A Higher Form of Killing: The Secret History of Gas and Germ Warfare

NINE The Tools of Spies

ON 7 SEPTEMBER 1978 an exiled Bulgarian writer drove from his suburban home to the huge central London office block which houses the BBC overseas radio services. Before his defection in 1969, Georgi Markov had been a member of the privileged literary elite of Bulgarian society, a popular writer whose work had won him the friendship and confidence of senior members of the Politburo. Now he regularly broadcast commentaries on Bulgarian life back to his native land from the studios of the BBC and Radio Free Europe.

Parking space was hard to find immediately outside the BBC offices, so Markov left his car alongside the Thames, beneath Waterloo Bridge. Having locked the car, he climbed the flight of stone steps to the road above, and began walking towards the BBC. Suddenly he felt a sharp jab in his thigh. Markov turned around. A man was picking up an umbrella from the pavement, mumbling apologies.

That evening Markov began running a fever. His blood pressure fell and continued to drop for the next two days. The fever intensified. Finally, his heart gave up.

If Markov’s death had been intended to resemble an accident, the plan fell apart when he was able to tell his wife, shortly before he died, about the incident with the umbrella. When Scotland Yard forensic scientists examined the body, they discovered a small metal ball beneath the skin on Markov’s thigh. No bigger than a pinhead, the tiny pellet had four holes bored through it. The analysts became convinced that the pellet had contained poison. But of what type?

The clue came from Paris, where another Bulgarian exile, Vladimir Kostov, was living. Like Markov, Kostov was a journalist. When he read of his colleague’s death in the newspapers, Kostov recalled how he had felt a sharp pain in his back while riding the Paris Metro some ten days earlier. Kostov too had developed a fever, although in his case it had subsided after three or four days. Now Kostov requested a thorough medical examination.

An X-ray of his back revealed another metal pellet, buried beneath the skin. The French doctors who removed the object immediately sent it to Scotland Yard’s forensic laboratories, where analysis by microscope showed it to be identical to the ball removed from Markov’s thigh. The police scientists called in Porton Down, with its unrivalled expertise in germ warfare. Scientists at Porton found that the pellet taken from Kostov’s body still contained traces of poison. Soon they had identified it as Ricin, a highly toxic substance derived from the seeds of the castor oil plant. They checked their suspicion by taking a sample of Ricin from the Porton stores, and injecting it into a pig. The fever and heart attack which the animal developed were identical to the symptoms Markov had displayed as he struggled for life in the Intensive Care Unit. The biologists concluded that Kostov had only survived the attack on the Paris Métro because his assailants had failed to put enough poison into the pellet.

Ricin had been one of a series of poisons which the British had considered for use in assassinations during the Second World War. Indeed, even in the 1960s research was still being conducted into the effects of the poison under a contract with Exeter University. But the public evidence of British interest in Ricin was small in comparison with the work which had been carried out in Eastern Europe. Even a superficial scan of the published research papers on Ricin revealed a surprisingly high proportion of the work to have been carried out in Hungary and Czechoslovakia.¹

By the time that Scotland Yard realized they were handling a murder investigation, the assassin had gone to ground. Suspicion fell immediately upon the KGB – trained Bulgarian secret police, who appeared to be engaged in a campaign to silence dissidents who dared to criticise the dictatorship of President Todor Zhivkov. In their techniques of assassination, as in almost all other areas, the Bulgarian secret police were controlled by the KGB.

Like every section of the Soviet secret services, the activities of the KGB Technical Operations Directorate were shrouded in obsessive secrecy. What little was known about the gases and poisons produced by the KGB scientists there came mainly from the corpses of their victims. A handful of cases will serve to illustrate the range of poisons and chemicals available to KGB agents.

In February 1954 Captain Nicholai Khokhlov arrived in Frankfurt with orders to assassinate Georgi Sergeivich Okolovich, leader of an exiled dissident group. At the last moment Khokhlov’s nerve broke. He broke down and warned his intended victim of the danger he was in, before handing himself over to American intelligence. Khokhlov took American agents to a forest outside Munich. There, hidden deep in the woods, he produced an apparently normal gold cigarette case. It had been modified by KGB scientists into a pistol firing poisoned dum-dum bullets.

