CIA Declassifies Pages From Their Cookbook

AngryNick writes "The Washington Post reports today on the declassification of some of the CIA's oldest secrets: Do you want to open sealed envelopes without getting caught? According to one of the six oldest classified documents in possession of the Central Intelligence Agency: 'Mix 5 drams copper acetol arsenate. 3 ounces acetone and add 1 pint amyl alcohol (fusil-oil). Heat in water bath — steam rising will dissolve the sealing material of its mucilage, wax or oil.... Do not inhale fumes.'"

Comments

But...but...

[LordStormes]

what if I've got nasal congestion? This stuff ought to eat through that lickety-split if I inhale the fumes, right?

Useful for something

[antifoidulus]

While hardly anyone sends info via letters anymore, I bet a bunch of teenage amateur meth manufacturers are getting ideas for new drugs.

Re:Useful for something

[dmbasso]

Just yesterday I became aware that people drink (or inhale the vapor of) a infusion made of VHS videotapes to get high. It's been a long time since I laughed so much... with ideas like that we can confirm that there are no bounds on human stupidity.

[Warning: VHS tea may cause cancer or metal poisoning, take it only if you are completely retarded and want to kill that lonely neuron of yours.]

Re:Useful for something

[Anonymous Coward]

Drinking it is extremely dangerous to your health. It's only (not that I'd know, but wikipedia has told me before) the vapours that are to be taken.

Re:Useful for something

[mysidia]

with ideas like that we can confirm that there are no bounds on human stupidity.

I will confirm there are no bounds on human stupidity when congress passes a new law banning the sale and/or possession of VHS tapes.

Re:Useful for something

[Lumpy]

I love how Darwinism is wiping out all the idiot teenagers.

Keep doing stupid shit to get high kids... It makes the world better for the ones that are not so stupid.

Re:Useful for something

[Anonymous Coward]

All teenagers are idiots. Most adults are, too. The ones who survive into adulthood are merely the lucky ones, and it's hit and miss as to which ones grow out of their stupidity.

Ideas of social Darwinism are for morons.

Re:Useful for something

[Anonymous Coward]

I have SEVERAL neurons remaining you insensitive clod!

Re:Useful for something

[Cheech Wizard]

I agree. Evidence: Politicians... ;)

Re:Useful for something

[Lobachevsky]

All of evolution is luck. Consistent luck is just another term for skill.

Re:Useful for something

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you sure you aren't talking about inhaling "tape head cleaner" (amyl nitrate)? Because that's pretty common and relatively harmless.

Re:Useful for something

[Internetuser1248]

and also used as a first aid remedy for some poisons like cyanide

Re:Useful for something

[Anonymous Coward]

well, decrease the risk of doing drugs by educating properly and decreasing irrelevant risks (getting arrested) and those who deem education important will survive thus giving you less morons.

drams

[Anonymous Coward]

i'll have to scavenge the flea market for those old drams

wow

[Charliemopps]

Wow, 6 documents from 100 years ago. We'll find out about Kennedy any day now!

Re:wow

[Spritzer]

Why? The CIA knew nothing about that.

Re:wow

[creat3d]

That's right, son. That's right.

Re:wow

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, the interesting thing is as recently as 1999 the CIA thought this was important to retain as confidential. That means the CIA was USING this within the last decade and as such, these techniques developed in WWI still had applicability almost a hundred years later.

Re:wow

[GodfatherofSoul]

More likely they don't want to give a heads up to other fledgling or small-scale intelligence operations.

Re:wow

[Kamiza Ikioi]

Hey, MI-6 recently released the fact that semen was used as a secret invisible ink. I just wanna see the CIA show them up. How about breast milk booby trap bombs? Cause I know "booby trap" is somehow related. The truth is out there!

Re:wow

[jbeaupre]

We'll find out about Kennedy any day now!

Rumor is he's dead. Uh, which Kennedy are we talking about? Never mind. He's dead too.

Re:wow

[ACE209]

Unless its about cartoon mice.
Then you probably would have to wait forever (minus a day).

