Mr. Death

The subject of this interview is an explosives expert who worked for 20 years designing assassination devices for the CIA while holding various cover jobs in military research and development. While still in high school, he was regularly approached by CIA contacts with requests for poisons, explosives, guns, silencers and specially designed gadgets for killing or incapacitating people. He worked his way through a number of employers during this period and finally ended up director of research at a large, well-known firearms manufacturer, where he continued to do work for the CIA as well as implement projects for the gun company, which, in turn, sold its work to the military.

His career began in the early Fifties. In the late Sixties, he had two heart attacks in as many years. His absence from work due to illness finally forced him to quit and in 1970 he had his last official contact with the CIA. At this meeting, he said he did not want to do any more work for the agency. For a number of months, they followed him, thinking that he was running gums to radicals or showing them how to build terrorist weapons. They finally left him alone, as far as he was able to tell.

To establish his credibility, I verified that he did hold the jobs he claims to have held. In addition to this, I saw extensive documentation of the type of work he was doing. He also showed me several devices that he had built for the CIA, including a modified butane cigarette lighter that fired a tiny poisoned dart capable of penetrating a heavy coat. He brought out an explosive .22-caliber bullet, which I tested in the presence of a firearms expert. It did explode. His activities were also verified by others in the intelligence community who are involved in similar fields. And, finally, he was given a series of lie-detector tests, which indicated that he was telling the truth.

The subject wanted to remain anonymous to protect his family. Chemical and material names have been deleted in some cases to avoid providing a "cookbook" of weapons and tactics.

Q: During the Senate select committee's investigation of intelligence activities of the CIA, chairman Frank Church was shown a "poison dart gun" by William Colby, former CIA director. During the week, of September 15, 1975, this was shown on television and on the front pages of newspapers around the country. Do you know anything about that gun?

A: I must have seen half a dozen different dart guns at one time or another, because I was testing either ballistics or methods of applying poisons. The one in the Church committee was said to be electric. I doubt that very much. The electric guns I saw used magnetic bullets, but they had to be much larger.

Q: Do you think the CIA was lying?

A: It wouldn't be the first time.

Q: But you did say you worked with poisons. What type of work was that?

A: Basically, I was asked by the CIA to devise methods and devices for assassination. Almost everything I worked with was designed to kill people. The three major assassination techniques I dealt with were shooting, poisoning and explosive devices. There was a lot of emphasis in those days--say, from 1952 to the late Sixties--on low-profile devices. The agency wanted things that would be lethal but that would not leave "U.S. Technology" signatures.

Q: Can you give us an example of a weapon that used poison?

A: Yes. In the mid-Fifties, my CIA contact came to me with a problem he wanted solved. These things were always put hypothetically. For example, suppose you wanted to kill someone on an airplane without attracting a lot of attention. Well, the simplest answer is a contact poison. I was given a substance called [deleted], a liquid that penetrates the skin and carries with it anything you mix in. Put a drop on someone's clothes, in his shoe. That would be the most basic tool for this type of thing.

Q: Did you deliver that to your CIA contact?

A: No, I went a step further. I started fooling around with snake venoms, mixing them with [deleted]. I used lyophilized [freeze-dried] tiger-snake venom at first. There's another snake called the boomslang that I finally settled on, because the symptoms are very subtle. It causes internal bleeding and can take days to finally kill you. It would be hard to tell what had happened to you. And I took a ballpoint pen, substituted a wick for the refill, soaked it with the liquid and mixed in some ink. I actually invented the felt-tip pen, but it never occurred to me to patent it. Anyway, you could just touch someone with this and that was it.

Q: Did you have to get approval to build the gadget?

A: As I remember it, I went back to my contact with the idea after I thought about the problem for a while. He said, "Will it work?" I said, "Well, I don't have any volunteers to test it on; are you interested?" Incidentally, like all the other types that I ever met, he had no sense of humor. I mean zero, zilch. He just gave me a very calm "No. We'll take care of the testing. You make one." My contact was kind of strange, anyway. He looked like the Penguin from the Batman comics and spoke out of the side of his mouth, as if he had been hurt. At any rate, the snake pens apparently worked, because later he seemed very pleased. I remember making some comment like "I trust you tested them in house." No reaction.

Q: Where did you get boomslang venom?

A: It used to be easy to get exotic animals from pet stores, back in the early Fifties. Now it's a bit harder if they're dangerous. Incidentally, never try to milk a boomslang. A bad snake. They're damn dangerous, hard to get, not very cooperative, and because their fangs are in the rear of their mouth, it is hell on wheels extracting venom. Anyway, I milked them, put the poison into the solution with [deleted], soaked the wicks for the pens, sealed them up and delivered them.

Q: You say those jobs were given to you hypothetically. Did your contact ever get specific?

A: One of the only times he had to get specific rather than just give me a "What if" was when he wanted to extract a black guy who drove a Jaguar.

Q: Extract?

A: Yes, that was their euphemism. Lovely term, isn't it? Anyway, this black man had to the at a certain point in the ride he was to take, say eight minutes after he started--for what reason I don't know, perhaps to keep him from crashing into something. I had to know a lot--body weight, was he right-handed, that sort of thing. They eventually brought me the steering wheel from a Jaguar and a photograph of the man driving, which was just his hands on the wheel. That's how I knew he was black. I don't know why, but that seemed strange to me. This was somewhere between 1954 and 1959. The poison could have been for use anywhere, Jamaica, Ghana. Anyway, I mixed up a batch of [deleted] and good old sodium cyanide, which I told them to paint onto his steering wheel where he'd normally put his hands. I adjusted the dosage so that knockdown time would be the eight minutes or whatever the figure was. Apparently, they were pleased with that.

Q: How could you tell they were pleased?

A: Well, a guy I knew pretty well invited me to my first outside job then and I got the impression that it was being offered as a bonus for work well done.

Q: What do you mean by outside?

