Now it can be told. Real spies in World War II and the Cold War actually did use secret code rings.
They may not have talked into their shoes like Don Adams of television’s “Get Smart,” but they did talk into their wristwatches, and they carried knife blades and gold coins in their shoes.
Once in a while, they’d stick miniature radio transmitters into the soles of enemy agents’ shoes, making it easier to track them.
Two amazing arrays of spy weaponry and paraphernalia such as code rings and transmitter shoes are now on view in exhibitions recently opened at a government office complex here. One of the displays springs from the fervid imagination of Hollywood, the other from the fervid ingenuity of U.S. and Russian clandestine espionage agencies, among others.
Perhaps the most amazing thing about both shows is how close the Hollywood stuff comes to the real thing — and vice versa.
“They drew a lot from the real spy world,” said Hollywood screenwriter Danny Biederman, whose 4,000-piece collection of movie and TV spy memorabilia was used for one of the two exhibitions. “But they had to use their imaginations because so much of that is secret.”
In fact, even the two exhibitions are secret, which is to say, closed to the public. The government office complex they’ve been installed in is the famously impenetrable CIA headquarters at Langley. The displays are solely for the enjoyment and edification of CIA staff and official visitors. Ordinary people will have to settle for reruns of “Get Smart.”
Espionage historian Keith Melton, whose 6,000-piece collection of real-life spy artifacts was drawn on for the other show here, maintains a private museum in Florida that is also closed to all but intelligence professionals and knowledgeable experts.
“In general, the public doesn’t understand the subtlety of the spy world,” he said.
True, there may not be a great deal of subtlety to the Peskett Close-Combat Weapon that’s part of Melton’s collection — a fiendish device that includes a spring-loaded dagger, weighted cosh and — for silent work — a retractable garrote.
But the British did use a pocket garrote that came subtly concealed in a condom. And the Russians used to write secret invisible-ink messages on the backs of women they’d send through the lines in World War II.
“It would be on the skin,” said Melton, who did intelligence work as a naval officer during the Vietnam War. “When you put a re-agent on it, it would recover. Spies have also put secret writing on their forearms.”
The Nazis invented a mode of spycraft even more Byzantine.
“They’d take the synthesized hormones of female German shepherds,” said Melton, who writes the espionage section of the Guinness Book of Records. “Reproductive hormones in liquid form. They’d put them in aerosol spray to use as a tagging substance so they could track people (with male German shepherds) through the streets of Berlin. They found they could put this on a doormat and when you walked across it they could track you for up to three days.”
Probably the most subtle espionage device of the Cold War — until they discovered one in the wooden carving of the Great Seal of the United States that had been hanging above the U.S. ambassador’s desk in the American embassy in Moscow — was the “passive cavity resonator.” This was a battery-less, transmitter-less microphone that activated when reached by a radio beam targeted at it from outside the building.
“In Russia they used to joke that the national pastime after hockey is eavesdropping,” said Melton, who now counts several ex-KGB officers among his good friends.
Hollywood hasn’t built too many movies or TV shows around passive resonators — or garrote-condoms. But the great minds in entertainment and intelligence do seem to think alike.
“The real thing is vastly different than the world of James Bond,” said Melton. “But there are some striking parallels between the gadgets that Danny Biederman has and the real artifacts. Years ago I did a study on Maxwell Smart. I was correlating 85 to 90 percent (of his gadgets) where there was a real counterpart. In my exhibit, I have a shoe that’s bugged. The (then Communist) Czechoslovaks put this elaborate transmitting device into an ambassador’s shoe. He was a walking radio station.”
Smart’s actual TV shoe — with the sole removed to expose its intricate workings — is one of the highlights of the Biederman exhibit.
“They had it locked away in a vault for decades,” said Biederman, who eventually acquired it from a Hollywood prop master. “If you’re persistent and you wait long enough, things change.”
Biederman also has a pair of the shoes Sean Connery wore as James Bond in the early films of the series. “They don’t do anything,” he said. “They’re just shoes.”
A scriptwriter for the Robert Urich spy series “Gavalan” and the Patrick Macnee, Diana Rigg classic “The Avengers,” Biederman is a lifelong spy junkie who started playing with James Bond attache cases, Secret Sam spy toys and secret camera-radio rifles as a kid — and never stopped.
Biederman has been called in as an expert witness in copyright trials involving the James Bond franchise, and he is so enamored of the field he gave all three of his children famous spy names: daughters Illya (from “The Man From U.N.C.L.E.) and Moriah Flint (from “Our Man Flint”), and a son named Bond — though not James Bond.
His collection also embraces “The Girl From U.N.C.L.E,” Bill Cosby’s “I Spy,” Dean Martin’s “Matt Helm” movies, the television “Mission Impossible,” “Austin Powers” and — one of his favorites — “The Wild, Wild West,” a 1960s TV series about a James Bond type who was a 19th Century U.S. Secret Service agent operating in the American West.
Biederman’s showbiz spy artifacts include a fireproof metal mask and a derringer “wrist-gun” from that series, plus such rarities as the “stereo” guns used by K.A.O.S. agents in their attempts to “get Smart.” These involved twin-revolvers mounted on a single trigger mechanism that enabled the villains to get off two shots with a single pull.
Equally unsuccessful was the super gun used by T.H.R.E.S.H. agents against Robert Vaughan in “The Man From U.N.C.L.E.,” which in real life turns out to have been just an old Army M-1 carbine with a scope attached.
