Private Intelligence

3 / SIONICS & THE SILENCER In 1967, after his failure to seize Haiti for the Cubans, WerBell returned to The Farm, but not to rest. His most important project was about to reach fruition, and it seemed to him that he was on the brink of millions. The project involved a firm he owned—SIONICS, Inc. It sounded, somehow, like an electronics business, but the deadly nature of its product line was hinted at by the corporation’s heraldic insignia and the meaning of the acronym that was its name. The emblem was a “cobray”—half cobra snake and half moray eel. The acronym stood for “Studies In the Operational Negation of Insurgents and Counter-Subversion.” It was, of course, a workshop in assassination. Its most significant product, developed under Mitch’s guidance, was a weapons system so lethally and even beautifully efficient that it made Ian Fleming’s paraphernalia obsolete.* It consisted of a submachine gun and a silencer (or “suppressor”), each made for the other, and each representing a giant step forward in the state-of-the-art of killing. The suppressor was WerBell’s invention, and according to David Truby, perhaps the foremost authority on this arcane subject, its pressure-relief valve represented “the greatest modem contribution in the history of silencers.”† Not only did it transform BANGs into phyyyts, but it improved the accuracy of marksmen using the gun by reducing barrel vibration; even more surprisingly, the silencer actually increased the weapon’s penetrating power—an unheard-of development. As if this were not enough, WerBell’s invention also served to inhibit fouling of the weapon, stifle gas from the breach, and smother the powder flash. This last improvement made it ideal for snipers, assassins, and practitioners of the ambush. As it happens, there are not one but two sounds made by a weapon’s firing. The first is that of the powder exploding; the second is the sonic boom that results when a high-velocity shell exceeds the sound barrier. WerBell’s suppressor (resembling a sawed-off black baseball bat) virtually eliminated the first noise. The second sound could also be prevented: all that was necessary was for the shooter to lower the velocity of his bullet by using less powder than usual. This done, the weapon made less noise than a cap pistol and, with the powder flash smothered, rendered the sniper less visible than ever before. (Soldiers in Vietnam, however, found that the sonic boom had its own utility: because the bullet moved faster than the speed of sound, those being ambushed heard the shot only as it moved away from them. As a consequence their first reaction was to retreat into the direction from which the shots had actually come—walking backward into the same ambush.*) And the silencer was cost-effective too. According to WerBell, his suppressors, used on Army sniper rifles, “killed nineteen hundred V.C. in six months. Those V.C. took only one-point-three rounds per kill. Twenty-seven cents apiece they cost Uncle Sam. That’s the greatest cost-effectiveness the Army’s ever known.” Former Green Beret officer Robert K. Brown, citing congressional hearings on the matter, points out that fifty thousand rounds of ammunition were expended for each enemy killed in Vietnam by conventional methods. At almost a nickel a round, that works out to about $2,300 a body. WerBell’s method accomplished the same end for about a quarter. Clearly, it was a devastating technological “advance.” Doubly devastating, that is, because it was expressly designed for use with automatic and semi-automatic weapons, guns that had formerly resisted silent operation. And the particular gun that WerBell had in mind, the other half of the weapons system, was the super-sleek Ingram M-10/M-11 LISP (Lightweight Individual Special Purpose) “machine-pistol.”

Hougan, Jim. Spooks: The Haunting of America—The Private Use of Secret Agents (pp. 13-15). Open Road Media. Kindle Edition.

One might think, therefore, that the M-10 or M-11 would be strapped to the hip of every anti-Communist grunt from Bangkok to Brunei. But it isn’t. The international arms trade is a behavioral sink of spooks and bureaucrats, corrupt officials and megalomaniacal generals. The “open marketplace” is mined with industrial espionage agents, bagmen, con men, and influence peddlers. Whom one knows, or owns, is often more important than what one has to sell, and the best submachine gun doesn’t always win. “SIONICS,” WerBell says, “was vastly underfinanced.” A factory needed to be built, salesmen hired, and so forth. To raise the required capital, WerBell took to the skies in a private jet, searching out (ad) venture capitalists, carrying a hand-tooled leather attaché case with prototypes of the silencer and M-11 inside. The selling point was simple. Not only did the arms package have marvelous applications for snipers and assassins, but, more importantly, the gun itself might actually replace the ancient .45 and serve in support of the standard M-16 rifle. Generally, America’s Vietnam ground-combat strategy was one of saturation fire. If a swatch of jungle looked hostile, if something moved, or, God knows, if someone was actually shooting, GIs would put their guns on “rock ’n ’roll” and empty clip after clip into the area. And, of course, if you take the five minutes necessary to pour four thousand rounds per soldier into a space the size of a department store, something or someone’s bound to fall. But what about the soldier in support—the cook, the driver, the orderly, the seven or so guys who must support each man at the front? They couldn’t be lugging M-16s wherever they went, and, in fact, they didn’t. Which is to say, most GIs were, most of the time, unarmed. And, because insurgents preferred to hit and run, sap and split at unexpected times and inconvenient hours, the unarmed soldier was always at hazard. What he needed, WerBell theorized, was a small, lightweight machine-pistol—an M-10—loaded with hard-hitting .45-caliber ammunition and capable of withering automatic fire. The sort of thing you could wear in the kitchen, the latrine, the movie, and the hospital. And so it seemed that for every M-16 sold, more than half-a-dozen Ingrams could be flogged. Having a patent on the Ingram, then, should have been equivalent to holding debentures on the golden goose.

Hougan, Jim. Spooks: The Haunting of America—The Private Use of Secret Agents (pp. 15-16). Open Road Media. Kindle Edition.

Not surprisingly, WerBell found his investors—twenty-nine of them who collectively chipped in seven million dollars. Forming a holding company called Quantum Ordnance Bankers, Inc. (later changed to the less revealing Quantum Corporation), the moneymen submerged WerBell’s SIONICS into a newly established manufacturing subsidiary, the Military Armaments Corporation (MAC), placing WerBell in overall command of the firm’s operations. He was the logical choice for the job: not only had he invented the suppressor, but he’d worked closely with the guns’ designers and had excellent contacts among international arms dealers, Third World police/intelligence services, and Pentagon officials. Almost as importantly, WerBell seemed to enjoy the high profile that went with the job—whereas Quantum’s other investors were determined to remain anonymous. 4 / DEATH MERCHANTS & LIBERAL ANGELS “I don’t know whether you know it or not, but we’ve got a fat-assed Jewish community here in New York that’s selling America down the drain to the Communists. People like Javits and Kennedy. No, goddamnit, I won’t tell you who Quantum’s stockholders are, but I assure you that every one of those twenty-nine individuals is in Who’s Who and you’d recognize each name. If I said Nelson Rockefeller—you’d recognize that name, wouldn’t you? Well, that’s the caliber of men we’re talking about!”

Hougan, Jim. Spooks: The Haunting of America—The Private Use of Secret Agents (p. 18). Open Road Media. Kindle Edition.

The SAS, which eschews uniforms, the use of last names, and badges of rank, is a Top Secret regiment skilled in both unconventional warfare and intelligence operations. Accused of using assassination and torture (notably sensory-deprivation techniques) against the Irish Republican Army (IRA) and others, SAS veterans have long been available to Colonel Sterling for service in paramilitary adventures of an ad hoc sort and have served widely as mercenaries under various leaders and banners.

Hougan, Jim. Spooks: The Haunting of America—The Private Use of Secret Agents (p. 28). Open Road Media. Kindle Edition.