Surveillance and espionage in the cold war - 3 April 1987

Two stories, or rather one documented story and one fearful headline, bring us up short with the rude reminder that Mr Gorbachev’s new openess is restricted to his policy toward the Soviet peoples.

It is not meant to introduce a new cosiness in the personal relations between American citizens in Moscow or Russian citizens in Washington. Both sides still proceed, in the confines of their embassies, on the assumption that they are mortal enemies and that the walls of the American Embassy in Moscow and the White House, the State Department, the CIA building in the Pentagon in Washington are condominiums more private that Mata Hari’s boudoir.

Not only do their walls have ears; their walls are installed with extremely complicated, what we call sophisticated, devices to pierce the other fellow’s walls and record what is being said in any voice louder than a whispered aside. We are talking about what the governments call electronic surveillance.

The first story, you’ll have guessed, it’s the disclosure that two American marine guards posted to the American Embassy in Moscow have been charged with espionage and/or conspiracy in becoming too friendly with Russian women and allowing them to have the run of rooms in the embassy that have secret files. This was followed by the severe reaction of recalling all 28 marine guards from the embassy, though there’s no suggestion that any of the others were similarly involved.

The second story may not yet have become so familiar outside this country. It was summed up by a headline in the New York Times on Thursday and, in itself, delivers a blow to those of us who are always happy, or warily hopeful, whenever there’s a top-level get together between the American and the Soviet governments.

It said “US fears Soviets may spy on Shultz on Embassy Visit” and the sub-heading read “Eavesdropping devices may have been left in the embassy in the espionage case”. That, er, sub-heading is rather cryptic. Let me make it clear by reading the lead sentence of the piece, “Administration officials said today that security in the United States Embassy in Moscow might have been so compromised by the marines espionage case that Secretary of State George Shultz might not be able to hold conversations safe from eavesdropping inside the building when he visits the Soviet Union on April the 13th."

So, one story links up with the other. It means, of course, that inside what we’ve always assumed is the sanctuary of an embassy the poor secretary of state may have to be mum on the home ground and anything he wants to say to the new ambassador, who moved in on Friday, or for that matter to a waiter or chambermaid – certainly a chambermaid – had better be said during a walk in the woods. This items sent me back to the day when we – I’d better say when I – lost my innocence.

It was the spring of 1945. Along with, or at the same time as, about three, four hundred other correspondents, I’d taken the train out to San Francisco to cover the founding conference of the United Nations, to watch and report all the meetings and negotiations between 50 nations pledged to set up a new world organisation which would eventually write a charter, as it did, to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war.

We – we being not only the correspondents but the statesmen, the soldiers, lawyers, delegates from all these nations – we were all full of hope and good cheer and goodwill. Within a week or two Mussolini was literally at the end of a rope and Hitler was on the ropes, and then dead. Nazism was defeated, pulverised and gone for good. At no time before or since has there been better feeling, more openess between the United States, the West European allies and the Soviet Union.

In the days before the grand conference opened, when there was nothing substantive to report, we used to watch the various famous men and their delegations arriving at the airport or tumbling out of their limousines to check into their hotels. And there was a fine morning when we were told that the Soviet delegation, including the big bugs Mr Molotov and Mr Gromyko, would be arriving in Union Square at the St Francis Hotel. It would be exciting, I thought, to see these great men for the first time, to make acquaintance with our valiant Russian allies.

I posted myself on the sidewalk at the hotel entrance along with a small crowd of the townspeople. We were coralled –or courteously horded back – to leave a lane open for the visitors. The hording was done by the traditional honour guard the United States assigns to distinguished visitors, a half-dozen or so United States marines, very smart, coltish, proper, upright young men.

Eventually a big black limousine swung round the square and stopped at the hotel entrance. Two marines walked briskly to open the doors of the car and two burly men in what looked like double-breasted cut-rate suits got out and immediately put splayed hands against the chests of the marines and shoved them violently back into the crowd. This was astonishing.

Hadn’t the Russians been told that the marines on all formal occasions constitute an honour guard and are there to see that no embarrassment of any kind comes to them? For a split second I thought there was going to be a sidewalk tussle at least, but the faces of the two marines were too awestruck for them to do anything. They moved forward to the hotel steps and stood back and gingerly indicated the entrance. Something even stranger was to come.

I followed the Russians into the hotel lobby – no public security thoughts in those days. The Soviet flunkies signed the delegation in and Mr Molotov, Mr Gromyko and the other big shots were led to the lift. Then there was some sort of confusion and they were led away to a corner of the lounge and guarded from all curiosity-seekers by other burly men.

It came out later, I learned from an American delegate, a story confirmed by the hotel management, that the delegation leaders were not allowed to go up to their suites until their guards, watchers, secret service men I suppose, had been up there and gone through every sitting room, every bedroom, kitchen, bathroom, cupboard, closet, chandelier, and whatever to make sure that there were no microphones, no listening devices of any sort.

It took about an hour, at the end of which time Mr Molotov, Mr Gromyko and the delegates retired to their lodgings. I don’t suppose this story will surprise anyone under the age of 60 but it was so odd, so shocking at the time that in the general atmosphere of good hope and goodwill it was something that only what we called a keyhole reporter, a member of the yellow press, would dream of reporting. I never reported it.

We simply wondered why the delegation of a great ally should appear in public to be so – we were just beginning to use the word – so paranoid, and once the conference was under way we had other disturbing signs of the same affliction. At one point during a plenary sesssion, during a speech from Mr Anthony Eden as I recall, Mr Molotov got up and so did four or five of those burly men sitting around him. They all marched out.

We’d come to assume that they objected to the speech and were having an early try-out of what was later to become a Russian reflex: they were about to exercise their veto. They were doing nothing of the kind. Mr Molotv was going to the bathroom but not, you may be sure, taking the risk of going there alone.

Well, down four decades we know that few departments of technology have developed to such a pitch of fiendish ingenuity as the business of electronic surveillance. Last year there was a loud but brief hullabaloo about the fact that the Russians had acquired in Washington a building on a hill which was capable of receiving clear radio-signal conversations from the Pentagon and other American government building, from devices, from chips, so tiny that they could never be detected. They were capable of picking up conversations in the street.

Well, if this is so, I wonder why anybody in government bothers to use the human voice and shouldn’t rather trust to sign language and word processors. I suspect we outsiders simply don’t know the difference between the truth and wild exaggeration in reports of what electronic surveillance can do and what it can’t.

Evidently, from the arrest of those two American marines in Moscow, the human touch is still there, still perilous and – in the business of espionage – the way of a man with a maid is still a paramount hazard. Even then the the anxiety about Mr Shultz’s freedom to say anything inside the embassy except “Please pass the marmalade”, this anxiety is rooted in the suspicion that the beguiling young Russian woman who worked at the American Embassy between 1984 and 1986 and who seduced Sergeant Lonetree (his odd name by the way is not odd at all among American Indians of whom he is one) the suspicion that she may have planted listening devices during the times that Sergeant Lonetree allegedly gave her access to secret files.

She, Violetta Seina, is being called the Russian Mata Hari. Well, for one thing Violetta is beautiful and Mata Hari was far from it. For another thing, it’s been pretty well established that Mata Hari, a neutral, gave no information to the Germans and the French concluded in 1932 that there was no tangible irrefutable evidence that she did any spying at all.

With this cautionary tale in mind we’d better wait to know whether Violetta Seina is a KGB agent or a Russian girl who felt sympathy for a young American Indian who still harbours deep resentment over the fate of his people at the hands long ago of the American government.

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