The holiday season has been and gone and we are back to the ritual of codewords with Mister 8 where he is taking readings from spy-master Allen Dulles’ The Craft of Intelligence. This week, we still on the subject of eavesdropping and Dulles is catching illegal radio operators where Lieutenant General Ion Mihai Pacepa is listening to what you say over dinner.

“Approved,” Ceausescu said, moving on to a display showing monitoring equipment for restaurants. The ceramic ashtrays and flower vases caught his attention. Geartu reported that, by the end of the next five year plan, every restaurant would be equipped with only ceramic ashtrays and vases containing thin, battery activated micro-transmitters. They could be turned on by any surveillance officer or waitress-agent, who needed to pull out a needle-like pin.

First invented by the Soviet KGB, ceramic ashtrays and flower vases, containing micro-transmitters are now secretly used by all East European security services for monitoring discussions in restaurants and hotel lobbies. The American journalist Hedrick Smith humorously describes when he witnessed in a Soviet hotel by the Caspian Sea, when word came down that a delegation of foreign ambassadors was about to make a visit there “Like the provincial bureaucrats of Gogol’s rich satire The Inspector General, the staff scurried about in a frenzy to make the hotel more presentable….The regular, glass ashtrays disappeared from the dining room tables and new, more decorative ashtrays appeared. Large, white carnations were placed on each table.” It evidently did not occur to Smith that the new ashtrays and flower vases were not only for show. Their use as portable monitoring devices is still one of the best kept secrets of the Soviet bloc.