Word: kgb
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...number of smoking guns were found in this equipment. But one by one they turned out to be innocuous. The first was a circuit board that had been replaced but not sprayed with a special plastic that "tagged" it as an authorized repair. American officials were afraid the KGB had installed this circuit board to reroute uncoded U.S. message traffic. But the device was tested by NSA experts, who found that it did nothing improper. Security officials later discovered that some State % Department technicians had never been told about the secret tagging program and had not used the spray...
...last possibility was that KGB agents had entered the code room and installed some kind of device. One of the Marines posted just down the hall could have let the Soviets into the embassy. He might also have been able to help the KGB learn the combination to the vaultlike front door of the PCC. But once inside, Soviet operatives would have been faced with several locked doors, one of which led to the CIA's area: that would have been the target. Inside that room was a subvault that housed the CIA's printers, communications and coding machines...
...investigators determined that it would take KGB safecrackers one to four hours to crack each lock inside the code room. Opening the CIA vault would trigger another set of sensors that would ring at the Marine post. It would also be recorded by a device that counted the number of times the door was opened and closed. This counter was displayed inside a tamperproof box: if a KGB spy tried to open it and change the number, he would destroy certain indicators inside the device. Having destroyed them, he would not be able to examine them in order to duplicate...
...elemental assumption in the intelligence game that no security system is foolproof. U.S. investigators reasoned that if the KGB's best technical experts had access to the PCC repeatedly for several hours at a time, they might be able to devise ways to spoof or bypass one device after another. Eventually, they might make it all the way to the equipment inside the State Department and CIA communications vaults without being detected. But, says an official directly involved in this analysis, "I never saw a scenario that was credible." Declares another source: "If there had been a penetration, it would...
...sure the Soviets have enjoyed watching us do this to ourselves," muses a security officer involved with the case. In fact, the greatest benefit to the KGB from the whole affair may have been the spectacle of the U.S. Government tearing itself apart over what turned out to be a phantom...