Bat-bombs, mind control and umbrella guns: This over-the-top spy agency was the forerunner of the CIA

As President Franklin Delano Roosevelt sat in his wheelchair in the Oval Office, dictating a letter to his secretary, in sneaked William Donovan, the head of the Office of Strategic Services, armed with a loaded pistol.

At Donovan’s feet was a bag of sand.

As 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 in 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 as the OSS’s new 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.

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That summer, “Wild Bill” Donovan had also appointed Dr. Stanley Lovell as the director of research and development at 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 “frequently bizarre tasks,” writes Lisle. 

Nothing was a bad idea, at least not initially. There were tear gas pencils and booby-trapped exploding chairs, invisible inks and the “En-Pen,” a single-shot pistol that could be disguised as a pen or even a cigarette.

There was also that staple of any spy organization — the umbrella gun. 

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Developed by 24-year-old scientist Al Polson, it could be placed under the arm and then discharged simply by turning it slightly.

“The way they would kill people was by putting it right up against a guy’s kidney and bam! It was gone,” says Polson. 

“If you don’t have a kidney – you’re gone.” 

One of Lovell’s favorite inventions, writes Lisle, was the ‘Beano’ grenade.

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The same weight and size as a baseball, it was designed so that the average American man would be able to throw it more effectively than the more typical, pineapple-shaped version.

While the Beano got the green light to be used in combat, it wasn’t without its problems — testers didn’t realize it exploded on contact rather than on a timer. During final testing at Maryland’s Aberdeen Proving Ground, an Army civilian engineer tossed one in the air before catching it and blowing himself up in the process.

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. 

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And they made “Aunt Jemima” exploding flour that was so similar to the real thing you could even bake cakes with it.

Firearms and explosives weren’t the only speciality at R&D. 

They also developed a range of pills for spies to take in any given situation; A-pills alleviated travel sickness, B-pills gave them extra energy in the form of amphetamine and E-pills were a fast-acting anaesthetic.

The H-pills, meanwhile, contained an incendiary device that could be mixed with gasoline to make a Molotov cocktail, while the morphine in a K-pill could knock a person out in moments.

Then there were the lethal pills, or L-pills, that contained a fatal dose of potassium cyanide but also had the pleasant aroma of almond butter.

“If you’re ever in a position that looks hopeless, and you’ve lost the will to fight, take as directed,” read the instructions.

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In 1943, meanwhile, the US Army, in conjunction with Lovell, opened Camp Detrick in Frederick, Md., as the country’s main 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 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.

They also 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.

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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 prolonged period and injecting air embolisms 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. 

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 development of “Dog Drag,” a device 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 could be distributed to little boys in China so they could “spray it on the backsides of occupying Japanese officers to make it seem as if they had soiled themselves.” 

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This particular plan never came to fruition, but it did cause a stink in the laboratory when some of the ‘perfume’ was stolen from a secure cabinet and sprayed around the building. 

Lovell wasn’t surprised since everyone at the OSS was fully trained “in the art of picking open all makes of locks and door latches,” writes Lisle.

It wasn’t the only failed attempt at psychological warfare.

There was a plot for US planes to release a giant payload of pornography over Adolf Hitler’s headquarters and another to drop bombs into the craters of Japan’s semi-active volcanoes and, when they erupted, spread the word around the local population that it was because the Gods were angry with the country’s actions.

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When the OSS was disbanded at the end of the war, President Harry Truman created the Central Intelligence Group, which soon became the Central Intelligence Agency. 

Like the OSS, the CIA had an R&D department, the Technical Services Staff (TSS), and, in 1953, they charged New Yorker Sidney Gottlieb to lead a controversial new project to study mind control — MKULTRA. 

“Under Gottlieb’s direction, MKULTRA took the mind control experiments to a new level,” writes Lisle.

“Many of the early MKULTRA experiments involved drugging unwitting subjects with LSD to see how it affected their behavior. 

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In one of his experiments, seven volunteers in Kentucky were given LSD for 77 consecutive days. 

“Gottlieb even hired renowned magician John Mulholland to teach the TSS personnel how 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, some of which were administered under hypnosis. 

Another experiment involved shooting barbiturate into a person’s arm and as they fell asleep, then injecting amphetamine in the other arm to see if they would wake up.

Over 7,000 veterans would take part in Gottlieb’s illegal human experimentation, all without consent or prior knowledge of exactly what they were doing.

Gottlieb was also engaged in the same kind of activities as Stanley Lovell had been during the war.

His main target, though, was the Cuban leader Fidel Castro, who he planned to attack using the kind of methods usually reserved for Bond villains.

From poisoned wetsuits to exploding conch shells, Gottlieb was never short of ideas.

One plot involved lacing Castro’s shoes with thallium salts, a depilatory that would cause his beard to fall out.

Another involved impregnating Castro’s famous cigars with lethal amounts of botulinum toxin.

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Later, in his role as the head of the CIA’s Technical Services Division (TSD), Gottlieb also oversaw everything from portable key copiers to lasers that could pick up audio just from windowpane vibrations.

He also signed off a fountain pen that could shoot Mace or nerve gas.

For Gottlieb, as it was for Donovan and Lovell, though, the rationale for these weapons, physical or psychological, was that everybody else was doing it too. 

As one retired CIA officer told Lisle: “That period was a wild and woolly time at the CIA. It was the old OSS mentality: Go out and do it. Doesn’t matter if it’s a good or bad idea, go do it. 

“We’re at war, so anything is justified.”