Spycraft - Melton [167]
Reviewing the Hi-Standard pistol design, TSD engineers discovered that if the sear—the part of the firing mechanism linking the trigger to the hammer—was trimmed down, the weapon functioned as a machine gun, emptying its ten-round magazine in about a second and a half. “You’d pull the trigger once and it would go ‘burp.’ You’ve put ten rounds into your target and multiple hitting is always more effective than a single shot,” said Parr. “But with the silencer on there was a tendency for the muzzle to drop rather than rise. You have to compensate in that direction. With the shoulder stock, you had a degree of control. The whole trick was cutting the sear, and then you had to do a little work making sure the magazine spring was correct. Our goal was a silent machine gun and we made pretty good progress.”
During their research, engineers found that silenced weapons frequently malfunctioned and jammed when firing standard military ammunition. For a weapon to be silent as well as lethal, powder loads needed to be precise. Too much powder and the weapon was noisy, too little powder and it suffered in terms of velocity and lethality. “That was always trouble with the silent-weapons program, using standard-issue ammunition. There was a wide variance in loading consistencies and performance,” explained Parr. “It turned out the ‘silenced’ guns just didn’t work with regular ammo.”
The 9mm CIA DEAR Gun in the mid-1960s was a low-cost personal weapon accurate only at short distances and a successor to the OSS-designed Woolworth or Liberator pistol.
TSD engineers also updated the OSS Liberator pistol, the single-shot .45 caliber handgun designed for large-scale distribution to partisan forces behind enemy lines during World War II.24 The Vietnam edition, called the DEAR Gun (for DEnied ARea Weapon), was a small, inexpensive cast aluminum handgun with a blued steel barrel that fired a single 9mm parabellum round. As with the Liberator, it was intended for use by partisans to obtain another, more powerful, weapon from the enemy. Packed in a Styrofoam box with illustrated instructions, the plan called for an airdrop of the weapons behind enemy lines.25
“By unscrewing the barrel, inserting a single round, and screwing it back together and cocking it by pulling a plunger like a little kid’s toy pistol, the DEAR would shoot a single 9mm round,” explained Parr. “Then somebody at Headquarters said, ‘Maybe we’re not doing them a favor. Maybe we ought to let them shoot twice.’ So then we loaded extra rounds in the handle. That created a problem of what to do with a stuck casing after firing. That led to our designing a simple stick, or push rod to eject the casing attached to the rubberized butt of the pistol.”
The question then arose as to the weapon’s safety after firing multiple rounds. Would the gun, designed for firing only once, fall apart in the shooter’s hand after discharging five or twenty rounds? “We sent a tech to the range and he must have shot it fifty times in a row,” remembered Parr. “But on one shot, he lost control of it and chipped a tooth. After that, people started saying, ‘Oh, it’s a dangerous weapon. People get hurt using it.’ That spread like wildfire through Headquarters and the plan to airdrop thousands of the guns was scrapped.”
The Hi-Standard and Liberator were not the only OSS innovations that saw a second life during the Vietnam War. The technical innovations from TSD and other CIA technical offices frequently improved upon the World War II technology with updates that included modern materials