Let's Talk About That Time the CIA Was Obsessed With Weaponized Shellfish Toxin

Inside the "wacky" world of 1960s assassination programs

In my recent column about fascism in the United States, I mentioned a dastardly CIA program called MK-ULTRA. To refresh your memory, that was a decades-long project conducted at hospitals and universities all across the United States and Canada that mostly amounted to heinous psychological experiments conducted on unwitting test subjects, all in the name of seeing what kind of advances we could make in the field of mind control.

It’s why searching “mind control” on a stock image site produces 300 pages of this

While we still know almost next to nothing about the scope and specifics of MK-ULTRA, it is a veritable open book compared to its successor program, MK-NAOMI.

Sorry, its alleged successor program. That’s how little is known about MK-NAOMI. We know it was real and that it got into some equally weird and deplorable stuff, but beyond that, details are so sketchy that it can’t really even be confirmed that it was the successor to MK-ULTRA. We just know they both existed and they were both very bad.

To gauge the available information disparity between the two projects, you need only compare their respective Wikipedia pages. The MK-ULTRA page isn’t the longest I’ve ever read, but there is certainly some meat on those bones.

Meanwhile, the article you’re reading right now is already approximately as long as the MK-NAOMI page.

That said, we do know some things about MK-NAOMI, and what we know is pretty damn wild.

For one thing, it was definitely a biological weapons project conducted jointly between the CIA and the Department of Defense, but even that much information seems like it’s on the verge of being lost to history. I culled that last sentence from the opening paragraphs of the aforementioned MK-NAOMI Wikipedia page. The sources cited are four out of print books and a Time Magazine article from 1975 that is only available in internet archive form.

The Time article was published in 1975 in the midst of the Church Committee investigations, which ultimately uncovered a vast array of CIA wrongdoing. At one point during that investigation, then CIA Director William Colby explained that MK-NAOMI was started in 1952, in part to find countermeasures to chemical and biological weapons the KGB might use.

Because when in doubt, blame Russia.

Another goal was to give agents in the field a quicker and cleaner way to commit suicide if captured by the enemy. Turns out death by cyanide pill is slow and painful and not at all what it looks like in the movies.

So that all sounds sorta innocent enough I guess?

However, and you’re not gonna believe this, there were some rumblings at the time and in the years since that MK-NAOMI was about a lot more than countermeasures against the commies and painless death.

The project came rushing back into my mind on account of a recent series of podcast episodes I recorded about one of the most famous and influential conspiracy theory books of all-time — Milton William Cooper’s Behold A Pale Horse.

I’m positive this cover is at least half the reason the book is so popular.

Cooper makes some wild claims about MK-NAOMI, chief among them that the people behind it were responsible for creating and releasing the AIDS virus as a means of population control. I don’t think he does a great job of selling that theory, but he does bring up something else that seems outlandish at first glance until you dig into the details a little more.

Bill Cooper partially built his career as a luminary on the conspiracy theory scene by way of his pet theory about how JFK was killed. To put it bluntly, he believed Kennedy was killed at the behest of the CIA by his limousine driver who shot him with…a shellfish toxin pellet. He brings it up almost immediately in Behold a Pale Horse.

I’m not sold on that particular claim either. There was way more blood than I’d expect from a shellfish toxin shooting, although I don’t know what I’m expecting from a shellfish toxin shooting. I’ve never seen one, obviously. It is interesting that he brings up shellfish toxin, though. Because, as it turns out, that’s something the CIA was super duper interested during the MK-NAOMI days.

Case in point, when Francis Gary Powers’ U2 spy plane was shot down over the Soviet Union in 1960, there was a modified silver dollar in his pocket that hid a needle loaded with a lethal dose of shellfish toxin instead of cyanide.

Shellfish toxin, as opposed to the pain and agony of cyanide, just causes a tingling sensation in the fingers and lips and then death by way of painless paralysis about ten seconds later. We should all be so lucky as to go that way.

You can find even more evidence of the Agency’s interest in shellfish toxin in a document from the US National Archives called “Summary Report of CIA Investigation of MK-NAOMI.” It’s a pretty fascinating insight into how the CIA works, or at least how it worked back then.

Specifically, the CIA is known to be a very compartmentalized place. People work on their projects and for the most part don’t really know what everyone else is working on.

No one person has enough time to topple foreign governments AND consult on the FX original hit series Snowfall

This report happened at a point in history when the CIA was under intense public scrutiny on account of the Church Committee hearings, which was a massive Senate investigation of American intelligence malfeasance.

Around that time, there was a call within the CIA for employees with knowledge of projects that might make the agency seem like morally bankrupt Nazi collaborators who conduct medical experiments on the public to come forward and tell what they know. Someone with some knowledge of MK-NAOMI alerted internal investigators to the existence of the project, and that’s how the investigation into it started.

In this report, the investigators note that MK-NAOMI was especially shrouded in secrecy, with only two or three officers cleared for access to MK-NAOMI and Fort Detrick activities at any given time. Fort Detrick in Maryland is where MK-NAOMI was headquartered. 

They couldn’t even find the name of the project at first. When they did, they still only found two files, but what they did find was highly alarming.

