Word: toxins
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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...
...records on the research program to preserve its secrecy from all but a handful of CIA officials. Church committee staffers are investigating reports that the CIA prepared detailed plans to poison Congolese Radical Leader Patrice Lumumba in 1960 and even shipped an undetermined quantity of poison, possibly the shellfish toxin, to the African nation. Richard Bissell, ex-director of covert operations for the CIA, told a reporter last week that the agency had investigated "the feasibility of an action of that kind" but abandoned the idea "for various operational reasons." He insisted the CIA was not involved in Lumumba...
...hearing, Richard Helms recalled orally ordering the destruction of the CIA stockpile of shellfish toxin and venom, and an end to the M.K. Naomi program which by then had cost about $3 million. Asked why the poisons were saved, Colby replied: "I think that it was done by people who were so completely enmeshed in the subject and the difficulty of production [100 Ibs. of shellfish produces 1 gm. of toxin] that they simply couldn't bear to see the stuff destroyed." But Nathan Gordon, the stooped and bushy-browed ex-CIA chemist who was in charge...