Good grief, there wasn't a way to give them a fast and painless death? Or even moderately painful?
You just tell them it is painless. It is not like they are going to test it on themselves.
If someone somehow ends up whitnessing a usage and they complain you tell them “this is very concerning, we are going to investigate. Maybe a bad batch? Or enemy action?” and then you classify the whole thing for 150 years.
If there is such a widespread leak that you can’t do the above (for example one of your agents swallows poison direct on camera broadcast publicly) then you say to your agents: “Turns out it is not working as painlessly as we thought. Obviously we are not monsters, we couldn’t test it on live subjects. Discontinue old formulation, new painless formulation is being distributed.” And then you give them new pills with the same or nearly the same poison and visibly new packaging/concealment. But that is a last resort, only if there is too much grumbling amomg the rank and file.
- the actual use of poison pills is very rare. If our agents need to pop them all the time we suck and our organisation is hemourhaging valuable resources and we need to improve our trade craft.
- things done in missions are murky, especially murky when the mission went so horribly wrong our agents commited suicide. Most often the agency notices that something went this wrong by an agent failing to report in. It is not like the agent who died a painfull/painless death will complain about it at the “illegal undercover agents anual ball”. Information spreads slowly by default under these circumstances and through unreliable narrators.
- the business of inteligence agencies is to keep information compartmented and on a need to know basis. They have processes with teeth to enforce this. Keeping information available to one part of the organisation away from other parts of the organisation is their bread and butter. Keeping the truth about a possibly painfull poison pill is not a special case there, you can use the same aparatus to keep this info locked down you use to keep other information within the agency.
Here's a couple more.
Like taking off a tight shoe
Like sinking into a warm bath
Maybe ricin?
I thought the point was to remove you from enemy torture and questioning. If you're dying slowly, then the enemy is just going to torture and question you while the poison acts slowly, or possibly even find a way to ‘cure’ you well enough that the torture can go on for a long time … which defeats the point, doesn't it?
1) There is no antidote 2) It induces quick unconsciousness so you can't be tortured while it's working.
First, if they are detained, they will be strip searched long before any torture takes place. You either take it early or not at all - odds are everything will be taken away.
Second, the last thing you want in such situation is ambiguity - people don't just commit suicide willy-nilly. Instructions must be very clear.
Thirdly, either the agent has secret information that cannot be divulged, or they don't. This is known upfront before the mission. Any agent at high risk of capture is kept away from sensitive information, to minimise possible damage. Every spy and reconnaissance organisation work like that. As soon as agent is captured, damage control is put in place.
Lastly, orders to commit suicide are not legally possible.
You do realize that we're talking about the CIA here, right?
We are talking about US citizens for whom this is a job, they are not like foreign prisoners. CIA -agents are 'one of their own'.
This is like Taliban-level stuff
This assumes the others would know that it happened. Who would tell them? Certainly not the guy who complied with the request for suicide.
Surely even the CIA has limits on the atrocities they are willing to commit?
Aleksandr Ogorodnik was able to get the KGB to give him his pen, which had a suicide pill in it, to write his confession.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleksandr_Dmitrievich_Ogorodni...
Obviously you don’t order it. You play up the cruelty of the enemy tortourers. This probably is not hard, every secret service probably have enough nightmare fuel on hand to do if they want to. And then you provide the means and let your agent know they can use it uppon capture.
If the pill causes pain, that's an unwanted side-effect. It's unlikely to be as painful as the actions of your torturer, whose goal is to cause as much pain as possible, and who may also want to stretch it out for weeks. And there's a good chance your torturer will kill you anyway.
Sometimes torture is used for punishment or repression, not to obtain information. Arguably that's always the purpose; "information" obtained through torture isn't very reliable.
When it comes down to a quick death by a suicide agent vs being tortured and then likely an unmarked grave it can be a reasonable option. Agents which aren't so likely to be put through the wringer and might be exchanged are another matter--Gary Powers had little reason to use his suicide option. He didn't have great secrets to be tortured for.