Vladimir Pasechnik

Defector who told the West of Soviet plans for biological warfare

The London Times
November 30, 2001

The defection to Britain in 1989 of Vladimir Pasechnik revealed to the West for the first time the colossal scale of the Soviet Union's clandestine biological warfare programme. His relevations about the scale of the Soviet Union's production of such biological agents as anthrax, plagues, tularaemia and smallpox provided an inside account of one of the best kept secrets of the Cold War.

It was not until Boris Yeltsin became President of Russia that the illegal programme was acknowledged and an assurance that it had already been ended made. A second defector from the programme, K.B. Alibekov, who went to the U.S. in 1992, told his interlocutors that it was Pasechnik's revelations that had prompted Mikhail Gorbachev to take that decision.

Vladimir Artemovich Pasechnik was born in 1937 in Stalingrad and he grew up after the war in Leningrad, where he read physics at the Polytechnic Institute and went on to complete a PhD at the Institute of High Molecular Compounds.

In 1974, at the age of 37, he was appointed director of the newly created Institute of Ultra Pure biochemical Preparations, part of the Biopreparat, the chief directorate of biological preparations. Although at that time he understood the work to be entirely on civil projects, his supicisions were aroused when military biological warfare officers were posted to the facility. It soon became clear to him that Biopreparat was a cover for a vast biological warfare programme.

He at first continued with the work on the basis that it was necessary to keep pace with similar developments in the U.S. When this ceased to be plausible he attempted to move the work of his institute on to genuine medical-related areas of research. But the authorities refused to allow him to test a new compound developed as an anti-cancer drug. Instead it was used to increase to potency of plague.

By this time Pasechnik was determined to sabotage the programme by taking his information to the West. Since his duties in another post he held - that of general manager of the scientific production organisation, Pharmpribor - required him to travel to France, he took the opportunity to give his KGB minder the slip and present himself at the British Embassy in Paris.

He ws whisked to London and spent many months being intensively debriefed. Thereafter he worked for ten years at the Department of Health's Centre for Applied Microbiology Research before forming his own company Regma Biotechnics to work on therapies for cancer, neurological diseases, tuberculosis and other infectious diseases.

In the last few weeks of his life he had put his research on anthrax at the disposal of the Government, in the light of the threat from bioterrorism.

Pasechnik is survived by his wife Natasha, and by two sons and a stepdaughter, who were eventually able to join him in Britain.

Vladimir Pasechnik, biophysicist, was born on October 12, 1937. He died of a stroke on November 21, 2001, aged 64.

Copyright 2001 Times Newspapers Ltd.

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