That Time the Soviets Bugged Congress, and Other Spy Tales

[MelissaB]

Fascinating read

That Time the Soviets Bugged Congress, and Other Spy Tales

Allowing a photographer from the Russian state media into the Oval Office was an act of breathtaking recklessness.

By Calder Walton
May 22, 2017

During a private meeting in the Oval Office earlier this month, President Donald Trump is understood to have disclosed highly classified intelligence to two senior Russian diplomats. U.S. reporters and photographers were excluded the White House meeting, but bizarrely, a photographer from the Russian state-run media agency, TASS, was admitted. Soon, commentators were asking an obvious question: whether it was smart to allow a Russian government photographer, with his electronic equipment, into the Oval Office. Responding to that point, a former deputy director of the CIA, David Cohen, replied: “No, it was not.”

In the days that followed, Vladimir Putin helpfully offered to provide a “recording” of the Russian meeting in the Oval Office, leading to howls of laughter on Twitter at the Kremlin leader’s puckishness. It turns out this was a mistranslation from Russian: He meant a written “record.” However, though it may seem like a story line from The Americans, fears that the TASS photographer may have planted an electronic monitoring device in the Oval Office are not as far-fetched as they first seem. In fact, the Kremlin is a past master of planting hidden listening devices in America’s most sensitive government buildings. During the Cold War, Soviet intelligence used TASS as cover for espionage, and in one operation, used it to plant a bug at the center of Capitol Hill.

Despite struggling to compete with Western technology throughout the Cold War, the Soviets were masters at electronic bugging. The U.S. Embassy in Moscow was one of the KGB’s most remarkable targets; it was riddled with Soviet microphones. It was penetrated virtually continuously from the beginning of Soviet–American diplomatic relations in 1933 until at least the mid-1960s. Inexplicably, however, almost all historical studies of American relations with the Soviet Union, even those recently published, overlook the hemorrhage of diplomatic secrets from the U.S. Moscow embassy for more than 30 years.

At the end of the Second World War, an electronic sweep of the Embassy revealed a staggering 120 hidden microphones. According to a member of its staff, they “kept turning up, in the legs of any new tables and chairs that were delivered, in the plaster of the walls, any and everywhere.”
More: http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/05/22/donald-trump-russia-soviet-union-spying-congress-bug-215174

[MelissaB]

1. Last paragraph

If Trump has not ordered every inch and crevice of the Oval Office swept for bugs, he needs to do so now. Russia’s intelligence services today, the FSB and SVR, consider themselves the proud heirs of the KGB and to be waging a resurgent Cold War with the West—whatever the president may say to the contrary. Since the end of the Cold War, it appears that Russia’s SVR has continued to use TASS as cover for its operations in America and in 1998 a highly sophisticated Russian listening device was discovered in a key conference room at the State Department. Unlike the past, however, today’s White House does not seem to recognize Russia’s intelligence services as hostile. On the contrary, Trump appears to regard them as allies, judging from the top-secret Israeli intelligence he is said to have disclosed during that now-infamous meeting. Perhaps Putin does not need to install a bug under the Resolute Desk after all—he already has a source there.

[GReedDiamond]

2. In Trump's WH, a bug's not a bug...it's a feature. nt