Lose your keys? It may have been a Russian spy:
Russian spies have launched a campaign of psychological harassment against U.S. and British diplomats living there, the Guardian reports, by breaking into their homes and moving things around just to fuck with their heads.
There's no real intelligence value to the operations, which were first revealed in Mafia State, a forthcoming book by former Guardian reporter Luke Harding. American and British counterintelligence officials know all about the break-ins, so no diplomats keep anything of real value in their homes. No, the aim is just generally to act like gremlins and make people think they're going crazy and desperately want to get out of this god-forsaken country as soon as possible and keep our diplomatic corps destabilized.
Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin perfected “soft torture” techniques when he worked as an undercover spy in East Germany:
Mafia State recounts how the KGB first became interested in "operational psychology" in the 1960s. But it was the Stasi, East Germany's sinister secret police, that perfected these psychological techniques and used them extensively against dissidents in the 1970s and 1980s. These operations were given a name, Zersetzung – literally corrosion or undermining.
According to former Stasi officers the aim was to "switch off" regime opponents by disrupting their private or family lives. Tactics included removing pictures from walls, replacing one variety of tea with another, and even sending a vibrator to a target's wife. Usually victims had no idea the Stasi were responsible. Many thought they were going mad; some suffered breakdowns; a few killed themselves.
It was Erich Honecker, East Germany's communist leader, who patented these methods after concluding that "soft" methods of torture were preferable to open forms of persecution. The advantage of psychological operations was their deniability – important for a regime that wanted to maintain its international respectability. Putin spent the late 1980s as an undercover KGB officer based in the east German town of Dresden.
Of course, Western states also adopted Stasi tactics, which included framing targets and teaming up with fascist spies to create a clandestine terrorist network used to discredit the left.