U.S. COMPLACENCY SEEN IN SPY CASES

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00965R000504890002-7
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 2
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: February 22, 2012
• Sequence Number: 2
• Publication Date: April 6, 1987
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/02/22 : CIA-RDP90-00965R000504890002-7
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ON PAGE 6 April 1987
A Breakdown of Management
U.S. Complacency
Seen in Spy Cases
'-J By MICHAEL WINES and RONALD J. OSTROW, Times Staff Writers
WASHINGTON-The scene reeked of an espionage scandal: a young
Marine guard at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow and his lover, Galia, a buxom
Soviet employee at the embassy, caught in the most compromising of
situations in an American diplomat's private apartment.
When it happened late last sum-
mer, U.S. punishment was swift.
Sgt. Arnold Bracy, who seven
months later would be arrested in a
KGB sex-for-secrets operation that
has devastated American interests
in Moscow, was busted last Aug. 21
to the rank of corporal.
Then he was put back on duty,
guarding the most sensitive diplo-
matic outpost in the world.
By ignoring the security risk in
the Bracy case, officials at the
embassy and in Washington proba-
bly gave the KGB seven extra
months of unmolested spying on
the embassy, American intelli-
gence experts said last week.
Several said the Marine spy case
underscores a basic and unreme-
died defect in American counterin-
telligence and security policies-a
complacent attitude toward espio-
nage that has led to fatal lapses in a
long string of U.S. spying disasters.
'Management Breakdown'
"What it points to is much
broader-a fundamental manage-
ment breakdown in handling secu-
rity across the board," said a
federal law enforcement source
heavily involved in security mat-
ters.
"Don't mistake this. It's not a
failure of technical systems. It's a
breakdown of people and manage-
ment."
"The biggest mistake we'll
make-and we're going to make
it-is to come down on the Marines
and stop there," a veteran congres-
sional intelligence expert said.
"What we really need to do is to
change something that's virtually
impossible to change: a mind-set."
In interviews last week, those
and other intelligence officials bit-
terly criticized the State Depart-
ment and the former U.S. ambassa-
dor to the Soviet Union, Arthur A.
Hartman, for what they called
unforgivable blunders in securing
the Moscow embassy against the
KGB.
Diplomats Blamed
More than the Marines, they
argued, the American diplomatic
Establishment is to blame for over-
looking a spy ring that apparently
wiped out U.S. intelligence opera-
tions in the Soviet Union and gave
the Kremlin months of top-secret
cables between the embassy and
Washington.
One expert disagreed. Former
CIA Director William E. Colby said
the department "has taken its se-
curity responsibilities seriously,"
and suggested that better overall
supervision of the Marine guards
might have prevented espionage
losses.
All granted, however, that the
State Department is far from alone
in failing to address the espionage
threat effectively. American com-
placency has been central to every
recent U.S. spying loss, from the
John A. Walker Jr. Navy spy ring,
which lasted 17 years, to the
Jonathan Jay Pollard, Larry Wu-
tai Chin, Ronald W. Pelton and
Edward Lee Howard cases of 1985
and 1986:
-Walker and three helpers fed
the Soviets data on ship and sub-
marine movements, stolen easily
from the Navy. They were tripped
up not by U.S. agents, but by
Walker's unhappy ex-wife, who
tipped the FBI.
-Pollard, a low-level Navy ter-
rorism analyst, used a limited secu-
rity clearance to rummage through
Pentagon satellite photos, intelli-
gence reports and other top-secret
data for Israel.
-Chin, a similarly low-level
CIA translator, gave Beijing two
decades of top U.S. secrets on Far
East policies and military opera-
tions. His gambling junkets and
Hong Kong trips went unnoticed.
The CIA gave him a distinguishvd,
service medal on his retirement
and his spying was not discovered
until he was implicated by a Chi-
nese defector.
A Bankrupt Drug User
-Pelton quit the super-secret
National Security Agency a bank-
rupt drug user, then sold the
Soviets crucial data on U.S. codes
and electronic eavesdropping. So-
viet defector Vitaly Yurchenko
tipped the United States to Pelton
in 1985.
- Howard, fired by the CIA for
instability and drug use, vanished
until Yurchenko disclosed that he
had given the Soviets details of
U.S. espionage in Moscow. Howard
used his CIA training to shake FBI
agents trailing him and defected to
Moscow in 1986.
U.S. intelligence experts now
poring over the cases of Bracy and
Marine Sgt. Clayton Lonetree, the
other guard accused in the spying
operation, say that U.S. officials
were as blind to danger signals in
those cases as in the past.
According to former diplomats at
the Moscow embassy, for, example,
it was well known that Violetta
Seina, a Soviet national who
worked there as a translator, had
won Lonetree's affections within a
few days of her 1984 arrival at the
U.S. mission. Lonetree's defense
lawyers contend that it was com-
mon to allow guards to mingle with
Soviet women, despite official poli-
cy frowning on such close contact
Embassy officials are now said to
have ignored other warning signs
in the spy case, including disre-
garding alarms that Soviet KGB
agents tripped as they wandered
through the embassy at night in
1986, planting listening devices and
photographing documents.
Embassy officials "had him by
the neck," one bitter intelligence
official said, "and they never pur-
sued it. It's absolutely criminal."
One theory embraced by some
investigators holds that except for
serendipity, U.S. officials might
still be unaware that the Soviets
had penetrated the most secret
recesses of the United States' Mos-
cow outpost.
