How The Soviet Union spied on the US Embassy ("The thing")
It was the middle of the 40th, the German army surrendered to the allies, and it seems that the Nazi party would vanish from the history of the humankind. People felt the wings of peace blows all over and it seemed that the Soviet Union could join efforts with the United States and start the blossom era of Europe. The ambassadors of each side shared mutual respect and aimed to the construction of Europe.?
The date was August 4, 1945. The war in Europe was over and a group of 10 to 15 year old boys from the Young Pioneer Organization of the Soviet Union arrived at the US embassy carrying a hand carved great seal of the United States of America. They presented the seal to W. Averell Harriman, the US ambassador at the Soviet Union. The seal was given as a gesture of friendship between the US and Soviet Union.? The US ambassador hurry to bring at least fancy and elegant gesture to the Soviet Union representative. The following months included dense meeting that were meant to build and create a new prosper future.
One day a confidential memo was received at the White House from FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. The memo related results of an investigation triggered by British complaints that shared intelligence was being leaked to the Soviets through the Moscow embassy. The memo revealed that single U.S. employees in Moscow frequented met a prostitute linked to Soviet intelligence. Moreover, classified documents were handled improperly and may have been obtained by Soviet employees that worked at the embassy as household. The memo added that the code room was found open at night, with safes unlocked and code books lying on the table. The failures mentioned in the investigation were fixed and the fiasco was finalized.?
In 1951, a British radio operator was monitoring Soviet air force radio traffic, in their own bit of espionage, when he recognized the voice of the British Air Attaché. It's not exactly clear what happened next, but the following year, an American listening to military radio traffic picked up a conversation featuring American-accented voices that clearly seemed to come from the American Embassy. The claims seem to be very strange and somehow not relate to the atmosphere during these days. An investigation was started immediately however, no Americans were transmitting though. Numerous radio sweeps were performed, all of which turned up nothing. The security team in the embassy was confidence that the Soviets revealed the Americans searches and removed the bug equipment from the Embassy. Nevertheless, special receiver was shipped from United States and the security team continue to investigate the Embassy. The search finally ended felicitously and revealed a transmission frequency of 1.6Ghz. The source of the frequency seems to arrive from the wooden carve of the Great Seal of the United States, which had been presented to the Ambassador several years earlier as a gift from the Soviet people.
Close inspection of the carving found it had been hollowed out, and a thin needle placed behind the eagle’s beak. No batteries or wires were evident, and the device was not powered through the nail which had been hanging the seal. The mystery even increased after the device was sent to Washington for more in-depth analysis. It took a while to figure out the function of the wooden device with no batteries however, it was finally cracked, and the mechanism was reviled.
The wooden Seal was actually a passive Theremin - the theremin was invented in the 1920s by Russian inventor Leon Theremin and it is the only instrument you play without ever touching it (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K6KbEnGnymk). The wooden device was later named "The?Thing".
The Theremin played a role in the Beach Boys song - “Good Vibrations” released as a single on October 10, 1966.
It seems that the Theremin consists of two antennas – one vertical and one horizontal and the position of the hands relative to the "antennas" produces different frequencies. The best way to explain the Theemin operation is by understanding the oscillation mechanism.
The basic oscillator composed of Inductor ( L ) and Capacitor ( C ) connected together what causes the capacitor to charge up and the current flow decreases. When the potential across the capacitor is equal to the source voltage the current changes direction. This process repeats itself indefinitely what causes the current to oscillate at a frequency, ω.
The capacitor capacitance depends on many parameters and one of them is the distance between the surfaces of the capacitor and in our case, it is the distanced of the musician hands that plays the Theremin.
During the time that Léon Theremin worked on his musical instrument he was working for the Soviet military. Almost two decades later, Theremin found himself in a Siberian gulag conscripted to create high-tech radio listening devices in a secret laboratory.
With his second-greatest creation, "The Thing", Theremin crafted the wooden Great Seal of the United States. His creation was like a sandwich cookie, with a tiny capacitive membrane connected to a small quarter-wavelength antenna—which together acted as a microphone. Theremin's hidden bug wasn't connected to a battery or power supply; the device only worked when a radio signal of the correct frequency was sent to the device from an external transmitter. This signal came via a van parked nearby that could broadcast a strong radio signal, activating the "Thing" and allowing the Soviets to eavesdrop, via a radio receiver.
The moral of the story is to close your venetian curtains in your office (metal made) during your next discussions.
The phrase "Don't look a?gift horse?in the mouth" is not always correct.