The Little Ears

In Oceania two-way "telescreens" monitored every citizen's movements, reminded him every minute of every day: BIG BROTHER is WATCHING YOU. Oceania was the fictional country in George Orwell's 1984, but in real life 1961, the same eerie consciousness of being under intimate, round-the-clock surveillance weighs heavily on every U.S. official who lives and works in a Communist state. Electronic eavesdropping has become so insidious and ubiquitous an art behind the Iron Curtain that there is hardly a single spot where a Western diplomat--or even a vacationer--can talk with utter certainty that Big Brother is not listening. Says one old State Department hand: "You just have to get used to living with it. It's like living in a haunted house."

Unseen ears are the dominant presence in every U.S. home and office in a Communist country. A foreign service officer must drill himself never to quote a source by name for fear a U.S. agent will be identified or an innocent acquaintance charged with espionage. He can never talk shop with his wife or pass on gossip that could reveal a colleague's foibles and lead to blackmail. With friends, he must listen closely to others' conversation, be continually alert to give or obey the service's traditional signal to change the subject: a long, pointed look at the ceiling. In time, the naturally communicative, libertarian American citizen tends to react to constant surveillance with moods of black depression.

Short-Waved. The art of "bugging"* has made spectacular strides since the days when a microphone was a cumbrous object that trailed telltale wires and could be installed only by drilling through a wall from the next room. Slimmed to insect size by transistors and printed circuits, today's microphones can be tucked into a sofa or buried inches deep in walls or floor. With battery-powered transmitters no bigger than a cigarette pack, the new gadgets need no outside power source and can eavesdrop for two whole years without attention. In one East European capital, a foreign service officer first learned that his living room was bugged when a U.S. embassy clerk telephoned to report verbatim what he had been saying --two miles away. The clerk had accidentally picked up the bug's transmissions on his short-wave radio set.

Red bugs are mostly concealed in diplomatic offices, cars and homes, where they are often as thick as cockroaches. A favorite spot is under or even in a bed, where the bugs might pick up useful leads for blackmail. For many U.S. families in Iron Curtain countries, sleuthing for bugs has become a kind of sport, an indoor counterpart to the Easter egg hunt. One couple in a satellite capital boasts that its cocker spaniel can sniff out a bug as surely as a pig snuffling a truffle. But new bugs always take their place.

Highball Relay. From long experience, diplomatic personnel only say on the telephone what they want the Communists to know. The Russians tap telephones so blatantly that--according to a cherished diplomatic legend--a Moscow operator once apologized to a U.S. officer for a delayed phone call, explaining candidly: "The tape recorder is on the blink." Westerners have learned to be even more leary of a telephone when it is resting innocently on the cradle. One of the Poles' pet dodges is to turn an idle receiver into a live mike, a trick most easily accomplished by replacing the phone's regular two-wire flex with a four-strand cable whose extra wires lead either to a transmitter in the wall socket or to an outside tape recorder.

Russia's most useful eavesdropping weapon is a tiny, kopeck-sized reflector. It was such a reflector, installed inside a plaque of the U.S. Great Seal in the Moscow embassy, that U.N. Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge displayed to the Security Council last year. When an infra-red beam is aimed at the reflector from outdoors, it acts as a microphone. Alternatively, but less reliably, the infra-red beam can be trained on any imperceptibly oscillating object, such as a metal lampshade or empty highball glass, that can act as a crude reflector for conversation.

Faceless Army. Spies in a police state have one almost insuperable advantage over the foreigner: they are already there. At the new U.S. embassy now abuilding in Warsaw, sharp-eyed security men found that Polish technicians had thoughtfully installed 18 bugs, connected them to a single underground conduit deep in the concrete foundations. In any Iron Curtain country except Poland, foreigners must also apply to a government agency for servants and office hands--who invariably work primarily as espionage agents. "Repairmen" can hide bugs faster than they can be tracked down by security officers.

To be of use, every intercepted conversation must be recorded, expertly translated, evaluated, transcribed and filed for future use. Organized espionage on such a scale demands a vast, faceless army of snoopers: technicians, "planters," linguists, analysts. State Department security men estimate that, to cover the offices, homes and cars of one medium-sized (30-man) Western mission in a Communist city, up to 300 fulltime eavesdroppers are needed. Moscow has 49 non-Communist embassies.

Next, Telescreens? Indoctrinating staffers for Iron Curtain assignments, the State Department guides them around its basement "Chamber of Horrors," whose stacks of bugging devices include some new U.S. gimmicks that were described by an expert last week as "ten years ahead" of the latest Russian equipment. Some Western diplomats still employ the old mobster trick of flushing a toilet or playing a record at full volume to drown out confidential discussion. Such tricks make bugging more difficult, but with modern equipment it is usually possible to filter out foreground noise and isolate the voices. West Germany's representatives in Moscow, when confidential matters are to be discussed, repair to an air-conditioned, steel-walled tank in the embassy basement, where a variety of electronic devices shield them from all known bugging techniques. Even in the tightly guarded "security zone" of the U.S. embassy in Moscow, staffers "talk" by writing out secret information--and destroy the notes as soon as read.

There is only one sure way to elude Big Brother: by saying nothing at all. And it may only be a matter of time before the Communists develop miniature, invisible versions of 1984 telescreens. After all, they have 23 years to go.

* A hand-me-down term derived from telegraphers' slang for the Morse code signaling key.

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