Without a trace: The wild story of the strangest weapon the CIA ever produced
Real-life spies will be the first to tell you that their work is nothing like the movies.
There’s no volcano bases, no invisible cars, if you make tell people your name often enough to make it a catchphrase, you’ll get fired at best and at worse… well, let’s just say it’s much worse.
I mean, honestly? If you’re having pitched gun battles as a spy regularly, that’d be enough to get your hook slung from whatever intelligence agency took a chance on you. The whole point of real spy work is that if anyone has the slightest idea that you’re doing it, you’ve done it wrong.
However, all those spy stories do have a crumb of reality to them. Or at least they did nearly a century ago. After all, half the authors behind them, from Ian Fleming to John Le Carre, actually worked for the secret service and had their novels inspired by their real goddamn escapades. Very, very broadly inspired in Fleming’s case, but it still counts. Of course, the most realistic part of real-life spy work in these novels is the depressingly grey morality of it all, but coming a close second is something a lot more fun.
The world of espionage might’ve moved on a bit in the 21st century – these days, all you really need to uncover state secrets is a laptop and a bit of bottle. But from the 1940s through to the ’80s, spies had to get a bit more inventive to get the job done. That’s where Q Branch and its gadgets came in, and funnily enough, they were probably the most realistic part of the James Bond novels. Alright, maybe not the cars with missile-launching headlights, but when you take a look at some of the real-life kit knocked up by MI6 and the CIA, you’d be surprised how many of those wild ideas actually made it to the drawing board — if not beyond.
What sort of gadgets did the CIA make?
Case in point, one of the most infamous examples of American desperation during the Cold War was a weapon they created specifically to carry out targeted assassinations with impunity. Yeah, you know everything I was saying earlier about the grey morality of spy work? Just because there are some kooky gadgets there, lightening the tone up, doesn’t mean that these gizmos weren’t going to be used to destabilise other countries and make a mockery of their democracy.
It doesn’t look like much of a gadget on the surface. In fact, it looks like a garden variety Colt M1911 pistol, just with a comically large scope on top of it. No, the really bizarre part is what it shoots. Because with a list of assassination targets a mile wide, the CIA couldn’t risk something as traceable as a bullet. They needed something that would kill quietly, and they found it, bafflingly enough, in shellfish. Upon discovering that Saxitoxin, found in numerous shellfish, could retain its lethality after being frozen, they created a gun that could shoot frozen Saxitoxin out in a dart the width of a human hair.
Effective from up to 100 meters away, the weapon could send out a dart of frozen poison that would penetrate the skin, leaving only a pinprick behind as evidence. Then the dart would melt, sending the toxin into the victim’s bloodstream and killing them within a minute. No coroner in the world would be able to identify that it was a poisoning and thus would chalk up the death to what gave the weapon its charming nickname: “The heart attack gun”.