It seems that the Americans did not know about Mairanovsky’s experiments with ricin in the late 1930s–1940s and the more recent discussions of Soviet military scientists regarding the use of ricin as a weapon. In an interview with investigative writer David Wise, Benjamin Harris, a former technical director of the Maryland Air National Guard Office at Edgewood Arsenal near Baltimore (one of the main American research facilities on chemical weaponry), said:
I was aware of one incident where we were asked by the [American] intelligence people to supply information on a toxin that was not a good candidate for use as a weapon. It was ricin. It was considered a toxin because it was produced by a living organism, the castor-bean plant. We did not consider it a good candidate because it was difficult to come by in large quantities and had not been synthesized at that time.176
Analyzing Markov’s assassination and Harris’s information, David Wise came to the wrong conclusion: “Whether the information about ricin was passed to the Soviets, either in the deception phase of SHOCKER [a code name for an FBI/army operation against the Soviet Military Intelligence (GRU) spies who collected information on the development of American nerve gas weaponry] or in a separate, parallel counterintelligence operation, is not clear.”177 Definitely, neither Harris nor Wise knew about Mairanovsky’s “achievements” with ricin.
Drs. Mirzayanov and Alibek warned their colleagues and Western politicians that despite all international agreements, Russian scientists would continue to work on chemical and biological weapons. In 1990–1991 in the USSR, eighteen research institutes with 42,000 employed scientists and six plants were working on the problems and production of biological weapons.178 In 1999, Dr. Mirzayanov was convinced that the only serious problem for the main Russian research institute on chemical weapons, the GosNIIOKhT in Moscow, was lack of funding. If funded, chemists at this institute and its branches will develop new poisonous agents that will be able to penetrate the filters of gas masks.179 Dr. Alibek pointed to the fact that publications in scientific literature in 1996–1997 showed that Russian scientists have continued the development of genetically engineered strains of virulent viruses and bacteria for biological weapons.180 These studies were done with the involvement of the Russian Academy of Sciences and under FSB/SVR control. Such scientific work is a definite violation of the Russian agreement with the United States and Britain signed in 1992 that prohibits all work on biological weapons.181
Despite the warning, in May 2000 the United States, the European Union, and Japan decided to provide $1.61 million to improve security at the State Research Center for Applied Microbiology in Obolensk (about fifty miles from Moscow), one of the former most secret military installations in the Soviet Union.182 For the first time, an international conference took place at this center and Western scientists were shown the infamous Building No. 1 where the most top-secret research was previously conducted.183 General Nikolai Urakov, director of the center, pledged to open the “curtain of secrecy” and convert the center from military to peaceful research. However, the center will still be in the system of military institutions, and there is no guarantee that a group of scientists within this institution will not continue studies in biological weaponry.
In contemporary Russia, academic science is in trouble because of poor governmental funding.184 At the celebration of the two hundred and seventy-fifth anniversary of the academy in June 1999, President Academician Yurii Semenov declared: “[In 1998] we lived in a state of emergency. All promises of state support for science were not fulfilled.”185 In 2000, the situation became even more desperate. Because of the underfunding of science and miserable salaries, many academic researchers, especially young scientists, have left scientific institutions, and their number in 2000 fell to 910,000, half the figure for 1990.186 Scientists working in the system of the KGB’s secret institutes (since the August 1991 coup, the official name of the KGB has changed several times, but it is easier to refer to it in the old way) never had such a problem, and presumably still do not. In February 1994, after Mirzayanov’s release from prison, General Golushko (at the time head of the Federal Counterintelligence Service—alias the KGB) told the journalist Yevgeniya Albats: “The scientific-technical directorate includes institutes for the design of special technology and intelligence equipment. The scientific-technological directorate, along with the designers and the institutes, numbers about ten thousand people. We also work for intelligence and help the Ministry of Internal Affairs.”187 These words are confirmed by the fact that since 1989, special Spetsnaz troops have been armed with guns to shoot bullets that contain neuroparalytic chemicals. These chemicals are produced at a secret research institute in Klimovsk, a town not far from Moscow.188 Apparently, KGB laboratories are thriving in the economic disaster of contemporary Russia. The general’s estimate of 10,000 scientists being involved in secret service work is impressive. The staff at Mairanovsky’s laboratory numbered approximately only 20–30.
The legacy of Mairanovsky and his colleagues continues in Russia. There were reports in 1999 to early 2000 that chemical weapons were used by the Russian troops against Chechen rebels and civilians during the fight in Grozny in the North Caucasus.189 Here is a witness’s description:
Animals were the first who felt the beginning of chemical attacks… Poisoned dogs heart-rending howled and whirled strangely as they were trying to bite their own tails. Cats squealed disgustingly like babies when they weep for a long time. Later, after a few hours, people started choking, their skins were covered with red pimples, and their eyes became watering and swollen.190
One can only guess what kind of chemical poisons the Russian military experimenters tested in Chechnya that caused these symptoms.
EXPERIMENTS
In or about December 1943 and in or about October 1944 experiments were conducted at the Buchenwald concentration camp to investigate the effect of various poisons upon human beings. The poisons were secretly administered to experimental subjects [Russian prisoners] in their food. The victims died as result of the poison or were killed immediately in order to permit autopsies. In or about September 1944 experimental subjects [who had been condemned to death] were shot with poison bullets [filled with aconitine nitrate projectiles] and suffered torture and death…. The defendants Genzken, Gebhardt, Mrugowsky, and Poppendick are charged with special responsibility for and participation in these crimes.
I found the first description of Mairanovsky’s lab in the literature in a book authored by the KGB defector, Peter Deriabin:
As late as 1953 the interrogations [at the MGB] were backed by a terror device which would have done credit to the worst of the Gestapo professionals. From 1946 until that year, the state security maintained at its Moscow headquarters a quietly notorious laboratory called the “Chamber” (Kamera). Its staff consisted of a medical director and several assistants, who performed experiments on living people—prisoners and persons about to be executed—to determine the effectiveness of various poisons and injections as well as the use of hypnotism and drugs in interrogation techniques. Only the Minister of the State Security and four other high officers were allowed to enter.