Former CIA Chief of Disguise Breaks Down Cold War Spy Cameras | WIRED

we were looking for the plans and the intentions of our enemies there are a lot of ways to collect intelligence cameras was my preferred method of collection my name is johnna mendez i'm the former chief of disguise at cia and before that i was a photo operations officer at cia there is an interesting history of using homing pigeons to collect intelligence we learned that we could put harnesses and cameras on the pigeons they were very very small the combined weight of the harness and the camera was one and a half ounces the cameras in question were motorized cameras battery operated cameras that would take pictures at pre-determined intervals the pigeons must have looked absolutely innocent [Music] flying over whatever their targets were one of the beautiful things about a homing pigeon of course is it will always come back and so we would put our lasers they'd fly over the navy field we'd bring them back home we'd develop their film and the reports are that the precision in their photographs was very good at least as good as what we had in satellite photography at the time the minox camera was an amazing camera for its day it was really the first sub miniature camera it was about three inches long it would fit in the palm of your hand you could take pictures unbeknownst to anybody else you didn't even need to be a spy to do it because this was a commercially available camera you could copy anything with the minox the people that were using them for the foreign agents who had access to the intelligence who could get right up next to the documents and take the picture agents we're always in a time crunch and when you get down to the nitty-gritty when you're actually taking the photos which is an act of espionage in most of those situations it was usually you wanted to get in and out and and not be caught doing what you were doing it was the toughest part of an operation we were photographing documents that would give us the information we needed typically they might be minutes from a meeting or an agenda for a meeting talking about what our enemies were getting ready to do next there are many ways to conceal cameras this camera is the tessina camera and it could fit in a cigarette box another concealed camera was the matchbox camera the fun part about the matchbox camera was that it was just a box with a camera in it but it looked like a matchbox and you could get back then everybody had these wooden match boxes and you could take the label off whatever local restaurant or hotel and put it on your matchbox camera there's another category of body worn cameras and there were two particular cameras that were interesting in that regard one was called a tesena the other one was called a robot they were both spring wound but you could get a group of pictures without touching the camera and without physically touching the shutter mechanism you could put one in a broad a tie a belt a pregnant woman a button they are kind of all part of a group of places to put cameras where they wouldn't be expected where they would probably not be discovered and where you'd be able to covertly take some pictures that your office thought was necessary and you'd actuate them by putting your hand in your pocket by putting your hand on the strap of your purse by a hundred different ways and take the picture if you're wearing a body worn camera you're more interested in the place that you're at the place that you're going you might want to see who's meeting with who who's interacting with who you might want to see walking by a building that usually doesn't have an open door what's in there there were lots of ways to conceal these cameras and we'll use them all i loved the trip pin camera we only gave these cameras to our very very best agents and the one that had the very best access these cameras were handmade the troppal was the smallest concealed camera that we had was made by one man it contained an optic that was eight tiny tiny pieces of glass stacked on top of each other and it couldn't be duplicated anywhere in the world the tropel camera could go places that nothing else could go and collected just amazing intelligence for the central intelligence agency so it wanted to be 13 inches off the piece of paper so in the training you teach the agent that he was the tripod otokachev was a foreign agent who used our tropel pen concealment device to a great effect his case was amazing he was called the billion dollar spy and that was because with his photography he collected the plans and intentions of the soviet union as regards its weapon system 10 years out its radar systems airborne and on the ground he collected he had the schematics he photographed them the department of defense at the pentagon received them and they said this has saved us years and years of r d and the money that we would spend doing the r d because we have the plans for their next generation of defensive weapons the tropel camera was a breakthrough in size and the quality of the images that it would produce there was really never anything like it before and i think there was nothing like it since next i'm going to talk about micro dot technology the micro dot is a very secure method of communication a micro dot is taking an eight and a half by 11 page of text just a regular piece of paper and reducing it down and it ends up being about the size of a period at the end of a sentence in the international edition of time magazine even if someone hands you the magazine and says there's a micro dot in the magazine you will never if you don't know the page in the paragraph and the sentence you won't find the micro dot we'd send it to our foreign agent and he would know maybe we'd send him a secret writing message that says your package will arrive along with time magazine we'd have some code detailing the page the paragraph so i'm holding a couple of micro dots that have been concealed behind a stamp we've separated the stamp from the sticky backing and so if you can see there's a micro dot in each corner when this stamp is put onto an envelope these micro dots become absolutely invisible the agent would whatever it was adhered to he'd tear it out he'd put it in a cup of water the dot would float off because it's water soluble glue holding it and the agent would have a lens it used to be called a fresnel lens looked like a grain of rice he'd get a piece of cardboard and he'd punch a hole in it and he'd take his fresnel lens and he'd put it in the hole and then he'd put some spit on his finger pick up the dot put it on the end of the fresnel lens and hold it up to the sun or a light and he could read an eight and a half by eleven page of text it was fabulous it was very secure photography played a large role in the cold war some things that were just myths we were able to prove some things that were rumors we were able to disprove photography is sort of the indisputable truth very often not that the documents can't be wrong but over time and distance photography has been able to provide the information that the intelligence agency has been after it's an important tool even though technology has changed a lot tradecraft hasn't

Channel: WIRED

Views: 1,303,646

Keywords: jonna mendez, micro dot, microdot, cold war spy, cold war spy photography, spy, spies, spy photography, spy camera, cold war spy cameras, tropel pen, tropel pen camera, jonna mendez cia, cia spy, wired cia, wired spy, spy breaks down, cia chief of disguise, pen camera, spy pen camera, pigeon camera, camera pigeon, pigeon camera wired, wired spy cameras, cameras spy, minox camera, matchbox camera, tessina camera, wired

Id: D07CkMbGEkM

Length: 8min 36sec (516 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 09 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/BubbleTheGreat]

Crazy what they used back then, I can only imagine what devices they use today.

[u/brotmandel]

Huh, that stuff with the micro dots is wild!

[u/cosimo415]

Cool - thanks for sharing. She was married to Tony Mendez, part of the team who successfully removed the US Embassy hostages from Iran.

[u/[deleted]]

People working in the CIA must be the smartest people in the world to come up with this stuff yet the most psychopathic went it comes to ruining third world countries and feeling 0 remorse.

[u/Elemen0py]

Wtf that microdot is insanely cool.

[u/christophlc6]

Nice try deep state... Everyone knows birds had 40 mega pixel eyes back in the 1700's thanks to alien technology