Re:wow

[JWSmythe]

    Yup, openness and transparency. That's the CIA's motto. "No, we don't know anything about that". If you can't trust them to tell everyone the whole truth, who can you trust?

Re:wow

[JWSmythe]

    I'm pretty sure the duration of that one is "When hell freezes over" +100 years.

Re:wow

[Teunis]

if I remember rightly, that secret's in the documents the FSB declassified a few years back ;)

Re:wow

[Bing Tsher E]

The only one who has figured it all out is Oliver Stone. Yep.

Re:wow

[Anonymous Coward]

We have top men working on it now.

Invisible ink

[mangu]

That one I learned as a kid: either orange juice or sugar dissolved in water makes invisible ink. Heat the paper with a clothes iron to develop.

Re:Invisible ink

[vgerclover]

Real Agents use Semen.

Re:Invisible ink

[tsalmark]

Ewww. I didn't want to know that.

Re:Invisible ink

[Farmer Tim]

Ah, so that's why people say "come again" when they didn't get the message the first time.

Re:Invisible ink

[Ogive17]

Orange juice or lemon juice? I always saw lemon juice being used, I would think orange juice might leave behind some color.

Re:Invisible ink

[mangu]

Then perhaps Mata Hari was not a spy after all. The secret ink found in her room which was used as evidence against her could have been left by one of her lovers.

Re:Invisible ink

[hellop2]

urine works too

Re:Invisible ink

[Anonymous Coward]

Best part? The guy who was interested in using semen as invisible ink was named Mansfield Cumming.

Re:Invisible ink

[geoffaus]

"In June 1915, Walter Kirke, deputy head of military intelligence at GHQ France, wrote in his diary that Mansfield Cumming, the first chief (or C) of the SIS was making enquiries for invisible inks at the London University" And he had a rather appropriate name too!

WWI documents are not CIA

[Anonymous Coward]

These documents predate the CIA. Therefore the recipes aren't CIA recipes.

Re:WWI documents are not CIA

[morgan_greywolf]

But they were classified and kept by the CIA. The documents themselves (1 2 3 4 5 6) carry stamps keeping them exempt from declassification for dates as late at 1978 and 1989.

Some of the recipes in there, however, are as old as Julius Caesar.

Re:WWI documents are not CIA

[Anonymous Coward]

No greek fire recipes though.

Anarchist cookbook?

[vlm]

Mix 5 drams copper acetol arsenate. 3 ounces acetone and add 1 pint amyl alcohol (fusil-oil).

This is sounding like the "anarchist cookbook" which had made up recipes intended to blow up potential bombers rather than cooking up the real thing.
Right up there with "get high from banana peels"

You want a solvent for mucilage, try ethanol fumes. I have no idea how to test it because envelope manufacturers have not used biological mucilage for longer than I've been alive... Maybe a museum or an old relative has an envelope they'd let you mess with?

Re:Anarchist cookbook?

[TheCarp]

I dunno, I think you give the guy who put the cookbook together a bit too much credit. If anything it was a collection that was put together from book learning and inexperience. Sure, anybody can look up the reaction and figure out how to make nitroglycerin. Doing it safely on the other hand isn't something that a lot of people (even some who did it) can speak to.

Getting high from banana peels is a perfect example. It wasn't new in the cookbook. It was a hoax printed in a Princeton newspaper. The author of the book got ahold of it and included it in his book. Hardly some grand conspiracy, just, ignorance, inexperience, and lack of source checking.

Re:Anarchist cookbook?

[bmo]

The Anarchists' Cookbook had real recipes.

It's just that some stuff was left out, like... safety.

This was discussed here on Slashdot and if you read the packet of declassified docs relating to it, it was pretty well stated that sure, these are actual things you can do, but they might not quite work out as you plan.

"they" - meaning law enforcement, preferred you blow yourself up and draw attention to yourself instead of having to hunt down every PFY that downloaded the book off the local BBS at 1200 (or 300!) bps.

