Poison Laboratory of The Soviet Secret Services - Prominent Victims

Prominent Victims

• The leader of the Russian All-Military Union general Alexander Kutepov was drugged and kidnapped in Paris in 1930. He died from a heart attack due to an overdose of the administered drug.

• One of the leaders of the White movement, Russian general Evgenii Miller, was drugged and kidnapped in Paris in 1937. He was executed later in Russia.

• Archbishop Theodore Romzha of the Ukrainian Catholic Church was killed in 1947 by injection of curare provided by Mairanovsky and administered by a medical nurse who was an Ministry for State Security (USSR) agent.

• In 1978, dissident Bulgarian writer Georgi Markov was assassinated in London using a tiny pellet poisoned with ricin; the necessary equipment was prepared in this laboratory. In a Discovery Channel television program about his illustrated book of espionage equipment called "The Ultimate Spy," espionage historian H. Keith Melton indicated that once the Bulgarian secret police had decided to kill Markhov, KGB specialists from the Laboratory gave the Bulgarians a choice between two KGB tools that could be provided for the task- either a poisonous topical gelatin to be smeared on Markhov, or an instrument to administer a poison pellet, as was eventually done.

• Attempted poisoning of the second President of Afghanistan Hafizullah Amin on December 13, 1979. Department 8 of KGB succeeded in infiltrating the illegal agent Mitalin Talybov (codenamed SABIR) as a chef of Amin's presidential palace. However, Amin switched his food and drink as if he expected to be poisoned, so his son-in-law became seriously ill, and ironically, was flown to a hospital in Moscow.

• Cy Oggins, significant for being one of the few Americans who became a Soviet spy, subsequently was sent to the Gulag, and finally was executed by the Soviets themselves.