A gift from the Soviet Union

[Baron von Lotsov]

The time was 1945 and this was a gift to the United States Ambassador of the Soviet Union



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August 4, 1945, several weeks before the end of World War II, a delegation from the Young Pioneer organization of the Soviet Union presented the bugged carving to Ambassador Harriman, as a "gesture of friendship" to the USSR's war ally. It hung in the ambassador's Moscow residential study for seven years, until it was exposed in 1952 during the tenure of Ambassador George F. Kennan.

In 1951 at the British embassy a radio operator accidentally heard Soviet voices on the radio.



Crazy story? What was remarkable was the bug did not actually transmit anything by itself. You have to transmit a signal that it picks up and then it uses the tiny amount of power from the radio signal to modulate it via some incredibly clever and simple circuit. It is the world's first RFID with microphone.



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This is the special relationship at work. What would Uncle Sam have done without the British pulling them out of a ditch?