This is the CIA's scariest weapon. The CIA has been called before Congress. They are about to reveal a very unique gun. Does this pistol fire the dart?
At first glance, this pistol looks like any other, but it is the ultimate assassination tool. You won't realize if you get hit by it, and it will kill you in seconds, but no one will be able to tell. As a murder instrument, that's about as efficient as you can get, isn't it?
It is a weapon, a very serious weapon. How did the CIA create this pistol, and how does it work? It's the 70s.
This scene is a product of three events. One, after enjoying a good image for decades, the CIA turns out to be involved in two major scandals. In both, they spied on American citizens.
Two, as a result of said domestic spying and public outrage, the church committee is set up. They are to investigate what this omnipotent agency is actually up to. 3. As part of their investigation, the committee searches through CIA locations.
In a little used vaulted storeroom, they find 11 grams of shellfish porcini. poison, saxitoxin to be precise. It is extremely deadly and one of the fastest acting poisons on the planet.
It blocks the transmissions of nervous system impulses. With sophisticated equipment, the 11 grams hoarded by the CIA could kill hundreds of thousands of people. Due to this and other findings, the committee questions the agency in various hearings.
Most of these are held privately to protect intelligence sources and methods. But this one is public and televised. It is meant to educate the American people of the CIA's various misconducts. Senator Frank Church of Idaho leads the hearing as chairman. He thinks the agency is a rogue elephant rampaging out of control.
Why did the agency prepare toxins of this character in quantities sufficient to kill many thousands of people? What was the need for that in the first place? Across from Church sits then-CIA director William Colby. He explains the agency supposedly wanted a better, more pain-free alternative to cyanide pills for agents in the field. Church doesn't buy it.
Have you brought with you some of those devices which would have enabled the CIA to use this poison for? We have indeed, for killing people. The CIA brings the committee the weapon. It is a result of two decades of development.
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Visit fern.deal slash Udo and start building your own website for free. Two decades prior, 50s. The Cold War is already in full swing. Tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union are high. Both sides are always testing the limits, showing their power, but are careful not to go too far.
In 1957 and 1959, this man, Bogdan Stashinsky, kills two people for the KGB. At first glance, both victims appear to have died of natural causes, but it turns out he used a special weapon. a mysterious poison vapor gun.
The US becomes aware of these incidents in 1961. It is unclear if the CIA already thought about working on a similar weapon at the time, or if they only started developing one to catch up. Whatever the reason, the agency starts looking for a poison, one that can kill a person, but makes it look like a natural death. And there is a woman who may have helped them find it. This is Mary Embry.
She started working for the CIA as a secretary. I went to technical services where I was in charge of finding documents that you don't find in libraries. One time they wanted me to find if there was such a thing as a poison that was undetectable that would kill someone, but it would appear that they had a heart attack. I did find such a thing. Next, the CIA needs to figure out how to effectively get the poison into the victim's body.
They tasked the Army Special Operations Division in Fort Detrick, Maryland. CIA and SOD have been secretly collaborating for years, and will do so for almost two decades. The SOD experiments with different types of delivery systems, and ultimately lands on this design.
The weapon is named the non-discernable micro-bionoculator, in a CIA memo. But it is more commonly known as the heart attack gun. This is how it works. The gun itself is practically a normal.45 with a round side attached on top.
But inside it's quite unique. It works by electricity. Here in the handle of the gun is a small battery that powers everything.
The gun fires a small dart. You put the dart in here. When the trigger is pulled, it shoots out almost silently and reaches its target over a surprisingly long distance.
What range does it have? 100 meters, I believe, about. These darts are a key part of the weapon.
They come in different sizes. One of them is so thin that the target doesn't even realize. they've been hit. A special one was developed which potentially would be able to enter the target without perception.
The darts are coated with the shellfish poison, which gives the target an apparent heart attack. In a later iteration, the CIA found a way to freeze the deadly poison into a tiny pellet so they could fire it directly. So when it reached the person it would melt inside them and the only thing would be like one little tiny red dot on their body which was hard to detect. There wouldn't be a needle left or anything like that in the person. But also the toxin itself would not appear in the autopsy?
Yes, so that there was no way of perceiving that the target was hit. No way of perceiving that the target was hit. A truly powerful tool in the hands of trained agents. In the hearing, the CIA only presented this one pistol. In reality, they developed a range of poison guns.
Little is known about their exact design. Presumably, they could hit targets at an even greater distance. By the time of the hearing, the heart attack gun was already illegal under US law.
President Nixon had ordered the end of all chemical warfare and the disposal of all bioweapons and agents. But some people at CIA and SOD disobeyed the president's command. They kept the 8 mg of Cobra venom and 11 grams of saxitoxin in storage, first at Fort Detrick and later in the little used storeroom in Washington DC. Manufacturing shellfish toxin is not only expensive, but also a very time consuming and complex process.
The CIA chemist, Dr. Nathan Gordon, wasn't prepared for all this work to be for nothing. He made plain that the prospect of destroying it troubled him greatly, so he just took one of the world's most dangerous poisons, in a quantity to kill hundreds of thousands, and hid it. Who knows when you might need it? The Church Committee's final report is damning for the CIA at the time.
It is over 2,700 pages long and paints a disturbing picture of the Secret Service's operations. The report shows that the CIA had planned political assassinations. They orchestrated mind control experiments that sounded like straight conspiracy theories. And in a wild test, they flooded the New York City subway with a harmless simulant of a disease-carrying gas.
The final question would be if the CIA ever used the heart attack gun on anybody. Mr. Colby said there were no records of any actual use. But just because there are no records of it, has it really never been used?
What became of the gun after the hearing remains a mystery.