House Panel to Subpoena Files on Moscow Embassy

A House panel, accusing the State Department of withholding information on security problems at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, voted 6 to 0 Tuesday to subpoena department files.

Rep. Daniel A. Mica (D-Fla.), chairman of the House Foreign Affairs subcommittee that is investigating the embassy security problems, said after the vote that he was “shocked and chagrined” over actions of department officials that, he said, have impeded the subcommittee’s investigation.

State Department spokesman Charles Redman said, however, that Mica’s charges were unfounded. “I just have no idea on what basis he could make such a statement,” Redman said.

One batch of papers was turned over to Congress last Friday, Redman said, and additional installments were delivered Monday and Tuesday. Mica said, however, that when thick binders full of papers were given to the committee on Monday, committee staff members saw that sections had been removed. The tip-off, he said, was that references to the missing papers were still in the accompanying index.

Hints at Negotiation

Redman conceded that some “highly classified cables” had not yet been released to the subcommittee but hinted that even those might be released after negotiations. “We have said that that’s something that we’re willing to try to work out between the committee and the department,” Redman said.

Mica said the subcommittee intends to wait several days before it takes further action on the subpoena, but that negotiating over the documents could prove difficult.

“I am not sure we are in a mood to negotiate,” Mica said in an interview. “We want to be fair and reasonable,” he said, but “the norm has been set for several decades that the (Foreign Affairs) committee has the right to any documents.”

If the stalemate over the papers continues, first the full Foreign Affairs committee and then the House as a whole would have to vote to enforce the subpoena before Congress could go to court and insist on Administration compliance. In the past, most such confrontations over documents have been resolved well before they came to court, and usually with Congress getting most, if not all, of what it wanted.

Hundreds of Papers Sought

In this case, congressional investigators are fairly confident they already know what is in the papers in question. The State Department has turned over several thousand pages to subcommittee investigators, but the “several hundred” documents still in question include some “that would be difficult to explain, that would cast a bad light on an individual, or some individuals,” Mica said.

Although Mica would not give details of what the committee is seeking, sources familiar with the investigation said the papers include cables referring to embassy security that the former U.S. ambassador to Moscow, Arthur A. Hartman, sent to senior State Department officials.

Critics of Hartman have said that his cables revealed a lax attitude toward security problems, a charge that Hartman and his associates have called a distortion of his views.

According to Redman, after the subcommittee first requested documents earlier this month, State Department officials ran a computer search and turned up thousands of pages that might fit into categories of information that the investigators want to see. The department then established a task force to review those documents and select the ones that “do, in fact, bear on the subject at hand,” he said.