Washington D.C.’s International Spy Museum boasts, according to its curator, “the largest public display of espionage artifacts anywhere in the world.” From trick pens to covert vehicles, its collection spans continents and decades. Among these, some devices are downright disturbing. Here are ten of the most unsettling spy gadgets, a true 10 unsettling spy showcase.
10 Unsettling Spy Gadgets Unveiled
10. Pigeon Camera
Animals have often been hijacked for war. For example, dolphins and sea lions were used to find mines, bats have been fitted with bombs, and elephants were once living tanks. But you can’t beat birds for reconnaissance missions. Pigeons are especially useful because of their homing instinct, hence their use as messengers during the two world wars—for which they won many medals (which we’re sure they showed their grandchicks). This instinct also allows handlers to release them where their homeward flight will pass over a site of interest.
During the Cold War, the CIA saw the potential and attached tiny cameras to the birds. Compared to aircraft and satellites, they reasoned, pigeons fly closer to the ground, providing more usable intel. Operators could set the camera to start snapping right away or after a preset delay. The pigeon camera at the Spy Museum is only a replica (the real one’s on display at the CIA’s private museum in Virginia), but it’s a faithful copy. The camera itself measures less than 5 centimetres across and weighs around 35 grams—which, at the time, was state of the art.
Apparently, the plan was to ship camera-equipped pigeons to Moscow and secretly release them—perhaps from a hole in the floor of a car. It’s unknown, however, whether or how often the birds were actually used.
9. Ultimate Skeleton Key
From a forensic point of view, lockpicking is clumsy. Even professionals leave scratches in the keyhole—a telltale sign it’s been cracked. Of course, lockpicking can also be time‑consuming. That’s why, from at least the 1960s, copying keys was preferred. Using a handheld key pattern device, spies were able to record a key’s tooth positions to make a copy later.. Needless to say, this method depended on having the key in the first place. It also took time to get the key cut.
This is where the wordily named “pin lock pin and cam system” comes in. This device, a masterpiece of precision engineering, features a key with detachable teeth and a cylindrical dispenser to replace each one. The generic key blank is inserted in the lock, leaving no sign of tampering, to gauge the pin positions, and the dispenser swaps out the teeth. It’s a little technical to describe here in detail, but, essentially, it allows anyone to make a custom key in the field—right by the lock they want to open.
Designed by a British toolmaker for fun, it was never intended for mass production. However, as soon as the CIA found out about it, they ordered a whole bunch for their spies.
8. False Glass Eye
Faking a fake is just the kind of wheels within wheels you’d expect from spycraft inventors. And what could be more iconic for the profession than a glass eye that isn’t merely a glass eye? In pop culture, such a device is famously associated with James Bond’s nemesis, Ernst Stavro Blofeld, the head of SPECTRE, whose bionic eye could record and store video—and play it on a connected device. It could also receive audiovisual data from a paired eye worn by Primo, aka Cyclops, Blofeld’s proxy. (In fact, the Spy Museum has Primo’s eye on display.)
The museum’s real false glass eye, however—the one actually used by spies in the field, in this case in World War One—is decidedly less sophisticated. Painstakingly hand‑painted to include even blood vessels, it was only used to hide data on missions. This might have included, for example, a roster of spies in microdot form—that is, a sheet of text reduced in size to be unrecognizable even as text without proper magnification.
7. Bulgarian Umbrella
Ubiquitous on the streets of London, umbrellas are good cover in more ways than one. In 1978, the so‑called “Bulgarian umbrella” was chosen by the KGB to take out the Bulgarian dissident Georgi Markov. Since defecting to the West nine years earlier, he’d been a thorn in his government’s side—speaking out against conditions in his home country and the USSR on the American‑backed Radio Free Europe.
The Bulgarian umbrella was basically a gun, firing a tiny, pinhead‑sized pellet of ricin. Few other poisons could have guaranteed a kill at the tiny dose allowed by the pellet—and it had to be tiny so as not to arouse suspicion, at least until it was too late. As Markov recalled to his friend and colleague Teo Lirkoff shortly before he died, he’d been pushed in the leg with the point of an umbrella by a well‑built foreigner outside his workplace in London, the BBC Overseas Service. The assailant then apologized and disappeared in a taxi. It was only hours later that Markov felt weak, and by the next day, he was hospitalized in a rapidly deteriorating condition. Obviously, this gave the assassin plenty of time to escape.
6. Lipsticks With a Twist
Chanelling Wacky Races’ Penelope Pitstop and her girly‑girl gadgets, the KGB’s lipstick pistol “delivered the ultimate ‘kiss of death’.” This 4.5 mm single‑shot gun fired not with a conventional trigger but by pushing the barrel into the victim. Otherwise, it looked just like a lipstick, drawing little attention from Cold War‑era border guards. (Incidentally, for male agents, there was a tobacco pipe gun.)
This femme fatale pistol (a replica of the original) isn’t the Spy Museum’s only deadly lipstick gadget. There’s another they nickname the “Whiff of Death.” On loan from North Korea, its black, nondescript body is designed to hold an ampule of “liquified poisoned gas.” Spies and assassins routinely carry one, although mainly for suicide in the event of their capture.
