The Pentagon's Brain (29 page)

Reis brought the idea to Neale Cosby at the IDA SIMNET Center. “I told Vic it was a great idea,” Colonel Cosby recalled in
2014. “I said, we can do it and we should do it.” Reverse simulation of the Battle of 73 Easting, he thought, would be “the ultimate after-action report.” There was much to learn from technology.

In a matter of days, a team from DARPA, led by Colonel Gary Bloedorn, flew to Iraq to interview soldiers who had fought in the battle. Bloedorn and the DARPA team heard varying accounts, read notes and radio transcripts, and listened to an audiotape made by a soldier in one of the command vehicles. The team traveled to the GPS gridline at 73 Easting, where they walked around the battlefield, recorded forensic evidence, and measured distances between U.S. firing positions and destroyed Iraqi vehicles. Then they returned to IDA to input data and reconstruct the battle down to fractions of seconds. The process took six months.

With a draft version complete, the reconstruction team traveled to Germany, where most of the battle’s participants were stationed. The DARPA team showed the soldiers the SIMNET version of the battle, took notes, and made final adjustments for accuracy. Back at IDA the team worked for another six months, then met with the key leaders of the battle one last time for a final review. They proved that “capturing live combat” after the fact could be done, says Cosby. Now it was time to take the show to Congress.

On May 21, 1992, members of the Senate Armed Services Committee were shown the DARPA simulation of the Battle of 73 Easting. Retired general Paul Gorman led the opening remarks. But before playing the SIMNET simulation, Gorman pointed to the simulator and introduced the machine.

“This somewhat daunting graphic apparatus before you is an instrument of war,” Gorman told the committee members, “a mechanism designed to enable humans to understand the complexity, the kinetics, the chaos of battle.” Gorman reminded his audience what General Patton once said, “that it is men, not machines, who fight and win wars.” But the world had changed, Gorman said, and now machines were there to help. In the past,
war stories were the only record of battle. Computer simulation had now changed that.

“I am here to urge [you] that all must recognize that simulation is fundamental to readiness for war,” Gorman said. With that, he played the twenty-three-minute simulation of the Battle of 73 Easting. Congress, Cosby recalled, was “wowed.” The military services would begin moving toward computer simulation as a primary training tool for war.

DARPA’s Assault Breaker concept had delivered results in the Gulf War, and at the Pentagon, renewed excitement was in the air. Ever since the Vietnam War, the Defense Department had struggled with a public perception of the military rooted in impotency and distrust. The Gulf War had changed that. The Pentagon was potent once again. The Gulf War was over fast, the death toll remarkably low: 390 Americans died, with 458 wounded in action. There were 510 casualties from all allied forces. President George H. W. Bush even triumphantly declared, “By God, we’ve licked the Vietnam Syndrome once and for all!”

But the optimism would not last long.

It was the early afternoon of October 3, 1993, in Mogadishu, Somalia, a lawless, famine-stricken city run by armed militias and warlords. What had begun as a peacekeeping mission ten months prior had devolved into a series of quick-action Special Forces operations. On this particular day, a joint special operations task force named Task Force Ranger, made up of elite U.S. military personnel including Army Rangers, Navy Seals, and Delta Force, embarked on a mission to capture two high-level Somali lieutenants working for the warlord and president-elect General Mohamed Farrah Aidid. A group of Aidid’s lieutenants were holed up in a two-story building downtown, not far from the Olympic Hotel.

It was fifteen minutes into the mission and everything was going according to plan. Ground forces had arrived at the target
location and were loading twenty-four captured Somali militants into convoy trucks when a series of deadly events began to unfold. A Black Hawk helicopter, call sign Super 61, was heading toward the target building with a plan in place to transport U.S. soldiers back to base, when suddenly a group of Somali militants scrambled onto a nearby rooftop, took aim at the helicopter, and fired a rocket-propelled grenade.

Norm Hooten, one of the Special Operations team leaders, watched in horror. The Black Hawk “took a direct hit toward the tail boom and it started a slow rotation” down, Hooten recalled. “It was a catastrophic impact.” Super 61 began spinning out of control. It crashed in the street below, killing both pilots on impact. In a videotape recording of the crash released by the Defense Department in 2013, a voice can be heard shouting over the military communications system, “We got a Black Hawk going down! We got a Black Hawk going down!”

