Secrets Declassified with David Duchovny

Throughout time, governments and the people

who work for them have done strange

and even terrible things in the name of national interest.

Tonight, strange weapons intended to kill.

From a weapon fired on the moon...

Scientists have to now start figuring out

how to make a gun that will work as it does on earth

but on the moon.

To an experimental nuclear weapon

that needs unusual helpers to make it work...

So some genius decides to enlist an animal

to live inside a nuclear bomb.

The safety of the entire western world

depends on these barnyard animals.

And even a plot to defeat Hitler using hormones..

This would constitute a sneak attack

against Adolf Hitler's masculine health,

and he wouldn't even know it was happening.

Dangerous threats sometimes inspire strange weapons.

It's time to bring these stories to light.

At the height of the cold war,

the U.S. and Russia raced to create weapons

to give them an edge.

In the late 1950s, the Soviets come up

with what could be a game changer

a handgun that kills without a trace.

In August 1961, a kgb hitman walks

into a west German police station and defects.

Bohdan stashynsky is interrogated by the CIA.

And he spills the beans

on a high-level hit he just carried out

using a top secret gun that induces

a heart attack on the victim.

He claims to have poisoned two Ukrainian exiles,

both very much enemies of the Soviet state.

Stashynsky claims to have used a modified pistol

that, instead of firing a bullet,

sprays a little bit of a spray of hydrogen cyanide vapor

right into somebody's face.

The CIA have never heard of a heart-attack gun,

but it inspires the agency to create

its own untraceable weapon.

And in 1968, a highly classified science unit,

code name project mknaomi, gets to work.

When CIA finds out that the Soviets have a poison gun,

they set out on a mission to create something even better.

They want a toxin that's fatal, untraceable, undetectable,

and would look like natural causes

in the case of the victim, if they were ever discovered.

Toxins are basically nature's poisons.

They are things that are highly poisonous

that exist out there in the natural world.

They land on something called saxitoxin.

Saxitoxin is found in contaminated clams,

and it is 1,000 times more deadly than cyanide.

It works very quickly to disrupt your nervous system,

interfering with your ability to breathe,

causing heart failure, leading to a heart attack.

The toxin breaks down quickly

and is likely to have disappeared

before an autopsy is carried out.

It's the perfect poison.

The only problem is, how to deliver it?

The Soviet cyanide gun has a lot of drawbacks.

You have to be very close to use it.

You really had to get in somebody's face,

and you had to kind of hope

that the breeze wasn't blowing towards you.

A change in the wind

could make the person shooting the weapon the victim.

Plus, you never know whether or not somebody else

is going to be exposed to the cyanide.

The obvious solution is to use a bullet, not a spray.

But bullets create their own problems.

If they use a bullet or pellet,

it will leave a physical trace, even if the poison doesn't.

So the mknaomi unit develops the only way

to covertly shoot a target with saxitoxin.

They freeze the poison into a hair-thin dart

that will leave nothing but the tiniest little pinprick.

But does this strange weapon

ever get off the drawing board?

In 1975, accusations against the CIA

lead to a congressional investigation,

and the agency must answer questions

regarding alleged criminal activity.

CIA director William Colby must bring out

some skeletons from the closet,

and he reveals project mknaomi.

Congress gets to see more than just documents.

Have you brought with you

some of those devices which would have enabled the CIA

to use this poison for

- we have indeed. - For killing people?

Don't point it at me.

It's the kind of thing that would make James Bond jealous.

Does this pistol fire the dart?

Yes, it does.

CIA takes a Colt m1911 gun and actually adjusts it

so that it can be fired from an electronic chamber

so it's silent,

and it fires frozen darts instead of firing bullets.

So that when it fires, it fires silently?

Almost silently, yes.

- Very little, very little... - What range does it have?

- About 100 yards, 100 meters. - About 100 meters' range?

Right.

The heart-attack gun is, in many ways, the perfect weapon.

If you're the victim, you may not even know you were hit.

You may only feel a sting, a pinch,

or maybe just an itch

before you have a heart attack and die.

For the coroner or investigator

trying to determine the cause of death,

everything is going to look like natural causes.

It's going to look like a natural heart attack.

It's now clear that the gun not only exists, but it works.

But who were the intended targets?

In the wake of the select committee,

the CIA is forced to release

the largest-ever cache of declassified CIA projects.

Detailed within are covert assassination plans

to poison Congolese president patrice lumumba

and Cuban revolutionary fidel Castro.

There's no direct connection between project mknaomi

and subsequent assassination attempts.

And the CIA continues to deny

that its heart-attack gun was ever used in the field.

But during world war ii, there is a secret weapon

that is fully deployed in American skies.

A silent winter's night is suddenly broken

by the sound of an explosion.

Locals rush out to see what has happened.

They find debris

and what looks like parts of a balloon

and bomb shrapnel.

Could it be a homemade attempt at bomb building

or a stray military test?

Within days, there are reports of similar events

coming in from all over the country.

Same sort of debris is found off the coast of Hawaii,

in kalispell, Montana, Marshall, Alaska, and Oregon.

Is the United States under attack?

The army's military intelligence department

investigates.

What they find is that these

are hydrogen-filled paper balloons.

While they look pretty, these are not party balloons.

The lanterns carry a deadly cargo

four incendiary devices and one 30-pound bomb.

The air force is told,

if you see these balloons while you're flying your plane,

shoot them down with extreme prejudice.

But one mystery remains.

Who is making these weapons?

The army's military intelligence department

starts looking at the balloons

to try to figure out where they came from.

And they realize something incredible.

They're not made of plastic.

They're made of paper that derives from the kozo tree,

and that tree is native to Asia.

But there's more, because they're able to analyze

the sand inside the ballast bags

and determine that they come from a very specific place

the beaches of southeastern Japan.

It's clear Japan is attacking the U.S.

With a very strange weapon

paper balloons carrying bombs

that can travel across the pacific.

The Japanese discover that air currents

at high altitudes travel from west to east.

The deadly balloons, named fu-go,

can ride the jet stream on a four-day journey,

all the way across the ocean.

It's an ingenious use of natural resources.

One of the key features of the balloon bomb

is that it doesn't have a pilot on board.

And so you can deploy military force against the United States

without risking your vital military personnel.

The trouble is, you can't guide it,

and so you don't know where it's going to drop.

It's indiscriminate.

The bomb's explosive power

isn't enough to do huge damage.

Its real threat is starting fires.

The state of California is especially vulnerable

to forest fires.

And the Japanese were hoping that the balloon-bomb campaign

would trigger forest fires across the state.

The U.S. military reacts to that

by keeping aircraft on standby to douse any part of California

that might be affected by a balloon bomb

that triggers a forest fire.

The government keeps the bombs secret

and out of the press because they want the Japanese

to think their campaign is failing.

Then disaster strikes.

In may of 1945, a minister and his wife

were taking five Sunday-school children out for a picnic.