Khokhlov became a frequent speaker at anti-Soviet gatherings, where his experience as a KGB agent lent authority to his attacks on the Soviet system. But while at a speaking engagement in Frankfurt in September 1957, Khokhlov became violently ill. His face became covered in black, brown and blue lumps, his eyes oozed a sticky liquid, lumps of hair fell from his head. Two days later his German doctors decided that death was imminent. Khokhlov was transferred to an American military hospital, where six doctors began a desperate battle to save his life. They knew little about what had poisoned Khokhlov, but by constantly changing his blood, and with huge doses of cortisone, steroids, vitamins and experimental drugs, they managed to keep him alive. Gradually, Khokhlov recovered. Only later were American experts able to deduce from analysis of the course of Khokhlov’s illness that he had been poisoned by the insertion of highly radio-active metal fragments into his food supply.²

Two years later another assassin was despatched from Moscow to murder another dissident, this time with a chemical agent, prussic acid. On 15 October 1959 Stefan Bandera, a prominent Ukrainian exile, arrived at his home in Munich just before 1 pm. As he inserted the key into his front door the KGB agent, Bogdan Stashinsky stepped out of the shadows, and pointed a seven inch tube at his face. As Stashinsky pulled a trigger, prussic acid poured into Bandera’s face. The effect of the acid, once inhaled, was to cause the blood vessels in the victim’s body to contract suddenly, simulating a heart attack. Within minutes Bandera was dead. When Stashinsky defected to the West two years later, he described a range of chemical and biological devices produced by KGB technicians.

In the first week of September 1964 a German electronics engineer was called to Moscow to ‘sweep’ the West German Embassy for KGB listening devices. The man, Horst Schwirkmann, was highly proficient at his job, uncovering bugs concealed all over the building, all of which he destroyed. Before returning to Germany at the completion of his task, Schwirkmann travelled to a monastery outside Moscow for a Sunday of sightseeing. As he stood admiring the icons inside Zagorsk Monastery, Schwirkmann suddenly felt a searing pain across his buttocks and the back of his thighs. The paralysed technician was carried back to the West German Embassy, and thence to the specialist doctors at the United States compound. They concluded that he had been sprayed with nitrogen mustard gas, a gas developed and stockpiled during the Second World War. Twenty years later, Schwirkmann had become its first victim.

Not all KGB chemical or biological devices were intended to produce fatalities. Equally important, according to defectors, were the incapacitants, designed to disable a victim temporarily. Most notorious in this group were the drugs said to have been slipped into the drinks of diplomats or civil servants prior to their being found in compromising positions with KGB-run prostitutes. Other chemical or biological devices were designed to produce a temporary illness such as a severe stomach upset, which might render it necessary for victims to take to their beds at moments when Soviet intelligence wished to be certain of their absence.

But the Western intelligence agencies were not content to rely upon the information produced at a small number of autopsies or from hospital records or the evidence of defectors. Such cases, they believe, represented only the tiniest proportion of the work on gases and poisons carried out by the KGB’s Technical Operations Directorate. The same arguments which had been used to justify the development of chemical and biological weapons by the armies of the West had also been used to justify research in the laboratories of the Soviet secret services.

The British and Americans had first begun collaborating on the use of chemical and biological devices by secret agents during the Second World War. The assassination of General Reinhard Heydrich was undoubtedly the most spectacular example of the use of germ weapons by secret agents during the war (see here). But there had been numerous other missions on which the British and Americans had planned to use similar weapons.

In the early stages of the war plans for the covert use of gas and germ weapons had been relatively crude. During the Libyan campaign of 1940, the British War Cabinet had pondered various methods of contaminating German water supplies with easily available substances such as acid, salt and creosote.³ By 1942 the British Special Operations Executive had been supplied with a range of gas weapons for use in clandestine warfare. The Chiefs of Staff, meeting in July 1942, recognized the delicacy of issuing British undercover agents with gas weapons, but concluded that the Allies could not wait until gas had been used on a large scale before making the weapons available to undercover organisations like the Special Operations Executive. They ordered that gas weapons be shipped to SOE training schools in India, the Middle East, Australia and Canada, and samples were to be demonstrated to the American and Soviet allies.⁴

But the weapons themselves were not impressive. Among them was a tube 4½ inches long, filled with tear gas, which, commented one of the officers present, was ‘highly unlikely… [to] cause any panic, or hold up work for long, unless the liquid could be brought into contact with the victim’s face’.⁵ Porton Down had also assisted in developing a tube of ‘mustard gas ointment’, intended to be squeezed onto objects likely to be touched by a potential victim, which would then cause his skin to erupt into blisters. But even with this device there were problems. Each tube contained only a small amount of ointment, which was anyway likely to lose its effectiveness due to ‘weathering’. ‘The difficulties connected with the effective use of this store far outweigh its possible advantages’, the report concluded.⁶

The problem encountered by the British in attempting to devise reliable methods of carrying chemical and biological agents in sufficient safety and quantity to prove effective on undercover operations was one which bedevilled Porton Down for years. But with the entry of the United States into war in December 1941, the British were soon assisted by a group of American scientists who, in their tireless and fanciful efforts, made the Porton Down men seem pedestrian indeed.

