A Voice in the Carving

The Walls Have Ears

Eli: Moscow, the summer of 1952. George Kennan, the new American ambassador, sits alone in the upstairs study of Spaso House, his residence. He's reading aloud, in Russian, to keep his vocabulary sharp. His pages are Voice of America scripts, what he called “vigorous and eloquent polemics against Soviet policies.” This comes from Kennan's own account. And of life in that house, he said: “It's just as though there is a great hand pressing down on all of us.”

Mara: Voice of America, meaning Washington's own radio, making the American case abroad.

Eli: Government radio, and these were its sharpest pieces. Which is what makes the next part strange. In that very study, a listening device was hidden. Kennan was performing anti-Soviet polemics, in fluent Russian, for an audience he didn't know was there.

Mara: Which is where a listener's question comes in: is it true that Soviet schoolchildren gave the US ambassador a carved wooden seal that secretly spied on him for seven years? Today's angle is a diplomat's invisible surveillance trap exposed by a staged dictation sting.

Eli: Getting there means following Kennan into the autumn of 1952, to a sting staged in that same study, and back to a gift from the last days of the war. Not every piece of it is settled.

Mara: And nobody in that house was naive. Kennan wrote that bugging embassies had been “a standard practice of the Soviet government, and not of that government alone.” Diplomats had learned to assume that in Moscow “most walls–at least in rooms that diplomats were apt to frequent–had ears.”

Eli: With reason. By the end of the war, some 120 bugs had already turned up. In the fifties, visitors to the residence got a card. “Every room is monitored by the KGB,” it warned. The staff worked for the KGB, maybe the garden was wired too, and luggage could be searched two or three times a day. Then the card's one comfort: “Nothing is ever stolen and they hardly disturb things.”

Mara: Polite burglars, at least. Yet every search came up clean, Eli: no wires, no power source, no microphone.

A Gift from Artek

Eli: Go back to the end of the Second World War. On August 4th, 1945, a group of Young Pioneers, the Soviet state's youth organization, something like scouts, presented the American ambassador, Averell Harriman, with a gift: a carved wooden replica of the Great Seal of the United States. The children sang. Harriman promised to display it. And he kept his word. He hung it in his study at Spaso House.

Mara: One account dates the presentation to 1946. Either way, the same gift.

Eli: It went up on the wall and stayed there. The leaks came later. Mara has those.

Mara: There are two accounts of how they surfaced. The first comes through British radio monitoring reports. In the fall of 1951, a British officer tracking Soviet military aircraft suddenly heard the voice of Britain's own Air Attaché, loud and clear. An engineer was sent to Moscow to investigate. He found no bugs. Kennan recounts that, the Diplomatic Security Service recounts that that same fall, an American Signal Corps officer, acting on a tip, picked up a conversation from inside the US Chancery.

Eli: Nobody could find the way out.

Mara: The second reading runs through Kennan himself and the Diplomatic Security Service. Early in 1952, Spaso House was refurbished for the new ambassador, by Soviet workers. Kennan believed that gave the Soviets a chance to plant bugs, and he ordered regular sweeps. Those found nothing either. Whether the British intercepts or those routine sweeps set off the search that finally worked is still open.

Eli: That search came in September 1952. A State Department technician arrived in Moscow and, with Kennan's consent, moved into Spaso House as a house guest, his equipment sent on ahead. The plan needed the ambassador as bait: dictate a phony classified message in the library, so whoever was listening would switch on. Kennan agreed to take part in the staged dictation, even as he later questioned the propriety of an ambassador joining in such deception.

Mara: All summer he'd read to that room by accident. Now on purpose.

Eli: With a wager on top. The technician had a friendly bet with Kennan: a wooden Russian doll for every microphone he found. The secretary arrives. The technician and an embassy colleague slip up to a listening post in the attic. Downstairs, Kennan begins to dictate. He later wrote, “It is difficult to make plausible the weirdness of the atmosphere in that room.” One “was acutely conscious of the unseen presence in the room of a third person: our attentive monitor.” “It seemed that one could almost hear his breathing.”

Mara: First a great hand, now a third person breathing. Up in the attic, the receiver waits.

Cracking the Eagle

Eli: Within moments, the attic receiver is picking up Kennan's voice, and the noise of the secretary's equipment. The technician won't walk in himself, in case Kennan asks whether he's found something and gives it away. So his colleague carries in a scribbled note. Kennan remembered one of them in the doorway, imploring him “by signs and whispers, to 'keep on, keep on.'” Then the two men move through the library, clearing decorative objects off tables, one by one.

Mara: So Kennan's reading to his monitor again. Only this time, someone's listening back.

