by David Wise
The new floors were built by three hundred American construction workers flown in for that purpose, and special precautions were taken to make sure that this time there were no transmitters. No outsiders were allowed on the construction site, and security was tight. But while all this was going on, an incident took place that was not reassuring. In April 1997, an AWOL Russian soldier somehow managed to slip into the residence of the acting American ambassador and spend the night. He was discovered the next day, taking a shower.
Meanwhile, U.S. intelligence found that the Soviets had also built tunnels leading into and under the new American embassy in Moscow. The way this was learned was not publicized. “Satellites told us there were tunnels under the new embassy,” one former intelligence official revealed. “There were air pockets; the heat varies when there are tunnels, and they were detected.”
In Washington, the FBI’s own tunnelers were hard at work. A major concern was disposing of the enormous amount of displaced dirt, but that was made much easier by the construction going on all around the site. The FBI’s dump trucks would have blended in with the rest.
By 1980, the Russians and their families began moving into the apartments, the $12 million first phase of the project. But the Hyman company did not find the Soviets easy to deal with and chose not to bid on the rest of the work. “The Soviets would make an agreement and overnight change their mind,” recalled Benny Pasquariello, who had supervised the building of the apartments as vice president of Hyman. “It was just not fun to work with them.
“They inspected everything, and there were a lot of delays because of that. The Soviets were constantly looking for bugs. Concrete was poured on site and they watched when we poured. They said to me a lot of times, ‘We do not want to live in a glass house.’ ”
When the Hyman company pulled out, the $44.4 million second phase of the project, including construction of the embassy building, went to the Whiting-Turner Contracting Company of Baltimore.
All the while, the FBI was monitoring the construction. The bureau had people on site posing as construction workers and subcontractors. In addition, some of the real construction workers agreed to cooperate with the FBI after they were approached by the bureau with an appeal to their patriotism. These co-opted workers planted many of the bugs in the embassy itself. In an apartment house across Tunlaw Road, the FBI maintained twenty-four-hour surveillance of the construction site.
Below ground, there were problems with MONOPOLY from the start. Water leaked into the tunnel, and even with a set of blueprints of the embassy complex, the tunnel builders could not always be sure of the precise location of their targets. “The problem was, you didn’t know where you were going to come up,” one FBI man said. “We had the plans, but you don’t know what a room is used for. It might end up being a Xerox room or a storage room. What you want is a coffee room where people talk. Or a secure room where they think no one can hear them.”
Nor was the tunnel universally popular in the FBI’s intelligence division. “We were concerned because a lot of our budget was going for that purpose,” said one former senior FBI official. “We were pretty upset.”
NSA provided and manned the sophisticated eavesdropping equipment that was brought into the tunnel as sections were completed. The tunnel, it was hoped, would offer technical advantages. Presumably, the NSA was able to tap into telephone cables from the tunnel. It is said to have experimented with exotic laser beam technology as well.
But some of the sophisticated equipment did not work, and the technicians spent a lot of time trying to figure out why. Soviet countermeasures were a likely explanation, since the Russians assumed all along that U.S. intelligence would attempt to bug their embassy.
At least the tunnel was spacious enough; those who have been inside say a person could easily stand up. It had sturdy walls and lights. It was not, in other words, some dark and dank passageway like a tourist might expect to crawl through in an underground cave.
Although the obvious purpose of the tunnel was to glean what is called positive intelligence by listening in to what the Soviets were saying, there was another, subtler goal. With luck, the NSA and FBI wiretappers might have been able to discover what the Soviets were overhearing in their own electronic eavesdropping efforts against American targets.
The Soviets, of course, did everything they could to foil the planting of any bugs. John Carl Warnecke, Sr., the architect who helped to design the Wisconsin Avenue embassy, said that the Russians had X-rayed “each inch of steel the night before it was put up.” They also took all the window frames apart, inspected them, and reassembled them on site. The Russians insisted that the building’s marble facing be cut two inches thick because they did not want a layer of epoxy glue, in which a bug could be hidden, between two thin marble slabs.
As the embassy buildings went up, the intelligence services on both sides kept a close eye on each other, Warnecke recounted. “Before lunch the KGB would come into our office in Washington, and I said to my staff, ‘Tell them everything we’re doing.’ After lunch the FBI or the CIA would come in and say, ‘What did they ask?’ ”
Warnecke, eighty-two and still practicing his profession in San Francisco, was amused after the Hanssen case broke to read about the FBI’s tunnel, because, he said, the Russians have their own network of tunnels beneath the embassy complex. “We designed and connected tunnels to all the buildings for utilities and other things,” he said. “We designed the underground passages at the request of the Soviets. I designed the Hart Senate Office Building, so I’m familiar with tunnels.”
The FBI tunnel was dug so secretly that even the architect of the Soviet embassy and the builders were perplexed about how it could have been managed. Warnecke said he had not known about the FBI’s tunnel. “I wonder how the hell they did it. To get all that dirt out, somebody would have spotted it.”
