Showing posts with label Great Seal Bug. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Great Seal Bug. Show all posts

Saturday, October 15, 2022

SPECIAL EDITION: U.S. Bugging Operation Against Soviets

by Zach Dorfman
Recently, I obtained a set of declassified 1980s intelligence files from Poland’s cold war-era archives. The files detailed a Soviet operation to identify and remove a cornucopia of bugs placed in Russian diplomatic facilities across the United States. 

The document — written in Russian and almost certainly produced by the KGB, unlike the other Polish-language files in the tranche of documents — provides a meticulous pictorial account of the ways in which the U.S. spy services sought to technically surveil the Russians on American soil. The file offers an unprecedented, stunning — if dated — look at these efforts to eavesdrop on Russian government activities within the U.S.

Click to enlarge.

The file details a number of bugs found at Soviet diplomatic facilities in Washington, D.C., New York, and San Francisco, as well as in a Russian government-owned vacation compound, apartments used by Russia personnel, and even Russian diplomats’ cars. 

And the bugs were everywhere: 
  • encased in plaster in an apartment closet; 
  • behind electrical and television outlets; 
  • bored into concrete bricks and threaded into window frames; 
  • inside wooden beams and baseboards;
  • stashed within a building’s foundation itself; 
  • surreptitiously attached to security cameras; 
  • wired into ceiling panels and walls; 
  • and secretly implanted into the backseat of cars and in their window panels, instrument panels, and dashboards. 
It’s an impressive — and impressively thorough — effort by U.S. counterspies... 

Click to enlarge.
“The number of bugs is useful as an indication that this is a sustained operation over years,” a former U.K. intelligence official with experience conducting technical operations told me. (The official requested anonymity to discuss sensitive intelligence techniques.) The sheer variety in where U.S. counterspies placed the bugs shows a great deal of “creativity” on their part, the former U.K. official said. While the bugging of cars and power outlets is considered “fairly standard,” the former official added, U.S. spies cleverly inserted bugs in more unusual locations like window frames...

It's unknown why the Soviets declined to publicize all the bugs they found within their U.S.-based facilities. The Russians ripped them out from their hiding spots, ostensibly preventing them from feeding the U.S. disinformation through the listening devices and trackers they identified.

Click to enlarge.
The likelier explanation is that the KGB knew that U.S. diplomatic facilities in the Soviet Union were bugged to hell — including, at certain points, with listening devices activated by blasting American facilities with microwaves. The use of this technique by the Soviets, which some U.S. officials believed sickened those exposed to it, became a serious diplomatic issue in the 1970s between the two superpowers. more

(Kevin) A friend of mine, now deceased, was one of the CIA technical specialists during this time period who developed and planted these devices. He was prohibited from discussing the actual devices and placement operations even after he retired. However, he did write a "fictitious" story which details a typical bugging operation. Corporate security directors especially should read... The Attack on Axnan Headquarters: An Espionage Operation

Tuesday, July 3, 2018

Washington Policymakers Bluster About High-Tech Foreign Surveillance (again)

Washington policymakers are growing increasingly worried about the threat of high-tech foreign surveillance, a development complicated by U.S. spy agencies' use of similar technologies.

Lawmakers are stepping up their demands for more information from the Trump administration about foreign efforts to spy on Americans' cellphones. more

Saturday, May 26, 2018

The Great Seal Bug Story - 58 Years Ago Today

In 1946, Soviet school children presented a two foot wooden replica of the Great Seal of the United States to Ambassador Averell Harriman.

May 26, 1960 – Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr. displays the Great Seal bug at the United Nations.
The Ambassador hung the seal in his office in Spaso House (Ambassador’s residence). During George F. Kennan’s ambassadorship in 1952, a secret technical surveillance countermeasures (TSCM) inspection discovered that the seal contained a microphone and a resonant cavity which could be stimulated from an outside radio signal.
The cavity resonator ‘bug’ microphone found inside.

On May 26, 1960, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr. unveiled the Great Seal Bug before the UN Security Council to counter Soviet denunciations of American U-2 espionage. The Soviets had presented a replica of the Great Seal of the United States as a gift to Ambassador Averell Harriman in 1946.

The gift hung in the U.S. Embassy for many years, until in 1952, during George F. Kennan’s ambassadorship, U.S. security personnel discovered the listening device embedded inside the Great Seal.

Lodge’s unveiling of this Great Seal before the Security Council in 1960 provided proof that the Soviets also spied on the Americans, and undercut a Soviet resolution before the Security Council denouncing the United States for its U-2 espionage missions. – U.S. Department of State... 

Read the fascinating full history here.

Wednesday, July 12, 2017

How the Dutch Bugged the Soviet Embassy -- Updated with Excellent Graphics

Our friend in The Netherlands, Dr. Cees Wiebes, has alerted us to some updates on the cryptomuseum.com website.

Click to enlarge.
Backgrounds: Dr. Wiebes is the author of Intelligence and the War in Bosnia: 1992-1995 (Studies in Intelligence History). In researching this book he was granted full access to the top-secret archives of the Dutch services and the still classified UN archives. Foreign intelligence services gave him confidential briefings, and he spoke with more than 100 intelligence officials from various countries.

The Crypto Museum, curated by Paul Reuvers and Marc Simons, is the absolute best virtual site I've seen for information on government eavesdropping and information security countermeasures. Both are self-employed engineers from Eindhoven, a lovely small (but very high-tech) city which I've been to multiple times. Their dedication to preserving this history is only rivaled by the photography and graphics they have been able to obtain for the website. Enjoy...

