have testified to that, and it is now public record that the Agency7 s Health Alteration Committee, under the direction of Dr. Sidney Gottlieb and Col. Boris Pash, experimented with weapons systems that used drugs, esoteric poisons, and viruses, i.e., germ warfare. According to official testimony before Sen. Frank Church's Senate Select Committee on Intelligence in 1975, one of these weapons was described as "a noiseless, disguisable weapon firing darts which could be contaminated with LSD, germs, or venom." In other testimony, Charles Senseney, a U.S. Army weapons expert, was asked by Sen. Howard Baker if the dart-firing assassination device could actually be used in the field in its disguised versions. Senseney replied evenly, 'Oh yes. Senator, the M-l projectile [the dart] could be fired from a cane; also from an umbrella. We've used both." Senseney testified that he had developed the darts at Fort Derrick, Maryland, for CIA and for the army's Special Forces. The firing systems for the inch-and-a-half projectiles are nearly silent, smokeless, and recoilless. They are fired electrically using a solid-state fuel and have a velocity of 750 to 800 fps and an accurate and effective range of about 80 meters. The umbrella-disguised weapon used a batterypowered electrical circuit to ignite the dart's propellant and fire it through a straw-sized metal tube, which was mounted on the framework of the umbrella, attached to one of the ribs. Cutler wrote, 'The ftechette looks like the tip of a large chicken feather. The needle nose is held in a block of plastic which has tiny tail fins for flight stability. These darts were first described to me by Col. L. Fletcher Prouty, a retired CIA liaison officer who knew of their development." Later, Prouty told me, 'I personally saw the fisheries at Fort Derrick on 29 July 1960, according to my records. I saw this tiny nylon or plastic rocket, a perfect miniature of about 5 millimeters diameter, with tail fins and solid propellant built into its body. They were obviously top-secret stuff. "There were less them 10 CIA and Special Forces people who would have had personal access to that tlechette and a launcher in 1960, and I doubt that number had grown to more than 30 by 1963. That is how highly classified and