FOIAWEAR — MKNAOMI / The Dart Gun Made for Guard Dogs Tee

FOIAWEAR / ARCHIVE SERIES 045 — MKNAOMI

It built a gun whose whole job was to put a guard dog to sleep, let an agent walk into an installation, and wake the dog up again on the way out.

MKNAOMI was the Agency's biological and chemical stockpile programme, run with the Army's Special Operations Division at Fort Detrick. In 1967 the CIA summarised its purposes in four lines, quoted here exactly:

“(a) To provide for a covert support base to meet clandestine operational requirements. (b) To stockpile severely incapacitating and lethal materials for the specific use of TSD [Technical Services Division]. (c) To maintain in operational readiness special and unique items for the dissemination of biological and chemical materials. (d) To provide for the required surveillance, testing, up-ing, and evaluation of materials and items in order to assure absence of defects and complete predictability of results to be expected under operational conditions.”

Under an agreement reached with the Army in 1952, the Agency acquired “the knowledge, skill, and facilities of the Army to develop biological weapons” for its own use. What came out of that arrangement, according to the released file:

“SOD developed darts coated with biological agents and pills containing several different biological agents which could remain potent for weeks or months. SOD also developed a special gun for firing darts coated with a chemical which could allow CIA agents to incapacitate a guard dog, enter an installation secretly, and return the dog to consciousness when leaving.”

The same file records that the scientists could not produce an equivalent incapacitant for people, that delivery devices were transferred to Agency personnel in bulk along with the agents themselves, and that the programme was asked to study attacks on crops and animals as well as on people — the 1967 memorandum lists “three methods and systems for carrying out a covert attack against crops.”

Then there is the shellfish toxin. President Nixon's 1970 order required existing stocks of biological weapons to be destroyed, and in February 1970 he confirmed that toxins fell under it. The file says what happened next:

“Although instructed to relinquish control of material held for the CIA by SOD, a CIA scientist acquired approximately 11 grams of shellfish toxin from SOD personnel at Fort Detrick which were stored in a little-used CIA laboratory where it went undetected for five years.”

By September 1975 the last of it had a destination. A National Security Council memorandum of 18 September 1975, subject “Transfer of CIA's Stock of Shellfish Toxin to the NIH”, recorded that the National Institutes of Health would ask for “the 11 grams of shellfish toxin now in the CIA's possession… transferred to NIH for medical research purposes, rather than being destroyed” — adding, by way of explanation: “The toxin is very rare and this cache may be the only substantial amount in existence.”

A cluster of further documents from 1975 records the internal discussions of MKNAOMI, and a 1977 release covers the declassification of the programme's material.

The artwork is a 1960s defence-contractor specification plate: the special gun in side elevation with ruled dimension leaders, five darts laid out under it with their coated tips marked in red, a squat screw-top vial banded with hazard hatching, and a dotted trajectory arcing up and across to a small silhouette of the guard dog.

Offered in twelve garment colours, printed as two different plates rather than one image re-toned. On the dark garments (Black, Espresso, Graphite, Navy, Pepper) it prints as pale technical linework — bone outlines, an olive-grey gun body and a cold steel barrel. On the light garments (White, Ivory, Butter, Chalky Mint, Light Green, Blossom, Chambray) the same instruments are drawn again as a three-ink screen plate for pale cloth — heavy black line work and halftone shading, a deep olive gun body, and the vial cap and dart bands in red.

The QR code on the front opens the released document itself — the file carrying the MKNAOMI section: https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/cia-rdp01-01773r000100170001-5

Note: quotations above are taken verbatim from the released documents, with redactions and OCR damage not reproduced; where a passage is damaged it is paraphrased rather than quoted. The 1967 four-part summary is quoted as it appears in the file, including its OCR artifact “up-ing”. This is not an official publication and is not affiliated with any government or agency.

Garment: Comfort Colors 1717 garment-dyed t-shirt. Heavyweight 6.1 oz/yd² (206.8 g/m²), 100% ring-spun US cotton, pre-shrunk, relaxed fit, double-needle stitched with no side seams and a sewn-in label. Sizes S–4XL. Printed on the front at 300 DPI; plain back. The main artwork prints at 10 × 10 in and the QR at 1.8 × 1.8 in.

Care: machine wash cold, inside out, with like colours. Tumble dry low. Do not iron directly on the printed area.

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