The device is called a Minox subminiature camera\u2014and it’s surprisingly easy to find. Although its products were commonly associated with spies, Minox produced hundreds of thousands<\/a>\u00a0of film cameras for civilian customers during the 20th century. They go for between $100 and $200 on the secondhand market today. The catch is finding and processing the bespoke 8 mm by 11 mm format film the camera uses.<\/p>\n These recent photos were taken with a Minox B camera, made in 1966, and developed by\u00a0Blue Moon Camera and Machine<\/a>\u00a0in Portland, perhaps the only commercial lab in the U.S. that still processes Minox film. The process is a reminder of how much we take for granted in the age of smartphone cameras, and how resourceful people in the past were. Portable photography used to be difficult and limited to people possessing specialized resources.<\/p>\n The cameras were first made in 1936 by Latvian inventor Walter Zapp, a former photographer’s apprentice who\u00a0became obsessed<\/a>\u00a0with making a camera “so small as to vanish in a clenched fist.” His devices quickly attracted the attention of governments, especially given the state of Europe at the time. Zapp’s first customer outside of Riga was a French diplomat, according to an article by Minox enthusiast Morris G. Moses, now archived on the\u00a0CIA website<\/a>.<\/p>\n The Soviet Union invaded Latvia in 1940, and Nazi Germany counterinvaded in 1941, taking over the Minox factory. The U.S. Office of Strategic Services hoarded whatever Minox cameras it could get its hands on. Its successor agency, the CIA, eagerly sought<\/a>\u00a0new Minox products after the war.<\/p>\n Zapp, an ethnic German, reopened his business in West Germany in 1945. Later models followed the same basic 1936 design, with a few additions. For example, the B model includes an automatic light meter powered by a photovoltaic cell\u2014essentially a tiny solar panel. The postwar Minox models also come with a\u00a0totally innocent<\/em>\u00a0measuring chain that happens to show exactly where the camera needs to be held to surreptitiously photograph a document.<\/p>\n The most famous real-life Minox user in America was John Anthony Walker Jr., a U.S. Navy officer who spied for the Soviet KGB. Walker used a Minox C camera, provided by his\u00a0Soviet handlers<\/a>, to copy hundreds of highly sensitive military documents. After catching Walker in 1985, the FBI released an infamous\u00a0reenactment photo<\/a>\u00a0of Walker with his Minox camera in hand, its chain stretched towards a pile of papers.<\/p>\n The camera was infamous on the other side of the Iron Curtain as well. Oleg \u2028Penkovsky, a Soviet military intelligence officer who spied for the CIA and MI6 during the Cuban missile crisis, was given\u00a0several Minox cameras<\/a>\u00a0by his British and American handlers. When Soviet authorities\u00a0raided Penkovsky’s apartment<\/a>\u00a0in 1963, his cameras (along with codebooks) were the smoking gun that gave him away as a spy.<\/p>\n Minox’s marketing department\u00a0continued to advertise<\/a>\u00a0the subminiature camera as an innocent travel accessory. A\u00a0magazine advertisement<\/a>\u00a0from 1972 shows Minox cameras stashed on top of a passport, inside an outdoorsman’s jacket, and on the waistband of a swimsuit. “More members of royalty, captains of industry, TV, film and sports stars, and ‘now’ people use Minox as their personal camera than any other precision camera,” it claims.<\/p>\n Zapp, who died in 2003, “always denied” that espionage was “the primary design goal of the camera,” according to Moses’ article. But the company did come to wink and nod toward its reputation as a supplier for secret agents. Another\u00a0magazine ad<\/a>\u00a0from 1961 mentions that the Minox was “originally designed for undercover work.”<\/p>\n Although Minox stopped making film cameras in 2003, it later introduced an electronic model called the Digital Spy Camera. “Traditionally, when you think about Minox, you think about small spy cameras,” company representative Bruce Michelson said in a\u00a0Digital Spy Camera commercial<\/a>\u00a0from 2012. “We’ve been making them for years and years. And that tradition continues today.”<\/p>\n The post The History of Minox Cameras, James Bond's Real-Life Spy Tool Used by the CIA<\/a> appeared first on Reason.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" You can still get a secondhand Minox subminiature camera. Finding someone to process the film might be more difficult. …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"tdm_status":"","tdm_grid_status":""},"categories":[19,9,161],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/3rdcitynews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/121246"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/3rdcitynews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/3rdcitynews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/3rdcitynews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/3rdcitynews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=121246"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/3rdcitynews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/121246\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/3rdcitynews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=121246"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/3rdcitynews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=121246"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/3rdcitynews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=121246"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net\/img\/q60\/uploads\/2025\/08\/33-scaled.jpg\")
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![magazine ad<\/a>\u00a0from 1961 mentions that the Minox was “originally designed for undercover work.”<\/p>\nAlthough Minox stopped making film cameras in 2003, it later introduced an electronic model called the Digital Spy Camera. “Traditionally, when you think about Minox, you think about small spy cameras,” company representative Bruce Michelson said in a\u00a0Digital Spy Camera commercial<\/a>\u00a0from 2012. “We’ve been making them for years and years. And that tradition continues today.”<\/p>\nThe post The History of Minox Cameras, James Bond's Real-Life Spy Tool Used by the CIA<\/a> appeared first on Reason.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" You can still get a secondhand Minox subminiature camera. Finding someone to process the film might be more difficult. …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"tdm_status":"","tdm_grid_status":""},"categories":[19,9,161],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/3rdcitynews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/121246"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/3rdcitynews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/3rdcitynews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/3rdcitynews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/3rdcitynews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=121246"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/3rdcitynews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/121246\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/3rdcitynews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=121246"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/3rdcitynews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=121246"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/3rdcitynews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=121246"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}](\"http:\/\/www.submin.com\/8x11\/manuals\/minox\/minox_literature1960\/minox_61_2.jpg\"){kind=link}