Soviet Spy Technique: The Great Seal Bug 🕵️‍♂️

The Thing, also known as the Great Seal bug, was one of the first covert listening devices or
"bugs" to use passive techniques to transmit an audio signal. It was concealed inside a gift given by the Soviet Union to W. Averell Harriman, the United States Ambassador on August 4, 1945.
The gift, a gesture of friendship to the USSR's World War Il ally, was hung in the ambassador's official residence at Spaso House in Moscow. It stayed there on a wall in the study for seven years until was discovered accidentally in 1951 by a British radio operator at the British embassy who overheard American conversations on an open radio Soviet air force radio traffic channel.