Security Meltdown at State Department Start at the Top

(Washington, D.C.): When Congress gets back to town next month, one of its
first agenda items
had better be an inquiry into the Russian penetration of a conference room on the State
Department’s sensitive executive seventh floor. This is needed to understand the troubling
particulars of the present case, but also to explore the Clinton-Gore Administration’s cavalier
attitude towards information, personnel and physical security practices that appears to have
contributed significantly to this debacle — and perhaps to as-yet-unquantified damage to
other
national security interests over the past seven years.

For example, the Russian “bug” affair offers insights into the Administration’s problematic
handling of matters involving information and personnel security. According to a an article by
Jamie Dettmer that appeared recently in Insight Magazine, U.S. counter-intelligence
sought and
secured the Secretary of State’s agreement not to “read-in” her deputy, Strobe Talbott, on their
efforts to determine the location of the Kremlin’s listening device and to assess the damage done
prior to its discovery. Congress and the Nation need to know why the State Department’s
Number 2 official — a long-time Friend of Bill and principal U.S. policy-maker on the former
Soviet Union — could not be trusted with this information.

While they are at it, congressional investigators had better explore why the Number 3 man,
Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Thomas Pickering, personally intervened to stymie
efforts made over a year ago by the department’s Diplomatic Security Bureau to tighten up
building access procedures. The Washington Post’s David Ignatius reports in today’s
paper:
“The mandarins at State have never much liked the security people, viewing them as gumshoes
and right-wing zealots.” Unfortunately, the chief mandarin — Mrs. Albright — has herself
exhibited similar contempt for those concerned with physical security of diplomatic facilities,
having ignored repeated requests for additional protection for the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi prior
to its destruction by terrorists. How many more American lives and other, less
tangible equities
will be needlessly sacrificed to the reckless attitudes of Clinton appointees?

Insight Magazine, December 1999

News Alert!

Strobe Talbott and the Russian bug in the State Department: Why
did the CIA think
Talbott was too close to the Russians?

By Jamie Dettmer

U.S. counterintelligence officers secured Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s agreement
last
August to refrain from briefing her deputy, Strobe Talbott – a onetime Moscow correspondent for
Time magazine – about their discovery of a sophisticated Russian eavesdropping device
concealed in a seventh-floor State Department conference room.

According to several U.S. intelligence and Justice Department sources, all of whom spoke on
the
condition of anonymity, Talbot was kept out of the loop of the security probe that led to the
arrest outside the State Department on Dec. 8, 1999, of 54-year-old Russian intelligence officer
Stanislav Borisovich Gusev. “Talbott didn’t need to know; it is as simple as that,” says a Justice
Department source who declined to expound on the reasons why the Clinton administration’s
main Russia expert was shut out.

A CIA source tells news alert!: “Talbott has long been widely seen at Langley as being too
close
to the Russians – a sort of trusted friend, you might say.” According to that source, only Albright
herself and Undersecretary of State Thomas Pickering were kept fully briefed on the progress of
a bug hunt triggered when Gusev, the top technical intelligence officer in the Russian Embassy,
was spotted last summer by an FBI surveillance team wearing headphones and loitering in his car
and on foot on a weekly basis outside the department. The FBI team suspected immediately that
Gusev was receiving transmissions from a bug. Talbot, they were afraid, inadvertently might let
slip information about the security probe.

FBI monitoring of the Russian and a bug hunt in the department led to the discovery in
August of
the device – consisting of low-powered batteries, a microphone, a recording mechanism and a
line-of-sight transmitter. The device was concealed in a wooden rail molding in the conference
room used by the Bureau of Oceans and International Environmental Scientific Affairs. When
Gusev was arrested, a remote-control antenna was found hidden in his car.

In the political flap since the arrest, State officials, including Albright, have sought to dispel
fears
that the Russians could have gleaned sensitive information from the bug. Intelligence sources
take issue with all the downplaying of the potential damage. They say there is a shortage of
meeting space on State’s seventh floor, which includes Albright’s suite, and that conference
rooms frequently are shared by other sections.

Further, sources say the eavesdropping device had directional-sound capabilities and may
have
picked up noise from the offices of State’s inspector general and from the department’s
congressional-affairs section. The FBI also is working under the assumption that where there is
one bug, there could be more.

The damage-assessment operation under way consists of trying to discover how the bug was
planted and whether the Russians had inside help; it is assumed they did. According to former
CIA officer Paul Redmond, concealing the bug would have been time-consuming. “I’ve actually
been involved in operations like that. It’s a very complicated matter. You actually have to go in
several times,” he told NBC. As with other retired and current CIA officers, Redmond criticizes
the almost open-access policy granted to Russian diplomats by State. More than 20 Russian
diplomats were accorded the status of “visitors not requiring an escort.”

The timing of Gusev’s arrest has prompted speculation that it was a tit-for-tat response to the
Russian arrest in Moscow on Nov. 30, 1999, of CIA operative Cheri Leberknight. Neil
Gallagher, assistant director of the FBI’s national-security division, insists Gusev’s arrest was
unrelated. But a U.S. intelligence source tells news alert!: “In this business there’s no such thing
as a coincidence. Working on that theory, one can also hazard maybe the Russians themselves
suspected Gusev was about to go down and went for Leberknight as a preemptive strike – or
maybe it was in retaliation for our Chechnya criticisms.”