Spy vs. Spy at the Wende
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| W.W. Bledsoe, Locating Features, from research materials. Woodrow "Woody" W. Bledsoe Papers Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, University of Texas at Austin |
A small but absorbing section of the show treats Russian-American physicist Leon Theremin (1896-1993). He is remembered as namesake of the peculiar musical instrument he invented in 1919. The theremin, played by a performer waving hands next to two antennae, produces a vibrato effect known for cuing the uncanny in old sci-fi films. "Counter/Surveillance" tells Theremin's no less weird backstory.
In the 1920s Theremin toured European capitals giving demonstrations of his instrument. Its eerie tonalities gained the attention of adventurous modernists such as Edgard Varèse. Theremin landed in New York, where he secured a U.S. patent for his instrument (1928) and licensed it to RCA. Moving in art-and-science circles, he performed at Carnegie Hall and met Einstein (like Ingres, an amateur violinist). Theremin invented the terpsitone, a device that converts dance movements into music. This led to him meeting—and marrying—African-American ballet dancer Lavinia Williams. Then in 1938 Theremin vanished. Williams said that he had been kidnapped by Soviet agents. Others speculated that American taxes or debt had led Theremin to skip town. Williams never saw her husband again.
It's now known that Theremin spent years in a Siberian gulag and then in forced labor at a gold mine. He was a model political prisoner, eventually talking his way into tenuous freedom working at a secret laboratory. There he became a Soviet counterpart to James Bond's Q, inventing spy gear for the East. This included a border surveillance camera that is now recognized as Russia's first working television system and a way to eavesdrop on conversations via an infrared beam aimed at a window. (A version of the device using lasers is still in use.) But Theremin's most notorious invention was "The Thing."
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| Moog Theremin, 1996 or later, and 1960 press photo of bugged U.S. Presidential Seal |
In 1945 a Soviet youth organization gave the U.S. Soviet Ambassador, Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., a wood-carved replica of the U.S. Presidential Seal. It contained Theremin's ingenious bug, a hidden microphone that relayed conversations to Soviet Intelligence. The U.S. discovered the mike only after they tapped into Soviet transmissions and heard American Embassy conversations live. They did a sweep of Cabot's residence and found "The Thing," as they called it. With neither wires nor batteries, it was powered by a radio signal broadcast from outside the Embassy.
Coincidentally, 1945 was also the year that Hollywood discovered the theremin. Miklós Rózsa used it in Hitchcock's Spellbound (1945). Six years later Hitchcock composer Bernard Herrmann adopted the theremin for the sci-fi classic The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951). That led to the instrument being typecast for sci-fi. The 1960s and 70s saw a rock revival of the instrument, with the Beach Boys ("Good Vibrations"), Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, Simon and Garfunkel, and Frank Zappa using it. Starting in the 1990s Bob Moog, of synthesizer fame, produced updated theremins commercially.
For decades the U.S. kept the Thing's existence secret as agents tried to understand how it worked—and how to make more of its kind for U.S. intelligence use. It was not until 1960 that the U.S. revealed the Thing's existence at the United Nations. This was counter-programming to offset the embarrassing news of an American U-2 spy plane shot down over the Soviet Union.
The constant theme of the Wende show is that nobody holds the moral high ground in the spy biz. Theremin may stand out as a true innovator, but his politics remain as murky as ever.
"Counter/Surveillance" runs a full year through Oct. 19, 2025.
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| Installation view with Ken Gonzales-Day's mobile Different Measures: From Xipe Totec to Facial Recognition to System Overload, 2024 |
Comments
> Hollywood discovered the theremin.
What a hoot learning that spooky-sound device has the origins it does. When beginning to read the post, I skipped over the first 2 or 3 paragraphs and thought the guy's name sounded vaguely reminiscent of that device. Duh.
> nobody holds the moral high ground in the spy biz.
In today's world, that's increasingly true in general. And not just of things like a CIA or a KGB (now Russia's FSB), etc. It's similar to a movie where the characters portrayed as the good guys in the beginning turn out being the bad guys at the end. Or visa versa. So moral equivalency (or relativism) may be more fitting than assumed---and in a way that flips around everyone's preferred cultural - or political - narrative.