A: Out of the country.

Q: What sort of job was it?

A: I was picked up in a car. My friend was there. We were driven to an airplane. Then we flew all night, it seemed like. We landed somewhere. Another car picked us up. We were driven out into the countryside. Some guy had an antitank weapon and said, "Do you know how to use this thing?" I said, "Yes." He said, "Well, use it." I asked what he wanted it used on and he pointed to a convoy of military trucks over the rise on a little road. So I blew away a couple of the trucks.

Q: Do you know what that was all about?

A: No. It was in Caracas. As soon as I had blown away the trucks, my friend sent me back to the car and he went over to "finish diem off," as he put it.

Q: Meaning what?

A: He just took his pistol and put a bullet through each guy's head to make sure he was dead. Anyway, it was my impression that that was my reward for doing a good job with the poison systems. It wasn't my idea of a reward. Later, I asked the guy who had invited me what it was all about. He just looked at me with a stunned expression and said, "But didn't you enjoy it?"

Q: So far, we're talking about chemical systems. Did you also design gadgets like that dart gun?

A: Not quite like that, but quite a number of other things. After the automobile episode, my contact came to me with another hypothetical problem: Suppose you're in a situation in which it is impossible to bring into a room any firearms or unconventional things that would be suspect. How would you take care of a roomful of guys? Well, next question is: How taken care of? I mean, do you want them extracted, do you want them blinded temporarily? Biological assault?--always loved that term. It sounds obscene. Well, in this particular instance, my contact said, "We want them extracted for sure. A fair number of them, in a moderate-sized room." And I wound up with one of the nastiest nasties that I came up with. That, incidentally, was the jargon for those gadgets: Assorted Nasties. This one was a subminiature bomb, roughly the size of a .45-caliber cartridge. You threw it and it exploded. It was loaded with hardened steel shot, like bird shot, which was coated with poison. Eventually, I replaced that with small pellets of [deleted]. If you get hit with an incandescent fragment of it, you go into anaphylactic shock almost instantly. It kills you faster than you can believe. I've seen films of tests on monkeys. The knockdown is truly remarkable. Load it into a shell, fire it at someone and his whole central nervous system goes berserk.

Q: Wasn't that a bit dangerous for the person throwing it?

A: It certainly was. It would kill him outright.

Q: Didn't the agency object to that drawback?

A: No. And I found that interesting. They (continued on page 138)Mr. Death(continued from page 132) did ask that I make two versions, the second being one that would give the guy a chance to survive. It had what amounted to a fuse you could light with a cigarette or something. Another version lit like a road flare. You could remove a piece of tape that covered a material similar to what's on the tip of wooden kitchen matches. Strike it and throw it. In a third version, I mixed red phosphorus with [deleted]. When you wet this down with chloroform, it will not explode. But if you let it dry, it becomes highly explosive. You could just plop it into the middle of a room and it would explode. You could put it on the top of a door, put it under a toilet seat or any place where it would get bashed. Once it was armed, it was not easy to disarm, either.

Q: How many of those did you make?

A: Maybe 15 or 20. I also loaded a lot of small-arms ammunition with incendiary bullets made of [deleted]--.22s, nine-millimeter, shot shells. Those were for rapid kill. And there were strange requests. I made some ammunition that Was loaded with an explosive called tetryl, so that when you fired it, it blew you and the gun all over the ceiling. The Walther PPKS .22 was a fairly standard firearm with the CIA people I knew. I was issued one that had a barrel threaded to accept a silencer. And I was once asked to modify one so that the slide would blow back and take the guy's head off. I assume that was for one of our own people.

Q: Do you mean to say that they were assassinating their own people?

A: I have no idea what they did with that device--or any of the devices, for that matter. I was only building them. But others within the agency had given me the distinct impression that they would kill their own people if it suited them to do so. And, at that time, it seemed odd that they wanted that particular gun modified in that particular way. It's certainly not standard equipment for any army or government I can think of.

Q: When you say you were issued that weapon, in what sense do you mean that?

A: Well, again, it was given as a kind of reward. I did some job that pleased them. Then a friend of mine--the same one who took me to Caracas--took me to lunch one day. He indicated they were pleased. Then he gave me a package. At the time, I was working at the [deleted] Institute. So I took the package back and fluoroscoped it to see what was inside----

Q: Why didn't you just open it?

A: Well, I thought if they were so pleased, they might want to send me to heaven. Seriously, it was just a standard precaution. And, lo, there was a brand-new Walther with a nice new silencer custom-fitted to it.

Q: So far, is the work you've described representative of what you were doing throughout the mid- and late Fifties?

A: Yes, but, of course, I had a regular job as well. I was doing research for the [deleted] Institute, which was involved in everything imaginable. One of my first projects for them was to design and test miniature detonators. I knew they had a vault where they locked secret reports, and I used to go in and read reports on everything imaginable, just because I was fascinated. Nuclear stuff, cannon technology. They were very heavily into the study of flame fuels. Thixotropes, for instance. A thixotrope is a gel that turns into a liquid when you move it; for example, if you pump it. There were reports discussing the reality of building a death ray with laser beams--that was in the Fifties. Of course, they have now actually developed it and it's something the Defense Department won't even mention. It is a breakthrough in technology equal to the atomic bomb. When I worked there, the laboratories were in the basement and included a fully equipped range for firing anything up to and including 20mm cannon shells. I felt like a mole. Especially in the winter, I'd go down in the early morning and it was dark and I'd come up at night and it was dark again. I never saw daylight.

Q: Was this institute a secret operation?

A: No, not the institute itself. Most of the work I did was classified, but parts of the place were open to the public. There were public exhibits upstairs from us. And the institute did a lot of unclassified work, stuff that had nothing to do with the military, like testing the strength of a certain kind of toilet tissue or something equally strange. But the fact that people were allowed into the place and that we were obviously working for the military had some funny results, because we got a reputation for being able to handle strange objects. If somebody found an old pineapple grenade in his attic, he'd bring it down to the institute and ask us if it was safe or to dispose of it.

