The Moscow Signals Declassified:
​​​​​​​Irradiating Richard Nixon

Washington D.C. September 22, 2022 - The Soviets exposed then Vice President Richard Nixon and his wife, Pat, to ionizing radiation during his famous visit to Moscow in July 1959, according to declassified Secret Service records posted today by the National Security Archive. Using detection devices known as Radiac Dosimeters, Nixon’s Secret Service detail measured significant levels of radiation in and around Nixon’s sleeping quarters at Spaso House, the residence of the U.S. Ambassador, during the first days of his trip. A few hours after the agents initiated what one called “a bluff” by loudly and coarsely denouncing the Soviets’ dirty tricks, the radiation levels “settled down.”

According to the key Secret Service report on the incident, the U.S. Ambassador to Moscow, Llewellyn Thompson, and a senior member of Nixon’s entourage, Vice Admiral Hyman Rickover, decided “not to make this information known to the Vice President.”

The Secret Service records were obtained by Archive Senior Analyst William Burr from a request to the Nixon Presidential Library in California. According to Burr, “this unusual and virtually unknown Cold War episode deserves more attention so the mysteries surrounding it can be resolved.”

The story of the Spaso House radiation incident remained secret for 17 years until the scandal over the Moscow Signal broke in the media in February 1976. A member of Nixon’s Secret Service team, James Golden, believed the 1959 episode was immediately relevant to the State Department’s investigation into the health effects of the microwave beams directed at the Embassy building. On April 28, 1976, he shared the secret history about the discovery of radiation at Spaso House with a State Department Soviet Desk official and medical officers. According to Golden, he was later told that he had been exposed to “massive dosages” of ionizing radiation emanating from an atomic battery that Soviet intelligence “used to power radio transmitters used for bugging purposes.”

Just two days after the State Department meeting, the Nixon story broke in an obscure and unlikely media outlet called Black & White—the student newspaper at Walt Whitman High School in Bethesda, MD. The article, “Russian Radiation Thought ‘Diabolical,’ was written by two enterprising teenage journalists, Michael Gill and Richard Berke, based on an interview with an unnamed U.S. government source. That source, as Gill has subsequently confirmed to the National Security Archive, was former Secret Service agent James Golden—a family friend.[1]

The Black & White scoop provided the first published description of the dosimeter readings in Nixon’s quarters at Spaso House and the “ruse” that Secret Service agents then used to get the Soviets to turn off the radiation. The Washington Post quickly picked up the story, confirming the incident with Golden and a second Secret Service agent, John T. Sherwood.

But the radiation story remained undocumented for years until records were declassified as part of the vice presidential papers at the Nixon Presidential Library. Journalist Peter Carlson reviewed the files for his book on Nikita Khrushchev’s 1959 visit to the United States, while historian Irwin Gellman cited them in his book on Nixon’s vice presidency.

The National Security Archive’s posting today of the Secret Service records marks the first time this declassified information has been made publicly accessible on the Internet.

Today’s posting is part III of the Archive’s three-part series: “The Moscow Signals Declassified.” Part I, “Microwave Mysteries: Projects PANDORA and BIZARRE,” was posted on September 13; Part II, “Microwave Diplomacy, 1967-1977,” was posted on September 15. The Archive will post a larger special collection of supplementary documentation on the full history of the Moscow Signal in the near future.

Spaso House, the residence of U.S. Ambassadors in Moscow since diplomatic relations with the former Soviet Union were established in 1933. (Source: Wikipedia)

Irradiating Richard Nixon:
An Overview of A Little Known Cold War Episode

On July 23, 1959, during Vice President Richard Nixon’s visit to Moscow, U.S. Secret Service agents discovered that the Soviets were beaming radiation at the vice president’s living quarters in Spaso House, the U.S. ambassador’s residence. Assuming that the rooms were bugged, the next morning the agents started “berating the Russians in loud voices” and “cursing them for pulling a trick like this,” hoping that this “bluff” might get the Soviets to turn the radiation off. By the afternoon, the radiation was gone. U.S. Secret Service and State Department documents published today for the first time by the National Security Archive provide details about the radiation incident, which Nixon did not know about at the time.

