Today I learned the CIA hid a home movie camera inside a Xerox machine — and trained a real repairman to steal the film right in front of the KGB
The audacious story of the secret service, the Soviets, and the Xerox photocopier that caught on fire
by https://www.techradar.com/uk/author/steve-clark · TechRadarFeatures By Steve Clark Published 28 July 2026
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The CIA has never confirmed or denied the following story.
The only evidence we have that it happened at all is a 1997 article in Popular Science Vol. 250, Issue 1, where journalist Dawn Stover spoke to the mastermind behind one of the best-kept secrets of the Cold War.
We think of digital surveillance as a relatively modern fear. We worry that our phones are spying on us. That CCTV watches our every move. Even laptops have physical privacy covers to mitigate security risks. But it turns out, this goes back at least 60 years - right to the heart of the Soviet embassy in Washington DC.
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The year is 1963. Kennedy still sits in the White House. Khrushchev holds the Kremlin. The Cuban Missile Crisis is still fresh in everyone’s mind. Paranoia runs high on both sides of the Iron Curtain.
And a repairman strolls unnoticed through the halls of a mansion in the capital. He steps into a busy administrative office used by Russian diplomats and the KGB. His bag of tools clunks with every swing. The man pauses at a large, boxy machine in the corner of the room. It hums and whirs.
Launched just three years prior, the Xerox 914 was the company’s first successful photocopier - with a troubling tendency to catch on fire. But that’s not why the repairman is here today.
He drops his bag to the floor. The diplomats and KGB agents ignore him, the clerical staff barely see him, the hawkish security guards notice nothing out of the ordinary. The repairman diligently begins, as he always did, his routine maintenance work.
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