‘The most ingenious stunt since the Trojan Horse’: The Soviet artwork that spied on the US

Within Spaso House, The Thing was only activated when a remote transceiver, based in a nearby building, was switched on. This sent out a high frequency signal which reflected back all the vibrations coming from the bug’s antenna. It was only when a British military radio operator working in Moscow in 1951 accidentally tuned into the exact wavelength used by The Thing, and heard conversations from a far-distant room, that it was detected. The next year, US technicians swept the ambassadorial residence and – after no fewer than three days’ search – realised that the hand-carved Great Seal was an invisible ear, eavesdropping on behind-the-scenes ambassadorial discussions.

Art as espionage

Reflecting on the success of The Thing, one of the Russian technicians who operated it, Vadim Goncharov, said that “for a long time, our country was able to get specific and very important information that gave us certain advantages… in the Cold War”. And to this day, nobody outside of Soviet intelligence knows how many other “Things” may have been used by the USSR to spy on the West at the time.

But its success as a bugging device was only partly due to its technical originality. It was effective because it exploited cultural attitudes towards beautiful objects. We tend to trust artworks and decorative items as passive symbols of status, taste or cultural interest. Russian intelligence weaponised this assumption with their sculpted, maple wood Great Seal. 

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And it’s not the only example from the history of art having been manipulated for espionage, subterfuge and military strategy. As well as painting the Mona Lisa, Leonardo da Vinci also designed tanks and siege weapons, and Peter Paul Rubens acted as a spy during the Thirty Years War. Artists from various nations during World War One and World War Two devised camouflage and deception operations, and Anthony Blunt, a British art historian (and Surveyor of the Royal Art Collection) was a Soviet spy throughout World War Two and the beginning of the Cold War. 

In the strange case of The Thing, musical history is also relevant. Its ingenious inventor, Lev Sergeyevich Termen, more commonly referred to as Léon Theremin, was a Russian-born inventor and a talented musician. He devised the world’s first electronic instrument – known, after its creator, as the Theremin. It can be played without touching anything – movements of the hand through the air around its antennas control the notes. The Theremin’s haunting sound became synonymous with American sci-fi film scores in the 1950s – perhaps most notably The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), which, fittingly enough, is often cited as a parable about Cold War paranoia.