Thank you dear subscribers, we are overwhelmed with your response.
Your Turn is a unique section from ThePrint featuring points of view from its subscribers. If you are a subscriber, have a point of view, please send it to us. If not, do subscribe here: https://theprint.in/subscribe/
In the shadowy world of espionage, technology often advances in ways few could imagine. While we tend to think of hacking as a modern-day digital threat, the roots of sophisticated spycraft reach deep into the analogue past. Long before cyberattacks grabbed headlines, international intelligence agencies were engaged in an invisible war for secrets—one that played out not only in encrypted messages but in the very machines we trusted to keep our communications private. This forgotten chapter of Cold War stealth is as much a lesson in ingenuity as it is in the relentless pursuit of an upper hand.
The Discovery of Listening Devices: Embassies Under Surveillance
The year was 1983. Tensions simmered between world powers, but the battle for sensitive information was relentless and creative. It started when the French and Italian embassies in Moscow discovered listening bugs hidden in their teleprinters and promptly warned the Americans to inspect their own embassy for similar threats.
A History of Espionage: Microphones Hidden in the American Embassy
Now the Americans knew all too well about being bugged. A routine sweep in 1945 in their embassy helped them discover more than a hundred microphones embedded in the furniture and wall plaster. Then, in 1952, they discovered covert bugs embedded in a seemingly innocent gift – a wooden seal, carved and gifted by school-children to the ambassador in 1945. The seal was right at the ambassador’s residence. Imagine the breadth and depth of the conversations that the Soviets had listened to undetected for seven years.
New Threats Emerge: Building the Moscow Embassy
Back in 1983, the Americans were constructing a new embassy. They discovered listening devices in concrete, no less. But these were the devices they could find. What they could not find then, and found later, shook them to their core. It was a hack job so sophisticated, standard setting, and I daresay, beautiful, that it became the guiding light for all hack-jobs in the digital world that we know today.
Principles of Hacking: Breaking, Weakening, or Bypassing Encryption
Hacking isn’t bound by circuit boards or lines of code; it’s a mindset. Over the decades, three basic strategies have dominated the field:
- Break the encryption: If you can solve the cipher, all secrets are revealed.
- Weaken the encryption: Create flaws or install backdoors so eventually the code yields.
- Work around the encryption: Sidestep security entirely, intercepting information before it’s encrypted.
That last tactic is especially cunning. Why wrestle with complex locks when you can simply catch the secrets before they’re locked up?
We will shortly see what the Soviets did.
Securing Secrets: Extreme Countermeasures Taken by Americans
The Americans knew that everything they ever typed was reaching the Soviets, but how. Did the Soviets hack their encryption? The Americans never got the evidence of it. Those were the days of electromechanical typewriters. They decided to pull back all the equipment and spy proof it. For that, first they had to send the replacement equipment. Then, they had to ensure that the replacement typewriters were not tampered with before they reached the American embassy in Moscow.
The Americans used the IBM Selectric typewriters those days. Every IBM Selectric typewriter headed for Moscow was disassembled, its components were X-rayed, it was then reassembled, anti-tamper sensors and tags were installed on the inside and outside, and finally they were all sealed off in tamper-proof bags not available in the USSR. Upon arrival in their embassy in Moscow, each piece was painstakingly checked for the integrity of anti-tamper sensors and tags. All the old equipment was transported back to the US under identical anti-tamper protection.
Unravelling the Mystery: The Ingenious Soviet Bug in IBM Selectric Typewriters
All the while, the Americans had been thinking that the Soviets had somehow breached the encryption equipment on the typewriters, until one of their staff figured that all of these typewriters meant for use in Moscow had an additional coil in the power switch. Yes, the Soviets had a different voltage setting than the US, so the additional coil. But what was the additional voltage setting for? Was there an extra device resting inside the IBM Selectric?
Inside the Hack: How Magnetometers Made Every Keystroke Vulnerable
Right underneath the keyboard, there was an aluminium bar to maintain the structural integrity of the typewriter. The American who figured the extra coil, X-rayed the humble bar only to realise that the bar was not solid, but had been hollowed out to install bugs. This was an electromechanical typewriter; every keystroke caused a unique distortion in Earth’s magnetic field. The Soviets had installed magnetometers inside the bar to measure the distortion which encoded these signals and transmitted them via onboard memory chips to an antenna hidden in the embassy chimney, which relayed the data to a nearby Soviet listening post.
Inside the Hack: How Magnetometers Made Every Keystroke Vulnerable
What made this hack revolutionary was its subtlety. The technology intercepted information at its origin. Rather than attacking the typewriters’ encrypted output, the Soviets went straight to the source, reading each keystroke as it happened. By translating magnetic field changes into specific letters, every word typed on an American typewriter in Moscow reached Soviet ears – securely and invisibly.
The Soviets had been hacking into American information even before it was being encrypted.
Lessons from History: Hacking Before Encryption
The Soviet success didn’t come from breaking ciphers or weakening security protocols. It came from bypassing encryption entirely. By targeting the unguarded moment when information was created, they rendered the debate over secure codes obsolete. The Americans’ elaborate countermeasures were powerless because the leak happened before encryption ever started. This lesson reshaped intelligence thinking: sometimes, the greatest danger isn’t the code-breaker, but the one who listens at the very first whisper of information.
Is It Fascinating or Frightening?
This story leaves us with a potent question: How do we protect secrets when our tools themselves can be compromised? Today, as physical and digital boundaries dissolve, the legacy of Cold War espionage reminds us of a critical truth – security must guard not only the lock and the code, but the creation of information itself. As we marvel at the ingenuity and audacity of past intelligence operations, it’s worth asking: What vulnerabilities are hiding in plain sight right now, waiting to be uncovered?
Nitish writes on technology, relationships, and moral dilemmas blending deep research with storytelling to bring fiction and forgotten tales to light.
These pieces are being published as they have been received – they have not been edited/fact-checked by ThePrint.