When the CIA got away with building a heart attack gun | Hacker News Reader

When the CIA got away with building a heart attack gun

wisewolfmedia.substack.com

176 pointsdouchecoded88 comments

This article is about the Church Committee, if you're interested in the heart attack gun see: https://allthatsinteresting.com/heart-attack-gun

Also it's interesting to note how Russia doesn't use a gun like this, they spike drinks/food or spray it on surfaces like doorknobs.

There is no evidence the heart attack gun ever existed.

Every description of it is ludicrous.

>here, researchers under Dr. Nathan Gordon, a CIA chemist, mixed shellfish toxin with water and froze the mixture into a small pellet or dart. The finished projectile would be fired from a modified Colt M1911 pistol equipped with an electrical firing mechanism. It had an effective range of 100 meters and was virtually noiseless when fired.

The device held up by Senator Frank Church was not a modified Colt M1911. It was an air pistol with absurd rifle sight attached.

That device has no mechanism for cooling the pellets. The second a frozen pellet is inserted into that device it will begin melting.

Very few handguns, to the point that "none" is accurate ENOUGH, have an effective range of more than ~50 meters. There are some calibers, not nearly-silent ice pellets, that can travel further but their ballistics out of short barrels are so poor that demos at 100 yards and beyond are exercises in exhibition and bragging rights.

No known combinations of mechanisms needed to propel a projectile 100 meters are virtually noiseless. Even air rifles that can fling a metal pellet several hundred yards as their "maximum range" but operate in 50-60 yards as their "effective range" make a shit ton of noise.

Any small dart-like ice pellet would immediately disintegrate into dust at the forces needed to travel even a fraction of 100 meters with enough energy to pierce human skinned clothing.

Any large .45 caliber ice pellet would shatter and if it struck a target with enough force to penetrate skin it would leave way more than "a tiny red dot"'s worth of signature.

Saxitoxin is not, and has never been since its isolation, undetectable. It doesn't "disappear" from the body after death (indeed the mechanisms that would cause its distruction cease upon death) and can be detected with simple tests.

This doesn't make sense except as a distraction from things the CIA really didn't want investigators to see.

It's good to remember that these agencies do put false reports in with official docs. Some you purposefully leak to the enemy (like encourage a known mole to "find" them) and then your enemy doesn't know what's fact from fiction. You also plant false reports to detect moles because specific fantasies are only available to specific groups.

Is anyone surprised a organization focused on disinformation is... good at disinformation? I'm sure they sold tons of fantasies to Church and made the best of the situation. That Church quote (If a dictator took charge) seems like the greatest publicity the CIA could ever hope for. They wanted the Russians to be paranoid and really everyone to be paranoid. And here is a US senator saying the CIA can get you wherever you are and you'd never know? That's exactly what they want you to believe! That they are omniscient and omnipotent.

The problem I have with all these conspiracies is that they don't take a second to realize that these agencies want you to believe in conspiracies. We talk all the time about misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation yet when something fancifulness like UFOs or untraceable weapons pop up everyone is all too happy to believe. It is especially true for those who believe the government is lying to us. Why does no one ever consider that just another lie is being told? The problem with intelligence agencies is you can't believe anything they say, you need strong proof and to always be second guessing. Which is the entire point, to overload you and get you to believe a lie.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulgarian_umbrella is basically the same thing and your linked article mentions the CIA stole the idea from the Russians.

Isn't that more likely to be some kind of training mission for a junior agent? (make it personal, not totally clean and get away with it anyway?)

When they just want to make sure to kill someone, dumping a few magazines into the body and driving over it afterwards for good measure, like that ex-pilot in Spain, appears to do the trick just fine.

To be fair FSB/GRU doesn’t really care about it being secret

A lot of assassinations are sending a message

Russia abandoned a lot of the “secret” part of their dirty ops in the past decade and just farms it out

This seems _so_ much like a fake weapon.

It shoots an ice pellet, which can stay perfectly intact for a range of 100m(!), yet leaves a “tiny red prick on the victim” (implying it’s maybe a ~1mm in diameter), yet also instantly melts when it hits the victim?

And the gun has a ginormous scope, on top of a “modified colt m1911” that was made electric? How and why would you modify a non-electric handgun with a large internal barrel for this?

They also used ricin injected by an umbrella.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulgarian_umbrella

Or underpants, as they did with navalny.

There's dark pattern behavior in the ad on that site, tricked me into clicking what I think was a cookies button.

