More than one hundred hidden listening devices have in recent years been found in U.S. embassies and residences in Soviet-bloc countries. A picturesque example of Soviet advances in miniaturization was discovered accidentally by a U.S. military attache at a Moscow bar when he picked up a martini not intended for him. The “olive” in it, according to a Time account, contained a transmitter, and the tiny toothpick stuck in it was an antenna.
One step the U.S. Government is now taking to protect secret discussions in its embassies in questionable countries is to ship portable rooms to the embassies. Such a room is sent as a knockdown package and assembled inside the embassy. It is shielded on all sides to prevent transmission of sound and is so built as to permit visual inspection under, over, and all around the “room” for any wires.
U.S. companies now can make microphones and transmitters just about as small as anyone could conceivably desire. Transmitters now available can fit inside a lipstick tube or ball-point pen or appear to be a lump of sugar. Microphones smaller than a twenty-five-cent piece are being made and widely used.
At least thirty U.S. companies are now involved in manufacturing electronic eavesdropping equipment. One of the larger companies, Solar Research, Inc., in Oakland Park, Florida, claims that in 1962, for example, its sales increased fourfold within a year. Some sell only to law-enforcement agencies; others sell only surveillance equipment to law-enforcement agencies but sell counterintrusion devices to private concerns; and some seem interested in selling anything they have to anyone who has the money to pay for the devices. There is no law against manufacturing or selling bugging devices, and pitifully few laws, FCC regulations, or court decisions against their use. I had no difficulty, for example, in obtaining catalogues from several companies. And I saw on display in the window of an electronics shop on Forty-third Street in New York City a device that automatically starts a tape recorder when a telephone conversation comes onto a line.
When one West Coast manufacturer of “bugs” was displaying his new models to the convention of the American Society for Industrial Security, he cautioned that sales were “subject to pertinent regulation.” But he added: “I cannot be responsible for the integrity of the user. . . . I’m not going to ask the buyer what he does with it.” (A leading electronics magazine, incidentally, has advertised for $22.50 a “Be a Spy” correspondence course that includes instruction in bugging.)
As for tiny tape recorders, their manufacturers have been conducting large-scale advertising campaigns in large-circulation newspapers and magazines. A full-page ad for the pocketsize Minifon cited not only its value in recording routine memos, conferences, etc., but pictured its “wrist-watch” microphone ... its “inconspicuous tie-clip microphone” . . . how the recorder could be “concealed” in one’s briefcase . . . and its “unique telephone pickup” for attaching to one’s telephone receiver to record phone conversations.
In the course of my research I was given a number of demonstrations on the arts of bugging and de-bugging by people who were clearly experts. Those offering their services to the public as anti-intrusion specialists were perhaps most willing to discuss openly the problems involved. Raymond Farrell, manager of Bondwitt Sound Engineering Co., in New York, explained: “If we’re serving the public, we’re anti-intrusion specialists; if we’re serving the law, lawfully, we’re intrusion specialists.”
As he and I were chatting in an office, he took out of his briefcase a transmitter the size of a small matchbook. At his suggestion we went down the hall to a room where two girls were chatting and with their permission placed it and its tiny microphone on a table several feet from them. We returned to the office where we had been talking. He closed the door and turned on his receiving box. The conversation of the girls came through loud and clear. He said the girls could be heard at least a block away, and perhaps two, depending on conditions.
The most impressive demonstration was put on for me by Ralph V. Ward of Mosler Research Products, Inc., in Danbury, Connecticut. He is one of the leading authorities in the free world on surveillance devices. His company and its predecessors pioneered in making miniature surveillance devices for federal agencies, including some in the international field. As vice-president of sales he spends a good deal of time in Washington taking orders and soliciting research and development contracts. “We have not run out of wonders,” he said. The Mosler company now also makes much of its equipment available to state and city agencies and to licensed investigative agencies. And it offers to industry for slightly more than $300 a “security” kit that contains a host of tools for detecting bugging devices—but none of the bugging devices themselves.
The amiable Mr. Ward generously spent most of a day giving me a chalk talk on the problems involved in both bugging and de-bugging and demonstrated, item by item, the tools that go into the pigskin satchels sold to federal and other official agencies. The filled satchels are produced in lots of a hundred and contain both bugging and de-bugging tools. One interesting item was a microphone mounted in rubber a quarter of an inch thick. It can be slipped under a hotel door. Another device was the spike mike: a microphone attached to a spike nearly a foot long. It can be driven into walls or doors, which serve as resonators.
I shall try to describe here my understanding of the latest achievements in microphoning techniques and tools as they were explained to me by expert informants, including Mr. Ward.
The challenge today is not to make the “bugs” small but to make them more undetectable, for use in spots where the occupants are security-oriented and likely to make checks. A transmitter, no matter how small, is fairly easy to spot by an anti-intrusion expert with room-“sweeping” equipment. He hears a squeal in his receiver when his electronic “mop” gets close to a hidden transmitter. A buried microphone with a tiny wire leading to a remote tape recorder is vastly more difficult to detect. Thus the transmitter is considered to be most appropriate for quick hit-and-run jobs, whereas the mike wired to a remote recorder is preferred for permanent installations.
Some of the preferred places to tape hidden microphones in a room are at the back of desk drawers (because people usually don’t go all the way back even when searching), in the upholstery, or the underside of a bed. If a long-term bugging with a transmitter is planned, there is an advantage in putting the transmitter in an electric clock or TV set or in a light fixture so that it can draw its power from the building’s electric power source.
Another favored spot for hiding bugging devices is within the frame of a picture on the wall. Mosler sells a nice pastoral scene that has a very thin transmitter pasted inside the paper covering the back of the picture. (Price: $215.) A visual search would not detect this transmitter even if the picture were taken off the wall. These pictures are particularly esteemed for installation in hotel or motel rooms where persons under surveillance are going to stay.
The base of a telephone is also a choice spot for making a quick installation of a bug: Mr. Farrell demonstrated to me that it can be done within one minute. There are two ways of installing the bug. A two-wire tap using a small transmitter in the base gives you only the telephone conversation. A three- wire tap includes a wire that jumps the hook switch and thus broadcasts all calls and in addition all conversation going on in the room when the phone is not in use.
As counterintrusion skills have advanced, the professionals have sought to place their microphones beyond the probing range of the metal-detection sweepers now widely used. This means placing the mike