1946 was a time of rebuilding across the world as WWII reached it's conclusion. The allies had won, and the axis powers were defeated. Hitler and Mussolini were dead, Japan had agreed to unconditional surrender. The Cold War was just beginning.
In 1946 a group of Soviet school children gave a beautiful carved replica of the Great Seal of The United States to Ambassador Averell Harriman. The Ambassador hung the seal in the Ambassador's residence, Spaso House in Moscow, prominently on the wall. In 1952 a routine security check turned up something strange about the seal.
Within the seal was a small compartment, and inside the compartment was an advanced passive repeater. The repeater would activate when 330 MHz radio waves were received from an external transmitter. This meant that the Soviets could hear anything inside the office, and that no power supply was necessary on the device itself. As such, when the device was dormant, it was virtually undetectable. George Kennan, the ambassador at the time, spoke of the discovery in his memoirs.
'Quivering with excitement, the technician extracted from the shattered depths of the seal a small device, not much larger than a pencil . . . capable of being activated by some sort of electronic ray from outside the building. When not activated, it was almost impossible to prevent. . . . It represented, for that day, a fantastically advanced bit of applied electronics.'
While simple by today's standards, the device was quite advanced for the time. According to Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., United States Ambassador to the United Nations, there were more than 100 similiar devices discovered in U.S. Missions and residences in the U.S.S.R. and Eastern Europe.
So, always be careful what you say, you never know who may be listening.
-Professor Walter
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