America Banned Biological Weapons—But the CIA Hid a ‘Heart-Attack Gun’ Made From Shellfish Toxin

5 min read

Mary Embree entered into a life of public service fresh out of high school in the late 1960s. She started out with what was then called the Veterans Administration (now the Department of Veterans Affairs), but as she tells it, a typewriter repairman visiting her office suggested she set her sights higher.

So that’s precisely what Mary Embree did, and she didn’t just aim a little above the VA. She shot for the proverbial moon, the “Cadillac of government agencies”: the Central Intelligence Agency.

“There were very few women at CIA ... other than secretaries,” Embree recalled in the 1998 TV documentary Secrets of the CIA, “It was very sexist.” The interview process was rigorous, and Embree found it to be excessively probing. They even asked her if she was a virgin, a question she felt “embarrassed” to answer.

Despite her embarrassment, Embree passed all the tests, and became one of those “very few women” working for the CIA. She started out as a secretary for the Audio Surveillance Division, then she moved to Technical Services, “where I was in charge of finding documents that you don’t find in libraries like where you put explosives on a bridge.”

Eventually, Embree’s knack for research led her to a discovery that helped reshape our world in ways we may never fully understand. The lives of families and the fates of nations may have shifted because of what Mary Embree discovered during her time at the CIA. In 1975, the result of Embree’s research came to light during the nationally televised Church Committee hearings. It was there that Senator Frank Church pressed CIA Director William Colby about a secret weapon the CIA had developed, the “heart attack gun.”

Senator Church held in his hands a pistol, roughly the size of a standard Government Model 1911, but outfitted with a scope.

“Does this pistol fire the dart?” Church asked Director Colby.

“Yes, it does, Mr. Chairman,” Colby replied, “... and a special one was developed which potentially would be able to enter the target without perception.”

Mary Embree hadn’t designed a weapon, but she had discovered its unique ammunition: a poison known as saxitoxin. “They wanted me to find if there was such a thing as a poison that was undetectable, especially one that seemed to mimic a heart
attack, that would kill someone but it would appear that they had a heart attack.” Embee found her answer in the shellfish-derived saxitoxin.

When saxitoxin enters the human body, it kills in a manner reminiscent of a heart attack. The CIA then developed an undetectable “frozen dart” that would enter the body, leaving only a tiny red dot; no needle mark, no notable wound. Once inside, the frozen dart would melt, and the poison would enter its target’s bloodstream.

“But also the toxin itself would not appear in the autopsy?” Church asked Colby as Senator Barry Goldwater, the Republican presidential nominee a decade earlier, peered through the pistol’s scope with a grin, like a child with a BB gun.

“Yes,” Colby answered, “so that there was no way of perceiving that the target was hit.”

The existence of such an undetectable weapon would be unsettling in isolation; it was doubly so within the context of the Church Committee’s discovery of the CIA’s involvement, directly and indirectly, in myriad assassinations and attempted assassinations of foreign leaders such as Patrice Lumumba, Rafael Trujillo, and Fidel Castro. Here, before the committee, was a weapon that called into question countless deaths by “natural causes” that had been convenient for U.S. interests, at home and abroad.

This was a weapon that shouldn’t have existed, but that isn’t a moral judgement. Legally, it shouldn’t have existed. On November 25, 1969, President Richard Nixon delivered the “Statement on Chemical and Biological Defense Policies and Programs,” declaring an end to the United States’ offensive biological weapons development. Previous administrations may have dabbled, or dived deep, into the possibilities of biological warfare (including President Kennedy’s Project 112), but Nixon the self-branded “peacemaker” was determined to do things differently.

So why, five years after Nixon’s declaration, did the CIA have a stockpile of shellfish toxin and at least one dart gun to deliver it into unsuspecting targets? The simple answer is that they lied to the President. As for why, in 1975, the CIA’s dart gun came to light, there’s a cosmic irony to the fact that it only happened because President Nixon had himself lied to the American people.

Officially known as the Senate Select Committee to Study Government Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, the Church Committee wasn’t necessarily formed as a direct response to the Watergate scandal so much as a response to the overwhelming distrust of the American government that Watergate had come to emblematize. It wasn’t only the American people who felt that distrust, but also members of Congress who’d begun to realize that they weren’t being given all the facts. In fact, as that fateful break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters suggested, members of Congress could become unsuspecting targets of the very government they ostensibly had a hand in running.

The Church Committee was a call for accountability, trying to overturn and look beneath every stone they’d once been told to leave alone as a matter of national security. The activities of the CIA, the FBI, the NSA, and even the IRS suddenly faced heavy public scrutiny, where once they acted as though they had absolute impunity. What the Committee uncovered was a deluge of deceptions, abuses, and rights violations so overwhelming that, well, the fact that the CIA had a heart attack gun made from shellfish toxin managed to slip through the cracks. That’s because this same committee also uncovered the FBI’s infamous COINTELPRO operation, which spied on American civil rights activists and political organizations. It also uncovered the so-called Family Jewels, a record of illegal activities by the Central Intelligence Agency that William Colby called the “skeletons in the CIA's closet,” the NSA’s collaboration with major telecom companies to intercept civilian communications with Project SHAMROCK, and CIA’s work with journalists to create propaganda in the nascent days of the Cold War with Project Mockingbird.

And, of course, the Church Committee also uncovered the famed CIA mind-control experiments, Project MKULTRA.

With all that on the table, it isn’t all that surprising that the “heart attack gun” (part of MKULTRA’s successor program, MKNAOMI) slipped through the cracks of American public consciousness. What’s more worrisome is the possibility that other heart attack guns are somewhere out there right now. While the literal gun held up at the Church Committee hearing was supposedly secured and kept under lock and key, who’s to say that more weren’t produced? President Gerald Ford responded to the Committee’s findings by signing an executive order that made it illegal for federal employees to “engage in, or conspire to engage in, political assassination.” But so what? President Nixon had similarly signed an order telling the CIA to destroy their stockpiles of biological weapons, but they still held on to what Military.com describes as “enough saxitoxin to kill some 5,000 people.”

With advanced weapons systems, there’s always the concern that the genie can’t be put back into the bottle. Once you’ve invented the “heart attack gun,” you can never escape the potential for havoc that so horrified Congress half a century ago. And you’ll never know whether it’s been used. How many seemingly random deaths, how many expirations that looked like acts of fate, were really a single frozen bolt of shellfish toxin fired by a CIA agent’s gun?