I’m referring to this article I found declassified on the CIA’s website. It’s a short read, but the gist is that the US Secret Service claims that the Soviets tried to kill Vice President Nixon with radiation while he was at the American embassy in Moscow in 1959.
Now I know crazy shit happened during the Cold War’s height, but even for the Russians this is a bit much. If this actually happened, what on earth were they hoping to gain from this? The political destabilization of an enemy super power that massively outgunned it in terms of nuclear warheads? If the VP dropped dead of rad poisoning while in Moscow, or right after he returned, it’d be pretty hard to just brush that off.
I’m hoping someone can provide insight on this.
So the article is just from the Washington Post — the fact that the CIA had a copy of it should not be taken as an endorsement of its claims by the CIA. The CIA obviously kept copies of many news stories. Don't use the fact that it's in the CIA's online archive as a sign of anything other than the fact that the CIA made copies of articles from newspapers that had anything to do with its intelligence mandate.
As for the actual story — the story doesn't make a whole lot of sense as reported in various newspapers at the time. The Secret Service officers report using dosimeters, but many of the accounts report it was microwave radiation, which is non-ionizing and would not show up on a standard dosimeter. Microwave radiation is not the same thing that we associate with "nuclear radiation"; it doesn't (so far as we can tell) cause cancer or the other effects we associate with (ionizing) nuclear radiation. It does vibrate molecules, which is why you can use it to heat things in your kitchen.
There are accounts of the Soviets using microwave radiation on various US diplomats and visiting guests, either purportedly to make them ill (the exact biological mechanism of this is not entirely clear, if it is a real thing) or as some form of electronic spying (again, I'm unsure how they might be used for that, but this was one of the rumors). (There are similarly hard-to-confirm stories about the use of infrasound by the Cubans, for example, reported to make people ill.) It's not impossible they were doing something like this as a form of harassment, or as an attempt to somehow gain some little advantage over Nixon.
The newspaper accounts of this are garbled in various ways that make it hard to know what, if anything, happened. This is, of course, potentially the point of it all: unproven and mysterious innuendo can be as useful as, or even more useful than, actually doing anything. In such uncertainties, of course, considerable fear and even psychosomatic effects can arise (there are lots of things that can give people headaches, make them feel ill, etc., that can be erroneously attributed to the strange and unknown, as we see from people who spuriously attribute all sorts of effects today to wearing masks, 5G towers, and so on).
But I don't think one should interpret this as an attempt to kill anyone. Whatever they were doing, if they did anything, was mild enough that you couldn't detect it without specialized equipment.