What Happened to Vladimir Alexandrov?

0:00Hey, it's Rund. Just a quick thing before we start. This is a special bonus episode of ThruLine. Every month, we make exclusive episodes just for our very special ThruLine Plus supporters that take listeners behind the scenes of our work. But this month, we thought we'd give everyone a chance to listen. If you're already a Plus supporter, thank you so much. It means a lot to us, and you got first access to this episode in your Plus feed. But if you're not a Plus supporter yet, we hope you'll consider joining. It's a great way to support NPR and public media. Go to plus.npr.org slash throughline to join now.

0:43Earlier this year, I worked with producer Christina Kim. Hey, Rund. On an episode about nuclear winter theory, which is the idea that if every world power that had nukes started to actually use them, the world would descend into nuclear winter. Think the end of the world a la the end of the dinosaurs.

1:08It was a theory popularized by the astrophysicist Carl Sagan and other scientists in the 1980s. Some credit the theory with helping to avert nuclear war at the height of the Cold War. A new consciousness is developing which sees the Earth as a single organism and recognizes that an organism at war with itself is doomed. Sagan was the scientist of the time, in large part because he hosted this public media show called Cosmos that made science accessible and, well, human. He was part scientist, part poet, and 100 % magnetic. We are one planet. You should check out the episode if you haven't already.

1:52But we're telling you all this because while Carl Sagan was bringing nuclear winter theory to U.S. audiences, he had a Soviet counterpart. Vladimir Alexandrov. Vladimir Alexandrov. He was handsome and young, and he spoke a decent amount of English and had a sort of a fluency that let him befriend many American scientists. This is Andrew Revkin. We interviewed him for the original episode because he wrote a big cover story for Science Digest magazine about nuclear winter theory in 1985. And that's when he told us that over the course of covering the nuclear winter story, something happened that the global scientific community couldn't explain.

2:34Not long after, my piece ran in March of 1985 in Science Digest magazine. And it was just a month or two later, I started getting emails and I think a call from some of the scientists I had interviewed saying that one of their Soviet colleagues appeared to have vanished. And this was Vladimir Alexandrov. At the height of his scientific career, Vladimir Alexandrov had disappeared.

3:06Ever since I heard this story, I haven't been able to stop thinking about it. Where did Alexandrov go? Why would he want to disappear? Or who might have wanted him gone? And so, for this month's ThruLine Plus episode, we're leaning into the infamous genre of true crime. Oh boy. Just kidding. We won't be recording ourselves in a car as we chase down a red herring lead. We don't have that kind of budget. But we will be bringing you the mystery of Vladimir Alexandrov with help from Andrew Refkin.

3:40Okay, so here's what we know. Alexandrov's specialty was atmospheric science, but he got on the nuclear winter train pretty quickly. He was sort of groomed to be the public face of this issue. At the time, Refkin wrote, quote,

4:17Pretty much the perfect guy to pair up with the charismatic Carl Sagan. I think Sagan recognized the value of Alexandrov as a public voice from that side of the question. Sagan and Alexandrov got together to spread the word that it would be best for the whole world if the U.S. and the Soviet Union didn't use their nukes to blow each other up. He was already kind of on this world tour, often along with Carl Sagan and or others, to try to beat the drama of disarmament, and that nuclear winter demonstrated that nuclear war was unwinnable. Alexandrov went to the Vatican to talk to the Pope. He was on US TV, and he even...

4:59Testified in Congress. And all of this was possible, because at this time during the Cold War, science was both a means by which the two powers wanted to win, think arms race, but also the bridge. There was this sort of detente, glasnost effort to use science as a bridge between the Russians and the United States. Aleksandrov, he was part of that. As part of this exchange, Aleksandrov spent a lot of time in the U.S. with American scientists. They were congenial friends of his. He had spent enough time in the United States that he had an Oregon driver's license. This is a Soviet scientist in the early 80s.

5:41Aleksandrov was a public figure, the Soviet Carl Sagan, friend to American scientists. And no one could have predicted that he would simply disappear on a work trip to Spain. But that's exactly what happened. Aleksandrov traveled to Spain in March 1985 to attend a conference in Cordoba. He was speaking at a nuclear free zone meeting. It was mayors from nuclear cities around the world that wanted to declare that we won't house nuclear weapons here. we won't support nuclear war. So nothing too out of the ordinary for Alexandrov. He's doing his thing, spreading the word about disarmament. But from the start of his trip to Spain, something had seemed off.

6:23According to the timeline Revkin pieced together through his reporting, Alexandrov arrived in Madrid. And even though there's a Spanish chauffeur waiting for him, he's escorted immediately from the airport to the Soviet embassy by embassy staff. After about half an hour, Alexandrov emerged and immediately asked the Spanish driver, who was waiting nearby, to take him to a bar. Any bar. He was very distraught. Alexandrov got drunk and spent the five-hour car ride to Córdoba, where the conference was taking place, alternating between sleeping and getting sick. That night, after arriving and getting set up in his room, he goes out.

