Australian Spy Museum

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This week's Featured Artefact - ultra rare Yugoslavian KZU-31 teleprinter cipher machine.

The 1990's Balkan Wars destroyed just about all the JNA's original equipment, I cannot find another example or even other photos online.

Follow @aus-spymuseum.bsky.social for retro spycraft goodness.

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Australian Spy Museum Featured Artefact - rare subminiature spy cameras - from Left to Right:

c1980 The stunning EFBE 😍 made by Franz Brinkert

c1962 Stasi Uranus 5 creates 2mm x 1.5mm Mikrats

c1960's Soviet GRU SRC-1 - is one of only five examples known, I'm very happy to bring this to Australia

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This Stasi room-surveillance rig comprised of:
- A commercial Bühnenempfänger - or stage receiver
- A microphone / transmitter concealed inside a polished wooden presentation box
- Paired with a western Uher cassette recorder

Pictured also - 2x pages of Stasi deployment guide book

Australian Spy Museum Featured Artefact this week is one of our surveillance listening stations.

We have a few of these from both East & West and its interesting to see how they compare, and evolved over time.

Follow us here for more retro-spookery

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Thanks @SecTalks for the invite to present on Tuesday, and to @Atlassian for hosting 😀

@aus-spymuseum.bsky.social presented "The Enigma Machine - Live Demo'd and Explained" with hands-on time.

As a bonus we included these rare cipher devices used in WWII Occupied France.

Have a great weekend!

Here are:
- One of Powers flight suits
- A page from his prison notebook, learning Russian
- His autograph and Time Magazine cover
- Soviets propaganda "No Return for u2"
- And an original piece of wreckage from Powers U2.

I was honoured to meet his son Gary Jr who signed "Spy Pilot" for me

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CIA pilot Francis Gary Powers was shot down in a U2 spy plane on May Day (May 1st) 1960. He was captured, put on trial in the Soviet Union and sentenced to 10 years in prison.

On Feb 10th 1962 he was exchanged for Rudolf Abel on the "Bridge of Spies" in Berlin.

Here's some nice U2 artefacts:

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So that collection includes:
- Turing's pre-WWII thesis, and now more of his papers
- Original material from Bletchley Hut 8 (U-boot decrypt)
- Operational Enigma machines, and parts of Tunny
- The costumes from "The Imitation Game"
- Very early compute items

We'll exhibit some in SYD in 2026.

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I know some are thinking "Wait - that's not a camera / recorder / spy gadget!" No - no it's not. But a credible museum needs an INcredible reference library.

And y'know - Turing / Enigma - so these fit into our larger Maths/Codebreaking collection and along an evolutionary timeline.

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Some bookish and nerdy Australian Spy Museum Acquisition News.
We've recently added some more Turing papers "Computability and Lambda Definability" in the Journal of Symbolic Logic - 1936, and "The Word Problem in Semi Groups with Cancellation" in Annals of Mathematics - 1950.

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Lots of cool zine style inspo there, pretty happy to appear alongside screenprint, scraper board, hand drawn etc

Well, looks like we are a hit with the kids

You've know you've made it when someone spots you in the wild and posts you on F*ck Yeah Stickers

fuckyeahstickers.tumblr.com/post/8039319...

Twenty years ago I ran a promotion in Australia that took our biz partners up in BAC Strikemasters - two seat jet fighter bombers - to experience some G-forces and simulated dogfighting. That was for a computer networking company not gaming but I think the kind of thing gamers would like

Yeah that’s a total vibe killer

YouTube video by DF2AR TTY Siemens T68D receiving i-telex message

T68D in action - awesome bzzzt-clackety-clack analog retro goodness.

youtu.be/Xp7g2okPZIw?...

Australian Spy Museum acquisition news! We've completed our NATO 1950's teleprinter cipher system.

It includes the Hagelin T-55 cipher appliance that sits in between our T68D teleprinter and a comms circuit, providing a high security point to point link.

In below comment, link to T68D demo video

“We need a society that once more values its dreamers and visionaries, those *** who uncomfortably go against the grain of what and who we are, exploring our nightmares *** so we might better know ourselves …

Yep - 💯 this, might have been lifted from Aust Spy Museum’s mission statement website

Reading history served you well

I don’t think people understand what this really means

Thanks

Can you please share the document the above post was taken from, these are all very interesting data points.

Something seasonal - for 30+ yrs NSA, then later the CIA, DIA and NRO have been putting out Christmas decorations.

Here's some of NSA & CIA's greatest hits - including Enigma, U2 and portraits of Donovan, Dulles, Helms and Tenet.

Thoughts are with all of you over the break, we'll see you in 2026.

There’s a global audience for this as the US giving up soft power creates power vacuums & instability in other regions - we’re watching with keen interest. Set a fair price for digital access maybe $10 a month/$100 annual?, we appreciate interview recordings we can watch in our timezone.

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Second - a stunning new find from Germany - an allied strip cipher of a type I've not seen before, complete with 6x pages of instructions.

It uses double transposition and is marked "This is a Top Secret Document", likewise the instructions say to destroy them after memorising the method.

A set of items from World War 2 allied agent in France - a British made B2 spy radio in a suitcase, a box of radio spare parts, and a previously unknown manual "strip cipher" encryption device made of card.

Closeup view of a British made B2 spy radio in a suitcase, the radio has a hammered metal paint finish, and there are pluggable radio crystals, headphones and a morse code key.

A previously unseen British "strip cipher" device from World War Two that is made from card, along with its instruction sheet. The device features 11x sliding strips made out of card with alphabets arranged on them, the intructions advise how to run two sequential transpositions of letters to create an enciphered message.

A closeup view of the manual strip cipher device - its backing board is about 40 centimetres wide and 25 centimetres tall, with 11x sliding strips that can be rearranged to create enciphered messages.

Australian Spy Museum Featured Artefacts this week are from WWII Europe - a mysterious allied cipher device and a clandestine radio

First - a British B2 spy radio used in Occupied France by agents of the British SOE, American OSS and the French Resistance. Alongside it more B2 spares.

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Nice little Ricoh Half - you might be interested to know they were used as concealed cameras by Stasi & other intelligence agencies. Cheap, reliable, light and spring powered so a good choice to hide in a bag etc

There’s also a whole series of them with patterned facades - super 60’s retro styling

Yes to the pod kitty - here’s Spookcat and The Void - they run QA sniff tests on our inbound shipments and love buzz / click / blinkenlights action

Black and white photo of Enigma machine sitting on a granite plinth in front of the Reichstag in Berlin. It’s a cloudy day and a moody shot devoid of nearby people.

Two weeks ago I shared a photo of our Enigma at The Beehive, the New Zealand parliament.

Here it is at the Reichstag in Berlin.

Point here being - in the age of relays and other electromechanical gear a Chinese cipher machine is a bridge too far - look at the incredible effort just to build a Chinese typewriter.

But OMG what a thing of beauty this Missing Link object is … amazing