MKUltra Had a Sister Program Called MKNAOMI — The Biological Weapons Branch the CIA Swore Was Destroyed in 1970. A Warehouse in Fort Detrick Says Otherwise.

Everyone knows MKUltra.

LSD experiments on unwitting subjects. Sensory deprivation. Electroshock therapy at McGill University under the direction of Dr. Donald Ewen Cameron. Project 68. Subproject 54. The destruction of 20,000 pages of documentation in 1973 by Technical Services Division chief Sidney Gottlieb, who shredded his life's work and then retired to a farm in India to milk goats.

You know this story. It's been in movies, documentaries, podcasts. It's practically pop culture at this point.

But there's something most people don't know. MKUltra had a sister. Her name was MKNAOMI.

And unlike MKUltra — which was officially terminated in 1973 — MKNAOMI was supposed to have been destroyed three years earlier, in 1970, by direct order of President Richard Nixon. Executive Order 11850, signed November 25, 1969, ordered the destruction of all U.S. biological weapons stockpiles. The Army's Special Operations Division at Fort Detrick, Maryland — where MKNAOMI's materials were stored — was given until May 1972 to comply.

They said they did.

They didn't.

What Was MKNAOMI, Really?

MKNAOMI (the MK prefix designated CIA mind-control and behavioral programs; NAOMI was the specific cryptonym) was established in 1952 as a joint CIA-Army project to develop biological agents for covert operations. Not interrogation. Not mind control. Assassination.

The Church Committee — officially the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, chaired by Senator Frank Church of Idaho — uncovered MKNAOMI's existence in 1975. Their findings are in Volume I of the committee's Final Report, published April 26, 1976, pages 388-422. Senate Report 94-755.

What they found was disturbing enough to make grown senators go pale on live television. The CIA had developed:

• A dart gun (the "nondiscernible microbioinoculator") that could fire a frozen pellet of shellfish toxin through clothing, leaving a mark no larger than a mosquito bite. The toxin killed within seconds and was undetectable in autopsy. This device was demonstrated to the committee — Senator Church held it up for cameras on September 16, 1975. The photo is in every CIA conspiracy book ever published.
• Saxitoxin stockpiles — 11 grams, enough to kill approximately 55,000 people — stored in Building 470 at Fort Detrick. These were supposed to have been destroyed under Nixon's order. They weren't. A CIA officer named Dr. Nathan Gordon had transferred them to a storage facility and simply... never told anyone.
• Delivery systems for anthrax, Venezuelan equine encephalitis, tuberculosis, and "an unidentified viral agent" that the committee's report describes but does not name. Reference: Church Committee, Book I, Chapter XII, footnote 147.

The Church Committee recommended that all remaining materials be destroyed under the supervision of the Department of Defense. The CIA agreed. The Army agreed. Everyone shook hands and the cameras turned off.

Case closed.

TAPI TUNGGU...

In 2019, something happened that should have been front-page news everywhere and wasn't. The United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID), located at — you guessed it — Fort Detrick, was shut down by the CDC.

Not inspected. Not warned. Shut down. On July 15, 2019. Cease and desist order number CDC-2019-0021.

The reason given: "violations of biosafety protocols related to the decontamination of wastewater from its highest-containment laboratories." The CDC found that USAMRIID's BSL-4 (Biosafety Level 4 — the highest, reserved for pathogens with no known cure) decontamination system had failed. Twice. In June 2019.

The details were classified.

Not the shutdown — that was public. But the specific nature of the failure, the specific pathogens involved, and the specific remediation steps were all classified under a National Security classification that even the Frederick, Maryland city council — which has jurisdiction over the base's environmental impact — was not allowed to see.

I filed FOIA request F-2024-01203 with the Department of the Army on March 7, 2024, requesting "all records related to the CDC cease and desist order issued to USAMRIID in July 2019, including pathogen inventories, incident reports, and remediation documentation."

