130 • Zips, Pipes, and Pens controlled these assassination devices were. "That they were actually used to assassinate human targets would be debatable, because it would be tough to find hard evidence," Prouty added. 'But there is lots of hard evidence about the existence of the Agency's secret assassination unit and the disguised weapons they used, like those deadly dart-firing umbrella guns." According to a public statement made by former CIA official H. Howard Hunt in December 1975, the Agency had an in-house unit for the assassination 'of suspected double agents and others It had been operational since the midfifties.' Hunt added that he'd been told that Col. Boris Pash was in charge of this unit. Senator Church's investigating committee found that this unit was known officially inside CIA as Program Branch 7 (PB 17). No records or documents about this unit existed by 1975, during the Church committee investigation of CIA-directed assassinations, other than one policy memo which stated in part, " PB / 7 will be responsible for assassinations . . . and other such functions which . . . may be given it ... by higher authority." In his testimony to the Church committee, Senseney said that he and his associates produced the more exotic weapons used in some of this activity "out at the Branch unit." Did he mean Colonel Pash's PB/7 unit? Senseney refused to say. He claimed he didn't know what happened to his devices, who used them, or what they were used for. Cutler has compelling evidence, though, that one of those devices was actually used in the murder of President Kennedy. Indeed, Cutler's research is such that he has written extensively on the assassination. Considering the inherent danger of both the topic of his writing and the genre research, he might have considered the use of a pengun to compile his field notes. In the case of the pengun, truly, it is mightier than the sword.