Vadim Birstein - The Perversion of Knowledge

The execution of Zalus [a former guard of Leon Trotsky] was conducted through an MGB agent, who gave him a special chemical on February 13, 1953 [in Munich]. The chemical causes the death of a person in 10–12 days. After this Zalus got sick and died on March 4, in one of Munich’s hospitals. Using different sources it was found out that the poisoning of Zalus did not provoke the enemy’s suspicion. Doctors came to the conclusion that his death was a result of pneumonia. 127

In the 1950s–1960s, the results of experiments performed at Mairanovsky’s former lab, now Special Laboratory No. 12 of the OTU, were used for similar means in Germany. In 1957, Nikolai Khokhlov, a former KGB agent, became deathly ill while attending a convention in Frankfurt. Khokhlov defected in February 1954 after he had arrived in Germany with an order to kill Georgii Okolovich, chief of operations of the anti-Soviet émigré organization the Popular Labor Alliance of Russian Solidarists (NTS). 128This order had been approved by the Presidium of the USSR Communist Party Central Committee (a new name for the Politburo). The complete anti-NTS operation was ordered by Beria and continued to be important for the Politburo after Beria’s arrest and extermination. It was fulfilled under the personal supervision of the new head of the MVD Second Main Directorate, Aleksandr Panyushkin. 129Khokhlov was a member of the MVD Ninth Department, which succeeded Sudoplatov’s Special Bureau No. 1. During the time that Khokhlov was in Germany in 1954, another MVD/KGB team kidnapped and assassinated the NTS Berlin leader, Aleksandr Trushinovich.

Khokhlov was provided with a sophisticated execution weapon—an electrically operated gun with a silencer that fired cyanide-tipped bullets. It was concealed inside a cigarette packet. 130He received this gun from the head of the Operational Techniques Department, Colonel Khoteyev. This department was located in Kuchino, where Maironovsky’s laboratory had moved previously, and included his former lab. The weapon was created with the assistance of Naumov’s laboratory.

Instead of killing Okolovich, Khokhlov defected, as Christopher Andrew and Oleg Gordievsky later wrote in their investigation of the KGB, to “an initially skeptical CIA.” 131In 1957, it was discovered that Khokhlov had become ill from poisoning by radioactive thallium. 132In April 1955, after Khokhlov’s defection, “special actions” became the responsibility of the reorganized Thirteenth Department of the KGB First Directorate. 133Evidently, the KGB specialists from the former Ninth, now renamed Thirteenth, Department of the First Directorate, believed that this substance would not be detected during an autopsy. Due to radiation, the thallium would have already disintegrated. American doctors saved Khokhlov, but he became crippled. He wrote in his memoirs:

I… was an exhibit of the achievements of Soviet science. Totally bald, so disfigured by scars and spots that those who had known me did not at first recognize me, confined to a rigid diet, I was nevertheless also living proof that Soviet science, the science of killing, is not omnipotent. 134

The MVD/KGB was definitely embarrassed that the “traitor” Khokhlov who had refused to kill Okolovich remained alive. Even forty years later, in his memoirs, Sudoplatov described Khokhlov with irritation as an unstable and unreliable person who “claimed that he was poisoned at a cocktail party by the KGB in 1957 and that CIA doctors helped him survive the radioactive thallium used on him.” 135

In 1957, Lev Rebet and, in 1959, Stepan Bandera, both prominent Ukrainian emigrants, were killed in West Germany by another sophisticated weapon: a spray of prussic acid released by a noiseless “pistol.” 136The inhaled gas caused the contraction of blood vessels. The cause of Rebet’s death was officially listed as a heart attack. The killer, Bogdan Stashinsky, a member of the same KGB Thirteenth Department, was awarded the Order of the Red Banner in 1959 for these assassinations. However, Stashinsky defected to West Berlin in 1961, one day before the Berlin Wall was sealed. The details of the murders and the secret weapon became known because of Stashinsky’s confession. Apparently, there had been serious progress in the killing methods of the MGB since Mairanovsky’s time:

A metal tube about as thick as a finger and about seven inches long, and consisting of three sections screwed together… A metal lever in the middle section… crushes a glass ampoule in the orifice of the tube. This glass ampoule, with a volume of five cubic centimeters… contains a poison that resembles water and escapes out of the front of the tube in the form of vapor when the ampoule is crushed. If this vapor is fired at a person’s face from a distance of about one and a half feet, the person drops dead immediately upon inhaling the vapor… Since this vapor leaves no traces, it is impossible to ascertain death by violence, and… the perpetrator suffers no harmful effects from the poison if he swallows a certain kind of tablet beforehand as an antidote and immediately after firing the weapon, crushes an ampoule sewn up in gauze and inhales its vapor. 137

Stashinsky was tried in Germany and sentenced to eight years’ imprisonment.

In 1963, “special actions” were handed over to the newly created Department T, and in 1965, to Department V of the First Directorate. 138

In October 1964, an attempt to assassinate a German counter-audio debugging expert, Horst Schwirkmann, took place in Zagorsky Monastery near Moscow. 139Schwirkmann was standing in front of an icon he admired in a monastery church, when a middle-aged man who had been praying behind him suddenly left the church. After this, Schwirkmann felt what seemed like ice water on his left buttock and within seconds he was in agonizing pain. This time another chemical from Mairanovsky’s arsenal was used. Schwirkmann was sprayed with nitrogen mustard gas. He almost lost his left leg but survived.

In 1978, Mairanovsky’s former Laboratory No. 12 was renamed the Central Scientific Investigation Institute for Special Technology, or TsNIIST, within the KGB. 140It “was attached to Directorate OTU (Operational-Technical) and was under the direct control of the KGB chairman [Yurii Andropov].” 141This chain of command seems to have been exactly as it was during Beria-Merkulov’s time. The laboratory provided the Bulgarian Secret Service with a secret weapon, through a KGB general, Sergei Golubev (Department “K” of the KGB First Main Directorate). This weapon was an umbrella that could shoot small poisoned bullets. 142The operation was controlled by the head of Soviet Intelligence (the KGB First Main Directorate), Vladimir Kryuchkov (who later became head of the KGB under Mikhail Gorbachev, until the August 1991 coup). Yurii Andropov, at the time the head of the KGB, ordered this operation at the request of Todor Zhivkov, first secretary of the Bulgarian Communist Party. (After Leonid Brezhnev’s death, Andropov was for a short time first secretary of the USSR Communist Party, ergo, a Soviet leader). The operation was developed at a meeting chaired by Andropov and attended by Kryuchkov, Vice Admiral Mikhail Usatov (Kryuchkov’s deputy) and Oleg Kalugin (at the time head of the First Main Directorate of Counterintelligence). 143

The Bulgarian emigrant Georgi Markov, who defected to Britain in 1969 and worked for the BBC, was killed by this special weapon. A poisoned pellet was fired from an umbrella on September 7, 1978. The poison used—ricin—was from Mairanovsky’s arsenal. For some unknown reason, John Bryden, author of the book Deadly Allies: Canada’s Secret War, 1937–1947 , did not believe that ricin was used for Markov’s assassination. 144Oleg Kalugin, the former KGB general, claimed in an interview given to Moscow News in 1991 145that it had been the third attempt to kill Markov. 146