In May 1960, Francis Gary Powers’ U-2 spy plane was shot down over the Soviet Union during a high-altitude reconnaissance mission. In his pocket was a modified silver dollar, containing a hidden needle loaded with a lethal dose of a toxin to be used in case of capture.
At the Kodiak Area Marine Science Symposium this month, ocean researcher Patricia Tester said she might know where the poison in Power’s secret needle, known as saxitoxin, came from: Alaska shellfish.
Saxitoxin causes paralytic shellfish poisoning. It paralyzes muscles by interfering with signals from the body, stopping respiration.
Tester said she learned about saxitoxin experiments from a trove of documents found in Kodiak revealing tests on mice involving shellfish toxins in the 50s. The research was conducted in a facility in Ketchikan that no longer exists.
The documents Tester reviewed include a contract for clams, and a shipping receipt to the U.S. Army Biological Warfare Laboratories at Fort Detrick in Maryland.
“In one of the files, there was a Department of Defense contract for toxic shellfish,” she said. “And this is what led to the detective journey that brought us through the Cold War history. The contract was from the Department of Defense and it was for toxic clams written in Oct. 6, 1952.”
The contract was for $10,000 of toxic clams — closer to $100,000 today — to be shipped to the East Coast.
“The department worked with the CIA to actually develop a replacement for the cyanide poison pill that was provided to U.S. covert agents and spies during that time,” Tester said.
Cold War enthusiasts might remember that, under Nixon’s orders, the United States destroyed its stockpile of biological weapons in 1969. But in practice, the CIA interpreted those instructions selectively. During a 1975 congressional committee investigation, the CIA admitted it had kept a small stockpile of saxitoxin. And it was that same saxitoxin Powers carried on his flight over the USSR.
Tester said it is possible to save somebody who has acute saxitoxin poisoning by putting them on a respirator and giving the toxin time to work its way out of the body. But the amount carried in Powers’ needle would likely have been lethal within minutes.
The document Tester found doesn’t determine that Powers definitively carried saxitoxin from Alaska, but Tester said her research indicates it’s likely.
“There could have been another order, either earlier or later than the one I found,” she said. “There could have been orders for toxic clams off the East Coast, which happened as well, I think for the first time down in the Woods Hole area in the Massachusetts area about 1972. But that would have been, you know, pretty late in the game for them to have been doing anything like that.”
Powers never used the poison. He was captured after ejecting from his plane and ultimately returned to the U.S. in a prisoner exchange about two years later.
No other cases of operational use of saxitoxin by the CIA have come to light.
