Full of Holes

It won’t be easy for Secretary of State George P. Shultz to stay in touch with Washington when he goes to Moscow next week. The U.S. Embassy, whose communications facilities Shultz would normally use, is now considered too insecure for any sensitive conversations between the secretary and the White House or the State Department. So Shultz will either have to go out to the airport each day to use his plane’s coded communications system, or a special and presumably secure communications van will have to be flown in and parked temporarily on the embassy grounds. This inconvenience is only a small part of the story.

U.S. officials now have no choice but to assume that the Moscow embassy’s security has been thoroughly breached. Two former Marine guards at the embassy are suspected of having allowed Soviet agents to roam freely throughout the building, with the feared result that the KGB may now be able to tap into the most secretive communications. This revelation has set off a nasty round of bureaucratic blame-laying in Washington, with every agency involved trying to pass along responsibility for what happened. But this, too, is only a part of the story.

In 1972 work began on a new U.S. Embassy compound in Moscow. The Nixon Administration, reportedly over State Department objections, approved the construction of the building from prefabricated modules manufactured by the Soviets at a site not under American inspection. The result, charges Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.), a former vice chairman of the Intelligence Committee, is that the KGB in effect became the prime contractor for the new embassy. A lot of listening devices have already been found in the uncompleted structure; others have probably escaped detection. Leahy wants the whole $190-million complex to be torn down and rebuilt under tight U.S. control, with the Soviets footing the bill. Otherwise, he says, the Russians ought not to be permitted to move into their own new embassy in Washington. Others think that, for an additional $20 million to $40 million, the building can be made secure.

It’s a grand, security-failure mess whatever happens--a still uncompleted story of naivete, laxity and bureaucratic indifference. The Reagan Administration, which has spent more than $1.5 trillion on defense, has like its predecessors paid far too little attention to making embassies in Moscow and other Eastern Bloc countries secure. The responsibility is widespread. The need to prevent further penetration has become imperative.