Q: Did you personally have to deal with people's leftover war souvenirs?

A: Yes, for a while, anyway, until one day, when my boss called me up and said that some little old lady had brought in this thing her son got in the war. He didn't recognize it and neither did I. It was about the size of a frozen-juice can, plain metal, and had a T-shaped handle. No markings. So I took it down to our range, taped a blasting cap to it and as I was wrapping the wires, I accidentally hit the handle and heard this clickety, clickety, clickety--a timer going--whereupon, being very brave, I dropped it, ran like hell and slammed the armored doors. Nothing happened. So I told the range attendant to leave the doors barred, put up a sign and I'd be back after lunch. I had a very long lunch that day, but when I went back, nothing had happened. Then, as I was opening the doors, that mother went off. It caused the first miniature earthquake in town and scared the shit out of me. The blast took a big hunk out of the concrete floor and scored the walls.

Q: What was it?

A: It took me two years to find out. It was a very rare Italian World War Two demolition device. They were made with variable-time fuses ranging from--get this--two seconds to several hours. After that, I flat-out refused to accept any unknown devices and sent a memo to my director, saying, fuck you; strong message follows.

Q: Was all of your work there oriented toward ordnance?

A: NO. I worked on methods of applying gold to the edges of Bibles. Some company wanted to find a way to do this by machine, because at the time, it was all handwork done by old craftsmen who were dying out. I was up to my asshole in Bibles for a long time. I found that kind of ironic working with one hand on that and with the other making miniature land mines or something.

Q: You mentioned miniature detonators. Were they for the CIA or part of your official work for the institute?

A: Both. Officially, I was developing detonators to be used in the warheads of missiles and artillery shells. Unofficially, I was making miniaturized timers and detonators for setting off high explosives. All you do is take a battery-operated wrist watch or a penlight cell to provide power to run that little thing I had made; plug the two together and that's your detonating system. Some arsenal was manufacturing a wrist watch that looked normal except it had terminals on it to which you could connect the detonators I was building. I tried to get one of the watches for myself but couldn't.

Q: What, then, was the difference between the detonators made for the institute and the ones for the CIA?

A: Basically, just looks. The CIA models were most commonly disguised as Marlboro boxes. They had asked that I make them so that they could be disguised as a package of cigarettes and the handiest thing was the Marlboro hard pack. After that, there were some other strange requests. Later, toward the last part of my stay at the institute, the Gravel Mine was being developed. Gravel was the code name for a land mine about the size of a tea bag that contained no metal or moving parts. They were dropped from airplanes and armed themselves by evaporation after they hit the ground. Their (continued on page 170)Mr. Death(continued from page 138) purpose was to be sown by air in vast quantities as an area-denial system. They didn't kill. When stepped on, they detonated and would shatter every bone in your foot. Actually, my task was to develop a disarm system, because of a meeting in which I had asked a casual question, like, "Hey, if you sow thirty-jillion-trillion Gravel Mines and you go to take the territory again, what is everybody going to do, walk on stilts?"

Q: Was this work for the institute or for the CIA?

A: Again, it was both. My job was to develop a disarm system. I made some Gravel Mines that were conventional in the sense that they functioned as they were supposed to. I also made some for the CIA that contained poisoned glass fragments. I made others that would appear to be disarmed but were not. With one system, the Gravel Mine would change color if it was disarmed. So I made some that would change color but not really be disarmed. I made them by hand and delivered them to my contact in Maxwell House coffee cans. For some strange reason, that was specified. Sealed in the cans. The institute had no knowledge of it. I had to buy the Maxwell House coffee, open the cans, resolder them, sand them and repaint them so they looked as if they hadn't been tampered with. Why, I don't know. I understand that in Guam, where Gravel Mines are still stored in great Quonset huts, some of them have become armed in the magazines. They're manufactured wet and if they dry out, then they are armed. Apparently, that happened there. Makes for an interesting problem. I think what you do is push the island away with a big stick.

Q: Was the mine ever used?

A: Jesus Christ, yes. Vietnam must be one large Gravel Mine. It wasn't a lethal thing. It just pulverized every bone in your foot. I mean to jelly. A nasty bastard. I know because I saw them tested, which was truly horrible.

Q: How did you test them?

A: We had to take severed legs from cadavers--which were, incidentally, legs stolen from guys killed in Vietnam. Their families were told the legs were lost in combat. Anyway, we'd put a foot in a regulation Army sock, insert that in a combat boot and then rig it to a machine that applied it to the Gravel Mine with the force of a 170-pound man stepping on it. We were so disgusted when we finished that job that we mixed up a batch of straight 200-proof ethanol with Coca-Cola. I got stoned blind and so did my buddy. We took a fork-lift truck, went into the janitor's supply area and took out a 55-gallon drum of concentrated detergent. Outside, there were huge fountains. In the summertime, they were turned off in the wee hours of the morning and then turned on again about 5:30 or six o'clock. They were off, so we took the drum out and dumped the entire contents into the biggest fountain, right in the middle of the road. Then we waited for the sun to come up while we were singing and dancing and carrying on. When those fountains came on, the Great Amoeba Caper started. A wall of foam 12 feet high erupted and began creeping across the road. It was absolutely impenetrable. Traffic stopped. It was magnificent to behold.

Q: You began by saying that you dealt with only three basic types of systems. There was a lot of talk about drugs during the Church investigations. Were you ever asked to work with drugs?