Eli: The signal leads to the wall above his desk, and the carved seal. They take it down and set it on an overstuffed chair in the middle of the room. Then the technician bumps it with his antenna, and the signal vanishes. He tells Kennan there's a device in that seal, without a doubt. It flickers back once, then dies for good. He's certain the Soviets know they've been found.

Mara: The Pioneers' gift. Nearly seven years on that wall, through three more ambassadors.

Eli: He clears the room in case it's booby-trapped, and takes a hammer to the carving. Inside are two cavities. In one sits a device no bigger than a pencil.

Mara: And nothing to run it. No battery, no power pack, no wires. Just a little metal chamber with a flexible front wall. That's a resonant cavity: a hollow space tuned to ring at one radio frequency, the way a bottle hums a single note when someone blows across it.

Eli: That night the technician went to bed with the device under his pillow and the seal under his bed. Next morning he and Kennan drove to the Chancery, the seal on the floor of the car, the device in the ambassador's pocket. From there it went on to Washington.

Mara: Nobody in that car could yet say how a hollow piece of metal, with nothing inside to power it, had been talking.

The Sharashka Invention

Eli: Washington's experts were baffled. No batteries, no electrical circuits. So they called it the Thing.

Mara: The power came from outside. Someone nearby aimed a radio beam at the seal, and the cavity sent back a signal shaped by whatever sound was in the room. Kennan put it plainly: “When not activated, it was almost impossible to detect.” Switched on, it relayed the room to a monitor who, he presumed, sat “in one of the surrounding buildings.”

Eli: Which is why the sweeps kept missing it.

Mara: And the voices came in through the eagle. Tiny holes under its carved beak led to a thin membrane just behind. Speech made the membrane move, and that changed the cavity's capacitance, roughly how much electric charge two facing metal surfaces can hold. Graham Brooker and Jairo Gomez describe that movement shifting the cavity's tuning, so the strength of the returning signal rose and fell with the sound. In the listening post, that rise and fall was the conversation.

Eli: So the carving wasn't only the hiding place. It was the funnel.

Mara: Simple to describe. Someone still had to think of it.

Eli: That someone was a prisoner. Léon Theremin was first imprisoned, then put to work in a sharashka, a secret laboratory inside the Gulag camp system, staffed by detained scientists and engineers. There he developed the Thing, along with other devices, for the NKVD, the Soviet secret police.

Mara: A prisoner's work, hanging in the American ambassador's study.

Eli: Washington, stumped, turned to Britain. A Marconi engineer who later joined MI5 took it on, working after hours. First he had to repair it: the membrane was so thin the Americans had damaged it in handling, and he replaced it. By his own account, he solved the whole thing in ten weeks. Then MI5 built its own copy, codenamed SATYR, a working bug with no battery inside, powered only by a beam from outside.

Mara: Washington, meanwhile, kept the original quiet, Eli.

Unveiled at the UN

Eli: Quiet for years. Kennan, for his part, wrote that the device “represented, for that day, a fantastically advanced bit of applied electronics.” And: “I have the impression that with its discovery the whole art of intergovernmental eavesdropping was raised to a new technological level.”

Mara: The British copy had already shown that new level needed no internal circuits at all.

Eli: The secret held for eight years. On May 1st, 1960, the Soviets shot down an American U-2 spy plane over their territory. Later that month, at the UN Security Council, they accused the United States of spying. On the fourth day, May 26th, the American ambassador to the UN held up a wooden replica of the seal, for the delegates and the cameras. That record, he said, made it particularly unsuitable for the Soviet Union to act holier than thou.

Mara: And the Soviet resolution failed, seven votes to two, with only Poland alongside.

Eli: A gift from 1945, turned into evidence in 1960.

Mara: Its technical life went on longer. The Thing is generally considered a precursor to RFID, radio frequency identification: unpowered tags that answer when a reader's radio waves reach them. Same principle as the seal, taking in outside radio waves and sending information back with no power source of its own.

Eli: So, to the question. Yes. The Pioneers' gift hid a passive listening device, and it hung in Spaso House for nearly seven years, until it was cracked open in 1952. Those late-night readings had an audience after all. Kennan later wondered what his monitors made of “perfectly phrased anti-Soviet diatribes issuing in purest Russian from what was unquestionably my mouth, in my own study, in the depths of the night.”

Mara: Some of it still waits on Moscow's files. Soviet operational logs would show whether the seal was listening from 1945, or only after a 1949 renovation. Declassified records could say whether children carved it at all, or Soviet intelligence made it whole. And tests could settle whether the cavity answered at the beam's own frequency or at a higher harmonic, a multiple of it.

Eli: A thing to look into is resonant cavities.

Mara: Follow security with Angle to see how listening devices evolve.

Eli: Thanks for spending this time with us. I'm Eli.

Mara: And I'm Mara. Until next time, this has been Angle.