Iranians, Bioweapons in Mind, Lure Needy Ex-Soviet
Scientists
By JUDITH MILLER with WILLIAM J. BROAD
December 8, 1998
The New York Times
MOSCOW -- Iran is scouring the former Soviet Union to hire scientists
who once worked in laboratories tied to Moscow's vast germ warfare program
and has succeeded in recruiting some of them to take jobs in Teheran, according
to Russian scientists and American officials.
Iranian officials who report directly to the leadership of the Islamic
state have approached dozens of scientists who once made germ weapons,
offering as much as $5,000 a month to people who earn far less than that
a year in the increasingly chaotic Russian economy.
Russian scientists say that most of these entreaties have been rebuffed.
But they acknowledge that at least five of their colleagues have gone to
work in Iran in recent years. Others have accepted contracts that allow
them to continue living in Russia while conducting research for Tehran,
the scientists said.
In interviews in Russia and neighboring Kazakhstan, more than a dozen
former germ warriors reported contacts with Iran, and two said they had
been asked specifically to help Tehran make biological weapons. American
officials say that many more Russian scientists have revealed such contacts
and believe Iran is developing a germ arsenal.
Iran has powerful reasons to want such weapons and even expressed interest
in acquiring them a decade ago. Most Iranians believe that Iraq used biological,
as well as chemical, weapons in the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980's, and many
countries in the region, including Israel, Syria and Iraq, are suspected
of having germ arsenals.
Gholamhossein Dehghani, counselor to Iran's mission to the United Nations,
said that many foreign scientists worked in his country, but were doing
only peaceful research. He also stressed that Iran had ratified a 1972
international treaty banning germ warfare. He said he "categorically
rejected" the claim that Iran is hiring Russian biologists to work
on germ warfare. "We do not believe that having such weapons increases
our security."
Other Iranian officials have said Iran's research is being conducted
for purely peaceful purposes. But veterans of the Soviet and American germ
programs dismiss such claims.
"It's often hard to distinguish between a drug and a weapon, or
between offensive or defensive research," said Lev Sandakhchiev, the
director of the state laboratory known as Vector, which made deadly viruses
for weapons in Soviet times. "What counts is intent. And that complicates
trust."
American officials say Tehran's recruiting successes are troubling because
they suggest that the people who were crucial to the once-secret Soviet
germ weapons program, which at its height employed some 70,000 scientists
and technicians, are in danger of being lured away by anyone with enough
influence or cash, including rogue states and even terrorists.
An important figure in the Iranian buying network, Russian scientists
and western officials say, is Mehdi Rezayat, an English-speaking pharmacologist
in Tehran who works directly for Iranian President Mohammad Khatami as
a "scientific adviser," according to his business card, which
was provided by a Russian scientist.
Russians approached by the Iranians say the recruitment style alone
raises suspicions. Visiting delegations, they said, are sometimes led by
Iranian clerics, who wield ultimate power in Iran's theocracy, and other
nonscientists who are studiously ambiguous about what, precisely, they
want the Russian scientists to do.
Moreover, the Iranians on other occasions have shown particular interest
in learning about microbes that can be used in war to destroy or protect
crops, as well as genetic engineering techniques that are vital both to
legitimate research and to making deadly germs for which there may be no
antidotes.
American officials assert that Tehran's biowarfare program may have
already turned some germs and toxins into weapons, but they have scant
information on Iran's progress. There is direct evidence, the officials
said, that Russia has significantly improved Iran's missile and nuclear
capabilities, but the value of Russian assistance to biological programs
is less clear.
"Outside assistance is both important and difficult to prevent,
given the dual-use nature of the materials and equipment being sought,"
the CIA said recently in a report on Iran and its biological weapons program.
To counter recruiting efforts by Iranians and others, the United States
has quietly launched an effort to become the largest and best-funded competitor
for the allegiance of Russia's former germ warriors. Washington is sponsoring
scientist-to-scientist exchanges, joint research projects, and programs
to convert laboratories and institutes once associated with the Soviet
germ program to civilian use.