A: Only twice that I remember. My contact brought me half a gram of LSD sealed in 27 different bottles inside of each other, delivered in the lunchroom of the institute. Normally, his manner was laconic, straightforward. In this case, he was edgy. This was in the Fifties and I had no idea what LSD was. I had to pump him for information. Finally, he started giving me a skeleton outline. That specific job gave me the very distinct, creepy feeling that it was under the counter even for them. I didn't know what the hell he was handing me. If it's botulismus toxin or something, screw you, Jack, I don't even want to get near the container. But, at any rate, he finally handed it to me. Well, I loaded LSD onto cough drops and resealed the packages. I put it into cough syrup. I had a whole box of Neo-Synephrine spray bottles that I loaded. Mostly cold remedies.

Q: What dosage were you using?

A: Enormous dosage. Probably wipe you out forever.

Q: You mentioned two instances. What was the other drug you worked with?

A: The other was called BZ, and I wouldn't ever want to get dosed with that. It was something like LSD, but the dosage was much lower and you had to work with it in a glove box, because it was administered by breathing. I saw some very frightening films of soldiers who had been given BZ. The guys were reduced to catatonics. They would just sit there, drooling, with no control over bodily functions. Unless they were given commands, like "Get up" or "Put your helmet on," at which point they would go berserk and attempt to kill the guy who had given the order. This effect, I understand, lasted weeks.

Q: What was the purpose of working with BZ?

A: Area denial, I would imagine. Chemical warfare, that sort of thing.

Q: Did you design anything for domestic use?

A: I think just about everything I had worked with up until the LSD and maybe those snake pens was not for use in the U.S. But I think that the pens were used here. Don't ask me why, but I got the feeling that it was a local gig. The LSD really impressed me as being something that even they were nervous about. And you're not going to find your basic Muscovite taking Neo-Synephrine or Vicks cough drops.

Q: When did you work with the BZ?

A: Near the end of the Fifties, I think. Sometime near the end of my stint with the [delete] Institute.

Q: What made you leave the institute?

A: I began getting disgusted around 1960. It had nothing to do with GIA types or anybody else around. I was getting very unhappy. First of all, by that time, my psyche was really fucked up. My marriage fell apart. And I had been eating what is now known as speed.

Q: Where did you get speed?

A: From the CIA. It was an auxiliary service. Meprobamates--Miltown, downers--and speed. I initially got some from a doctor, but even in those days, there were only so many times you could refill a prescription. And one day I casually asked my contact if he could help me with that. Well, he brought bottles that were like industrial mayonnaise jars. And very deadpan, he said, "Is this enough?" I was on speed for about two and a half years. I'd wake up in the morning and have three cups of coffee and a palmful of Dexedrine. I must have been taking sublethal doses. I think the turning point came when I met a very sharp girl. She made me realize a lot of things. I started to reappreciate the fact that I was really a lecherous character at heart and that I had been taking all that energy and sublimating it elsewhere. I had forgotten how good fucking could be. That kind of woke me up. Then she gently pointed out to me that I was killing myself with speed. Finally, one week I took off and locked myself in my apartment and kicked it--absolute cold turkey.

Q: How bad was the withdrawal?

A: The word agony is not good enough. Most of what I remember was uncontrollable muscle spasms. That was most distressing. Nausea. Oh, nausea. And my head--thoughts racing, just trying to keep control of myself. I was very sick, but I was also very determined. Because I knew if I was going to continue with speed, it (continued on page 196)Mr. Death(continued from page 170) would kill me and I'd just as soon put a gun to my head and get it over with. When I came out of it a week later, I was pretty wretched, but I was out. And that's when my creative urge came back and I designed a little device that fires a small powder charge and blows out a chemical irritant. At that point in time--where did I hear that phrase before?--there was a wave of rapes; I almost said a rape of waves. That's kind of poetic. Anyway, it started me thinking. There must be a way for a woman to defend herself. And this gadget came into my head. I got someone to promote it and a company called [deleted] was formed.

Q: Meanwhile, were you still in contact with the man from the agency?

A: No; once I left the institute, they called him off. I never saw him again. They were probably just waiting to see what happened. So I guess it was a year later, when this little company was doing well, and then I was contacted by a different guy, who came out to visit me at work.

Q: When someone contacted you, how did you know he was from the CIA?

A: In this case, the guy showed me CIA credentials. An I.D. card. Also, you kind of got to know what they looked like. When this guy came, he looked so Weird that my secretary came in and said, "There's a guy out there who must be a cop." And he certainly did look like a cop, square jaw, flinty eyes.

Q: You could spot those guys just by their looks?

A: Well, there were other telltale signs. When he showed up, he was accompanied by a very bad guy who bore a vague resemblance to King Kong. When he sat down, he clanked and I made some comment like, "Whatever it is you've got in that shoulder holster must be something to see." He just kind of smiled and opened his coat and in there was a .44 magnum. I have never seen a man before or since who was large enough to conceal that handgun in a shoulder holster. Anyway, I asked to see it; he unloaded it and handed it to me and there was no serial number on it. It hadn't been removed. There just wasn't any. So he was either president of a firearms company or a CIA operative.

Q: Did you ask him about that?

A: No. He wasn't the type you'd ask that sort of thing. He wasn't exactly talkative. If I remember correctly, he spoke in guttural monosyllables. I don't know what he said, but it didn't matter. When he talked, you listened.

Q: What did your new contact want from you?

A: Well, he looked at our little company and said, "This is an ideal setup. It's private, it's quiet. You can do a lot of useful things here." I gave him a few gadgets to look at. Later, he came back and said, "There are a lot of things that we want loaded into special shells. Can you do it?" I made shells loaded with poisoned fléchettes, little ballistic darts, phonograph-needle size. I made them loaded with poisoned shot, with incendiaries.

Q: What types of poisons were you using?

A: Most of what I worked with in those cartridges was sodium cyanide and an anticoagulant. I remember I dipped the fléchettes and dried them. There were a couple of exotic cartridges that converted [deleted] into a hand grenade. Some were loaded with HE [high explosives] and shot to get a frag effect. I developed a small land mine--I guess you'd have to call it that--that you could slip under a rug.

Q: What could something like that be used for?

