Further to last week’s Washington Times article about Seduced by Secrets, Harvard Magazine’s own piece about Makcrakis and her research gives us a glimpse at the woman behind the research behind the book. Escape plans and all!

The Seduction of Snooping

A recording device hidden in an ashtray. A camera concealed inside a pen, an innocuous-looking deer statuette, or even a bra. A chair that captures your body scent when you sit on it, to facilitate tracking your movements later.

What sound like gadgets from a James Bond movie were real-life instruments of espionage used by the Stasi—communist East Germany’s Ministry for State Security (Staatssicherheit), the secret police. Kristie Macrakis, Ph.D. ’89, learned about these devices and much more in her exploration of the Stasi archives, which were gradually declassified and opened for public perusal starting in 1992, three years after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Macrakis wrote her dissertation on science in Nazi Germany, but a trip to conduct research in East Germany before the Wall fell blossomed into a fascination with the Cold War period and Stasi spying techniques. She spent eight years intermittently poking through thousands of files during short trips, summers, and a year-long Fulbright scholarship, focusing on two particular aspects of East German spy science: how the Stasi got access to top-secret intelligence and scientific knowledge from the West, and the spying techniques they used.

Read more >>

That’s it for Kristie Macrakis and her treasure trove of Stasi gizmos. Thanks for joining us. I’ll make it easier for everyone, and post all the pictures in a gallery below. Seduced by Secrets is available nationwide; get the full story! Many thanks to Kristie for sharing images from her own research.

[UPDATE] Check out the comments section - a reader has posted a series of very cool, very outlandish spy cameras.

***

A tile mosaic at the former Stasi headquarters

The back room at the German Federal Criminal Police

Read the rest of this entry »

Goodness, it’s Monday already. The sky is gray here at Cambridge Americas, and the office is quiet. But I’m in high spirits, because we have some itty-bitty spy toys to showcase today. Kristie Macrakis, what do we have here?

It’s Mini Monday!

Spies can conceal cameras in many places, not just bras.

This is a “microdot” camera with a remote release.

It’s about as big as my thumbnail, you can catch a glimpse of it on the cover of Seduced by Secrets.

Just to fully convey the teensyness, have a look at this:

***

What a cool-looking old cigarette case. The brand is “Ernte 23.”

It looks straight out of James Bond. Wait until you see what’s inside of this one:

***

This is an exquisitely crafted, and very expensive Swiss-made Tessina Wristwatch Camera. It fits very nicely into that cigarette case, and looks very Dick Tracy! Click the image to zoom in and see the full detail–all of the controls are there.

***

Seduced by Secrets chronicles the Stasi, their culture, and the gadgets they produced. Kristie Macrakis is visiting professor at Harvard University and professor at Michigan State University.

It’s that time again. Kristie Macrakis, author of Seduced by Secrets, unveils some more Stasi spy gadgetry.

The Stasi had a way about them. They loved their toys. As Macrakis argues, this obsession was part of their own undoing — rather than performing their duties as an intelligence agency, they focused on hoarding secrets and spy-gear.

This week:

Too bad they don’t conceal the harmful effects of smoking!

During the Cold War a lot of spy paraphernalia was related to smoking. When I visited Mr. Regenhardt at the Criminal Evidence Collection, he handed me this ashtray and told me to open it. I twisted and turned and nothing happened. Feeling foolish I handed it back to him and, like a wizard, he took out a pin and pricked a hole and the ashtray popped open to reveal this next image:

…the open ashtray with a Minox camera inside.

Here’s another number, well several numbers in fact. This desktop lighter comes apart, concealing a cypher.

Come back next Monday for more Stasi gizmos, assuming my computer isn’t wiped clean by rogue agents.

Kristie Macrakis, author of Seduced by Secrets brings us some of the gadgets of the Stasi’s hidden spy-world, one photo at a time.

There are a lot of cool images surrounding the hidden world of espionage, many of them surprising. Hidden in plain sight, in a mind-boggling array of forms, spy gadgets have a clever way of concealing secrets. I think these images of objects of espionage are fascinating visual representations of the shadowy world of spying.

Each Monday, I’ll be opening my own photo-album of spy gadgets to show you the real Stasi espionage. I’ve been in and out of East Germany before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and have recently done a lot of research on the organization.

Here’s the first two:

This is a backroom at the German Federal Criminal Police, which houses spy evidence for court cases. It could be your garage, but alongside the seemingly innocuous tennis rackets are rows and rows of leather briefcase containers to hide documents and false documents like forged passports.

.

Of course, every spy needs to have a camera handy:

This carved deer statute has a Minox camera – the workhorse of the Cold War - hidden in the bottom. It is my favorite concealment. The spy inserts a pin in a hole in the bottom to activate the release mechanism.

Kristie Macrakis is author of Seduced by Secrets: Inside the Stasi’s Spy-Tech World, new April 17 from Cambridge.