Hey, history lovers. I'm Mike Rosenwald with RetroPod, a show about the past, rediscovered.

So in our previous episode, I went to the museum at the CIA's super secret headquarters and held a dead rat.

One of the rats the CIA used during the Cold War as a vessel to exchange secret messages.

A little crazy, a little gross, but hey, totally ingenious.

Well, we're back at the CIA Museum, and I think I've got something that might top the rat.

The Liberator pistol, as it's known, was a pistol

first developed by the Joint Psychological Warfare Committee in 1942. That's Robert Beyer.

I'm CIA Museum Director. Unlike the rat, I wasn't allowed to hold the pistol. I'm not a very good shot, so that was probably for the best.

So Bayer and I sat at a table looking at photos.

It's old, very rusty, and appears able only to fire one shot.

And I guess that was the point of this pistol.

The idea was that they were going to just drop them over Europe,

and resistance people would grab them up and be able to commit sabotage and

assassinations across Europe and hopefully bring an end to World War II very quickly.

You heard that right. During World War II, the United States devised a plan to airdrop thousands of one-shot pistols to aid the resistance in Europe and Asia.

So the origin for this was actually a Polish officer who was over here in the United

States. That officer told some U.S. intelligence officials the idea in March of 1942,

about four months after the United States and Britain declared war on Japan.

The officials liked the thought of airdropping guns so much that...

It went all the way up to the White House that immediately approved it and put it into production.

The name of the gun, officially, was the FP45.

But it was nicknamed the Liberator Gun.

...