As President Franklin Delano Roosevelt sat in a wheelchair in the Oval Office, dictating a letter to his secretary, stealthily found Director of Strategic Services William Donovan armed with a loaded pistol.
At Donovan’s feet was a bag of sand.
When the president continued his work and was unaware of Donovan’s presence, the OSS chief immediately fired ten bullets into the sand.
“He rolled his eyes and looked up and saw Donovan standing behind him with a flare in his hand,” John Lyle wrote in “Dirty Tricks Division: Secret Wars of World War II.” OSS and Mastermind Stanley Lovell” (St. Martins Press).
Donovan wrapped the pistol in a handkerchief and handed it to the president, introducing it as the OSS’s new silent, non-flashing gun.
The predecessor to the Central Intelligence Agency, the OSS was established in June 1942 to coordinate the espionage activities of the country’s armed forces during World War II.
That summer, “Wild Bill” Donovan appointed Dr. Stanley Lovell as the Institute’s Research and Development Director.
A noted industrial chemist, Lovell was a blue-sky thinker long before the term even existed.
His more left-wing ideas were developed by Division 19, an undercover arm of R&D tasked with performing “frequently odd tasks,” writes Lisle.
Nothing was a bad idea, at least at first. There were tear gas pencils and booby trap exploding chairs, invisible ink, and the “En-Pen,” a single-shot pistol that could disguise itself as a pen or even a cigarette.
There was also the umbrella gun, a staple of spy organizations.
Developed by 24-year-old scientist Al Polson, the device is placed under the arm and ejected with a slight twist.
“The way they kill people is put it in a man’s kidney and bam! It’s gone,” says Polson.
“Without your kidneys, you are dead.”
Lyle writes that one of Ravel’s favorite inventions was the “Vino” grenade.
It is the same weight and size as a baseball and is designed to be thrown by the average American man more effectively than the more typical pineapple-shaped version.
Beano got the green light for use in combat, but it wasn’t without its problems. Testers were unaware that it detonated on contact rather than on a timer. During final testing at the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland, an Army civilian engineer threw one of his into the air before catching it and detonating it.
Ravel also tested “bat bombs” intended to capture bats, attach small incendiary bombs and release them into enemy territory.
And they made the flour that exploded “Aunt Jemima”. This one was so lifelike I could even bake a cake.
Firearms and explosives are not the only areas of R&D expertise.
They also developed various pills for spies to take in certain situations. The A-pill relieved motion sickness, the B-pill gave extra energy in the form of amphetamines, and the E-pill was a fast-acting anesthetic.
The H-pill, on the other hand, contained a pyrotechnic device that could be mixed with gasoline to create a Molotov cocktail, while the morphine in the K-pill could instantly stun a person.
Then there was the lethal drug, or L-pill, which contained a lethal dose of potassium cyanide but had the pleasant aroma of almond butter.
“If you’re in a position that looks hopeless and you’ve lost the will to fight, follow the instructions,” read the instructions.
Meanwhile, in 1943, the U.S. Army, in partnership with Lovell, opened Camp Detrick in Frederick, Maryland, to serve as the nation’s primary biological warfare facility.
they were very busy
“In the first two and a half years alone, Camp Derrick had 598,604 white mice, 32,339 guinea pigs, 16,178 rats, 5,222 rabbits, 4,578 hamsters, 399 cotton rats, 225 frogs, 166 98 brown mice, 75 wistar rats, 48 canaries, 34 dogs, 30 sheep, 25 ferrets, 11 cats, 5 pigs and 2 chickens,” Lyle wrote. increase.
“Dirty Trick Department” reveals that enemy forces had also developed their own methods.
In Japan, the infamous Unit 731 showered China with drops of bubonic plague and conducted human experiments, including flamethrowers, water torture, vivisection without anesthesia, and forced introduction of venereal diseases.
They also infected prisoners with plague, anthrax, smallpox, and cholera.