--
BMO

Re:Anarchist cookbook?

[hoggoth]

But huffing cat urine is real, right?

Re:Anarchist cookbook?

[geekoid]

Have you read it? it goes into exactly what you need to do to maintain temperature and stability.

Bear in mind the idea was for someone in a house to do it, not a lab.

It's also a great book to read on the insight of the time.

People have forgotten, but we where right on the brink of a large violent revolution. Thanks to the FBI, it became a much calmer event.

Re:Anarchist cookbook?

[TheCarp]

Actually I have only read some of the online versions, and some bits of the US Army Improvised Munitions Manual (1969) which probably provided a fair amount of source material.

I wish I had read the real book, always meant to check it out. Maybe that wasn't a good example but, I have heard many times this theory that it was intended to kill the people who tried it, and I just never bought it. It always seemed plausible enough that errors or bad procedures were more the result of lack of QA than actual malicious intent. (and no,,I don't consider revolution to be malicious)

Re:Anarchist cookbook?

[Anonymous Coward]

Heck, a pre-1960s edition of Encylopaedia Britannica had more details on how to make the stuff safely than the Cookbook did. More particularly, on how to stabilize the stuff to store it safely. (Well, "safely" being a relative term in this context.)

Re:Anarchist cookbook?

[Omestes]

"they" - meaning law enforcement, preferred you blow yourself up and draw attention to yourself instead of having to hunt down every PFY that downloaded the book off the local BBS at 1200 (or 300!) bps.

Many of the books called by the name "Anarchist's Cookbook" on old BBSs weren't the same as the print edition. Actually in the early-mid 90's I don't think I ever actually found a text version of the print edition on any local BBS (or Fido, or, later, telnet BBSs). If anything, most of the BBS versions were more dubious than the original. I remember reading how to make a "contact explosive" from iodine and ammonia, and pondering how the hell someone would do that without blowing themselves up or inhaling particularly nasty fumes. Some of them devoted tens of pages on stuffing match heads into tennis balls and calling it a "grenade"...

The 90's were a much simpler time. I supported myself through high school by selling print, and disk, copies of the BBS versions of the Anarchist Cookbook, and other "counterculture" literature to my fellow students. I think I charged like $10 for a print copy, and $5 for a floppy. These days I would have been expelled, arrested, and probably permanently black marked from ever having a successful life.

I also sold compilations of ways to extract drugs from ethnographic plants for awhile (most of which were probably completely innacurate and potentially harmful, in retrospect)...

I feel sorry for kids there days... Half the stuff I did in my youth would get someone into very deep water now.

Re:Anarchist cookbook?

[Lumpy]

Ive made nitroglycerine and its not that dangerous until you get to the unstable levels of concentration.

Low grade nitro that can take out a house by putting it in a nice sealed pressure cooker left on a fire in the basement? Easy as hell to do. I was 13 when I mixed my first batch of it. I made a small mason jar full of low grade stuff. a campfire in the wood to detonate it, 1 hour later it left a nice 6 foot crater where the campfire used to be. we spent the next 6 hours putting out small fires in a 60 foot radius.

Re:Anarchist cookbook?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's actually ironic that I spent my youth being paranoid about all that stuff, then come to find out the year after I get out of high school I was right to be (Columbine happened, then 9/11, then whatever other crap has happened since) with the steady decline of youth rights leaving me to ponder where I want to raise children, and being pretty sure it isn't here. Whether or not they end up being more SUCCESSFUL than me, I want my kids to have the opportunity to become much more rounded than me, both for better and worse, and without the opportunity to experiment and make some serious fuckups of their own, I'm not seeing that happening in modern american society.

What are some of the rest of you guys (and gals) opinions?

Re:Anarchist cookbook?

[bernywork]

> I remember reading how to make a "contact explosive" from iodine and ammonia,

Made it, it worked. Had to play with the ratio a bit though to get the desired effect (I wanted throw downs, not sneeze and blow up...)

Re:Anarchist cookbook?

