Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

When the CIA got away with building a heart attack gun

wisewolfmedia.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 99 posts

Re: When the CIA got away with building a heart attack gun

#61

Post by dopa42365 »

AnotherGoodName wrote: post #11
dmix wrote: post #7

This article is about the Church Committee, if you're interested in the heart attack gun see: https://allthatsinteresting.com/heart-attack-gun Also it's interesting to note how Russia doesn't use a gun like this, they spike drinks/food or spray it on surfaces like doorknobs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulgarian_umbrella is basically the same thing and your linked article mentions the CIA stole the idea from the Russians.

Isn't that more likely to be some kind of training mission for a junior agent? (make it personal, not totally clean and get away with it anyway?)

When they just want to make sure to kill someone, dumping a few magazines into the body and driving over it afterwards for good measure, like that ex-pilot in Spain, appears to do the trick just fine.

Re: When the CIA got away with building a heart attack gun

#62

Post by cryptonector »

thejazzman wrote: post #44
gosub100 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a purely technical ponderance, I wonder if it's possible to design a stun gun that would inflict death by either increasing the current and voltage, or if a specific signal could be sent to the heart that would induce an arrhythmia. Basically the opposite of a defibrillator. A biotech maintenance guy told me that if you receive a shock when your heart is in a critical phase of the complex, it can cause it to shut…

i have no idea if this is possible, but i have to point out that really smart people pondering out loud is heard/read by many people who may have much sinister intentions than the nerd simply pondering out loud. 1984 has become a playbook. be careful what ideas you share. the public internet is not a casual conversation among friends.

For sure, though those really sinister people in high places tend to be extremely smart too. By the time the public develops some technology that could be of great interest to those people, those people have likely already developed something along those lines.

To give an obvious example (not necessarily involving sinister people): the NSA invented public key cryptography long before Diffie and Hellman.

Re: When the CIA got away with building a heart attack gun

#63

Post by gruez »

culi wrote: post #40
almostbasic wrote: post #3

It really makes you wonder what other weapons they have that we don't know about.

Almost certainly, Havana Syndrome. Caused by a (microwave-, possibly) weapon that can lead to permanent neurological symptoms. And the US is not the only country that has it but is expanding a lot of energy into making the media talk about it less. CHUPPL did a great investigation on it if you're interested https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Havana_syndrome https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xqE0ltifQ2M

Your linked article admits it might not even be real.

>A 2023 review article written by Bartholomew and Baloh concluded that Havana syndrome was erroneously classified as a novel entity due to a moral panic based on the fear of foreign entities such as the Russians or Cubans attacking the U.S, the over-interpretation of data, misconceptions about psychogenic illness, and coverage and leaks by the media. The authors stated that the U.S. intelligence community had concluded that Havana syndrome is "a socially constructed catch-all category for an array of pre-existing health conditions, responses to environmental factors, and stress reactions that were lumped under a single label".[8][9]

>A 2024 review article by Connolly et al., surveying multiple peer-reviewed studies, concluded that the cause of AHIs is still unknown. The review discussed several possible causes, including mass psychogenic illness and head trauma, but did not endorse a specific cause.[6]

Re: When the CIA got away with building a heart attack gun

#64

Post by cryptonector »

Scipio_Afri wrote: post #54
Arturo525 wrote: post #22

The Church Committee investigated excesses at CIA. The article deals mainly with creating agitprop which the administration creates regularly on its own.

Nearly everything controversial about them can be simplified to most entirely being before the existence of the Church committee. The reforms put in place since then has prevented any rouge sort of activity which might not have been in the interests of the US to peruse, be legal, or otherwise explicitly asked for by the president or congress for them do

> The reforms put in place since then has prevented any rouge sort of activity which might not have been in the interests of the US to peruse, be legal, or otherwise explicitly asked for by the president or congress for them do

Whew! What a relief! Now all the nasty rogue intel agency things are only done at the behest of elected officials!

(And if you believe that I have a number of bridges to sell you. And if you believe that's a good state of affairs, well, elected officials come and go, and someday there will be one you really don't like, if there hasn't been one already.)

