Wil Sultanowitsch Mirsajanow

Wil Sultanovich Mirsajanow ( Russian Вил Султанович Мирзаянов , in English transcription : Vil Sultanovich Mirzayanov ; born March 9, 1935 in Starokangyschewo , Bashkortostan ) is a Russian chemist. He is known for exposing the Soviet and Russian development of the Novichok warfare agent.

Career in the nerve agent program of the Soviet Union

Mirsayanov was born in a small town on the European side of the Urals and belongs to the Tartar ethnic group. His father was a schoolteacher and staunch communist and broke with the family tradition that the eldest son should become a Muslim preacher. He studied at the Moscow Academy of Fine Chemistry until 1958, graduating as a chemical engineer for the petroleum industry. He then worked at a research institute for synthetic fuels and then on boranes as rocket fuels. He also worked on his doctoral thesis at the Institute of Petrochemical of the Soviet Academy of Sciences and was awarded a dissertation on a topic of gas chromatography in analytical chemistry in 1965 his doctorate .

After receiving his doctorate, he was recommended to the State Research Institute for Organic Chemistry and Technology (GosNIIOKhT) in Moscow and, after a security check, hired in 1966. He was initially entrusted with environmental analyzes and analytical aspects of the development of warfare agents, but was not directly involved in the development of synthetic warfare agents in the Novitschok program. He became a member of the Communist Party and most recently headed the technical counterintelligence department from the late 1980s. This included the analysis of warfare agent residues and warfare agents in the environment, the detection of which should be as low as possible in the sense of the Novitschok program and the residues and means of production as inconspicuous as possible, even for inspectors of the international chemical weapons control or secret agents.

Mirsajanov was increasingly concerned that although Mikhail Gorbachev officially discontinued the Novichok program, developments were still secretly going on, and he was also concerned about environmental hazards. In 1990 he was supposed to prepare the chemical weapons factories in Volgograd and Novocheboksarsk as part of an upcoming inspection visit by US chemical weapons experts as part of the chemical weapons control agreement that had just been negotiated, for which the Soviet Union had not disclosed its Novichok program and had otherwise agreed to destroy the stocks of nerve agents. As early as 1987, Gorbachev officially announced the end of chemical weapons production. At the closed Soman production plant in Volgograd, he found concentrations of the warfare agent fifty to a hundred times higher than “permitted” in the chimney, and he found the wastewater to be highly contaminated. The factory manager asserted that Soman tests with acetylcholinesterase did not work, which, as Mirsajanow found, was due to an interaction with salts in the water. When he then raised the alarm with his boss Victor Petrunin, he was told to keep quiet, as this would cause problems for the institute. Petrunin openly gave Mirsayanov his suspicion that similar contamination and environmental hazards were to be found in the second large chemical weapons factory in Novocheboksarsk, which was later confirmed. When Mirsayanov nevertheless sent a report to higher authorities, he was reprimanded and his credibility was questioned. When he left the Communist Party in 1990, he was sidelined in the institute.

Unveiling of the Novichok program in the early 1990s

A turning point for Mirsajanov was the award of the high order of Lenin to three leaders of the Novichok program in 1991, for Mirsajanov a sign that the Soviet Union not only wanted to keep the Novichok program secret, but also wanted to pursue it. In October 1991 he published information on the existence of Novichok in the Moscow newspaper Kuranty , but this received little public attention in view of the turbulent political events in Moscow during the collapse of the Soviet Union. Mirsayanov was released in January 1992. A little later, many of his colleagues were dismissed due to general cost-saving measures. Mirsayanov made a living by trying to sell items he owned at the Moscow flea market.

In mid-1992 he met Lev Fyodorov (Lev Fedorov), a professor of organic chemistry at the Vernadsky Institute of Geochemistry and Analytical Chemistry, who was keenly interested in the history of chemical weapons. Both wrote an article ( Poisoned Politics ), which appeared in the magazine Moskowskije Novosti on September 16, 1992 , and this time Mirsayanov also received international attention. They pointed out that in the event of an accident at the GosNIIOKhT Institute, great danger would arise for the Moscow population, which they compared to the 1986 Chernobyl reactor accident. Mirsayanov also gave an interview to the Moscow correspondent of the Baltimore Sun (Will Englund), which appeared there in October 1991. They did not disclose technical details. A year later, Mirsayanov received a visit from the domestic secret service, who searched his home (without finding sensitive material) and took him to Lefortovo Prison . Fyodorov was also questioned, but released because he had no access to classified information. Eleven days later, Mirsayanov was released from house arrest by a judge, on condition that he report to the secret service every day. The basis of the indictment were secret lists of state secrets, which were actually no longer permissible for criminal prosecution under current Russian law. The management of his former institute, however, strongly urged prosecution.