7:02He was seen drinking a lot. and is found by Spanish police lying in the street unconscious. His friends later tell Refkin, this is not like Alexandrov. I've tossed a few vodkas down with him on occasion, but he certainly was not a heavy drinker. Bob Sess, atmospheric scientist at the State University of New York, Stony Brook. He's drunk throughout the three days of the conference. He refuses to talk to the press. The Spanish newspaper El País writes, Quote, no one saw him until Sunday morning when he turned up at the conference headquarters in a state of apparent inebriation. And by Sunday, the conference is over.

7:42His original Spanish driver plus an additional driver for support are tasked with taking Alexandrov back to Madrid. According to the driver, Alexandrov is like, airport, airport, airport. And the driver's like, sí, claro. But really, no. The folks from Córdoba have told the driver to take him back to the Soviet embassy. Okay, and here's where the details get lost in contradictions. This is what we know based on reporting Andrew Rufkin did shortly after Alexandrov disappeared. Alexandrov reportedly starts to act violently in the car. The drivers are then asked to take him to Hotel Apartamento Sabana.

8:20The drivers refuse. There are reports of him being bundled into a van. Some say he's put into a van by embassy officials and dropped off at the hotel. According to the receptionist, who was not on duty at the time Alexandrov arrived, but whose friend was. Alexandrov was not drunk or disheveled and was given a room key. Okay, so important note here. Several sources, including some with connections to intelligence, told Revkin that at the time, Hotel Havana had a close relationship with the Soviet embassy. So anything the hotel employees told him needed to be taken with a grain of salt. So then, again, according to the receptionist at that hotel, Alexandrov left the hotel and did not spend the night there.

9:06The next day, when representatives from the Soviet embassy came, he wasn't there. So they took his belongings, paid his bill, and left. And that's where the case ends. Since that night, Alexandrov hasn't been seen ever again. There were a lot of questions, but... There's no body. At the time, it all seemed a bit hush-hush. The Spanish authorities and press are not reporting that he's missing. In fact, it's Alexandrov's American scientist friends that start to ring the alarm. And they actually call up Andrew Refkin. And say... We need help. Can you help us find him? Andrew started digging into it.

9:49Where was Vladimir Alexandrov? There was tons of information that I pulled together. You know, I had many different lines of evidence leading to why he might have vanished, but it all kind of ended up murky. There were a lot of questions and ideas of what exactly had happened. There are theories that Cuban operatives in Spain had maybe been too heavy-handed. There was the idea that Cuban security guards at the Soviet embassy roughed him up too much. Or, as his friends hoped, that he had simply defected from the Soviet Union and was starting a new life elsewhere. Who knows? Maybe he'll have a happy ending and we'll find him on a beach in Greece with a girlfriend.

10:36But his friends, like American scientist Bob Chevron, weren't optimistic. My gut feeling? I think I'm fairly safe in saying we will never hear from him again or see him again. Everything leads to him being killed for reasons that can only be examined and not nailed down firmly without someone in the Soviet Union, someone in Russia, coming out with a clear basis for information. The prevailing theory is that Alexandrov was killed. But by who and why? Without more information from Russia, it's hard to piece it all together, according to Andrew Refkin. But there is some information that's come to light that helps us understand what could have been a possible motive.

11:29I do think some of that relates to some of the questions about whether he was a spy for us or a spy for them in terms of technology access. Was he a spy, a double agent? And this, you know, there was a telling moment late in his life, just before he vanished, actually, when the visa he was granted for his last visit to the United States was marked, he should have no access to supercomputers. So someone within the United States government was starting to get concerned about his level of access to technology here. There are many, I can go on and on about why that is unlikely to have been a real issue.

12:13But it certainly was seen to be an issue by the State Department. Revkin can't confirm one way or another. But he knows that the U.S. government was keeping close tabs on Alexandrov. They were tracking him very carefully because of his access to American supercomputing technology in the 80s and late 70s. The U.S. State Department limited how much Alexandrov knew about the USA's supercomputers. And they were well aware that the Soviet government had supported his role as the Soviet face of nuclear winter theory. He was put forward by others within the Soviet science apparatus to direct his attention to nuclear winter.

12:53Had the U.S. decided he knew too much? Or had the Soviet Union feared they'd lost him to the West, especially the more he promoted nuclear winter theory? Was he caught sharing information to one side or both sides? Or had he simply been the victim of professional rivalry or a mental breakdown from the pressures of being such a prominent scientist? In the end, there's always more questions than answers. Andrew Revgren tried as best as he could to piece it together in 1986, a year after Alexandrov first went missing. He didn't provide anything conclusive, but some people in power did think he tipped the scales.

13:33When my story on the disappearance of Vladimir Alexandrov ran, there was an article in the Viteranya Gazeta, a Soviet publication. They thought that my implications in my article on Alexandrov, that he had been kidnapped and perhaps murdered or accidentally killed by Russian operatives, they didn't like that very much. Today, we still don't know what happened to Vladimir Alexandrov. Andrew Refkin is still thinking about it. He's currently working with a British documentary team trying to find answers to understand how and why the Soviets' leading scientists on nuclear winter theory vanished and was never found.

14:18Okay, that concludes this bonus episode of ThruLine+. If you're already a Plus supporter, thank you. And if you aren't yet, we hope you'll consider joining for exclusive content just like this. It's a great way to support NPR, public media, and of course, ThruLine. Go to plus.npr.org slash ThruLine to join now. And thank you.