It really makes you wonder what other weapons they have that we don't know about.

Almost certainly, Havana Syndrome. Caused by a (microwave-, possibly) weapon that can lead to permanent neurological symptoms. And the US is not the only country that has it but is expanding a lot of energy into making the media talk about it less. CHUPPL did a great investigation on it if you're interested

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Havana_syndrome

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xqE0ltifQ2M

Your linked article admits it might not even be real.

>A 2023 review article written by Bartholomew and Baloh concluded that Havana syndrome was erroneously classified as a novel entity due to a moral panic based on the fear of foreign entities such as the Russians or Cubans attacking the U.S, the over-interpretation of data, misconceptions about psychogenic illness, and coverage and leaks by the media. The authors stated that the U.S. intelligence community had concluded that Havana syndrome is "a socially constructed catch-all category for an array of pre-existing health conditions, responses to environmental factors, and stress reactions that were lumped under a single label".[8][9]

>A 2024 review article by Connolly et al., surveying multiple peer-reviewed studies, concluded that the cause of AHIs is still unknown. The review discussed several possible causes, including mass psychogenic illness and head trauma, but did not endorse a specific cause.[6]

That "linked article" is Wikipedia. The second link is an actual investigation which goes into good detail debunking and investigating the source behind claims that it's a social psychogenic illness

> Your linked article admits it might not even be real.

There's no evidence of anything "we don't know about". In the same way there's no pictures of things never photographed.

Those microwave attacks by spies are known since at least the sixties if you care to read some CIA leaker books. What's new is that those attacks became public, even if they didn't name and shame the attackers yet, if Chinese or Russians.

In a purely technical ponderance, I wonder if it's possible to design a stun gun that would inflict death by either increasing the current and voltage, or if a specific signal could be sent to the heart that would induce an arrhythmia. Basically the opposite of a defibrillator. A biotech maintenance guy told me that if you receive a shock when your heart is in a critical phase of the complex, it can cause it to shut off. Maybe a heart attack stun gun could attempt to read the cardiac waves and deliver the shock at the worst possible point.

(I have to emphasize that no homicidal motive drew me towards wondering that. It's just the borderless free thought that causes random ideas to float through my mind. If I can think of it, certainly the people who design covert weapons also have)

Defibs dont actually work like the movies - once a persons heart has truly stopped you need to provide proper CPR.

Defib is for patients with hearts that are beating incorrectly - and now are mostly automated.

Heart stopped and zapped with electricity makes for better movies though!

Totally possible. This is why stun guns and tasers are referred to as "less lethal" by some instead of non-lethal. Lots of electricity will occasionally stop someone's heart, and they die.

Was he referring to commotio cordis? There's a window of tens of milliseconds where a blow to the chest can cause sudden cardiac death, due to the ventricular rhythm being disrupted rather than any mechanical damage to the heart.

Probably referring to R-on-T phenomenon or unsynced shocks delivered during cardioversion. Can send you into ventricular arrhythmia.

i have no idea if this is possible, but i have to point out that really smart people pondering out loud is heard/read by many people who may have much sinister intentions than the nerd simply pondering out loud.

1984 has become a playbook. be careful what ideas you share. the public internet is not a casual conversation among friends.

For sure, though those really sinister people in high places tend to be extremely smart too. By the time the public develops some technology that could be of great interest to those people, those people have likely already developed something along those lines.

To give an obvious example (not necessarily involving sinister people): the NSA invented public key cryptography long before Diffie and Hellman.

There are weapons that can permanently paralyze an entire city. Not paralyze infrastructure or traffic... but permanent incurable paralysis of all the people in any area exposed to the weapon. That is still a 20th century technology.

Mind sharing some links? Curious what you are talking about.

That's a hell of a claim, and unless you're talking about some kind of chemical spray or seeding some weaponized microbe across the city, you could at least post a link or name that explains what it is.

Of course there are. I learned about that reading the works of Milo Rambaldi.

There was claims of a possible cancer "gun". See https://www.ibtimes.com/hugo-chavez-says-us-could-be-giving-...

There's a very silly article. The basis is old people in Latin America getting cancer and a paranoid dictator blaming the US.

Given the already verifiable history of the CIA in Latin America, I'd give any paranoid dictator the benefit of the doubt.

I'll gladly jump into the gray with you. Or hopefully that changes.

My dear old friend, now on the yonder side, showed me research that showed the intravenous injection of nothing more than mineral oil consistently causing a form of cancer that I can't remember the type for.