The United States had no tradition of secret agents. When Roosevelt finally decided to create the organisation which became known as the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the forerunner of the CIA, he made an inspired choice for its Commander in General William ‘Wild Bill’ Donovan. Donovan, who was then fifty-seven, recruited some 12,000 men to form what eventually became the largest intelligence organization in the Western world. Among those he approached was Stanley P. Lovell, a Boston scientist and businessman. Lovell was summoned to a meeting one evening in an office at the corner of 25th and E streets in Washington.

Donovan began, in a voice Lovell later recalled as soft and beautifully modulated, by saying ‘I need every subtle device and underhand trick to use against the Germans and Japanese – by our own people – but especially by the underground resistance groups in all occupied countries. You will have to invent all of them, Lovell, because you’re going to be my man’.⁷ Lovell set about recruiting scientists to join him in developing ‘underhand tricks’. The technique he used was to approach candidate scientists and say ‘Throw all your normal law-abiding concepts out of the window. Here’s a chance to raise merry hell. Come, help me raise it.’⁸

The hell-raisers Lovell gathered around him were soon at work on some of the most daring and ludicrous schemes of the war. As the OSS itself largely trained by British agents, so Lovell’s scientists worked under the initial guidance of, and later in collaboration with, the British specialists. When Lovell came to write his memoirs some twenty years later he sent a copy of the published volume to Lord Stamp, the British Biological Warfare Liaison officer, inscribed with the words: ‘My deep respect to the little band to which you contributed so much during your Washington days. You were glorious pioneers in an uncharted field of warfare.’⁹

In the early stages much of the American research into clandestine methods of chemical and biological warfare was carried out in collaboration, with or at the request of, the British. Soon, however, the large resources of the OSS were being devoted entirely to projects of their own devising. Over the next thirty years the OSS and CIA were to produce some of the most ingenious chemical and biological weapons ever manufactured.

Lovell and two colleagues developed a simulated goat dung, to be dropped from allied aircraft onto German-occupied Morocco during the North African campaign in 1942. Lovell had heard that there were more goats than people in Spanish Morocco, and goat dung was likely to be everywhere. The simulant the American scientists developed contained a chemical so attractive to flies that it could, they believed, wake them even from hibernation. They envisaged millions of flies gathering on the goat dung, which would have been previously contaminated with bacteria causing tularemia (‘rabbit fever’) and psittacosis (‘parrot fever’). Both diseases, likely to cause debilitating illnesses lasting from days to weeks, would be spread to the German troops by the infected flies. Lovell did worry about how Moroccan peasants could be persuaded to accept the presence of goat droppings on their roofs after Allied aircraft had passed overhead scattering the stuff, but in the event the problem did not arise, since intelligence reports indicated that the German troops were being withdrawn, and the operation was rendered unnecessary.

There was no limit to the inventiveness of Lovell’s small group of hell-raisers. Many of their ideas seem in respect so preposterous that one wonders how anyone could have taken them seriously. OSS anthropologists were asked to report on the area of social behaviour most sensitive to Japanese. They concluded that nothing embarrassed a Japanese more than the smell of his own excrement. OSS chemists made up a compound which perfectly reproduced the smell of diarrhoea. This revolting liquid was then packed into collapsible tubes, which were smuggled into Chinese cities occupied by the Japanese army. When a Japanese officer walked along the street, the OSS reasoned, a small Chinese child would step up behind him, and squirt the liquid at the seat of his trousers. They christened the device the ‘Who? Me?’ bomb.

Another experiment centred on the well known aversion of cats for water. Cats, it was suggested to the OSS, always land on their feet, and will go to any lengths to avoid water. Why not wire a cat up to a bomb, and sling both cat and attached high explosive below a bomber? When flying over enemy ships, the explosive cat would be released. The cat would be so concerned to avoid landing in the water that it could, it was argued, be virtually certain of guiding the bomb onto the deck of enemy warships. Experiments with flying cats soon proved to the supporters of the project that even unattached to high explosive, the cat was likely to become unconscious long before Nazi decks seemed an attractive landing place.

