Nuking the Moon: And Other Intelligence Schemes and Military Plots Left on the Drawing Board

by Vince Houghton

Another plan called for arming Chinese call girls with poisons or toxins to use against high-ranking Japanese officers who utilized their services. Simple enough, right? The catch was that the poison’s delivery system needed to be just about invisible, since these women didn’t have the means to conceal anything in what they were(n’t) wearing. Odds are, you can probably figure on your own how they solved that problem . . . And then the weapon, which was based on the highly lethal botulism toxin (fun fact: so is Botox!) was successfully smuggled into Japanese-occupied China. But nothing happened. No high-level Japanese officers were killed, and the OSS was baffled as to why. Only later would they learn that their OSS contacts in Asia, performing their due diligence, decided to test the botulism on donkeys before giving it to the Chinese prostitutes. To their dismay, the weapon didn’t work. The donkeys survived (and in fact, seemed completely oblivious that they’d been poisoned), so the OSS contacts in Asia assumed the weapon was ineffective and scrapped the mission. What they didn’t know: Botulism is so lethal it will kill the living bejesus out of almost everything on earth . . . except for donkeys, which are one of the few living creatures immune to the toxin. Whoops.