The US National Security Archive in 2022 released formerly secret documents on the “Moscow Signals” – a decades-long chapter of the Cold War in which Soviet intelligence flooded the US Embassy in Moscow daily with microwave transmissions, and in the late 1950s with ionizing radiation broke into the US ambassador’s residence.
The Americans immediately began a series of experiments to demonstrate which radiation technologies could achieve such effects.
Project BIZARRE was the codename for a program of experiments on monkeys to determine whether the Moscow signal was intended to impair the ability of U.S. personnel to work in the embassy. Project BIZARRE was a top-secret component of Project PANDORA, a broader research effort by the Department of Defense’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) that included the analysis of blood samples from U.S. personnel stationed in Moscow and the examination of medical records from crew members of the aircraft carrier USS Saratoga to determine whether exposure to onboard radiation-emitting technology causes physiological effects.
“The Soviets have reported in the public literature that humans exposed to low-level (non-thermal) modulated microwave radiation experience adverse clinical and physiological effects,”
ARPA official Richard Cesaro reported in a September 1967 TOP SECRET update on Project BIZARRE. The White House had ordered a program of “intensive investigative research” “codenamed Project ‘TUMS’” (Technical Unidentified Moscow Signal).
Despite four years of effort, the multi-million dollar PANDORA BIZARRE projects failed to prove the early hypothesis that the Russians used the microwave beams to impair the mental and physical abilities of U.S. embassy officials to carry out their diplomatic and intelligence duties.
Another theory put forward by U.S. intelligence is that the signal served as a jamming device to disrupt U.S. espionage operations conducted from a monitoring station on the roof of the embassy building. A third and prevailing theory is that Soviet intelligence services used the Moscow signal to activate, power and/or interpret listening devices in the walls of the embassy building.
In April 1964, numerous such listening devices were discovered hidden in the walls of at least eleven embassy offices – including the office of the US defense attaché.
A technician with the State Department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security, Maclyn Musser, identified it as microwave radiation and reported in 1963 that the beam was 50 feet wide.
There was also planning for experiments on humans: declassified summaries of meetings of the PANDORA Program’s Scientific Advisory Committee document preparations that go beyond experiments on primates and use unsuspecting human subjects who would be unaware of the nature of the radiation tests. Subjects for human radiation exposure tests would be exposed to radiation from Fort Detrick over a six-month period, according to discussion at a meeting in April 1969.
Detrick had been involved in MKULTRA and similar projects for a long time. The Soviets had conducted similar research early on.
U.S. officials also made attempts to persuade the Soviet leadership to turn off the signal. In mid-1975, U.S. intelligence agencies discovered additional and stronger signals directed at the embassy. Hundreds of diplomats, security and intelligence officials and their families living in the residential area of the consulate building were unknowingly exposed to radiation for up to 19 hours a day.
But the NSA and CIA’s intelligence operations and assessments of the Moscow signal remained TOP SECRET.
“Information about non-biological tests that followed the discovery of the Moscow signal is still classified,”
noted Professor Steneck in his book “The Microwave Debate,” which, when published in 1984, included several detailed chapters on microwave radiation and the U.S. government’s response. After nearly four decades, almost no intelligence agency records of the Moscow signal have been released.
Some of the PANDORA documents were eventually published on a Pentagon website and later used by former Foreign Policy editor-in-chief Sharon Weinberger in her book Imagineers of War: The Untold Story of DARPA, the Pentagon Agency That Changed the World.
In December 1975, the two countries became embroiled in controversy after the intensity of the microwaves had increased. In a telephone conversation with Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger asked about the “beam you are beaming into our embassy in Moscow.” Kissinger said the Ford administration would “feel hell if we said something was happening,” noting that “too many people already know about the microwaves.”
Kissinger wanted strict secrecy and was reluctant to inform embassy staff. According to a February 1976 statement, the microwave radiation posed a “major foreign policy problem” and there should be no leaks about the briefing because the Soviets would view the revelations as a “means of embarrassing them.”
A long-secret but important episode in the history of the Moscow Signal concerns negotiations between US Deputy National Security Advisor William Hyland and Soviet diplomat Yulia Vorontsov that took place in early 1976. Hyland offered the Soviets a trade – if the Soviets turned off the microwaves (including those emanating from their facilities in Washington), the US would demolish their electronic intelligence shack on the roof of the Chancellery.
The negotiations between Hyland and Vorontsov failed.
While much of the Moscow Signal’s diplomatic history was disclosed in the 1960s and 1970s, key documents remain unavailable and many have been destroyed.
According to declassified Secret Service records, the Soviets exposed then-Vice President Richard Nixon and his wife Pat to ionizing radiation during his famous visit to Moscow in July 1959.
The Nixon story spread through an obscure media outlet called Black & White – the student newspaper of Walt Whitman High School in Bethesda, Maryland. 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 US government source. That source, Gill later confirmed to the National Security Archive, was former Secret Service agent James Golden – a family friend.
The Washington Post quickly picked up the story and confirmed the incident involving Golden and a second Secret Service agent, John T. Sherwood.
