The CIA has never confirmed or denied the following story.
The only evidence we have that it happened at all is a 1997 article in Popular Science Vol. 250, Issue 1, where journalist Dawn Stover spoke to the mastermind behind one of the best-kept secrets of the Cold War.
We think of digital surveillance as a relatively modern fear. We worry that our phones are spying on us. That CCTV watches our every move. Even laptops have physical privacy covers to mitigate security risks. But it turns out, this goes back at least 60 years – right to the heart of the Soviet embassy in Washington DC.
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The year is 1963. Kennedy still sits in the White House. Khrushchev holds the Kremlin. The Cuban Missile Crisis is still fresh in everyone’s mind. Paranoia runs high on both sides of the Iron Curtain.
And a repairman strolls unnoticed through the halls of a mansion in the capital. He steps into a busy administrative office used by Russian diplomats and the KGB. His bag of tools clunks with every swing. The man pauses at a large, boxy machine in the corner of the room. It hums and whirs.
Launched just three years prior, the Xerox 914 was the company’s first successful photocopier – with a troubling tendency to catch on fire. But that’s not why the repairman is here today.
He drops his bag to the floor. The diplomats and KGB agents ignore him, the clerical staff barely see him, the hawkish security guards notice nothing out of the ordinary. The repairman diligently begins, as he always did, his routine maintenance work.
When he’s finished the job, he slips away as quietly as he came. He leaves behind a single trace of his presence.
The repairman has just become one of the CIA’s best assets.
But the real story begins the year before in New York, at a disused bowling alley so anonymous you wouldn’t give it a single glance, let alone two. It’s far away from prying eyes.
Inside, Xerox’s head of government programs Donald Cary meets with four engineers. They’re not there to bowl. The Xerox men selected for the mission are Douglas Webb, Kent Hemphill, James Young, and thirty-six-year-old Ray Zoppoth, who knows the Xerox 914 inside out. He should do. He helped create the photocopier in the first place.
It’s exactly the expertise the CIA needs if the agency’s plan is to work.
Because the plan is to heist as many files as they can from the Soviet Union embassy, located within the Mrs. George Pullman House in downtown DC. With security so tight, not even a repairman, however inconspicuous, could hope to walk out unfrisked with stolen files stuffed down his pants.
So, the secret service has to get creative.
For days, the engineers discuss potential ways to capture images of the files being photocopied on the Xerox 914. Finally, Zoppoth hits upon an answer. Like all great ideas, it’s as maddeningly simple as it is cunning.
Mount a battery-powered home-movie camera with a zoom lens inside the copier. Aim the lens at the mirror used to reflect images onto the drum. And start taking pictures.
According to Stover’s piece, Zoppoth suggests the team “Mount a battery-powered home-movie camera with a zoom lens inside the copier. Aim the lens at the mirror used to reflect images onto the drum. Add a photocell that would prompt the camera to snap still frames whenever the photocopier lit up. And start taking pictures.”
Every time someone lays a document on the bed and presses ‘Copy’, the photocopier lights up, triggering the camera.
Easier said than done, but the Xerox engineers are excited by the breakthrough. They set to work installing a Bell & Howell 8mm movie camera inside a copier located in Xerox’s New York campus.
The noisy, bulky 914 is, it turns out, perfectly tailored to the role of spying device. It’s so impossibly large, it conceals the camera even when the maintenance panels are removed, and the operational sound as staff make copies masks the whir of the camera. No-one has any idea they’re being covertly watched.
The test run proves a success. Ray Zoppoth and the rest of the research team can see everything passing through the photocopier. “When we developed the pictures, we found recipes and copies of music and cartoons and jokes and all kinds of things,” he later tells Popular Science.
Weeks later, Ray Zoppoth finds himself deep inside a building used by the CIA. He’s led into a basement room allegedly code-named ‘Disneyland East’. Zoppoth shows the spooks the Xerox invention. He teaches them how to fit the camera inside the 914. They, in turn, train the embassy’s regular repairman to install the camera and extract the film each time he returns.
Then, one day, in 1963, a familiar face arrives at the Soviet Embassy to carry out routine maintenance work. He holds a bag containing tools and, in its depths, an innocent 8mm home-movie camera. He’s waved through the gates without a thought.
The rest is history.
With lips tightly sealed and files classified, we’ll never know what was learned. The Cold War dragged on for another 27 long years.
But shortly after the project ended, Zoppoth confessed that the secret service again tapped up Xerox. This time, they want cameras hidden inside the more streamlined Xerox 813 desktop photocopier, used by ministries, agencies, and diplomatic offices around the world.
If the story is true – and only Zoppoth admitted it, with his colleague confirming but refusing to go on record – it suggests the joint operation was a success.
It remains a reminder that even the unsexiest machine in the office can be a security risk.
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