NOT ‘GOOD ENOUGH FOR GOVERNMENT WORK’: SENATE NEEDS TO HEAR ABOUT RUSSIAN CHEMICAL WEAPONS FROM RUSSIAN EXPERTS

(Washington, D.C.): Tomorrow afternoon the Senate
Foreign Relations Committee will take secret testimony
from senior Clinton Administration officials concerning
Russian violations of agreements concerning the
development and stockpiling of chemical and biological
weapons and its likely violation of the Chemical Weapons
Convention (CWC) now awaiting Senate advice and consent.
The Center for Security Policy has long urged the Senate
to give these issues close examination prior to acting on
the CWC⁽¹⁾; it
welcomes this hearing as the first step toward doing so.

Tomorrow’s hearing must, however, be followed
by at least one more session — a
hearing that should be held in an unclassified setting so
that the American people might have an opportunity to
learn first-hand about the facts in this area. The
witnesses for such a hearing should not be American
officials providing guesses and other intelligence
assessments about what Moscow is up to or conveying
assurances about Russian compliance tendered by President
Yeltsin in the course of last week’s summit.

Hear From the Real Authorities

Instead, testimony should be taken from
Russian scientists who have been directly involved in the
Kremlin’s ongoing chemical and biological warfare
programs. In particular, the Senate should ensure that it
hears from Vil Mirzayanov, an individual who —
like Andrei Sakharov — broke with his employers in the
old Soviet military-industrial complex to protest its
misdeeds and alert the West to the peril they represent.
Mr. Mirzayanov is the subject of a stunning profile by
Michael Waller published in the October 1994 editions of Reader’s
Digest. No responsible U.S. Senator could
read that article and not insist upon an opportunity to
discuss Russia’s frightening and ongoing efforts
to develop ever more effective, undetectable and deadly
chemical agents. And no Senator can responsibly consider
voting on the Chemical Weapons Convention without having,
at a minimum, read Mr. Mirzayanov’s story.

Fortunately, on 9 June 1994, the Foreign Relations
Committee’s ranking member, Sen. Jesse Helms
(R-NC) served notice — in the course of the one hearing
the Committee held with critics of the CWC — that he
would insist on just such a hearing. In response to
testimony on this point by the Center for Security
Policy’s director, Frank J. Gaffney, Jr., Sen. Helms
said:

“This hearing should not be the end of it,
base on what you have just said. And I thoroughly
agree with you on that. [Mr. Gaffney] made the
suggestion that we have a further hearing. And I
agree with that. I will formally request such a
meeting in writing, Mr. Chairman.”

Sen. Helm’s concerns — and those of other responsible
legislators — should only be amplified by three newly
released documents: a 202-page critique of the Chemical
Weapons Convention issued by the Senate Intelligence
Committee, which is properly alarming on the question of
the unverifiability of this agreement; href=”#N_2_”>⁽²⁾ a withering
12-page analysis of the Convention by the Senate
Republican Policy Committee; and an unclassified report
to Congress by the Clinton Administration which confirms
that it has “concerns” about the continuing
Russian work in the chemical and biological weapons
arenas, about the accuracy of Moscow’s representations
regarding such work and about the erroneous data supplied
concerning the former Soviet Union’s massive chemical and
biological weapons stockpiles.

The Bottom Line

The Center for Security Policy believes that tomorrow’s
hearing will represent an important test of the
conscientiousness of members of the Senate Foreign
Relations Committee: In the first place, will
they exhibit sufficient concern about their
responsibilities to provided informed advice and consent
to treaties even to attend that session? And,
more importantly, will they have the intellectual rigor
and honesty to insist, along with Senator Helms, that
people who really know what is going on with the Russian
chemical and biological weapons programs be called to
testify as well?

The Center notes that two leading Democratic members
of the Foreign Relations Committee — Sens. John
Kerry (MA) and Daniel Patrick Moynihan
(NY) — along with Sen. Bill Bradley
(D-NJ) previously expressed concerns in writing about Mr.
Mirzayanov’s fate when it appeared that he might be
subjected to brutal Stalinist “justice” for his
revelation of “state secrets.” It can
only be hoped that such constructive Senatorial
intervention will extend to hearing what Mr. Mirzayanov
has to say, not just to his safeguarding his right to say
it at home.

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1. The most recent example of this
effort is contained in the href=”index.jsp?section=papers&code=94-D_100at”>attached op.ed. article
by the Center’s director, Frank J. Gaffney, Jr.,
published in the 29 September 1994 Wall Street
Journal.

2. The Intelligence Committee
states, for example, that it “largely
accepts the Intelligence Community’s pessimistic
assessment of U.S. capability to detect and identify a
sophisticated and determined violation of the Convention,
especially on a small scale….It is likely that some
countries that ratify the CWC will seek to retain an
offensive chemical weapons capability. While it is
unlikely that they would do so by diverting declared CW
stocks, the covert stockpiling agent or munitions could
well occur.”