Why this little camera from Grenchen was popular with the Stasi and the CIA

Who today after the term Tessina-Search camera, comes across a photo on the CIA website: The American Secret Service used this camera. The same goes for the Australian. But the greatest enthusiasm developed Stasi, the state security of the GDR. The camera from Switzerland is on sale today Stasi Museum in a display case on Normannenstrasse in Berlin. And in the archives of Stasi There are dozens of documents showing how the little thing from Switzerland was adapted.

The Tessina came onto the market in 1960. It is designed as a dual-lens reflex camera. The recording and viewfinder lenses were on the narrow side. And it had a motor that was powered by a spring mechanism. The spring motor produced a characteristic whining sound during film transport. At the time, the Tessina was the smallest camera that worked with conventional 35mm film and also the smallest SLR camera in the world.

The inventor was the Ticino-based German engineer Rudolf Steineck, who patented the camera in 1957 and immediately named it after the name of his new house. Paul Nagel, a brother of August Nagel, the company’s founder, helped him with the construction Contessa and Nagel are working in Stuttgart, where it later came from Kodak were taken over. Steineck was able to use the company for production Siegrist & Cie in Grenchen, a company specialized in precision mechanics that actually mainly supplied parts for the watch industry and still exists.

That came at the same time Minox on the market: it was also appreciated in espionage circles, but used a much smaller negative format. However, it was more successful Rollei35which also worked with 35mm film and came onto the market in 1966.

In total, approximately 25,000 cameras were produced in Grenchen from 1960 to the late 1980s. They were sold until the early 2000s. Sales abroad were outsourced to external companies: in Germany Robot Berning and in the US to the Swiss expat Karl Heitz in New York, who had good contacts in government circles. The US was the largest sales market for Ticina. The specially created company took over the coordination of sales Concava in Lugano, where the lenses were also manufactured until 1967.

Even though the camera was not a financial success and suffered from numerous construction problems, especially in the early days: the Tessina was a mechanical marvel and is therefore still prized by collectors. It was image advertising for the company and showed the quality of Grenchen’s precision technology.

This came about during the Watergate scandal in the early 1970s Tessina received dubious credit when she served as a spy agent in an affair that led to the overthrow of U.S. President Richard Nixon in 1974.

Daniel Ellsberg, a military specialist at the RAND think tank, had done so in the spring of 1971 New York Times and the Washingtonpost Leaked 7,000 pages of a secret report commissioned by the government to shed light on the reasons for the continued failure of the war. The documents revealed that the US government had lied to Parliament and the public for years; they were given the name “Pentagon papers”.

The two newspapers published excerpts from the newspapers until the court banned them from doing so. The president was furious and appointed a small task force to find the leak. The group was given the internal nickname “The Plumbers”.

The brains behind the operation, the first C.I.AAgent Howard Hunt and government official Gordon Liddy were not squeamish in their choice of methods. Hunt initially purchased spy equipment from the C.I.Aincluding one Tessina-Camera. With other accomplices, they broke into the practice of psychoanalyst Lewis Fielding in Los Angeles on September 3, 1971. He was treating Daniel Ellsberg at the time and the task force hoped to find incriminating material against him there.

Although the Plumbers Task Force Howard Hunt and his associates were disbanded in late 1971 and continued to work for the White House. On June 17, 1972, they staged a burglary of the Democratic Party campaign office in the Watergate Building in Washington DC. A night watchman noticed the burglary and alerted the police FBI five people arrested. In their luggage they found numerous spy tools, including two 35mm cameras. Whether there is one among them Tessina was located is not known.

This arrest led to further investigation, in which two Washington Post reporters, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, with the assistance of the FBI-Source “Deep Throat” revealed even more disturbing details. Under pressure from the evidence, Nixon finally resigned on August 9, 1974.

In the StasiThe document archive in Berlin contains numerous documents Tessina. This shows that the small camera from Grenchen was prized by the Stasi and used under various disguises.

There were cameras in key cases and shopping bags, in scarves, umbrellas and wallets or even hidden in a plaster cast for use ‘outside of hospitals’. The model was also particularly refined “Cigarette” from 1972: When opened, cigarette filters appeared that could be removed. Two cigarettes were real. The inventors each received an “inventor’s bonus” of 50 points.

In 1984 a bonus also went to the inventors of the model “Wanderer”. Here the camera was hidden in “baggy trousers with studs”. The model was suitably loud Stasi– Files mainly “for observation activities at folk festivals, press festivals, in holiday homes, at campsites, in outdoor swimming pools, which are mainly visited by young people or negatively decadent young people…”.

The camera had already featured prominently in the Hitchcock thriller a year earlier “Topaz” from 1969. The scene takes place in a hotel in Harlem, where French agent Philippe Dubois, disguised as a journalist, meets Cuban revolutionaries.

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He wants to get his hands on the plans for stationing Soviet missiles in Cuba. Before he and the Cuban Rico Parra enter the balcony of the hotel, where the revolutionary wants to greet his supporters, the Tessina discovers: “What is that?” the Cubans want to know. “That’s my camera,” Dubois replies. “It’s a nice little camera,” says Parra, and Dubois adds, “A very good one.”

She almost did Tessina experienced another triumphant use: the magazine planned in the early 1970s National Geographic a special edition with 3D images of the moon landing, which she wanted to show in the magazine using the ‘groove technique’. To do this, nine were connected Ticino commissioned. The project failed due to the printing technology in the magazine, reports Swiss collector Rolf Häfliger, who died in April 2023.

Today is the Tessina a sought-after collector’s item that is available in the simplest version for about 500 francs. Colored versions and custom versions in particular are considerably more expensive. Numerous museums have them in their collections, including the Swiss National Museum.