The German army was equally vicious. When his OSS agent was arrested on the Belgian-German border in 1944, he pulled out his nails and attached electrodes to his ears, nostrils and testicles.
They then attached raw meat to his naked body before riding him with a pack of hungry dogs. Then they shot him dead.
The OSS response was their “Natural Causes” project, designed to assassinate enemy agents without leaving any trace of wrongdoing. Ideas included injecting lethal suppositories to induce hyperthermia for long periods of time, as well as air embolization into veins.
Not all of their ideas and inventions were designed to kill people.
OSS chemical engineer Ernest Crocker was able to recreate virtually any scent in his Maryland lab.
Crocker, known as the “million-dollar nose,” has already synthesized the odors of vomit, urine, foot odor, and sour butter, creating a ‘dog drug’ that wards off bloodhounds from the agent’s scent. contributed to the development of .
But now he was commissioned by Lovell to create a fecal fragrance codenamed “Who Me?” —it was distributed to little boys in China and could be “sprayed on the backs of occupying Japanese officers to make themselves look dirty”.
This particular plan never came to fruition, but a foul odor was created in the laboratory when some of the “perfume” was stolen from a secure cabinet and sprayed around the building.
Lovell wasn’t surprised, Lisle wrote, because everyone at OSS was well-trained in “the art of picking and opening all kinds of locks and door latches.”
This wasn’t the only psychological warfare that failed.
An American plane flew a large number of pornographic images over Adolf Hitler’s headquarters, and another plane dropped bombs on the craters of semi-active volcanoes in Japan, chanting the words around locals as they erupted. I had a plan to expand. The gods were angry with the country’s actions.
When the OSS was dissolved at the end of the war, President Harry Truman created the Central Intelligence Group, which soon became the Central Intelligence Agency.
Like the OSS, the CIA had an R&D arm, the Technical Service Staff (TSS), and in 1953 appointed New Yorker Sidney Gottlieb to lead MKULTRA, a controversial new project to study mind control. rice field.
“Under Gottlieb’s direction, MKULTRA has taken mind control experimentation to a new level,” Lyle writes.
“Many of the early MKULTRA experiments involved administering LSD to subjects unconsciously to see how it affected their behavior.
In one of his experiments, seven Kentucky volunteers were given LSD for 77 consecutive days.
“Gottlieb hired the famous magician John Mulholland to teach TSS officials how to put drugs in drinks without getting caught.
“After that, it was not uncommon for pranksters to spike the office coffee pot.”
Gottlieb also conducted tests with heroin, morphine, mescaline, psilocybin, and temazepam, some of which were administered under hypnosis.
In another experiment, barbiturates were shot into a person’s arm, and when they fell asleep, an amphetamine was injected into the other arm to see if it would wake them up.
More than 7,000 veterans participated in Gottlieb’s illegal human experimentation, all without consent or prior knowledge.
Gottlieb also engaged in the same kind of activity that Stanley Lovell was doing during the war.
His main target, however, was Cuban leader Fidel Castro, whom he planned to attack using the kind of methods normally reserved for Bond villains.
From poisoned wetsuits to exploding conch shells, Gottlieb had no shortage of ideas.
One conspiracy involves lacing Castro’s shoes with thallium salts. This is the epilator that causes his beard to fall out.
Another was to impregnate Castro’s famous cigars with a lethal dose of botulinum toxin.
Gottlieb then headed the CIA’s Technical Services Division (TSD), overseeing everything from portable key copiers to lasers that could pick up sound with just the vibration of a windowpane.
He also approved a mace or a fountain pen capable of firing nerve gas.
But for Gottlieb, as was the case with Donovan and Ravel, the rationale for these weapons, physical or psychological, was that everyone else was doing it.
As one former CIA officer told Lyle: That was the old OSS mentality. It doesn’t matter if it’s a good idea or a bad idea.
“We are at war, so anything is justified.”
