The Pentagon's Brain: An Uncensored History of DARPA, America's Top-Secret Military Research Agency by Annie Jacobsen

Author:Annie Jacobsen [Jacobsen, Annie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History / Military / Biological & Chemical Warfare, History / Military / Weapons, History / Military / United States, History / Military / General
ISBN: 9780316349475
Google: D4EyrgEACAAJ
Publisher: Hachette Book Group USA
Published: 2015-09-22T20:35:11+00:00

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Biological Weapons

On December 11, 1991, a mysterious forty-one-year-old Soviet scientist named Dr. Kanatjan Alibekov arrived in Washington, D.C., one of a thirteen-man Soviet delegation. The group was part of a trilateral mission that also involved scientists from the United States and Great Britain. The purpose of this visit was allegedly to allow each delegation to inspect the other countries’ military facilities that had, decades earlier, been involved in biological weapons programs. But really there was a lot more than just that going on. Back in 1972, the Biological Weapons Convention Treaty had made germ weapons illegal, and all three countries had pledged to renounce biological warfare. But recently American intelligence officers had discovered that the Soviets had not given up bioweapons work and instead had created a far more nefarious and frightening program than any military scientist in the Western world had imagined. This information was first learned two years earlier, in October 1989, and the Americans and the British had been puzzling out what to do about it ever since. This trilateral mission was a piece of that puzzle.

In December 1991 the Soviets did not know that American and British intelligence officers were aware of their covert bioweapons program, which was called Biopreparat. Nor did the Soviets realize that American intelligence officers knew that the mysterious Dr. Kanatjan Alibekov was deputy director of Biopreparat, meaning he was second in command of a program that involved roughly forty thousand employees, working in forty facilities, twelve of which were used solely for offensive biological weapons work.

That the Soviet delegation was in the United States at all was a highly sensitive issue. Secretary of Defense Cheney did not want the details made public, and to ensure secrecy, his office issued a press blackout around the mission. The only people outside the Defense Department cleared on the Soviet scientists’ whereabouts were individuals with the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID), who served as escorts.

The group traveled to Dugway Proving Grounds, in Utah, where deadly pathogens had once been tested in the open air, but whose Cold War–era buildings had since been abandoned. They traveled to Pine Bluffs Arsenal, in Arkansas, where the United States had once manufactured biological weapons on an industrial scale, but where there was now nothing left but weedy fields and rusting railroad tracks. They went to Fort Detrick, in Frederick, Maryland, the former locus of U.S. bioweapons research and development, where USAMRIID now had its headquarters.

Years later Dr. Alibekov would write a memoir, and in it he described the 1991 trip as one on which he was less interested in what he saw at the former weapons facilities than in the lifestyle of abundance that so many Americans seemed to enjoy. He regarded with wonderment “the well-paved highways, the well-stocked stores, and the luxurious homes where ordinary Americans lived.” Democracy, he concluded, offered more to its citizens than communism ever did.

The trip to America in 1991 was Dr. Alibekov’s first. He spoke not a word

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