When they came to get the once-indispensable spy, Isaiah Oggins, it wasn’t any different
from the many other people who’d been“disappeared” by the Soviet government.
There wasn’t any warning...
One day he just didn’t return home.
Oggins’ family would never see him again and it would be years until they discovered
he’d died as part of a depraved experiment.
One day in May, 1947, Oggins was taken to Laboratory One, otherwise known as “Kamera”,
or “The Cell” in English.
“You are sick,” government doctors told Oggins, offering him an unmarked, unidentifiable
pill.
Oggins knew he would never survive the Soviet secret police, but perhaps if he cooperated…
a pill was surely better than a gunshot to the back of the head.
Oggins consumed his bitter pill, which was the poison often used on poison darts called
curae.
Within seconds he was paralyzed… conscious, but paralyzed.
He was locked in... lying on the laboratory bed, completely helpless and immobilized.
He could hear, see, and smell everything around him- most frighteningly of all, he could feel
everything the doctors might do to him.
And then there was darkness.
The experiment had been a success.
The Soviet doctors were pleased with the efficiency of this poison, and their dear leader, one
Joseph Stalin, soon got word that his once brilliant spy was no longer of any concern.
That was The Cell, the secret research laboratory of the Soviet Secret Police… and those who
went in, didn’t come out.
The patients were nothing more than lab rats.
In Stalin’s mind, these former loyal government officials, military leaders, and spies now
served the greater good as guinea pigs for his secret medical experiments.
Stalin and his comrades were obsessed with poisons.
Those killer compounds could take people to the abyss, and when they had the right compound,
death came fast and the cause of death was difficult to ascertain.
The perfect tool for clandestine murder- especially for kilings in places people might ask a lot
of questions, places like America.
As you will see, some remarkable people became victims of The Cell, and while Laboratory
One, aka, “Poison laboratory of the Soviet secret services”, might not exist today,
the Russian government has not relinquished its fondness of poisons.
Make no mistake, The Cell still exists, but under a more formal name in line with modern
values.
But who was Isaiah Oggins, the man they paralyzed and killed in a matter of minutes?
His story mirrors many other people’s stories in the darkest days of the Soviet Union, in
that one day he just went missing.
His wife and child waited for him to come home, but the man was made a ghost on the
orders of the perpetually paranoid Soviet leader, Joseph Stalin.
Oggins’ life story is quite unique since he was actually American, born in the state
of Connecticut to Jewish immigrants . In his 20s, he worked as a researcher at Yale
University, and it was around that time he joined the Communist Party of America, and
not long after he’d begun working for Stalin’s intelligence service.
So then why would Stalin have him killed?
The likely answer is that Oggins simply knew too much.
He’d worked around the world spying for Stalin, the Soviets were soon fearful that
Oggins might defect and go back to his native USA.
So they “disappeared” him, and sent him to the Gulag where he was convicted of treason
and espionage.
His family protested to the American government, but their words fell of deaf ears.
Stalin was too cautious, too unstable, to allow this man who knew too much to return
home.
Instead, Oggins received a lethal dose of the neurotoxin curare.
The Soviets had been researching and working with poisons for a very long time.
The first of the poison labs was introduced in 1921, but it was in the late 30s and 40s
that the poison program would really flourish.
That was the era of a Soviet biochemist named Grigory Mairanovsky, a man who developed poisons
and tested them on hundreds, if not thousands of people.
He took his orders from the People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs, an organization abbreviated
as NKVD.
The NKVD was in simple terms a kind of secret police and under the ruthless Stalin it grew
in size.
It was a dreaded organization that had eyes and ears on every street in Russia’s major
cities and across the Soviet Union.
It made people disappear in the night, sometimes murdering people on the spot, sometimes shipping
them off to the feared prison camps known as gulags.
while others were sent to the good doctor’s secret lab.
Stalin's “Great Purge” would lead to the deaths of hundreds of thousands, and some
of those people were political opponents and other so-called dissidents.
And The Cell had a prominent role to play, because getting rid of people quietly was
often the job of a poisoner.
Mairanovsky’s life’s work was centered around ways of making people die quickly from
exposure to poisonous substances.
Any man that titles his PHD thesis, "Biological activity of the products of interaction of
mustard gas with human skin tissues” is truly someone to be feared.
The inhumanity of his work earned him the nickname of “Dr. Death” and he was proud
of the fact that he didn’t use animals to test his poisons on, but human subjects who
came from the gulags.
These were prisoners who had been declared “enemies of the people” and so were considered
expendable.
Mairanovsky was tasked with developing poisons that were odorless and tasteless, poisons
that couldn’t be detected by their victims.
They needed to be fast-acting and create a furious internal breakdown of organs so that
the person who’d ingested the poison died quickly.