He had a low level position in the NSA via the Navy prior and was persistently interesting, to me. Foremost an exceptionally fine person who I sorely miss. I remember him being fervently berated by a few intellectual (IT inclined) adversaries for attempting to explain more than a few things that came out in the Snowden docs almost a decade later.

Personally, I've no doubt cancer can be quickly, efficiently induced, albeit probably not with a mineral oil squirtgun. I've heard of things I wouldn't discuss here.

I've always wondered why we've not experienced the evil terrorist version of David Hahn, say from a guy in a major food production facility. The bright side of surveillance I guess.

I may be a worthless, irrelevant moron, but I think for anyone with a bit of intelligence and a big imagination, the world is a very frightening place in this regard. I try not to think of it, but many scenarios have occurred to me and I'm often surprised, quite pleasantly so, that so far as I know, only to me, for now, and indefinitely I hope.

That can’t even be that hard. Some sort of directed radiation beam will do that easily.

You should talk to a radiation oncologist. It is extremely hard to target a person with directed ionizing radiation at any distance in a way that would significantly increase the risk of cancer without causing very obvious surface effects.

Are there other ways to induce cancer?

It's a remarkable coincidence that Hugo Chavez and Kim Jong Il died very young within two years of each other (2011 and 2013). Yes, the level of medical care in Venezuela and North Korea is poor, but these were dictators who had access to the best doctors in their own countries as well as imported experts from China, Cuba, etc.

Or maybe it's just two older dudes dying of cancer. Happens literally all the time.

Injecting undifferentiated stem cells is pretty effective at causing cancer.

Paranoid people find all sorts of coincidences in random events.

The CIA has done much worse than a heart attack gun. How about giving someone LSD everyday for 18 months for science.

I think tolerance builds up fast enough for that to be a rather boring experiment.

This is also just one example of what the CIA does. They killed an elephant with a single dose of LSD. Used it on foreigners, US citizens, etc... The Rest Is Classified did a great series about it (1,2)

1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kO0bQGf3uH8 2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gKnoZhbqTfM

Yeah, it's exponential. You'd have to double the dose each day to achieve the same result as the day before. Otherwise they're just gonna have some mildly distorted thoughts and a nasty headache.

Probably inspired by the Nazi geniuses we rescued as part of operation paperclip

Besides the Church Committee testimony, is there any evidence for the heart attack gun existing? There's part of me that wonders if they made it up for the purpose of disclosing it to Congress, to make themselves seem like they were authentically participating in the overview and accountability proceedings.

Kind of like the way murder suspects in police interrogations might give unprompted and quite possibly fake confessions to minor crimes, to manipulate the police into believing the suspect is being open about everything and doesn't have anything to hide.

Part of my doubt stems from my confusion about how a traceless dart gun would actually work. The dart guns I know of fire darts with fletchings, they can't be discrete. If you removed the fletchings, the darts would almost certainly tumble. If they said it was a BB gun that fired poisoned BBs then I wouldn't think twice about it, but they say it shot darts..

from previous reading up on this, it is my understanding this was most likely for show for the committee (this was public information after all) and was not a real device used, because it could not work

skimming this article is also seems based on a false premise…the church committee did not hold the CIA accountable. they openly destroyed documents, fairly openly murdered their own employees, broke laws, etc.

see “Legacy of Ashes”

This is a huge problem IMO.

You have to assume the CIA are the absolute masters of layered deception.

I just listened to Anna Paulina Luna on Joe Rogan drone on about the CIA and remote viewing. I just assume that is all some kind of booby trap nonsense to fall into. I actually think the whole interview was Anna telling the bullshit the CIA showed her to keep her from finding anything that matters.

Same way with classifying the JFK assassination docs for decades even though there is absolute nothing in them.

It is brilliant. Something far beyond gas lighting.

Objectively, I have no idea what to believe with the CIA and that obviously is the strategy.

The JFK documents were classified to protect methods, and are still classified to protect people. People who are still alive, were tangentially involved (e.g. clerical staff or random bystanders who might've been interviewed but reported nothing of note).

It's why releasing more documents never reveals anything: it's stuff that wasn't worth trying to declassify because it's irrelevant, but it might contain a bunch of random names of people who are still alive and did things like sign for lunch that day.

My basic assumption is that were a top-level CIA officer or several involved in the JFK assassination, they probably wouldn't leave behind mountains of documents in a clear paper trail.

