Top secret invisible ink pen9/16/2023 Hopefully, they didn't drill a new hole in his tooth to hide the secret ink in it.” Hopefully, he already had a hole in his tooth. “And finally, it came out that he hid a little baggie with invisible ink in his molar. “At first, he told a bunch of lies, and they asked him about secret writing, and he said he didn't use any,” Macrakis relates. Of course, the invisible ink cat-and-mouse game between the Germans and the Brits continued into WWII as well.ĭuring that war, the Brits caught a Norwegian named Nickolay Hansen. “I mean, I looked at it, and I thought, ‘Wow, a 100-year-old lemon.’ And this innocuous lemon meant that about a dozen German spies were shot one by one in the Tower of London.” In fact, in writing the book, Macrakis uncovered the story of the "Lemon Juice Spies" - a group of Germans in Britain who were caught using lemon juice to try to send secret messages during World War I. She even found one of the actual lemons used as evidence against them in a box. Then you hold the paper over a flame and the message appears. Primitive, but it works. You take the juice, dip a toothpick or other sharp object in it, and then write on a piece of paper. There are lots of ways of concealing and they're all just fascinating.”īy now, you’re probably thinking back to those days as a kid when you tried this with lemon juice. Throughout history, you find the most fascinating ways of concealing secret messages, whether it's in jewelry, or even writing on bodies, or even in a tooth. You name it, says Macrakis, and it's been tried. We're talking about al-Qaeda hiding correspondence in the pixels of a porn film. We're talking about prisoners who have used oatmeal and milk, urine and even semen to write notes. We're talking about the Roman poet Ovid giving Dear Abby-style advice about the kind of plant juice that lovers could use to write secret messages. Macrakis was having so much fun with the topic that she decided to write a book about the history of invisible ink and "secret writing:" steganography, to use the proper name. Macrakis brought the Stasi secret ink formula back to Georgia Tech in Atlanta, where she teaches. She found a chemist friend, and together with some students, they recreated the formula through trial and error. I fled down the steps and looked behind me, and they weren't asking for my files back, and I walked outside, thinking I was home free.” I felt like I was in a Hitchcock movie, you know. “I stuffed the copy of the file in my knapsack and started waltzing down the steps in my sandals. Macrakis hand-copied the whole file, convinced there was no way the archivists would make a photocopy for her.īut she asked anyway, and to her surprise, they did.Ī few minutes later, she was making a quick getaway. It contained invisible ink formulas from the Cold War in the 1970s. “I opened it up, and my mouth fell open, and I thought, 'Wow, finally,” Macrakis says. Then the archivist handed her a very thin file, tucked in among a bunch of others. She'd gotten hints that the Stasi liked to use invisible ink, but she'd never seen an actual method or formula detailed. On a trip to Berlin a few years ago, she was working on a book about the East German secret police, the Stasi. Her research focuses on the historical intersections between science and espionage. It is serious business,” says the book’s author Kristie Macrakis. “People are always surprised, because they think this is kid's stuff. Spy, but it did pique my interest.Īnd then, I received a review copy of a new book called " Prisoners, Lovers and Spies: The Story of Invisible Ink from Herodotus to Al-Qaeda." I tend to write back: "Eat your vegetables." My daughter's notes usually say something like: "Can I have a cookie?" You use the other pen to rub over the note, revealing those messages. One pen has "invisible ink," which you use to craft your super-secret messages. I say "seemingly" because my daughter recently got a "top secret sleuthing kit" for her 8th birthday. I have been finding little scrappy bits of seemingly blank paper all over the house lately.
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