A: Who knows? Liven up going-away parties. As I said, I really have no direct knowledge of what happened with any of those devices.

Q: What other projects were you working on at [deleted]?

A: Sometime in 1962, I invented the miniature distress signal. I had also screwed around with soft plastic-cased grenades. [Deleted] was doing a lot of riot-control work. I started screwing around with those to see what I could come up with for the CIA. And I loaded some special ones. They were mostly concussion grenades, designed to produce horrendous blast effects. It was like a giant firecracker initiated by a regular grenade fuse. I did this type of work until I was able to form my own company to do industrial research. That company staggered along and I had no CIA contact whatsoever. I was going broke. And I finally got a lovely order for some pyrotechnic devices from the [deleted] government that we couldn't fill. I had invented the device, I knew how to set up production, but I didn't have enough money to start. So I picked up the phone one day and called a large firearms manufacturer and they bought us out and hired me. I got my very own laboratory and a nice comfortable salary. I was running the whole show, basically. What I really wanted was to get into the commercial end of this business. The military-ordnance business was going to hell rapidly. Vietnam was going to end and there we would be, selling military equipment. Unfortunately, I was very quickly pressured into getting into military research and development.

Q: What form did this pressure take?

A: Oh, it was very indirect. Like, "Get us into military R and D or hit the street." I was told that by the officials of the company. They were manufacturing [deleted] for the Army with a great deal of success and wanted more contracts. So I obliged them and started work on an improvised-munitions program, which was funded by the [deleted] Arsenal. I wrote a couple of proposals. Again, one of those hypothetical situations: The Special Forces are dropped behind enemy lines with access to virtually nothing in the way of sophisticated materials. And I sold a program of improvising things, literally out of nothing. For example, you can make white phosphorus from sulphuric acid, bones and charcoal. It's a pain in the ass, but you can get a nasty incendiary weapon out of it. Thermite presents two problems, getting granulated black-iron oxide and getting granulated aluminum. The iron oxide is easy to make by burning steel wool. You can make 40-to-100-mesh consistent granular aluminum by melting scrap aluminum in a shallow iron pan and stirring it as it cools. Without going into any of the exotic demolition stuff, those were the types of problems I was solving.

Q: Now, meanwhile, what was going on with the agency?

A: Nothing. I had no contact. This work was for the military, the official, aboveboard work of the firearms manufacturer. So we generated our first report on improvising munitions and, I must openly say, it was a damn good piece of work. Because, literally, we showed a guy with an I.Q. on the order of a 12-year-old's how to make black powder, nitric acid, sulphuric acid, nitroglycerin, detonators by starting with nothing and winding up with some pretty sophisticated sabotage and demolition stuff.

Q: You haven't mentioned anything about your educational background. How did you acquire the know-how to write such a report?

A: I have no formal education. As a kid, I was interested in fireworks, explosives, firearms and generally weird things. When I was 14, I was apprenticed to an old Italian fireworks designer. I would work for him after school and on weekends. He used to eat garlic and sardine sandwiches and I'd kid him that sooner or later he'd breathe on some fireworks and blow himself up, which I suppose he did, because one day it was snowing hard and I couldn't get out to the shack where he worked. And the next day I found out that something had gone wrong and his business had spread laterally and him with it.

Q: Are you essentially self-taught, then?

A: More or less. When I was 17 or thereabouts, I was friends with a classmate who was a genius with firearms. He had an encyclopedic knowledge of guns, especially Nazi weaponry. He was a complete fascist. And one calm day, he announced that he was doing work for the CIA, which, of course, I didn't believe. Finally, he offered to give me guns that I wanted in exchange for work. He, incidentally, was the guy who took me to Caracas.

Q: Are you saying that the CIA recruited you when you were 17 years old?

A: Around that time. I was in high school.

Q: Is that common practice?

A: I have no idea. [Deleted] was working for them even before that. It's not so young if you consider that a lot of kids 17 years old fought in Vietnam and World War Two. People always think of spooks as 40-year-old seasoned James Bond types. Hey, that kid riding by on the bicycle may be carrying an automatic pistol in his belt--with national security as his excuse. At any rate, [deleted] used to take me to these Sunday-school indoctrination sessions. There was a church we used as a front and we'd go there and get basic indoctrination, ideology, instruction in firearms, explosives, and so on.

Q: From whom?

A: I don't know who they were, but they were certainly well prepared with slides, charts, literature, and so on.

Q: What kind of work did the CIA have you doing when you were that young?

A: Mostly building silencers. [Deleted] would come to me and say they needed one for such and such a gun and I'd fabricate it. They were all made to be easily disassembled, both so they could be thrown out easily after use and so that you could carry them in your luggage on a plane and not arouse suspicion if someone looked in. A Maxim-type silencer is simply a series of baffles, like an automobile muffler. Little metal washers stacked on each other with holes for the bullet to go through. Once, I made one where the parts were strung on a piece of jewelry chain so it looked like some kind of modernistic jewelry. It was actually rather attractive. Another one I made from Japanese coins, some of which are manufactured with holes already in them. Other than that, most of what I did during high school was brain-storm with [deleted], who would record the sessions with a wire recorder.

Q: And from high school you went to the [deleted] Institute?

A: Yes, shortly after getting thrown out of high school for continuing to blow things up and that sort of nonsense. I went first to the institute, then to the company that did riot control, then to my own firm and, finally, to the firearms manufacturer.

Q: But at the time you moved to the firearms company, you said there was no CIA contact.

