Vince Houghton - Nuking the Moon - And Other Intelligence Schemes and Military Plots Left on the Drawing Board

It also provided the Soviet Union with what might go down as the greatest signals intelligence (SIGINT) operation in history. Inside the Great Seal (which is now colloquially known as “The Thing”) was a device known as a passive cavity resonator, a special type of bug that will only turn on when a specific frequency is beamed at it from an external transmitter. You know how in the movies, when the good guys are searching for bugs, the security dudes wave some kind of wand thingy around the room to see if their gadget doodad makes a beep-beep noise? (This is a highly technical discussion—try to keep up.) Well, that’s an effective technique, but only if you are looking for active listening devices—ones that are constantly sending out an electromagnetic signal for you to detect. A passive listening device, like The Thing, isn’t sending out anything unless it has been turned on. So as long as the Soviets wait for the embassy security teams to sweep the ambassador’s study before they fire it up, The Thing will remain undetectable.

Which it did for seven years . Seven .

From 1945 to 1952, the Soviets listened in to some of the most important diplomatic, political, military, technological, and economic conversations of the early Cold War. Think about all that happened during this period: Churchill’s Iron Curtain speech, the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, the establishment of Israel, the Berlin Airlift, the formation of NATO, the formation of West Germany, the Alger Hiss trial, Mao’s takeover of China, the testing of the first Soviet atomic bomb, the beginning of the Korean War, the conviction of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg for passing atomic secrets to the Soviets. There’s more, but you get the point. Each of these monumental events was almost certainly discussed by top American officials in the ambassador’s residence. And each one of those discussions was almost certainly captured for Soviet intelligence by The Thing.

As much as I hate to admit it, we got our butts kicked, and I have to tip my cap to the Russians on this one. They took us to the woodshed. Worse yet, it was only blind luck that led us to the discovery of The Thing in 1952. A radio operator at the British embassy stumbled upon the signal at the exact time the Soviets had activated it. He didn’t mean to, it just happened.

And fortunate for us. Spaso House remains the official residence of the U.S. ambassador to Russia, so that damn Thing could still be listening to the most secret of conversations even today.

Not that it ever really had to. The Soviets created numerous different ways to eavesdrop on embassy conversations. Some we didn’t discover until far too late.

In 1964, American officials found forty different bugs hidden throughout the foundations of the Moscow embassy. Though they had long suspected the presence of bugs, they never found any until they started breaking down walls. No one knew how long they had been listening, but rust on the bugs suggested they probably weren’t recent installations. Then, in 1984, Americans discovered Soviet transmitters hidden inside typewriters in use by U.S. diplomats since 1982. The transmitters picked up the sounds of documents typed by embassy staff and sent the information to antennas hidden in the embassy walls. Those signals were relayed to a listening post outside, and then Soviet analysts used the distinct sound of each keystroke to reconstruct the secret document.

When the United States decided to build a new embassy in Moscow in 1969, Soviet intelligence saw a unique opportunity to literally build listening devices into the foundation of the embassy. Soviet workers were able to emplace eavesdropping devices in pillars, beams, and floors of the building, all while it was under construction. These were fully uncovered by 1985—before any real damage had been done—but it was years before a consensus could be reached on what to do with the new embassy building, now sardonically nicknamed the “Great Transmitter.” In 1988, President Reagan suggested demolishing the building and starting from scratch, but a year later the newly inaugurated Bush administration reconsidered, and a middle ground was reached. At a cost of $240 million, the U.S. embassy in Moscow was taken apart piece by piece and rebuilt. The top two floors were replaced completely, with four new extremely secure floors, built by American workers, using materials shipped over from the United States. Crisis averted… at least as far as we know.

But have no fear,noble readers, America is here to settle the score!

Well, kinda.

Okay, not really at all.

We tried, damn it!

Why can’t you give us credit for trying? Everyone is so judgy all of a sudden.

The plan was called Operation Monopoly, and it would take advantage of the new Soviet embassy, whose construction was near completion in the late 1970s. The compound site in Northwest DC’s Mount Alto neighborhood was 350 feet above sea level, and had a clear line of sight to both the White House and the Capitol—useful for sightseeing, as well as electronic eavesdropping. During the Nixon administration, when the planning for the new location began, officials from the NSA, CIA, and the FBI all spoke out against the embassy’s favorable geography. We don’t know exactly why, but someone in the government overrode those objections.

So they moved on to Plan B. If the Soviets were going to get their ideal embassy location in DC, we could at least take full advantage of their presence. Let’s turn lemons into lemon-flavored vodka.

In 1977, the FBI and the NSA began digging an underground tunnel to tap into the communications systems and the physical infrastructure—the rooms themselves—of the Soviet embassy. They used several houses in the area, secretly purchased by the FBI, as discreet observation posts, and one house as the starting point for the tunnel. To maintain cover, two FBI agents, pretending to be a young married couple, moved into the tunnel house to keep the neighbors (and the Russians) from getting suspicious.

That didn’t really work: Most of the neighbors knew something was up. One of the FBI houses always had its shutters drawn, and no mail was ever delivered—yet neighbors watched people come and go through a rear entrance (almost as if they were on shifts…). Every so often, someone would see a telephoto lens sticking out of one of the windows that faced the embassy. Neighbors complained of poor TV reception (in the days before cable or satellite TV) and that from time to time their phones would mysteriously go dead for short stretches of time—like someone was messing around with the phone lines.

While the FBI was trying (unsuccessfully) to keep a low profile above ground, the NSA was running into its own subterranean issues. One problem was obvious: How the hell do you get rid of all that dirt from digging the tunnel without anyone noticing? This was actually less of an issue than you might think. The embassy itself was still under construction at that time. There were trucks, and cranes, and girders, and pallets of building materials, and (of course) big piles of dirt. At night, once the construction workers had gone home and embassy security was less alert, the tunnel dirt could be secretly added to the existing piles from the embassy’s construction.

A much bigger issue was that no one really knew where the tunnel would come up into the Soviet embassy. The NSA/FBI team had the plans for the building, but they had no idea what each room would be used for. As one FBI agent who worked on the operation said, “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.” It was a crapshoot, and all the U.S. intelligence agencies could do was hope for the best.