Al Cantello’s unlikely journey into the secret world of spies began in late 1959, when he received a phone call from a mysterious individual asking him to meet at the Willard Hotel in Washington, D.C. For reasons the Olympic javelin thrower couldn’t quite articulate later, he agreed to the clandestine conference. When Cantello arrived, he found a darkened room with so many shadows that he felt like he’d wandered onto the set of a B movie. The unnamed man Cantello met with spoke with an accent the athlete couldn’t place, but he was certain the stranger wasn’t a native English speaker.
“He said to me, ‘Would you like a drink?’” Cantello recalled in a 2017 interview with historian Austin Duckworth, who was researching espionage at the 1960 Summer Olympics in Rome at the time. “I said, ‘Sure, I’ll take a drink.’”
But as Cantello, then a lieutenant in the Marine Corps, sipped the drink, he started to suspect it contained something other than alcohol. “Suddenly, I thought I got a little loose-lipped,” he told Duckworth. “I’m sure there was a truth serum in the drink.”
An effective truth serum has never been scientifically proved, but that hasn’t stopped various intelligence and law enforcement agencies from slipping subjects a cocktail’s worth of different substances in an attempt to increase their truthfulness. Whether Cantello was one of these subjects or simply felt the effects of the alcohol on its own, he started talking.
In June 1959, the 27-year-old had broken the world javelin record with an epic throw of 282 feet, 3.5 inches. Short for an elite athlete at just under 5-foot-8, Cantello was scrappy, and he made up for his slight stature with an unorthodox throwing style: For extra momentum, he’d fling his full body into the throw, falling to the ground during his follow-through. At the time of the hotel room meeting, Cantello had his eyes set on Rome, which was set to host the Olympics the following year. The 1960 Games would be the first fully televised Summer Olympics in North America, introducing the world to 18-year-old Cassius Clay, later known as Muhammad Ali, along with many other highlights.
But the man Cantello met with wasn’t interested in the Games themselves. Instead, he wanted to know about the javelin thrower’s interactions with an elite Soviet long jumper named Igor Ter-Ovanesyan. Earlier that year, in July, Cantello had participated in a head-to-head meet in Philadelphia between the United States and Soviet track and field teams. The athletes had several chances to interact informally between competitions.