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If you’re wondering whether the Kremlin has pulled another poison out of its arsenal of secret toxins, you’re not the only one. Kremlin nemesis Alexei Navalny was taken to a hospital from his jail cell this weekend after authorities claimed he had an “allergic reaction,” leading some to wonder if he’d been poisoned. It’s unclear yet whether that’s the case but poison is a historic go-to weapon for Russian intelligence services looking to silence dissidents—a weapon with a long and bizarre history involving poison umbrellas, gas guns, and bee turds.
The poison umbrella: Georgi Markov is probably the most famous victim of a Soviet assassination toxin because the attack against him reads like something out of a James Bond novel. The dissident Bulgarian playwright’s radio broadcasts had been a thorn in the Bulgarian government’s side and in 1978, Bulgarian intelligence operatives poisoned him with a pellet of ricin toxin shot into his leg by an umbrella injection gun. Authorities might have simply chalked his death up to natural causes rather than murder had Markov not aired his suspicions about being poisoned to hospital staff in his final moments.
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While the assassination had been carried out by Bulgarian intelligence, the ricin pellet and gun were cooked up by KGB scientists after Bulgarian authorities turned to their communist cousins for help in discreetly ridding themselves of the dissident.
Gas gun: Before the poison pellet umbrella, there was the cyanide gas gun. In 1961, KGB assassin Bogdan Stashinsky defected to West Germany and brought with him a trove of secrets about the Soviet Union’s poison assassinations. Stashinky had been the trigger man on the murder of two ultra right-wing dissidents from Ukraine, which was then a part of the Soviet Union. Stashinksy first killed Lev Rebet by “firing a poisonous liquid into his face as Rebet ascended the stairs to his office in Munich,” according to a CIA debriefing of Stashinsky, followed by another Ukrainian far-right anti-communist leader, Stefan Bandera. Stashinsky’s weapon for the assassinations was a gun made by the KGB which fired a small cloud of poisonous potassium cyanide at its target. To protect Stashinksy from his own weapon, the KGB gave him little yellow pills of antidote which he was supposed to take before approaching his prey.
Dinner coup: The Markov assassination plan had worked so well that, a year later, when the Soviets decided to overthrow Afghan President Hafizullah Amin in 1979, Soviet leaders decided to take a run at it. Intelligence historian Christopher Andrew published a history of the KGB based on documents smuggled out of the Soviet Union by a dissident KGB archivist, Vasili Mitrokhin. The book shows that the KGB first tried to kill Amin by using an illegal agent—an agent without diplomatic immunity or cover—named Mutalin Agaverdioglu Talybov. Talybov, an Azerbaijani who had worked for the Soviets undercover in Iran, took on the identity of a Persian-speaking cook and got a job in Amin’s presidential palace.
Andrew wrote that Talybov’s attempts to bump off the Afghan president may have accidentally sickened his brother. Documents show that Asadullah Amin was taken to a hospital in Moscow after a bout of food poisoning shortly after Talybov started working at the presidential palace.
In 1982, Vladimir Kuzichkin, a KGB officer who had defected to the U.K., gave an account of KGB activities in Afghanistan for Time magazine and wrote of Talybov’s follies in trying to poison Amin. "But Amin was as careful as any of the Borgias,” Kuzichkin wrote. “He kept switching his food and drink as if he expected to be poisoned. The illegal's nerves began to fray at his attempts."
Impatient with the attempts at a subtle assassination, the Soviet politburo soon opted for a more direct approach. They sent Soviet special operations forces dressed as Afghan troops to Amin’s presidential palace, where they burst in and shot up both Amin and his security detail, kicking off the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
Canary in the coal mine: The Soviets also offered friendly countries advice on how to counter the kinds of poisons and toxins they used to bump off undesirables. Andrew’s Mitrokhin archive history, The World Was Going Our Way, shows that former Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser’s security detail asked the KGB for help in detecting assassination attempts against him. Egypt’s domestic security agencies had been trained by former Nazi Gestapo officers and were used to getting help from abroad in stamping out threats. Much as they wished to court the Egyptian leader, the Soviets were reluctant to share their best tricks. Instead, they recommended that Egyptian bodyguards use a simple technique to detect assassination attempts with poison gas: keep caged birds at Nasser’s offices and residences and run like hell if they started dropping dead.
Bee poop: Not every sick enemy of the Soviets or the Russians is necessarily a poison victim. The Reagan administration learned this lesson the hard way when Secretary of State Alexander Haig and President Reagan himself accused the Soviets of providing a poison used against members of a Laotian community. In the late 1970s, refugees from Laos’s Hmong ethnic group began to report that Vietnamese troops had poisoned them with a substance they called “yellow rain.” Given that Hmong dissidents had helped the U.S. war efforts in Vietnam, Reagan administration officials were suspicious.
According to a Senate intelligence committee study, the administration formed an interagency working group which concluded that the “yellow rain” described by Hmong refugees—and now some in Soviet-occupied Afghanistan—was a trichothecene mycotoxin poison made by the Soviets and “provided to the Lao and Vietnamese either directly or through transfer of technical know-how, and weaponized with Soviet assistance in other countries.”
That conclusion was bee shit—literally. Scientists at the U.K.’s Porton Down laboratory and entomologists later studied the claims and found that the substance which Hmong refugees had described was, in fact, bee turds. Entomologists had also observed wild honeybees pooping en masse while airborne and producing the kind of yellowish cloud described by refugees, which explained the fears of airborne spraying among U.S. officials.
