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Dead letter box
Perhaps the most well-known device for a dead drop,
or dead letter box, is the so-called dead drop spike,
a watertight metal container, usually made of aluminium, with a sharp
tip at one end and a removable cap with a piece of rope at the other end,
giving access to a small storage space.
In the German language a dead drop spike is known as Erddorn
and in Dutch as a trapcontainer.
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The dead drop spike
can best be described as a hollow nail.
It comes in many flavours: short, long, thick and thin. The one shown
here is a narrow one that is suitable for passing money,
One-Time Pads (OTPs)
or small documents, for example between an agent and his handler.
The spike can easily be hidden by the owner, simply by pushing it into the
ground in a known place, e.g. between some plants, or in the grass,
with the short pieces of rope (or leather as in this case)
sticking out at the top. It will
hardly be noticable between the existing grass or plants.
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The sharp tip at the bottom allows the spike to be pushed into the ground
easily. If the ground was too hard, the agent could even step on it in order
to 'drill' it into the ground completely.
The removable cap at the top gives access to the actual
container in which the message was hidden.
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The removable threaded cap
has an O-ring that makes it watertight.
Small objects, like the OTP booklets shown here, could be stored
inside it.
Once the spike was placed in the secret location, the sender had to notify
the recipient that a message was waiting for him. This was usually done
by leaving a secret mark (signal) at at a predetermined place,
for example a white cross written with chalk at the side of a phone booth.
The recipient then went to the secret location and collected the spike
by pulling its strings.
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After that, he confirmed reception by leaving another secret mark at a
predetermined place. This way, sender and recipient (or agent and handler)
never had to meet in person and were less likely to get caught by the
counter-espionage agency of the country in which they were operating.
During the Cold War, spikes like this were often used for passing
One-Time Pads,
or OTPs,
that were needed for encoding and decoding secret messages.
Other types of dead drop spikes were much thicker and some even had space
for one or two 35 mm photo films. The dead drop spike shown above is a
high-quality reproduction made by Dereu & Sons Manufacturing Co. (US) [1].
This company also produces high-quality
hollow coins that can be used to
hide a memory device.
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Dead drop spikes are known under different names in different languages.
Here are a couple of popular ones that we've come across:
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Dead drop spike English Erddorn German Briefstift German Trapcontainer Dutch
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© Crypto Museum. Created: Tuesday 04 August 2015. Last changed: Thursday, 04 October 2018 - 12:07 CET.
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