The following paper will examine the nature of the Soviet electronic penetration and the damage assessment of Soviet access to typewriters at the U.S. embassy in Moscow. This history of Project GUNMAN will also answer such questions as how the typewriter bugs were discovered and how they worked.

In spite of all the papers that others have written about the manuscript, there is no complete survey of all the approaches, ideas, background information and analytic studies that have accumulated over the nearly fifty-five years since the manuscript was discovered by Wilfrid M. Voynich in 1912. This report pulls together all the information the author could obtain from all the sources she has examined, and to present it in an orderly fashion. The resulting survey will provide a firm basis upon which other students may build their work, whether they seek to decipher the text or simply to learn more about the problem.