9 Disturbing Covert Operations Executed By The U.S. Government

By Kaleena Fraga | Edited By John Kuroski

Published September 30, 2022

Updated July 18, 2024

Heart Attack Gun: The U.S. Government Operation To Assassinate World Leaders

Associated Press/The U.S. CapitolSenator Frank Church of Idaho and Senator John Tower of Texas exhibit a “heart attack” gun developed by the CIA at a Senate hearing in 1975.

On Sept. 17, 1975, an extraordinary hearing took place in the U.S. Senate. Following the Watergate scandal and the erosion of trust in American institutions, many Americans demanded to know what the CIA had been up to. Idaho Senator Frank Church created a committee to find out.

Not only did the so-called Church Committee uncover evidence of covert operations like MK-Ultra, but it also pulled back the curtain on a different government operation called Project MKNAOMI. Analysts with Project MKNAOMI, it found, had been working on weapons, including a “heart attack gun.”

The gun had a simple but devious design. Using a frozen dart of shellfish toxin mixed with water as a bullet, it could swiftly and quietly kill someone from 100 meters away. Once the victim was shot, the dart would melt. And since shellfish toxin is an undetectable poison, the cause of death would always appear to any medical examiner as an ordinary heart attack.

YouTubeArizona Senator Barry Goldwater examines the so-called “heart attack gun” during the September 1975 hearing.

At the Sept. 17 hearing, Church and other senators handled the “heart attack gun,” a modified Colt M1911 pistol equipped with an electrical firing mechanism, and asked CIA Director William Colby questions about it.

“A special [gun] was developed which potentially would be able to enter the target without perception,” Colby admitted to members of the Church Committee. “There was no way of percieving that the target was hit.”

But after that hearing, the gun seemed to have vanished. And, to date, there’s no official record that the CIA assassinated anyone with a heart attack gun. What’s more, President Gerald Ford signed an executive order in 1976 explicitly forbidding government employees from “[engaging] in, or conspire to engage in, political assassination.”

author

A senior staff writer for All That's Interesting since 2021 and co-host of the History Uncovered Podcast, Kaleena Fraga graduated with a dual degree in American History and French Language and Literature from Oberlin College. She previously ran the presidential history blog History First, and has had work published in The Washington Post, Gastro Obscura, and elsewhere. She has published more than 1,200 pieces on topics including history and archaeology. She is based in Brooklyn, New York.

editor

Based in Brooklyn, New York, John Kuroski is the editorial director of All That's Interesting. He graduated from New York University with a degree in history, earning a place in the Phi Alpha Theta honor society for history students. An editor at All That's Interesting since 2015, his areas of expertise include modern American history and the ancient Near East. In an editing career spanning 17 years, he previously served as managing editor of Elmore Magazine in New York City for seven years.

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Fraga, Kaleena. "9 Outlandish Covert Operations That The U.S. Government Actually Executed, From LSD Mind Control To Spy Cats." AllThatsInteresting.com, September 30, 2022, https://allthatsinteresting.com/covert-operations. Accessed September 9, 2025.