Spycraft - Melton [93]
Further evidence of the Soviet’s use of eavesdropping was demonstrated by the NKVD’s (forerunner to the KGB) aggressive operations during World War II. In the late fall of 1941, as German forces approached Moscow, the Soviet government ordered foreign diplomats out of the city to the relative safety of Kuybyshev (Samara). Then, with foreign embassies standing empty or hosting only skeleton staffs, the NKVD hardwired virtually every Western embassy in the city with embedded microphones. After the German army’s advance halted just twenty miles outside Moscow in early 1942, the diplomats were allowed to return to the Soviet capital and their bugged embassies.9
The bugged Great Seal of the United States that hung over the U.S. Ambassador’s desk in Moscow contained a passive cavity resonator and went undetected for seven years, from 1945 to 1952. The CIA had no comparable audio technology at the time.
The NKVD bugged the rooms and conversations of President Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Churchill during the Tehran and Yalta summit meetings.10 In Tehran, in 1943, Stalin maneuvered the American President into staying in the Russian compound amid rumors of a German assassination plot. At the 1945 Yalta conference, the NKVD techs employed an early version of a directional microphone to capture Roosevelt’s private outdoor conversations at a distance of fifty to one hundred meters.11 When Churchill’s daughter, Sarah, made an off-hand comment that lemons might be just the thing with caviar (in another version of the story Sarah suggested lemons with tea), a lemon tree reportedly appeared in the orchard overnight.
After receiving the audio take from these operations, Stalin pushed his intelligence service for more and more information, insisting they report even the tone of voice in transcripts. After devouring the raw intelligence delivered each morning with his breakfast, Stalin would then act taciturn, even bored, during the actual meetings.12
However, what was discovered hanging behind the Ambassador’s desk in 1952 was revolutionary in the technology of listening devices. Implanted in the middle of the carved wood of the Great Seal, cleverly hidden behind an air passage formed by the American eagle’s nostril, was a device that was alarming as much for the technology it employed as the fact it had been active for more than half a decade. Indeed, four American ambassadors—Averell Harriman, Walter Smith, Alan Kirk, and George Kennan—presumably had their secret conversations picked up by the bug.
Differing significantly in design and function from any piece of covert listening equipment previously known, the device was constructed of precision-tooled steel and comprised a long pencil-thin antenna with a short cylindrical top. Agency engineers could not understand exactly how it worked. The stand-alone unit, apparently, did not require a battery or any other visible power source. It had no wires or tubes, nothing that identified the device as a piece of electronic equipment. If the oddly shaped length of metal was transmitting conversations, then how was it doing it?
“The Thing,” as it was soon dubbed, bounced among the Agency’s lab, the FBI, and private contractors for evaluation and reverse engineering. No one could offer anything beyond an educated guess as to how The Thing worked, and somewhere in its travels from lab to lab it was damaged from either improper handling or shipping.13
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