Biological warfare, also known as germ warfare, is the use of biological toxins or infectious agents such as bacteria, viruses, insects, and fungi with the intent to kill, harm or incapacitate humans, animals or plants as an act of war. Biological weapons are living organisms or replicating entities. Entomological (insect) warfare is a subtype of biological warfare.
Project MKUltra was the code name of an illegal human experimentation program designed and undertaken by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The experiments were intended to develop procedures and identify drugs such as LSD that could be used in interrogations to weaken individuals and force confessions through brainwashing and psychological torture. MKUltra used numerous methods to manipulate its subjects' mental states and brain functions, such as the covert administration of high doses of psychoactive drugs and other chemicals, electroshocks, hypnosis, sensory deprivation, isolation, and verbal and sexual abuse, in addition to other forms of torture.
CIA cryptonyms are code names or code words used by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to refer to projects, operations, persons, agencies, etc.
The term incapacitating agent is defined by the United States Department of Defense as:
Project Coast was a 1980s top-secret chemical and biological weapons (CBW) program instituted by the apartheid-era government of South Africa. Project Coast was the successor to a limited post-war CBW program which mainly produced the lethal agents CX powder and mustard gas; as well as non-lethal tear gas for riot control purposes. The program was headed by Wouter Basson, a cardiologist who was the personal physician of the then South African Prime Minister P. W. Botha.
Frank Rudolph Emmanuel Olson was an American bacteriologist, biological warfare scientist, and an employee of the United States Army Biological Warfare Laboratories (USBWL) who worked at Camp Detrick in Maryland. At a meeting in rural Maryland, he was covertly dosed with LSD by his colleague Sidney Gottlieb and, nine days later, plunged to his death from the window of the Hotel Statler. The U.S. government first described his death as a suicide, and then as misadventure, while others allege murder. The Rockefeller Commission report on the CIA in 1975 acknowledged their having conducted covert drug studies on fellow agents. Olson's death is one of the most mysterious things to come out of the CIA mind control project MKUltra.
Sidney Gottlieb was an American chemist and spymaster who headed the Central Intelligence Agency's 1950s and 1960s assassination attempts and mind-control program, known as Project MKUltra.
Project ARTICHOKE was a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) project that researched interrogation methods.
The Office of Technical Service is a component of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, responsible for supporting CIA's clandestine operations with gadgets, disguises, forgeries, secret writings, and weapons. In the 1950s and early 1960s it also researched, investigated, and experimented the use of drugs, chemicals, hypnosis, and isolation to extract information during interrogation, as well as to make it easier for American captives to resist interrogation. OTS is part of CIA's Directorate of Science and Technology.
Project FUBELT is the codename for the secret Central Intelligence Agency operations that were to prevent Salvador Allende's rise to power before his confirmation and to promote a military coup in Chile. This project came after the circumstantial failure of Track I, which involved making president Eduardo Frei Montlava interfere with the 1970 national election in opposition to Allende.
Operation Midnight Climax was an operation carried out by the CIA as a sub-project of Project MKUltra, the mind-control research program that began in the 1950s. It was initially established in 1954 by Sidney Gottlieb and placed under the direction of the Federal Narcotics Bureau in Boston, Massachusetts with the "Federal Narcotics Agent and CIA consultant' " George Hunter White under the pseudonym of Morgan Hall. Dr. Sidney Gottlieb was a chemist who was chief of the Chemical Division of the Technical Services Staff of the CIA. Under the Cold War and fears of the Soviet Union and China, Gottlieb felt inspired to investigate methods of mind control. Gottlieb based his plan for Project MKUltra and Operation Midnight Climax off of interrogation method research under Project Artichoke. Unlike Project Artichoke, Operation Midnight Climax gave Gottlieb permission to test drugs on unknowing citizens, which made way for the legacy of this operation. Hundreds of federal agents, field operatives, and scientists worked on these programs before they were shut down in the 1960s.
From 1948 to 1975, the U.S. Army Chemical Corps conducted classified human subject research at the Edgewood Arsenal facility in Maryland. The purpose was to evaluate the impact of low-dose chemical warfare agents on military personnel and to test protective clothing, pharmaceuticals, and vaccines. A small portion of these studies were directed at psychochemical warfare and grouped under the prosaic title of the "Medical Research Volunteer Program" (1956–1975). The MRVP was also driven by intelligence requirements and the need for new and more effective interrogation techniques.