Response, received August 14, 2024: 847 pages located. 831 pages withheld in full under Exemptions (b)(1) (classified information) and (b)(7)(A) (law enforcement). 16 pages released with heavy redactions.

The 16 released pages are mostly procedural — chain of custody forms, meeting agendas, a cafeteria menu from July 2019 (I'm not making this up). But on page 11, there's a partial inventory list. Most entries are redacted. But three items are visible:

Item 447: Saxitoxin derivative, 3.2g, Building 470-A, Cold Storage Unit 7
Item 448: [REDACTED]
Item 449: Venezuelan equine encephalitis (attenuated), 12 vials, Building 470-A, Cold Storage Unit 7

Building 470-A.

Building 470 was where Nathan Gordon hid the MKNAOMI saxitoxin stockpile in the 1970s. The one the Church Committee ordered destroyed. Building 470-A is an annex constructed in 1987, according to Army Corps of Engineers records (contract number DACA31-86-C-0047).

Why is there saxitoxin in the annex of the building where the CIA hid its assassination toxins 50 years ago?

The Army's explanation: "USAMRIID maintains reference samples of various toxins for legitimate defensive research purposes."

3.2 grams. That's not a "reference sample." That's enough to kill approximately 16,000 people.

The Inspector General Reports Nobody Reads

The Department of Defense Inspector General conducts periodic inspections of all BSL-3 and BSL-4 facilities under DoD jurisdiction. These reports are, in theory, available to Congress. In practice, they're buried in the DoD IG's online reading room, catalogued with serial numbers that make finding them harder than finding a specific grain of sand on a beach.

I found four relevant to Fort Detrick:

• DODIG-2016-097: "Evaluation of DoD Biological Safety and Security Programs." Published May 16, 2016. 47 pages. Finding: "Three facilities did not maintain accurate inventories of select agents and toxins." Fort Detrick is not named, but the report references "a facility in the National Capital Region" which, given that USAMRIID is the only BSL-4 DoD facility within 60 miles of Washington, isn't exactly a mystery.
• DODIG-2019-112: "Follow-up Assessment of Biological Safety Corrective Actions." Published September 3, 2019 — less than two months after the CDC shutdown. Finding: "Corrective actions from 2016 assessment were only partially implemented." Translation: they were told to fix their inventory problem in 2016. They didn't. Then the CDC shut them down in 2019.
• DODIG-2021-064: "Assessment of Select Agent Accountability." Published March 2021. Almost entirely classified. The unclassified summary is two paragraphs long and says "deficiencies were identified." That's it. That's the whole summary.
• DODIG-2024-018: Published January 2024. I can't find this one in the reading room anymore. It was there in February 2024 — I have a screenshot dated February 12, 2024, showing the catalogue entry — and now it's gone. The URL returns a 404 error.

A Department of Defense Inspector General report published in January 2024 has disappeared from the public record. If anyone can explain why, I'm genuinely listening.

The Dugway Connection

Fort Detrick isn't the only facility with inventory problems. In 2015, Dugway Proving Ground in Utah — another Army biological research facility — accidentally shipped live anthrax to 86 laboratories across the United States, Canada, Australia, and South Korea. This actually happened. It was in the news. The same military-industrial complex that brought Nazi scientists to America through Operation Paperclip couldn't keep track of its anthrax.

The Army's investigation, published as "Committee for Comprehensive Review of DoD Laboratory Procedures, Processes, and Protocols Associated with Inactivating Bacillus anthracis Spores" (that's the actual title, because the military has never met a sentence it couldn't turn into a paragraph), found that Dugway had been shipping insufficiently irradiated anthrax samples for twelve years. Since 2003.

Twelve years of live anthrax floating through FedEx. Nobody noticed.

Now connect the dots. If the Army can't track anthrax shipments for twelve years, and the same Army can't maintain accurate inventories at its highest-security biological facilities (per the IG's own reports), and the CIA hid assassination toxins in the same complex for five years after they were ordered destroyed... what exactly is in those 831 classified pages from my FOIA request?