[Anonymous Coward]

> I remember reading how to make a "contact explosive" from iodine and ammonia, and pondering how the hell someone would do that without blowing themselves up or inhaling particularly nasty fumes.

We did that in chemistry class. It makes NI3 (nitrogen tri-iodide). You're right about how it's totally unstable. We only used 0.1 gram of iodine on filter paper, let it dry, then set it off with a feather or something for a loud bang.

Making large quantities of that stuff is suicidal. We made lots of tiny samples and sometimes one going off would set others off. Or it would go off while still wet. It's a neat demonstration, not something that should ever be used for demolitions.

Re:Anarchist cookbook?

[J053]

I actually made some nitrogen tri-iodide at around age 15. I had gone to a summer camp for "gifted" students at a local college, and we had pretty free access to the chem lab. So, I and a buddy were able to get pure iodine crystals and concentrated ammonium hydroxide, which made it easy. You just dissolve the iodine in the NH4OH, filter the residue, and do whatever you want with it while it's wet. Once it dries, it's a very effective contact explosive. Great for painting on stair treads and doorknobs, or stuffing into capsules for little throwable bombs.

Good times...

Re:Anarchist cookbook?

[dbIII]

Go back a bit more and my uncle was making touch powder (picric acid version I think) and simple gunpowder and when that was not enough for his little cannon he ducked under the fence to the army dump and came back with cordite. It turns out there was also mustard gas there but it wasn't found until decades later.
He was the smart one. Another younger relative blew off four fingers playing with less powerful home made explosives some time in the 1960s. Some of the old chemistry textbooks were a lot more informative on explosives than the anarchists cookbooks ever were. I'm lucky that by the time I knew enough to play with explosives I was busy making sure nasty stuff wouldn't go off. Sitting sixty metres up on scaffolding with a picric acid solution in a machine on your lap which is running an electrical current through it is a good time to muse about how explosive things are or are not. It's also amusing seeing what's left of a vehicle after a lit cigarette, detonator and charge all occupy the same space in the back of it - a wheel knocked a hole in a fence right next to the head of the idiot that was walking away from it who didn't think that throwing his butt out the window would end up in the back where he'd put the gear in a heap.

Re:Anarchist cookbook?

[Omestes]

I remember being very happy to be out of high school when Columbine happened. I was also very happy that our school had a very high nerd ratio, so we were never really bullied much or ostracized to the point where the less balanced of us were tempted to act out. Hell, in a certain sense we were even respected... which is very odd from all I've heard from other peoples experience of high school

Most of our tastes were pretty benign, we were more likely messing with computers than messing with potential explosives (there was some of that, obviously).

Sorry for being nostalgic, its the tail end of a birthday, after a fair bit of beer.

What are some of the rest of you guys (and gals) opinions?

I think most of the West is trending towards being overly protective of our children, while being overly fearful of them at the same time. Your best bet is in more rural areas, I'd think.

Please do inhale...

[Super Dave Osbourne]

If someone is opening my mail, by all means inhale drop dead.

Wax Seal

[Anonymous Coward]

That's why I always use a wax seal for my very important parcels, stamped with the family emblem and delivered by horse or my trusty pigeon.

Re:Wax Seal

[TheCarp]

My god just use pgp already.

Re:Wax Seal

[Vectronic]

It seems he does, Pidgeon Get Parcel... Pidgeon Give Parcel.

Re:Wax Seal

[An ominous Cow art]

He said 'trusty', so I assume it's a pretty good pigeon.

Re:Wax Seal

[ThatMegathronDude]

Pretty Good Pun

Re:Wax Seal

[Captain Splendid]

The pigeon was best man at his wedding, IIRC.

CIA Cookbook?

[errxn]

Mix 5 drams copper acetol arsenate. 3 ounces acetone and add 1 pint amyl alcohol (fusil-oil). Heat in water bath — steam rising will dissolve the sealing material of its mucilage, wax or oil.... Do not inhale fumes.

