Secret fort in US must come clean on its work

What's so "fishy" after all

The US media bluntly described Fort Detrick as a cutting-edge lab. In the 1950s and 1960s, it was the center of the US government's darkest experiments.

Allen Dulles, who ran the CIA's covert-operations directorate and would soon be promoted to direct the agency, envisioned and established a mind-control project.

This is said to be the prototype of what would later become the CIA's infamous "mind control" (MK-ULTRA) program. In 1951, Dulles hired chemist Sydney Gottlieb to design and oversee a systematic search for the key to mind control.

MK-ULTRA ended in failure in the early 1960s. Nonetheless Fort Detrick, as it was renamed in 1956, remained Gottlieb's chemical base. After the end of MK-ULTRA, he used it to develop and store the CIA's arsenal of poisons. In his freezers, he kept biological agents that could cause disease, including smallpox, tuberculosis and anthrax as well as a number of organic toxins, including snake venom and paralytic shellfish poison.

In 1970, US President Richard Nixon ordered all government agencies to destroy their supplies of biological toxins. Army scientists complied. But saxitoxin — enough to kill 55,000 people was discovered and only destroyed in 1975.