Trusted Friend Talbott Out of Loop on Russian Bug

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Jan 10, 2000 | by Jamie Dettmer

U.S. counterintelligence officers secured Secretary of State Madeleine Albright's agreement last August to refrain from briefing her deputy, Strobe Talbott -- a onetime Moscow correspondent for Time magazine -- about their discovery of a sophisticated Russian eavesdropping device concealed in a seventh-floor State Department conference room.

According to several U.S. intelligence and Justice Department sources, all of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity, Talbot was kept out of the loop of the security probe that led to the arrest outside the State Department on Dec. 8, 1999, of 54-year-old Russian intelligence officer Stanislav Borisovich Gusev. "Talbott didn't need to know; it is as simple as that," says a Justice Department source who declined to expound on the reasons why the Clinton administration's main Russia expert was shut out.

A CIA source tells news alert!: "Talbott has long been widely seen at Langley as being too close to the Russians -- a sort of trusted friend, you might say." According to that source, only Albright herself and Undersecretary of State Thomas Pickering were kept fully briefed on the progress of a bug hunt triggered when Gusev, the top technical intelligence officer in the Russian Embassy, was spotted last summer by an FBI surveillance team wearing headphones and loitering in his car and on foot on a weekly basis outside the department. The FBI team suspected immediately that Gusev was receiving transmissions from a bug. Talbot, they were afraid, inadvertently might let slip information about the security probe.

FBI monitoring of the Russian and a bug hunt in the department led to the discovery in August of the device -- consisting of low-powered batteries, a microphone, a recording mechanism and a line-of-sight transmitter. The device was concealed in a wooden rail molding in the conference room used by the Bureau of Oceans and International Environmental Scientific Affairs. When Gusev was arrested, a remote-control antenna was found hidden in his car.

In the political flap since the arrest, State officials, including Albright, have sought to dispel fears that the Russians could have gleaned sensitive information from the bug. Intelligence sources take issue with all the downplaying of the potential damage. They say there is a shortage of meeting space on State's seventh floor, which includes Albright's suite, and that conference rooms frequently are shared by other sections.

Further, sources say the eavesdropping device had directional-sound capabilities and may have picked up noise from the offices of State's inspector general and from the department's congressional-affairs section. The FBI also is working under the assumption that where there is one bug, there could be more.

The damage-assessment operation under way consists of trying to discover how the bug was planted and whether the Russians had inside help; it is assumed they did. According to former CIA officer Paul Redmond, concealing the bug would have been time-consuming. "I've actually been involved in operations like that. It's a very complicated matter. You actually have to go in several times" he told NBC. As with other retired and current CIA officers, Redmond criticizes the almost open-access policy granted to Russian diplomats by State. More than 20 Russian diplomats were accorded the status of "visitors not requiring an escort."

The timing of Gusev's arrest has prompted speculation that it was a tit-for-rat response to the Russian arrest in Moscow on Nov. 30, 1999, of CIA operative Cheri Leberknight. Neil Gallagher, assistant director of the FBI's national-security division, insists Gusev's arrest was unrelated. But a U.S. intelligence source tells news alert!: "In this business there's no such thing as a coincidence. Working on that theory, one can also hazard maybe the Russians themselves suspected Gusev was about to go down and went for Leberknight as a preemptive strike -- or maybe it was in retaliation for our Chechnya criticisms."