It wasn’t so easy to settle the question about tapping telephone conversations, because this work was done at the request of the Deputy Director of the Department for the Security Regime, and as I soon discovered, the job was performed with great enthusiasm. This is not surprising, since it allowed the operator to report every day to the KGB major himself, and to keep him well informed about the private lives of the institute employees!
I hurried to Martynov to discuss the fate of the concealed listening unit in the PD ITR Department. I gave him the reasons why this unit shouldn’t be my responsibility and asked the major to transfer it to the Department for the Security Regime, where the former blacksmith from the Analytical Department, Boris Churkov, could handle this work very well. I suggested that we provide technical support, making sure that the equipment was maintained at the necessary level and even purchase a more automated recording system, if necessary.
Martynov’s face turned red with anger and he said, “So, you start your work by making a mess of ours?!”
He had already become used to almost completely controlling the PD ITR Department, although formally it answered directly to First Deputy Director Guskov. However, before we had our conversation, I had learned that the operator of the concealed listening unit was also intercepting Guskov’s conversations. If necessary he could intercept the Director himself, except during his high frequency communications, of course. Several times I noticed Guskov sitting near his office and talking with people who had come to see him. So he understood that not only were the telephones being intercepted, but talks in his office were subject to eavesdropping as well. It was very easy for Martynov’s people, who were nominally members of my department, to install the “bugs”. They provided protection of information in the offices, and from time to time they checked the telephones and doors. This was funny and a little bit sad, because the people who were supposed to protect the bosses in these offices actually worked against them. Unfortunately, these were the KGB’s rules of the game. And I decided to go against the grain!
I explained to Martynov, who could hardly contain his rage, that additional work not stipulated by the provisions for organizing the PD ITR Department, might cost a lot in terms of energy and productivity, not just for me but also for him as Deputy Director in charge of the Department for the Security Regime. “Bugging” distracts us from our main work, which had increased sharply in its significance, on the threshold of finalizing the Chemical Weapons Convention.
Nobody at GOSNIIOKhT doubted that the negotiations for finalizing the CWC had nothing to do with the work of the military-chemical complex.
We had to hide our new developments at any cost. The KGB major certainly understood that my arguments were pure demagoguery. However, he couldn’t openly object to my logic, especially since I referred to the opinion of people from the Third Department of Ministry of Chemical Industry, of the USSR. As a result, Martynov promised to think it over.
The struggle for transferring the concealed listening unit succeeded only in 1988, when I handed over all the keys for the room and its equipment to Boris Churkov from the Department of the Security Regime, on receipt. However, these facts didn’t prevent the Director of GOSNIIOKhT, Victor Petrunin, from stressing in interviews to different correspondents that my responsibilities included tapping the telephones of the institute employees, as well as looking through their papers.
Concerning this “looking through the papers” business, I can firmly state that from my first days in my position as head of the PD ITR Department at GOSNIIOKhT and of the branch, I prohibited this occupation as useless and offensive to people’s dignity. In my opinion, the objectives of the department were different, and I did my best to run the department professionally.
There was also the matter of protecting the secrets involving the production of chemical agents. Part of the work of some Finnish specialists, which addressed the problems connected with technical control issues raised by the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC), appeared at GOSNIIOKhT. There was nothing there that could possibly surprise me, but the information contained in those reports allowed me to understand to some extent, the Western countries’ level of knowledge and experience in identification of chemical agents. And I believed this corresponded to their capabilities of technical intelligence.[62], [63], [64], [65], [66], [67]
At the same time, I couldn’t refuse Guskov’s next request to help the scientific commission conduct an evaluation of the effectiveness of a new radioactive device for detecting a gas attack on Soviet tanks. This device was proposed by scientists from the Military Academy of Chemical Defense, and it was designed and constructed by the Tula Special Design Bureau of Automation (OKBA). I spent a week in Tula testing this device, by “easy” military specialists. Several times OKBA created artificial concentrations of Substance 33 in a huge gas chamber. They injected the required volume of liquid agent into the flow of air directed into the gas chamber, and it was all thoroughly mixed by powerful fans. After that, two parallel streams of air from the chamber were sampled and directed through cells with a biological substrate (cholinesterase) and a radioactive device with an alpha-radiation source.
Whereas the cholinesterase analysis showed an almost constant concentration in the gas chamber model, the radioactive detector showed a decline of the concentration of Substance 33, and within ten minutes only very small concentrations were recorded. We repeated these tests several times, but the result was always the same.
I called the attention of the members of the commission to the fact that, increasing moisture in the air was the reason behind the tendency of the radioactive device’s signal to drop to almost a zero level. On the basis of this, I proposed the idea that the molecule of Substance 33 was undergoing a reaction of dietherification and the creation of mobile positive hydrogen ions (H+), which resulted in the formation of complexes of salts with molecules of Substance 33. These compounds have much higher ionization potentials than the original molecules of Substance 33, and under those conditions they cannot be ionized, which caused the drop in the detector’s signal.
No one believed me at the time, but I performed experiments with other scientists from the Physical Chemistry Department, and we entirely proved my hypothesis. The fate of this development of the Military Academy of Chemical Defense was solved entirely.
A scientific and technical conference on the problems of the PD ITR of the branch took place in November of 1986 at the Volgograd Scientific Production Association (Khimprom). Representatives of the Novocheboksarsk, Volsk, and Volgograd subsidiaries of GOSNIIOKhT, the Redkino subsidiary of the NPO “Khimavtomatika”, and employees of Ministry of Chemical Industry of the U.S.S.R. took part in the conference. Krasheninnikov, Tkachenko, and Kochetkov, a representative of our Main Administration “Soyuzorgsynthesis” with whom I shared a room at the privileged hotel for the regional committee of the CPSU, were also there.
A few years later, Anatoly Kochetkov became a member of the expert commission that the KGB investigator appointed for investigating my case, and he signed a resolution saying that I was guilty. Since then he has been actively promoted and became a member of the Russia’s Committee for Conventional Problems of the Chemical and Biological Weapons which answers to the President of Russia. However, I am not going to accuse him, because I know how long it took him to slowly scale the job ladder to a high position. He was terrified to lose his position.
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