A: Not at first. But apparently that report got some wide circulation, because the next thing I knew, I got a call from someone at work who said, "There will be another agency contact." And a group of five guys came down and we talked. They did not identify themselves, but I knew from what was said that they were CIA men. At any rate, they were mostly touching base. "What are you doing?" "Where are you?" An establishment of a new kind of link. More official, really. Somewhere in there, a general manager was brought in over me at my request. I couldn't handle the whole operation. I just wanted to do the research. They brought in [deleted], who became my liaison to the Central Intelligence Agency. I was clearly instructed that absolutely no one else was to be aware of this sort of work. The very first CIA task was a rather sizable one. And that was the development of a handbook, which I dubbed The Devil's Diary. It was an offshoot of the improvised-weapons thing, but instead of being oriented toward explosives and munitions synthesis, it was specifically aimed at chemical and biological weapons and systems. It was to be written for anyone with no more than a high school chemistry background. I will tell you right now that I was not very much in favor of that whole idea. I began to realize that that was really dangerous information to assemble all in one place. That is something that, if it ever got out anywhere, would give somebody the ability to take over or even destroy large cities with very little investment in time or money. But I got the word. "Write it. One copy. No carbons." So what I did was survey the plant poisons. There are so many plant poisons that it bends your mind. Common things you can walk out and find right now in your back yard can, if treated properly, yield very deadly poisons that are not easily detectable. I think I included about 40 plants and instructions on how to use them. The agency was very pleased with it. I went on from there to biological systems. I came up with a number of agents that could be made without too much grief. There are a fair number of those. You do need certain safety precautions or you're going to wipe yourself out. It's pretty dangerous.

Q: Are you referring to things such as anthrax, botulism?

A: One of the most toxic materials known to man is botulismus toxin. The lethal dose is on the order of a 25th of a microgram. There is a very slim chance of recovery. The so-called R strain developed by the agency is even more potent than the garden variety. So, in The Devil's Diary, I told a guy how to breed botulin, identify it, keep it under vacuum. You could literally set that up in your own kitchen and then extract the lethal agent in a form you could disperse. You need a little more sophisticated equipment for things like botulin, but there is easy access to [deleted]. You can find [deleted] in the soil. Or pneumonic plague, the air-borne form of bubonic plague. As history has shown, it can get out of control very quickly. At any rate, I wrote all this up and sent it in and apparently they were happy, and then they said, "Now you can do the chemical section and systems." And that's when I did some work using extremely simple materials to deliver those agents. You know, sprinkle this on a car engine block, throw that in ventilating ducts. One system I gave them is so simple, using a material you can get in any hardware store, that you can't even print it, because you'd have kooks tossing it all over the place every time they got pissed at someone. Spritz it around and no one can enter the area. Put some of that mixed with [deleted] extract, for example, in jars and drop them off tall buildings or out of a plane and you could deny admittance to the island of Manhattan in a matter of hours. That stuff is unbelievable. Just unbelievable. A canister of it chucked into the subway system and you've messed up tens--perhaps hundreds--of thousands of people. Incidentally, in the Diary is an extremely simple method of synthesizing a rather potent nerve gas from a material that is easily available on your grocer's shelf right now. It requires no time or effort, really.

Q: Do you want to go into that?

A: No, I don't even want to mention it. I don't even want you to know what it is. Right now, you can walk in and buy enough of it to do all kinds of ferocious damage. It's not as toxic as VX or some of those things, but damn close to it.

Q: What's VX?

A: The most potent nerve gas they had at the time I was working for the CIA.

Q: How long would it take to synthesize your grocery-store nerve gas?

A: Two hours for enough to do a large building, like a high-rise. Low dosage, inhalation or skin contact, either one. So that also was a very pleasing thing for them. There is also a form of heavy metal--I'd rather not say which one--that's readily available. It has a natural tissue-penetrating property. Put a drop in someone's shoe and he'll absorb it in time. Then he has heavy-metal poisoning, which is frequently fatal. Where did he get it? They'd never know. Similar in potential were some very peculiar plant poisons that are little-known, although the literature's there. These are all things that are buried in the avalanche of scientific paper. For example, there is a substance that can be extracted from a plant that grows in the Southwest. It's a neurotoxin, orally administered, but it has this remarkable six-month delay before any symptoms show up at all. By that time, it's irreversible. You deteriorate steadily. Like muscular dystrophy. A tribe of Indians used it long ago.

Q: Would they ever be able to figure out what had killed the person?

A: It's very unlikely.

Q: Do you have any idea what they wanted that document for?

A: Well, there was one peculiar thing about The Devil's Diary and that was that I was specifically instructed to orient it toward domestically available materials and plants. Plants that grow in the U.S. and materials that are sold in the U.S. What that means, I don't know, but it makes you wonder.

Q: And how much did you get for The Devil's Diary?

A: I was not paid directly by the CIA at that time. The firearms manufacturer was being paid. I would cost out the project, report the price to my supervisor and he would take care of any administrative details. I have no idea where the money went, who knew about it or what they did with it. I believe I told [deleted] the CIA should pay about $20,000 for The Devil's Diary.

Q: It was just understood that you would do work for the CIA as part of your job?

A: Right. I had a pretty decent salary. I was happy with it. I had a lot of fringe benefits. Like a big car with a telephone and a modified, built-in console that concealed a revolver. Very nice car. Also, a sawed-off shotgun, a Mafia special, overall length 18 inches, clipped under the dash.

Q: What was the next request from the CIA?

A: I had idly mentioned developing a special .22 rim-fire cartridge. The agency got very interested and said, "Could you develop one that would radically increase lethality?" Incidentally, by that time, [deleted] had left the company.

Q: Who became your contact?

A: Just some character from the agency itself. At any rate, the special .22 was a subminiature, delay-fused bomb. A miniature, metal-cased cherry bomb, if you want to boil it down that simply. The fuse was a pressed column of barium chromate and boron, topped with an ignition material. The casings were machined out of [deleted]. The first batch I fired myself with a Sionic silencer and a High Standard pistol. My contact man took a 2000-page phone book out to the back foyer and I fired one into that from about 15 feet. And that mother blew a hole in the book you could damn near put your fist through. It didn't make much noise, a kind of odd thump, and then the paper just flew. The bullets were loaded subsonic to make them quieter. "Christ, that's amazing," he said. Then he wanted to know if it would penetrate a military overcoat or a Russian greatcoat and still do the damage, because the bullet was so underpowered, anyway.

