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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.
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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.
“You know what they wanted? They wanted Playboy magazine and to meet chicks,” Cantello recalled. “And I’m saying to myself, ‘These guys are just like us.’” He particularly hit it off with Ter-Ovanesyan.
“[He was] tall, handsome, great personality,” Cantello said. Ter-Ovanesyan expressed a deep interest in the U.S. and even in potentially defecting from the Soviet Union. Cantello said he would talk to someone about that possibility.
The athletes’ exchanges seemingly prompted the subsequent meeting between Cantello and the mysterious man with the accent at the Willard Hotel. In the 2017 interview, a recording of which was obtained for this story, Cantello said he didn’t know the man’s name and was uncertain which intelligence agency he represented—or, for that matter, if he was working for the U.S. or the Soviet Union. But it’s likely the man in the hotel was there on behalf of the CIA. While declassified CIA documents don’t explicitly reference the Cantello hotel meeting, they make it clear that the agency was watching the meet in Philadelphia and was deeply interested in recruiting Soviet athletes, particularly those of Ukrainian origin, who might defect.
The man in the hotel room wanted to know whether Cantello thought Ter-Ovanesyan was seriously considering abandoning the Soviet Union or if his comments were just the idle talk of a young man. Faced with this line of questioning, Cantello demurred. “I think it was just exploring,” he said. “I don’t think he made any serious moves to defect.”
That was the end of the conversation in the hotel room—but the CIA wasn’t yet done with Cantello, Ter-Ovanesyan or the Olympics overall.
Trickery is baked into the Olympics’ creation myth. The first Olympic Games, the story goes, were inspired by a chariot race between a hero named Pelops and the father of his betrothed, a king named Oenomaus. A prophecy had warned Oenomaus that he would be killed by his son-in-law, so, in classic self-fulfilling prophecy style, the king challenged his daughter’s suitors to defeat him in a chariot race or die by his hand. To avoid meeting the same fate as the 18 would-be husbands who’d preceded him, Pelops sabotaged Oenomaus’ chariot in secret before the race. Shortly after the race started, the chariot’s wheels fell off, and the king’s horses dragged him to death.
From this moment of violence, according to tradition, the ancient Olympics were born.
Relaunched in Athens in 1896, the modern Olympics have generally been less bloody but similarly full of intrigue.
“The Olympics offer a really terrific venue for espionage,” says Barbara Keys, a historian at Durham University in England who studies international affairs and global sports. “You get lots of high-level people, high-level leaders, diplomats, businessmen, celebrities convening all in one place. It’s kind of a spy candy shop.”
Doug Patteson, a former CIA case officer who now teaches at the University of New Hampshire, says it’s naive to believe espionage isn’t taking place at the Olympics. “Everybody thinks that [the Games are] just this venue for goodwill,” he explains, “but countries are required to pursue actions that protect their inherent self-interest, and it would actually be a dereliction of that responsibility to not look for opportunities to do that.”
When intelligence isn’t gathered properly, the results can be disastrous. In 1972, at the Summer Olympics in Munich, 11 Israeli athletes were murdered by the Black September terrorist organization. “It was a clear intelligence failure on the part of the Israelis to be totally unaware that that risk was real, and it was a security failure on the part of Munich,” Patteson says.
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More recently, experts raised concerns about digital spying by China during the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing. And hours before the opening ceremony in Paris on July 26, arsonists targeted France’s railway system in an apparent attempt to disrupt transportation to this year’s Games.
In addition to these acts of sabotage, covert operations by a variety of nations are almost certainly taking place in Paris this summer, Patteson says. “We still have what we would define as ‘hard target nations’ or ‘priority collection targets’ who still send delegations to the Olympics,” he adds. “It’s one of those rare places in the world where Iranian athletes and government officials and others come face to face with Western athletes and officials.”
Then, of course, there is the symbolic nature of the Games, which Patteson describes as “very much a proxy for war.” That’s why, in the buildup to Rome in 1960, both the Americans and the Soviets were obsessed with Olympic medal counts, and the CIA was so set on encouraging high-profile Soviet athletes to defect to the U.S.
“The fact that people were defecting was a huge propaganda bonus for the West,” Keys says. “The idea was that the Soviet Union and the Soviet bloc more generally were prison states in which people had no freedom, and this is a vivid demonstration of people’s longing for freedom.”
Andrew Hammond, a historian and curator at the International Spy Museum in Washington, agrees. “Athletes are high-profile,” he says. “They’re often seen as a reflection of the inherent value or worth of a nation or a society, and they are people that [we] look up to.”
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But just as Pelops had to resort to unsavory means to survive the chariot race against his future father-in-law, the CIA got its hands dirty in the lead-up to Rome. To head operations before and during the Olympics, the agency turned to Mykola Lebed, a man accused of war crimes during World War II. During the war, Lebed had helped lead a violent Ukrainian nationalist group that fought both the Germans and the Soviet Union. The paramilitary force was also accused of participating in the mass killings of Jews during the Lviv pogroms of 1941.
Despite Lebed’s questionable record, the CIA recruited him after the war. The agency had no illusions about who he was: A 1947 Army counterintelligence report described him as a “well-known sadist.”