But H. Russell Hanna, Jr., who worked on the planning and landscaping stage of the embassy project, speculated how it might have been managed. “There was a two- or three-story underground parking garage that had to be excavated,” he said. “After the workers left the site at 4 P.M., someone else could have come in and started digging. The dirt could have been put on the stockpile and taken off the next day by the construction company, unbeknownst to them. The stockpile is not measured. The trucks are counted, but not the dirt. And underground tunneling doesn’t have to be noisy, so it could have been done that way.”
Benny Pasquariello, the Hyman official, firmly believed the FBI could not have dug it “without our knowledge.” Asked if dirt from the tunnel could have been mingled with other dirt and trucked out without his company being aware of it, Pasquariello replied: “That’s a possibility.” But he remained skeptical.
Homer Willis, the supervisor on the site for Hyman, insisted the tunnel must have been dug at a later date. “I walked the job every day; somebody digging a tunnel under what we were building in my opinion didn’t happen. Could I be wrong? Sure, but I don’t think so.”
According to Willis, the Russians tried to gather intelligence on the construction site. “They would come in around 3 P.M. every day. They would have three kinds of vodka and sit around and try to pump us for information.”
Because the Soviets had built tunnels under the American embassy in Moscow, they tried to guard against that happening to them in Washington. During the construction of the embassy and related buildings by Whiting-Turner, the Soviets drilled holes thirty or forty feet deep and lowered sensors into the holes attached to a monitoring device. By that time either the FBI tunnel was already largely completed or the sensors failed to detect the burrowing underground.
Having built the American embassy in Moscow with corner pillars that would have allowed the KGB to insert agents and wires straight up into the building, the Soviets were not about to permit the same design on Mount Alto. One senior intelligence official described how the Russians avoided this trap. “When they built the concrete columns they were staggere
d”—he held up his hands to illustrate—“so you couldn’t drill up vertically. You couldn’t go straight up the columns because you would hit the floor above. I assumed they built it that way because they did it to us in Moscow.”
In 1987, Soviet diplomats took reporters and photographers on a press tour of the Wisconsin Avenue complex, pointing to various places where they claimed transmitters had been discovered. One of the diplomats, Vacheslav Z. Borovikov, the embassy security chief, brandished a two-foot piece of pipe that he said had concealed a transmitter inside a marble column.
By that time work on the new Soviet embassy had been completed, but under an agreement between the two countries, the ambassador and his staff could not occupy the chancery building in Washington until the dispute over the bugging of the new American embassy in Moscow was resolved. As a result, the Russians did not move into their new embassy until 1994, three years after the collapse of the Soviet Union. By that time, there was no longer a Soviet embassy; it had become the embassy of Russia.
Of course, back in the early 1980s, after the Soviets and their families had moved into the apartments, the FBI tunnel may have produced some information from electronic eavesdropping on the apartments. But one veteran FBI counterintelligence official doubted that conversations overheard in the apartments were of much value. “The residential, that would be mostly for assessment: does he drink, does he get along with his wife, is he unhappy? In other words, for assessing recruitment possibilities. And accountability—where they are, maybe someone saying ‘I have to leave early in the morning,’ or ‘I gotta go.’ I can’t imagine that it was ever very productive.”
In 1989, Hanssen betrayed MONOPOLY. The FBI’s tunnel was compromised from that time forward. Since the Russians did not occupy the embassy until 1994, they had five years to put countermeasures in place, and to build a secure room, like “the bubble” in the U.S. embassy in Moscow, for sensitive conversations.
Although the Russians might have been tempted to use their knowledge of the tunnel to disseminate disinformation—deliberately misleading their listeners with false data—most U.S. intelligence officials discount that possibility as too complicated a game. Unless it was done flawlessly, phony conversations might tip off U.S. intelligence to the fact that the Soviets knew about the tunnel, which in turn could point to the fact that somebody might have told them about it.
“There was no disinformation,” said John F. Lewis, Jr., former assistant director of the FBI in charge of the intelligence division. Asked whether the tunnel had ever produced useful information, he replied: “There was no information of any kind. I don’t remember receiving any intelligence.” Lewis’s frank view was echoed by other former FBI officials.*
Perhaps it was fitting that a spy tunnel was betrayed by a mole, a creature that burrows underground. But the tunnel under the Soviet embassy was not the first to be compromised in exactly that manner.
Until it was revealed that Hanssen had told the KGB about the tunnel in Washington, the most famous spy tunnel was the one built by the CIA in Berlin at the height of the Cold War. What happened then was startlingly similar to what happened to the tunnel in Washington. In 1954, Allen W. Dulles, the legendary CIA director, approved the Berlin project, a joint effort with Britain’s MI6, and gave it the code name OPERATION GOLD. Starting in an Army warehouse in West Berlin, the tunnel extended three hundred yards into Communist East Berlin. For a year, the technicians in the tunnel were able to tap into the cables that carried Soviet military and diplomatic communications.
Unfortunately for the CIA and MI6, one of those who helped plan OPERATION GOLD for the British was George Blake, an MI6 agent secretly spying for the Soviets. He had apparently switched sides for ideological reasons while he was in a North Korean prison camp, before he had joined British intelligence. Blake told the KGB everything about the tunnel; it was compromised from the start, and as a result produced very little of value. The Soviets ended the charade in April 1956 when they broke into the tunnel and trumpeted the news to the world.
