Spycraft - Melton [94]
To operate the device, the NKVD aimed a continuous 800 MHz radio signal at the seal from a listening post in the building across from Spaso House.15 The Thing’s thin diaphragm at the top, which Wright had repaired, vibrated with the sound of a voice. Those vibrations were carried by an interior tuning post to the antenna. Then, as the vibrations hit the antenna, they altered the reflected radio signal that bounced back to the listening post.16 The Thing did not require internal power in the same way a mirror does not require power to reflect light. The radio transmitter and receiver, code named LOSS (or REINDEER by the Russian techs), were a marvel of signal processing, considering the technology available at the time.
According to Wright’s own account, once he understood the principle and made the device work, he took another eighteen months to create a similar system for British intelligence. Called Satyr, his device featured aerials—transmitter and receiver—disguised as two proper British umbrellas. 17 Satyr proved to be a great success and Wright called it “black magic.”18 Then, as he observed, “the Americans promptly ordered twelve sets and rather cheekily copied the drawings and made twenty more.”19 The American version of the device, according to Wright, was called Easy Chair (also Mark2 and Mark3).20
The concept behind The Thing represented a remarkable leap forward in eavesdropping technology. Viewed as a wake-up call at CIA for audio operations, it was the clandestine equivalent to Sputnik. The Agency had to play technological catch-up in RF audio as well as in space.
Ironically, although they did not know it at the time, many of the scientists who had worked and failed to decipher The Thing’s mystery would probably have recognized the name of its creator, Lev Sergeyevich Theremin. 21 A musical prodigy and physicist, Theremin was born in czarist Russia in the late 1800s, excelled at some of Russia’s finest universities, and his genius was recognized by the Soviet regime. He lived in New York City during the 1920s and 1930s where he demonstrated the electronic instrument that bore his name. The theremin was played without touching it and enjoyed a brief life as a serious instrument. In the 1930s it captured the imagination of the avant-garde of the jazz age, though eventually it was relegated to creating the spooky sounds heard in horror and science-fiction films.
Those who crowded ballrooms and concert halls to hear Theremin’s thoroughly modern instrument, or caught glimpses of him amid Manhattan’s high society, never suspected that the socially sophisticated “Russian genius” was also covertly working for Soviet intelligence. Just before the Soviet Union’s entry into World War II, Stalin summoned Theremin back to Moscow where he was summarily sent to a Siberian prison camp. Later he was transferred into one of the KGB’s secret laboratories—a sharashka—to work on creating spy gear. After developing The Thing, Theremin was awarded one of the Soviet Union’s highest honors, the Stalin Prize First Class, along with the equivalent of $20,000, a fortune in Soviet society, but remained imprisoned.22
At its formation in September of 1951, the CIA Technical Services Staff employed fewer than fifty people. Its scientists and engineers were housed in a makeshift lab at Indian Head, Maryland, thirty miles south of Washington, D.C. The facility, a one-time gun test facility for the Navy, sat on a large peninsula that jutted out into the Potomac.
“Somehow the Agency begged, borrowed or stole some space down there, but conditions were bad. We had to do our own janitorial service.