As President Franklin Delano Roosevelt sat in his wheelchair within the Oval Office, dictating a letter to his secretary, in sneaked William Donovan, the pinnacle of the Office of Strategic Services, armed with a loaded pistol.
At Donovan’s feet was a bag of sand.
Because the president continued working, oblivious to Donovan’s presence, the OSS chief quickly fired 10 bullets into the sand — and still Roosevelt knew nothing, only turning round when he could smell burnt gun powder within the air.
“He looked up with wide eyes and saw Donovan standing behind him with a smoking gun in his hand,” writes John Lisle in “The Dirty Tricks Department: Stanley Lovell, the OSS and the Masterminds of World War II Secret Warfare” (St. Martin’s Press).
Donovan wrapped the pistol in a handkerchief and gave it to the president, introducing it because the OSS’s recent firearm, silent and flashless.
A forerunner to the Central Intelligence Agency, the OSS was formed in June 1942 to coordinate the espionage activities of the country’s armed forces during World War II.
That summer, “Wild Bill” Donovan had also appointed Dr. Stanley Lovell because the director of research and development on the agency.
A renowned industrial chemist, Lovell was a blue-sky thinker long before the phrase even existed.
His more left-field ideas were developed by Division 19, a hush-hush branch of R&D tasked with performing “incessantly bizarre tasks,” writes Lisle.
Nothing was a nasty idea, at the very least not initially. There have been tear gas pencils and booby-trapped exploding chairs, invisible inks and the “En-Pen,” a single-shot pistol that might be disguised as a pen or perhaps a cigarette.
There was also that staple of any spy organization — the umbrella gun.
Developed by 24-year-old scientist Al Polson, it might be placed under the arm after which discharged just by turning it barely.
“The best way they’d kill people was by putting it right up against a man’s kidney and bam! It was gone,” says Polson.
“In case you don’t have a kidney – you’re gone.”
Certainly one of Lovell’s favorite inventions, writes Lisle, was the ‘Beano’ grenade.
The identical weight and size as a baseball, it was designed in order that the common American man would find a way to throw it more effectively than the more typical, pineapple-shaped version.
While the Beano got the green light to be utilized in combat, it wasn’t without its problems — testers didn’t know it exploded on contact moderately than on a timer. During final testing at Maryland’s Aberdeen Proving Ground, an Army civilian engineer tossed one within the air before catching it and blowing himself up in the method.
Lovell also tested a “bat bomb” where they captured bats and attached tiny incendiary devices to them with the intention of releasing them in enemy territory.
And so they made “Aunt Jemima” exploding flour that was so just like the true thing you may even bake cakes with it.
Firearms and explosives weren’t the one speciality at R&D.
Additionally they developed a variety of pills for spies to soak up any given situation; A-pills alleviated travel sickness, B-pills gave them extra energy in the shape of amphetamine and E-pills were a fast-acting anaesthetic.
The H-pills, meanwhile, contained an incendiary device that might be mixed with gasoline to make a Molotov cocktail, while the morphine in a K-pill could knock an individual out in moments.
Then there have been the lethal pills, or L-pills, that contained a fatal dose of potassium cyanide but additionally had the nice aroma of almond butter.
“In case you’re ever ready that appears hopeless, and also you’ve lost the desire to fight, take as directed,” read the instructions.
In 1943, meanwhile, the US Army, along with Lovell, opened Camp Detrick in Frederick, Md., because the country’s major biological warfare installation.
They were very busy.
“In its first two and a half years alone, Camp Derrick went through 598,604 white mice, 32,339 guinea pigs, 16,178 rats, 5,222 rabbits, 4,578 hamsters, 399 cotton rats, 225 frogs, 166 monkeys, 98 brown mice, 75 Wistar rats, 48 canaries, 34 dogs, 30 sheep, 25 ferrets, 11 cats, 5 pigs, and two roosters,” writes Lisle.
“The Dirty Tricks Department” also reveals how enemy forces were also developing their very own methods.
In Japan, the infamous Unit 731 showered bubonic plague drops over China and conducted experiments on humans involving flamethrowers, water torture, vivisections without anaesthesia and the forced transfer of venereal diseases.