Starting with a modest base of less than $10 million dollars, the United
States expects to spend at least double that sum next year, trying to keep
Russian scientists gainfully and peaceably employed at home and the countering
efforts not only of Iran, but also of North Korea, Syria, and China to
lure biological talent and technology to their countries.
"This is a high-stakes game to win the hearts and minds of Russia's
best scientists, who are dangerous simply because of what they know,"
said Sen. Dick Lugar, R-Ind., who recently visited former Russian weapons
sites now engaged in peaceful research.
Russian scientists who have been courted by Iran describe what amounts
to a fairly predictable recruiting pattern. First, they say, there is a
call, sometimes from a Russian colleague, or a faxed letter from an Iranian
scientist that proposes a visit. Then there are initial discussions of
vague scientific cooperation and hints of large sums of money.
At subsequent sessions or in follow-up calls, letters and faxes, specific
invitations to visit Iran are issued, and the Iranians begin discussing
their needs more bluntly. Often, they said, the weapons question is raised
through hints and implication.
Shortly after the Persian Gulf war, Russian scientists said, Iran attempted
to recruit Russian biological talent from leading germ laboratories. The
effort largely failed, the scientists said, and Rezayat and other Iranian
agents turned their attention to smaller institutes.
In an interview, Gennadi Lepyoshkin, the former director of Stepnogorsk,
a sprawling germ weapons plant in Kazakhstan, said that he had been approached
in 1991 by Iranian middle men who presented themselves as private entrepreneurs
interested in establishing commercial contacts. "But their proposals
were such that we immediately declined and ceased contact with them,"
said Lepyoshkin, whose plant once specialized in developing and producing
anthrax weapons.
Scientists say the Iranians' 1997 visit to the All-Russian Institute
of Phytopathology in Golitsino, which is about 30 miles west of Moscow,
was typical of approaches to smaller institutes involved in the Soviet
germ program.
Under communism, the institute made pathogens that would kill crops,
thus starving their enemies. But since the collapse of the Soviet Union,
it has struggled to do purely peaceful research. In the past seven years,
its staff has dropped from 1200 to 276, and employees are paid only intermittently.
Despite the hard times, the institute has become a leader in pesticide
research and in transgenic plants, whose genes are manipulated to resist
certain herbicides, insects and diseases.
About a year ago, one of its scientists bumped into an Iranian while
visiting a Moscow-based laboratory. The man was Rezayat, and his business
card described him as the director of Tehran Medical Sciences University's
pharmacology department and also as a scientific adviser to the Office
of Scientific and Industrial Studies of Presidency.
"Rezayat seemed to have visited most labs and institutes in the
area," recalled the Russian scientist, who invited him to come to
Golitsino and meet his colleagues. Eventually, a five-man Iranian delegation
made the trip and met, among others, Yuri Spiridonov, a crop expert who
is now head of the herbicide department.
The Iranians expressed great interest in scientific exchanges between
Russia and Iran, according to Spiridonov.
He told the Iranians he had no objection in principle to such collaboration.
But the delegation made Spiridonov nervous. For one thing, he said, only
half of the Iranians were scientists. "The others just sat their with
their hands folded and said nothing," he said.
In addition, he said, they asked "troubling" questions about
substances related to biological warfare. Spiridonov declined to elaborate.
"These were not scientific questions," he recounted 18 months
later in an interview in that same office.
Wary of his guests' intentions and fearful of endangering his growing
ties to Western scientists and companies, Spiridonov declined invitations
to visit Tehran or to discuss his research in any detail. But three of
the institute's other scientists did visit Tehran, and invitations keep
coming -- including another last month.
Rezayat, reached by phone in Moscow on Sunday and asked about allegations
that he was helping to recruit Russian scientists for germ warfare, said
he could say nothing without Tehran's approval. He added that such claims
were both common and spurious. He promised to seek permission. On Monday,
his assistant said that Rezayat was no longer in Russia.
Western officials identify Rezayat as a key official in the biology
branch of an Iranian office that covertly shops for talent and technology
involving nuclear, chemical and biological weapons. It also has responsibilities
for public health.
