Dutch technical experts helped US bug foreign embassies in Cold War

A tightly knit group of Dutch technical experts helped American spies bug foreign embassies at the height of the Cold War, new research has shown. The research, carried out by Dutch intelligence expert Cees Wiebes and journalist Maurits Martijn, has brought to light a previously unknown operation, codenamed EASY CHAIR. Initiated in secret in 1952, the operation was a collaboration between the United States Central Intelligence Agency and a small Dutch technology company called the Nederlands Radar Proefstation (Dutch Radar Research Station).

According to Dutch website De Correspondent, which published a summary of the research, the secret collaboration was initiated by the CIA. The American intelligence agency reached out to the Dutch technical experts after interception countermeasures specialists discovered a Soviet-made bug inside the US embassy in Moscow. The bug, known as ‘the Thing’, had been hidden inside a carved wooden ornament in the shape of the Great Seal of the United States. It had been presented as a gift to US Ambassador W. Averell Harriman by the Young Pioneer organization of the Soviet Union in 1945, in recognition of the US-Soviet alliance against Nazi Germany in World War II. But in 1952, the ornament, which had been hanging in the ambassador’s office in Moscow for seven years, was found to contain a cleverly designed listening device. The bug had gone undetected for years because it contained no battery and no electronic components. Instead it used what are known as ‘passive techniques’ to emit audio signals using electromagnetic energy fed from an outside source to activate its mechanism.

Wiebes and Martijn say the CIA reached out to the Dutch in 1952, soon after the discovery of ‘the Thing’, in fear that “the Soviets were streets ahead of the Americans when it came to eavesdropping technology”. According to the authors, the approach was facilitated by the BVD, the Cold War predecessor of the AIVD, Holland’s present-day intelligence agency. In the following years, technical specialists in the Netherlands produced the West’s answer to ‘the Thing’ —a device which, like its Soviet equivalent, used ‘passive techniques’ to emit audio signals. Moreover, the Americans are believed to have used the Dutch-made device to but at least two foreign embassies in The Hague, the Soviet Union’s and China’s, in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

The work by Wiebes and Martijn was initially published in Dutch by De Correspondent in September of last year. An English-language version of the article, which was published in December, can be read here.

► Author: Joseph Fitsanakis | Date: 06 January 2016 | Permalink