Robots

In the 1970s, the CIA Created a Robot Dragonfly Spy. Now We Know How It Works.

...Despite being a star attraction at the CIA’s museum, many details about the bug remained a secret for decades until John Greenwald, founder of the anti-secrecy website The Black Vault, put in a request for documents under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) in the summer of 2013.

“I've learned over the years, the U.S. military and government often will acknowledge something or confirm something exists, and many times that largely satisfies the public's curiosity,” Greenwald told Popular Mechanics. “However...we often don't get the full story. So I go after documents never-before-released to tell either more of the story, or the real story.”

Seven years later in January 2020, Greenwald received a stack of documents detailing the dragonfly’s design and construction—and the story stretches back into spying’s peak during the Cold War.