Word: pcc
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Next, investigators looked into whether the Soviets had been able to penetrate the PCC electronically without setting foot inside, either by drilling a hole or by placing a device on the outside wall of the code room. "If they could touch it, they could penetrate it," says former official. "At least, that's what our guys say we can do. Our best offensive and defensive guys spent a lot of time looking at this. They concluded it was not a problem...
...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...
...easy enough to determine that those devices reflected no evidence of penetration. The alarms for the main State Department vault and the CIA area had never gone off on the same night -- as would be expected if someone had entered the PCC, walked through the main room and entered the CIA subvault. Although there were some anomalies in the records for various monitors (for example, the door counter sometimes registered twice if the door was slammed hard), these never matched up with one another in any meaningful...
...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...
...Clayton Lonetree, the Marine who started the whole fuss, who inadvertently laid the PCC-penetration theory to rest. In August 1987 Lonetree was sentenced to 30 years in prison on espionage charges. In exchange for a five-year reduction in his sentence, he agreed to talk. His debriefing began in October 1987 and continued for four months. He took repeated polygraph tests. A dozen military and intelligence officers watched him through a one- way window. By the time the interrogation was over, everyone involved was convinced that Lonetree had been telling the truth when, contrary to Bracy's confession...