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'The most ingenious stunt since the Trojan Horse': The Soviet artwork that spied on the US

A listening device hidden in an artwork in 1945 was undetected by US security for seven years – and quina numeroit's not the only example of art having been manipulated for subterfuge.

Eighty years ago, during the final weeks of World War Two, a troop of Russian boy scouts presented the US Ambassador in Moscow with a hand-carved Great Seal of the US, at his official residence – Spaso House. The gift symbolised cooperation between Russia and the US during the war, and the US Ambassador W Averell Harriman proudly hung it in his house until?1952.

But unbeknownst to the ambassador and his security team, the seal contained a covert listening device, later dubbed "The Thing" by US technical security teams. It spied on diplomatic conversations, completely undetected for seven years. By using a seemingly innocuous artwork to infiltrate the enemy and gain strategic advantage, the Soviets had pulled off the most ingenious stunt since Odysseus's Trojan Horse. But this is a true story, even if it sounds like the stuff of spy fiction.

How did The Thing work? John Little, a 79-year-old specialist in counter-surveillance, has long been fascinated by the device, and even built his own replica of it. A documentary about Little's incredible work was released this year and, following its sell-out first live viewing in May, is due to be screened on 27 September at the National Museum of Computing, at Bletchley Park, Buckinghamshire.

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.

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.

But its success as a bugging device was only partly due to its technical originality. It was effective because it exploited cultural attitudes towards beautiful objects. We tend to trust artworks and decorative items as passive symbols of status, taste or cultural interest. Russian intelligence weaponised this assumption with their sculpted, maple wood Great Seal.

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And it's not the only example from the history of art having been manipulated for espionage, subterfuge and military strategy. As well as painting the?Mona Lisa, Leonardo da Vinci also designed tanks and siege weapons, and Peter Paul Rubens acted as a spy during the Thirty Years War.?Artists from various nations during World War One and World War Two devised camouflage and deception operations, and Anthony Blunt, a British art historian (and Surveyor of the Royal Art Collection) was a Soviet spy throughout World War Two and the beginning of the Cold War.

In the strange case of The Thing, musical history is also relevant. Its ingenious inventor, Lev Sergeyevich Termen, more commonly referred to as Léon Theremin, was a Russian-born inventor and a talented musician. He devised the world's first electronic instrument – known, after its creator, as the Theremin. It can be played without touching anything – movements of the hand through the air around its antennas control the notes. The Theremin's haunting sound became synonymous with American sci-fi film scores in the 1950s – perhaps most notably The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), which, fittingly enough, is often cited as a parable about Cold War paranoia.

After its discovery, The Thing was kept top secret by US intelligence. But in May 1960, at the height of the nuclear arms race, an American U-2 spy plane was shot down over Russia. In the ensuing diplomatic furore, US State Department officials publicly exposed the Great Seal at a UN Security Council meeting in order to prove that Cold War espionage was not one-sided. The infiltration of an ambassadorial residence was such an embarrassing breach of security, John Little believes, "that it took shooting down a spy plane to actually bring The Thing into the public domain". But the true technical mastery of The Thing was never revealed to the general public.

Behind closed doors, the device was studied in depth by British counter-intelligence, who codenamed it SATYR. And its details remained an official state secret until former security officer Peter Wright revealed all in his memoir Spycatcher in 1987.

The Thing has beguiled historians because of how technically sophisticated it was for its time, and how it shaped the Cold War spy game. But it also reveals a strange and darker history of high culture, occurring outside the cosseted splendour of opera houses and art galleries, where classical musicians devise bugging devices, and hand-carved artworks are instruments for gathering military intelligence.

The Thing will be screened on 27 September at the National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park, Buckinghamshire.

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