I asked Bob Wallace – author and former CIA tech office director – about the preponderance of ever-awesomer kids’ spygear. We shared a laugh about cheap cameras, false notions of privacy, and unstoppable technological progress. His point? We ain’t seen nothin’ yet.
Spycraft: The Secret History of the CIA’s Spytechs from Communism to Al-Qaeda goes on sale in stores today. I know you think I probably milked it for all it’s worth, but there’s actually a ton of mind-boggling spy gear in there that I didn’t have a chance to cover on Giz, such as:
The freakiest thing about reading CIA gadget lore is that it’s all real. The nerds working for the agency’s Office of Technical Services were always devising and building gadgets to get people out of—or into—difficult situations. Here’s a rundown of crazy stuff from the Spytech book, not necessarily stuff you’d carry all at the same time, but stuff that, to paraphrase Dr. Strangelove, would help a fella have a pretty nice weekend in Moscow. Jump for all the pictures and descriptions:
In celebrating the launch of Spycraft, I’ve looked at all kinds of gadgets, but the bread and butter of Cold War CIA gear were tiny cameras and listening devices. The bugs aren’t so exciting to look at, though the stories of their placement make great reading. The cameras, on the other hand, always come in clever “concealments.”
You know how, when KGB agents are tailing you, all you want to do is roll out of the car while your driver keeps going? Only those agents aren’t dumb: If they suddenly see one fewer head inside the car, they’re gonna know something’s up. Spytechs at the CIA figured that if you brought along something compact yet inflatable, you could quickly blow it up as you exited the vehicle, and nobody would see any difference. It was the early ’80s so, naturally, the researchers thought of sex dolls.
It looks like your typical junk, tooling around on coastal waterways in Southeast Asia in the late 1960s. Think of it in Apocalypse Now terms: It was basically a water taxi for personnel on highly classified missions. OK, so then say that classified mission is somehow compromised—here’s what it looks like when it literally blows its cover:
I was surprised to learn that the CIA has had a long though not always fruitful relationship with the animal kingdom. In Spycraft, the authors describe many clever animal-assisted devices, from the dead-rat dead-drop pouch to the “acoustic kitty,” a cat with a remote listening system embedded in its body. And what’s this about the 1 million bats the CIA’s precursor, the OSS, were gonna use to firebomb Tokyo during WWII?
You find yourself held under “house arrest” in a remote jungle region of Indonesia, sometime in the late 1950s. You may have your suit, fedora and at least one halfway decent tie, but the chances of getting back to the US of A seem slim. The CIA thinks you’re not so dispensable, so spytechs—with the help of the always patriotic Goodyear Company—build an inflatable aeroplane that they can drop into a jungle clearing. Here’s what it looks like when fully inflated and ready for takeoff:
To kick off our CIA gadget series, I’m starting with something from the beginning, well, before the beginning: covert weaponry sent to resistance fighters behind enemy lines during WWII. They thought of all kinds of disruptive technologies, including exploding edible flour, cigarette-shaped single-use guns and other discrete but explodey gadgets.
This week is Gizmodo’s salute to CIA spy technology. What’s the occasion? The May 29th release of Spycraft: The Secret History of the CIA’s Spytechs from Communism to al-Qaeda, by Robert Wallace and H. Keith Melton (with Henry R. Schlesinger). While we don’t typically review books, this one happens to be the best we’ve ever seen on the subject of old-school spyware, a book the CIA itself held up for many many months before just barely deeming it safe for public consumption, a book that pretty much proves that all the freaky spy gadgetry you’ve seen in movies—and some that you haven’t—is ALL TOTALLY REAL.
