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During the Cold War, the invisible troops of the intelligence agencies carried out a variety of tasks at the bidding of their political masters. These jobs included assassination and destabilizing unfriendly regimes. But the core of espionage is gathering information and by definition, that goal must be accomplished in secret. Some tools and missions could be concealed simply by placing them far away from the target -- the approach taken by surveillance planes and satellites. But satellites can only go so far, and old-fashioned human intelligence must come into play. Like "Q," the master engineer in the James Bond films, engineers at every spy agency labored to produce tools for their spies in the field -- devices that could escape detection or, if they could not be hidden, looked like anything but what they were. Some of their inventions seem almost quaint today: A two-way radio that could fit in a briefcase! A tape recorder that could be concealed under clothing! Throughout the Cold War, the demands of espionage helped drive familiar trends in technology -- making both exotic and everyday items more sophisticated, smaller, and more concealable.
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