Word: bug
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Police Nab Bug Thief...
Police Nab Bug Thief...
...book, The FBI (Pocket Books), Ronald Kessler, a former investigative reporter for the Washington Post, tells of an operation against a Washington-based KGB officer who was trying to recruit a Pentagon employee. As the Soviet official slept, FBI agents stole his car to plant a bug in it. To avoid suspicion, they put an identical car in the official's parking space overnight. They also made sure that the replacement odometer's mileage read exactly the same as that of the real car. Meanwhile, the KGB car's odometer was temporarily removed to keep it from registering miles...
...allowing the bureau to keep track of KGB movements without recourse to machines that required replacement tapes or batteries. One car did not have a headrest, so agents planted the device in the glove compartment. When the car was brought in for a regular inspection, KGB mechanics found the bug and quickly inspected other vehicles for similar spy paraphernalia. By then the FBI had infiltrated 20 cars. The KGB removed every single bit of buggery. According to Kessler, the cost to the U.S. was in the hundreds of thousands of dollars...
Novelist Richard Powers is a prodigiously talented manufacturer of literary astonishments, which is not exactly the same as being a good writer, though he is that too. His novel The Gold Bug Variations was widely praised as one of the best books of 1991. But whenever one of his narratives loses its forward motion, as happens early in this big, messy, off-and-on brilliant novel, Powers tends to go for flash. He sets off skyrockets, then more skyrockets. Great, arcing bursts of language streak across not just pages but whole chapters. (On pollution: "Maroon-brown patinas of condensing...