No idea was too far out for the American specialists. In their very receptiveness to new and seemingly ridiculous plans, they pushed the frontiers of chemical and biological warfare into realms hardly dreamed of by the British. At one stage they shipped botulinus toxin pills out to prostitutes in occupied China in the hope that they would be able to poison Japanese army officer clients. On another occasion ‘Professor Moriarty’, as General Donovan called Stanley Lovell, dreamed up a plan to infiltrate a secret agent into a room on the Brenner Pass where Hitler and Mussolini were to meet. The man was to crush a capsule of nitrogen mustard gas into the water holding a bunch of flowers in the room. As the liquid began to vaporize anyone in the room would be permanently blinded by the gas. Lovell proposed that the Pope be then prevailed upon to issue a statement that the two fascists had been blinded in divine retribution for their contravention of the Sixth Commandment that Thou Shalt Not Kill.

Lovell’s own favourite scheme was a plan to attack Hitler with female sex hormones, which would be supplied to an anti-Nazi working in the vegetable garden of the Eagle’s Nest. The gardener was to inject the hormones into the Führer’s food, with the intention that ‘his moustache would fall off and his voice become soprano’.¹⁰ Like most of the other more bizarre plans for secret chemical and biological attacks, this scheme, too, failed. But some twenty years later, the successors to the Second World War ‘Hell Raisers’ were still toying with the idea of clandestinely tampering with a victim’s sexual identity.

With the end of the World War and the first stirrings of the new Cold War which was to dominate international life over the coming thirty years, there were new tasks for the intelligence organizations and their biological and chemical warfare specialists. As the Office of Strategic Services, hastily formed during the war, was replaced by the highly structured Central Intelligence Agency, so the nature of chemical and biological warfare research changed from a search to discover agents suitable for particular missions, to a long-term plan to isolate drugs and poisons available for use as and when the need arose. In particular the 1950s were dominated by what has come to be known as ‘The Search for the Manchurian Candidate’.¹¹

Two days before Christmas 1948 squads of Hungarian secret police had surrounded the Archiepiscopal Palace of Cardinal Josef Mindszenty, the Primate of Hungary. Ever since the occupation of his country at the end of the war by the Soviet army, Mindszenty had been an outspoken critic of the new socialist regime, ceaselessly campaigning for freedom to practise his religion, and attacking the government for failing to hold elections.¹²

On 3 February 1949 he was taken from the secret police headquarters to a court-room on Marko Street in Budapest, to face charges of subversion, espionage, and illegal use of foreign currency. As the Cardinal stood in the dock wearing a black suit run up by the police tailor, it was clear that the Hungarian authorities were hoping for a trial which would set an example to their people, a display of contrition in which the eminent churchman would recant his anti-government activities and so help to silence further opposition.

But whatever effect the trial might have had in Hungary was easily outweighed by the response of the West. Cardinal Mindszenty seemed a wreck of a man. His eyes, it was said, were the eyes of a man whose brain was no longer his own. As he stood in the dock confessing to the catalogue of crimes, Western intelligence began to wonder what had happened to him during his time in secret police cells. They concluded that he had either been drugged or subjected to extreme hypnosis.

Senior CIA men believed that the Russians had developed a method of making a man completely subservient to their will. There were reports of Soviet agents arrested in Germany equipped with syringes said to contain a liquid making any victim amenable to the will of his captor. Later, when American servicemen taken prisoner during the Korean War began to make confessions of their ‘crimes’ and to sign petitions calling for an end to United States involvement in Asia, the intelligence experts became convinced. They believed the Russians had developed a drug which, when administered to a victim, turned him into a robot, responsive only to their orders, and unaware even that he was being manipulated. By the time a high level military study group had concluded that no such drug existed, the CIA had already begun its own search for a reliable method of controlling human behaviour.¹³

It had started in 1950 with ‘Project Bluebird’, a study to examine the effects of hypnosis and electric shocks on defectors and would-be agents. By the following year the CIA wanted to broaden the investigation into the possible uses of drugs. (There was a scheme to find ways of inducing amnesia in ‘blown’ agents and defectors with the use of drugs, as an alternative to long periods in CIA custody.)¹⁴ The British and Canadian representatives who took part in the discussions remained sceptical about the chances of discovering a drug which would turn a man into an unwitting agent, but the CIA pressed ahead regardless. The quest continued for almost twenty years.

In April 1953 the CIA’s Deputy Directory of Plans, Richard Helms, proposed that the agency establish a ‘program for the covert use of biological and chemical materials’¹⁵ for the manipulation of behaviour. The project was, Helms believed, ‘ultra sensitive’, and he therefore argued that it be exempt from all the normal accounting channels, its very existence hidden from all but the most senior officers of the CIA. The Director of the CIA, Allen Dulles, approved the proposal, and the project began, under the codename MKULTRA.

The CIA made an agreement with a centre for the treatment of drug addicts in Lexington, Kentucky, run by a Dr Harris Isbell. Dr Isbell would receive consignments of drugs selected by CIA scientists as likely to be of use in MKULTRA, and would experiment with them upon the addicts in his care. Often addicts would be offered a ‘fix’ of the drug of their dependency in exchange for the opportunity to give them a drug of the CIA’s choice.

