In celebrating the launch of Spycraft, I’ve looked at all kinds of gadgets, but the bread and butter of Cold War CIA gear were tiny cameras and listening devices. The bugs aren’t so exciting to look at, though the stories of their placement make great reading. The cameras, on the other hand, always come in clever “concealments.”
The agency’s star camera was the T-100, so named because it could take images of up to 100 full-sized documents on a piece of film measuring 4mm wide by 15mm long—and that baby could be embedded anywhere. Hollywood may have desensitized you to the spycam notion, but remember, the images you see here are of totally real devices that were actually used in death-defying espionage. Hey, careful where you point that necktie, buddy.
All of this CIA tech and much more like it is covered with great depth and hair-raising anecdotes in Spycraft, a new book by Robert Wallace and H. Keith Melton, reviewed by us, and available for pre-order at Amazon.
https://gizmodo.com/cia-spy-gadgets-revealed-q-aint-got-nothin-on-langley-392289
