March 4, 2001

U.S. Thinks Agent Revealed Tunnel at Soviet Embassy

By JAMES RISEN with LOWELL BERGMAN

The New York Times

WASHINGTON, March 3 — The United States government constructed a
secret tunnel under the Soviet Union's embassy in Washington to
eavesdrop, but federal investigators now believe the operation was
betrayed by the F.B.I. agent who was arrested last month on charges of
spying for Moscow, current and former United States intelligence and law
enforcement officials say.

The secret tunnel operation, which officials indicated was run jointly by the
F.B.I. and the National Security Agency, was part of a broad United States
effort to eavesdrop on and track Soviet — later Russian — facilities and
personnel operating in the United States.

Spokesmen at the F.B.I. and the White House declined to comment on the
tunnel operation today.

Current and former United States officials estimated that the tunnel
construction and related intelligence-gathering activities cost several
hundred million dollars, apparently making it the most expensive
clandestine intelligence operation that the agent, Robert Philip Hanssen, is
accused of betraying. The tunnel was designed to aid in a sophisticated
operation to eavesdrop on communications and conversations in the
Soviet Embassy complex, which was built in the 1970's and 1980's but was
not fully occupied until the 1990's.

In the 1980's, at about the time the tunnel operation was under way, the
United States and the Soviet Union argued bitterly over their respective
embassies in Moscow and Washington, with the United States accusing
Moscow of spying at both locations.

The government has never publicly disclosed the existence of the tunnel
operation. But in an F.B.I. affidavit in the Hanssen case, the government
stated that Mr. Hanssen "compromised an entire technical program of
enormous value, expense and importance to the United States
government." Officials said that was a reference to the tunnel operation and
related intelligence activities.

The government charges that Mr. Hanssen, a 25-year veteran of the F.B.I.
and a counterintelligence expert, volunteered to spy for Moscow in October
1985. He was arrested on Feb. 18 in a Virginia park after leaving a
package containing classified documents for his Russian handlers,
according to the affidavit.

It could not be determined when the government believes Mr. Hanssen
betrayed the tunnel operation and related intelligence-gathering activities
targeting the embassy complex. Nor are many details known about how
and when the operation was mounted, or whether it ever succeeded in
collecting useful intelligence.

But the emerging belief that the tunnel program had been compromised
was a factor in the government's decision to keep looking for additional
spies after the 1994 arrest of the C.I.A. officer Aldrich H. Ames, according
to current and former officials.

A secret investigative team was established to identify the source of a
series of damaging intelligence losses, including the tunnel and related
activities against the embassy, that could not be explained by Mr. Ames.
Other unexplained intelligence losses — including other technical
intelligence programs, as well as the 1989 disclosure to Moscow that the
F.B.I. was conducting an espionage investigation of a State Department
official, Felix S. Bloch — also prompted officials to begin a new mole hunt,
officials added.

That mole-hunt team played a critical role in the counterespionage probe
that led to Mr. Hanssen's arrest, United States officials said. It was a
successor to an earlier C.I.A. mole-hunt team that helped uncover Mr.
Ames. The tunnel was built under Moscow's embassy complex on
Washington's Wisconsin Avenue, a hilltop location known as Mount Alto,
officials said.

The Soviets were prevented for years from fully occupying the embassy
complex as a result of a long- running dispute with the United States about
charges that the American Embassy in Moscow had been thoroughly
bugged. Soviet diplomats occupied apartments there in 1979, and
Congressional critics charged that they were using those buildings as
espionage outposts. In the mid- 1980's, some American lawmakers
claimed that the hilltop location would give the Soviets an edge in
intelligence gathering against United States government buildings in
Washington. The new embassy complex was not fully occupied until after
the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Meanwhile, the American intelligence offensive against the embassy
remained hidden from public view even as the United States publicly
protested a Soviet campaign to lace the new United States Embassy in
Moscow with listening devices. Construction on the new American
Embassy in Moscow was halted in 1985 after the Reagan administration
protested that Soviet construction crews were imbedding eavesdropping
equipment within the walls of the new chancery building. The disclosure that
the United States believed that the new embassy was bugged sparked
Congressional hearings and criticism of the handling of the matter by the
State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency.

Ultimately, after considering tearing the embassy down, the United States
flew in American construction workers and lopped off the top two floors and
replaced them with two new secure floors before finally occupying the new
facility.

The United States operation against the new Soviet Embassy in
Washington, like the Soviet bugging of the United States Embassy
complex, was designed to eavesdrop on electronic communications and
conversations inside the facility. F.B.I. agents were secretly placed in
critical jobs in some of the key contractors hired by the Soviets, according
to an individual knowledegable about the planning of the operation. That
individual said that bugging the building involved the use of secret
technology developed by the intelligence community to pick up sounds
inside a large building.

The tunnel operation against the Soviet complex, designed to tap into
electronic communications inside the embassy facility, is just one of many
similar clandestine technical operations run by the United States
intelligence community, both during and since the cold war. And, like the
embassy operation, many of those other operations were eventually
compromised by spies.

In the 1950's, the C.I.A. dug a tunnel into East Berlin in order to tap into
Soviet telephone lines. But George Blake, a British intelligence officer who
was then a spy for Moscow, is believed to have betrayed the operation to
the Soviets.

In the 1970's, the United States Navy used submarines to tap into Soviet
undersea communications cables. In 1972, the Navy tapped into an
undersea cable used by the Soviet Navy in the Pacific, largely in hopes of
gaining intelligence about the locations of Soviet ballistic missile
submarines. In 1979, the Navy began a similar operation in the Barents
Sea to tap into a communications line that went to and from the
headquarters of the Soviet Union's biggest fleet.

In 1980, Ronald Pelton, a former National Security Agency employee,
compromised the Pacific cable tap operation by alerting the Soviets to the
operation. But Mr. Pelton, who was arrested in 1985 on espionage
charges, is not believed to have known about the Barents Sea operation,
which continued for years afterward.

The C.I.A. also conducted a secret operation to tap into a communications
line outside Moscow. Code- named TAW, that cable-tapping operation
continued for several years in the early 1980's. But it is believed to have
been compromised by Edward Lee Howard, a C.I.A. case officer who was
fired from his job in 1983 and later began to spy for Moscow. Mr. Howard
defected to Moscow in 1985. Mr. Ames may also have betrayed the TAW
operation. He also apparently compromised a technical operation code-
named Absorb, in which the C.I.A. hid sophisticated nuclear detection
equipment on a rail car crossing the Soviet Union in an attempt to identify
the locations of Soviet nuclear warheads.

Indeed, the record on the value of the intelligence gleaned from many of
these high-cost technical intelligence programs is mixed, current and
former officials say.

In fact, a former United States intelligence official said he was not certain
that the Soviet Embassy tunnel operation ever actually produced any
intelligence.

Another official suggested that technical problems prevented the operation
from becoming productive. That official suggested that the tunnel was both
compromised by a spy, and also failed on technical grounds.

New York Times