-Caveat Lector- From http://www.security-policy.org/papers/1999/99-F39.html {{<Begin>}} Publications of the Center for Security Policy No. 99-F 39 SECURITY FORUM 23 December 1999 Security Meltdown at State Department Start at the Top (Washington, D.C.): When Congress gets back to town next month, one of its first agenda items had better be an inquiry into the Russian penetration of a conference room on the State Department's sensitive executive seventh floor. This is needed to understand the troubling particulars of the present case, but also to explore the Clinton-Gore Administration's cavalier attitude towards information, personnel and physical security practices that appears to have contributed significantly to this debacle -- and perhaps to as-yet-unquantified damage to other national security interests over the past seven years. For example, the Russian "bug" affair offers insights into the Administration's problematic handling of matters involving information and personnel security. According to a an article by Jamie Dettmer that appeared recently in Insight Magazine, U.S. counter-intelligence sought and secured the Secretary of State's agreement not to "read-in" her deputy, Strobe Talbott, on their efforts to determine the location of the Kremlin's listening device and to assess the damage done prior to its discovery. Congress and the Nation need to know why the State Department's Number 2 official -- a long-time Friend of Bill and principal U.S. policy-maker on the former Soviet Union -- could not be trusted with this information. While they are at it, congressional investigators had better explore why the Number 3 man, Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Thomas Pickering, personally intervened to stymie efforts made over a year ago by the department's Diplomatic Security Bureau to tighten up building access procedures. The Washington Post's David Ignatius reports in today's paper: "The mandarins at State have never much liked the security people, viewing them as gumshoes and right-wing zealots." Unfortunately, the chief mandarin -- Mrs. Albright -- has herself exhibited similar contempt for those concerned with physical security of diplomatic facilities, having ignored repeated requests for additional protection for the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi prior to its destruction by terrorists. How many more American lives and other, less tangible equities will be needlessly sacrificed to the reckless attitudes of Clinton appointees? Insight Magazine, December 1999 News Alert! Strobe Talbott and the Russian bug in the State Department: Why did the CIA think Talbott was too close to the Russians? By Jamie Dettmer U.S. counterintelligence officers secured Secretary of State Madeleine Albright's agreement last August to refrain from briefing her deputy, Strobe Talbott - a onetime Moscow correspondent for Time magazine - about their discovery of a sophisticated Russian eavesdropping device concealed in a seventh-floor State Department conference room. According to several U.S. intelligence and Justice Department sources, all of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity, Talbot was kept out of the loop of the security probe that led to the arrest outside the State Department on Dec. 8, 1999, of 54-year-old Russian intelligence officer Stanislav Borisovich Gusev. "Talbott didn't need to know; it is as simple as that," says a Justice Department source who declined to expound on the reasons why the Clinton administration's main Russia expert was shut out. A CIA source tells news alert!: "Talbott has long been widely seen at Langley as being too close to the Russians - a sort of trusted friend, you might say." According to that source, only Albright herself and Undersecretary of State Thomas Pickering were kept fully briefed on the progress of a bug hunt triggered when Gusev, the top technical intelligence officer in the Russian Embassy, was spotted last summer by an FBI surveillance team wearing headphones and loitering in his car and on foot on a weekly basis outside the department. The FBI team suspected immediately that Gusev was receiving transmissions from a bug. Talbot, they were afraid, inadvertently might let slip information about the security probe. FBI monitoring of the Russian and a bug hunt in the department led to the discovery in August of the device - consisting of low-powered batteries, a microphone, a recording mechanism and a line-of-sight transmitter. The device was concealed in a wooden rail molding in the conference room used by the Bureau of Oceans and International Environmental Scientific Affairs. When Gusev was arrested, a remote-control antenna was found hidden in his car. In the political flap since the arrest, State officials, including Albright, have sought to dispel fears that the Russians could have gleaned sensitive information from the bug. Intelligence sources take issue with all the downplaying of the potential damage. They say there is a shortage of meeting space on State's seventh floor, which includes Albright's suite, and that conference rooms frequently are shared by other sections. Further, sources say the eavesdropping device had directional-sound capabilities and may have picked up noise from the offices of State's inspector general and from the department's congressional-affairs section. The FBI also is working under the assumption that where there is one bug, there could be more. The damage-assessment operation under way consists of trying to discover how the bug was planted and whether the Russians had inside help; it is assumed they did. According to former CIA officer Paul Redmond, concealing the bug would have been time-consuming. "I've actually been involved in operations like that. It's a very complicated matter. You actually have to go in several times," he told NBC. As with other retired and current CIA officers, Redmond criticizes the almost open-access policy granted to Russian diplomats by State. More than 20 Russian diplomats were accorded the status of "visitors not requiring an escort." The timing of Gusev's arrest has prompted speculation that it was a tit-for-tat response to the Russian arrest in Moscow on Nov. 30, 1999, of CIA operative Cheri Leberknight. Neil Gallagher, assistant director of the FBI's national- security division, insists Gusev's arrest was unrelated. But a U.S. intelligence source tells news alert!: "In this business there's no such thing as a coincidence. Working on that theory, one can also hazard maybe the Russians themselves suspected Gusev was about to go down and went for Leberknight as a preemptive strike - or maybe it was in retaliation for our Chechnya criticisms." NOTE: The Center's publications are intended to invigorate and enrich the debate on foreign policy and defense issues. The views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of all members of the Center's Board of Advisors. 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