Operation WASHTUB was a covert operation organized by the United States Central Intelligence Agency to plant a phony Soviet arms cache in Nicaragua. It was a part of the CIA's effort to portray the administration of Guatemalan President Jacobo Árbenz as having ties to the Soviet Union, prior to the CIA sponsored 1954 Guatemalan coup d'état which overthrew Árbenz later the same year. On 19 February, 1954, the CIA, working through the Guardia Nacional de Nicaragua, planted a cache of Soviet-made arms on the Nicaraguan coast near the fishing village of Masachapa to be "discovered" weeks later by Rafael Lola, a lieutenant in the Nicaraguan army, and fishermen in the pay of Nicaraguan president Anastasio Somoza García. The CIA also wished to dispose of the weapons, which were to have been used by Carlos Castillo Armas, and were therefore incriminating to the CIA. On May 7, 1954, President Somoza told reporters at a press conference that a Soviet submarine had been photographed, but that no prints or negatives were available. The story presented to the press was embroidered with the involvement of Guatemalan assassination squads. Somoza was supposed to convince the public that the arms had been intended for Guatemala. The press and the public were skeptical and the story did not get much press. However, the story became part of the Nicaragua local legends until the 1979 revolution.
The United States biological weapons program began in 1943 and was discontinued in 1969.
The U.S. Army Biological Warfare Laboratories (USBWL) were a suite of research laboratories and pilot plant centers operating at Camp Detrick, Maryland, United States beginning in 1943 under the control of the U.S. Army Chemical Corps Research and Development Command. The USBWL undertook research and development into biocontainment, decontamination, gaseous sterilization, and agent production and purification for the U.S. offensive biological warfare program. The laboratories and their projects were discontinued in 1969.
Saddam Hussein (1937–2006) initiated an extensive biological weapons (BW) program in Iraq in the early 1980s, despite having signed the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) of 1972. Details of the BW program—along with a chemical weapons program—surfaced only in the wake of the Gulf War (1990–91) following investigations conducted by the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM) which had been charged with the post-war disarmament of Saddam's Iraq. By the end of the war, program scientists had investigated the BW potential of five bacterial strains, one fungal strain, five types of virus, and four toxins. Of these, three—anthrax, botulinum and aflatoxin—had proceeded to weaponization for deployment. Because of the UN disarmament program that followed the war, more is known today about the once-secret bioweapons program in Iraq than that of any other nation.
Horn Island Chemical Warfare Service Quarantine Station, also known as the Horn Island Testing Station, was a U.S. biological weapons testing site during World War II. It was located on Mississippi's Horn Island and opened in 1943. When the war ended, the facility was closed.
Psychochemical warfare involves the use of psychopharmacological agents with the intention of incapacitating an adversary through the temporary induction of hallucinations or delirium. These agents have generally been considered chemical weapons and, more narrowly, constitute a specific type of incapacitating agent. Although never developed into an effective weapons system, psychochemical warfare theory and research—along with overlapping mind control drug research—was secretly pursued in the mid-20th century by the US military and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in the context of the Cold War. These research programs were ended when they came to light and generated controversy in the 1970s. The degree to which the Soviet Union developed or deployed similar agents during the same period remains largely unknown.
Numerous experiments which were performed on human test subjects in the United States are considered unethical, because they were illegally performed or they were performed without the knowledge, consent, or informed consent of the test subjects. Such tests were performed throughout American history, but most of them were performed during the 20th century. The experiments included the exposure of humans to many chemical and biological weapons, human radiation experiments, injections of toxic and radioactive chemicals, surgical experiments, interrogation and torture experiments, tests which involved mind-altering substances, and a wide variety of other experiments. Many of these tests were performed on children, the sick, and mentally disabled individuals, often under the guise of "medical treatment". In many of the studies, a large portion of the subjects were poor, racial minorities, or prisoners.
Various types of biological warfare (BW) have been practiced repeatedly throughout history. This has included the use of biological agents as well as the biotoxins, including venoms, derived from them.
