CIA: Toxin Tocsin

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The boot, with its tiny steel tongue, flashed out. Bond felt a sharp pain in his right calf... Numbness was creeping up Bond's body ... There was no feeling in his fingers ... Breathing became difficult ... Bond pivoted slowly on his heel and crashed headlong to the wine-red floor.

So ends Ian Fleming's delightful spy novel, From Russia with Love, with James Bond's fate left hanging. Agent 007, of course, survives to brave new dangers in Doctor No, in which it is revealed that he had been dealt a near fatal dose of fugu poison. "It comes from the sex organs of the Japanese globe-fish," an eminent neurologist tells Bond's boss. "It's terrible stuff and very quick."

Last week Fleming's words sprang eerily into the real world. Idaho Democrat Frank Church, chairman of the special Senate committee investigating the CIA and other intelligence agencies, revealed that the U.S.'s James Bonds have their own secret supply of quick and terrible poisons—in direct violation of a presidential order. In keeping with the draft convention of the U.N. Disarmament Conference, Richard Nixon five years ago ordered the destruction of all stocks of toxin weapons. But the CIA held on to 10.9 grams of saxitoxin, a close chemical cousin of the fearsome fugu, along with eight milligrams of a toxin made from cobra venom. That minuscule stockpile is enough, said Church, to kill "many thousands of people."

Dart Guns. Six-tenths of a milligram of saxitoxin can kill an adult, often within an hour, by blocking the transmission of impulses in the nervous system—just as in Fleming's account. Saxitoxin is produced by a single-cell sea creature that flourishes during the warmest months. Oysters, clams and mussels that eat the organism are poisonous to humans, which is why in some areas such seafood is not harvested in summer. By contrast, fugu poison, which has almost the same effect, is always present in the sex organs and liver of Japanese puffer fish. Hence in Japan chefs who prepare puffers are required to learn how to make the fish edible.

In the 1950s the CIA began experimenting with saxitoxin at Fort Detrick, Md., where it also carried out the notorious LSD experiments that led to, among other things, the long hushed-up death of Biochemist Frank Olson (TIME, July 21). Researchers took contaminated butter clams and distilled the poison from them through a costly process. According to sources close to Church's panel, the CIA used saxitoxin in suicide pills for its own agents (U2 Pilot Francis Gary Powers had one, but chose to pass it up) and had it on hand to eliminate troublesome guard dogs when breaking into embassies and some other places. The agency reportedly developed dart guns and other clever means of delivering the poison.