Bugged at the State Department

[mea culpa <jericho () DIMENSIONAL COM>]

Forwarded From: "James M. Atkinson, Comm-Eng" <jmatk () tscm com>
Originally To: TSCM-L Mailing List <TSCM-L () onelist com>


Bugged at the State Department
By David Ignatius
Wednesday, December 22, 1999; Page A33

The season's most intriguing puzzle is how Russian spies managed to
install a bug in a seventh-floor conference room at the State Department
down the hall from the secretary of state's office.  Now a sorry answer is
emerging: The Russian penetration of our diplomatic inner sanctum may be
partly the result of bureaucratic delay by top State Department officials.

Internal State Department documents show that more than a year ago, the
department's Bureau of Diplomatic Security tried to issue new
access-control rules that would have prevented visitors from wandering the
building unescorted. But implementation of these rules was blocked by
senior officials, including the widely respected undersecretary of state
for political affairs, Thomas Pickering.

To appreciate the access-control fiasco, you need to understand that,
until several months ago, visitors were free to roam State's headquarters
on C Street after clearing an initial security check-in at the front door.
Officially, visitors were supposed to go directly to the specific office
where they had an appointment and then leave. But in practice, once a
scheduled meeting was over, a visiting Russian, Indian or Egyptian
diplomat could stop off at the cafeteria for a cup of coffee, say, or drop
by the office of another U.S. official. Or perhaps he could duck into an
empty seventh-floor conference room, install a specially constructed piece
of wood molding and dart out, with no one the wiser.

The first effort to tighten these loosey-goosey access rules came in a
"Department Notice" dated Nov. 17, 1998. It mandated that "All visitors,
with the exception of active U.S. Government (USG) agency personnel who
display proper photo identification, shall be escorted at all times."

But this notice was withdrawn just six days later. No reason was given,
but I'm told it was because of objections from Pickering and other senior
Foreign Service officers. Among their complaints was that having to escort
visitors out of the building would be a nuisance.

Pickering said yesterday he'd objected to the policy initially because it
hadn't gone through appropriate channels. "I found out when I came to work
and was handed a piece of paper," he recalled. "The security people had a
notion you could just give orders," and hadn't thought carefully about how
the policy would be implemented. State's philosophy had always been "open
corridors and closed offices," he said.

The Bureau of Diplomatic Security relaunched its access-control plan on
Aug. 6--which officials say was probably after the Russians had planted
their bug. The FBI monitored the Russian operation for several months and
then, on Dec. 8, arrested a Russian operative named Stanislav Borisovich
Gusev outside the department.

The access-control issue is important, because some investigators now
suspect that unescorted vistors may have installed the Russian bug. They
speculate that if the Russians had a real mole inside State they would
have used that person to plant a bug in a more sensitive area than the
conference room.  The room they bugged hosted some pretty tedious
meetings, and one CIA veteran jokes that he feels sorry for the Russian
case officer who had to listen to all the tapes.

The scary fact about the State Department bugging isn't that it produced a
hemhorrage of secrets (which it probably didn't).  It's that it
illustrates a lack of consensus at State about security procedures.
Indeed, this tale--pieced together with help from my fellow Post columnist
Mike Causey--is a classic study of how bureaucracies can work at cross
purposes.

The simple fact is that the mandarins at State have never much liked the
security people, viewing them as gumshoes and right-wing zealots. The
security types have reciprocrated, deriding senior diplomats as "The Black
Dragons." In this environment, it has been hard for the two sides to
cooperate.

The danger of this mentality is that it could get Foreign Service officers
killed. After the 1983 U.S. Embassy bombing in Beirut and other terrorist
attacks, Congress passed the Diplomatic Security Act of 1986. It called
for a range of tough new measures to make our embassies and diplomatic
headquarters safer. But many of these recommendations were never carried
out, officials say, because of foot-dragging by top Foreign Service
officers.

After last year's terrorist bombings of U.S. embassies in Africa, the
security officers tried again. They hired a consulting firm, Booz-Allen
and Hamilton, to conduct an outside audit. That confidential report,
completed Oct. 18, recommended that State "elevate the role of the Bureau
of Diplomatic Security" and take other steps to respond to terrorist and
counterintelligence threats. Pickering said his office helped carry out
some recommendations of the study but opposes others.

We're an open society, so it was characteristically American that until a
few months ago, a visitor could roam the corridors of the State
Department. You can't do that at Microsoft or Sun Microsystems. But hey,
those are high-tech companies, whereas the State Department just has
national-security secrets.

Maybe we should thank the Russians. It took their clever little bug,
disguised as a section of chair railing, to remind our diplomats and
security officials that they're all playing on the same team.

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