A fifteen-man combat search and rescue team and an MH-6 Little Bird helicopter raced to the crash site to assist. But hundreds of angry Somalis were gathering in the surrounding streets, creating barricades made of burning tires and garbage, inhibiting access. A firefight ensued, trapping the Americans and pitting them against a violent mob. The situation grew dramatically worse when a second Black Hawk, call sign Super 64, was shot down. Another mob of Somalis charged to the second crash site, where they killed everyone except one of the pilots, Michael Durrant. Ranger and Delta Force teams took to the streets in an attempt to provide search and rescue, and cover to their trapped fellow soldiers. A chaotic, deadly battle ensued, lasting all through the night and into the morning. By the time it was over, eighteen Americans, one Pakistani, and one Malaysian soldier were dead and eighty were injured. An unknown number of Somalis, estimated to be roughly three thousand, had been killed.

This was asymmetric warfare—a battle between two groups with radically different levels of military power. The superior military force, the United States, killed a far greater number of the opposition while its own losses were played out on television screens around the world. Videotaped images of mobs of Somalis dragging the semi-naked, bloodied bodies of the dead American pilots and soldiers through the streets were shocking.

It was a watershed moment and a turning point in modern U.S. military affairs. The might and morale of the United States military, made evident in the Gulf War, had been weakened. Every war planner, going back at least 2,500 years, knows better than to fight a battle in a crowded place. “The worst policy,” wrote Sun Tzu, “is to attack cities.” The battle of Mogadishu was not part of any plan. There was no rehearsal for what happened. U.S. forces were drawn into a hellish situation, and the result was more lives lost than in any other combat situation since Vietnam.

“The Americans were not supermen,” commented Somali clan leader Colonel Aden. “In these dusty streets, where combat was reduced to rifle against rifle, they could die as easily as any Somali.” Technologically advanced weaponry had been disabled by sticks, stones, AK-47s, and a few rocket-propelled grenades.

After the battle of Mogadishu, DARPA convened a senior working group (SWG) to analyze what had happened in Somalia and make recommendations for how the Pentagon could best prepare for future conflicts of a similar nature—situations called Military Operations Other Than War, or OOTW. The group, led by General Carl W. Stiner, former commander in chief of the U.S. Special Operations Command, focused on solutions that would require new technologies to be developed. The group involved itself in ten study sessions over two months and spent six months preparing a written report.

The opening lines read like a salvo. “The world is no longer
bipolar,” the Senior Working Group wrote. “The post–Cold War strategic environment is ill-defined, dynamic and unstable.” During the Cold War, America knew who the enemy was. Not so anymore. Terrorist organizations, paramilitary groups, and militia were destined to emerge from multiple chaotic urban environments around the globe. Third World instability, ideological and religious extremism, and intentional terrorism and narco-terrorism meant that the whole world was the new battlefield. In future military operations other than war, irregular enemy forces would include a “diverse range of adversaries equipped with an ever increasing array of sophisticated weapons,” including some that were atomic, chemical, and biological in design. The United States was not properly prepared to deal with these emerging new threats, the SWG warned. DARPA needed to refocus its attention on urban warfare. It needed to research and develop new weapons systems to deal with this threat, now growing across the Third World.

In one part of the report, the group listed dangerous insufficiencies that DARPA had to shore up at once: “Inadequate nuclear, BW, CW [biological weapon, chemical weapon] detection; inadequate underground bunker detection; limited secure, real-time command and control to lower-echelon units [i.e., getting the information to soldiers on the ground]; limited ISR [intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance] and dissemination; inadequate mine, booby trap and explosive detection capabilities; inadequate non-lethal capabilities [i.e., incapacitating agents]; inadequate modeling/simulation for training, rehearsal and operations; no voice recognition or language translation; inadequate ability to deal with sniper attacks.” The SWG proposed that DARPA accelerate work in all these areas and also increase efforts in robotics and drones, human tagging and tracking, and nonlethal weapons systems for crowd control.

DARPA had its work cut out. The agency had been leading military research and development for decades against a different enemy, one with an army of tanks and heavy weaponry. The new focus was
on urban warfare. What happened in Mogadishu was a cautionary tale. “Military operations that were of little consideration a decade ago are now of major concern,” the study group warned.

