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.