Mairanovsky’s poisons of choice were mustard gas, ricin, digitoxin, curare and cyanide.
Not all people are built the same, so Mairanovsky had prisoners sent from the gulags of all
different shapes and sizes to test the varying effects of these deadly poisons.
He tested his poisons on men and women of different ages, telling them that they were
sick and needed to be treated with his medicine that would quickly put an end to their suffering.
But his piece de resistance was the development of the organic compound, carbylamine choline
chloride, a poison he named C2 or K2.
When people were given a shot of this, their bodies would literally change as they wilted
like dying trees.
Witnesses stated that the victims became shorter, and within a few minutes a great calm seemed
to settle on their faces.
After 15 minutes they were dead.
These experiments were all approved by the secret police, with a former chief testifying
in court, “I gave orders to Mairanovsky to conduct experiments on people sentenced
to the highest measure of punishment, but it was not my idea.”
So who’s idea was it then?
Did these orders come all the way from the very top?
The Stalinist era was pervasive with paranoia.
Even the most loyal officials were never sure it wouldn’t be them getting a knock on the
door from the secret police in the dead of night.
Fame was no safeguard either, the great Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich was constantly
at risk for writing music that might not fit with Stalin’s idea of ideal nationalistic
compositions.
Every night Shostakovich put a suitcase next to his apartment door, just waiting for what
he thought was the inevitable, “Hello Mr. Shostakovich, you are coming with us.”
But was Stalin himself ultimately a victim of poisoning?
When he died in 1953, the autopsy stated he died of a stroke, but some researchers who
have looked into his death have come to a different conclusion.
They believed that when Stalin sat down to eat one with four of his comrades, his food
was laced with warfarin, a blood-thinner that is often used as a rat poison.
Thanks to research done in The Cell, it was well-known that this tasteless and colorless
anticoagulant could kill a person quickly and leave little trace.
And who was present at this final dinner?
Only the director of the secret poison lab and chief of the secret police, one Lavrentiy
Beria.
Had he laced Stalin’s food with rat poison?
Some reports claim that when Stain collapsed, Beria spat and cursed at him, but when Stalin
suddenly gained consciousness, Beria got down on his knees and kissed his hand.
Whether he had done the deed or not, a few months later he was executed with a bullet
to the brain- someone certainly had reason to want to put Beria away permanently.
The Cell was renamed Laboratory 12 and the work of researching and administering poison
would go on for many years… with some even saying the Cell is still open for business,
but that’s something we’ll get around to soon.
In the 50s, 60s and 70s, Soviet scientists experimented with more modern ways to get
rid of a person in public and make the death look natural.
They developed weapons that emit clouds of cyanide that could be sprayed into a person’s
face.
The victim would drop to the floor and the death would look like a heart attack.
In 1957, the assassin known as Bohdan Stashynsky used such a weapon to kill the Ukrainian political
writer, Lev Rebet.
The autopsy ruled that he’d died of natural causes, but years later, after Stashynsky
defected from the Soviet Union, he would testify that he’d used a modified gun to explode
a hydrogen cyanide capsule into Rebet’s face.
He said his victim immediately fell against a rickety staircase and died shortly after.
Stashynsky used the same device in 1961 to kill the leader of the Ukrainian nationalists,
Stepan Bandera.
He was approached by Stashynsky on a street in Munich, and soon after getting a facefull
of toxic powder was lying on the floor dead.
Fast forward a few years and The Cell was focused on experimenting with a highly potent
substance called ricin.
This poison is made from the castor oil plant and when it’s purified, just a tiny amount,
no bigger than a few grains of salt, can kill a person.
Ricin is deadly if inhaled, injected, or ingested and it can also get into the blood through
cuts on the skin or can get into a person’s system through the eyes.
This poison had been around for years, but in the 1970s the KGB weaponized it.
On August 8th in the year 1971, the Russian writer and outspoken critic of Communism,
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, was in a town in southern Russia in line for some food.
A KGB agent walked up behind him and pricked him with a needle.
The agent left the shop, went over to his boss, and confidently uttered the words, “It's
all over.
He won't live much longer.”
But it wasn’t over, because not enough of the poison had entered Solzhenitsyn’s body.
At the time he had no idea what had happened, but many years later he recalled experiencing
a debilitating sickness in that period of his life and realized it was a failed hit,
although he said he couldn’t remember feeling a prick.
What he certainly could remember was the fact that later that morning his shoulder started
to hurt.
Soon after burn like marks started appearing on his body and when he woke up the next morning
much of his body was covered in painful blisters.
He was bedridden for the next three months but survived.
The outcome wasn’t as good for a Bulgarian dissident and writer Georgi Markov.
