Mitch WerBell

Mitchell Livingston WerBell III (1918–1983) was an OSS operative, mercenary, paramilitary trainer, firearms engineer, and arms dealer.

WerBell was born in Philadelphia, the son of a Czarist cavalry officer in the Imperial Army of Russia. In 1942 WerBell joined the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and served in China, Burma, and French Indochina. As a guerrilla operative during World War II, he carried out a secret mission for the OSS under the command of Paul Helliwell in China with E. Howard Hunt, Lucien Conein, John K. Singlaub and Ray Cline. They were paid with five-pound sacks of opium. Following World War II, WerBell briefly worked as the director of advertising and public relations for Rich's, a department store in Atlanta, Georgia; he left after a year to open his own PR firm.

After WerBell closed his PR Firm to design suppressors (commonly known as "silencers", a term which is a misnomer) for firearms, he incorporated SIONICS to design suppressors for the M16 rifle. The name was an acronym for "Studies In the Operational Negation of Insurgents and Counter-Subversion". Through SIONICS he developed a low cost, efficient suppressor for machine guns.

In 1967 he partnered with Gordon B. Ingram inventor of the MAC-10 submachine gun. They added WerBell's suppressor to Ingram's machinegun and attempted to market it to the U.S. military as "Whispering Death" for use in the Vietnam War. WerBell is credited with over 25 different suppressor designs and the "WerBell Relief Valve", a mechanism designed for machinegun suppressors. WerBell's modular designs and use of exotic materials such as titanium in sound suppressors influence their design to the present day.

SIONICS was absorbed by the company MAC (Military Armament Corporation) and later called Cobray where WerBell developed a training center for counterterrorism in the 1970s. The courses lasted 11 weeks and students included members of the military, high-risk executives, CIA agents, and private individuals. WerBell concurrently ran Defense Systems International, an arms brokerage firm.

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