Beware the Greeks Bearing Gifts

The actual quote is, “Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes.”

A better translation would be, “I fear the Danaans (Greeks) even when they bear gifts.”  The line is usually attributed to Homer’s Iliad, but is actually from the Aeneid, a poem written by Virgil, roughly 1200 years after the Battle of Troy.  In Virgil’s version of the battle, the Trojan priest, Laocoön, warns his countrymen not to accept the gift of the wooden horse and emphasizes his point by throwing a spear that pierces the side of the horse.  A Greek soldier hiding within is wounded and his loud groan would have alerted the Trojans but for the intervention of the Gods.

Had not the Gods already decided that Troy should be destroyed, the Trojans would have realized that the giant wheeled statue contained soldiers and they would have never dragged the gift inside their city.  In fact, the statue would have probably been set on fire.

In the weeks following the surrender of Germany in World War II, the Soviet Union was still publicly appreciative of the support of the United States during the war.  While there is no doubt that the Russian Army had done more than its share of the fighting during the war against Nazi Germany, there is also no doubt that without the incredible logistical support the United States had provided, the Soviet Union would have collapsed.  While postwar tensions between the two countries were already slowly escalating into what would be called the Cold War in 1947, in 1945, the relationship was still mostly cordial. 

On August 4, 1945, three months after VE Day and still four weeks short of the surrender of Japan, a delegation from the Vladimir Lenin All-Union Pioneer Organization brought a gift to the American ambassador, W. Averell Harriman, at the American embassy in Moscow.  The Pioneers were a state-sponsored organization for youths between the ages of 9 and 14, modeled after the Boy Scouts in the West, but with a heavy dose of political and economic indoctrination added.  (Before you make jokes about the Pioneers, I would point out that thousands of these young boys and girls died fighting the Nazis.)

The gift (left) was an exquisitely carved plaque of the Great Seal of the United States.  If you want a closer look at the seal, look at the reverse side of a one-dollar bill.  The seal has two sides; the obverse side is the coat of arms depicting the eagle clasping both arrows and oak leaves, while the reverse shows the base of a pyramid topped by the Eye of Providence.

Ambassador Harriman was so pleased with the “gift of friendship” that he hung it in his study at the ambassador’s residence.  It hung there for seven years.  Those young pioneers, of course, had not made the plaque:  it was a creation of the NKVD, one of the predecessors of the Russian KGB.  The scientist who actually created the device was Léon Theremin, the inventor of the Theremin Instrument.  (If you don’t know the instrument, it is responsible for the spooky and slightly annoying music in the Midsomer Murders theme song.)

In 1952, a radio operator in the British Embassy was surprised to hear a conversation between the British air attaché and the American ambassador on his radio set.  At the time, he was idly tuning in on different frequencies, when he suddenly heard English at 1800 MHz.  

The mystery was how a relatively small listening device could continue to operate for years after it was placed on the wall directly behind the ambassador’s desk and why it had never been discovered during the numerous sweeps of the office with equipment that would detect any transmitted signal.  It took weeks and the joint cooperation of both the English and American intelligence agencies (along with a technician from the Marconi Company), but eventually, this led to identification of what became known as The Great Seal Bug or The Thing.

The listening device had no battery or other power source and did not transmit on its own.  It was mostly a thin membrane stretched over a frame that acted as a microphone, which was connected to an antenna.  If a radio wave was transmitted at the device, sound waves vibrating the membrane would slightly vary the frequency of the radio signal the device was receiving and passively re-transmitting.  I’ve dumbed that down a lot, but what the Russians had done was create what was functionally the first working version of the RFID chip.  

Unless a radio wave of the precise frequency was hitting the device, it had absolutely no electronic fingerprint.  The best electronics available could (and regularly did) sweep the room looking for bugs and never find it, because it was almost impossible to detect—as evidenced by the fact that the NKVD listened in on the conversations of four different ambassadors during the seven years that the plaque hung on the wall of the official residence.  

The United States did not publicly reveal the existence of the bug for years, though we have to wonder why.  The Russians obviously knew it was there and when it stopped working.  The British knew.  We knew.  And if that many people were aware of the security breach, it means that it was probable that the intelligence agencies of every nation on the planet knew.  Everyone knew but the American taxpayers.

It wasn’t until the 1960 visit by Nikita Khrushchev to the United Nations following the embarrassment of the Russians shooting down an American spy plane piloted by Francis Gary Powers (the same visit during which the Russian Premier banged his shoe on the podium while promising to bury the United States) that the American ambassador to the USSR, Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., displayed The Thing as he denounced Russian espionage.  The presentation was recorded, and you can watch it here.

I wish I could tell you that this type of device can no longer be used because modern security techniques immediately made its technology obsolete.  Unfortunately not: what really happened is that the United States, England, and Australia developed better versions of the bug almost immediately.  For all I know, the NSA has one in my home.  And in yours.

Trusting the Greeks may have been stupid, but the few surviving Trojans could at least pin the blame on the Greek Gods.  The United States Department of State accepted a Russian gift that compromised our national security for years, but almost 80 years later, still has not told us whom we should blame.