In 1972, Ovchinnikov asked the Ministry of Defense to support the development of new types of bacteriological and toxicological weapons using genetic engineering methods.158 This secret program, “The Enzyme,” was started under his supervision. Beginning in 1973, a group of research institutes was united under the name Biopreparat. Besides Ovchinnikov’s very large Institute of Bioorganic Chemistry, three more Academy of Science institutes in Moscow were involved in the Enzyme project: the Institute of Molecular Biology (Moscow, directed by Academician Andrei Mirzabekov), the Institute of Protein (Pushchino, Moscow Region; directed by Academician Aleksandr Spirin), and the Institute of Biochemistry and Physiology of Microorganisms (Pushchino, Moscow Region; directed by Academician Georgy Skryabin, and after his death, by Professor Aleksandr Boronin). A special commission, the Inter-Agency Scientific and Technical Council, coordinated the secret work of institutions involved in the development of new types of biological weapons: the Academy of Sciences, the Ministries of Health, Agriculture, Defense, and Chemical Industry, and the KGB. It consisted of members from the principal scientific organizations of the Soviet Union, and then Russia, including directors of the academy institutes mentioned above and the secretary academician of the Biochemistry, Biophysics and the Chemistry of Physiologically Active Substances Division (since 1994, Physical-Chemical Biology Division), Academician Aleksandr Baev.159 Although Academician Baev (1903–1995) spent seventeen years in Stalin’s worst labor camps and in exile,160 he was a devoted supporter of the Soviet regime. In the 1980s–early 1990s, the Inter-Agency Council was headed by a minister of medical industry. It met once every two or three months to discuss the current needs of biological weapon development.
According to Alibek, in 1990, during the peak of Gorbachev’s perestroika, the KGB/SVR colonel at Biopreparat, Butuzov, approached Alibek with a plan to assassinate Zviad Gamsakhurdia, the former Soviet political dissident and at the time the newly elected president of Georgia.161 The KGB authorities (the operation was under the personal control of the KGB chairman Vladimir Kryuchkov) planned to use an aerosol of Ebola virus concealed in an empty box of Marlboro cigarettes for the assassination.162 An alternative method of killing that Butuzov also considered was spraying the steering wheel of the victim’s car with a poisonous agent.163 It seems that the plan was turned down by the Soviet leaders.
In 1992, Gamsakhurdia was ousted from office, and the former Soviet foreign minister, Eduard Shevarnadze, became Georgian president. The next year, on December 31, 1993, Gamsakhurdia died in mysterious circumstances. Officially his death was announced as a suicide. However, there were rumors that he was killed by Moscow agents.164 The killing of Gamsakhurdia was the last known assassination plan of Mairanovsky and Muromtsev’s KGB successors.
The KGB generously provided their secret service colleagues in many Eastern European countries with Mairanovsky’s arsenal of chemicals. In his recently published memoirs, Markus Wolf, chief of the foreign intelligence service of the Ministry of State Security of the German Democratic Republic, recalled:
One KGB man was dispatched to buyers throughout the Eastern bloc bearing wares such as untraceable nerve toxins and skin contact poisons to smear on doorknobs. The only thing I ever accepted from him was a sachet of “truth drugs,” which he touted as “unbeatable” with the enthusiasm of a door-to-door salesman… One day, in a fit of curiosity, I asked our carefully vetted doctor to have them analyzed for me. He came back shaking his head in horror. “Use these without constant medical supervision and there is every chance that the fellow from whom you want the truth will be dead as a dodo in seconds,” he said. We never did use the “truth drugs.”165
Even recently, Russia seems to have been engaged in secret scientific work that is prohibited by international law and agreements. In 1991, a group of military chemists was awarded with the prestigious Lenin Prize for the development of a new extremely destructive neuroparalytic weapon.166 One of the supervisors of this project, Academician Irina Beletskata (b. 1933, became an academy corresponding member in 1974), who heads the Laboratory of Organic Elements Compounds of the Chemistry Department of Moscow University, was elected a full academician in 1992, just after the finalization of the project.167
Almost simultaneously, on October 22, 1992, a Moscow chemist, Vil Mirzayanov, was arrested by the police and put into Lefortovo Prison. He was accused of divulging state secrets in newspaper articles published in 1991–1992. In these articles Mirzayanov exposed “the military-industrial complex, which, on the eve of the signing of a Government convention to ban chemical weapons, developed a new type of chemical weapon five to eight times stronger than all known weapons.”168 In 1993, Russia signed the 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention banning chemical weapons.169 The new type of weapon was a binary nerve agent called Novichok, which means “newcomer” in Russian. The development of Novichok was based on the idea that after the reaction of two neutral chemical compounds, an extremely strong toxic substance can be produced.170 In this way, the country that keeps the neutral compounds can deny that it has chemical weapons. The binary phospho-organic paralytic nerve gas called Novichok-9 especially has an extremely high toxic activity.171
According to Dr. Mirzayanov, Novichok was developed in 1973 by the chemist Pyotr Kirpichev, who worked at the Shikhany (the town of Volsk) branch of the State Scientific Research Institute of Organic Chemistry and Technology (GosNIIOKhT). Another chemist, Vladimir Uglev, joined in the research in 1975. At first Novichok was tested at the Shikhany institute and then, in 1986–1989 near the city of Nukus (Uzbekistan), at a special military testing base. In 1987, a Moscow scientist, Andrei Zhelezov, was accidentally exposed to the residue of the gas during tests. He died in 1992.172 Mirzayanov made his accusations together with Lev Fedorov, president of the Union of Chemical Safety (Moscow), and one of the inventors of Novichok, Vladimir Uglev.173 He refused to testify at his own closed trial, which began on January 6, 1994. On February 22, 1994, Mirzayanov was released from prison, and at present he lives in the United States.174
In his interviews, Dr. Mirzayanov pointed out that ricin, one of the most dangerous of Mairanovsky’s poisons, was produced in Russia as a chemical weapon.175 Soviet scientists had the same technological problem of dissemination with this toxin in enemy territory as British and American experts had during World War II. Due to the high temperature of the blast from a shell or a bomb, most of the ricin would be inactivated. The idea of putting ricin inside hollow steel needles was then considered by Soviet scientists. During the explosion of a bomb containing such needles, ricin would retain its toxic ability and could easily be introduced into the bodies of numerous victims. Mairanovsky could not have come up with a better solution himself. However, this technology was not introduced into production due to the very high cost of the procedure.