Project MKNAOMI: CIA biological weapons program

Project MKNAOMI began in 1952 as a joint program between the CIA's Technical Services Division and the Special Operations Division of the U.S. Army at Fort Detrick, Maryland. Fort Detrick had been the center of the U.S. offensive biological weapons program since World War II. MKNAOMI was established in part as a response to intelligence assessments that the Soviet KGB was developing biological and chemical agents for covert assassination operations. One stated goal was to find countermeasures. Another was to develop the capability to match.

The program had three documented primary objectives. The first was to stockpile severely incapacitating and lethal materials for the specific use of the Technical Services Division, the CIA's unit responsible for specialized devices used in intelligence operations. The second was to maintain and improve operational use of biological, chemical, and radiological materials. The third was to develop delivery systems capable of administering those materials without detection.

A 1967 CIA memorandum uncovered by the Church Committee documented a fourth operational area: covert techniques for attacking and poisoning crops, with at least three such techniques tested under field conditions. The agricultural warfare component of MKNAOMI received less attention than the assassination tools but is confirmed in the same primary source documents.

The most publicly known product of MKNAOMI is the device Senator Frank Church held up during the 1975 hearings. The weapon was designed by CIA researcher Dr. Nathan Gordon at Fort Detrick. It used compressed air to fire a dart approximately the width of a human hair and a quarter of an inch long at a range of up to 100 meters. The dart was coated in saxitoxin, a neurotoxin derived from shellfish that feed on toxic algae. A dose of approximately 0.57 milligrams was sufficient to cause death.

The weapon was designed specifically around the properties of saxitoxin: its rapid degradation in the body makes it nearly undetectable in standard toxicology screens, the dart itself was made of frozen water and melted within seconds of entering the body, and the symptoms it produced, tingling, paralysis, respiratory failure, and cardiac arrest, could be mistaken for a natural heart attack. The CIA's stated goal was a delivery method for assassination that could survive a formal autopsy examination without detection.

CIA researcher Mary Embree, who later gave a recorded interview about her work at the agency, described being assigned to find a poison that was undetectable and that saxitoxin was the answer the program was looking for. Her account provides a firsthand description of the design objectives from someone who worked on the program.

On November 25, 1969, President Nixon announced the unilateral termination of the U.S. offensive biological weapons program. He stated that the United States would destroy all its stocks of biological weapons and would confine its biological research to defensive measures. A follow-up executive order on February 14, 1970 extended the destruction order to cover all bacteriological weapons and nonliving toxins, explicitly including the materials developed under programs like MKNAOMI.

Project MKNAOMI was officially dissolved. Fort Detrick was reassigned to vaccine research and disease countermeasures. The stockpile destruction program began.

What the Church Committee discovered five years later was that the official record was incomplete. Despite the presidential orders, a CIA scientist had acquired approximately 11 grams of shellfish toxin from Special Operations Division personnel at Fort Detrick and retained it at a laboratory in Washington, D.C. The 11 grams represented nearly a third of all shellfish toxin the program had ever produced. Vials of cobra venom were also retained. The materials were held outside the chain of custody that would have ensured their destruction under the executive order.

The destruction order was issued directly by the President. The retained materials were in violation of that order. The CIA scientist who retained them did so against the instructions of Sidney Gottlieb, the head of the Technical Services Division who administered MKNAOMI. The materials remained in the Washington laboratory, undisclosed, until the Church Committee's investigation in 1975.

The Church Committee discovered the retained toxins as part of its broader investigation into CIA assassination plots and covert operations. On September 16, 1975, during televised hearings, Senator Frank Church held up the dart gun manufactured under MKNAOMI for the cameras. The image is one of the most widely reproduced photographs from any congressional investigation of the intelligence community.

CIA Director William Colby testified before the committee. He confirmed that the agency had retained approximately 11 grams of shellfish toxin and 8 milligrams of cobra venom in the Washington laboratory, in violation of the presidential orders. He testified about the dart gun's design and intended use. The committee's questioning established that the materials had been held covertly and that the CIA's internal review process had not surfaced the violation before the congressional investigation found it.

The committee's findings on MKNAOMI were incorporated into its final report and into its interim report on assassination plots, "Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders," released November 20, 1975. The Church Committee confirmed that elements of MKNAOMI had continued operating under different CIA components including the Office of Security and Office of Medical Services for what the documents described as special interrogation techniques into the 1960s, beyond the program's stated operational period.

Two specific CIA FOIA releases address MKNAOMI directly. On April 4, 2005, the CIA declassified a document titled "Release of MKNAOMI Material" addressing the disposition and transfer of program assets following the program's termination. A second document released through the CIA's CREST database, designated "3. MKNAOMI," provides internal records on the program's extension beyond its purported operational end date, with documentation of continued use by CIA components for special interrogation techniques.

The FOIA releases confirm the Church Committee's findings and add detail on the program's internal organization, the handling of materials after the Nixon executive order, and the incomplete nature of the files that were maintained. The CIA's own 1975 internal review, initiated in April of that year in anticipation of the Church Committee's inquiry, retrieved two key files from the Records Center that described operational details including covert support bases for biological and chemical agent dissemination. The review found the files incomplete and lacking comprehensive evaluative statements on program outcomes.