Additionally they infected prisoners with plague, anthrax, smallpox, and cholera.
German forces were no less vicious. When an OSS agent was apprehended on the Belgian-German border in 1944 he had his fingernails pulled off and electrodes attached to his ears, nostrils and testicles.
Later, they attached raw meat to his naked body before setting a pack of hungry dogs on him. Then they shot him dead.
The OSS response was their “Natural Causes” project, designed to assassinate enemy agents with no trace of foul play. Ideas included lethal suppositories that induced a high body temperature for a chronic period and injecting air embolisms right into a vein.
Not all their ideas and inventions were designed to kill.
The OSS’ chemical engineer, Ernest Crocker, could replicate virtually any odor at his Maryland Research Laboratory.
Often known as the “Million Dollar Nose,” Crocker had already successfully synthesized the smell of vomit, urine, foot odor, and rancid butter and was instrumental in the event of “Dog Drag,” a tool for throwing bloodhounds off the scent of an agent.
Now, though, he had been tasked by Lovell to create a fecal fragrance — codenamed “Who Me?” — that might be distributed to little boys in China in order that they could “spray it on the backsides of occupying Japanese officers to make it seem as in the event that they had soiled themselves.”
This particular plan never got here to fruition, however it did cause a stink within the laboratory when among the ‘perfume’ was stolen from a secure cabinet and sprayed across the constructing.
Lovell wasn’t surprised since everyone on the OSS was fully trained “within the art of picking open all makes of locks and door latches,” writes Lisle.
It wasn’t the one failed attempt at psychological warfare.
There was a plot for US planes to release an enormous payload of pornography over Adolf Hitler’s headquarters and one other to drop bombs into the craters of Japan’s semi-active volcanoes and, after they erupted, spread the word across the local population that it was since the Gods were indignant with the country’s actions.
When the OSS was disbanded at the tip of the war, President Harry Truman created the Central Intelligence Group, which soon became the Central Intelligence Agency.
Just like the OSS, the CIA had an R&D department, the Technical Services Staff (TSS), and, in 1953, they charged Recent Yorker Sidney Gottlieb to guide a controversial recent project to check mind control — MKULTRA.
“Under Gottlieb’s direction, MKULTRA took the mind control experiments to a recent level,” writes Lisle.
“Most of the early MKULTRA experiments involved drugging unwitting subjects with LSD to see the way it affected their behavior.
In one in all his experiments, seven volunteers in Kentucky got LSD for 77 consecutive days.
“Gottlieb even hired renowned magician John Mulholland to show the TSS personnel the right way to slip drugs into drinks without getting caught.
“Thereafter, it wasn’t unusual for a prankster to spike the office coffee pot.”
Gottlieb also conducted tests with heroin, morphine, mescaline, psilocybin and temazepam, a few of which were administered under hypnosis.
One other experiment involved shooting barbiturate into an individual’s arm and as they fell asleep, then injecting amphetamine in the opposite arm to see in the event that they would get up.
Over 7,000 veterans would participate in Gottlieb’s illegal human experimentation, all without consent or prior knowledge of exactly what they were doing.
Gottlieb was also engaged in the identical sort of activities as Stanley Lovell had been in the course of the war.
His major goal, though, was the Cuban leader Fidel Castro, who he planned to attack using the sort of methods often reserved for Bond villains.
From poisoned wetsuits to exploding conch shells, Gottlieb was never in need of ideas.
One plot involved lacing Castro’s shoes with thallium salts, a depilatory that might cause his beard to fall out.
One other involved impregnating Castro’s famous cigars with lethal amounts of botulinum toxin.
Later, in his role as the pinnacle of the CIA’s Technical Services Division (TSD), Gottlieb also oversaw every part from portable key copiers to lasers that would pick up audio just from windowpane vibrations.
He also signed off a fountain pen that would shoot Mace or nerve gas.
For Gottlieb, because it was for Donovan and Lovell, though, the rationale for these weapons, physical or psychological, was that everyone else was doing it too.
As one retired CIA officer told Lisle: “That period was a wild and woolly time on the CIA. It was the old OSS mentality: Exit and do it. Doesn’t matter if it’s or bad idea, go do it.
“We’re at war, so anything is justified.”
