Operation Easy Chair was a joint covert operation of the US

Central Intelligence Agency The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA ), known informally as the Agency and historically as the Company, is a civilian foreign intelligence service of the federal government of the United States, officially tasked with gathering, processing, ...

, the Dutch

Internal Security Service Internal Security Service (ISS; ar, جهاز الأمن الداخلي, transliterated: ''Jahaz al Amn al Dakhly'') is the national security agency of the Sultanate of Oman. The agency focuses solely upon domestic security while foreign intellig ...

(BVD), and the Dutch Radar Laboratory (NRP) from 1958-1962. The goal of the operation was to place a

covert listening device A covert listening device, more commonly known as a bug or a wire, is usually a combination of a miniature radio transmitter with a microphone. The use of bugs, called bugging, or wiretapping is a common technique in surveillance, espionage and ...

in the office of the Russian Ambassador in

The Hague The Hague ( ; nl, Den Haag or ) is a city and municipality of the Netherlands, situated on the west coast facing the North Sea. The Hague is the country's administrative centre and its seat of government, and while the official capital of ...

. Named for a bug the CIA claimed to have found in a chair, the operation was a response to the discovery of The Thing—a passive covert listening device discovered in the Great Seal gifted to the American Embassy in Moscow by the

Young Pioneer organization of the Soviet Union The Vladimir Lenin All-Union Pioneer Organization ( rus, Всесоюзная пионерская организация имени В. И. Ленина, r=Vsesoyuznaya pionerskaya organizatsiya imeni V. I. Lenina, t=The All-Union Pioneer Organi ...

. The operation resulted in the creation of several devices, notably Easy Chair Mark I (1955), Mark II (1956), Mark III (1958), Mark IV (1961) and Mark V (1962). Although initially they could not get the resonant cavity microphone to work reliably, several products involving Passive Elements were developed for the CIA as a result of the research. In 1965, the NRP finally got a reliably working pulsed cavity resonator, but by that time the CIA was no longer interested in passive devices, largely because of the high levels of RF energy involved.

Bugs implanted

On 10 April 1987, the

Soviets Soviet people ( rus, сове́тский наро́д, r=sovyétsky naród), or citizens of the USSR ( rus, гра́ждане СССР, grázhdanye SSSR), was an umbrella demonym for the population of the Soviet Union. Nationality policy in th ...

held a press conference and revealed that their embassy in Washington had been bugged by the Americans. The image of the bug has been identified as an SRT-56, a bug developed by NRP, speculated to be part of the Easy Chair program.

Devices created

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Covert Listening Device Espionage Espionage devices Central Intelligence Agency operations Netherlands–United States relations