Date: 04/26/22
Author: Kent Moors, Ph.D.
As you have probably surmised from the recent Russian focus of the Classified Intelligence Brief Spy Tale series, events issuing after the invasion of Ukraine have prompted me to mull over a career in counterintelligence against Soviet/Russian equivalents and the time I spent living there.
When you reach my age, TV headlines have a way of returning you to other times. Especially when one happens to be carrying some heavy baggage. What is unfolding daily has prompted me to go back to the series of journals I kept during my Moscow stays, written in a personal code, and involving just about everything that I saw, heard, or experienced (see “Tale of a Child in a Moscow Underground,” Classified Intelligence Brief, April 6, 2022).
During those Moscow sojourns, I was introduced to unusual situations. Some of these had an impact on my reasons for being there – the overt academic appointment and the “other” intel assignment (see the installments beginning with “Setting Up Shop in Moscow,” Classified Intelligence Brief, May 12, 2021). Others arose in the inevitable miasma of living in a pressurized situation. But a few stood out as truly memorable.
Like the one that is the subject of this Spy Tale. I return to it because of a recent story in a Moscow newspaper, where some journalists are still trying to write as if there was something called a free press.
It is becoming more chillingly applicable as concerns over Russian chemical weapons use in Ukraine intensify.
Early this month, during the fog of a war initiated by a national leader’s warped reading of history, a report appeared briefly in a Moscow newspaper. I say briefly because the initial installment had promised subsequent entries that editors apparently rethought after an unexpected visit from the authorities.
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It addressed an attempt to revisit stories written decades earlier and to provide a promised update that is now unlikely to see the light of day.
That is because the shroud suppressing any critical press reaction to a center’s strained line on the Ukrainian invasion now extends beyond the war itself. Seems that the bludgeon of a 15-year jail sentence for telling it like it really is has a broader chilling effect.
The story in question revisited a sad commentary on a remnant of the Cold War. It had the earmarks of a tragedy, more so since it affected those who were truly innocent.
It also adversely impacted the prestige of the Russian nuclear arsenal, you know, the bombs Putin these days rattles against the West because his tanks can’t drive straight. All the more reason to deep six memories in favor of toeing the official propaganda. Even after three decades, the Kremlin still remembers a primary Soviet way of doing business. If in doubt, bury it.
The situation I have been recalling over the past several weeks emerged in those uncertain years following a collapse of the Soviet Union although the seeds of the tragedy preceded that fall. The tale begins with a rendition told to me by a Russian contact. He was serving on one of the disarmament teams charged with keeping weapons-grade nuclear material in check after the USSR ceased to exist. It centers in one of those tiny enclaves that dot the Russian tundra. My interest in what was happening began with this guy’s recollections but hardly ended there.
Koshelevo, then and now, is a small western Siberian village. It would have remained in total obscurity had it not been for the children. They were dying. Later it was learned that they had not been the first.
The “yellow babies” – as they were quickly called – began appearing in 1989. By early the following year, most of the newborns were severely jaundiced. By 1991, infant mortality had risen 90 percent in a single year. Almost 7 in 10 infants born in the district were showing damage to the central nervous system.
The authorities may have been preaching the “open door” of glasnost from then-President Mikhail Gorbachev on down. But their response was vintage Soviet. As with the aftermath of the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl, they said nothing.
The problem, on the other hand, would not go away. Similarly afflicted babies were born in other regions of the Soviet Union. Two areas were hard hit – the Altai Territory in Siberia and the Astrakhan Province in Bashkiria. Throughout 1991 and 1992, over 40 percent of newborns were affected in Altai. In one village of Astrakhan, 92 percent of children born in 1991 were “yellow,” and less than half of them survived.
So frantic was the Gorbachev government to hide the cause, they officially suggested that it was radiation poisoning. But the children were found in isolated areas far from the Chernobyl corridor or other nuclear facilities. Infants born after the 1986 disaster had shown other radiation complications but nothing like this.
By 1996, when I was picking up on this story, independent newspapers (Moscow used to have such vehicles), especially Nezavisimaya Gazeta, where providing information said to be leaked from a sealed central government Security Council report.
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The Kremlin had no comment. That was probably the clearest indication the information appearing in print was reliable. More damaging still was the conclusion that officials knew what was going on and did nothing.
Soviet weapons, and later Russian Federation attempts to destroy them, had done the killing. The report leaks chronicled these children as victims of both the Cold War and an abortive attempt to end it.
The isolated areas had been selected in the 1950’s for the testing of missiles. Decades later they would be the scene for the destruction of such delivery systems by a joint Russian-American team of specialists.
As early as 1990, Moscow had concluded the sickness came from the burning of rocket fuel, specifically the liquid rocket propellent heptyl. Rather than defending the young, Russian officials played dumb.
But after the events at Koshelevo, it was bound to come out. There had been American technicians there (I tracked down one of them) and they had joined Russian colleagues in questioning the environmental impact of destroying such weapons in the open. Unfortunately, there was a political clock ticking and elections in both countries to win.
Yet cases began attracting a wider audience. Doctors were seeing too many of these children and they were coming from the same rural areas. Still, government leaders turned their backs.
A few did try to act but were silenced. In 1995 and again in 1996 requests from the Ministry of Public Health to deal with the problem were denied on budgetary grounds. By the time I was putting all of this down in my journal, cases had been registered in 20 districts, with as many as 1,500 children severely sick.
Many who survived would suffer mental retardation, or permanent speech and motor impairment. Throughout, no responsibility was ever claimed and no damages admitted. Incredibly, the stonewalling tactics used by the “representatives of the people,” came back to haunt them.
The communist opposition at the time came up with a new ploy in defending Mother Russia. They openly charged that the “Western inspired” movement for START II treaty disarmament would harm the health of the people.
More weapons like the ones at Koshelevo would have to be destroyed. As one deputy at the time said from the floor of the Duma (the more powerful lower house of the Russian Parliament): “How can you trust tomorrow the same government which let your children die yesterday?”
Some even suggested that the Kremlin had to make public the locations of chemical weapons as well – as a public service!
Nobody in Moscow expected that one. The communists were demanding openness in government.
That is a shortcoming still evidenced today. Because openness remains in the eye of the beholder and accountability is usually an early casualty.
Dr. Kent Moors
This is an installment of Classified Intelligence Brief, your guide to what’s really happening behind the headlines… and how to profit from it. Dr. Kent Moors served the United States for 30 years as one of the most highly decorated intelligence operatives alive today (including THREE Presidential commendations).
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