.R.
In 1971 Daniel Ellsberg published the Pentagon Papers, 7000 pages of secret Pentagon documents about the Vietnam War, which the military did not want the American people to know about. The Soviet press presented this as some kind of power struggle within the American intelligence community. However, anyone familiar with our newspapers and their propaganda tricks could easily guess what had really happened. I understood that Ellsberg sacrificed himself in the name of civic truth, so that Americans could judge for themselves what the real face of President Nixon’s administration was. In accordance with American law, he was threatened with more than a hundred years of imprisonment. Nixon ordered the use of all possible secret illegal channels to investigate Ellsberg’s case, but the brave man received a fair deal after all. The judge got acquainted with the criminal case, and when he was certain that it violated the norms of the U.S. Constitution, he decided to terminate it immediately. President Nixon soon resigned from office, because he lost his base of support thanks to the Watergate scandal with its “dirty tricks”, and because of the Pentagon Papers. The case against Daniel Ellsberg was one of the supporting arguments during the impeachment of Nixon.
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.
73
Ellsberg is renowned for preparing and releasing the Pentagon Papers to the
74
In October 1986, Mordechai Vanunu, who had worked at the Dimona nuclear facility, told the