The Pioneering Soviet Espionage Device that was Active in the US Embassy in the USSR for Seven Years
‘The Thing’ is surely one of the most remarkable espionage devices in all history. Given to the Americans as World War II was closing, it managed to escape American notice for 7 years – despite being in the US Embassy in the USSA. And it took a lot longer for the West to uncover its secrets. But what was ‘The Thing’? And what did it do? Pitamber Kaushik explains.
The seal opened exposing the Soviet bugging device, ‘The Thing’, on display at the National Cryptologic Museum in Maryland, USA. Source: Austin Mills, available here.
Automated Doors, Manufacturing line tracking, Supermarket Product Tags, Credit Cards, and Passports are common places where you might encounter the humble RFID tag - a radio frequency identification tag whose information can be “read” using radio waves, a form of shortwave electromagnetic radiation. RFID tags are a crucial component of modern-day automation and information tracking, and were the very definition of “Smart” before the advent of the modern smartphone, and were in fact, a contender technology for realizing the ‘Internet of Things’. These nifty, effortless labels became commercially popular only in the last couple decades of the 20th century and hence it might come as a bit of a surprise to know that they essentially operate on World-War II technology. Its bulky forerunners were Radio Frequency Identification kits that were used in World War 2 fighter aircraft to prevent friendly fire. One aircraft’s radar would “illuminate” the other’s kit which would automatically communicate a signal indicating that it was on their side. This response needed no power source on the part of the latter - it drew its energy from the incident radiation.
As a token of appreciation, amity, and solidarity for their alliance in the Second World War, and a promise of maintaining them in its wake, the Young Pioneer Organization of the Soviet Union, an organization of boys, presented a hand-carved two-foot wooden plaque of the Great Seal of the United States to the American ambassador to the Soviet Union W.A. Harriman, a month before the conclusion of the war. It was a natural procedure for the embassy office to meticulously scrutinize any inbound item but this souvenir without a trace of wiring or batteries seemed totally innocuous and did not appropriate a thorough dissection and consequent desecration. It was, after all, a harmless gift from enthusiastic children, and was thus gladly and dearly hung on the wall of Harriman’s study. Harriman gave it a privileged place in his private chambers since it was a welcome gesture from the Soviets. Or was it? The Americans had slightly underestimated Soviet engineering. They had fallen for the Trojan horse, admitting it into their most intimate quarters.
Leon Theremin, the inventor of the eponymous no-contact electronic musical instrument, was compelled to work in the Soviet Experimental Design Bureau, a specialized espionage department. It was here that he had designed the Buran eavesdropping system, a sophisticated device that cast infrared rays on windowpanes from a distance, in order to “listen to” conversations inside the room via the vibrations induced by them on the glass - a technology that Lavrentiy Beria, the Head of the Soviet Secret Police would use to eavesdrop on the British, French, and American embassies, as well as allegedly, on Stalin himself. It was also Theremin who had designed the minimalistic bug that was concealed in the plaque. It was a passive device, meaning it needed no attached power source. When the Soviets irradiated it with radio waves, it responded to them, at other times remaining inanimate, making it very difficult to detect. It derived its operational impetus from the inbound “interrogating” signal and “answered” to it utilizing the signal’s own energy.
The device being inconspicuous in size and structure and spontaneously operational (staying dead-silent when not being tapped into), it didn’t catch the notice of anyone at the office for a long time. It remained dead until it was activated by the right frequency Soviet interrogation waves, upon which it reacted to the sounds around it (sounds varied its ‘capacitance’, encoding their waveforms into its outbound signal) and relayed them to the Soviets in its retransmitted signal. The Soviets sent out a characteristic signal which would be regenerated by the device, now enclosed in the envelope of the signal of the sound in the room. The audio transmission from the room would be superposed over (act as a container for) the communicating signal. The Soviets would disentangle their own rebounded communication wave from the characteristic frequency from the encoded signal in a process called demodulation, extracting the audio from the room. Put simply, whenever the Soviets cast the appropriate signal upon it, the device conveyed the sounds of the room encoded in the same signal back to them.
Its simplistic design and passive nature gave it a veritably unlimited operational life. It would be seven years before the device would be discovered, during the tenure of George Keenan, owing to an accidental reception by an operator at the British Embassy when the Soviets were illuminating the device. In the meantime, it would have relayed much of the vital contents of Harriman’s private conversations. Upon its discovery, two State Department Employees were dispatched to the USSR in order to conduct a “sweep” of American, British, and Canadian embassy buildings to check for other bugs. Its discovery sparked a frenzy of emulation, improvisation, and progressive development of radio signal-based eavesdropping devices on the Western side. Such was the precisely frugal ingenuity of the device that even upon discovery and procurement, it befuddled American scientists, working on comprehending and possibly emulating it, for quite some time. It appeared to have several resonant frequencies, relied on both Amplitude Modulation and Frequency Modulation, and its membrane was so sensitive that it was damaged during the American probe of the device and had to be replaced. It would be years before the British and the Americans would develop a reliable, pulsed cavity resonator of their own. The Western vexation at the elusively designed device is palpable in the name it was given – ‘The Thing’.
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