Toxin Tocsin

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.

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.

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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.

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