The Soviet-designed “thing” was god-tier levels of surveillance wizardry.

In a world full of computers, if you’re younger, it’s often hard to picture a world where they didn’t exist at the same levels that we see today. In the post-WW2 years, though, global tensions would remain high. As superpowers would acquire and expand nuclear weapon stocks, the Cold War-era espionage between these superpowers would reach insane levels.

The Cold War was the era of the double-agent, counterintelligence and offensive espionage operations targeting all manner of state infrastructure and assets.

It wasn’t just physical surveillance, though. Electronic and technical surveillance would also rapidly expand during this era, and while the most noteworthy systems would be space-based, there were also a myriad of terrestrial-based systems that would also play an important part in history.

Without a doubt, one of the most infamous systems would be the tale of “The Thing”.

The What?

When you edit a blog focused on radio-based systems and education, you tend to be passionate about all things RF, and as one of those people, it’s hard not to be impressed by the overall design of the thing.

Acquired by the US ambassador as a gift in mid-1945 the thing was a simple, carved wooden seal that carried its own little secret. As ingenious as it was simple, this secret would be responsible for shaking geopolitics in the aftermath of World War 2.

A passive listening device, the thing was a membrane connected to a small, quarter-wave antenna that required no onboard energy source to operate. An extremely smart design the thing would remain radio silent in all circumstances until it was illuminated by RF signals of a particular frequency. When this occurred, the capacitive membrane would become a microphone, transmitting all nearby audio in the vicinity out to a nearby listening station.
The thing was as simple as it was ingenious. It would lay dormant untill hit by RF at which point the onboard transmitter and microphone would activate. Here’s a cutaway of the internals. Source: Wikipedia.

This almost rudimentary design would hide its efficiency. Due to its lack of an active transmitter, the thing would be remarkably effective, feeding intelligence to soviet intelligence agencies for years before its discovery.

Discovery

While it was gifted in 1945, it would take a full six years before its discovery and even then, that only occurred by chance. It would be a British Intelligence officer at the British embassy in Moscow who would incidentally note the presence of strong radio signals on an open Soviet Air Force radio channel that contained strong and distinct American accents.

Once its presence was identified, it became much easier to search for the system, as when illuminated, the transmitter would be vulnerable to all the usual direction-finding techniques.
With this in mind, British intelligence agents were able to make short work of locating the system, which would eventually be found in the ambassador's private study. Whoops.

Gary Powers would be shot down in his U-2 spyplane during the height of tensions. Source: Wikipedia.

Effect On Geopolitics

While you’d expect this to be a big deal in intelligence circles, the reality was that at the time, it was a different era regarding diplomatic incidents that would focus on surveillance and espionage. Suspicion between superpowers would be at an all-time high after nuclear testing, and the incident really only served to normalise this aggressive form of spying between countries.

In fact, it would be just five years later when US pilot Francis Powers would be piloting a Lockheed, U-2 spyplane deep inside the Soviet Union in an attempt to photograph soviet missile and bomber bases. Powers and his aircraft would eventually be shot down by an S-75 Dvinia missile system as he flew over Sverdlovsk.

It’s fair to say that in some instances, little has changed in our modern world, as you won’t have to look far to find instances of diplomatic incidents and over-spying between countries the world over. Even allies have openly spied on each other at points!

Modern Espionage

It’s important to point out that this was the 1940s when this was initially developed, but it would help to lay the foundations for surveillance principles that would far outlive the longevity of the device, namely the concept of passive surveillance that would help decrease the overall detection probability of a surveillance device.

As you’d expect, it’s much easier to find a transmitter that is transmitting all the time in comparison to one that transmits in short bursts, and modern encryption techniques have been paired with microelectronics to help make electronic surveillance methods almost trivially easy.

When we talk about passive surveillance methods though, we’d be doing a disservice if we didn’t at least touch on the topic of the surveillance device most of us carry with us each and every day.

Poorly configured Mobile phones also provide a veritable treasure trove of information available to those who might care to look for it. We’ve talked before about things like probe requests in the Radio Hackers publication as well as taking a look at how these might be tracked passively as well.

As technology continues to evolve, we’ll see more of these interesting and curious espionage plots that sound like they’ve come straight out of a James Bond feature movie.

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