If the Cold War was an era of heightened anxiety, it was also a time of great ingenuity. When the Russian speed skater Zenaida Yakovlev returned victorious from the 1960 Winter Olympics in Squaw Valley, the well-worn blades of her ice skates went unnoticed by American officials, though their seemingly random scratches were later revealed to be an elaborate set of precise markings that encoded a secret message.

The United States responded through its Steganographic Operations Organization (stegopsorg/us), bent on finding ways to introduce undetectable changes to everyday objects that could be repurposed as a means of transmitting secret information. These machines, recently declassified by the nsa, were designed to encode information as (fig. 1) photographic ‘microdots,’ which could compress a large image down to the size of the dot on a lowercase ‘i’; (fig. 2) the grooves on poker chips; (fig. 3) the scent of additives used in dish soap; (fig. 4) the intervals between markings on wooden rulers; (fig. 5) the color of tattoo ink; (fig. 6) the position of sprocket holes on fan-fold paper used by dot-matrix printers; (fig. 7) the reflective properties of embroidery thread; (fig. 8) the audio track on Ultra Panavision 70mm film.

Published December 12, 2022. Copyright © 2022 Jonathan Hoefler.