Booby trap setup by who? Who are these mysterious master minds?

The CIA's dart gun likely used a compressed gas system with flechette-style projectiles that are stabilized by their center of gravity rather than fletchings, similar to technology developed for special operations where the projectile is designed to dissolve or fragment after delivery.

There's a zillion ways to kill people in slow ways. Put poison that is slow acting in restaurant food - that's harder than just a single shot with some gun. Cancer causing substances in their house water that you later remove the source of (let's not figure millions of people have unsafe drinking water just on the ordinary day in the us).

Probably much easier than using the heart attack gun! That thing did not have a very long range, and almost certainly did not have great accuracy, so its use would have been conspicuous. Sure, it's not easy to arrange to have an agent as a server or cook at some restaurant, but it surely is easier.

Another problem I have with the heart attack gun; why did they make it look like a gun? I agree that the assassin would have to be close to the target to use it, so making it look like an obvious gun risks somebody getting a glimpse of it and immediately raising an alarm. A more discrete shape would make infinitely more sense.

Indeed, why not make it more like a more discreet version of an epi pen? Like the ricin umbrella, but a bit more subtle.

"got away with"

that's... that's what they're hired and paid to do.

Yeah this seems like exactly what they should be doing. Developing weapons that kill a single targeted person is better than developing weapons that kill dozens or hundreds at a time. I'd much rather world leaders focus on assassinating each other instead of sending thousands of their teenagers to die fighting.

and here is a real-deal medical device literally intended to liquify cells at a distance:

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9404673/

I hear they even have a gun that makes a big hole in you that makes you die

America is occupied and the most powerful entities are not accountable one bit to the people, but have been captured by the small circle of "elites"

I cannot tell if you’re being randomly vague or dog whistling here. Who do you think is occupying? Ahem., “occupying”?

The information in the article is shocking and disturbing, and largely known to most informed people.

So I'm not sure what's meant by the "got away with" part.

It's hard to call it "getting away with", when it's the standard operating procedure of the agency. What is it exactly that they don't get away with? With people being routinely killed worldwide.

When I saw a little old lady, literally in a doily hat, in the BWI airport, looking terrified as she was forced to sit in the stainless steel seat, with her feet in the marked feet positions, as she was being questioned, because TSA had found a nail file in her bag 8-/ I knew the gangsters were out of the closet.

Cornering, questioning, and roughing up the public, in public, was now fair game for the federal government.

Dick Chaney's wet dream come true.

All of this is now massively superseded by the cheeto administration. Masked people, in unmarked cars, dragging people off of the streets for shipment to foreign country's dark prisons.

But the democratic administrations have also been eager user's of the "Fascist State United Act". Terrorism is functionally defined as anyone impeding the revenue stream of a large powerful organization.

And once designated, there are many avenues of intimidation, up to and including murder. Which isn't usually needed, but is always available as an option.

Recreating the Church commission today wouldn't be just difficult, it is completely impossible. The two dominant poitical parties have no interest in reform, and no one is going to stop them.

> So I'm not sure what's meant by the "got away with" part.

The agency still exists, in the exact same form, with no additional oversight. Did you think it just meant remaining obscured from the public? Shouldn't someone have gone to jail for this?

> Recreating the Church commission today wouldn't be just difficult, it is completely impossible.

The CIA has literally taken "ex-employees" and run them into the House and the Senate. It's far worse than you imagine. They "got away" with it and they continue to "get away" with it.

Schlesinger was right. The CIA needs to be divided into two separate firms. One responsible for research which reports directly to the civilian administration and the other responsible for operations which reports directly to the military administration.

It's not hard to kill people or anything. Doesn't exactly take a lot of research to do either. If your agency is developing a bunch of new ways to kill people, it doesn't actually increase capabilities, doesn't it just mean they're bored?

> It's not hard to kill people or anything.

Unless you want to be completely clandestine about it. Then it is very hard. My understanding is this is why the CIA exists, to perform work, and remain unknown.

> Doesn't exactly take a lot of research to do either.

You're basing this off of years of experience within or with the agency? You've reviewed many CIA political assassinations over the years and came to a careful conclusion on this point?

> it doesn't actually increase capabilities

Yea. The world is static. So developing new techniques is just "for funsies." It's not like cameras, cell phones, and advanced sensors haven't made this more difficult or anything.

> doesn't it just mean they're bored?

Doesn't it just mean they no longer have a reason to exist?