Mirsajanow got support from Vladimir Ugljow (Uglev), one of the Novichok developers. Ugljow gave an interview to the Russian newspaper Novaya Vremja in February 1993 and threatened to disclose technical details, whereby he enjoyed immunity as a city councilor. From Ugljow's point of view there was no reason to keep the Novichok program a secret, because it was militarily obsolete and only served the career and the receipt of research funds from high representatives of the former chemical weapons complex. Then one began to proceed against Ugljow. Meanwhile, many human rights activists and scholars in the West campaigned for Mirsayanov, and two of them (Gale Colby, Irene Goldman at Princeton) got two key members of the Senate Committee on Foreign Affairs ( Jesse Helms , Bill Bradley ) to write letters to Boris on the matter Yeltsin wrote. The US Ambassador to Moscow Tom Pickering also gave a press conference in which he described the crackdown on Mirsayanov as contrary to the spirit of the chemical weapons control agreement. Nonetheless, a secret trial began in January 1994 of the betrayal of state secrets, which threatened Mirsayanov with up to eight years in prison. Only after six weeks did the Yeltsin government terminate the trial “for lack of evidence”. Meanwhile, Mirsayanov's marriage ended in divorce, which left him with two young sons.

During his trial, he was given free access to classified chemical weapons development records by the Russian authorities in order to prepare his own defense. According to his own statements, it was only through this that he found out about the existence of binary weapon versions from Novichok, which he then made known in the West. In the case of binary weapons, the poison is much safer to handle and, in contrast to the unitary versions, they have a longer shelf life or, if necessary, can be made from commercially available chemicals and only converted into the highly toxic form immediately before use.

Emigration to the USA

In February 1995, Mirsajanov traveled to Princeton, USA, where he received a Scientific Freedom and Responsibility Award from the American Association for the Advancement of Science . A little later he emigrated and settled in Princeton, where he married the human rights activist Gale Colby, who had previously stood up for him. He was offered a position in the US chemical weapons research laboratory in Eaglewood, which he declined. Mirsajanov continued to be interested in the Russian chemical weapons program in the United States and suspected that it was being pursued further. In 2006 it served as one of the sources for Jonathan Tucker's book on the history of nerve agents. In 2008 he self-published his autobiography in English (a previous version had already appeared in Russian in Tatarstan in 2002 ), in which he also published technical details, including the structural formulas of the Novichok warfare agents, which this time also caused trouble with the American secret services who were against the publication of technical details. However, apart from chemical weapons experts, the book did not attract public attention for a long time. It was only on the occasion of the Skripal assassination in March 2018 that he became the center of public attention as the one who first discovered the Novitschok program and published the correct structural formulas and gave some interviews.

In 1994 he received the Heinz R. Pagels Human Rights of Scientists Award from the New York Academy of Sciences .

literature

• VS Mirzayanov: State secrets: An insider's chronicle of the Russian chemical weapons program. Outskirts Press, Denver 2008, ISBN 978-1-4327-2566-2 . Autobiography
• Jonathan B. Tucker: War of Nerves , Pantheon Books 2006, p. 299ff, p. 315ff and other places

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Brief biography of Mirasajanov on the website for his book , Outskirts Press.
2. ↑ Career data based on Jonathan Tucker's book, War of Nerves, 2006
3. ^ Tucker, War of Nerves, p. 301.
4. ↑ Interview by Mirsajanow, Komersat FM, March 21, 2018 (Russian).
5. ↑ Vil Mirzayanov: Dismantling the Soviet / Russian Chemical Weapons Complex: An Insider's View . In Chemical Weapons Disarmament in Russia: Problems and Prospects , Henry L. Stimson Center, 1995.
6. ↑ Karel Knip "Unknown" newcomer Novichok was long known , RHC Handelsblad (online edition), March 21, 2018.