The CIA tested large numbers of drugs, including many, like cocaine, which later became part of the drug culture. But, like the Army Chemical Corps, their main interest was in the then little known drug LSD. Dr Isbell’s letters back to the CIA note that a number of the addicts to whom he was giving the drug began to show signs of fear of the doctors at the centre. But his curiosity and enthusiasm drove him on nonetheless. After one experiment with LSD in 1953, Dr Isbell reported that:

Most of the ‘patients’ appear to have been ‘negro males’, and most of the experiments to have involved the unwitting receipt of LSD. In one experiment Dr Isbell kept seven men on LSD for seventy-seven days, a feat which would have terrified even the most hardened ‘acid head’ of the drug culture.

But to appreciate the effects of LSD on normal people in a normal environment, the CIA could not rely exclusively upon the experiments with drug addicts or volunteers. To gain a full understanding of the effects of LSD, they needed to administer the drug to unsuspecting victims.

Twice a year the scientists from the Special Operations division at Fort Detrick would gather at an old log cabin in the Appalachian mountains to spend a few quiet days discussing their work, and sketching out new areas of research. On 18 November 1953 they were joined by a group from the CIA working on the effects of LSD. On the evening of their second day in the mountains, the men sat around sharing a bottle of Cointreau. Twenty minutes later the senior CIA man present, Sid Gottlieb, told his colleagues that he had spiked their drinks with LSD. The conversation soon disintegrated into confusion and laughter, and few of them managed any sleep that night. The following day all set off to drive home.

Frank Olson, one of the civilian chemists from Fort Detrick, arrived home extremely depressed. Years of experience in Top Secret work had conditioned him to say little about his activities in the laboratories, and when his wife asked him what was wrong he replied only that he had made a mistake and felt that he should leave his job. ‘He was an entirely different person’, his wife recalled later, ‘I didn’t know what had happened, I just knew that something was terribly wrong.’¹⁷ Olson remained in this disturbed condition throughout the weekend and while at work at Fort Detrick on Monday. By Tuesday his colleagues had decided he needed specialist psychiatric advice.

One of Olson’s colleagues at Fort Detrick, Colonel Vincent Ruwet, offered to accompany Olson to New York to see a recommended psychiatrist. They were joined on the journey by a civilian, Robert Lashbrook, who worked for the CIA. To pass the evening in Manhattan the three men went to see a musical, but Olson became so upset that Colonel Ruwet had to walk him back to their hotel during the intermission. Later, while Ruwet was asleep, Olson went out wandering the streets. At one point he apparently became convinced that Ruwet had ordered him to destroy all his paper money, and tore it up and threw away his wallet.

The New York psychiatrist, who had been chosen because his previous work for the army had given him a top security clearance, diagnosed Olson as suffering from ‘psychosis and delusions’, and recommended that he enter hospital. Although Olson had planned to return home for the Thanksgiving weekend celebrations before any further treatment, he apparently felt too ashamed to make the journey. While Colonel Ruwet travelled down to explain to Alice Olson why her husband would not be home for the family celebrations, Olson and Lashbrook went back to see the psychiatrist. He recommended again that Olson be admitted to hospital, but the earliest that arrangements could be made was the following day. That evening the two men checked into Room 1018A at the Statler Hotel in midtown Manhattan.

At 3.20 in the morning the CIA man was awoken by the sound of breaking glass. Ten floors below, the body of Frank Olson lay shattered on Seventh Avenue.

Immediately a cover-up began. The police were given the impression that Olson had simply been suffering from a great deal of stress. Alice Olson was told first that her husband had died as a result of an accident at work, and then that he had fallen from a hotel window. No one mentioned the LSD tests. It was only twenty-two years later, when a report into the activities of the CIA mentioned how an unnamed army employee had jumped from a hotel window after being given LSD, that his family were able to establish how Frank Olson had died.

Frank Olson was by no means the only unwitting victim of CIA attempts to discover the effects of LSD and other ‘mind bending’ drugs. As noted earlier, a decision had been taken soon after the start of MKULTRA that to determine the effects of drugs on intended victims, realistic tests had to be conducted upon unsuspecting ‘clients’. In May 1953 the CIA hired one of their more colourful operators to arrange the testing for them.

