Special Operations Division

The Special Operations Division (SOD) was a top-secret unit of the Army Chemical Corps at Fort Detrick in Frederick, Maryland, that developed biological weapons and delivery systems for CIA covert operations. Marks dates its founding to 1950 under Dr. John Schwab; historians Ed Regis and Stephen Kinzer place the creation of the clandestine division a year earlier, in 1949.¹² SOD shared one of the darkest secrets of the Cold War with the CIA's TSS: that the U.S. government maintained the capability, which it would use at times, to kill or incapacitate selected people with biological weapons. The CIA paid SOD about $200,000 a year through the MKNAOMI program in exchange for, in Marks' phrase, operational systems to infect foes with disease. Only a handful of the highest CIA officials knew about the arrangement.¹

The Olson incident

SOD men came under the cover of being wildlife writers and lecturers. They carefully removed Fort Detrick parking stickers from their cars before traveling. In November 1953, SOD scientists led by Lt. Colonel Vincent Ruwet and including Dr. Frank Olson and Benjamin Wilson gathered with Sidney Gottlieb and his CIA colleagues at Deep Creek Lodge in Western Maryland for a planning retreat. Without warning the SOD men, Gottlieb spiked their after-dinner Cointreau with LSD, triggering the crisis that led to Frank Olson's death.¹

Security

To enter the SOD building, one needed not only an incredibly hard-to-get security clearance but a "need to know" authorization and an up-to-date shot card with anywhere from 10 to 20 immunizations. The process was so painful and time-consuming that at one point the general who headed the entire Army Chemical Corps decided against inspecting SOD. An SOD veteran explained: "That's the way we kept them out. Those [military] types didn't need to know."¹

The MKNAOMI arsenal

The weapons SOD produced for the CIA ranged from the lethal to the merely incapacitating. Among the killing agents was shellfish toxin, a poison so concentrated that a microscopic dose brought rapid death; SOD coated the needle of a drill bit with it as a suicide device for U-2 pilot Francis Gary Powers, who carried it concealed in a silver dollar when he was shot down over the Soviet Union in 1960.¹ Botulinum, with its eight-to-twelve-hour incubation period, figured in CIA plotting against Fidel Castro, and SOD could supply diseases selected to appear indigenous to a target region. Incapacitants in the catalogue included staphylococcal enterotoxin, Venezuelan equine encephalomyelitis, and brucellosis, which could sideline a victim for months. SOD engineered the delivery hardware as well: remote aerosol sprayers, dart guns built from .45-caliber pistols, and poisons hidden in cigarette lighters and other ordinary objects.¹

The shellfish toxin scandal

SOD continued to manufacture and stockpile bacteriological agents for the CIA until 1969, when President Richard Nixon renounced biological warfare; a February 1970 order extended the ban to toxins and directed that existing stocks be destroyed.³ In 1975 the Church Committee discovered that the order had been defied. CIA Director William Colby testified that the Agency had secretly retained a cache of shellfish toxin, reported at roughly 11 grams (the New York Times gave a figure of 5.9 grams, said to be a third of all the shellfish poison ever produced) along with a quantity of cobra venom, stored in a Washington-area laboratory for more than five years after it was supposed to have been destroyed.³ The chemist responsible, Nathan Gordon, told Frank Church's committee that he had never received an explicit destruction order and had concluded that the toxin fell outside the scope of Nixon's directive.³