According to Patteson, these kinds of unsavory relationships are common in the spy game. “We often make bad bedfellows,” he says.
Despite Lebed’s checkered past, he was tasked with leading Project Aerodynamic, an initiative designed to “provide for the exploitation and expansion of the anti-Soviet Ukrainian resistance movement,” per declassified CIA documents. Aerodynamic operatives distributed propaganda at the 1956 Melbourne Olympics, wrote Duckworth and co-author Thomas M. Hunt in a 2019 journal article, and they embarked on an even more ambitious mission four years later in Rome.
This 1960 operation stands out from other Olympic espionage efforts for two reasons. First, a trove of documents related to Lebed’s work with the CIA was made public in the 2000s under the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act, offering rare insights into the agency’s operations. Second, in his efforts to land high-profile defections during the Games, Lebed did something highly unusual: enlisting the aid of American athletes.
In his 2017 interview with Duckworth, Cantello downplayed his involvement with the CIA at the 1960 Games. In his view, the real star of both the track and field team and the team’s small brush with espionage was sprinter Dave Sime. “[He] was a glamour boy,” Cantello said. “He was a white spur [on the] cover of Sports Illustrated. … I was just a street urchin.”
Indeed, Sime, a celebrated athlete dubbed the “fastest man on earth” by reporters, had fielded offers to play in both the National Football League and Major League Baseball. He’d also been recruited by the CIA before the Games, agreeing to help facilitate defections by Soviet athletes. Sime’s involvement with the agency has been well publicized both before and after his death in 2016, but some of his recollections conflict with the events described in declassified CIA documents. Sime said he’d facilitated a meeting between the CIA and Ter-Ovanesyan. But CIA documents tell a different story.
After the Games commenced, Cantello reconnected with Ter-Ovanesyan, who once again expressed interest in defecting, as he felt his background as a Ukrainian was holding him back in the Soviet Union. Cantello told his good friend Sime about this, and Sime, in turn, alerted his CIA handler. Through Sime, Cantello was asked to arrange a meeting between Ter-Ovanesyan and an unidentified CIA operative, who described the meeting in a manner that feels ripped from a spy novel.
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“Since there [was] insufficient data to judge that Subject [Ter-Ovanesyan] was bona fide, I arranged that my meeting with him be surveilled in the initial stages,” the agent wrote. “The whole operation was so planned that if surveillants were discovered, I would have only a street-walking meeting with Subject, and after leaving him, a getaway was arranged in such a manner that whoever would be surveilling me would not be able to trace me to wherever I was going.”
The operative then gave a thorough, if sardonic, accounting of the meeting: “Involved in the surveillance were six individuals and three autos (one of which, of course, broke down in the process—it never fails). Although no surveillance was noted and I was so signaled, I did not take Subject in the vehicle I had ready for such an eventuality, because there was no real point in doing this.”
Cantello made the introduction, then left the agent and Ter-Ovanesyan to talk alone. After all the buildup to this moment before the Games, the meeting itself was anticlimactic.
“In view of the fact that Subject had expressed some glimmerings of Ukrainian nationalism, I had told Cantello to give Subject my name as [redacted], a typically Ukrainian surname,” the operative reported. “According to Cantello, Subject was pleased that a Ukrainian would be talking with him.” But Ter-Ovanesyan couldn’t speak Ukrainian, so the pair conversed in Russian. The athlete expressed little sense of Ukrainian pride during the meeting. “At no time during the meeting did Subject in any way indicate any nationalistic feeling,” the disappointed operative wrote. After so much effort and interest from the CIA, Ter-Ovanesyan never defected.
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Still, this wasn’t the only mission that Lebed’s operatives undertook. According to Duckworth and Hunt, two Ukrainian priests clad in civilian clothing made contact with the Soviets, while other operatives distributed literature and made successful connections with future sources. But most efforts led by Lebed fell well short of the podium of spy success.
During one particularly inept attempt to spread dissent, an unnamed operative had a conversation about politics with Soviet sports journalist Sergey Gregoyevich Fedoulov. The operative gave Fedoulov anti-Soviet material prepared by Aerodynamic. After Fedoulov read it, he was terrified. “I have read the booklet you gave me last night,” he told the operative. “It is purely counter-revolutionary. Do you know what would become of me if anybody had taken it from me and read it? No, such a book I could not possibly give to anybody.” Fedoulov added, “I ask you, my friend, do not tell anybody about our conversation last night, and about my name and this booklet you gave me.”
On the field itself, Cantello also came up short. Though he had the second-longest javelin throw during qualifying rounds, he ultimately finished in tenth place at the 1960 Games. He never competed in the Olympics again, but he enjoyed a legendary 55-year career as a track and field coach at the Naval Academy. He died in January 2024 at age 92.
Looking back on the affair in 2017, Cantello saw it as a minor footnote in Cold War history. “This seems like a very, very small detail in the scheme of things,” he said. That sentiment could explain why he seemingly never spoke publicly about his actions until the interview with Duckworth. Or perhaps the elite athlete and coach remembered that when it comes to the spy game, one principle stands above all the others: secrecy.
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