I tried to explain the real situation and sent Director Petrunin an official report, but there was no logic working in the system. There was a real threat that I would lose my job, on the pretext that I had ruined the State Plan for securing the military chemical complex. I don’t think that Petrunin, Guskov and the others were so stupid that they did not to understand the elementary scientific realities. It was trap set against me.
My young senior scientist Vladimir Buzaev came up with a plan to write a fictitious method, in order to placate the bosses, but I categorically refused to accept this machination, because it was impossible for me to cooperate in the destruction of my scientific integrity and personal honor. “That’s fine,” he replied. “You’ll see how they ruin you.” He was right. Petrunin called a meeting exactly two months later in late December 1988, when I sent my report to the Directorate of GOSNIIOKhT that my department couldn’t fulfill its order.
Right at the beginning, Guskov declared that I had ruined such an important governmental order on the protection our defense capabilities, so our leadership right now was in a very bad situation. There would be severe consequences for all of GOSNIIOKhT.
Deputy Director Aleksander Martynov exploded in response: “Didn’t I ask you not to appoint Mirzayanov as the chief of Foreign Technical Counterintelligence Department? You didn’t listen to me so you are picking up the harvest!”
Compared with Guskov and Martynov, Director Petrunin knew the real situation with my assignment. He was changing colors – getting red and white without any verbal reaction. Then he asked me how long it would take me to develop this method. I answered that if the entire global scientific community couldn’t do that then there would be no time period for it at all. On that note, Petrunin closed the meeting. My assistants and many people were sure that swift retaliation would come, but nothing like that happened. Nevertheless I clearly understood that I was not their man – someone who could play their games, joining in the cheating and manipulations. For them I was the ultimate stranger…
Once in 1988, in the third year of Gorbachev’s Perestroika, Petrunin was lecturing to us “stupid” scientists at one of the introductory sessions, “Any Perestroika is purely the internal business of the country. You can’t forget for a minute that the nature of capitalism hasn’t changed, and imperialism, as before, is still our most evil enemy. That is why our task is to fortify the defense power of our country. Any other attitude plays into the hands of our enemies and is criminal.”
By that time there were already many democratically minded scientists and engineers at GOSNIIOKhT. Some of them formed an organization to support Yeltsin’s democrats, and they were regulars at meetings and demonstrations against the C.P.S.U. and the opponents of Perestroika. I was one of organizers of these meetings, and this pained the Directorate greatly. Although neither the department I headed nor I were directly subordinate to the KGB, we were considered to be in its domain to a certain extent. That is why my behavior was so provocative to the Chekists. Some well-wishers from the Directorate reproached me for my excessive idealism and my impractical approach to life. However, I had already made the decision to struggle against the reigning system, particularly against the military-chemical complex. It goes without saying that I didn’t even allow myself to think about neglecting the regime of secrecy at my job.
By that time I had managed to equip my department with modern imported laboratory instruments. There were some real scientific successes as well. Among them were the preservation of chemical agents intact in solid materials such as brick, concrete, sand and others, and the development of chromatomass-spectrometric methods of analysis of these agents, as well as my special methods of extraction of these agents from solid media.
Since I moved to the U.S., I have answered many questions posed by correspondents on subject of the Gulf War veterans.[76] Many of them are currently ill with an unknown disease, accompanied by symptoms consistent with poisoning by chemical agents. Official statements say that Iraq didn’t use the chemical weapons it possessed against the US Army. At the same time we know that Iraq had experience in using chemical weapons in the war against Iran and also against its own Kurdish citizens, shortly before the events in the Persian Gulf. I have no reason not to trust this version because the open use of chemical weapons against the well-equipped US Army could not have passed unnoticed.
Numerous UN inspections in the defeated territory of Iraq showed that there were no more stockpiles of chemical weapons. They stated that they were partially destroyed before the American intervention in Kuwait and the invasion of Iraq in 1991. Ultimately it seems clear that the American military chemists carelessly destroyed a large arsenal of Iraqi chemical weapons in the open air with crude explosions. Such a barbaric way of destroying chemical weapons is not effective, and a considerable fraction of the chemical agents would have remained intact. When chemical agents are exploded in this way, what remains mixes with solid particles (dust, sand, and products of combustion), and results in the strong contamination of the affected area. Adsorbed chemical agents can “live” on the surface of solid particles indefinitely, without changing their chemical composition. Moreover, highly toxic yet very stable pyrophosphonates are produced, at the high temperatures of the explosions of phosphoorganic agents. Given the climatic peculiarities of the Persian Gulf with its dry air, and its plentiful sand and dust which could be carried a long distance from the place of chemical destruction, we may presume that the American troops could have been exposed to the remnants of the “destroyed” chemical agents.
Finally, I would like to note that Human Rights Watch conducted an expedition in 1993 to the Kurdish village where the Iraqi regime had used sarin against peaceful inhabitants. There, they took some samples two years after the gas attack, and almost a year after samples had been taken from the graves of the victims. It was proven that micro-concentrations of sarin were found there. For the first time in the world and in the practice of scientific research, it was demonstrated that even such a relatively unstable chemical compound as O-isopropylmethyphosphonfluaridiate (sarin) could remain intact under the ground for a long time.[77]
Determination of adsorbed compounds is extraordinarily difficult, and it requires special laboratory research. I don’t know whether or not such analyses were conducted in the field laboratories of the US Army or what their results might have been. If an ion mobility spectrometer was used, which was the main field instrument of the US Army, it is probable that chemical agents were not discovered in solid micro-particles. This device is designated for the determination of chemical agents in the gaseous phase. It has a relatively low sensitivity and can’t record those small concentrations which don’t kill people, but still are hazardous to the health.
Additionally, this device has very low selectivity. That means it is difficult to determine which molecule it has finally registered. That is why it had to be preliminarily adjusted for registering known compounds, which appear some time after the device starts operating, if they are present in the analyzed air. Each compound has its characteristic time of display. If the device gives a signal with a characteristic time that doesn’t correspond to the time for which it is adjusted, the signal is discarded as interference.
I think that during the Persian Gulf conflict, these spectrometers were adjusted for detecting mustard gas, sarin, and VX gas because there was information that Iraq possessed these kinds of chemical agents. Unfortunately, the US intelligence didn’t take into consideration the fact that Iraq couldn’t produce the American agent VX gas. It is highly likely that Iraq had the Soviet agent Substance 33, which is analogous to VX gas, but has different physical and chemical properties. It is also important to point out that Substance 33 has a different characteristic time of display on an ion mobility spectrometer. This means that if American soldiers were exposed to Substance 33, chemical specialists from US intelligence agencies couldn’t register it in the air. I can’t claim with confidence that Iraq had Substance 33, but I do know that modern Soviet chemical weapons were delivered to the Middle East in the 1980s. A retired colonel who participated in this operation told me about it. It is not difficult to guess where these weapons could have been shipped to, especially if we take into consideration which friends the Soviet Union had in this region, at that time.
76
For instance, Howard T. Uhal, ex-Clemson University, Clemson, SC, USA, “Soviet Chemical Warfare Agents Novichok and Substance 33: Were They Used During the Persian Gulf War?” http://www.nbcdefence.net/nore/novi_1.htm