Blake, in turn, was betrayed by a Polish defector. He was arrested in 1961 and sentenced to forty-two years in prison for giving away the identities of dozens, perhaps hundreds, of agents.†
* * *
The FBI, unaware that its own tunnel had been compromised, gave very hush-hush VIP tours of the installation to show it off to a select group of senior government leaders, including high-ranking officials of the CIA, a few members of the Senate and House intelligence committees, and visitors from MI6, the British secret intelligence service, and MI5, the British internal security service.
The tunnel proved to be a work in progress. Some digging went on for years because the passageway was expanded from its original length. There were, of course, suspicions within the FBI that the tunnel might have been compromised, if only because it was producing so little of value. But in the absence of hard evidence, the tunnel and its staff of technicians kept going. The project, like so many government programs, had taken on a life of its own.
A former senior CIA official, who had been given a tour of the tunnel, thought it had been abandoned a few years after the fall of the Soviet Union, “because the Cold War was over, and why risk damaging relations with President Yeltsin, and our new friends the Russians?”
Even before the Soviet Union collapsed, an extraordinary event took place in Moscow in the battle of the bugs. The setting was the office of Vadim V. Bakatin, a reformer who briefly headed the KGB late in 1991 after the failed coup against Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. Robert S. Strauss, the U.S. ambassador, called on the KGB chief. Bakatin, in an unprecedented act, and to promote a friendlier atmosphere between the two countries, went over to his office safe and pulled out and handed to Strauss the blueprints of the new American embassy, showing the precise location of the KGB’s bugs. He also gave Strauss a suitcase full of transmitters, saying, “These are the instruments that were used.”
Despite the collapse of the Soviet Union a few months later, and with it the end of the Cold War, the tunnel under the embassy in Washington, now the embassy of Russia, remained in the FBI budget as late as the mid-1990s, even though it was producing virtually nothing useful. Still, there was the upkeep on the town house, and funds had to be allocated to pay the rather large electric bills and maintain the equipment.
When the tunnel surfaced, so to speak, in the days after Hanssen’s arrest in 2001, the Russians issued the usual diplomatic protest, summoning an American diplomat to the foreign ministry in Moscow. In a statement, the ministry declared: “If these reports prove true, this will be a flagrant case of the violation of generally recognized standards of international law concerning foreign diplomatic missions.”
Russia’s ambassador to Washington, Yuri V. Ushakov, seemed a good deal more laid-back. “If we find it,” he told a reporter, “perhaps we can use it as a sauna.”
What does one do with a used tunnel? In the 1990s, even the project’s champions in the FBI realized that its time had passed. But when senior counterintelligence officials met to consider the fate of the tunnel, a major argument broke out.
“The question,” said one former FBI counterintelligence agent, “was, Should we fill it up? There was this big fight over whether to fill it full of concrete.” John Lewis, for one, argued against it. What if it turns out to be the same old Russia, Lewis asked; suppose the Cold War comes back? The tunnel, Lewis argued, might yet prove useful in the future. At the time, of course, neither Lewis nor his colleagues knew that Hanssen had already betrayed the tunnel.
In the end, a compromise was reached. The tunnel was sealed up at the town house end, but not filled. “Of course you’d want to seal it up,” the former FBI man explained. “How would you like to be living in the house and suddenly the Russians walk in?”
*The embarrassing discovery was kept secret by the United States for almost a decade. But in May 1960, after the Soviets shot down the CIA’s U-2 spy plane 1,200 miles inside their territory, Washing
ton tried to counter international criticism by revealing the Soviet eavesdropping device. Henry Cabot Lodge, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, opened up and displayed the Great Seal and its tiny transmitter at the UN Security Council.
†Unknown to the CIA, British intelligence was able to replicate the Soviet bug, which MI5, the British internal security service, code-named SATYR.
*Some FBI agents who had been directly involved in the project defended it and insisted the tunnel had produced worthwhile data. The fact remained that the tunnel was compromised by Hanssen before the Soviets ever moved into the embassy, a reality that, in retrospect, made the project of dubious value. According to a senior former FBI official, “The tunnel was never completed.” Some of the NSA’s eavesdropping equipment failed to work as it was supposed to, he said, and may not even have been installed in the tunnel.
†in 1966, Blake escaped from Wormwood Scrubs prison to Moscow, where he took a Russian wife, Ida; fathered a son, Mischa; and was given a dacha by the KGB. In 1989, Blake asserted what Western intelligence had long suspected—that he had betrayed OPERATION GOLD.
14
“A Contagious Disease Is Suspected”
A few months before Hanssen betrayed the tunnel under the Soviet embassy, he had also disclosed to the KGB the FBI’s investigation of Felix Bloch, an American diplomat who had returned to the State Department after seven years in Austria.
It was in 1981 that Bloch began his secret Saturday morning visits in Vienna to Tina Jirousek, a prostitute specializing in sadomasochistic sex. At the time, Bloch was an economic officer in the American embassy on the Boltzmanngasse, a rising star in the State Department’s foreign service who was promoted to deputy chief of mission two years later.