The Secret Service agents who protected Nixon were prepared for the possibility that the vice president could face exposure to radiation. On July 23, dosimeters brought to detect and measure ionizing radiation provided readings of up to 15 roentgen per hour during an inspection of Nixon’s quarters at Spaso House.[2] While far from lethal exposure—that would take a dose of well over 400-500 roentgen administered in a short time (“prompt radiation”)—15 roentgen was still ”alarmingly high,” according to J. Samuel Walker, the former historian of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission,[3] far above the permissible dose—the level of exposure unlikely to cause harm. During the 1930s and early 1940s, the permissible dose for occupational exposure was one-tenth of a roentgen per day; by the late 1950s, it was much lower, one-tenth of a roentgen per week (or 5 roentgen per year).

Vice President Nixon's Secret Service team used Radiac pocket dosimeters something like these to detect radiation at Spaso House where Nixon and his wife Pat were staying in July 1959. (Source: National Library of Medicine)

 

How and why the rooms in Spaso House were exposed to ionizing radiation remains a mystery. Decades later, a State Department medical consultant opined that the radiation emanated from an atomic battery “used to power radio transmitters used for bugging purposes.” James Golden, the Secret Service agent who first detected the radiation, thought otherwise and suggested that the Soviets had some unspecified “diabolical” purpose. More than 60 years later, it also remains unclear whether Soviet intelligence deployed the ionizing radiation in Spaso House prior to (or following) Nixon’s visit, as part of a surveillance operation against the U.S. Ambassador, or whether the radiation was specific to the vice president’s presence in Moscow. An advance team of Secret Service agents found no radiation at Spaso House in the several weeks prior to the Vice President's arrival.

As the U.S. ambassador’s residence, Spaso House was the location of a previous and famous Soviet eavesdropping operation. In 1952, U.S. technicians discovered a small, sophisticated listening device hidden in a wooden carving of the “Great Seal” of the U.S.—a gift from Soviet girl scouts to the wartime and post-World War II U.S. Ambassador, Averell Harriman, in 1946. The device went undetected for six years because its power source was generated by radio frequency waves beamed at Spaso House from a van parked across the street.

Officially, Nixon was in Moscow for a ceremonial purpose—to open the American National Exhibition, where the U.S. displayed consumer goods, high-speed computers, elaborate demonstrations of household kitchens, and cultural products, including the work of artists and architects Edward Hopper, Jackson Pollack, Isamu Noguchi, and Buckminster Fuller. The Russian-speaking U.S. tour guides were all young and included five African Americans to demonstrate racial progress.

But the Vice President had far more important non-official purposes for making the trip. To advance his presidential prospects, Nixon wanted to engage and debate Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev; as he told Eisenhower, the trip to Moscow would provide an “excellent chance to probe and cause some blurting out of Khrushchev’s real feelings.” Nixon achieved his political objective. In one of the most famous moments of his career, he held the now legendary “kitchen debate” with Khrushchev, where each engaged in ideological jousting over the advantages of their respective political and economic systems. By publicly taking on the top Soviet leader, Nixon demonstrated once more his Cold Warrior credentials and generated some positive publicity for his 1960 presidential campaign.

The Nixon entourage included several Russian speakers, including State Department officials Alexander Akalovsky and Vladimir Toumanoff, as well as Raymond L. Garthoff, a young CIA Soviet expert working under Defense Department cover.[4] Nixon also brought the chief of the U.S. Navy’s nuclear propulsion program, Vice Admiral Hyman Rickover, with him to justify a visit to the nuclear-powered icebreaker Lenin. To provide day-to-day security, several Secret Service special agents were in Nixon’s party, including John T. Sherwood, Jack Golden, Donald Hughes, and Wade J. Rodham. Nixon’s party also included several military aides and his long-serving and later famous secretary Rose Mary Woods.

When the National Security Archive requested documents from the Secret Service on the Nixon incident, the latter excised the documents from 1959 and 1978 that we are publishing today. On appeal, the Secret Service released more information but still withheld the names of Secret Service agents and other government officials. Fortunately, the same documents, along with others, are in the Nixon vice presidential papers at the Nixon Presidential Library. Through dialogue with the Secret Service, the Nixon Library archives made sure that the documents could be shared without excisions. It is worth noting that when the Secret Service processed the Archive’s original request it found information produced by another government agency. The unidentified agency is most likely the CIA, which has yet to declassify any documents relating to the irradiation incident. Access to these still-hidden records may someday further illuminate this unusual Cold War episode.

Note: Thanks to Melissa Heddon and Meghan Kay-Parker, Richard M. Nixon Presidential Library, for their invaluable assistance.