Word: bugging
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...will not be permitted to occupy their new embassy on Mount Alto in Washington until security can be assured for the U.S. in its new Moscow quarters. He conceded that the red-brick U.S. chancery, whose walls are already water-stained because of its unfinished roof, may be so bug-ridden that it will have to be demolished. The entire complex, which includes 114 occupied residential units and recreational facilities, had been budgeted at $89 million. The cost when it is finished, apart from the electronic cleansing, is now projected at $192 million...
...clothing. Some do not need wires to transmit; they send out microwave signals that can be read by equipment outside the building. They can be turned on and off by remote control, or set to be activated by heat, radiation, the vibrations of a voice or pressure. A bug in a chair might turn itself on when someone sits down...
Diplomats who have served in Moscow insist that Americans have assumed for decades that all their conversations might be overheard, and made it a rule to take precautions. George Kennan remembers discovering a Soviet bug in the Ambassador's residence when he was a young foreign-service officer in Moscow in the 1930s and finding a more sophisticated one in the beak of the eagle in the Great Seal of the U.S. when he was Ambassador to Moscow in 1952. (President Eisenhower disclosed that bug years later during the U-2 spyplane crisis.) Says Kennan: "For half a century...
...precaution was the "bubble," a supposedly bugproof, heavily shielded room-within-a-room in the embassy. But now it is assumed that Marine guards let Soviet agents into the bubble to plant bugs there too (two new bubbles have since been built). The greatest damage would have been wrought if a bug in the encoding equipment did indeed allow the Soviets to crack the U.S. code and read all messages going into and out of the embassy. Presumably these would have included U.S. negotiating positions. Says John Barron, author of a book about the KGB: "Give me access to your...
...suspects that when Bracy and Lonetree shared night watch, Soviet agents were able to bug the most secure of the embassy's communications equipment and place intercept devices in highly sensitive cryptographic information, enabling them to read State Department messages before they were put in code. "There's lots of grounds for assuming the worst case in this instance," explained a White House source. Based on what Bracy and Lonetree have revealed, U.S. officials are convinced that for more than a year, beginning in mid-1985, the Soviets read every important classified communication issued by the embassy; the assumption...