Matthew Bevan

So this British radio operator is sitting inside the British embassy, which is in Moscow.

And he's, you know, used to listening to Soviet radio communications with each other.

And suddenly he hears voices speaking English in American accents.

And this is not supposed to be...

on the radio something very strange is going on that this conversation is is being beamed out across Moscow in a way that he can pick up so he's certainly very confused they figure that the only reason they can hear this American voice on Soviet radio is that there must be a spy bug somewhere that the Soviets are listening in on important conversations

somewhere in an American building or a British building or something that is somehow broadcasting private conversations out on the airwaves that can then be picked up by anyone with a radio receiver.

So they're very concerned about what they're hearing.

So it must be, they thought, coming from inside either the embassy, the US embassy, or the US ambassador's residence, which were two separate buildings.

But obviously they said, well, we heard this voice at this time, so the ambassador was inside his residence at the time, and so it must be inside the residence.

I think there would have been some freaking out, but I think to a certain extent it was expected, simply because they knew that the Soviets would be trying to do something like this because they were also doing it to the Soviets.

So they simply assumed that someone, you know, that people were potentially spying on them.

The concerning thing, the bit where they really started to freak out was when they couldn't find it.

When they went through with their bug detection equipment that is designed to detect anything that's got an electric charge going through it or a radio signal going through it, coming out of it, they walk around the US ambassador's residence scanning every single bit of the residence and they cannot find any bugs.

They can't find any source of these voices.

No matter what they do, they're walking around, they're scanning, scanning, scanning, scanning the building and they cannot find anything.

Well, I mean, you would assume, because this was the technology that they had at the time, the things that you see in spy movies.

They were expecting there to be a little microphone hidden somewhere in the building.

Obviously, though, that little microphone would need to have a battery, a power source of some kind that was allowing it to broadcast information.

these voices out onto the radio waves because a microphone would need a power source, they thought.

And the other thing is that they would have assumed that the microphone, if it was hidden somewhere in the residence, would be broadcasting all the time.