U.S. Scurries to Find How Spy Planted Bug

Stunned FBI agents and U.S. diplomatic security officers scrambled Thursday to determine how--and when--a Russian spy secretly planted a sophisticated eavesdropping device inside a State Department conference room used by high-level officials and whether national security was put in jeopardy as a result.

U.S. officials also identified Stanislav Borisovich Gusev, the 54-year-old Russian diplomat who was arrested Wednesday as he monitored the “bug” from a bench outside the State Department, as a member of the technical staff of the SVR, Russia’s foreign intelligence service.

U.S. officials said that the espionage case marks the first time State Department headquarters is known to have been successfully bugged. “This was a very bold operation,” said a senior official. “It’s about as aggressive as it gets.”

State Department officials said they have no record that Gusev ever was inside the sprawling building, however. The investigation thus has focused on identifying the spy who placed the tiny electronic device in a seventh-floor meeting room near a high-security area that includes Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s offices.

“They don’t know yet how it got there,” said another senior official. “It could be a visitor. It could be a workman. It could be a Russian agent in place” in the State Department. He added, “They don’t have a suspect.”

Officials said that 50 to 100 meetings were conducted in the room from early last summer, when Gusev first came under suspicion, until his arrest Wednesday. Investigators planned to interview everyone who attended the meetings in an attempt to assess the severity of the security breach.

Gusev was arrested by the FBI outside the State Department as he adjusted reception equipment designed to monitor transmissions from the device, officials said. He was turned over to the Russian Embassy after claiming diplomatic immunity but was ordered to leave the United States within 10 days.

Officials said that Gusev entered the United States in March and was on his last assignment before retirement. But they do not know how long the bug has been in place.

Officials said that installation of the device required access to the meeting room, perhaps including taking photographs, then a return trip to place it. Neil Gallagher, an assistant FBI director, called the placement “very professional.”

“It’s just not slapped on here,” he said. “The ordinary person would not see it.”

Neither did State Department diplomatic security and counterintelligence experts. Their routine sweeps of crucial parts of the building with sensitive electronic equipment did not locate the bug. One official said that the device was only found a few weeks ago, months after the FBI first became suspicious of Gusev.

FBI agents first noticed the Russian early last summer, when they saw him standing outside the State Department headquarters and thought he was acting oddly. Gusev was subsequently found to visit every week or so, “literally just walking around the surrounding street,” Gallagher said. Gusev’s driving and parking also raised suspicion, since he apparently was “trying to position his car in an ideal location” for a clandestine technical operation.

Gallagher described the subsequent search for the bug inside the eight-story building, which occupies an entire city block, as “literally attempting to find a needle in a haystack.” Ironically, investigators began searching the building from the first floor up, in part because they believed the executive secretariat on the seventh floor was secure.

When the device finally was found, counterintelligence experts were shocked. “We have not seen a device of that sophistication before,” Gallagher said. He declined to provide details.

A senior official insisted that Gusev was only able to listen to conversations in real time. But other intelligence experts were skeptical, saying that it was far more likely he was servicing a device designed to secretly record and encrypt conversations and then broadcast the compressed data in an intense, targeted burst when triggered from outside.

That would explain both the regular timing of Gusev’s weekly visits--which officials said did not correspond to the scheduling of key meetings or talks inside--as well as the inability of normal electronic sweeps to detect ongoing transmissions.

Gallagher said that the device was left in place to avoid tipping off the Russians. He said security teams conducted an aggressive sweep of top-level offices in the building to search for other devices but found none. Senior officials were warned to avoid sensitive conversations near the bug. Officials refused to say whether deliberate disinformation was fed to the device after it was detected.

During the Cold War, the former Soviet Union was considered a master of high-tech bugging techniques. It placed microphones in a carved wooden plaque behind the U.S. ambassador’s desk in Moscow in the early 1950s, implanted scores of listening and transmitting devices in construction materials used to build a new U.S. Embassy in the 1970s and tapped IBM electric typewriters in the embassy in the 1980s. It also reportedly placed bugs in offices on Capitol Hill.

“The Russians are very good at this sort of thing,” said Robert M. Gates, CIA director from 1991 to 1993. “We were concerned 15 years ago about their ability to read conversations from the vibrations of window panes in Washington.”

Christopher Andrew, chairman of the history department at Cambridge University and author of several books on Soviet-era spying, called the current bugging a “classic operation.” Moscow “picked up a lot of expertise over the years, and it’s a lot easier to operate in Washington than in Russia.”

John L. Martin, former head of the Justice Department’s espionage investigations unit, said: “The seventh floor is the inner sanctum of the State Department, and it is scary that the Russians in the post-Cold War atmosphere first would be so bold as to attempt it and, secondly, that they would be successful.”

The bugging has raised new concerns about security at the State Department, which records 1,400 visitors a day. Until August, anyone given access to the vast complex of color-coded corridors was allowed to walk the halls without an escort. Security was tightened after a review of the terrorist bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998.

“This says two things,” said Paul Redmond, former director of counterintelligence at the CIA. “If the Russians put an audio device on the seventh floor, they’re very aggressive and very good. And State Department security is very weak. They’re still doing what they did during the Cold War. And the State Department hasn’t learned.”

In Moscow, officials denied that Gusev was a spy. Boris Labusov, chief spokesman for the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service, told the Itar-Tass news service that “it was implausible and nonsensical” to claim a bugging device could be planted in the inner reaches of the State Department. Mikhail Shurgalin, the Russian Embassy spokesman in Washington, declined comment.

State Duma Deputy Vladimir Lukin, a former Russian ambassador to Washington, told Russian radio that the case was “cooked up” and was a “deliberate retaliatory reaction” to Russia’s expulsion last week of a U.S. diplomat in Moscow for allegedly attempting to obtain military secrets. U.S. officials denied that the two cases are linked.

Russian spying has been a mounting concern in Washington in recent years. Indeed, U.S. officials said that aggressive espionage against the United States appears to be one of the few weapons in Moscow’s security arsenal that has survived the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989 and the chaotic transition to democracy.

In July, Vice President Al Gore complained about the intensity of Moscow’s intelligence-gathering efforts during a meeting with Sergei V. Stepashin, Russia’s then-prime minister. A senior U.S. official said that Gore specifically complained about the number of Russian agents still in America nearly a decade after the end of the Cold War.

Experts said that Russia appears to have stepped up its spying in the United States even as its overall intelligence budget has been cut. The chief target, officials said, is U.S. military and other technology, as well as information about U.S. government policy.

“There’s been no diminution of their efforts against America,” said Gates, the former CIA chief.

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Times staff writers Tyler Marshall in Washington and Richard C. Paddock in Moscow contributed to this story.