The following year, DARPA asked RAND to study OOTW and write an unclassified report. The RAND report was called “Combat in Hell: A Consideration of Constrained Urban Warfare.” It began with the prescient words: “Historical advice is consistent. Sun Tzu counseled that ‘the worst policy is to attack cities.’” Accordingly, avoid urban warfare.

O
n December 11, 1991, a mysterious forty-one-year-old Soviet scientist named Dr. Kanatjan Alibekov arrived in Washington, D.C., one of a thirteen-man Soviet delegation. The group was part of a trilateral mission that also involved scientists from the United States and Great Britain. The purpose of this visit was allegedly to allow each delegation to inspect the other countries’ military facilities that had, decades earlier, been involved in biological weapons programs. But really there was a lot more than just that going on. Back in 1972, the Biological Weapons Convention Treaty had made germ weapons illegal, and all three countries had pledged to renounce biological warfare. But recently American intelligence officers had discovered that the Soviets had not given up bioweapons work and instead had created a far more nefarious and frightening program than any military scientist in the Western world had imagined. This information was first learned two years earlier, in October 1989, and the Americans and the British had been puzzling out what to do about it ever since. This trilateral mission was a piece of that puzzle.

In December 1991 the Soviets did not know that American and British intelligence officers were aware of their covert bioweapons program, which was called Biopreparat. Nor did the Soviets realize that American intelligence officers knew that the mysterious Dr. Kanatjan Alibekov was deputy director of Biopreparat, meaning he was second in command of a program that involved roughly forty thousand employees, working in forty facilities, twelve of which were used solely for offensive biological weapons work.

That the Soviet delegation was in the United States at all was a highly sensitive issue. Secretary of Defense Cheney did not want the details made public, and to ensure secrecy, his office issued a press blackout around the mission. The only people outside the Defense Department cleared on the Soviet scientists’ whereabouts were individuals with the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID), who served as escorts.

The group traveled to Dugway Proving Grounds, in Utah, where deadly pathogens had once been tested in the open air, but whose Cold War–era buildings had since been abandoned. They traveled to Pine Bluffs Arsenal, in Arkansas, where the United States had once manufactured biological weapons on an industrial scale, but where there was now nothing left but weedy fields and rusting railroad tracks. They went to Fort Detrick, in Frederick, Maryland, the former locus of U.S. bioweapons research and development, where USAMRIID now had its headquarters.

Years later Dr. Alibekov would write a memoir, and in it he described the 1991 trip as one on which he was less interested in what he saw at the former weapons facilities than in the lifestyle of abundance that so many Americans seemed to enjoy. He regarded with wonderment “the well-paved highways, the well-stocked stores, and the luxurious homes where ordinary Americans lived.” Democracy, he concluded, offered more to its citizens than communism ever did.

The trip to America in 1991 was Dr. Alibekov’s first. He spoke not a word of English and had met just thirteen Westerners in his
lifetime, all members of this same trilateral mission who had visited the Soviet Union earlier that same year. During that visit, Dr. Alibekov had acted as one of the tour guides. The Soviets were producing germ weapons, and it was Alibekov’s job to make sure that the Western scientists were steered clear of any sights that might belie the Soviets’ illegal weapons work.

Born in Kazakhstan in 1950, Alibekov had trained as an infectious disease physician, specializing in microbiology and epidemiology. At the age of twenty-four, he joined the military faculty at the Tomsk Medical Institute in Siberia and began working inside what he later described as “a succession of secret laboratories and installations in some of the most remote corners of the Soviet Union.” With each job came financial privilege, which was unusual for a non-Russian. Kazakhs were generally considered second-class citizens during the Cold War. But Alibekov was a talented microbiologist and a hard worker, which served him well and paid off. By the 1990s, “with the combined salary of a senior bureaucrat and high-ranking military officer,” he wrote, “I earned as much as a Soviet government minister.”

