Nixon was exposed to potentially harmful ionizing radiation while staying at the US ambassador’s residence in Moscow during the first days of his trip, according to intelligence documents obtained by the National Security Archive at George Washington University. He was vice president at the time. The threat was not disclosed to the vice president after a decision was made by the then US envoy to Moscow, Llewellyn Thompson, and a senior member of Nixon’s entourage, Vice Admiral Hyman Rickover. The State Department was made aware of the incident 17 years later, in 1976, when a member of Nixon’s secret service team, James Golden, revealed that detection equipment, known as radiation dosimeters, had “measured significant levels of radiation” in and around the vice president’s sleeping quarters. at Spaso House. Golden claimed he was later informed that he had been exposed to “massive doses” of ionizing radiation that came from an atomic battery used by Soviet intelligence to power detection devices such as radio transmitters. Analyst William Burr, who submitted the request to the Nixon Presidential Library to obtain the records, said: “This unusual and almost unknown Cold War episode deserves more attention so that the mysteries surrounding it can be resolved.” Spaso House was reportedly the site of an earlier Soviet eavesdropping operation. American technicians in 1952 discovered a small, sophisticated listening device hidden in a wooden carving of the US “Great Seal”, which was a gift from Soviet Girl Scouts to post-World War II US Ambassador Averell Harriman in 1946. The device remained secret for six years because its power source was produced by radio frequency waves beamed into Spaso House from a “van parked across the street”. Prior to his visit to Soviet Moscow, Nixon was asked by a member of his Secret Service if he wanted radiation detectors taken on the trip. The vice president agreed to more discreet dosimeters, while refusing to wear one himself to keep the discussion secret. On July 23, 1959, dosimeters brought in to detect radiation levels provided readings of up to 15 x-rays per hour during an inspection of Nixon’s apartment. While the levels were far from lethal exposure, the allowable standard for occupational exposure in the US was 5 x-rays per year. Assuming that the rooms had been breached after discovering the levels of radioactivity, the secret service agents, the next morning, began “hassling the Russians with loud voices” and “swearing at them for pulling such a trick”. “We sat on the beds facing each other and began to applaud the Russians in loud voices, cursing them for doing such a trick, and wondering aloud why they were taking us for fools, and asking each other if they thought they could do it. away from doing that,” Golden said. The radiation stopped in the afternoon.
