The Poisoned Handkerchief Plot: A Cold War Oddity

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
During the days of the Cold War, few schemes rivaled
the bizarre elegance of the CIA's poisoned handkerchief plot. In
the early nineteen sixties, Washington grew increasingly uneasy with Iraqi
Prime Minister Abdul Kareem Kassim, whose left leaning policies and
growing ties with a Soviet Union threatened American influence. Determined

(00:23):
to eliminate him, the CIA turned to science and subtlety.
The plan he classify in nineteen seventy seven during Senate
hearings on covert operations, was chilling in its simplicity. A
monogramed handkerchief, outwardly refined and gentlemanly, was laced with one
of the deadliest substances known to science, bachulim toxin, producing

(00:44):
a covert us lab. The toxin could cause paralysis and
death with only microscopic exposure. Unlike a bullet or a bomb,
the handkerchief promised a genteel but lethal touch. In nineteen
sixty the handkerchief was reportedly sent to bag death or
a day diplomatic pouch and delivery method immune to inspection
as deadly payload was intended to act to contact killing

(01:07):
Cassim if he so much has dabbed his brow. Yet
the operation collapsed in an anti climactic fashion. Cassim never
used the handkerchief, or the toxin degraded before it could
even work. Either way, that dictator lived on, internal lived
on until nineteen sixty three, when a coup by nationalists
officers ended his rule by the more traditional set use

(01:30):
of violence. What remains, though striking, is the plot's surreal
fusion of refinement and ruthlessness. In an era when superpowers
raced to build nuclear arsenals and top of governments, the
CIA imagined that a silken square of cloth could quietly
alter the course of Middle Eastern politics and history. The
poison Handkerchief, though both absurd and deadly, epitomizes the strange

(01:52):
creativity of covert warfare, where charm and civility could mask
lethal intent.