This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race

by Nicole Perlroth

When Deeley’s team searched back through their inventory, they discovered that the first implant had been installed in a typewriter shipped to the embassy in 1976. That meant that by the time Gunman was complete, the Soviets had been siphoning American secrets off their typewriters for eight years. Routine embassy inspections had missed the implants. American inspectors had come close after finding an antenna in the embassy chimney at one point, but they’d never discovered its purpose. And analysts never wondered why the Soviets treated their own typewriters with such paranoia. The Soviets banned their own staff from using electric typewriters for classified information, forcing them to use manual models for top-secret information. When Soviet typewriters weren’t being used at the country’s own embassies, the Soviets stored them in tamperproof containers. And yet the Americans hadn’t bothered to ask why.