Has this dupe russe tale appeared in the US? Or brags of cutting edge XX-equipment duping global buyers? ----- The Sunday Times (UK) 31 March 1996 Spy in the copier gave CIA its coup by James Adams Washington A tiny camera hidden in a photocopier in the Soviet embassy in Washington provided America with one of the greatest intelligence coups of the cold war, it emerged last week. The camera, planted by the CIA in the early 1960s, provided a treasure trove of intelligence, with access to virtually every document copied by the Russians for most of the decade. The CIA was exploiting a Russian bureaucratic obsession with documents: in 1963, word got out that embassy staff were fed up with copying documents by hand and had approached Xerox to rent a photocopier. American spies went to work. Ray Zoppoth, one of Xerox's engineering experts, hit upon the idea of installing a camera opposite the photocopier's mirror. It was activated automatically when the document scanning light came on. The coup could hardly have come at a better time for the CIA. The Cuban missile crisis had plunged American-Soviet relations into one of their darkest periods. The CIA, embarrassed over the way the Soviets had been able to move missiles into Cuba, was determined to improve its intelligence capability. One problem was how to retrieve the camera's film at regular intervals. Xerox prided itself on the reliability of its early machines but it sent a maintenance man regularly to the embassy to collect the film. Later Zoppoth invented an even smaller camera that could be disguised as a tool. Over the next six years the camera was installed in photocopiers at other embassies of hostile and friendly countries. "Xerox copiers had become part of every office system and no foreign embassy was immune to possible spying," said Zoppoth. The operation was halted only in 1969, when an American chemical company tried to bug the photocopier of a rival firm to steal patented designs. The publicity surrounding the case alerted the Russians and they stopped photocopying their secret documents. --