Check Out the CIA’s Demonic, Face-Melting Osama bin Laden Toy for South Asian Kids

There’s no way to go about this other than to lay out all the
weirdness at once: In the mid-’00s, the
CIA developed an Osama bin Laden toy with a face designed to
melt off and reveal a demon once in the hands of Pakistani and
Afghan children. The code name for the operation was “Devil
Eyes.” 

Around 2005, former Hasbro toymaker Donald Levine—known for

his work on G.I. Joe figurines—was asked to develop the toy for
the CIA, according to The Washington Post. Levin’s winning
design? A bin Laden figure painted with a special material so that
the normal face would peel away in heat, revealing a red and black
demon-eyed face. (See
the transformation here.) 

“The goal of the short-lived project was simple,” the
Post says: spook children and their parents into turning
away from bin Laden.

There’s a dispute over how many of the figurines, if any, were
ultimately delivered. A person with direct knowledge of the project
in China said hundreds of the toys—one of which was seen by The
Washington Post—were made as part of a preproduction run and
sent on a freighter to the Pakistani city of Karachi in 2006.

The CIA, while not disputing that it had commissioned the bin
Laden figures, said the project was discontinued shortly after the
prototypes were developed.

“To our knowledge, there were only three individual action
figures ever created, and these were merely to show what a final
product might look like,” CIA spokesman Ryan Trapani said. “After
being presented with these examples, the CIA declined to pursue
this idea and did not produce or distribute any of these action
figures. Furthermore, CIA has no knowledge of these action figures
being produced or distributed by others.”

Regardless of how far the “Devil Eyes” project proceeded, it
appears to have borne all the hallmarks of what are known in
intelligence parlance as “influence operations.” As part of its
covert action programs, the agency has for decades tried to win the
hearts and minds of local populations or turn them against a
particular ideology.

Another recent CIA influence op was revealed in April:
developing
a Twitter-like social network in Cuba that was secretly run and
monitored by the U.S. government. (The CIA itself
joined real Twitter earlier this month.) Meanwhile, the

FBI is trying to fool us all into thinking anybody actually
uses the acronym BTDTGTTAWIO— “been there, done that, got the
T-shirt and wore it out.”