Overview
Project MK-NAOMI was a classified agreement between the Central Intelligence Agency and the U.S. Army's Special Operations Division at Fort Detrick, Maryland, running from the early 1950s until 1970. Where MK-ULTRA pursued the control of human behaviour, MK-NAOMI covered the other half of the problem: the development, stockpiling and covert delivery of biological agents and toxins.
It is not a theory. The Senate committee that investigated American intelligence in 1975 devoted part of its report to it, and that report — Senate Report 94-755, the Church Committee's first book — remains the primary public record of what the programme was for. What the record does not settle is what it was used for, and the reason is stated in the report itself.
What the Committee could and could not establish
The Church Committee's account opens with an admission that shapes everything after it:
The original purpose of MKNAOMI is difficult to determine. Few written records were prepared during its 18-year existence; most of the documents relating to it have been destroyed; and persons with knowledge of its early years have either died or have been unable to recall much about their association with the project.
Working from what survived, the Committee reached a conclusion by inference rather than by document: that "it is fair to conclude from the types of weapons developed for the CIA, and from the extreme security associated with MKNAOMI, that the possibility of first use of biological weapons by the CIA was contemplated."
The absence of records was not incidental. The Committee found that no written record was kept of transfers of agents such as anthrax or shellfish toxin, quoting the reason given: "because of the sensitivity of the area and the desire to keep any possible use of materials like this recordless." One consequence was that the Agency "had no way of determining what materials were on hand, and could not be certain whether delivery systems such as dart guns, or deadly substances such as cobra venom had been issued to the field."
The programme in its own words
A CIA memorandum of 18 October 1967 — "MKNAOMI: Funding, Objectives, and Accomplishments" — set out four objectives, which the Committee reproduced:
a. To provide for a covert support base to meet clandestine operational requirements. b. To stockpile severely incapacitating and lethal materials for the specific use of TSD [Technical Services Division]. c. To maintain in operational readiness special and unique items for the dissemination of biological and chemical materials. d. To provide for the required surveillance, testing, upgrading, and evaluation of materials and items in order to assure absence of defects and complete predictability of results to be expected under operational conditions.
The arrangement gave the CIA something it could not build for itself. The Special Operations Division at Fort Detrick had been the centre of American biological warfare research since the Second World War, and under MK-NAOMI its scientists worked to CIA requirements: agents that acted quickly, that could be delivered in quantities too small to be visible on a body, and that standard autopsy toxicology of the period would not find.
The devices, and one that is usually described wrongly
Fort Detrick's Special Operations Division developed pills containing biological agents that stayed potent for weeks or months, dart guns, and darts coated with biological agents. It also built a gun for firing darts carrying a chemical that could incapacitate a guard dog silently, allowing officers to enter an installation and revive the animal on the way out.
The report adds a sentence that sits awkwardly beside the programme's reputation: "SOD scientists were unable to develop a similar incapacitant for humans."
The device that anchors most retellings is the dart pistol photographed in the hands of Senator Church at a public hearing in September 1975. It is real, it was shown to the committee, and it is not in dispute. What is worth noting is that the phrase attached to it ever since — the "heart attack gun" — appears nowhere in the Church Committee's report. It is press shorthand for a weapon the record describes in plainer terms, and the gap between the two is where a good deal of later embellishment has grown.
The same report is equally plain on the question everything else turns on: the Committee "found no evidence that such material was ever in fact used against a person by the CIA."
Eleven grams
On 25 November 1969 President Nixon announced that "the United States shall renounce the use of lethal biological agents and weapons, and all other methods of biological warfare," confining research to defensive measures and asking the Defense Department to recommend how existing stocks should be disposed of. On 14 February 1970 he clarified that toxins — substances that are not living organisms but are produced by them — fell under the same order. MK-NAOMI was terminated in 1970.
The Defense Department complied. The CIA did not entirely.
A CIA scientist obtained roughly eleven grams of shellfish toxin from Special Operations Division personnel at Fort Detrick — "approximately one-third of the total world production," in the Committee's description, and "sufficient to prepare tens of thousands of darts." It was stored in a little-used laboratory at the CIA, where it went undetected for five years until the reviews of 1975 found it.
The Committee was careful about who was responsible. The Director of Central Intelligence had been told retention was possible and rejected it. The decision to transfer and keep the toxin "was not made by, or known to, high-level officials of either the Defense Department or the CIA," and was taken instead "by a few individuals in the CIA and SOD" — the retention is attributed in the report to Dr. Nathan Gordon.
The Committee's explanation for how that happened is more interesting than a simple act of defiance. The scientist involved received no written instruction to destroy anything, because MK-NAOMI generated almost no written instructions about anything. Kept outside the National Security Council's review, he "had to rely only on the newspaper account of the President's announcement and on his own interpretation of it." The National Security Council staff, tasked with determining policy, "did not discover MKNAOMI in the course of its study" at all.
Why the records are gone
In January 1973, MK-ULTRA records were destroyed by Technical Services Division personnel on verbal orders. Much MK-NAOMI material went with them or had never existed in written form to begin with.
That is the durable point. A programme contrary to American policy since 1925 and to declared presidential policy since 1943 ran for eighteen years, was not discovered by the body charged with setting policy in the area, and left so little documentation that the Senate investigators could not establish its original purpose. The Committee reconstructed what it could from surviving memoranda and the recollections of people still alive to give them.
What is claimed beyond the record
The gap between a confirmed programme and a destroyed archive is where the speculative version lives. Claims that MK-NAOMI materials were used in specific assassinations, or that the programme extended into non-consensual testing on Americans, are not supported by the surviving documentation to the standard that MK-ULTRA's testing programmes are, and the Committee said plainly that it found no evidence of use against a person.
That is not the same as a finding that nothing happened, and the report does not offer one. It is a statement about what could be established from records that the people who created them had deliberately not kept.