This recipe is terrible, and tastes like shit. Conclusion: The CIA's cooking sucks.

Re:CIA Cookbook?

[mangu]

Mix 5 drams copper acetol arsenate. 3 ounces acetone and add 1 pint amyl alcohol (fusil-oil). Heat in water bath â" steam rising will dissolve the sealing material of its mucilage, wax or oil.... Do not inhale fumes.

This recipe is terrible, and tastes like shit.

I knew it tasted bad, but had no idea that this is how shit tastes.

Re:CIA Cookbook?

[errxn]

Actually, you're right. Adding a couple of teaspoons of shit to this makes it taste better.

Re:CIA Cookbook?

[LordStormes]

Serve with the C4 recipe on the next page, and BAM! Kick it up a notch!

Re:CIA Cookbook?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not only that but it won't work on modern envelope glues.

Re:CIA Cookbook?

[errxn]

Ehh, that recipe blows.

Re:CIA Cookbook?

[Anonymous Coward]

And you thought Rachel Ray's ideas were bad...

Culinary secrets?

[Anonymous Coward]

CIA + Cookbook makes me think Culinary Institute of America. I was all ready for culinary secrets...

Re:Culinary secrets?

[muridae]

sodium alginate and calcium chloride
transglutaminase
agar agar
lecithin


Those are the current high tech kitchen secrets. The 100 year old secret is "don't overcook anything".

Re:Culinary secrets?

[toleraen]

The magic ingredient is water. Yes, ordinary water. Laced with nothing more than a few spoonfuls of LSD.

Pfft.

[ackthpt]

Geocaching technology is YEARS ahead of any of this stuff.

Why, I bet you can't even find the camoed ammo can hidden in this post!

Re:Pfft.

[Mitchell314]

Geocaching technology is YEARS ahead of any of this stuff.

Why, I bet you can't even find the camoed ammo can hidden in this post!

Found it. Cleverly masked the 2x4 club as a thread post.

If it's been declassified, it's not useful anymore

[PolygamousRanchKid]

A general rule of spooks . . . we'll tell you how we spied 100 years ago . . . but not how we do it today . . .

I did not know

[lahvak]

that the Culinary Institute of America had classified cookbooks.

Re:I did not know

[Anonymous Coward]

The onion tart recipe is to die for, or at least, I'd have to kill you.

Cookbook?

[Anonymous Coward]

Na, i *do* have a girlfriend.

(Captcha: "serving" ;))

CIA's Cooking

[wiredog]

Is awesome!

Re:CIA's Cooking

[Anonymous Coward]

No kidding. Just ask CIA spy Julia Child: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/08/13/national/main4349520.shtml

Re:CIA's Cooking

[biobogonics]

This CIA (Culinary Institute of America) used to be in New Haven. Maybe this explains why so many Bulldogs became spooks.

Re:If it's been declassified, it's not useful anym

[Nidi62]

A general rule of spooks . . . we'll tell you how we spied 100 years ago . . . but not how we do it today . . .

Except the principles of modern espionage go back hundreds if not thousands of years. Do you think brush-passes or dead drops were modern inventions? How about encryption and codes? While today's technology includes stuff spies could have only dreamed of 100 years ago, the fundamentals and basics are exactly the same.

Re:If it's been declassified, it's not useful anym

[Anonymous Coward]

Or maybe that's just what THEY want you to think.

Re:If it's been declassified, it's not useful anym

[Gnavpot]

A general rule of spooks . . . we'll tell you how we spied 100 years ago . . . but not how we do it today . . .

The joke is not that this is public today - but that it was still considered worth keeping secret yesterday.

Re:If it's been declassified, it's not useful anym

[creat3d]

Case in point: there's not much physical mail to be spied on anymore. If you've got something to whisper half way across the country or globe, chances are there's more secure connections out there than USPS.

Chili?

[j00r0m4nc3r]

Do they have a good chili recipe?

Re:Chili?

[UncHellMatt]

Well they could tell you, but then they'd have to kill you.

Re:Chili?

