Chapter 1: What historical context sets the stage for the Cold War rivalry?
ABC Listen. Podcasts, radio, news, music and more. How reliable is your memory of a crime scene? And can those memories be manipulated? Connected to wrongful convictions?
How a memory works can be damaging for a justice system and for the integrity of a justice system.
This is Sana Khadar from All In The Mind. If you are a fan of true crime, you should check out our new series, Forensic. It's about the quirks and curiosities of our weird human brains. Search for All In The Mind on ABC Listen or wherever you get your podcasts. Here is a news flash. The German radio has just announced that Hitler is dead.
Germany, the enemy who drove all Europe into war, has been finally overcome. During the first few moments of this bulletin, the war in Europe is coming to its official end.
World War II has ended. Nazi Germany has been defeated. The US, Britain and the Soviet Union banded together to win a war. But now the relationship between them all is, well, it's tense. We've shifted into Cold War territory and they're watching each other with intense side eye. And it turns out, listening to each other as well.
The year is 1951, and a British spy radio operator in Moscow is monitoring a Soviet frequency. He's been listening for hours, and frankly, he's starting to nod off. Until he hears something that makes him sit up and clutch his headphones in disbelief.
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. So he's certainly very confused.
And it wasn't just any American voice he was listening to. The US ambassador to Russia was the voice that they eventually managed to identify. So the Americans swing into action. They're searching the ambassador's study to see if they can find this listening bug.
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.
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Chapter 2: What mysterious event occurred involving the US ambassador in 1951?
Because it turns out that voice belongs to Alan G. Kirk, the US ambassador to the Soviet Union.
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.
No Cold War expert, but I've seen some James Bond movies, and did they just freak out a little bit when they realised that somebody clearly had a listening device on the US ambassador in the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War? Like, did they just freak out a little bit?
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.
Yes, it is one thing to know you're being spied on. It's another to not know how you're being spied on. The Americans searched the ambassador's residence inside and out. In fact, they looked everywhere for this thing.
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.
So what exactly are they looking for? If you're looking for a recording device back in the late 40s, early 50s, what sort of things would you be doing to locate a bug?
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Chapter 3: How did American officials react to the strange radio transmissions?
And inside, they found a device, a very simple device, which they called The Thing. It had no power source and no electronic components. and it just looked like a coin with an aerial sticking out of it, basically.
Unlike traditional bugs, the thing, as the Americans seriously called it, it contained no wires, no battery, no active electronics. Instead, it was a passive cavity resonator, meaning that it remained dormant until it was activated by an external radio beam, and only then would it transmit audio.
They were astounded by the simplicity and genius of this device. They studied it. And eventually they realised that it worked by Soviet spies would park a car outside the ambassador's residence, beam a high-frequency signal into the residence from a car outside. which would be picked up and wobble the antenna.
And then they would be able to pick up the vibrations of the antenna bouncing back to them. So that's the way that you would activate it, kind of. And the antenna was attached to a capacitor microphone
which would, you know, if voices that were in the room with the bug would wobble the little membrane on the capacitor microphone, which would wobble the aerial, the antenna, and they were able to pick up the vibrations of the membrane on the capacitor microphone back in the car and there record what was being said inside that room.
Right, so that goes some way to explaining why they couldn't hear it all the time, because it basically, without having a power source of its own, it required somebody outside to effectively trigger it. Exactly, yeah.
So when they weren't parked outside firing this beam of concentrated radio waves... at it, it was just a stick and a coin, basically. It was nothing. There was nothing unusual about it at all. It wasn't broadcasting anything, and it had no power source, which was the incredible thing about it that meant that it was totally impossible for them to find.
There really was no way of them finding it until they figured out how to activate it, and then that was what allowed them to find it inside the seal.
So they must have gone back and looked at the seal and went, hold on, who gave us this thing?
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