THE THING
Amy Ireland
In 1945, under instructions from the NKVD, Russian intelligence operatives planted
a passive covert listening device—designed by Léon Theremin and concealed inside
a carved, wooden replica of the Great Seal of the United States of America—in the
American embassy in Moscow.1 The bugged seal was gifted to the USA by members
of the Vladimir Lenin All-Union Pioneer Youth Organization and, once installed, was
sensitive to remote activation by means of a microwave signal transmitted in the vicinity of the embassy building. It was successfully used to record classified discussions
taking place in the American ambassador’s office between 1947 and 1952. For highly
suggestive reasons—its retrospective recognition as an occult resonator chief among
them—the device was dubbed ‘the thing’ by baffled employees of the United States
Secret Service.
In a demonstration of exemplary camouflage tactics, the thing had lain hidden in
plain sight for seven years, undetectable without contingent or clandestine knowledge
of the hypersonic frequency it operated at, before it was discovered accidentally, while
receiving its illuminating signal by a British radio operator monitoring Russian air force
traffic in 1952. As it needed no power supply and contained no active electronic components, routine security sweeps had consistently failed to detect the thing’s presence,
but it was finally given up by the howl of positive feedback it emitted whilst active
during a well-timed counter-surveillance sweep (using a tunable receiver operating
at 1800 megahertz) ordered in response to the tip-off.2 American officials removed
1.
The NKVD was the Russian Commissariat for State Security between 1931 and 1946. It is one of the predecessors of
the KGB. Léon Theremin is the name adopted by Lev Sergeyvich Termen whilst touring the United Sates and Europe in the
late 1920s.
2.
P. Wright, Spycatcher: The Candid Autobiography of a Senior Intelligence Officer (New York and London: Viking,
1987), 25.
138
the device and kept quiet, hoping that it might provide additional bargaining power in
future negotiations with the USSR.
I reland : T he T hing
Significantly, discovery of the thing was not coincident with an understanding of
how it worked, and it would take the American, British, and Dutch security services
between eighteen months (in the case of the British) and fifteen years (for the
combined Dutch/American effort) to reverse engineer and successfully replicate its
mechanism. In yet another twist of serendipitous denomination attentive, perhaps, to
the epistemological problem that accompanied it, the first working MI5 prototype was
nicknamed ‘Black Magic’ by its chief engineer, Peter Wright. Indeed, Theremin had
accomplished what seemed like a sorcerous act to anyone unfamiliar with the possibilities that electromagnetic radiation offered the world of espionage and clandestine
communication. Theremin’s brief was for a device that would function wirelessly, did
not require traditional microphones, and could be introduced into the ambassador’s
residence without raising suspicion. Faced with the implicit threat of being returned
to a Gulag camp in Kolyma, or executed, Theremin delivered. The thing comprised only
a few simple components: a silver-plated copper cylinder roughly 13 millimetres deep
and 20 millimetres in diameter, and an insulated rod antenna whose original length and
corresponding resonant frequency is a matter of much contention among those who
have attempted to reconstruct the device. Inside the cylinder, the rod terminated in an
adjustable tuning post, forming a capacitor with a diaphragm that extended across the
resonator’s open face. Exact descriptions of the original bug have never been released,
leading to speculation as to whether or not it was simply an early example of RFID
technology, or a more complex device employing harmonic reradiation. In the case of
the latter, the antenna would have acted as both the receiver for the illuminating signal
and the device’s transmitter. Wright’s reconstruction for MI5, renamed SATYR and
used by the British, American, Canadian, and Australian secret services, functioned
with a resonant frequency of 1400 megahertz, although higher frequencies have been
hypothesized for Theremin’s original design.3
The enigma surrounding the thing was to have enduring repercussions in the paranoid psychoscape of Cold War diplomacy and state-sanctioned espionage. In 1962, ten
years after dismantling Theremin’s bug but only two years after public revelations of its
3.
I.W. Conrad, ‘Internal FBI memorandum, 8 May 1953’, <www.cryptomuseum.com/covert/bugs/thing/files/19530508_
fbi.pdf>; G. Brooker and J. Gomez, ‘Lev Termen’s Great Seal Bug Analyzed’, IEEE Aerospace and Electronic Systems
Magazine 28:11 (2013), 4–11.
discovery, the United States became aware that their embassy in Moscow was once
139
again the target of abnormal levels of electromagnetic radiation. Was this evidence
more ominous? Several theories were advanced at the time, although none were ever
officially confirmed as motivation for the bombardment. If it wasn’t destined to illuminate
a newer model of the thing, the electromagnetic signal could have been connected to
Theremin’s subsequent innovation, a method of microwave-based audio surveillance
known as the ‘Snowstorm’ system.4 Others considered it to be a bluff, designed to lead
the Americans into believing that the Soviets possessed an unfathomable new piece of
military technology. Some went even further and suggested that it was indeed evidence
of the latter, hypothesizing a system that employed electromagnetic radiation to induce
neurasthenia or other biological and behavioural changes in its subjects, including
the use of ‘synthetic telepathy’, or mind control. This latter hypothesis inaugurated
an experimental research programme overseen by ARPA at the Walter Reed Army
Institute of Research in the late 1960s.5 The programme, dedicated to exploring the
biophysical effects of microwave radiation, is known in certain circles as the infamous
Pandora Project.6
The thing can be counted among the catalytic moments of covert electromagnetic
surveillance technology in the twentieth century. The existence of synthetic telepathy
may remain a peripheral theory, but the contribution of Theremin’s invention to the
development of RFID tags and scanners, tracking devices, and ubiquitous telesurveillance, not to mention its legacy of ambient paranoia, carries over the threshold of the
millennium, perpetuating itself imperceptibly in the deep structure of twenty-first-century control dynamics.
4.
A. Glinksy, Theremin: Ether Music and Espionage (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2000), 260–61.
5.
D.R. Justesen, ‘Microwaves and Behaviour’, American Psychologist 30:3 (1975), 391–401.
6.
P. Brodeur, Currents of Death (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989), 91–2; N. Steneck, The Microwave Debate
(Boston, MA: MIT Press, 1984), 94–5.
I reland : T he T hing
that a new passive listening device had been installed in the building, or something