[PPH]

I think you misspelled Chile. They can bring the gov't to a boil and add a pinch of Pinochet. But it makes a mess in the kitchen.

Re:Chili?

[GodfatherofSoul]

Mix a democracy with a dash of pro-US dissenters
Bring to a boil
Remove president when flavor suited to taste
Add one whole dictator
Simmer for 30 years

Re:Chili?

[Anonymous Coward]

No. But here's a nice one I got in Austin, Texas 15 or 20 years ago (sorry if it sounds a bit wonky in places, I'm retranslating it from German, just for you):

* Vegetable oil
* 1 medium onion, chopped
* 1 can (300 g) peeled tomatoes
* 1 can (150 g) tomato paste (double concentrated if you can get it)
* 500 g lean beef
* 1 chile pepper, chopped (cayenne or other)
* 1 beef bouillon cube
* 2 tbsp cumin
* 1/2 tbsp marjoram
* 1 tbsp oregano
* 2 cloves of garlic, finely chopped
* 2 tsp ground chile pepper (e.g. cayenne)
* 2 tbsp Mexican chile seasoning
* a bit of nutmeg
* water
* 1 tbsp corn flour
* 1/4 cup water
* hard cheese, grated, to taste
* onions, chopped, to taste

Heat oil in a pan and cook onion. Put into a large pot, add tomatoes and tomato paste, simmer for a while. Cut beef into 1 cm pieces; add beef, chile pepper, bouillon cube and spices. Add water until the ingredients are covered by about 0.5 cm. Slowly cook until the meat is tender (1-1.5 hours). Mix water and corn flour in a cup, slowly stir the resulting paste into the chili. Let cook for another 15 minutes. Sprinkle with cheese and onions, to taste.

Re:Chili?

[HornWumpus]

Lose the oil and start with some bacon instead.

Use 1/2 or more venison if available.

Marjoram, Oregano and nutmeg? Out.

Lose water, add beer.

You need many more chili peppers. One? Beef stew.

Add a chunk (or more) of baking chocolate when done cooking.

It is debatable, I like some beans in my chili. Black beans

Re:Chili?

[Anonymous Coward]

You need many more chili peppers. One? Beef stew.

Hey, some like it hot, some don't. ;)

Re:Chili?

[HornWumpus]

Chili pepper is a broad category that includes many mild peppers.

Now this is a major disappointment

[phrackwulf]

I thought we were finally going to get the cookbook the blind folks who work at the CIA snack stand in Langley use. Total gyp.

i tastes like shit to you?

[circletimessquare]

it tastes like diesel to me

what kind of shit have you eaten that has an acetone bouquet and an arsenate metallic tang on the tongue?

although that yak shit i ate once near the supply depot did have a weird gasoline type perfume

Re:i tastes like shit to you?

[517714]

I believe an anorexic chip fabricator would deliver the requested flavor combination.

To serve U.S. ?

[Thud457]

The Kanamits are not amused.

Nothing new

[Anonymous Coward]

So the CIA has been illegally intercepting your communications for over one hundred years. And you thought that illegal wire taps were something new.

LOL at our stupid government

[argStyopa]

All of them are re: the recipe for the GERMANSâ(TM) invisible ink in WWI (samples, methods for detecting, etc.). What ârecent advancement in techâ(TM) suddenly made this no longer secret?

Notice that theyâ(TM)re stamped âoeExempt from automatic declassificationâ in 1978. In 1999, the agency rejected a Freedom of Information Act request to release the six documents, asserting that doing so âoecould be expected to damage the national security.â Really?

I recognize as well as anyone the need for secret documents staying secret, but someone needs to be bitch-slapped for keeping âoelemon juice/vinegar secret inkâ recipe almost perpetually secret (yes, one of them the primary ingredient is acetic acid). Thatâ(TM)s just silly.

Re:LOL at our stupid government

[Antisyzygy]

Your typing is all weird.

Re:LOL at our stupid government

[Anonymous Coward]

What causes this kind of thing? Are people copying and pasting from a brain-dead Microsoft word processor that uses curly quotes or something?

