Of all the Central Intelligence Agency secrets revealed to the world by the so-called Church Committee of the 1970s, perhaps none captured the imagination of the American public as vividly as the agency’s “heart attack weapon.”

During the Cold War, there was almost nothing the CIA could not do, from simple operations to gain superiority over the Soviet Union. Such as intercepting and reading the mail of American citizens to more serious (and equally illegal) actions such as dosing”unwitting, non-voluntary human subjects“We saw how well they could withstand interrogation with LSD. We know about these secret efforts because in 1975 Congress investigated the agency, as well as the FBI, the National Security Agency, and the IRS, and released its findings to the American public. The results of the investigation were alarming, to say the least.

Idaho Sen. The Senate Select Committee to Study Government Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, led by Frank Church, known as the Church Committee, was sparked by a series of startling revelations in the early 1970s. First one whistleblower appeared the Army He was spying on American citizens in their homes. Almost as soon as the dust settles on this discovery, The New York Times published a news It was revealed that the CIA had been spying on Americans for decades, keeping dossiers on nearly 10,000 Americans – including at least one member of Congress – who were suspected of being foreign agents.

The Church Committee soon revealed the CIA’s powerful assassination program targeting anti-American leaders such as Patrice Lumumba of the Congo, Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic, Ngo Dinh Diem of Vietnam, General René Schneider of Chile, and the infamous Cuban dictator Fidel Castro. took it out. Survived multiple CIA assassination attempts.

But if the agency is going to kill world leaders, of course it can’t look like an assassination. The CIA needed the perfect weapon and found it in shellfish. Once extracted, the powerful neurotoxin could be frozen and fired from a gun, killing its victim with what appeared to be a heart attack. At a public hearing in 1975, Senator Church showed the world the CIA’s “heart attack weapon.”

The gun itself resembled a scoped Colt M1911 pistol but did not fire .45 caliber bullets. Instead, he fired a frozen pellet containing saxitoxin, a poisonous substance derived from shellfish that consume toxic algal blooms. The shot can be fired silently up to 100 meters away and enter the body through a pinhole entry wound. The poison would then dissolve and within minutes the victim would be dead.

Weaponized saxitoxin was the discovery of Mary Embree, who joined the CIA right after dropping out of high school in the 1960s. She started her career as a secretary; was working to create small electronic devices and deliver passports and other documents to field representatives. He was later moved to a project known as MKNaomi with a mission that included stocking “Severely injurious and lethal materials for the exclusive use of the Technical Services Division” — Source of special devices used in the Agency’s espionage operations. His mission was to find an undetectable poison, and saxitoxin was the silver bullet the CIA was looking for.

Even though Embree had discovered the right poison, the CIA still needed a delivery method that would literally let an agent get away with murder. Dr. Nathan Gordona researcher Fort DetrickMaryland discovered that mixing the toxin with water and freezing it allowed a poisoned arrow as wide as a human hair and a quarter-inch long to be fired from a modified M1911.

Once inside the body, the victim experiences paralytic shellfish poisoning, which can manifest as a tingling sensation, shortness of breath, abdominal pain, suffocation, and lack of coordination. The victim becomes paralyzed before dying of respiratory failure in a process that can take seconds. The only evidence of foul play might be a small, red wound that a casual coroner wouldn’t easily find. The cause of death may appear to be a heart attack even to a medical doctor.

The heart attack gun wasn’t just an American invention: The KGB, the Soviet Union’s secret intelligence and internal security force, also had a similar poison weapon. Bohdan Stashinsky, one of the hitmen of the KGB, was known killed two Ukrainian anti-Soviet activistsLev Rebet and Stepan Bandera with a gun that sprayed cyanide in their faces in the 1950s, causing death within minutes. The cause of death for both of them appeared to be a heart attack. The CIA learned the true causes of death when Stashinsky defected to the West in 1961.

The CIA’s heart attack weapon wasn’t just shocking because it was a secret weapon for targeted assassination. Imposed by President Richard Nixon banning biological weapons In 1969, he ordered the CIA to destroy stockpiles of poisons such as saxitoxin. Gordon claimed never received such an order. Others said the poisons were stored by CIA men who believed in the program. Sufficient saxitoxin killing approximately 5,000 people He eventually found his way into a storage room at CIA headquarters. (MKNaomi was officially discontinued in 1970, based on To the New York Times.)

The person who brought the famous heart attack weapon to the infamous congressional hearing in 1975 was none other than then-CIA Director William Colby. explaining In clinical parlance, it is referred to as an “undetectable microbioculator.” Although he detailed how it could be used, he never explained if or when it was used.

The Church Committee’s findings eventually led President Gerald Ford to conclude: sign an administrative order It prohibits employees of the United States government from “engaging in or conspiring to participate in political assassination.” Eventually, the CIA would have to figure out how to eliminate its foreign enemies without directly contributing to their demise—just as it had done before. Afghanistan, Argentina, Poland, Chad, Nicaragua and elsewhere.

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