Schlesinger Plan to Debug Embassy: Rip Off 3 Floors : Rebuilding Cost Put at $80 Million

The top three floors of the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, riddled with electronic bugs, should be torn off and a new six-story annex constructed alongside to house the mission’s most sensitive functions, former Defense Secretary James R. Schlesinger said today.

The cost of the rebuilding job is estimated at $80 million.

Schlesinger, asked by President Reagan to recommend what to do with the crippled eight-story structure, said the entire episode indicates how Soviet advances in spy technology have pushed Moscow ahead of the United States.

“As a nation, we failed to allow for the boldness, thoroughness and extent of the penetration,” Schlesinger told the Senate Budget Committee. “We now face a rising curve of Soviet technology with no gap between what we can do and what the Soviets can do. In fact, in some areas they are ahead of us.”

‘Neutralize’ Listening Devices

Among Schlesinger’s recommendations for the embassy complex was a suggestion that the United States try to “neutralize” listening devices hidden in the lower five floors of the chancery building and put that space to use for less sensitive functions.

Schlesinger said the top three floors should be replaced with floors made of shielded steel components. He said those floors would then be secure and could be used for sensitive diplomatic purposes. But the embassy’s most secret activities would be carried out in the annex, to be built next door, he said.

Deputy Secretary of State John C. Whitehead, who testified at the same hearing, said that depending on the size of the annex, which he said should be roughly one-fourth the size of the main chancery building, the project would cost about $80 million to complete.

Schlesinger called for a “new philosophy” at the State Department that would recognize the need for more vigilance in its handling of embassies in Soviet Bloc countries, where “an unending game of move and countermove is played.”

Adjust 1972 Agreement

He said the 1972 agreement under which each country is building a new embassy in the other’s capital should be adjusted to make clear that all new U.S. construction in Moscow will be done with security-cleared American personnel, not with Soviet workers.

He said that when the new embassy in Moscow finally is completed--in 1990 if the Soviets cooperate--the Soviets should be allowed to occupy their new complex on Mt. Alto, one of the highest sites in Washington.

Schlesinger said while much has been made of the advantages of that site as an intelligence-gathering post, “the intelligence potential of Mt. Alto is considerably less than popularly assumed.”

Schlesinger told the committee that if Soviet cooperation cannot be obtained in salvaging the Moscow embassy, “the traditional functions of an embassy behind the Iron Curtain will no longer” be what they are now.

But because of the wide array of larger issues between the two superpowers, the Soviets would be unlikely to let the embassy issue become a stumbling block in the way of better relations, he said.

Much of the difficulty with the building in Moscow stems from U.S. acceptance of a Soviet assertion that concrete building members could not be poured at the embassy site, Schlesinger said. That led to the fabrication of components away from the eyes of U.S. observers and the implanting of high-technology listening devices.

Sen. Lawton Chiles (D-Fla.), chairman of the Budget Committee, was incredulous. “Did we put in that agreement that we believed in the tooth fairy?” he asked.

Chiles laid the blame for the problems on the State Department, which he said is institutionally unequipped to handle building construction and has been guilty of chronic mismanagement.