From: cpunk@remail.ecafe.org (ECafe Anonymous Remailer)
Date: Mon, 1 Apr 1996 14:20:20 +0800
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Spy Dupe
Message-ID: <199604010019.BAA07060@pangaea.hypereality.co.uk>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


Has this dupe russe tale appeared in the US? Or brags
of cutting edge XX-equipment duping global buyers?

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The Sunday Times (UK) 31 March 1996

Spy in the copier gave CIA its coup

by James Adams Washington

A tiny camera hidden in a photocopier in the Soviet
embassy in Washington provided America with one of the
greatest intelligence coups of the cold war, it emerged
last week.

The camera, planted by the CIA in the early 1960s,
provided a treasure trove of intelligence, with access to
virtually every document copied by the Russians for most
of the decade.

The CIA was exploiting a Russian bureaucratic obsession
with documents: in 1963, word got out that embassy staff
were fed up with copying documents by hand and had
approached Xerox to rent a photocopier. American spies
went to work.

Ray Zoppoth, one of Xerox's engineering experts, hit upon
the idea of installing a camera opposite the
photocopier's mirror. It was activated automatically when
the document scanning light came on.

The coup could hardly have come at a better time for the
CIA. The Cuban missile crisis had plunged American-Soviet
relations into one of their darkest periods. The CIA,
embarrassed over the way the Soviets had been able to
move missiles into Cuba, was determined to improve its
intelligence capability.

One problem was how to retrieve the camera's film at
regular intervals. Xerox prided itself on the reliability
of its early machines but it sent a maintenance man
regularly to the embassy to collect the film.

Later Zoppoth invented an even smaller camera that could
be disguised as a tool. Over the next six years the
camera was installed in photocopiers at other embassies
of hostile and friendly countries. "Xerox copiers had
become part of every office system and no foreign embassy
was immune to possible spying," said Zoppoth.

The operation was halted only in 1969, when an American
chemical company tried to bug the photocopier of a rival
firm to steal patented designs. The publicity surrounding
the case alerted the Russians and they stopped
photocopying their secret documents.

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