As the tour of the American facilities was taking place, Russia was in a state of pandemonium. The Berlin Wall had come down two years earlier, but the red flag of the Soviet Union still flew over the Kremlin. The geopolitical landscape between the superpowers was in flux. “It wasn’t so clear the [Soviet leaders] weren’t going to re-form,” remembers Dr. Craig Fields, DARPA’s director at the time. “There was a lot of anxiety about the fact that they might re-form.” The two nations had been moving toward normalized relations, but for the Pentagon this was a time of great instability. While the world rejoiced over the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Defense Department had been coping with a myriad of national security unknowns. Would a unified Germany join NATO? How to handle troop reductions throughout Europe? What about all the nuclear weapons the Soviets possessed? The Soviet Union had
spent the past five decades building up its weapons of mass destruction, in a shoulder-to-shoulder arms race with the United States. Who, now, would control the Soviet arsenals of WMD? At any given moment the Russians had more than eleven thousand nuclear warheads aimed at carefully selected targets inside the United States, as well as an additional fifteen thousand nuclear warheads stored in facilities across the sprawling Russian countryside, including mobile systems fitted onto railway cars.

One person uniquely familiar with these kinds of questions, numbers, and threats was Lisa Bronson, the Pentagon official leading the delegation of Soviet scientists on their tour. Still in her thirties, Bronson was a lawyer and a disarmaments expert. As deputy director for multilateral negotiations with the Office of the Secretary of Defense, Bronson had helped conceive and design the visit by the Soviet team. She had also accompanied the U.S. and British scientists on their tour around Soviet facilities earlier in the year. She was one of the thirteen Westerners Dr. Alibekov had met before this trip. Now, with the facilities visited and the mission coming to a close, Lisa Bronson took the Russian scientists on a walking tour of the nation’s capital.

It was during this part of the trip that a fortuitous exchange of words between Dr. Alibekov and Lisa Bronson occurred. Alibekov recalled the conversation in his memoir. “At various stops along the way, she had challenged us about the Soviet biological weapons program,” he wrote. “Naturally, we denied we had one. But I admired her persistence.”

Standing on Pennsylvania Avenue, just down the road from the White House, one of Alibekov’s colleagues asked Bronson how much money an American scientist could earn in a year.

“That depends on your experience,” she answered. “A government scientist can make between fifty thousand and seventy thousand dollars, but a scientist in the private sector could earn up to two-hundred thousand dollars a year,” about $350,000 in 2015.

Alibekov was astonished. Throughout the trip he remained impressed by how much better everything was in America, from public infrastructure to personal living conditions. He thought of his own life in Moscow. How hard he worked and how little he had to show for it in comparison. And most of all how grim the future looked now that the wall was down. “At the time,” he wrote, “a top-level Russian scientist could make about one hundred dollars a month.” Emboldened, Alibekov decided to speak up. Through an interpreter he asked Bronson a question of his own.

“With my experience could I find a job here?” he asked.

Bronson gently told Dr. Alibekov that he would have to learn English first.

Through the translator, Alibekov thanked his Pentagon host. Then he made a joke. “Okay,” he said, “if I ever come here, I’ll ask for your help.”

Lisa Bronson just smiled.

“Everyone started to laugh,” Alibekov recalled, “including me.”

Dr. Kanatjan Alibekov returned to Moscow with the Soviet delegation. Just a few days later, on December 25, 1991, President Mikhail Gorbachev resigned. On New Year’s Eve, the red flag of the Soviet Union, with its iconic hammer and sickle beneath a gold star, was taken down from the flagpole at the Kremlin. The tricolored flag of the newly formed Russian Federation was raised in its place. The Soviet Union ceased to exist.

Two weeks later, Dr. Alibekov handed the director of Biopreparat, General Yury Kalinin, his resignation papers in Moscow. Then, using an intermediary, Alibekov reached out to Lisa Bronson to let her know that he wanted to defect to the United States. This was a military intelligence coup for the Pentagon. For two years now, all the intelligence on Biopreparat—including the revelation that it existed in the first place—had come from a single source, a former senior-level Soviet scientist named Vladimir Pasechnik,
now in British custody. The Pentagon wanted its own high-level defector. Soon they would have Dr. Kanatjan Alibekov.

As for Vladimir Pasechnik, his defection had come out of the blue. In October 1989 Pasechnik had been sent to France on an official business trip, to purchase laboratory equipment. Instead, he called the British embassy from a phone booth and said he was a Soviet germ warfare scientist who wanted to defect to England. British Secret Intelligence Service agents picked him up in a car, flew him to England, and took him to a safe house in the countryside.