Re:LOL at our stupid government

[JWSmythe]

Lets see...

apostrophe â(TM) '
dash â', â", â", â
ellipsis â¦, ...
guillemets  Â
quotation marks ( â â(TM), âoe â )
slash/stroke ( / )

And of course, I have to add enough text here to avoid the lameness filter, which said "Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted!
Filter error: Please use fewer 'junk' characters. " So if I were to write a few lines about the wonders of how Slashdot does not yet support UTF-8 (still), except on slashdot.jp, it should let me post this without problems. Of course, it will take a lot of text to that.

In the famous words of my high school french teacher, "repetez s'il vous plait" (without all the "special" characters)

And of course, I have to add enough text here to avoid the lameness filter, which said "Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted!
Filter error: Please use fewer 'junk' characters. " So if I were to write a few lines about the wonders of how Slashdot does not yet support UTF-8 (still), except on slashdot.jp, it should let me post this without problems. Of course, it will take a lot of text to that.

cia and cookbook? think poughkeepsie:

[circletimessquare]

http://www.ciachef.edu/admissions/newyork/

Shouldn't have declassified that

[Arancaytar]

It works on RSA too.

jCola

[spaceyhackerlady]

You don't make bombs with breast milk. Everybody knows it's the secret sweetener of jCola!

...laura

Re:jCola

[RockDoctor]

You don't make bombs with breast milk.

... you make ice cream.

It must be true ; I saw it on Slashdot a couple of months ago.

copper acetol arsenate?

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh. I think I'll be staying away from that, thanks. Honestly, sounds like a troll recipe to kill people who try to open letters repeatedly (steam, people, works sufficiently undetectably for almost anything). At least you'll die with beautiful glossy hair I guess.

Paging Michael Weston...

[mariox19]

Oh, come on! I'm a regular viewer of Burn Notice. What's the CIA going to tell me that I don't already know?

Re:Paging Michael Weston...

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course you're not serious.... right?

you gotta be fucken kidding me

[Anonymous Coward]

Mix 5 drams copper acetol arsenate. 3 ounces acetone and add 1 pint amyl alcohol (fusil-oil). Heat in water bath — steam rising will dissolve the sealing material of its mucilage, wax or oil.... Do not inhale fumes

Half the people with Ph.D. in chemistry will have problems doing this properly.
You're going to let some highschool dropout juicehead attempt to perform this?

Internet Recipe Comment

[Anonymous Coward]

This was a great recipe!

Instead of amyl alcohol I used whole wheat flour. I substituted eggs for the acetone, added a cup of butter, and used sugar instead of acetol arsenate. Then I added a 3/4 cup chocolate chips.

So delicious! 5 STARS!

Dammit I thought it was regular steam

[Anonymous Coward]

Well at least my clothes won't be wrinkled from that trip.

No, the real joke is

[Chicken_Kickers]

No, the real joke is on you. Why? Because the CIA and all other government and private (RIAA) acronyms can do today in plain sight and most importantly, legally what they had to do behind your back 50 years ago.

The English are notorious wankers.

[HornWumpus]

Give them credit for turning lemons into lemonade.

At least they weren't 'colonized by wankers'.

Re:The English are notorious wankers.

[Vorghagen]

What about us Australians? Colonised by the people that weren't good enough for the 'Notorious wankers'

Make a better use of the search function

[feranick]

http://www.foia.cia.gov/search.asp

yes you can make a contact explosive

[Anonymous Coward]

when the water dries out of the crystal, it becomes unstable and will pop with a loud noise and a tuft of purple iodine vapor. It isn't going to get hot or make much of a pressure wave. I made the stuff in a chem lab. It's neat. It is a contact explosive, but it isn't powerful enough to do any real damage. yes I am a chemist and some of the things I read in the good old cookbooks actually worked.

I wonder?

[slick7]

Does it say anything about selling drugs to the Crips and Bloods to finance their black ops projects?