The museum exhibits a number of other North Korean spy gadgets. The most popular, according to a South Korean journalist who was apparently spying on visitors’ reactions, is a poison needle Parker pen that kills by paralysis and suffocation. The perfect companion to the homicidal lipstick, this pen is fired by twisting the top and pressing it down, launching the needle towards a victim up to 10 meters away. It was apparently used in the 1968 raid on South Korea’s Blue House.
5. Bra Camera
Women have long made excellent spies, not least because they’re rarely suspected—especially in patriarchal countries. One of the most interesting gynocentric gadgets was a bra nicknamed “Meadow.” Designed by a group of female Stasi employees, it was equipped with a camera activated by a handheld remote. Basically, it allowed an agent to help crush dissent while wearing their favorite summer dress.
In more recent times, the corporate giant Nestlé fitted a bra with a mini camera for a bizarre publicity stunt. The idea was to raise awareness of breast cancer by showing, from a chest’s point of view, how much “breasts are checked out every day.” The film then posed the question, “When was the last time you checked your own?” Of course, the campaign was probably more of a cynical ploy to distance the brand from its aggressive promotion of breast milk replacements in the past.
4. 45‑Second Disguise Kit
The CIA’s 45‑second disguise kit contains everything an agent might need to rapidly transform their appearance. Items range from the mundane to the ridiculous—from scissors and a comb to stick‑on false mustache and inserts for the shoe to change a walk. The kit also included a dye brush and mixing dishes, a wig, spirit gum, tweezers, cold cream, glasses, mascara (for the mustache), and, of course, a mirror.
The main selling point, however, was the speed of deployment. Designed for the Cold War by the agency’s Chief of Disguise, Tony Mendez, it could disguise a person in 45 seconds flat—despite there being 45 steps. In one version, the first step disguised the kit itself, namely as a grocery cart complete with an inflatable paper bag, bread, and vegetables, all at the push of a button. The next was to turn one’s jacket inside out, transforming it into a woman’s coat with attached shawl. Then the agent would pull up their trousers, revealing black stockings, slip their shoes inside their shirt to resemble sagging breasts, and put on a “new pair of black Mary Janes.” Finally, they’d complete the look with a grey curly wig. Another version, put together for a 1970s mission to spy on a Russian nuclear facility, disguised the agent as a bearded old professor. This one featured a “semi‑animated” mask from the prosthetics artist behind the Planet of the Apes.
3. Rectal Toolkit
The CIA’s rectal toolkit had nothing to do with working on the rectum. It was, in fact, a pill‑shaped container designed for hiding stuff up the back passage. The standard contents were a set of escape tools—lockpicks, drill bits, saws, knives, files, wire cutters, and so on. It was issued to agents in the Cold War as a means of eluding a strip search.
Although it was big (about the length of an adult man’s palm), the capsule was finely machined for safe insertion. There were no sharp edges, and it clicked tightly shut with a totally smooth exterior, so it wouldn’t spill out inside an agent’s body.
It was, in this respect, superior to MI6’s version. They not only had sharp edges but also intentionally rough grips that ran around the capsule, apparently to make it easier to open when wet.
2. Fake Scrotum
Designed for concealing (ahem) sensitive items, such as a mini escape radio, the fake scrotum was another of Tony Mendez’s creations as the CIA’s Chief of Disguise. The scrotum, he believed, was the one area not thoroughly checked in a strip search. To pitch the idea to his boss, Mendez ordered an underling—a young tech ops officer—to wear it to a meeting with Director Richard Helms, then drop his pants to see if Helms could tell. Being a conservative sort, however, the director simply left the room appalled and didn’t approve it for use. Instead, it was chucked in a desk drawer and forgotten about for decades.
Little else is known about this gadget. The Spy Museum didn’t get any notes when they acquired it. They assume it’s made of latex, though, and, with its wrinkles and pubic hair, modeled on a real person’s balls. They also think it was meant for gluing in place.
If nothing else, as a museum guide puts it, the fake scrotum shows that spying isn’t as glamorous as Bond films suggest. “This line of work,” she said, carefully choosing her words, “requires a great deal of… commitment.”
1. Stasi Scent Jars
The East German secret police force, the Stasi, was among the weirdest, most paranoid organizations of its kind. Few of their secretive, intel‑gathering tactics illustrate this as well as their scent jars.
Each of these airtight glass containers held the scent of a citizen the government was afraid of. Scents were collected by various means, such as from personal items during a raid, clothes left in changing rooms or the workplace, and sweat‑catching cloths hidden in chairs during interrogations. Sometimes, tubes were even poked through walls to suck up scents from their homes. Scents were labeled “GK,” meaning Geruchskonserve or “odor sample,” along with the date and time of collection, as well as the citizen’s name and their 12‑digit identification number.
The reason for the scent jars was simple: to train sniffer dogs to pursue anyone the Stasi found suspicious. Weird and outdated as it seems, however, the German government used the tactic as recently as 2007 against G8 activists. For all we know, they’re still gathering odors today.