Nonfiction

The USA Tried Using Big Dick Energy to Intimidate Russia

Most of history is just one big pissing contest, isn’t it?

“Stop Communism: It’s Everybody’s Job,” poster dated 13 August 1951. Public Domain archived image from the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration via Wikimedia Commons.

In light of the current escalating conflict between Russia and Ukraine — and all the badass men and women, including President Zelenskyy himself, making big moves on the resistance front — I would like to share my favourite story of how the United States once attempted to intimidate Russia during the Cold War with massive condoms.

In the 1950s, propaganda was king. Without the Internet for fact-checking, getting your enemy to belief misinformation was both easier (with no way to easily confirm rumours) and trickier (with less access to delivering misinformation). Spies abounded on both sides of the Iron Curtain, trying to gain genuine intel and leak misinformation to the other side. As part of a mass disinformation campaign early into the conflict, the CIA helped fund an operation to send weather balloons into Soviet-controlled Europe which would distribute 300 million anti-Communist pamphlets by papering whole towns with flyers.

This flyby method of spreading the message wasn’t enough for Frank Wisner, newly appointed director of the Office of Policy Coordination of the CIA. Wisner wanted to get personal. An expert in psychological warfare, Wisner was convinced he could break Soviet soldiers’ spirits — using condoms.

Officially, Wisner framed his mission as part of a program of refugee assistance partnered with Red Cross. As part of this program, CIA operatives carried out covert operations while delivering American toiletries to the troops abroad. Both Americans and locals (European or Russian alike) were given rations of American soaps and toothpaste under the guise of promoting American brands and the quality and superiority of Western standards of comfort and hygiene.

Once the distribution channels for American toiletries were established across the Iron Curtain, Wisner would pull out the big guns — or rather, the big dicks. The plan was to intentionally mislabel XXL condoms as ‘small’ or ‘medium’ and then ‘accidentally’ distribute these among the Soviet troops who had, according to some sources, been demanding XL condoms as part of their care packages. Wisner hoped that distributing…