The handler assigned to Pasechnik was a senior biological warfare specialist on Britain’s defense intelligence staff named Christopher Davis. Pasechnik stunned Davis with a legion of extraordinary facts. The fifty-one-year-old Pasechnik had worked under Dr. Alibekov in a Biopreparat facility in Leningrad called the Institute of Ultra-Pure Biological Preparations. As a senior scientist at Ultra-Pure, Pasechnik had made such significant contributions that he was given the honorary military title of general. At Biopreparat, scientists weaponized classic pathogens like anthrax, tularemia, and botulinum toxin, standard operating procedure in a bioweapons program. But at Ultra-Pure, scientists had been working to genetically modify pathogens so they were resistant to vaccines and antibiotics. Pasechnik told Davis that at Ultra-Pure, he had been assigned to work on a strategic antibiotic-resistant strain of the mother of all pathogens, bubonic plague.

The Soviets called their laboratory-engineered version of history’s most prolific killer Super Plague. In the thirteenth century, the bubonic plague killed off roughly every third man, woman, and child in Europe; but it lost its potency in the twentieth century, when scientists discovered that the antibiotic streptomycin was effective against the infectious disease. When Christopher Davis learned that the Soviets were developing a genetically modified, antibiotic-resistant strain of plague, he interpreted it to mean one thing. “You choose plague because you’re going to take out
the other person’s country,” Davis said. “Kill all the people, then move in and take over the land. Full stop. That’s what it is about.”

For months, Christopher Davis and an MI6 colleague spent long hours debriefing Pasechnik. The information was then shared with American intelligence counterparts. In the first month alone, Vladimir Pasechnik provided the British government with more information about the Soviet biological weapons program than all the British and American intelligence agencies combined had been able to piece together without him over a period of more than twenty-five years. The United States’ vast network of advanced sensor technology had proved useless in detecting biological weapons. Bioweapons can be engineered inside laboratories hidden in buildings or underground. Unlike work on missiles, which require launch tests from proving grounds that are easily observable from overhead satellites or aircraft, biological weapons work can continue for decades undetected. And at Biopreparat it did.

Despite hundreds of billions of dollars spent by U.S. military and intelligence agencies on high-tech reconnaissance and surveillance systems, on the ground, in the air, and in space, collecting SIGINT, MASINT, OSINT, GEOINT, and other forms of technology-based intelligence, a single human being had delivered so much that was unknown simply by opening his mouth. Pasechnik provided HUMINT, human intelligence.

“The fact that Vladimir [Pasechnik] defected was one of the key acts of the entire ending of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War,” says Davis. “It was the greatest breakthrough we ever had.” Once Davis briefed his U.S. counterparts on Pasechnik’s information, things moved quickly. The United States sent the Nobel Prize–winning microbiologist Dr. Joshua Lederberg to England on a secret mission to interview Pasechnik. Lederberg came home unnerved. That the Soviets were working on Super Plague was shocking. But Lederberg also learned that scientists at Biopreparat had been working to weaponize smallpox, which was
duplicitous. In the late 1970s the international health community, including doctors from the Soviet Union, had worked together on a worldwide effort to eradicate the killer virus. In 1980 the World Health Organization declared smallpox dead. That the Soviets would weaponize smallpox by the ton was particularly nefarious.

Lederberg confirmed for the Pentagon that Vladimir Pasechnik was credible, level-headed, and blessed with an impeccable memory. “He never, ever stretched things,” says Christopher Davis. Using classified CIA satellite data, including photographs going back decades, the Pentagon located, then confirmed, the multiple biological weapons facilities revealed in Pasechnik’s debriefings. Many of the key photographs were from ARPA satellites that had been sent aloft in the earliest days of the technology. With confirmation in place, it was now time to tell President George H. W. Bush about the Soviets’ prodigious, illegal biological weapons program.

The wall had been down for only a few months, and from the perspective of the Pentagon, it was a precarious time as far as international security was concerned. There was a growing worry that President Mikhail Gorbachev was losing control of the Russian military. With this in mind, in the winter of 1990, President Bush decided it was best to keep the Soviets’ biological weapons program a secret. To reveal it, Bush decided, would make Gorbachev appear weak. Gorbachev was being hailed internationally as a reformer. He needed credibility to keep moving his country out of a Cold War mentality and into the twentieth century. The world could not allow Russia to fall into chaos. The revelation of the Soviet bioweapons program could backfire. It needed to stay hidden, at least for now.