The Soviet artwork that spied on the US

He describes the technology of The Thing in musical terms – as being composed of tubes like organ pipes and a membrane “like the skin of a drum, that will vibrate to the human voice”. But it was compacted into a tiny object that looks like a hat pin – and with the advantage of passing unnoticed by counter-surveillance screening because it had “no electronics, no battery, and it doesn’t get warm”.

The engineering of such an instrument was also painstakingly precise – “a cross between a Swiss watch and a micrometre”. Historian H Keith Melton has claimed that, in its day, The Thing “elevated the science of audio monitoring to a level previously thought to be impossible.”

Within Spaso House, The Thing was only activated when a remote transceiver, based in a nearby building, was switched on. This sent out a high frequency signal which reflected back all the vibrations coming from the bug’s antenna. It was only when a British military radio operator working in Moscow in 1951 accidentally tuned into the exact wavelength used by The Thing, and heard conversations from a far-distant room, that it was detected. The next year, US technicians swept the ambassadorial residence and – after no fewer than three days’ search – realised that the hand-carved Great Seal was an invisible ear, eavesdropping on behind-the-scenes ambassadorial discussions.

Art as espionage

Reflecting on the success of The Thing, one of the Russian technicians who operated it, Vadim Goncharov, said that “for a long time, our country was able to get specific and very important information that gave us certain advantages… in the Cold War”. And to this day, nobody outside of Soviet intelligence knows how many other “Things” may have been used by the USSR to spy on the West at the time.