Re: When the CIA got away with building a heart attack gun

#65

Post by zeroCoolMD »

gosub100 wrote: post #38
almostbasic wrote: post #3

It really makes you wonder what other weapons they have that we don't know about.

In a purely technical ponderance, I wonder if it's possible to design a stun gun that would inflict death by either increasing the current and voltage, or if a specific signal could be sent to the heart that would induce an arrhythmia. Basically the opposite of a defibrillator. A biotech maintenance guy told me that if you receive a shock when your heart is in a critical phase of the complex, it can cause it to shut…

Probably referring to R-on-T phenomenon or unsynced shocks delivered during cardioversion. Can send you into ventricular arrhythmia.

Re: When the CIA got away with building a heart attack gun

#66

Post by cryptonector »

Alive-in-2025 wrote: post #18
lupusreal wrote: post #9

Besides the Church Committee testimony, is there any evidence for the heart attack gun existing? There's part of me that wonders if they made it up for the purpose of disclosing it to Congress, to make themselves seem like they were authentically participating in the overview and accountability proceedings. Kind of like the way murder suspects in police interrogations might give unprompted and quite possibly fake con…

There's a zillion ways to kill people in slow ways. Put poison that is slow acting in restaurant food - that's harder than just a single shot with some gun. Cancer causing substances in their house water that you later remove the source of (let's not figure millions of people have unsafe drinking water just on the ordinary day in the us).

Probably much easier than using the heart attack gun! That thing did not have a very long range, and almost certainly did not have great accuracy, so its use would have been conspicuous. Sure, it's not easy to arrange to have an agent as a server or cook at some restaurant, but it surely is easier.

Re: When the CIA got away with building a heart attack gun

#67

Post by [deleted] »

ilamont wrote: post #35
nradov wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should talk to a radiation oncologist. It is extremely hard to target a person with directed ionizing radiation at any distance in a way that would significantly increase the risk of cancer without causing very obvious surface effects.

Are there other ways to induce cancer? It's a remarkable coincidence that Hugo Chavez and Kim Jong Il died very young within two years of each other (2011 and 2013). Yes, the level of medical care in Venezuela and North Korea is poor, but these were dictators who had access to the best doctors in their own countries as well as imported experts from China, Cuba, etc.

[deleted]

Re: When the CIA got away with building a heart attack gun

#68

Post by cryptonector »

2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #46
imchillyb wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There, researchers under Dr. Nathan Gordon, a CIA chemist, mixed shellfish toxin with water and froze the mixture into a small pellet or dart. The finished projectile would be fired from a modified Colt M1911 pistol equipped with an electrical firing mechanism. It had an effective range of 100 meters and was virtually noiseless when fired. > When fired into a target, the frozen dart would immediately melt and relea…

Sounds even more ridiculous, ice bullet handgun "effective" to 100m? Have you ever fired a handgun? That's quite far for even a conventional handgun I have no doubt they researched it but I highly doubt it was effective or used.

To be effective to 100m it would have to have near rifle muzzle velocities, and that would _not_ be "virtually noiseless" because that would be mach 2 or higher, and anything supersonic makes a loud crack. So if it was subsonic then the bullet drop at 100m would be at least a foot and a half. Wind would make its accuracy terrible enough, but then consider how you might stabilize a bullet made of ice... (I know it was a "dart", but the whole thing had to be made of ice or else plenty of evidence would be left behind.) And being an ice bullet (or dart) surely it would be melting along the way and not have enough mass to penetrate the victim's clothing.

No, the point blank range of such a weapon would be very short, perhaps not even 20m, and presumably it was meant to be used in public, which would be weird because the gunman would be very conspicuous.

Re: When the CIA got away with building a heart attack gun

#69

Post by modeless »

lenerdenator wrote: post #42

"got away with" that's... that's what they're hired and paid to do.

Yeah this seems like exactly what they should be doing. Developing weapons that kill a single targeted person is better than developing weapons that kill dozens or hundreds at a time. I'd much rather world leaders focus on assassinating each other instead of sending thousands of their teenagers to die fighting.
Post reply on HN