From the WSJ Opinion Archives
FROM THE ARCHIVES (Editor's note: This article was first published in The Wall Street Journal, Feb. 16, 2000.)
Deep in the gray caverns of Russian bureaucracy, there is an army general who holds a key to the future relationship between the Kremlin and the West. Yuri Tikhonovich Kalinin is director of a state-controlled pharmaceutical agency that today produces vaccines and medical equipment. Less than a decade ago, his agency, known as Biopreparat, had a less savory function. It produced the world's most formidable stockpile of bacteria and viruses earmarked for biological warfare. Biopreparat's past continues to haunt its present.
When Gen. Kalinin ran Biopreparat during its heyday in the 1980s and early 1990s, he was an accomplished master of subterfuge. He built an empire of 40 laboratories and production facilities around the Soviet Union that employed thousands of scientists and technicians, while assuring the West that no such program existed. Gen. Kalinin's continued management of the organization has therefore raised awkward questions for those American officials and scientists willing to take Russia at its word that it has abandoned its biological-warfare ambitions.
Now the general's lingering presence has become even more troublesome. Last month he replaced Vladimir Zavyalov, the respected civilian director of a Biopreparat-affiliated research institute in the Moscow region, with a military scientist. Mr. Zavyalov's sacking, for an alleged security infraction, was a slap in the face to American and European donors who thought they were funding the institute's conversion to peaceful research under civilian control.
Since former spy chief Vladimir Putin became acting president a month ago, uncertainty has grown about the direction in which he will take Russia. Gen. Kalinin's Biopreparat may thus be a good place to examine the growing influence of the Russian military-industrial complex on national politics--and Moscow's willingness to accept the Western arms-control agenda.
In the field of bioweaponry, the record is not encouraging. In 1992 President Boris Yeltsin announced that the massive Soviet investment in biological warfare--which reached $1 billion in 1990--had ceased. He promised to open for Western inspection the secret military installations where anthrax, smallpox and other elements of the Soviet biological arsenal had been stored by the ton, and to close down the labs whose research aimed at developing advanced genetically modified weapons.
Moscow has indeed shut down several large assembly lines for weapons, and dozens of Biopreparat production installations have been converted to pesticide plants or civilian biotechnology facilities. But the military plants are still off-limits to outsiders, and Mr. Yeltsin's pledge of transparency seems to have faded along with the post-Cold War glow of Russian-U.S. partnership.
Who is this mysterious general? Gen. Kalinin, a slim, elegant man in his early 60s, is a veteran of the rough-and-tumble world of Russian bureaucratic politics. He assumed control of the biological research program in 1979, following a successful career as an army engineer in the Soviet chemical-weapons directorate. He has steered Biopreparat through a succession of crises, the gravest of which was the collapse of the Soviet Union, when the agency was shuffled into the Ministry of Health and seemed all but moribund. The general not only managed to keep his post but expanded his authority in the murky network of ex-communist apparatchiks, military officers and security officials who exercised influence in the new Russia.
As one indication of just how powerful this network is, Gen. Kalinin retains his active military ranking even though he has passed the official retirement age of 60 for Russian officers. Thus he shuns even the appearance of civilian control over what is supposed to be a purely civilian state enterprise.
Gen. Kalinin is not the only former biowar military official with clout in Moscow. Gen. Valentin Yevstigneyev, former head of the Soviet army's 15th Directorate (the military wing of the bioweapons program), is now deputy chief of Russia's Radiological, Chemical and Biological Defense Directorate. Can such leopards change their spots?
Nevertheless, he continues to gloss over Biopreparat's links with its former military sponsors. Russian scientists familiar with the agency say privately that secret defense contracts still account for a significant component of Biopreparat research. It is also now clear that part of the old biological war machine remains in place. Certain dual-purpose production equipment has not been destroyed. Neither have the top-secret instructions for making weapons from seed stock; these "recipes" are stored on microfilm in secret facilities near Moscow.
The West will have good reason to doubt Moscow's good intentions until Gen. Kalinin and his superiors give a full accounting of their activities. Late last year, Russian officials provided the first detailed description of the Soviet chemical warfare program, as part of a request for $100 million in U.S. aid to decommission 10 remaining plants that produced VX and sarin gas. If Mr. Putin is searching for a way to reassure the West about his intentions, he could do worse than lift the veil of silence that envelops the elusive Gen. Kalinin.
Mr. Alibek, deputy chief of Biopreparat from 1988 to 1992, is now chief scientist at Hadron Inc. in Virginia. Mr. Handelman is co-author with Mr. Alibek of "Biohazard" (Random House, 1999), an account of the Soviet biological weapons program.
Is Russia Still Preparing for Bio-Warfare?
Moscow won't supply verification that the programs have shut down.
BY KEN ALIBEK AND STEPHEN HANDELMAN
Monday, February 24, 2003 12:01 a.m. EST
