CIA: Toxin Tocsin

(2 of 2)

Two months ago, CIA Director William Colby told the White House he had learned that someone had hidden away —presumably for future use—small amounts of the cobra and shellfish toxins at an agency lab in downtown Washington. The White House informed the Church committee, which this week will hold public hearings on the matter. Church hopes to discover whether the toxins were ever used in CIA assassination plots. He is even more concerned with the fact that the agency violated Nixon's command. The episode, he said, points up a "looseness of command and control within the CIA." According to a source close to Church's panel, some low-ranking CIA official unknown to the agency's chiefs had made the decision to retain small quantities of the toxins.

Congress has requested that the CIA hold on to all evidence that could be useful to the Church committee investigation, but an exception may have to be made in the toxin case. According to the U.N.'s Biological Weapons Convention, the U.S. Government has until Dec. 26 to get rid of all biological warfare materials. Probably the best solution was proposed last week by Murdoch Ritchie, a Yale pharmacology professor and an expert on saxitoxin. Since it is invaluable for the study of such diseases as multiple sclerosis, Ritchie urged that the CIA's costly trove of the poison be turned over to medical researchers. Under the terms of the U.N. accord, peaceful uses of even the deadliest poisons are perfectly permissible.

∙ ∙ ∙

The CIA faced another embarrassment last week. The House Intelligence Committee under Chairman Otis G. Pikes had subpoenaed from the White House top-secret briefing materials on the Yom Kippur War, the military coup in Portugal, and other events. The documents showed some crashing intelligence failures. Concerning the Yom Kippur War, an agency post-mortem admitted that "those responsible for intelligence analysis were quite simply, obviously and starkly wrong."

CIA officials negotiating with the committee agreed that five paragraphs of the classified material could be published, but differed hotly on four words in one of the documents. Over CIA and Pentagon protests, the Congressmen voted 6-3 to declassify them. Though the sentence fragment is now in the public domain, no one with any authority would identify it. But speculation was that the four words were "and greater communications security." The phrase referred to one of the preparations made by Egypt in the days before the war. CIA Director William Colby explained that the innocuous-seeming words could give experts a clue to U.S. intelligence methods.

The White House was furious. No more classified information would be forthcoming, was the word, until the House committee stops its "unilateral" declassification of documents.