U.S. Bid to ‘Bug’ Soviet Embassy Told

The United States tried in 1979 to implant eavesdropping devices in apartment buildings at the new Soviet Embassy complex here, forcing the Soviet Union to take extraordinary measures to protect its new embassy chancery from electronic surveillance, a man who helped to design the $65-million complex says.

Discovery of the “bugs” in the walls of residences within their complex led the Soviets to disassemble parts of the new chancery building, minutely inspect other parts and X-ray “each inch of steel the night before it was put up,” John Carl Warnecke Sr. said.

“For three months after the consulate building was finished,” Warnecke said in an account that he prepared for the Washington Post, “the Soviets moved scaffolding over the entire skin of the building with X-ray equipment looking for ‘bugs.’ ”

They also refused to accept materials fabricated outside the building site, including all precast concrete, he said.

The incident, which provoked an official Soviet protest, suggests that each side has used similar highly sophisticated espionage techniques to try to penetrate the other’s embassies.