Q: Can you explain that? The bullet was underpowered; yet it did so much damage.

A: I mean the charge that propelled it through the air was small to keep the bullet from breaking the sound barrier, which is noisy. But the little firecracker charge, when it blew inside something, had two effects. It released all the bullet's energy at once, unlike conventional bullets, which gradually slow as they enter something. And it--well, it blew up inside the target. At any rate, I had to test them for human targets by using these coats. So I asked my contact to get me the coats and let me know what he wanted me to put inside them for testing. He told me to start out with watermelons. And I sail, "Do you want these watermelons to be formally dressed?" Nothing. No feedback whatsoever. He said, "No, that will not be necessary." and left.

Q: A watermelon was used to test mercury bullets in the movie Day of the Jackal. Is that accurate?

A: It gives you an idea of what hydrostatic shock is like. In the movie, the watermelon exploded. That's accurate, more or less. But watermelons are not really good targets for simulating human tissue. So we ran tests with four sheep wearing Russian greatcoats, believe it or not. Nobody at work knew about it. It was Thanksgiving weekend. The CIA brought the sheep and the greatcoats and we took them out onto the testing fields and zapped them. There were two guys, my contact and another man, who was a witness. He had a Bolex movie camera and a 35mm camera. We used a High Standard with a Sionic silencer, a Walther that was fitted with a Sionic and a Venus submachine gun, which is a little-known. multibarreled weapon that shoots a zillion rounds a second, with tandem mounted clips, .22 Long Rifle rim-fire cartridges.

Q: What's the actual cyclic rate of the Venus?

A: It's some unbelievable number. I'd be guessing. Each clip held 50 rounds and I think it emptied those clips in 1.2 seconds. What's that, 5000 rounds per minute? That's the number that sticks with me, but I don't really remember.

Q: Was that weapon classified?

A: People knew that it was around, but everybody said, "What the hell would you use it for?" You could almost sling it in a shoulder holster. The one that I saw was maybe 15 inches overall. You could really lay down an unbelievable amount of high-speed lead in a very short time.

Q: Who put the coats on the sheep?

A: I did. Did you ever have to put an overcoat on a sheep? I guess not. I put its legs through the armholes. Well, that was the first one and I couldn't help thinking how ridiculous it all was. Me, the sheep rustler, dressing the sheep in Russian greatcoats before assassinating them. We shot that one in the chest cavity and, of course, that instantly killed it. The second one was shot in the right front leg. And, much to everybody's surprise, including mine, it was also instantly fatal. It was rather devastating. It dropped with only three legs. It blew the leg off, very definitely. But it did kill it instantly; I mean dead, not just wounded. Which is a rather dramatic test. Two shots and two rather startling effects. And there were four sheep. Anyway, they loaded the Venus. It had tandem silencers, which made the damnedest noise, like the world's record fart. It was such a weird sound, you would never identify it as gunfire. And when they fired it, the sheep turned to instant suet and it was a horrendous-looking mess. It was just unbelievable. A hundred rounds in 1.2 seconds. The sheep were literally blown over the whole damn place. That was two sheep unintentionally. Because the first one went down so fast and the clips emptied so fast that the bullets passed over he first and hit the other one.

Q: Was the CIA satisfied?

A: Totally, yes. They ordered 5000 rounds of that model. So I made those. Then they came back and said, "Look, what else can you do with this thing? Can you improve lethality?" I said, "How much more lethal do you need the mother, for Christ's sake?" They said, "Well, we want something that isn't quite as dramatic. Blowing a fist-size hole in somebody's chest cavity on an airplane is a little obvious." And I said, "Well, you've got a point there; it is a little messy." So I loaded some that had extremely small charges, very quiet, low velocity, so that when the bullet penetrated, it would kind of pop an end off and inject whatever you wanted. Some of them were loaded with lyophilized cobra venom. There was also tiger-snake venom, nasty stuff, another neurotoxin. I didn't understand why the hell they wanted a poisoned one, anyway. I got the feeling I was dealing with James Bond types just looking for more gadgets. They liked that a lot, a very handy device.

Q: That's a pretty sophisticated weapon, though. Were there others that were more subtle?

A: Yes. It was, again, hypothetical: What do you do if you're stuck in a place and you're surrounded by hostile, sex-crazed, Albanian dwarfs or savage cabbage butterflies? It was a brain-storm session. I had said, "Flame weapons are mighty damned effective psychologically. There must be a way to make a pocket-size one." That was very intriguing to them. But the conventional systems we had required a lot of mechanical junk. Anyway, what I came up with was a very, very simple system, which I'd rather not describe, because I don't want to take responsibility for the next skyjacking. It was about the size of a battery-operated vibrator. When you pulled the trigger, you got a jet of flame that was respectable, let's put it that way. And I say jet because it made a roar and covered an area of 20 feet. It would burn you badly if you were standing in front of it, but, as I said, it made a lot of noise and was psychologically devastating. The thing that they really dug about it was that you could disassemble it quickly, throw it into your luggage and carry it anywhere. To the authorities, it was nothing. A couple of hunks of metal you could say were part of the support for your jockstrap. They'd never suspect that it was a firearm of the first order.

Q: That must be taking us close to the end of that type of work for you.

A: Yes, There was one last major job that was a very rush program for a barometrically operated bomb that released cyanide gas, rather than exploding. It was to be very small, "as small as practical to wipe out a commercial-size airliner"--that's a quote from my contact. The emphasis was that it be something they wouldn't discover after the plane crashed. So I built one into a domestically available aerosol deodorant can, with a barometric switch, two batteries, a miniature blasting cap that shattered an ampule of [deleted] in a casing of [deleted]. I delivered two of those and they had asked specifically that the deodorant cans be from domestic sources. They were set to go off at 5000 feet and I have no idea what they did with them.

