Word: venoms
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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...
...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...
Agency Defenders. Eventually, Gordon transferred the venom and toxin from Fort Detrick to the CIA storeroom in Washington, which held other toxic substances that were considered exempt from the presidential order because they were not intended for use as general weapons of war (see box). Helms called the episode "an aberration -something that happened once, to my knowledge." That assessment doubtless would be shared by many of the agency's defenders, who believe the CIA is being unfairly hounded, partly for political reasons. But committee members thought otherwise. Said Church: "We have found out that ambiguity seems to plague...
...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...
...might almost pass for a Hindu." At that point his parents farmed him out to relatives in England, sadistic moralists after the Dickensian type who brutalized him until public school took over. The battered child became a lifelong hater who never quite managed to spit out all his venom...