In 1978, he’d long since defected from Communist Bulgaria and was living in London.
On 7th September of that year, Markov had just crossed Waterloo Bridge in London and
was waiting for a bus to take him to his job at the BBC.
Suddenly he felt a sharp prick in his side and wondered if he’d just been stung by
an insect.
He saw no insect, but did see a man behind him picking up an umbrella from the floor.
He thought nothing of it, but when he got to the BBC offices that sting started to hurt
a little more.
He told his colleagues about the incident, still thinking he’d been stung by something
like a wasp.
Later that evening he came down with a raging fever and was rushed to hospital, but the
doctors could do nothing to save Markov’s life.
He passed away four days later and the cause of death was discovered to have been ricin
poisoning.
The forensic pathologist wrote that he found a pellet inside Markov’s leg, no bigger
than a pinhead.
The outer casing of the pellet was made of 90% platinum and 10% iridium, and inside it
there were two extremely small cavities.
It was in those cavities that he found traces of ricin.
A KGB defector later confirmed the assassination and that ricin had been used.
In 1991, the world watched as the Soviet Union fell, and did that mean an end to The Cell
and the end of the poisoning of people who Russian politicians might have deemed an enemy
of the state?
The evidence tells us... no.
It appears that the Cell and its poison experts just evolved with the new government.
In 2004, Viktor Yushchenko was a candidate in the Ukraine Presidential election.
During that campaign he suddenly became very sick and was diagnosed with acute pancreatitis.
Other symptoms occurred and it seemed as if the man was literally falling apart.
His face became disfigured… bloated and covered in ugly pockmarks.
He had been poisoned, but with what, doctors didn’t immediately know.
A British toxicologist said that a chemical pollutant called dioxin was to blame for the
eruptions on Yushchenko’s face.
It was later discovered that the man had ingested 1000 times more dioxin than is usually present
in the body.
He survived, but not without some scars...
He also became President.
It turned out that those growths on his face saved him, because had they not appeared and
alerted doctors that he had been poisoned, the dioxin may have damaged his vital organs.
And the Cell didn’t stop there.
In the 2000s, Russian journalists and human rights workers were poisoned with mercury.
The KGB had long been closed down, but it had been replaced with the FSB, a security
department that seems to be just as fond of using poison in assassinations.
And even their former members aren’t safe!
In 2006, an ex-FSB agent named Alexander Litvinenko suddenly fell ill while living in London.
Litvinenko had defected from Russia and had blamed many atrocities, including assassinations,
on the Russian government.
He also started working for Britain’s secret services, which no doubt upset Vladimir Putin.
Before Litvinenko became ill, he’d been drinking tea in a hotel not far from the U.S.
Embassy in London.
The poison of choice in this case was polonium-210, a radioactive isotope that is deadly if ingested.
The hotel where Litvinenko was drinking his tea was fitted with the latest CCTV technology
and the tapes revealed that along with Litvinenko, two other prominent Russians with ties to
the government had checked in.
Both these men were known to Litvinenko and on the day of deed they were seen by security
cameras walking around the hotel and going in and out of the bathrooms.
An investigation would later reveal that massive amounts of radiation were found in the bathroom
stalls.
The traces of polonium these guys had left around the hotel were invisible to the eye,
but not to instruments that recorded levels of radiation.
Polonium was found on the floor, on bottles of alcohol, on a chopping board, and even
on an ice cream scoop.
Of course the two men also managed to get some into Litvinenko’s teapot.
Days after he drank the poisoned tea he started to feel weak and suffered from severe diarrhea
and vomiting.
Soon he was unable to walk and was rushed to the hospital where his condition worsened.
His hair fell out and he suffered irreversible nerve damage, but he hung on for weeks and
talked to the media from his hospital bed.
“I want the world to see what they did to me,” Litvinenko said when he was talking
to journalists.
Litvinenko was unable to survive the poisoning and after he died the investigation into his
death revealed that polonium-210 was to blame .
This radioactive substance can be moved around in a vial of water….It can be taken through
airports, and once it’s inside the victim’s body it takes its time to kill him as cells
slowly but surely commit suicide.
It’s ideal for assassins, since this kind of slow death gives them enough time to get
away.
A nuclear scientist in the UK said using polonium-210 was both “genius” and “stupid.”
Genius because it’s so hard to detect, but stupid because anyone opening that vial probably
would have been contaminated, too.
An expert on Russia has said that the Russian government had made a point in killing Litvinenko
slowly, and that the Kremlin was sending a message to its critics - talk badly about
Russia and, “No matter who you are, where you are, we will find you, and we will silence
you, in the most horrible way possible.”
Now you really have to watch this show, “What Is The Deadliest Substance On Earth?
Toxicity Comparison” or go watch this instead.