The CIA's Scariest Weapon

[Music] this is the cia's scariest weapon the CIA has been called before Congress they are about to reveal a very unique gun does this pistol fire the D at first glance this pistol looks like any other but it is the ultimate assassination tool you won't realize if you get hit by it and it will kill you in seconds but no one will be able to tell as a murder in that's about as effici that you can get isn't it it is a weapon a very serious weapon how did the CIA create this pistol and how

does it work Fern it's the' 70s this scene is a product of three events one after enjoying a good image for decades the CIA turns out to be involved in two major scandals in both they spied on American citizens two as a result of said domestic spy in in public outrage the church committee is set up they are to investigate what this omnipotent agency is actually up to three as part of their investigation the committee searches through CIA locations in a little used vaulted store room they find 11 G of shellfish poison saxitoxin to be

precise it is extremely deadly and one of the fastest acting poisons on the planet it blocks the Transmissions of nervous system impulses with sophisticated equipment the 11 Gams hoarded by the CIA could kill hundreds of thousands of people due to this and other findings the committee questions the agency in various hearings most of these are held privately to protect intelligence sources and methods but this one is public and televised it is meant to educate the American people of the cia's various misconducts senator Frank Church of Idaho leads the hearing as chairman he thinks the agency

is a rogue elephant rampaging out of control why did the agency prepare toxins of this character in quantities sufficient to kill many thousands of people what was the need for that in the first place across from church sits then CIA director William kby he explains the agency supposedly wanted a better more pain-free alternative to cyanide pills for agents in the field Church doesn't buy it have you brought with you um some of both divid is which would have enabled the CIA to use the for we have indeed for killing people the CIA brings the committee

the weapon it is a result of two decades of development luckily not every powerful tool has to be deadly with udo's all-in-one platform you have everything you need to manage your own business for example they have a great website builder you don't need any Tech skills honestly you can be a complete beginner simply answer a few questions what kind of website do you want what pages or features do you want you want what colors do you prefer what's your favorite style Udo handles the rest then you can easily customize the results you can drag text

boxes wherever you need them chat GPT is built right in as well to help you write engaging copy can also handle translations if you want your site to be multilingual you'll be online in no time udo's first app is free for life with unlimited hosting and support they even give you a free custom domain name for one year on top if you're ready to dive deeper Udu offers a range of other powerful applications to optimize your business visit fern. dealo and start building your own website for free two decades prior 50s the cold war is

already in full swing tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union are high both sides are always testing the limits showing their power but are careful not to go too far in 1957 and 1959 this man bdon stasinski kills two people for the KGB at first glance both victims appear to have died of natural causes but it turns out used a special weapon a mysterious poison Vapor gun the US becomes aware of these incidents in 1961 it is unclear if the CIA already thought about working on a similar weapon at the time or if

they only started developing one to catch up whatever the reason the agency starts looking for a poison one that can kill a person but makes it look like a natural death and there is a woman who may have helped them find it this is Mary Embry she started working for the CIA as a secretary I went to uh Technical Services where I was in charge of finding documents that were that you don't find in libraries one time they wanted me to find if there was such a thing as um as a poison that was undetectable

that would kill someone but it would appear that they had a heart attack I did find such a thing next the CIA needs to figure out how to effectively get the poison into the victim's body they tasked the Army Special Operations Division in Fort detric Maryland CIA and sod have been secretly collaborating for years and will do so for almost two decades The Sod experiments with different types of Delivery Systems and ultimately lands on this design the weapon is named the non- discernable microbio inoculator and a CIA memo but it is more commonly known as

the heart attack gun this is how it works the gun itself is practically a normal 45 with a round side attached on top but inside it's quite unique it works by electricity here in the handle of the gun is a small battery that powers everything the gun fires a small Dart you put the dart in here when the trigger is pulled it shoots out almost silently and reaches its Target over a surprisingly long distance what range does it have 100 m I believe a th these darts are a key part of the weapon they come

in different sizes one of them is so thin that the target doesn't even realize they've been hit a special one was developed which potentially would be able to uh enter the target without perception the darts are coed with the shellfish poison which gives the target an apparent heart attack in a later iteration the CIA found a way to freeze the deadly poison into a tiny pellet so they could fire it directly so at when it reached the person it would melt inside them and the only thing would be like one little tiny red dot on

their body which was hard to detect there wouldn't be a needle left or anything like that in the person but also the toxin itself would not appear in the autopsy yes so that there was no no way of perceiving that the uh the target was himit no way of perceiving that the target was hit a truly powerful tool in the hands of trained agents in the hearing the CIA only presented this one pistol in reality they developed a range of poison guns little is known about their exact design presumably they could hit targets at an

even greater distance by the time of the hearing the heart attack gun was already illegal under us law President Nixon had ordered the end of all chemical warfare and the disposal of all bioweapons and agents but some people at CIA and sod disobeyed the president's command they kept the 8 Mig of Cobra Venom and 11 G of saxitoxin in storage first at Fort detrich and later in the little use store room in Washington DC manufacturing shellfish toxin is not only expensive but also a very time-consuming complex process the CIA chemist Dr Nathan Gordon wasn't prepared

for all this work to be for nothing he made plain that the prospect of destroying it troubled him greatly so he just took one of the world's most dangerous poisons in a quantity to kill hundreds of thousands and hit it who knows when you might need it the church committee's final report is damning for the CIA at the time it is over 2,700 pages long and paints a disturbing picture of the secret services operations the report shows that the CIA had planned political assassinations they orchestrated mind control experiments that sounded like straight conspiracy theories MK

Ultra and in a wild test they flooded the New York City subway with a harmless simulant of a disease carrying gas the final question would be if the CIA ever used the heart attack gun on anybody Mr kby said there were no records of any actual use but just because there are no records of it has it really never been used what became of the gun after the hearing remains a mystery