That office, said Ahmad Hashim, a Middle East expert who is a consultant
for the U.S. government, is well known for its relentless pursuit of expertise
and technology in deadly weaponry, and not just in Russia.
One of the scientists Rezayat courted last year was Valery Lipkin, a
biochemist and deputy head of the Shemyakin and Ovchinnikov Institute.
The institute, built with Soviet Ministry of Defense funds, used to
do research on vaccines and biological toxins. Though it is struggling
financially, it still has valuable assets, including a laboratory where
advanced vaccines and other biological agents not designed for military
use are tested on animals.
In the summer of 1997, Lipkin met in the institute's branch in Pushchino,
about an hour outside of Moscow, with a six-man Iranian delegation that
included Rezayat.
The Iranians seemed to defer to a senior cleric in a black turban and
flowing robe, the Russians said.
His name was Mahmoud Hosseini and his business card in Russian identified
him as the general secretary of the Iranian Society's Office of Scientific-Technical
Cooperation with the Russian Federation, based in Tehran. The Iranian embassy
in Moscow said that Hosseini was a diplomat who held the title of first
secretary for Economic Affairs.
The meeting went well, Lipkin said in an interview at his sprawling
Moscow headquarters, though some things struck him as odd.
He said the mullah, though well educated, was not a scientist. And though
the Iranians spoke of possible exchanges of students and technology and
seemed willing to pay handsomely for them, the delegation was vague about
what it wanted. "One thing they repeatedly asked about," said
Sergei Feofanov, Lipkin's deputy, "was human genetic engineering."
In germ weaponry, the prospect of targeting human genes is the most
chilling possibility of all, military experts agree. In theory, genetic
engineering could produce ethnic weapons that kill or cripple selectively
by race and nationality. Such developments, if they are possible, would
be years away.
Over the next 18 months, the Iranians made three visits to the Shemyakin
institute, Lipkin said. But they never responded to his offer to train
Iranian students in Russia. Instead, they bombarded the institute with
invitations to younger researchers, asking them to come to Tehran for a
year or longer to teach genetic engineering and other advanced techniques.
There was also a personal invitation faxed to Lipkin from Abbas Keshavarz,
deputy chief of a research organization in Iran's Agriculture Ministry.
It invited him to visit Iran to discuss possible "future collaboration."
A copy was sent to Rezayat's office.
"I didn't want to discuss weapons," said Lipkin.
"So I kept pressing them, 'What will I do in Tehran? What is my
program?"' Lipkin said. "But they would not tell me. And that
made me nervous. For while they were cautious here, had I gone there, I
think they would have raised weapons and other inappropriate topics."
Lipkin said that before refusing the offer, he had sought advice from
a friend at the Russian Ministry of Science, who warned him that an Iranian
visa in Lipkin's Russian passport would not enhance his prospects of cooperation
with American scientists -- especially if the trip was sponsored by Rezayat.
Iran has succeeded in attracting several Russian biologists to Tehran,
said colleagues who, in recent interviews, named them. One is said to be
Valeri Bakayev, a senior biologist at the Institute of Medical Biotechnology
in Moscow who accepted a teaching post in Iran more than seven years ago,
one colleague said. A spokesman for the Moscow institute said she had no
idea where Bakayev had gone after leaving his post.
Another scientist said that Vladimir Rishinski, an expert at the Institute
of Molecular Biology, recently took a second leave-of-absence to go to
Iran for two months of teaching. His institute, which a former senior Soviet
official said conducted research in biological weapons, said he was "on
leave" for an "extended vacation," that did not involve
Iran. But his mother, reached by phone, said her son was in fact in Iran.
Another Russian scientist said that during a visit to Tehran last year
he encountered three former colleagues from the Institute of Biological
Protection in Moldova who had already been in Tehran for about six months.
They described the working conditions they had left behind in Moldova.
"They told me their institute had neither heat nor electricity,
never mind money for salaries or research," the scientist recalled.