Biederman agreed that, up close, a lot of these props look pretty primitive.
“But they have a certain charm,” he said, “and they look great on screen.”
Especially another devastatingly effective secret weapon on display elsewhere in Biederman’s exhibition: the black leather pants worn by Diana Rigg as Emma Peel in “The Avengers.”
Biederman’s collection has a cigarette pack that doubles as a radio, along with fake pens with the same function. Melton’s real stuff includes a pen loaded with microphone and transmitter, belt buckle and wristwatch radios, pencil bombs, tobacco pipe guns and cigarette pack cameras.
Nowadays, Biederman conceded, spies carrying smoking materials “would be asked to go outside.”
Fakery, of course, is a high art in both Hollywood and Langley. Among Melton’s printed artifacts are a Soviet-forged American press card and a West Virginia driver’s license. Biederman’s contains phony ID cards, magazine covers, travel documents and the like used by Peter Graves, Barbara Bain, Martin Landau and Greg Morris in the original television show “Mission Impossible.”
There’s also a T.H.R.E.S.H. ID card that asks the bearer, “What evil thing have you done today?”
Easily the most fascinating piece of printed matter in Biederman’s collection, though, is a green-covered book published half a century ago and titled, “Birds of Central America.”
“When he was starting in the 1950s, (James Bond creator) Ian Fleming tried to think of a name for his intelligence agent,” Biederman said. “He wanted a name that was really boring, something that wouldn’t draw attention to itself, something very ordinary. He looked up and saw that book.”
Its author? An ornithologist of the time named James Bond.
Happily, Fleming settled on that name instead of the co-author of “Birds of Central America.” Otherwise, 007 fans nowadays would hear their hero saying, “The name’s Eckleberry. Don Eckleberry.”
If closed to the public, the two exhibitions have proved extremely popular with the agency staff who can see them, as noted by Rachel Apple of the CIA’s “Fine Arts” division (don’t ask) as she led this correspondent on a tour of the shows.
“You may not have noticed but people have been following us,” she said. “They’re looking at the collection and they’re fascinated by it. Cowboys like to watch cowboy films. We like to watch spy films.”
The recent cable TV and video movie “In the Company of Spies” was such a big hit with staffers that the CIA threw a big red carpet and stretch limo premiere for it here at top-secret headquarters. The film included a human agent on the prowl in North Korea and a commando team raiding a Russian freighter, but, in keeping with reality, most of the action took place in an agency headquarters’ basement where stars Tom Berenger and Alice Krige worked with computers.
Biederman lamented current trends in which spy films have gotten away from inventive gadgetry and character development and become action movies filled with pyrotechnics and computer-generated special effects — as in Tom Cruise’s poorly received second outing in “Mission Impossible.”
“Personally, I think they’ve totally missed the boat,” Biederman said. “They’re relying on computerized technology and special effects. I think they’re really missing out in terms of characters on the street. You look back at some of the early things, there was such imagination put into it. You really had the characters and you had suspense and interesting plots.”
According to Melton, the outlandish cinematic emphasis on gunplay and violence is a decided departure from real espionage, where gunplay is indeed rare. His exhibition does contain a number of firearms, including a remarkable “liberty pistol” that was mass produced for the war effort by General Motors at a cost of $1.73 and distributed to agents behind enemy lines.
“The idea was you’d use it to shoot an enemy and then take his gun,” said Apple. “It was a trade-up weapon.”
The Melton exhibition does contain a number of notorious assassination devices, such as the KGB’s poison pellet cane and the famous poison-tipped Bulgarian umbrella used to kill a Bulgarian defector in London in 1978.
But, mostly, secret agents try to avoid that kind of stuff.
“Intelligence officers don’t use guns,” said Melton. “I have a friend in Moscow, a retired KGB officer, who says, ‘Intelligence stops when you pick up a gun.’ Intelligence officers don’t use guns. It’s a world in which what you want is information.”
Why then all the pistols, knives and pen guns?
“Many of the weapons KGB officers carried in the Cold War — if you asked them, ‘Why did you carry that?’ they would say, ‘It’s very dangerous to walk around at night in American cities. Some very, very bad people out at night.'”
“Of course,” Melton added, “many of their meetings and dead drops were late at night. It was essentially for self-protection.”
One can scarcely imagine what Hollywood will make of it, but espionage lately has been taking some interesting turns. According to Melton, the rise of the Internet as a communications tool has shifted the advantage in the espionage game from counter-intelligence agents to spies, leaving Harrison Ford of Tom Clancy movie fame with the short end.
Multinational corporations are getting into the spy game, and the French have become an intelligence adversary of the U.S. in a very big way in economic terms.
Spying is following technological advances into the micro-world of miniaturization, Melton said.
“Once they get to a level where they can start imbedding computers,” Melton said, “they can leave little DNA robots that can be programmed to do missions in your body.”
The secret code rings of the Cold War carried top-secret information in what are called “microdots” — writing so reduced in size it can be placed on the heads of pins and read only with a powerful microscope.
Contemporary spycraft has gone much further.
“Someone has come up with a way to imbed ciphered material in altered strands of DNA,” Melton said. “You can take that and put it on the back of a stamp. Think of how complex it is — and the resources it would eat up to find. Counter-intelligence is scrambling to find ways to catch up with the spies.”
Whichever way they go, said Biederman, Hollywood will be sure to follow. The spy movie is far from dead, even if it means more Austin Powers epics.
“There’s always evil in the world, unfortunately,” he said, “and we need heroes to battle with them.”