An update of the Dutch bugging of the Soviet embassy in The Hague: http://www.cryptomuseum.com/covert/cases/nl/ra1958.htm

The various types of Dutch bugs that were used.
http://www.cryptomuseum.com/covert/bugs/ec/ec1/index.htm
http://www.cryptomuseum.com/covert/bugs/ec/ec2/index.htm
http://www.cryptomuseum.com/covert/bugs/ec/ec3/index.htm
http://www.cryptomuseum.com/covert/bugs/ec/ec4/index.htm
http://www.cryptomuseum.com/covert/bugs/ec/ec5/index.htm

New information as regards the Moscow bug:
http://www.cryptomuseum.com/covert/bugs/ec/cavity/index.htm

An interesting overview of all Easy Chair- related affairs:
http://www.cryptomuseum.com/covert/bugs/ec/index.htm

Tuesday, July 11, 2017

The Great Seal Redux - Former Minister Admits to Installing a Video / Audio Bug

Ghana - The former Minister of Lands and Natural Resources, Alhaji Inusah Fuseini, has said that he installed the spying device retrieved from the office of the current Minister, John Peter Amewu...

According to him, the hue and cry over the incident was not necessary as the device was not even fully installed... (it appears fully installed)

The device was planted in the huge Coat of Arms plaque hanging in the far left corner of the Minister’s office.

The device included a camera, a storage unit and another device suspected to be a transmitter. It was neatly housed in a black metal box and used batteries.* more

* This description is not totally accurate, based on what's seen in the photo. 
For more on the original Great Seal Bug click here

UPDATE #1
It has emerged that, the secret audiovisual recording device planted at the Lands and Natural Resource Minister’s office was discovered by an Israeli national and not National Security operatives as widely speculated.

According to the Public Relations Officer of the Lands Ministry, Abraham Otabil, the Israeli national [name withheld], who had called on the minister to discuss some private matters when he surprisingly detected the ‘spying’ gadget...

He added that, the detective and his team discovered the bugged device after a brief inspection was carried out at the office. Though the said Israeli national, could not tell the minister how long the device had been planted, National Security operatives were alerted to pick up the matter for further investigations. more

UPDATE #2
Following the bugging of the office of the Minister of Lands and Natural Resources by a former minister under the out-gone National Democratic Congress (NDC) administration – Inusah Fuseini, the Majority Leader in Parliament, Osei Kyei-Mensah-Bonsu, has suggested to all ministers and deputy ministers in the current regime to have their offices screened and swept by the Bureau of National Investigations (BNI).

He said personally, he was going to ask the security agencies to also screen and sweep his office. more

UPDATE #3
The Member of Parliament for Kumbungu, Ras Mubarak, has admitted bugging the office and vehicle of the current acting Chief Executive of the National Youth Authority, Mr Emmanuel Asigiri. more

Tuesday, September 27, 2016

How The Great Seal Bug Became Your Electronic Toll Tag

The story of the electronic tollbooth begins at the turn of the century, in St. Petersburg, Russia. That's where Leon Theremin was born.

Yes, that Theremin — the creator of the musical instrument you play without even touching.

"Just as World War I was starting, and then the Russian Revolution, he found himself in the middle of that and was pulled into the new Soviet inner circle and told he was now a Soviet scientist," says Albert Glinksy, who wrote the biography Theremin: Ether Music and Espionage.

Playing with electromagnetic fields while working on a gas detection meter, Theremin discovered a trick: Using the radio frequency between two antennas, he'd wave one hand for volume and the other for pitch...

Theremin was sent to New York City, where he performed and continued to invent. But he also had another mission.

"He was carrying out espionage, so he had this sort of double life in New York," Glinsky says.

In 1938, Theremin returns to Russia.

But the political winds had changed, and he was sent to a Siberian labor camp, then transferred to a prison for scientists.

It was there that Theremin took spying to a new level when he was ordered to build a bugging device to spy on the U.S. ambassador in Moscow.

"The brilliance of this device was it had no batteries, it needed no electrical external source," Glinsky says. "And it was perfectly inert until it was activated, when they wanted to externally, by microwave beams from a companion device that was a few buildings down."


The bug was the size of a quarter and placed in the office of the U.S. ambassador in Moscow. It was hidden in a seal of the United States, where it stayed for seven years before being accidentally discovered.  (Not true. It was found during a TSCM search.)

Theremin may have created the first RFID-like device. But it took a Brooklyn inventor to connect another technology — friend or foe radar — with modern computing that gets us to electronic toll collection. more

Thursday, June 23, 2016

The Great Seal Bug - Excellent Synopsis

In 1946, a group of Russian children from the Vladimir Lenin All-Union Pioneer Organization (sort of a Soviet scouting group) presented a carved wooden replica of the Great Seal of the United States to Averell Harriman, the U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union.

Click to enlarge
The gift, a gesture of friendship to the USSR's World War II ally, was hung in the ambassador’s official residence at Spaso House in Moscow. It stayed there on a wall in the study for seven years until, through accident and a ruse, the State Department discovered that the seal was more than a mere decoration.

It was a bug.

The Soviets had built a listening device—dubbed “The Thing” by the U.S. intelligence community—into the replica seal and had been eavesdropping on Harriman and his successors the whole time it was in the house. “It represented, for that day, a fantastically advanced bit of applied electronics,” wrote George Kennan, the ambassador at the time the device was found. “I have the impression that with its discovery the whole art of intergovernmental eavesdropping was raised to a new technological level.” more

The full story.