There are individuals in the parties who are interested though. Not everyone is a sycophant willing to do whatever their party leaders say, fearing the president's call to be primaried or something. It will take people with strong reputations to do it though.

Ah, the feared CIA, that did nothing while the us imploded - my guess is the heart attack gun did never work, but the agency ordered several mansions worth of it.

AntiImperial russians, innocent brown people, white colonizers, the mighty dark cabals of the CIA.. is that all whats left of this story?

"theres no evidence" they say. The ones who would gather and fairly portray the evidence, are in fact the ones who we are looking for the evidence on.

The Church Committee investigated excesses at CIA. The article deals mainly with creating agitprop which the administration creates regularly on its own.

Nearly everything controversial about them can be simplified to most entirely being before the existence of the Church committee.

The reforms put in place since then has prevented any rouge sort of activity which might not have been in the interests of the US to peruse, be legal, or otherwise explicitly asked for by the president or congress for them do

> The reforms put in place since then has prevented any rouge sort of activity which might not have been in the interests of the US to peruse, be legal, or otherwise explicitly asked for by the president or congress for them do

Whew! What a relief! Now all the nasty rogue intel agency things are only done at the behest of elected officials!

(And if you believe that I have a number of bridges to sell you. And if you believe that's a good state of affairs, well, elected officials come and go, and someday there will be one you really don't like, if there hasn't been one already.)

> a weapon designed to deliver untraceable assassinations using shellfish toxin darts.

How is that untraceable? Gee, we found an extremely sophisticated shellfish toxin dart in the victim, must be nothing! What a stupid article

> There, researchers under Dr. Nathan Gordon, a CIA chemist, mixed shellfish toxin with water and froze the mixture into a small pellet or dart. The finished projectile would be fired from a modified Colt M1911 pistol equipped with an electrical firing mechanism. It had an effective range of 100 meters and was virtually noiseless when fired.

> When fired into a target, the frozen dart would immediately melt and release its poisonous payload into the victim’s bloodstream. Shellfish toxins, which are known to completely shut down the cardiovascular system in concentrated doses, would spread to the victim’s heart, mimicking a heart attack and causing death within minutes.

> All that would be left behind was a tiny red dot where the dart entered the body, undetectable to those who didn’t know to look for it. As the target lay dying, the assassin could escape without notice.

> https://allthatsinteresting.com/heart-attack-gun

Sounds even more ridiculous, ice bullet handgun "effective" to 100m? Have you ever fired a handgun? That's quite far for even a conventional handgun

I have no doubt they researched it but I highly doubt it was effective or used.

To be effective to 100m it would have to have near rifle muzzle velocities, and that would _not_ be "virtually noiseless" because that would be mach 2 or higher, and anything supersonic makes a loud crack. So if it was subsonic then the bullet drop at 100m would be at least a foot and a half. Wind would make its accuracy terrible enough, but then consider how you might stabilize a bullet made of ice... (I know it was a "dart", but the whole thing had to be made of ice or else plenty of evidence would be left behind.) And being an ice bullet (or dart) surely it would be melting along the way and not have enough mass to penetrate the victim's clothing.

No, the point blank range of such a weapon would be very short, perhaps not even 20m, and presumably it was meant to be used in public, which would be weird because the gunman would be very conspicuous.

It’s of course bogus. But why? What would be the point?

That requires speculation as to motives and such. Maybe the CIA wanted to show something nefarious-seeming to distract from actually nefarious things.

>undetectable to those who didn’t know to look for it

So is polonium. It's nonetheless not exactly that difficult to pinpoint if someone just drops dead.

> When fired into a target, the frozen dart would immediately melt and release its poisonous payload into the victim’s bloodstream

Ah yes, a gun which can send a chunk of ice fully intact 100m yet it will still puncture the victim unnoticeably and immediately melt

Ice needle projectile maybe

That one was so famous that people actually tried it out and eventually debunked it.

The US establishment, just like any other state engages in propaganda. Like the whole thing about Russia being able to nuke the entire world 1337 times over.

All of these claims need to be taken with a grain of salt.

> "We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false"

I think they succeeded awhile ago already with that

Sure, then you should provide evidence for that. Otherwise, anyone could claim anything.

You wouldn't believe it obviously, that's the point. It's like who started the cuban missile crisis? It was the US placing nukes in Italy and Turkey, how many Americans know that? Everything is like that. Why did 9/11 happen? They just hate our freedom. Et al

Like tuning frequencies on electronic devices...

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