George White had begun his working life in the classic fashion, as a club reporter on the San Francisco Herald Examiner. But the job failed to offer the excitement he sought, and in 1934 he joined the Bureau of Narcotics, committed to stamping out the illegal use of drugs. In the course of his career with the Bureau he claimed to have shot and killed a suspected Japanese spy, to have been put on trial in Calcutta after a gunfight, shot his way out of a bar in Marseilles, and to have infiltrated a Chinese drug-smuggling brotherhood.¹⁸ With the formation of the OSS during the Second World War, White was a natural recruit. Here he turned his experience with the Narcotics Bureau to advantage, volunteering to test new ‘truth drugs’ himself.

In May 1953 White became Subproject Three of MKULTRA, his job to provide the environment in which the CIA could test drugs on unsuspecting victims. Under an assumed name he rented an apartment in Greenwich Village, New York City, which the CIA then fitted out with microphones and two-way mirrors. White then engaged prostitutes to lure men back to the apartment, where their drinks would be doctored with drugs like cannabis concentrate and LSD. Then in early 1955 the Narcotics Bureau, who were still his notional employers, transferred White to San Francisco.

In the apartment George White took in San Francisco, the CIA moved in so much electronic surveillance equipment that one former agent was later to remark ‘if you spilled a glass of water, you’d probably electrocute yourself’.¹⁹ White brought his own peculiar flair to the place, furnishing it like a caricature brothel – red curtains, Toulouse-Lautrec posters and pictures of manacled women. It was appropriate enough, for the place was to be used as a government-sponsored bordello. White would watch from behind a two-way mirror sipping chilled Martinis as prostitutes stripped off and had sex with their clients.²⁰ Initially the project officers were interested to learn how much information a man might be prepared to give at various stages of the sexual encounter. Then the interest turned to drugs. The prostitutes would offer their clients apparently normal cocktails which had previously been spiked with LSD, and the CIA observers would monitor their behaviour.

In another LSD experiment in San Francisco in 1959, CIA agents were told to meet a random selection of people in bars, and to invite them back to a hired house for a party. When the room was crowded, they were to spray LSD from an aerosol into the air. Unfortunately for the experiment, it was an exceptionally warm day, and with the room full of people the windows had to be kept open, creating such a strong draught that it would have been impossible to ensure a reasonable concentration of LSD in the atmosphere. The test was abandoned, and the agents consoled themselves with unlaced drinks.²¹

Years later George White would write to Sid Gottlieb, the head of CIA drug and germ research programme:

Where indeed?

And yet, if the CIA were to continue their research into chemical and biological warfare, then they had, they felt, to test the substances on unwitting people. By definition this ruled out volunteers. In a memo classified ‘eyes only’ on the subject written by Richard Helms in December 1963 it was explained that other approaches had been considered. The CIA had thought of asking local police departments to give the drugs to prisoners, but that would have involved informing local politicians. ‘Several times in the past ten years’ the Agency had attempted to set up testing programmes abroad, but each time too many foreigners had known for the scheme to be secure. In the end they concluded that the only solution was to continue the arrangement with the Narcotics Bureau – the efforts of George White and others – because it ‘affords us more security.’²³

But if White’s activities were the most colourful, they were only a tiny part of MKULTRA. In August 1977 the CIA admitted that there had been no less than 149 subprojects, including experiments to determine the effects of different drugs on human behaviour, work on lie-detectors, hypnosis and electric shock, and ‘the surreptitious delivery of drug-related materials’.²⁴ Forty-four colleges and universities had been involved, fifteen research foundations, twelve hospitals or clinics and three penal institutions. Front organisations had been established to channel funds to institutions which the CIA believed would carry out work for them. Typical was the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology, which in two years gave money to academic foundations in Britain, Canada, Finland, Hong Kong, Burma, Israel, Holland and Switzerland, as well as to numerous institutions within the United States.²⁵ Not all these foundations were necessarily conducting work for the CIA’s mind control and chemical warfare programmes.

In June 1964 MKULTRA was renamed MKSEARCH. Eleven years after the attempt to develop means of waging clandestine chemical and biological warfare had begun, it was still felt that this was such a sensitive area that the project should continue to be exempt from all normal administrative and accounting controls. By the early 1970s LSD had been abandoned, but other drugs were under investigation. A tantalizing glimpse of the work being conducted is afforded by the report in 1973 on Project OFTEN. The heavily censored two-page report states the CIA belief that the ‘Soviets are known to be actively working in the glycolate area’, and records that Edgewood Arsenal had already earmarked an unnamed drug – presumably a similar compound – as a potential incapacitant. Twenty volunteers, five prisoners, and fifteen servicemen had been given the drug, and produced symptoms lasting up to six weeks.²⁶

Of the final phase of the CIA’s involvement in covert chemical and biological warfare, MKDELTA, the ‘use of biochemicals in clandestine operations’, very little is known. In one form or another, however, the research project had continued for twenty years, until, shortly before he left office, the man who had originated the research ordered that all records be destroyed. What little is now known is a tribute to the inefficiency with which the task was carried out, and the conscientiousness of CIA employees in answering Freedom of Information Act requests.

