the mother of invention

According to Greek myth, only the renowned inventor Daedalus could crack the devilishly difficult puzzle set by King Minos of Crete: how to pass a thread through a Triton shell. His ingenious answer was to drill a small hole in the tip and drip honey in the other end; he then tied the slenderest thread to the body of an ant and encouraged it through the hole and on through the spiral interior to the honey.

Unbeknown to Daedalus, the puzzle and the reward was itself a honey trap set by Minos to lure the inventor out of hiding because he had been avoiding the consequences of defying the king in previous encounters when his inventiveness had not only landed him and his son Icarus into a prison tower in the island of Crete, but out again with a set of replica bird wings made from wax and feathers. As most of us know, Icarus didn't make it, but his father did and he went into hiding. Minos calculated that Daedalus by his very nature wouldn’t be able to resist the tempting challenge he’d so cunningly set. And he was right.

Then there is the most famous tale of military ingenuity from the mythic age, when Greek soldiers were hidden in the belly of a great wooden horse and smuggled into Troy. Once inside they were able to slip out at night unnoticed, open the gates, let in the rest of the army and finally break the decade long deadlock in an orgy of fire and violence.

the renaissance

The Renaissance bred a new inventive genius—Leonardo de Vinci—who devoted his creative energy between artistic masterpieces dreaming up engines of war and, like Daedalus, the possible means of manned flight by reproducing the flapping wings of birds and bats.

victoriana

And more recently, the Victorians gave us the telegraph in the early days of the realm and the battle of the currents fought between Edison and Tesla at the twilight of the era.  

modernity

But what of modern times?

It appears that nothing focuses minds quite like the prospect of victory or death: radar, rockets and the Manhattan Project all in the space of five desperate years of global conflict. But in 1945 just after the conclusion of hostilities, Soviet Russia pulled off a masterstroke of such ingenuity and deception in the beginning of the Cold War, it ought to have elicited applause even from the Americans who were on the receiving end.

Their secret weapon was an enigmatic Russian noble and former military officer called Leon Theremin who had somehow managed to avoid the purges of The Red Terror and pursue his vocation as an inventor. He designed a mechanical proto television set and security devices that would trigger alarms through motion detection, but is undoubtedly best known for the invention of the eponymous theremin musical instrument—a wooden box with circuitry and loud speaker that emits an ethereal sound according to the proximity of a performer’s hands to two antennae. The vertical antennae governs the pitch, while the horizontal controls amplitude. Because there is no physical contact, it is a tricky instrument to master, certainly for anyone without a musical ear.

Theremin was already a skilled cellist and quickly became an expert on his own instrument to the extent that he was permitted to showcase both his talent as an inventor and as a musician on a very successful tour of Europe after a briefing by a scary looking head of military intelligence called Yan Berzin.

He eventually applied for an American immigration visa, which was granted. Once there he set about acquiring various patents for all his inventions and was very successful for a time, mingling with luminaries like Charlie Chaplin, Einstein, George Bernard Shaw and George Gershwin until the Great Depression hit and demand for his expensive musical instrument dried up. He also married a black dancer called Lavinia Williams, considered outrageous at the time, which further damaged his prospects. And when he was accused of being a Soviet spy, the writing was on the wall.

the motherland

In 1938 he slunk back to the motherland as a stowaway aboard a Russian vessel. Unfortunately, his loyalty may also have been under suspicion when he returned to Russia and he was bizarrely accused of plotting to murder a high ranking Soviet official called Sergei Kirov and sentenced to 8 years hard labour slaving on the notorious Magadan Track where several thousand kilometres of rough road was hacked and pounded out of the wilderness. Hundreds of thousands of political prisoners died miserably during its construction and were buried along the way in what came to be known as the road of bones. Other sources suggest he was sent to work in a gold mine.  

This punishment for Theremin could have been tantamount to a death sentence had, like Daedalus, his inventiveness not improved his chances of survival. Theremin designed a monorail which dramatically  increased productivity, and after a year his talents were more effectively put to use in a Sharaska prison where scientists and engineers who had been charged with some supposed crime or other were compelled to research and design tech for the Soviet Union to exploit against their capitalist opponents.

Once settled in and on tolerable rations, he began to design a range of discreet listening devices for domestic surveillance and to eavesdrop on foreign targets. And it was here that he designed the revolutionary endovibrator—a hollow cylindrical capacitor with a diaphragm and antennae that didn’t depend on a localised power source to function but was instead irradiated externally by high frequency radio waves directed at it so that the modulated sound waves were reflected back to a listening post in a nearby house where the audio could be recorded on magnetic wire or transcribed.

The next task was to position the device in a suitably sensitive location. This was obligingly carried out by the American ambassador William Avril Harriman, who gave it pride of place in the study of the magnificent Spaso House in Moscow—the residence of US ambassadors since 1933.

Harriman wasn’t a spy, though; he’d unwittingly planted the bug because it was secreted in a charming wooden carving of the American coat of arms that was shamelessly presented to him a couple of months before the end of WWII by children of the Young Pioneers Artek Camp on the Crimea Peninsula in a ‘gesture of friendship’. (The Young Pioneer Movement was like the scout movement but with communist indoctrination).

The Soviets had two covert posts in houses located near the building that performed two opposite functions at once: one transmitted and therefore activated the device, and the other received any sound present in the room via the endovibrator cylinder which was actually placed just behind the nostrils of the carved eagle’s beak. This system continued undetected for seven years and four ambassadors. And that’s a very long time for any bug to remain usefully active.

No one would ordinarily expect a listening device to last longer than the life of the average dry cell battery it normally relied upon. A favoured position was in the cavity of a wooden door where a hole would be drilled in the top and the device along with a string of batteries held in a stocking could be slipped down inside. This configuration might afford a month of eavesdropping. Sometimes, where possible, a hole could be carefully drilled into the wall of an adjoining room or ceiling and a small microphone inserted, offering reasonable long term eavesdropping opportunities.

Devices that depend on their own irreplaceable power sources have a limited useful life span and are detectable. And this is what made Theremin’s design so devastatingly effective. It was only ultimately discovered by a combination of factors which seem difficult to validate: but the British claimed to have overheard an American conversation whilst listening to an open Soviet air force channel from their embassy and alerted their allies who eventually tracked it down some time later, either in a sophisticated anti-surveillance sweep or by physically going through the inventory of the study when there was a change of ambassador.

American and British technicians from Marconi at the time seem to struggle to reverse engineer the tech even if at first site it seemed deceptively simple. It took a while to work out the nuances of the frequencies involved. Their analysis was also initially hampered when they didn’t notice that the membrane on the cylinder had been damaged at some point between the discovery and in gaining possession of the device, which was now dubbed The Thing.

The Americans sat on the discovery until 1960 when it became politically expedient to blow the dust off and unveil it at a UN Security Council meeting after a US U-2 spy plane was shot down in Soviet airspace by the Soviet Air Defence Forces. They were eager to suggest to the world that they were only responding to something the Soviets had begun years before, even when they were still allies.

The sad reality, though, was that the Americans had been spectacularly duped by the exquisite work of a master craftsman and a genius inventor which was offered in the spirit of diplomatic friendship by the soft hands of children who probably had no idea that they were presenting the ambassador with a Trojan horse.       

A replica of the Great Seal bug or The Thing hangs in the NSA's National Cryptologic Museum as an incredible artefact to a golden age of espionage, which is both testament to the depths of human duplicity and the unsurpassed heights of his inventiveness.