Word: toxin
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...SENATE. In the old Senate caucus room the ten members of the select Senate committee were questioning CIA officials, including Director William Colby and the deputy director for science and technology, Sayre Stevens, about 11 gm. of shellfish toxin and 8 mg. of cobra venom discovered last May in a CIA storeroom (TIME, Sept. 22). No one could claim that the existence of the poisons as such was all that momentous, but the committee wanted to know why the lethal substances had been preserved. Besides, they made fascinating listening. To dramatize the Senators' concern, Committee Member Walter Mondale...
Working at the U.S. Army's laboratory at Fort Detrick, Md., researchers came up with the shellfish toxin. After receiving the toxin orally or by pinprick, a victim first feels a tingling sensation in the fingers and lips, then dies within ten seconds of painless paralysis. Indeed, according to Colby, U-2 Pilot Francis Gary Powers carried the toxin-contained in the grooves of a tiny drill bit that was concealed in a silver dollar -when he was shot down over Russia in 1960, but chose...
...researchers also came up with an array of James Bond weaponry that could use the shellfish toxin and other poisons as ammunition. To illustrate his testimony, Colby handed a pistol to Committee Chairman Frank Church. Resembling a Colt .45 equipped with a fat telescopic sight, the gun fires a toxin-tipped dart, almost silently and accurately up to 250 ft. Moreover, the dart is so tiny-the width of a human hair and a quarter of an inch long-as to be almost indetectable, and the poison leaves no trace in a victim's body...
Congress has requested that the CIA hold on to all evidence that could be useful to the Church committee investigation, but an exception may have to be made in the toxin case. According to the U.N.'s Biological Weapons Convention, the U.S. Government has until Dec. 26 to get rid of all biological warfare materials. Probably the best solution was proposed last week by Murdoch Ritchie, a Yale pharmacology professor and an expert on saxitoxin. Since it is invaluable for the study of such diseases as multiple sclerosis, Ritchie urged that the CIA's costly trove...
...agencies, revealed that the U.S.'s James Bonds have their own secret supply of quick and terrible poisons-in direct violation of a presidential order. In keeping with the draft convention of the U.N. Disarmament Conference, Richard Nixon five years ago ordered the destruction of all stocks of toxin weapons. But the CIA held on to 10.9 grams of saxitoxin, a close chemical cousin of the fearsome fugu, along with eight milligrams of a toxin made from cobra venom. That minuscule stockpile is enough, said Church, to kill "many thousands of people...