As Mairanovsky stressed in his letters to Semyon Ignatiev (in 1952), Beria (in 1953), and Khrushchev (in 1955) after he was arrested, Abakumov did not support his laboratory and ideas. After the main reorganization of the MGB, Mairanovsky’s lab was included in the newly organized MGB Department of Operational Equipment (OOT),122 headed by General Fyodor Zhelezov.123 Therefore, the position of the laboratory within the security service structure became the same as it was in 1937–1938. Head of the NKGB Department “B” (Operational Equipment) Yevgenii Lapshin, with whom Mairanovsky worked, was sent out of Moscow to head the city of Tula regional MGB branch. Department “B” was in charge of making Mairanovsky’s and other NKGB scientists’ discoveries available for NKGB practice. Lapshin was replaced by Major General A. Kochetkov. Later, in 1951–1953, A. Polkovnikov became head of this department.124
In September 1948, Filimonov was dismissed from the MGB headquarters in Moscow (he subsequently became an alcoholic) and sent to head an MGB school in Lvov in the Ukraine. Later, in 1959, long after Mairanovsky’s arrest and conviction, his former laboratory (now Laboratory No. 12) ended up as part of the Directorate of Operational Equipment within the KGB. In 1978, under KGB chairman Yurii Andropov, Laboratory No. 12 was included in the newly organized Central Investigation Institute for Special Technology within the KGB Operational-Technical Directorate, or OTU (Table 2.1).
Although the existence of Mairanovsky’s lab was a closely held secret, in the late 1940s Sudoplatov lectured about it (without naming Mairanovsky) and its “developments” to the students of the MGB Special School. A former KGB officer, Ilya Dzhirkvelov, who defected to the West in 1980, later recalled:
At his [i.e., Sudoplatov’s] lectures we learned about practically every method of organizing sabotage, underground operations and the liquidation, i.e., the murder, of our enemies. He told us that a special Scientific and Technical Department of the KGB [i.e., MGB at the time], with a staff of nameless but exceptionally able doctors, chemists and technologists, was developing and producing new types of weapons and poisons and devices for carrying out “Liter L,” which was the code name for liquidation… Operations code-named “Liter I,” meaning kidnapping, and “Liter L,” can be carried out only with the approval of the Secretaries and Politburo members of the Soviet Communist Party…
…Even in those years the Technical Department of the KGB already had at its disposal fountain pens, cigarette cases and even fake cigarettes which could fire a fatal dose of poison. The poisons used left no traces in the body of the victim and produced the effect of a heart attack, a stroke or suffocation following an asthma attack. In addition, for kidnapping operations they had developed long-acting tranquilizers.125
Sudoplatov also gave examples of successful NKVD/MGB assassinations. He proudly described in detail how, on the personal order of Stalin, in 1938 in Amsterdam he killed the Ukrainian nationalist leader Yevhen Konovalets, who lived in Germany and France, using a bomb camouflaged as a candy box.126
THE LAB AFTER MAIRANOVSKY
After Mairanovsky’s arrest in 1951 and the reorganization of his laboratory, it was not completely disbanded. Laboratory No. 12 continued to exist under the directorship of Mairanovsky’s colleague and rival, Vasilii Naumov, and poisons were successfully used for executions abroad. In March 1953, after Stalin’s death, MGB minister Semyon Ignatiev wrote to the new USSR leaders Malenkov, Beria, Molotov, Bulganin, and Khrushchev:
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).128 This 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.129 Khokhlov 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.130 He 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.”131 In 1957, it was discovered that Khokhlov had become ill from poisoning by radioactive thallium.132 In April 1955, after Khokhlov’s defection, “special actions” became the responsibility of the reorganized Thirteenth Department of the KGB First Directorate.133 Evidently, 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