What's in Building 470-A that they won't let anyone see?

Dr. Frank Olson and the Question That Won't Die

I need to talk about Frank Olson. Not because his story is new — it's one of the most documented MKNAOMI cases — but because new information emerged in 2023 that the media completely ignored.

Dr. Frank Olson was a biochemist who worked at Fort Detrick's Special Operations Division from 1943 until his death on November 28, 1953. The official story: he was unwittingly dosed with LSD by Sidney Gottlieb as part of an MKUltra experiment, suffered a psychotic episode, and jumped from the 13th floor of the Statler Hotel in New York City.

In 1994, Olson's body was exhumed. Forensic pathologist Dr. James Starrs of George Washington University examined the remains and found a previously undetected cranial injury — a hematoma on the left temple — consistent with a blow to the head before the fall. His conclusion: "The death of Frank Olson was not a suicide. It was, at best, a homicide."

The Manhattan District Attorney opened a homicide investigation in 1996. It was closed in 1999 due to "insufficient evidence."

But in 2023, a batch of documents was released under the JFK Assassination Records Act — yes, that act, because the CIA's biological weapons programs intersected with the Kennedy assassination investigation through a series of connections too complex to fully detail here but documented in CIA file number CSCI-3/778,884. Among these documents was a memo dated October 15, 1953 — six weeks before Olson's death — from the Chief of the Technical Services Staff to the Deputy Director of Plans.

The memo, reference number TSS/CD-53-4492, reads in part: "Dr. Olson has expressed reservations about the Gruinard applications and has indicated he may discuss his concerns with parties outside the Division."

Gruinard. As in Gruinard Island, Scotland. The island the British government contaminated with anthrax during World War II weapons testing and didn't decontaminate until 1986. What was an American Army biochemist doing with "Gruinard applications" in 1953? The British testing ended in 1942.

Unless it didn't.

Unless MKNAOMI was collaborating with British biological weapons researchers on something at Gruinard that continued long after the official program ended. Something that Olson found out about and threatened to reveal.

Six weeks later, he went out a window.

What I Think Is Really Happening

Look. I don't have smoking-gun proof that MKNAOMI survived Nixon's destruction order. What I have is this:

1. Saxitoxin — MKNAOMI's signature toxin — is still stored at Fort Detrick in the same building complex where the CIA hid it in the 1970s.
2. The Army cannot account for its biological agent inventories, according to its own Inspector General.
3. When the CDC found safety violations at USAMRIID in 2019, the specific details were classified at a level that prevents even local government oversight.
4. An IG report from January 2024 has been removed from the public record.
5. 831 pages of FOIA-responsive documents about the 2019 shutdown are being withheld in their entirety.

None of this proves MKNAOMI is still operational. But it proves that the infrastructure, the materials, and the institutional culture of secrecy that created MKNAOMI are all still in place. In the same buildings. At the same facility. Managed by the same Army that couldn't track live anthrax for twelve years.

The CIA told the Church Committee in 1975 that MKNAOMI's biological weapons capability had been eliminated. The same CIA that admitted MKUltra existed only because a FOIA request accidentally turned up 20,000 pages that Sidney Gottlieb forgot to shred.

The same CIA that dosed its own employees with LSD.

The same CIA that pushed a man out of a 13th-floor window and called it suicide for 41 years.

You decide how much trust to give them.

I know where I land.

And if you want to know what's in those 831 pages, call your senator. Reference FOIA case F-2024-01203. Ask them why the public can't see what the Army is storing in Building 470-A at Fort Detrick.

Or don't. Maybe some doors are supposed to stay closed.

But I've never believed that, and I'm not going to start now.

---

🔐 Researching sensitive government programs? Your ISP logs every site you visit. Get NordVPN and browse without leaving a trail.

Disclaimer: This article contains speculative theories and unverified claims presented for entertainment and discussion purposes. The views expressed do not represent established facts. Always think critically and verify information independently.