Lev Navrozov
Tuesday, Sept. 17, 2002

In 1992, President Boris Yeltsin (newly elected in Russia after the demise of Gorbachev's dictatorship) opened for international inspection the former Soviet countrywide project of development of biological superweapons.

Yet 20 years earlier, in 1972, when I had emigrated with my family from Soviet Russia and came to New York, I revealed this project to the editor of the New York Times Magazine (the New York Times Moscow correspondent Ray Anderson had requested the editor receive me). I proposed an article on the subject for the magazine. The editor, upon hearing me, probably took me for a madman.

Similar treatment must have been meted out by the Western mainstream media between 1972 and 1992 to everyone else with a message like mine: In those 20 years, neither the New York Times nor any other mainstream media outlet, as far as I could tell, gave anyone, whether staff, a "guest" or an outside contributor, a single chance to describe the stupendous Soviet bioweapons project.

Nor did the CIA, which treated me in 1972 the way the New York Times Magazine editor did, even mention the Soviet bioweapons project in its testimonies to Congress, whether in open or closed sessions.

My failure to persuade the New York Times magazine drastically reduced my own possibilities of warning the West. I believed that anyone who would reveal the Soviet secret of secrets would be assassinated by the KGB unless a major media outlet like the New York Times had made the revelation world-known, and then the KGB assassination would be useless or, indeed, harmful to the Soviet rulers as proof that the revelation was correct. Small "conservative" periodicals, like Commentary magazine, which published me, could not make my revelation world-known and thus assure my safety.

In 1979, a Soviet top secret germ-warfare laboratory near the Urals sprang a leak. The lab was in a city unmarked on the map, and even if all its personnel and all the population of the officially nonexistent city had perished, not a soul in the West would have known about it. But the winds wafted a current of air, carrying anthrax bacteria, to Sverdlovsk, a civilian city of close to 1 million, complete with an opera house. The resulting anthrax epidemic in such a large civilian city, which communicated with the rest of the world by telephone, telegraph and radio, was impossible to conceal.

On March 18, 1979, the U.S. State Department announced that it had "asked the USSR for an official explanation of what happened in Sverdlovsk." The official Soviet explanation was that the epidemic had been caused by tainted meat or by foot-and-mouth disease. With that peculiar will to be duped which has characterized the "democratic West" ever since its belief, up to 1938, in Hitler's peaceableness, the U.S. government accepted this explanation.

Almost 15 years later, in 1993, President Yeltsin gave a team of American and Russian pathologists access to all the evidence on the site, and the team established that the epidemic in Sverdlovsk had been caused by anthrax bacteria from a Soviet military germ laboratory. The Soviet city of Sverdlovsk had not suffered from tainted meat – it had been brushed by a Soviet bacteriological weapon, one of the experimental candidates as of 1979 for Superweapon No. 3.

But the Soviet answer was quietly filed by the State Department. Such is the unwillingness of the U.S. government to confront the danger, while in the case of a technologically backward midget country like Iraq, Saddam Hussein's efforts to reinforce his defense with "weapons of mass destruction" at the level of 1914 have been denounced as a global threat, and a valiant all-out U.S. attack on the villain has been called for.

That the dictators of large, powerful countries, whether Soviet Russia or post-1949 China, would develop post-nuclear weapons in their "quest for world domination," to use Kennedy's pre-1963 phrase, must have been obvious even from the general considerations. Now the Sverdlovsk "accident" of 1979 was the hard evidence, the smoking gun. But it was, incredibly, given the benefit of boundless doubt and soon forgotten.

Finally, in 1989, Vladimir Pasechnik, one of those in charge of Gorbachev's giant biological superweapons project, was sent abroad, allegedly for a scientific conference but actually to buy in the West some equipment the Soviet project was in need of but that Soviet industry could not as yet produce. Unfortunately for Gorbachev, he defected. The cause? A mid-life depression! The West could not dismiss his revelations, since he was living proof, a live exhibit, of the Soviet bioweapons archipelago.

However, as he defected, he applied not to the Western media but to the British Secret Intelligence Service and the CIA. His information was passed to Prime Minister Thatcher of Britain and President Bush of the United States, both of whom decided not to divulge it in order to continue to get on with their friend, dear Gorbie. Their representatives met dear Gorbie, and he denied the existence of that countrywide bioweapons archipelago from which Pasechnik had fled and which Yeltsin soon opened for international inspection.

Did Gorbachev's duplicity damage his prestige in the West? Not at all! In fact, about 10 years later, in 2001, on Oct. 15 at 9:45 p.m. (EST) Larry King, the nationally watched host of his CNN program, invited Gorbachev to discuss anthrax terrorism.

It is worth noting that already by 1985, when Gorbachev came to power, anthrax was no longer a candidate for Superweapon No. 3. According to oral and published recollections of participants in the project, in the 1970s one idea had been to pulverize anthrax dust so fine that it could float in air, into the trade winds passing over target territories such as the United States and Western Europe.

This idea was rejected, since the possibility of Western nuclear retaliation was not thereby eliminated. For example, while the anthrax-carrying trade winds might be able to kill every human being on the ground and on the high seas, U.S. bombers on duty in the air with nuclear weapons aboard would still be able to retaliate.

But, of course, Larry King did not invite Gorbachev to describe how the idea of killing all Westerners on the ground was found inadequate, since the Westerners in bombers high in the air or in submarines deep underwater would remain alive. Larry King invited Gorbachev as a Nobel Peace Prize laureate to express his indignation and other appropriate feelings in connection with the fact that two Americans (as of that date) had died as a result of some unknown person(s) mailing letters containing anthrax powder.

For a comparable farcical absurdity, one would have to imagine that Hitler had been overthrown in 1942, on the eve of the Final Solution, had come to the West, and had been induced in a TV interview to express his indignation and other noble feelings in connection with the hate murder of two American Jews.

This piece is a variation on one of the themes of my book in progress, Out of Moscow and Into New York: A Life in the Geostrategically Lobotomized West in the Age of Terrorism and Post-Nuclear Superweapons. Publishers: the 27-page Proposal and the first 130-page part of the book can be mailed to you if you apply to me (navlev@cloud9.net , tel. 001 718 796 6038).

Read more on this subject in related Hot Topics:

Bioterrorism

Russia

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