In 1989, one of the the Russian biological weapons program’s highest-ranking scientists defected to the West, Annie Jacobsen explains (in Biological War):
His name was Vladimir Pasechnik. The information he revealed, first to the British intelligence officer Dr. Christopher Davis, and later to counterproliferation officers at the CIA, changed everything about the biological sciences going forward.
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“In retrospect, it was one of the greatest intelligence failures of the Cold War,” says the CIA’s James Lawler, the former head of its Counterproliferation Division, Special Activities Unit.
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Before his defection to England, Vladimir Pasechnik had been working in Leningrad as the director of an organization called the Institute of Ultra Pure Biochemical Preparations when he experienced a crisis of conscience. “He realized he could no longer live with himself,” doing illegal biological weapons work, says Davis. Pasechnik decided that on his next trip outside the Soviet Union, he would turn himself over to Western authorities, reveal the inner workings of the Russian program, and confess his sins.
During a somewhat rare trip to France, to sign contracts with an equipment company, Pasechnik made his move. In Paris, he located the address for the Canadian embassy in the phone book and knocked on the front door. Inside, he told a diplomat that he was a Soviet scientist who worked at a highly classified weapons laboratory and that he needed to speak with someone urgently. That he wanted to defect to the West. The Canadians didn’t believe him and made him leave. Desperate but determined, Pasechnik called the British embassy from a pay phone. The British Secret Intelligence Service took him seriously. He was picked up in a car, then secreted away to the United Kingdom. A week later, he was in an unnamed building in London, sitting across the table from Dr. Davis, the top biological weapons expert with the British Defence Intelligence Staff at the time.
Pasechnik told Dr. Davis everything he knew. Among the revelations, Davis learned Pasechnik oversaw some 3,000 scientists and weapons engineers. That he had access to an unlimited budget, which allowed him to purchase equipment in the West and to recruit the best science staff he could find. That he and his various teams had made biological superweapons, and the means to deploy them. That they’d figured out how to modify cruise missiles to fly beneath U.S. radar systems, to disperse aerosolized clouds of plague and other pathogens over large populations, in a strategic biological weapons attack. That Pasechnik had personally figured out how to stabilize plague microbes for exactly this kind of radical, widespread dissemination.
“As he talked about plague, I became incredibly alarmed,” Davis tells us. He realized the stunning ramifications of what Pasechnik was telling him. “You do not choose plague as a battlefield weapon,” says Davis. “You chose plague because you’re going to take out the other person’s country. It’s a nuclear equivalent, except it’s cleaner. It leaves all the infrastructure intact. Full stop. That’s what it is about.”
Mass extermination.