William Colby, the slim, well-dressed Director of the CIA, remembers i6 September 1975 as a ‘ghastly day’.²⁷ Beneath the assembled television cameras in a Committee room on Capitol Hill he began to read from a hastily prepared statement.

There had been some confusion over whether Nixon’s announcement of November 1969 – that the United States was to destroy all her biological weapons – was an instruction which also applied to toxin devices. Toxins are poisons which, although originally derived from living organisms, are not capable of reproducing themselves, and, unlike disease bacteria, cannot be transmitted from one person to another. Three months after his policy statement renouncing biological weapons, Nixon announced that toxins too were to be included in the ban. In a statement issued from Key Biscayne, Florida, and known as the Valentine’s Day Declaration, since it was issued on 14 February 1970, Nixon announced that all stocks of toxin weapons were also to be destroyed.

Colby felt uncomfortable as he sat facing the Senate Intelligence Committee in Committee Room 318 of the Russell Senate Office Building on Capital Hill five years later. As the Committee chairman, Senator Frank Church put it, ‘direct orders of the President of the United States were evidently disobeyed by employees of the CIA’.²⁸ Colby began to explain how it was that the CIA came to have eleven grammes of a substance clearly labelled ‘Shellfish Toxin’, and a further eight grammes of Cobra venom, five years after the President had ordered their destruction.

During the Second World War American secret agents had been issued with ‘L pills’, filled with cyanide. The suicide pills, designed to be taken as an alternative to interrogation and torture after capture, had one great disadvantage. Cyanide causes an agonizing death, and may take several minutes to act. The CIA, Colby said, had determined to find a faster and less painful poison.

Colby revealed that on his ill-fated espionage flight over the Soviet Union in May 1960, the U-2 spy plane pilot Gary Powers had carried a supply of the new shellfish poison which had been refined at Fort Detrick on the instructions of the CIA. The poison was hidden in the grooves of a ‘drill bit’, which was in turn hidden inside a silver dollar he carried everywhere. When Powers’s aircraft was shot down by Soviet missiles, he evidently decided to risk interrogation, and did not swallow the poison. Curious KGB counter intelligence officers who examined the silver dollar are said to have given the poison to a dog. It was dead within ten seconds. But there were, Colby explained, other uses for the shellfish poison too.

Beneath the bright lights and whirring cameras, Colby suddenly produced what he described, in masterly bureaucratese, as a ‘nondiscernible microbioinoculator’. It looked like a normal .45 pistol. But Colby told the senators it was powered by electricity. A small battery in the handle produced enough power to fire a small poisoned dart one hundred yards. The ‘nondiscernible’ element of Colby’s description now became apparent: tests had shown the weapon to be so effective that a poisoned dart could be fired into a victim without his even noticing that he had been hit.

Though the production of the poisoned dart gun created a sensation, other witnesses were to follow Colby who would describe many other devices. There were, it appeared, weapons which could be used to contaminate roads or railway tracks with biological agents, pens which would fire poison darts or spray gas into a room, unbrellas and walking sticks which would do the same. In fact the shellfish toxin represented only a tiny part of the arsenal which had been developed to wage clandestine chemical and biological warfare.

Colby explained that the toxins which should have been destroyed had been retained ‘in an excess of zeal’, since they had been enormously expensive to extract, and represented about one third of the world’s total supply. The few grammes of shellfish toxin represented enough to give a fatal dose to thousands of people. Colby was asked whether there were any records which would tell the story of the CIA’s involvement in chemical and biological warfare. No, he said, they had all been destroyed in 1972.

Such records as remain indicate that CIA interest in chemical and biological warfare dates back at least to 1952, when the Agency approached the Special Operations Division at Fort Detrick. Only a handful of CIA personnel knew of the arrangement between the two organizations, and on visits to the biological warfare base they were known simply as the ‘Staff Support Group’. The fact that the CIA was paying for research at Fort Detrick was hidden behind the funding code ‘P600’.²⁹

According to one of the participants it was ‘a kind of Never-Never land’.³⁰ Among the ideas tossed about were questions such as: could a material be developed to dissolve the Berlin Wall? Could a drug be produced to knock out everyone in a building? Could water divining be used to detect enemy submarines?

While these extraordinary theories were being discussed, other researchers were being sent on expeditions to far flung corners of the globe to gather plant or animal samples which might be used in the manufacture of new weapons.

