The Spying Game Returns With an Old-Fashioned Bug

Every intelligence agency would like to be a fly on the wall to listen in on its adversaries. Two weeks ago, it was discovered that Russia’s spy agency had literally accomplished that feat by placing a bug, albeit electronic, on the wall of a State Department conference room.

The tiny device broadcast confidential conversations from the seventh floor, the inner sanctum of the State Department, to a spy lurking on a park bench outside, high-tech proof that spying among nations continues even though the Cold War is over.

Why does the game go on? In part because intelligence agencies exist to spy. Government bureaucracies defend their budgets by promoting their product. Neither Moscow nor Washington has any plans to abandon their primary spy agencies, the CIA and the Federal Counterintelligence Service, or SVR, the successor to the KGB’s foreign-intelligence arm. Like two peas in a pod, both agencies operate from a complex of modern office buildings outside their capitals, the CIA in Langley, Va., and the SVR in Yasenevo, off the Moscow ring road.

In today’s world of fiber-optic cables and sophisticated algorithms, the codes that governments use are increasingly difficult to crack. An obvious alternative is for a spy agency to break into an embassy or foreign ministry to steal or copy code keys or to plant a bug and advance the art of good listening.

The Russians presumably are interested in gleaning information from inside the State Department on a wide range of issues: Washington’s stance on Russia’s brutal war in Chechnya; whether the United States will continue to support $4.5 billion in multilateral loans to Moscow despite widespread reports of money laundering and corruption in Russia; what Washington policymakers want to do about U.N. weapons inspections and sanctions against Iraq; even what Madeleine K. Albright’s aides are saying about Boris N. Yeltsin’s health or whether the Clinton administration favors one candidate over another in next year’s Russian presidential contest.

Last summer, according to the FBI, the bureau’s counterintelligence agents noticed Stanislav Borisovich Gusev, an attache at the Soviet Embassy, hanging around the State Department. He had arrived in Washington last March. Sometimes he was seen sitting on a bench, other times moving his car around the building, parking at different locations, carefully feeding the meters to avoid a ticket.

The FBI concluded that Gusev was conducting a technical operation, as indeed he was. Somehow, the Russians had succeeded in concealing a tiny battery-powered transmitter inside a piece of molding about three feet above the floor inside the conference room, the sort of wooden strip that keeps chair backs from scuffing the wall.

The device, the FBI said, was “professionally introduced,” meaning that the Russian spies cut away a section of the molding and then replaced it with a matching piece with the bug inside. That suggested that the Russians, or a confederate on the inside, had access to the room more than once, to case and photograph it and probably to collect a paint chip so their technicians could match the color of the molding.

The bug was activated by a remote control that the FBI said Gusev had in his possession when he was arrested Dec. 8. Since he had diplomatic immunity, he was turned over to his embassy but ordered expelled from the country. The bug that Gusev turned on in the conference room broadcast to a tape recorder in his car. The Russians used low-power batteries to make the bug more difficult to detect, but that also meant that its range was limited, and someone had to be outside the building to activate the bug and record the signals.

Once the FBI realized what Gusev was up to, the State Department security staff, using sophisticated equipment borrowed from the CIA and other agencies, electronically swept the entire building until the tiny device was found down the hall from Albright’s office. Although the room was assigned to the Bureau of Oceans and International Environmental and Scientific Affairs, other officials also used it for meetings, some of them sensitive.

The FBI would very much like to know how the Russians managed to get the bug inside the building. The bureau and the State Department would also like to know how long the bug was in place and broadcasting secrets. Several batteries were found inside the piece of molding, so the gadget might have broadcast for as long as four years, according to one intelligence source.

Once the bug was found, the FBI is said to have put it to a new use: The bureau’s counterintelligence agents arranged for misinformation to be fed to the Russians in conversations held in the conference room.

It was not the first time that a foreign intelligence agency targeted the State Department in this way. In 1966, Czech intelligence agents attempted to bug the department. The Czechs planned to put a transmitter in the office of Undersecretary of State George W. Ball. The FBI uncovered the plot, and the State Department expelled one of the spies involved, Jiri Opatrny, an attache at the Czech Embassy.

Gusev was arrested eight days after Cheri Leberknight, who was listed as second secretary of the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, was arrested on spy charges and briefly detained. The Russians charged she was a CIA officer on her way to meet a source to obtain military documents. They added she would be leaving Moscow shortly. Officials here deny the arrest of Gusev was in retaliation or that it marked the resumption of the tit-for-tat expulsions of spies that occurred during the Cold War.

Perhaps, but the electronic spy war between the Russians and the U.S. has been waged for years. In 1960, in the wake of the shooting down of the CIA’s U-2 spy plane piloted by Francis Gary Powers, U.N. Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge displayed a bug inside the Great Seal of the United States that had adorned the office of the U.S. ambassador in Moscow. The seal was presented by a Soviet officer to W. Averell Harriman in 1945. The bug was discovered in 1952 when George F. Kennan was ambassador.

In 1964, Ambassador Foy D. Kohler was dismayed to realize that Soviet premier Nikita S. Khrushchev seemed to have inside knowledge of embassy conversations. A few months later, it became clear why: 40 microphones were discovered embedded in the wall of the U.S. Embassy. Two decades later, in the mid-1980s, the new, unoccupied U.S. Embassy building in Moscow was discovered to be honeycombed with bugs that had been hidden in precast concrete used in construction. According to one House member, the Soviets had turned the building “into a seven-story microphone.” After years of debate, the State Department decided to tear down the two top floors and replace them with a new four-story “top hat” of secure offices. The State Department says it will be ready for occupancy in April.

The KGB also succeeded in planting a bug in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, according to a new book based on documents purloined by Vasili Mitrokhin, a KGB archivist. More often, the KGB and its successor have eavesdropped electronically by intercepting telephone calls. The book, “The Sword and the Shield,” also reports that the KGB intercepted Henry A. Kissinger’s conversations and telephone calls from Air Force One.

The bug in the State Department, in other words, is only the latest move in an old intelligence game. And the electronic eavesdropping by both sides is likely to continue, regardless of the ups and downs in relations between Washington and Moscow.