Notable Spy Gadgets Throughout History and How They Were Foiled
Spy gadgets have been used to turn the tide of war throughout all of human history. Perhaps one of the most famous examples of a clandestine machine was the Enigma device during the Second World War. A number of electro-mechanical units that worked across a rotor cipher principle were built by German industries, and termed Enigma machines. Arthur Scherbius invented the device at the end of the First World War, and commercial, government and military agencies in several nations used them during the interwar period. The models used by the Wehrmacht during WWII, however, were remarkably advanced.
The Steckerbrett, or plug board, was one of the reasons that it was so effective. While an Enigma without a plug board isn’t particularly effective, when it is installed it allowed operators to reconnect the wiring easily. This meant that codes could change on a whim. Hand methods of breaking coded messages were usually foiled by the addition of a plug board.
This meant that Allied cryptanalysts ended up having to work with special machines to break codes. Eventually, Allied code breakers collected a great deal of intelligence about Enigma devices. This information was codenamed Ultra by British forces, and many historians claim that it shortened the European war by two years. However, Enigma wasn’t the only code machine used during the war.
Unlike Enigma, the Japanese developed a machine that was built around electrical stepping switches instead of rotors. While the Japanese machine was codenamed Purple by the United States, the correct name was 97-shiki obun inji-ki or Angoki Taipu-B. These terms translate to “System 97 Printing Machine for European Characters” and “Type B Cipher Machine”. Interestingly enough, the Imperial Japanese Army and Navy had appeared to be working in completely separate camps when it came to cryptography. Shortly before the end of the conflict, the Army had warned naval forces of a weak point in the device. The Navy previously had accepted the advice of a mathematician named Takagi Teiji that the machine was a sufficient way of encoding messages.
Takagi was a famous and trusted mathematician who had previously proved the Takagi existence theorem. However, his advice seemed to prove incorrect. Intelligence collected by the United States government on the Purple device was codenamed Magic.
An even earlier spy gadget was the Kryha device, which was developed by Alexander von Kryha. Naturally, the machine bore his name. While there were several different versions, the standard version weighed about five kilos and was completely mechanical. The electronic version of the device was bulkier, but there was a version small enough to carry in a pocket that was termed the Lilliput. It saw use into the 1950s, despite the fact that the security code that the device use was actually rather weak. A cryptanalyst from the United States named William Friedman was given a challenge message that was 1,135 characters long. Friedman, along with Solomon Kullback, Abraham Sinkov and Frank Rowlett are said to have defeated the device’s code in 2 hours and 41 minutes.
The Kiss of Death is an interesting weapon, and it is a very appropriately named spy gadget. The image of a femme fatale agent working for the KGB is a spy movie fixture, and the Kiss of Death lipstick pistol is one of the ideal spy gadgets to work for this sort of a character. Indeed, it suggests that real agents like that must have existed. A single shot 4.5 mm pistol was actually hidden inside of a lipstick container. A unit was found at an American checkpoint in West Berlin. Today it’s held in Washington DC at the International Spy Museum.
Spy gadgets aren’t a modern invention, though. During the First World War, a pigeon was used to take photographs of battlefields. This sort of thing seems primitive in the modern world, but at the time it surely provided vital intelligence. Perhaps one of the earliest spy gadgets actually dates back to Ancient Greece.
The skytale, which rhymes somewhat with Italy, is a sort of baton that is used as a transposition cipher. The first agent would have wrapped a piece of parchment around the rod and written a message. The recipient used a rod of the same diameter to read back the message. While the code can easily be broken, it is not easy to make a mistake when encoding or decoding the message. Moreover, it doesn’t take long to use the skytale. This made it perfect for spies on ancient battlefields who may have been under serious pressure.
