THE GREAT SEAL BUG STORY

THE GREAT SEAL BUG STORY

(above) Replica of the Great Seal bug.
On display at the National Security Agency (NSA)
National Cryptologic Museum

In 1946, Soviet school children presented a two foot wooden replica of the Great Seal of the United States to Ambassador Averell Harriman.

The Ambassador hung the seal in his office in Spaso House (Ambassador's residence). During George F. Kennan's ambassadorship in 1952, a routine security check discovered that the seal contained a microphone and a resonant cavity which could be stimulated from an outside radio signal.

May 26, 1960
Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr.
displays the Great Seal bug at the United Nations.

A Brief History of Russian Spying
Henry J. Hyde, Republican of Illinois

Russia's notoriety for eavesdropping and espionage stretches back even to the czars. James Buchanan, U.S. minister in St. Petersburg during 1832-33 and later U.S. President, recounted that 'we are continually surrounded by spies both of high and low degree. You can scarcely hire a servant who is not a secret agent of the police.'

An 1850-53 successor, Neil S. Brown, reconfirmed that 'the opinion prevails that ministers are constantly subjected to a system of espionage, and that even their servants are made to disclose what passed in their households, their conversations, associations, etc.' Otto von Bismarck, who represented Prussia from 1859 to 1862, stated 'it was especially difficult to keep a cypher secure at St. Petersburg, because all the embassies were of necessity obliged to employ Russian servants and subordinates in their households, and it was easy for Russian police to procure agents among these.' The tradition intensified and became more sophisticated under the Bolsheviks and their successors. The wife of the Italian ambassador in Moscow during 1927-30 said: 'Spying on the part of the authorities was so common as not even to be thought of as spying.'

Nonetheless, Western laxity in the face of these dangers also has deep roots. A confidential 1940 memo to the White House from FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover related the results of an investigation triggered by British complaints that shared intelligence was being leaked to the Soviets through the Moscow embassy. The memo revealed that single U.S. employees in Moscow frequented a prostitution ring linked to Soviet intelligence and that classified documents were handled improperly and may have been obtained by Soviet workers. The code room was found open at night, with safes unlocked and code books lying on the table.

By the 1930's, technical eavesdropping supplemented human espionage. Guests at Spaso House, the U.S. ambassador's residence, at one point were given cards welcoming and warning them: 'Every room is monitored by the KGB and all of the staff are employees of the KGB. We believe the garden also may be monitored. Your luggage may be searched two or three times a day. Nothing is ever stolen and they hardly disturb things.'

In 1952, the Soviet gave U.S. representatives a carved wooden replica of the Great Seal of the United States. It hung prominently for years, at least part of the time in the ambassador's study, before a tiny microphone was found in the eagle. George Kennan's memoirs describe the event. In a theme now familiar, Kennan relates that Spaso House had been redecorated under Soviet supervision, without the presence of any American supervisors, giving them opportunity 'to perfect their wiring of the house.' 'The ordinary, standard devices for the prevention of electronic eavesdropping revealed nothing at all,' but technicians decided to check again, in case our prevention methods were out of date.

'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.'

In displaying this equipment to the United Nations, Henry Cabot Lodge charged that more than 100 similar devices had been recovered in U.S. missions and residences in the U.S.S.R. and Eastern Europe. Jacob Beam, U.S. ambassador from 1969 to 1973, wrote that the 'ever-present pressures' or residing in the U.S.S.R. included 'physical surveillance, and constant bugging of conversations by various types of concealed devices.'

Such Soviet monitoring techniques have been regularly discovered and occasionally publicized during the postwar period. Incidents revealed during the 1980's alone are alarming in their scope and seriousness. In 1982, we verified indications that the new embassy building had been penetrated. In 1984, we found that an unsecured shipment of typewriters for the Moscow Embassy had been bugged and had been transmitting intelligence data for years. In 1985, newspapers revealed that the Soviets were using invisible 'spydust' to facilitate tracking and monitoring of US diplomats. In December 1986, Clayton Lonetree's confession revealed that the Soviets had recruited espionage agents among Marine Guards at the embassy. Recently, we found microphones that had been operating in the Leningrad consulate for many years.

Although Moscow had developed over centuries a reputation for severe counterintelligence risks, and although the postwar period was replete with examples of this, U.S. State Department and embassy personnel continued to act like babes in the KBG woods.

The Congressional Record
Henry J. Hyde, Republican of Illinois.

"Electronic eavesdropping is not new. But until the Watergate incident, the general public knew little about it. This innocence was first challenged in 1960, when Henry Cabot Lodge (Jr.) displayed the now infamous Seal bug to the United Nations as an example of Soviet spying on this country (USA). With this dramatic revelation, bugging first became almost a household word, and widespread public interest has persisted ever since.

The triumph of the Great Seal bug, which was hung over the desk of our Ambassador to Moscow, was its simplicity. It was simply a resonate chamber, with a flexible front wall that acted as a diaphragm, changing the dimensions of the chamber when sound waves struck it. It had no power pack of its own, no wires that could be discovered, no batteries to wear out. An ultra-high frequency signal beamed to it from a van parked near the building was reflected from the bug, after being modulated by sound waves from conversations striking the bug's diaphragm.

The Great Seal launched electronic snooping as no other incident could. The feeling in many circles seems to be that if such appalling tactics are employed by major world powers, lesser applications would hardly be as startling, if indeed not justifiable."

The Electronic Invasion, Robert Brown, 1967, 1975

The original Great Seal bug.