Q: You say that was your last job. What made you decide to stop working for the agency?

A: I have not touched on the fact that things were changing with me psychologically. The real change was initiated when I started with the firearms company. First of all, I had met and fallen in love with [deleted], my lab assistant, and we got married. And I really didn't want to make any more weapons. Although I was originally enchanted by the James Bond macho trip, it had worn out and I was much more interested in living than I was in building things to kill people, including myself. I don't believe I mentioned, either, that I have very nearly blown myself away a few times.

Q: Did you ever find yourself getting paranoid, thinking that maybe it wasn't an accident?

A: Of course, but you have to watch yourself or you'll go crazy. The one time I was really suspicious was when I developed a miniature white-phosphorus grenade. It was loaded with powdered aluminum to give the fireball a better spread. Nifty little thing. Anyway, I ordered some six-second grenade fuses. A case came over labeled as if it contained six-second fuses. I screwed one in, pulled the pin and--whamo!--it was a one-quarter-second fuse and it blew me away. I was in the hospital for a very long time. The thing that saved my life was the fact that because it was experimental, I had put too much aluminum in the mixture, which made the white phosphorus disappear and not stick to me.

Q: Then you think someone was trying to tell you something?

A: No, not really. But it has made me wonder. Anyway, I had begun to resist fiercely any of the military R and D the firearms people wanted. But I couldn't talk that kind of sense to them.

Q: What was their response?

A: There was all kinds of chickenshit pressure.

Q: Was that pressure from the firearms company or the CIA?

A: The CIA had said nothing at that point. But in the firearms company, some of the key people from the main office were absolute wretches. Anyway, I had been worn down physically and emotionally to the point where something had to give, and that's when I had a heart attack. Then they tooled me off to the hospital and plugged me into the EKG and a few other things and said, "Man, it is an acute myocardial infarction." I was not very old, and there I was, wondering when the next blip was going to come. The chest pain was terrible, like somebody stabbing me with an ice pick. It's steady, relentless.

Q: When you recovered, did you return to work?

A: Correct. I hung around, but a year later almost to the day, I had a second heart attack. I had started an exercise program and used to jog every morning, which, quite frankly, was overkill. One morning, it was just too much, and zap. Three months later, I went back to work but with the express purpose of quitting. I had been out of work for so long they were just glad to see me leave. I think it was no more than a few days after I had officially separated that there was a phone call at home and I met one of the CIA contacts. And he was just supposedly inquiring about my health. But he was also obviously inquiring about my social life. You know, very oblique, casual references, but it was unusual. "How are things going at home?" I mean, that question was never asked. There was some vague probe: Had I made new friends? Meaning new radical friends. I'm pretty sure that I made some kind of sarcastic remark, "Yes, and they're all Weathermen." It was obvious to me that he was concerned. So I said, "Look, I've had two heart attacks. That's enough, and I'm kind of revising my whole lifestyle." I just didn't want to do any more weapons work. From the change of expression, it was apparent that he wasn't very happy with that statement. That's when questions started to come up about political feelings, which they would never have discussed before. They were paranoid: If you ain't with us, you're against us. And he did ask me if I had kept a copy of the Diary, which was reasonably indicative of what he was thinking. I told him, "No, and I'm not involved with anybody and don't intend to be." My wife and I managed to coast for a while and I got involved in all kinds of endeavors, consulting work, and so on. We made ends meet.

Q: Did they leave you alone then?

A: Not by any means. I know that I was followed. There was always a pickup car as I turned out of our street, no matter what time of day I left. There was one guy I began to recognize, who looked like Slim Pickens. The phones were also tapped. I would call somebody: "Fred, I'll be leaving at such and such a time" and, sure enough, there would be a pickup car out on my route. I started addressing friends as "Comrades" and other sophomoric things, just to relieve the tension. Well, then I started bumping into CIA guys in very peculiar places, like little restaurants that nobody ever went to. It was deliberate, to let me know they were watching. They were so obvious. Clever little oblique questions like, "Hey, did you ever walk off with any machine guns before you quit?" I think that I probably aggravated the situation by responding with what I considered to be humor. Statements like, "No, I'm too busy preparing botulismus R strain for radicals," or some other nasty thing.

Q: What was the last meeting?

A: The last confrontation that I had was when my wife noticed she was being followed. That was the first time she realized that somebody was behind her all the time and it frightened her. That did it. I made a phone call and set up a meeting with two CIA types at the [deleted], a pleasant, quiet restaurant. I walked in and sat down. They ordered drinks and asked if I wanted one. I said, "No, thank you, I just came here to make a statement, which is this: Very briefly--if you continue to fuck with my life, if you continue to keep me under surveillance and act as if I'm involved in some kind of political bullshit, particularly now that you've involved my family in it, I'm telling you right here and now that I will detonate a canister of VX in the central-air-conditioning system in Langley," I said. "If anything unusual happens to me or my family, I have arranged to do this and it will be done." And I got up and I walked out.

Q: Were you bluffing?

A: No, I was not. I worked with biochemical warfare long enough to be able to make that threat very real. They were well aware of what I had done for them, so they knew damn well what I could do to them. So at this point, it's kind of a Mexican standoff, if you will.

Q: Are they still after you in some way?

A: My impression is that they've dropped it, at least from within the CIA. I don't think they've completely given it up in other ways.

Q: What are your plans, now that you're out of weapons design?

A: I've started working on designing toys. I have patents and some backers and hope to be bringing out some toys soon, with any luck.

Q: Doesn't that strike you as odd, working for so long designing assassination devices and then switching to making toys?

A: All my life, I've liked to fool with things. I'm just doing it now in a way that will entertain people instead of kill them.

While this interview was being prepared, the subject died. Cause of death was shown by autopsy to be a heart attack.