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CIA Explosive Training
Bomb School: Excerpt from an article in INDY WEEK, June 5, 2002, about Harvey Point, the training facility in North Carolina used for CIA explosive training.
http://www.indyweek.com/gyrobase/Content?oid=oid%3A17746
Despite the CIA's best efforts to keep its role at Harvey Point under wraps, there is a mounting body of public information about the base's secret history. The latest example: In his newly published memoir, See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA's War on Terrorism, former CIA officer Bob Baer describes the "two weeks of nonstop demolition training" he received in North Carolina as a young recruit in the early 1970s:
"We spent two days crimping blasting caps to make sure we understood that if you crimped them too high, they'd explode and take your hand off. After we'd mastered that, we crimped them in the dark, by feel. Then we started blowing things up: cars, buses, diesel generators, fences, bunkers. We made a school bus disappear with about 20 pounds of U.S. C-4. For comparison's sake, we tried Czech Semtex and a few other foreign plastic explosives.
"Not that you really needed anything fancy. We blew up one bus using three sacks of fertilizer and fuel oil, a mixture called ANFO (ammonium nitrate fuel oil), that did more damage than the C-4 had. The biggest piece left was a part of the chassis, which flew in an arc, hundreds of yards away. We learned to mix up a potent cocktail called methyl nitrate. If you hit a small drop of it with a hammer, it split the hammer. Honest. We were also taught some of the really esoteric stuff like E-cell times, improvising pressurized airplane bombs using a condom and aluminum foil, and smuggling a pistol on an airplane concealed in a mixture of epoxy and graphite. By the end of the training, we could have taught an advanced terrorism course."
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For its first decade or so of operations, the base managed to maintain the covert character the CIA was looking for. But slowly, parts of the real story began to filter out. (See "The Truth About Harvey Point," p. 22.) A major, but still only partial, disclosure appeared in the April 1967 edition of Ramparts, a once popular and now defunct leftist magazine. The issue carried a testimonial from a CIA officer who had recently resigned after passing through the agency's demolitions course.
The former officer, who kept his name out of print, did not specify the location of his training. But now it's clear that the place he wrote about, the place where he ultimately soured on the CIA, was Harvey Point:
"The stated purpose of the paramilitary school was to train and equip us to become instructors for village peasants who wanted to defend themselves against guerrillas. I could believe in that.
"Some of the training was conventional: But then we moved to the CIA's demolition training headquarters. It was here that Cubans had been, and still were, being trained in conventional and underwater demolitions. And it was here that we received training in tactics which hardly conform to the Geneva Convention.
"The array of outlawed weaponry with which we were familiarized included bullets that explode on impact, silencer-equipped machine guns, home-made explosives and self-made napalm for stickier and hotter Molotov cocktails. We were taught demolition techniques, practicing on late-model cars, railroad trucks, and gas storage tanks. And we were shown a quick method for saturating a confined area with flour or fertilizer, causing an explosion like in a dustbin or granary.
"And then there was a diabolical invention that might be called a mini-cannon. It was constructed of a concave piece of steel fitted into the top of a #10 can filled with a plastic explosive. When the device was detonated, the tremendous heat of friction of the steel turning inside out made the steel piece a white-hot projectile. There were a number of uses for the mini-cannon, one of which was demonstrated to us using an old Army school bus. It was fastened to the gasoline tank in such a fashion that the incendiary projectile would rupture the tank and fling flaming gasoline the length of the bus interior, incinerating anyone inside. It was my lot to show the rest of the class how easily it could be done. I stood there watching the flames consume the bus. It was, I guess, the moment of truth. What did a busload of burning people have to do with freedom? What right did I have, in the name of democracy and the CIA, to decide that random victims should die? The intellectual game was over. I had to leave."
