Matthew Bevan

No, no, no.

A scout troop had given it to the ambassador on the 4th of August 1945 as a gift to celebrate the US and Soviet Union's allied victory in World War II.

It works, basically.

It's like a box with two little antennas sticking off it.

One is vertical...

Um, like, it makes it look like a radio, and the other one is kind of a loop that comes out the side of the box.

And it was invented by this man named Leon Theremin, who was a Russian citizen who was living in the United States in 1920 when he invented this device.

He was a musician and sort of had a fascination with technology and electronics.

And he invented this thing that made this weird noise and he started, you know, touring it around America and kind of had a sort of a little theremin show that he would go on.

And he became very famous throughout the 1920s playing his theremin.

There would be theremin concerts.

There was, you know, one with a performance where 10 thereminists performed.

played alongside a symphony orchestra at a big concert hall in New York.

It was a very famous thing.

But then, in 1938, he is kidnapped and returned to Russia.

As far as the Western media was concerned, he'd disappeared, presumed dead, but he had in fact disappeared into the Soviet gulag system where he was forced to invent various spying devices, including the thing...

Yes, she never saw him again.

Didn't have any idea what had happened to him for decades.

And little did any of them know he was making this incredible spy device for the Soviet Union under duress against his will.

How is it all of this ended up becoming public?