While Bill Cooper’s concern about MK-NAOMI was that it produced AIDS as a weapon to kill black people, the concern in this memo centers around the idea that MK-NAOMI was, at least in part, an assassination program.

Again, it was definitely a biological weapons program. There’s no disputing that. And in some cases, one that was clearly meant to kill lots of people. A CIA memo uncovered by the Church Committee mentioned at least three covert methods for attacking and poisoning crops and confirmed they had all been field tested. It just doesn’t say where.

This was a long running program. Keep in mind that it started in 1952 as you read this next quote:

“By the late 1960s, a stockpile of some 15 to 20 different BW agents and toxins was maintained on a regular basis by SOD for possible Agency use. The supply included such agents as food poisons, infectious viruses, lethal botulinum toxin, paralytic shellfish toxin, snake venom, Microsporeum gypseum which produces severe skin disease, etc.”

Do you see it? Shellfish toxin! Just like what Bill Cooper claims the same people behind MK-NAOMI used to kill JFK. 

Now let’s go back to that Time Magazine article. It mentions that during the Church Committee investigation, it came to light that we weren’t just looking into shellfish toxin to provide soldiers and spies a less gruesome death in the field.

Since Russia was reported to have killed some dissidents and enemies by way of poison darts, MK-NAOMI also worked on turning shellfish toxin into a weapon that could be fired like ammunition.

Sounds insane, huh? Well, sorry to shatter your expectations, but here’s video of William Colby showing Frank Church the shellfish toxin gun.

Here’s a quote from the article about that moment:

“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.” 

Frank Church called it “a murder instrument that’s about as efficient as you can get.” 

There’s also this sentence in that Time article:

“The agency has also developed two other dart-launching pistols, as well as a fountain pen that can fire deadly darts and an automobile engine head bolt that releases a toxic substance when heated.” 

All that said, I do have some concerns about Bill Cooper’s shellfish toxin assassination claim. The way he says the weapon would’ve been used on Kennedy and the way the weapon is described as working in the Church Committee testimony don’t really match.

Cooper says it was a pellet dipped in shellfish toxin and that was done as a backup measure in case the impact from the pellet didn’t kill Kennedy. If the goal was to kill the guy with a projectile to the head, you could just shoot him with a regular gun. It clearly seems like that is what happened.

The shellfish toxin gun mentioned by William Colby during the Church Committee hearings fired a quarter inch long dart the size of a human hair and just needed to prick the skin, not embed a shellfish toxin pellet in the brain.

There’s also this video on military.com where it’s mentioned that the entire appeal of the shellfish toxin gun was that it fired a dart and payload that was essentially undetectable once it entered the body.

Also, it’s referred to in most places as a “heart attack gun” and, I don’t know if you’ve seen the video, but JFK for sure did not die of a heart attack.

So Cooper is right when he claims the government had figured out a means of assassination by way of shellfish toxin, apparently, I just don’t buy his claim that it’s how Kennedy was killed.  

That said, the report about that CIA investigation into MK-NAOMI did raise another assassination related concern. Here’s a quote:

While no direct connections to assassination planning have been found, there are some disturbing similarities between the agents being investigated at Fort Detrick and some of the reported schemes for incapacitating or assassinating Castro.

That quote is followed by a full page of redactions, which is weird, because from there the report starts actually naming names. Specifically, Roosevelt (probably not that one) and Treichler. Only the first names are mentioned because they first come up somewhere in that page of redactions, where I’m guessing their first names are mentioned.

Treichler is of special interest to the investigators behind this report. He was Chief of the Biology Branch at Fort Detrick and, when talking to them, denied ever having worked on anything assassination related. However, the report notes that not too long before they interviewed him, he was interviewed by the Inspector General’s office regarding assassination attempts and gave a whole different story.

Here’s another quote:

“Treichler may constitute a connection between the MK-NAOMI project and the assassination plots involving Castro. The records show his giving direction in specific terms to the preparation of materials at Fort Detrick matching those mentioned in the assassination schemes. Finally, the IG’s report indicates that he delivered such material to other elements of the Agency.”

Now, just to put your mind at ease, I should mention that the Nixon administration put the kibosh on biological weapons programs during his time in office and whatever we had was destroyed.

So that’s nice! But also here’s another quote from the MK-NAOMI investigation report:

“It was the impression of those in OTS who were familiar with the project that the material had in fact been destroyed but no records confirming it could be found. In an attempt to find such confirmation, laboratory storage facilities in OTS were searched and in the course of that search about 11 GRAMS OF SHELLFISH TOXIN AND 6 MG OF COBRA VENOM — but none of the other materials — were discovered.”

Whoa! Close call there! Good thing we found it and definitely immediately destroyed it!

Except no, we probably did not. From there the report goes into as much detail as its blessed little heart possibly can given the lack of available information about how and when this stockpile of shellfish toxin and cobra venom was going to be destroyed, but then mentions that those efforts failed. Then, they bring it all home with this quote:

“No further efforts toward the disposal of the material have taken place, and it remains under guard in the OTS vault.”

But hey, that report is from 1975. I’m sure the government has since destroyed and/or used all of the weaponized shellfish toxin we accidentally forgot to destroy in the 1970s.