In 1953 a researcher was despatched to the mountains of central Mexico in search of the fabled Magic Mushroom used by Indians during religious ceremonies and said to ‘open the doors of perception’. Nine years later an unidentified CIA officer wrote to his Division Chief about the problems faced on another expedition. The plan had been to develop a poison based upon the gall bladder of the Tanganyika crocodile. The CIA man had decided there were two options:

Undaunted by the complex logistical problems presented in sending the unfortunate crocodile to CIA laboratories, the enthusiastic young agent concluded his report by mentioning that sources in Tanganyika could ‘provide us with details concerning methods and techniques employed by the witch doctors in preparing the poison’.³¹

While the CIA scoured the world in search of little-known poisons, its British and Canadian counterparts appear to have devoted their energies or refining poisons already discovered. Little is known of the exact nature of allied research in this field, although a report to the American House of Representatives did reveal that scientists at Fort Detrick had collaborated with Canadian counterparts in the early 1950s in attempts to isolate the ‘paralytic poisoning in man often caused by eating toxic clams and mussels’.³² By 1954, the two groups of scientists had extracted the poison in a ‘relatively pure form’.

In fact throughout the post-war years the British and Canadians have collaborated closely with their American counterparts, at least in the initial areas of research. In 1975 a veteran Fort Detrick scientist described the co-operation as ‘close co-ordination’.³³ Indeed, the shellfish toxin which the CIA had retained five years after it should have been destroyed had first been properly understood by a British scientist, Dr Martin Evans, employed by the Institute of Animal Physiology at Babraham on the outskirts of Cambridge.³⁴ Records from Fort Detrick also show that stocks of shellfish poison were shipped to the microbiological establishment at Porton Down, and to its Australian counterpart, the Defence Standards Laboratories at Ascot Vale, Victoria. During the time of the Senate hearings into the supplies of shellfish poison, one of the Fort Detrick specialists in clandestine biological warfare revealed that in 1975 he had been ‘on temporary duty’ in Britain where he had been working ‘on a collaborative effort’ in ‘Biological Protection’.³⁵

Details of which drugs and poisons the British finally settled upon for their secret services are likely to stay shrouded in secrecy for years to come. It would be surprising if, unlike the United States and the Soviet Union, the British had not developed such weapons for clandestine use. Perhaps it is some indication of the relative significance of chemical warfare for the undercover services that among the commemorative plaques on the wall behind the desk of the Director of Porton Down is only one from any army regiment. It is that of the Special Air Service, or SAS, the hand-picked special operations unit trained to operate behind enemy lines, and charged with carrying out the ‘dirty jobs’ of the intelligence services.

In the United States some evidence at least is available to suggest the sort of uses to which clandestine chemical or biological weapons might be put. There were numerous planned attempts on the life of Fidel Castro using chemical or biological devices.³⁶ Botulinal toxin pills were prepared, to be slipped into Castro’s food, cigars were contaminated with the same poison, plans were laid to contaminate his rubber diving suit with spores causing a chronic skin disease. There were even plans to dust his shoes with a chemical which would cause his beard to fall out, so, it was speculated, ruining his revolutionary appeal. None of these schemes came to anything, although in 1960 another poisoning operation came closest to success, when the CIA went after Patrice Lumumba, the radical prime minister of the Congo (now Zaire). Six months after independence Sid Gottlieb, the man who had slipped LSD into Frank Olson’s after-dinner drink, was sent to Kinshasa with a supply of poison. Much to his frustration, Gottlieb was unable to find a way of getting the poison into Lumumba’s body, and the plan was abandoned.³⁷

By the late 1960s the descendants of Sidney Lovell’s ‘hell raisers’ had developed a gamut of chemical and biological devices suitable for every purpose from disguised assassination to minor harassment. Some were described by former CIA agent Philip Agee:

There were many other devices which Agee did not choose to mention; three different forms of toxin, all of them fatal, other agents to cause diseases like anthrax and tuberculosis, chemicals to induce anything from hallucinations to heart failure.³⁹

When asked why the CIA had developed such a range of clandestine weapons, the architect of much of the programme, Richard Helms, cited the well-worn argument used by the chemical and biological warfare establishment since chemical warfare began. ‘A good intelligence organisation would be expected to know what his adversaries were doing and be in a position to protect himself against the offensive acts of his adversaries’, adding, unnecessarily, ‘if the worst came to the worst, and we were ever asked by the proper authority to do something in this field, we would be prepared to do so.’⁴⁰

In the years which followed Nixon’s decision to stop the chemical arms race in 1970, it was an argument which would be heard with increasing frequency.