G Is For... (Spy) Gadgets: A To Z Challenge 2017

                                                

  

Have you ever watched a spy movie, perhaps James Bond, and muttered, "Oh, come on, now!" as he draws his bizarre and unlikely equipment?

Mission Impossible is full of unlikely technology, put together and designed by a tech called Barney(whose son appears in the remake of the series, played by the son of the actor who played Barney).  

The Man From UNCLE had wrist phones which became shoe phones in the first UNCLE movie. In one scene agent Ilya Kuryakin is hanging beside another prisoner, unable to reach his shoe phone. When asked why the phones have changed, he replies,"Progress!" 

Get Smart features poisoned lipstick(which Maxwell Smart avoids by using plastic lips)and Max's own equipment, which includes a car phone that is posing as a cigarette lighter and a cigarette lighter disguised as a car phone. In one episode Agent 99 asks why the scientist is giving them a tape recorder disguised as a camera and a camera disguised as a tape recorder - why not the other way around? "Because," says the offended scientist, "my mind doesn't work that way."

Oh, and that shoe phone, of course. In the first episode, it rings while he's at a concert and he has to leave the hall to answer it. Mel Brooks commented that this was the first time on film/TV where someone had a mobile phone ring inconveniently in the theatre.

Yes, it was having fun with the tropes of spy fiction. And yet...

And yet, you'd be surprised what over-the-top equipment exists/ has existed over the years. Go check out the CIA web site for some of it. That's where I found some of the gadgets for my chapter on the subject in Your Cat Could Be A Spy. I must say, it was a lot more fun than the Australian web site, which just had information about how to apply to become a spy, like any other public service job!

 Poisoned lipstick? Maybe, maybe not, but there have indeed been lipstick guns(those were Soviet equipment.)

There were microdot cameras which could take photos the size of the full stop at the end of a sentence. Like this one.

But those were not the most bizarre equipment used in war and Cold War. During World War II agents of the SOE(Special Operations Executive) arrived in boats in some Asian countries, wearing shoes that made tracks of bare feet in the sand, because most locals didn't wear shoes and boot prints would have looked suss.

The SOE also stuffed dead rats with explosives in Germany so that they would explode when shovelled into furnaces. That didn't work, by the way - the Nazis caught on.

Did you think "bug" was just another name for a listening device? Well, the CIA had a listening device disguised as a dragonfly! Unfortunately, it couldn't keep on course...

CIA dragonfly. Public domain image

In the 1970s the CIA was using pigeons to carry aerial cameras, because who would notice a high-flying bird taking pictures? (During the American Civil War, hot-air balloons were used for aerial spying)

And then there was the animal poo... Fake tiger droppings were used during the Vietnam war to work out the movements of enemy troops in the jungle. Well, who was going to go near a pile of dung? 

One of my favourites is the CIA's robot catfish, used to collect water samples around enemy nuclear plants. It was so realistic it fooled other fish. Boy, would those bigger fish have been surprised when they took a bite!

Tomorrow: H is for Mata Hari