"Russian scientists may not trust or like Iranians," he added.
"But these are not love matches. They are marriages of convenience,
and often, of necessity."
It is now known that the Soviet Union built the most pestilential biological
arsenal of all time. At the program's peak, Russian and Western experts
say, scientists at scores of sites studied some 50 biological agents and
prepared a dozen or so for war. Bombers and intercontinental missiles were
ready to disseminate hundreds of tons of smallpox, plague and anthrax,
enough to wipe out entire nations.
Many of these biological agents were developed and tested at Vector,
formally the State Research Center of Virology and Biotechnology, which
made deadly viruses in Siberia; the State Research Center for Applied Microbiology,
or Obolensk, near Moscow, where lethal bacteria were perfected and Stepnogorsk,
a sprawling germ factory in Kazakhstan, which specialized in deadly anthrax.
This proud scientific elite was part of a culture that had a deep historic
distrust of Islamic regimes, which threatened to undermine the Soviet empire.
Thus, any current Iranian successes are all the more striking.
Since the collapse of Soviet Communism, these scientific centers, as
well as far smaller ones, have seen their operating budgets slashed and
research money disappear. But institute directors say they have fought
to keep their top scientific talent intact, dismissing junior scientists
and technical workers instead.
Yet, even top scientists have been tempted to sell their expertise.
Igor Domaradskij, a founder of the main Soviet program to make germ
weapons, lives in a spacious apartment in a fashionable part of Moscow,
a reminder of the special privileges and status he once enjoyed as director
of the anti-plague institutes in Irkutsk and Rostov-on-Don and later, a
key figure at Obolensk.
But his doorbell consists of two wires that must be twisted together
to ring, and his preoccupation with earning a living is a theme of the
"The Troublemaker," his memoir of his years as a germ warrior.
Domaradskij, 73, said he lives off his pension and his savings. And
he is fortunate in having a computer and e-mail that connect him to scientists
outside Russia. But he disclosed in his book that he was so desperate for
work in 1992 that he offered his services to China, Russia's longtime rival,
as well as to the Kalmyk Republic inside Russia. Neither responded, he
said.
Russia's economic chaos, which worsened with the collapse last August
of the ruble, has taken a huge toll on nearly all of the institutes once
lavishly funded by the biological bureaucracy.
Overall, Obolensk, one of the top former centers, lost 54 percent of
its staff between 1990 and 1996 but only 28 percent of its top scientists,
according to the institute's figures.
Prospects may seem better almost anywhere else to the scientists at
institute after institute, who work wrapped in layers of sweaters in unheated
buildings and get no pay for months on end.
"Like everyone else, we're just trying to survive," said Eugeniy
A. Nepoklonov, 42, the director of Narvac, an animal vaccine company founded
in 1990 which employs some 50 scientists, many from the former weapons
program.
Narvac, with $3 million in total sales, is testing a vaccine against
hog cholera that would be Russia's first genetically-engineered animal
vaccine. The laboratory has great hopes for the product, if it can survive
Russia's economic turmoil.
The Russian government has sent mixed signals about the Iranian overtures.
In May of 1997, Moscow went so far as to sponsor a biotechnology trade
fair in Tehran. More than 100 leading biologists from Russian institutes
that once were part of the germ-warfare program, including Vector and Obolensk,
the two most prominent facilities, participated as guests of the Islamic
republic.
And President Boris Yeltsin has kept in senior civilian biotechnology
posts several key military figures from the old Soviet germ program, some
of whom are openly hostile to the growing cooperation between American
and Russian scientists.
Moscow has embraced the Clinton Administration's programs to forge closer
ties between American and Russian scientists even as it allows some institutes
to strike commercial deals with Iran.
Vector for example, has been permitted to sell diagnostic kits for hepatitis
to Iran. But the institute has refused Iranian requests for broader technological
cooperation or the exchange of dangerous strains, according to American
officials and Sandakhchiev, Vector's head.
"There is a very fine line between good and bad dealings,"
he said, "which is why I am concerned about the challenge of bioterrorism."
