What the CIA Learned From Get Smart


Wired has a gallery of some of the stranger gadgets the CIA developed since the 1940s.
"Many of the devices first seen in movies and on TV actually came about," says Robert Wallace, former head of the CIA's covert skunk works, the Office of Technical Services. "Remember the Cone of Silence? We built shielded enclosures that did the same thing. And the pen communicator in The Man From U.N.C.L.E.? That evolved, 10 years later, into short-range agent communication."

Unfortunately, those particular devices are not illustrated in this post. In his new book Spycraft, Wallace writes about the CIA’s technical advances and some ideas that didn’t quite work out. The cigarette pistol pictured was a success! Link

(image credit: Steve Sanford)

"RFID stickes" are the real fun toys, of course there's not much news on them, nor the other bugs which are slapped on you and go just beneath your skin and track you.

/me waves hello to TLA
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Oh very cool! I was delighted to see the Dead Drop using a dead animal listed. Apparently they had trouble at first of scavenger animals running off with the carcasses so they spent tons of energy trying to develop chemicals to repel the animals. Eventually they discovered that simply dousing a creature in tabasco sauce kept the animals from running off the top secret material!
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