Millions Needed to Salvage New U.S. Moscow Embassy

Former Defense Secretary James R. Schlesinger said Monday that the new U.S. Embassy building in Moscow needs to be fundamentally restructured because of Soviet listening devices in the walls and floors but will not have to be demolished.

Giving reporters a preview of what he plans to report to Secretary of State George P. Shultz later this month in Washington, Schlesinger said that it will cost “many tens of millions of dollars” and take years to make the new building usable. The United States has already spent nearly $100 million on design and construction of the eight-story, red-brick edifice.

Members of Congress have demanded that the new building be razed and replaced to make sure that the embassy is free of Soviet listening devices. But Schlesinger said that parts of the building, to be used as a chancery or office complex, can be salvaged as long as the reconstruction work in the most sensitive areas is done entirely by Americans.

“We are going to have a major overhaul of the secure areas of the building,” he said, adding that he agrees with Shultz’s appraisal that the building is “honeycombed” with Soviet bugging devices.

Schlesinger, who in the 1970s also served as head of the CIA, expressed admiration for the Soviets’ accomplishments in devising and installing listening devices.

“In this area,” he said, “the technological gap tends to run the other way. The Soviet Union has been more ingenious than the United States in exploiting this . . . explosion of technology.”

Under a 1972 bilateral agreement that allowed the Soviets to build a new embassy in Washington while the U.S. building here was under construction, Soviet approval would be necessary for the United States to import construction workers to handle the reconstruction, Schlesinger noted.

Schlesinger said that Soviet officials he met during the week he has spent here gave “a sympathetic hearing” to his argument that it would be better for the Kremlin to cooperate in assuring security at the new embassy than to try to block reconstruction.

Without Soviet cooperation on renovation, Schlesinger said, moving day may be “many, many years--it might be decades--into the future.” At a minimum, he said, rebuilding will take 2 1/2 to 3 years.

The 1972 agreement, providing that embassy buildings would be built according to the construction practices of the host country, permitted the Soviets to use precast concrete built in Soviet factories for the U.S. building and provided a “very substantial opportunity” to plant bugs that no intelligence agency would have been able to resist, Schlesinger said.

Immune to the usual means of detection by X-ray, the Soviet listening devices were discovered only after the Americans used a new detection device, which Schlesinger did not identify. Until then, he said, there was “quite limited” American awareness of the security threat.

In Washington, where the Soviet Union is putting up a new embassy building, Soviet inspectors were able to watch the construction process more closely, he said, and there has been less dependence on precast structures.

Timed Occupancies

The 1972 agreement also provides that the Soviets will not be able to occupy their new Washington building until the Americans move into their new Moscow building.

Schlesinger said Shultz asked him to undertake the evaluation of technical security at the new building before it was charged that Marine guards had allowed Soviet intelligence agents to penetrate the most secret areas of the old building.

Without physical security--the barring of unwanted visitors from the building--there can be no technical security, Schlesinger added.

If the new embassy building cannot be made secure, he said, the Soviets face a political backlash in Congress.

“I have not expressed any indignation to you, or to them,” he told the press, but he said he emphasized the seriousness with which the U.S. government views the matter.

“I stressed it was in their interest that these problems be resolved,” he said.

While here, Schlesinger met with Anatoly F. Dobrynin, a former Soviet ambassador to Washington who is now a secretary of the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party, and with officials of the Foreign Ministry.