![]() It seemed that one could almost hear his breathing. In the book, he wrote chillingly about the moment he realized that the Soviets had a microphone in his own private study: "It is difficult to make plausible the weirdness of the atmosphere in that room, while this strange scene was in progress … At this particular moment, one was acutely conscious of the unseen presence in the room of a third person: our attentive monitor. Kennan published his memoirs of the period in 1967. It was shipped to Washington, D.C., the next day to be studied. That night, Bezjian slept with the device under his pillow so that it couldn't be stolen back by the Soviets. ![]() Minutes later, the team found just what they were looking for-hanging right on the wall. Something was broadcasting Kennan's voice from down in the study, and it was something very close by. When he switched on his receiver, he picked up a signal almost immediately. But on September 12, 1952, with suspicions still raised, the State Department's security technicians Joseph "the Rug Merchant" Bezjian and John Ford conducted another search for good measure, knowing that the Soviets sometimes removed bugs and later replanted them.Īt Bezjian's directive, Kennan sat at his desk and dictated an important-sounding message to his secretary while Bezjian searched the room with his radio instruments. A few bug-searching sweeps of the embassy, coordinated with the move-in of incoming U.S. 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 Spaso House. 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 was the British who first noticed something was amiss. Embassy Moscow, Wikimedia // Public Domain Suspicious VoicesĮxterior of Spaso House, the residence of U.S. 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, on unwittingly broadcasted conversations from within the Spaso House study. 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. Unbeknownst to casual viewers, the wooden Great Seal of the United States he created was like a sandwich cookie, with a tiny capacitive membrane connected to a small quarter-wavelength antenna-which together acted as a microphone-standing in for the cream filling. With his second-greatest creation, The Thing, Theremin nearly upstaged himself. Once in the prison system, he was conscripted to create high-tech radio listening devices in a secret laboratory. But almost two decades after creating the instrument, Theremin found himself in a Siberian gulag. ![]() In the U.S., Theremin is best known for his eponymous musical instrument, the theremin, which he invented while working for the Soviet military in 1920. The device was the brainchild of the Russian inventor Léon Theremin. Leon Theremin demonstrating his theremin in 1927 / Topical Press Agency/Getty Images
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