The dragonfly spy
Tabassum Zakaria
THE
CIA once built a mechanical dragonfly to carry a listening device
but found small gusts of wind knocked it off course so it was never
used in a spy operation.
The agency also tested
a 24-inch-long rubber robot catfish named ‘Charlie’ capable of
swimming inconspicuously among other fish and whose mission remains
secret.
Charlie and the
dragonfly were among spy gadgets displayed at CIA headquarters in an
exhibit to mark the 40th anniversary of the Directorate
of Science and Technology. It is not open to the public.
"Charlie’s mission is still classified, we can’t talk about
it," Toni Hiley, curator of the CIA museum, told Reuters on a
tour of the exhibit. "All we can say is he's our work on
aquatic robotic technologies."
After seeing the
life-like "insectothopter," Hiley jokes that she cannot
look at a dragonfly in the same way anymore.
In the 1970s the CIA
had developed a miniature listening device that needed a delivery
system, so the agency’s scientists looked at building a bumblebee
to carry it. They found, however, that the bumblebee was erratic in
flight, so the idea was scrapped.
An amateur
entomologist on the project then suggested a dragonfly and a
prototype was built that became the first flight of an insect-sized
machine, Hiley says.
A laser beam steered
the dragonfly and a watchmaker on the project crafted a miniature
oscillating engine so the wings beat, and the fuel bladder carried
liquid propellant.
Despite such
ingenuity, the project team lost control over the dragonfly in even
a gentle wind. "You watch them in nature, they’ll catch a
breeze and ride with it. We, of course, needed it to fly to a
target. So they were never deployed operationally, but this is a
one-of-a-kind piece," Hiley says.
Donald Kerr, CIA
deputy director for science and technology whose equivalent in a
James Bond movie would be "Q" the master spy gadgeteer,
said the tempo of spy operations has increased since his directorate
was established in August 1963. "You look at just the number of
things we’re doing, a week, a year, it’s really quite
astounding," Kerr said.
US spy agencies are
trying to develop technologies to track individuals, but the United
States has so far failed to find two of the world’s most wanted
men — al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and deposed Iraqi leader
Saddam Hussein.
"It’s not a new
problem, it’s in fact been a problem for law enforcement for
years. So one of the areas we spend a lot of effort on is so-called
tagging and tracking," Kerr says.
"It’s
everything from ‘can I paint a bullseye on your back and follow
you with a camera?’ Or do you leave a trail of candy wrappers that
are unique to you that I can use to find you?" Kerr says.
"So you’re dealing with the physical and electronic detritus
that people leave behind as one way of tracking."
Facial recognition
technology can be useful but not to search for an individual because
the databases are too big." If I have a picture of somebody in
the New York subway and I search it against pictures of everybody I
think are bad people in the world, it’s an immense problem and the
false results are overwhelming," says Kerr.
The
CIA also showed off its miniature technology.
A microdot camera had
a tiny lens on top of what looked like a thick coin, which contained
a film that rotated 11 times to produce 11 microdots.
Another item on
display was newly declassified triangle-shaped directional antenna,
weighing four ounces and used on mobile surveillance operations
throughout the eighties.
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