BBC TV asked if I could build a working replica of Leon Theremin's Great Seal Bug, a Top Secret 1940s Soviet eavesdropping device , for "The Secret Genius of Modern Life" with Professor Hannah Fry.
You don't say "No" to that sort of request.
The Bug was planted in the US Ambassador's residence at 10 Spasopeskovskaya Square in Moscow near the end of World War Two in 1945. It ran WITHOUT ANY BATTERIES OR MAINS POWER for the next SEVEN years, leaking the secret conversations from the Ambassador's study in Spaso House to the NKVD.
The story of the Bug is a masterpiece of Spycraft and PsyOps and technical engineering skill. An elegant solution produced under extreme conditions. It's also a classic tale of what spies and spying and counterespionage and technical security countermeasures used to be all about. I uncover a lot of disinformation, some of it intentional, some of it resulting from group-think and assumptions.
Now you may have heard the story before, and have heard the technical explanations and the politics and history. I'm the sort of obsessive nerd that has to MAKE things to test them out properly, and I try to do my research from primary sources rather than repeating the twaddle and nonsense that sometimes surrounds Zlatoust, the Great Seal Bug.
This is the story of my personal quest. It escalated from "Can you build one" right up to "Can you demonstrate it on camera in Broadcasting House and be interviewed by the presenter and appear on The Secret Genius of Modern Life?".
It encompasses research, design, modelling, machining, lathework, testing of the Bug, setting up the equipment inside the Council Chamber at the front of the BBC's iconic Art Deco Broadcasting House in Langham Place in the West End of London and working with the production team and Professor Hannah Fry. It's a story of mishaps and near-disasters. This is part one of a series about the Bug. Future instalments will cover the history right back to before 1920, the personalities, the Gulags, the Sharaskas, the showbiz celebrity musician and entrepreneur at the heart of the design, then the deep technical analysis and the Physics and Maths of how the passive resonant microphone and its supporting systems REALLY work.
BUY ME A COFFEE? https://ko-fi.com/machiningandmicrowaves
PATREON: https://patreon.com/MachiningandMicrowaves
For those able to access BBC programming, The Secret Genius of Modern Life Episode 1 (Bank Card) is at https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001f1td
Citations and references
https://www.unmultimedia.org/searchers/yearbook/page.jsp?volume=1960&page=51&searchType=advanced
https://web.archive.org/web/20200725004847/http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/u2.htm
https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1958-60v10p1/d147
https://qsl-history.webs.com/apps/photos/photo?photoid=28448651
https://www.rbth.com/history/335209-artek-soviet-pioneer-camp
https://vk.com/wall-57819359_58505?lang=en
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Young_Pioneers_(Soviet_Union)
https://www.cryptomuseum.com/covert/bugs/thing/files/theremin_cia.pdf
https://worldradiohistory.com/Archive-Electronics-Illustrated/Electronics-Illustrated-1962-01.pdf
https://www.hp.com/hpinfo/abouthp/histnfacts/museum/earlyinstruments/0010/0010front.html
https://hackaday.com/2015/12/08/theremins-bug/
https://www.counterpunch.org/2010/07/23/spying-in-the-red-dawn-of-wi-fi/
https://www.cryptomuseum.com/covert/bugs/thing/files/20181004_TheThingAndI.pdf
US Embassy image NVO, CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Chimney image US Dept of State
https://www.greetingsisland.com/ does lovely party invites!
Stalin and Berezhkov U.S. Army Signal Corp Photograph, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
US Naval Laboratory Devin Morris, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
UN Security Council Per Krohg, CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Horch 853 Steve Ginn from Western Washington, United States, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons