Call him “Jim.” A young U.S. diplomat in Moscow, he doesn’t want his real name used because, he says, “our security guys work a lot like the KGB.” And the security men wouldn’t like it if they knew Jim’s secret: he occasionally dines in the homes of Soviet friends, without another diplomat present. Jim says there’s nothing conspiratorial about the dinners. Still, they violate U.S. security rules, which require diplomats to do their socializing in groups of at least two. Solo contacts must be reported to the embassy security office, but when Jim reported one such meeting, he got a long lecture and some insinuating questions about his loyalty. “Those guys are awful,” he said of the security men. “I’d rather lie than have to deal with them.” Later, after he played tennis with a Soviet economist and two American non diplomats, Jim decided not to report it.
Just when Soviet society is more open than ever before, the U.S. Embassy in Moscow has drawn a curtain around itself. After a security scandal in 1986, involving Marine guards and a Russian woman, the embassy tightened up, restricting informal contacts with Soviet society. Work was stopped on a new embassy building when the structure was found to be embedded with listening devices. Then, last March 28, a fire billowed up the elevator shaft of the old embassy on Tchaikovsky Street, destroying electronic intelligence-gathering equipment on the top floors and-the Bush administration confirmed last week-allowing KGB agents disguised as firefighters to poke around in parts of the building. Its security compromised and its facilities in disarray, the embassy is handicapped in one of its most important functions: to gather intelligence on an increasingly turbulent Soviet society.
The embassy has morale problems. “I resent having to have a chaperon with me whenever I meet a Soviet,” says one employee. “I got a security clearance before I came, and I know what a secret is.” Washington insists that the KGB is still working hard to pry secrets out of Americans in Moscow. “There have to be guidelines,” says a senior State Department official. One of them, he says, is that embassy staffers must “stick to the NATO community when it comes to their love lives.”
Contacts with Soviet citizens also were inhibited in 1986, when the Kremlin withdrew all the locals who were employed by the embassy as cooks, cleaners, drivers and office workers. Americans were imported to do many menial tasks, and Washington now prefers it that way. But each of those employees costs up to $150,000 a year, so some office chores have fallen to diplomats. “The irony is that, for a diplomat, this is the most sexy, glamorous job in the world,” says one staffer. “Then you get here, and you have to do all this piddling office work yourself, because there aren’t enough service personnel.” Other tasks don’t get done at all. One diplomat says that because there are no native translators, some members of the embassy’s defense staff don’t follow Krasnaya Zvezda, the authoritative Soviet Army newspaper.
The March 28 fire made things worse. KGB agents apparently entered the embassy with the firefighters, and when their U.S. Marine escorts ran out of oxygen, they were free to ransack some offices, stealing classified, though not top-secret, material. “It doesn’t appear that they got into CIA files or got the names of contacts or agents,” says a State Department official.
But according to a source in Washington, the fire “pretty well devastated” the embassy’s “sigint,” its capability to intercept signals from Soviet radio and telephone traffic. It also knocked out telegraphic communications with Washington. At a time of political and economic turmoil in Moscow, " reporting officers" were limited to one 15-minute telephone call to Washington each day. Even now the diplomats must wait for an hour or more to send messages over one of the six secure terminals that have been set up.
Last month Ambassador Jack Matlock returned to Washington to plead for money to put things right. Despite objections in the Senate, the State Department is pushing a $215 million plan called Top Hat, in which the two uppermost floors of the new, unoccupied embassy building would be replaced by four secure floors built by American workers. Meanwhile the United States still has extensive sigint capabilities from spy satellites and electronic listening posts along Soviet borders.
Yet staffers argue that the embassy’s human-intelligence capabilities have been needlessly degraded by the limits on contact with Soviet citizens. “Without this contact policy, I could absolutely do a better job,” says one diplomat. Staffers are not allowed to bring Soviet citizens into their own offices or buy them lunch in the embassy cafeteria. One frustrated diplomat asked a security officer: “Where the hell am I supposed to meet my contact? On a snowbank?” “Yes,” replied the security man. At a time of high uncertainty about the future of the Soviet Union, when U.S. diplomats should be spending more time than ever with Soviet citizens, they are being wrapped in a cold-war cocoon.
