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.”136 The 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.139 Schwirkmann 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.140 It “was attached to Directorate OTU (Operational-Technical) and was under the direct control of the KGB chairman [Yurii Andropov].”141 This 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.142 The 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.144 Oleg Kalugin, the former KGB general, claimed in an interview given to Moscow News in 1991145 that it had been the third attempt to kill Markov.146
At first, Bulgarian agents tried to touch him “accidentally” with a cream that would cause death from a “heart attack” within one to two days. It would be impossible to identify the poison. They then tried to poison Markov with a chemical dissolved in a drink (a method strongly reminiscent of Dr. Mairanovsky’s experiments). This attempt also appeared to be unsuccessful. Only the ricin succeeded. Before killing Markov, the Bulgarian Secret Service had successfully tried the method on a convict condemned to death: an umbrella fired a bullet perforated with small holes filled with ricin.147 In 1978, General Dimitar Stoyanov, Bulgarian interior minister, presented General Kalugin with an expensive Browning hunting rifle as a reward for KGB assistance in killing Markov.148
The “umbrella murder” case has not been closed yet. In 1998, Bulgaria’s National Investigation Office was still trying to find Francesco Guillino (presumably Markov’s killer), to charge him with the murder.149 Guillino may have settled in Hungary or Romania.
The life of another Bulgarian defector, Vladimir Kostov, was saved because a similar pellet was removed from his back intact, before the ricin had time to escape from the steel bullet. This incident took place in the Paris metro. Seven years later, General Golubev supervised the drugging of a future KGB defector, Oleg Gordievsky, with drugs from Laboratory No. 12 in an attempt to get him to confess.150 It is known that sometimes dissidents in the Soviet Union were drugged in order to elicit confessions.
Another defector, who moved to the United States in 1992, is Dr. Kanatjan Alibekov, or Ken Alibek, as he is now known. Alibek, former deputy director of a Soviet biological warfare agency called Biopreparat, recently disclosed that the KGB had (and maybe the SVR and FSB still have) close contacts with the Ministry of Health’s institutes that specialized in the development of psychotropic and neurotropic biological agents.151 The network of medical institutions that investigated biological agents that could cause nonlethal and lethal organic and physiological changes useful for the KGB purposes had a name—the Flute Program.152 Basically, five research institutes in Moscow and the Moscow Region that belonged to the Third Main Directorate of the USSR Ministry of Health (Medstatistika; Institute of Applied Molecular Biology; Institute of Immunology; Scientific and Production Center of Medical Biotechnology; and Center of Toxicology and Hygienic Regulation of Biopreparations) were involved in the Flute Program. In 1989, Valerii Butuzov, who was both a KGB/SVR colonel and a pharmacologist, was put on the staff of Biopreparat formally as an engineer.153 His job was to provide the former KGB Laboratory No. 12, now TsNIIST, with the new developments at Biopreparat, especially within the Flute Program.
During the reorganizations of 1996–1997, Biopreparat and many former biological weapons facilities seem to have been moved under the Ministry of Economics.154 The state agency Biopreparat has been transformed into the Russian joint stock company, RAO Biopreparat, with a trading branch, AOOT-Biopreparat-Tsentr, and an international operation branch via a Geneva-based company, Pharmachemtec Limited. At present, the Russian military scientists who control RAO Biopreparat also control the Russian pharmaceutical industry.
The creation of Biopreparat was not possible without the energy and enthusiasm of Academician Yurii Ovchinnikov, who merged molecular genetics achievements at the Academy of Sciences with the interests of the Soviet Ministry of Defense.155 I have already mentioned Ovchinnikov in Chapter 1; he was the youngest academician and the youngest vice president of the academy. Ovchinnikov was a tall elegant man who easily found a mutual language with academicians and the highest Soviet bureaucrats. He also created a Party career and became a member of the Central Committee. It is interesting to note that his family was a victim of Stalin’s regime—his father was arrested and the family was exiled.156 Ovchinnikov’s autocratic and ruthless style of administration was widely known among Soviet biologists.157