Those investigators believe that
Lonetree was moved by mistake to
confess his complicity in spying to
amazed U.S. officials last winter.
The young guard, transferred from
Moscow to Vienna in 1988, in
believed to have continued meeting
with his Soviet "handlers" in Aus-
tria and to have discovered that
one of those sessions was being
monitored by outsiders.
Continued
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/02/22 : CIA-RDP90-00965R000504890002-7
 Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/02/22 : CIA-RDP90-00965R000504890002-7 .
Convinced that the United States
had found him out, the investiga-
tors now suspect, Lonetree turned
himself in, hoping for mercy. But in
fact, U.S. officials knew nothing of
his alleged espionage: what Lone-
tree had picked up was the KGB,
"countersurveilling" its own meet-
ing with the Marine to ensure that
no U.S. agents were on their trail.
The embassy spy case is espe-
cially galling to intelligence ex-
perts because warnings about dip-
lomatic security have been
sounded time after time in recent
years with little apparent result.
Two 1985 reports by the Presi-
dent's Foreign Intelligence Advi-
sory Board and a panel chaired by
past CIA Deputy Director Bobby R.
Inman blasted counterespionage
measures at American embassies
and urged a long list of improve-
ments. The Inman report recom-
mended $5 billion in new construc-
tion and other measures to improve
security, a figure rejected by the
last Congress as beyond the State
Department's ability to spend
properly.
'Deficiencies in Security'
Last October, the Senate Intelli-
gence Committee warned in a de-
classified report that it is "very
concerned over serious deficiencies
in the security of U.S. facilities
overseas, primarily those managed
by the Department of State." The
report noted that the Moscow out-
post had been bugged by the
Soviets at least once in recent years
with highly sophisticated minia-
ture transmitters that were hidden
in some embassy typewriters.
The bugs apparently transmitted
the texts of typed embassy messag-
es to the KGB via an antenna
hidden in the embassy chimney.
After the antenna was found in
1978, the United States sent its best
security experts to Moscow and
searched the U.S. mission "high
and low" but turned up nothing,
one official said. The typewriter
devices were not discovered until
1984.
moscow, and tell you they send 'em
by train and truck and that they're
secure the whole way. It's bull,"
one official said. "For any intelli-
gence service that's good at what it
does-and the KGB is good-it's
not all that hard to get into them."
That official and others complain
vigorously about the State Depart-
ment's security "mind-set," saying
that diplomats so intent on smooth
relations with the Soviets are re-
luctant to take any measures that
Moscow could view as unfriendly
or even mistrustful.
Others say the Ivy League-edu-
cated diplomats, by and large, are
disdainful of the sort of disciplined,
military-style security essential to
thwart foreign efforts to penetrate
an embassy. The Marines, in par-
ticular, were ostracized in Moscow,
a blue-collar police force amid an
American elite of better-educated
and wealthier diplomats.
A law enforcement official who
has worked closely with the State
Department on some assignments
expressed scant sympathy for
guards enmeshed in the spy scan-
dal. "Obviously the Marines you
had here didn't have pride in their
outfit or their country. They were
ready to toss it all for a pitch in the
hay," he said.
'Third-Class Citizens'
But he also berated their diplo-
matic supervisors for making the
guards' jobs more difficult than
they should be. "The State Depart-
ment has treated its security as
third-class citizens," he said.
"They treat their people as if
they're a bunch of knuckle-drag-
ging hammerheads."
The Marine scandal has prompt-
ed a sudden barrage of suggestions
for improving embassy security,
most of them dealing with the
problem of placing young men in
hostile nations for long stretches
without trustworthy female com-
panionship.
Most experts say that is a prob-
lem, but not the problem.
The sorts of attitude problems
said by many to be endemic at the
State Department persist through-
out the vast national security bu-
reaucracy, they say. Diplomats
who do not want to be bothered
with routine tasks bristle at recom-
mendations to reduce the low-cost
use of foreign citizens as embassy
workers, and defense contractors
balk at costly industrial security
Yet it is human failure, not measures. Government reports
electronic snooping, that most ex- have urged an overhaul of the
perts say is at fault in any Ameri- secret-classification system, either
can breakdown in counterintelli- to limit access to the material or to
gence and security. The typewriter limit the types of material classi-
bugs, for example, likely were fied, to little avail.
implanted while the machines were Some experts had believed that
en route to Moscow via the State the so-called "year of the spy,"
Department courier service-a with the Soviet, Chinese and Israeli
service notorious among intelli- espionage scandals, awoke the de-
gence officials for poor security. fense and diplomatic establish.
The Moscow debacle, they say,
has proven that that was not the
case. Some now doubt that any-
thing will do the trick.
Colby and George Carver, a
former senior official of the CIA
now affiliated with the Georgetown
Center for Strategic International
Studies, blame a "post-Watergate"
attitude that frowns on restrictions
that affect civil liberties, such as
limiting access to sensitive docu-
ments or rejecting job applicants
who appear to be security risks.
Officials are fearful of complaints
or lawsuits by disgruntled workers
or candidates.
"If you've got a guy who is
known to be an ardent Zionist, do
you put him in a position with
access to very sensitive docu-
ments?" Carver asked. "Well,
that's a touchy question, but it's the
kind of question a good counterin-
telligence officer needs to ask.
These days they're reluctant to ask
it.,.
More Intense Screening
Among other measures, the crit-
ics are calling for more intense
screening of personnel for sensitive
positions, more extensive backup
security measures to catch em-
ployees who go astray and height -
ened attention to the warning signs
of potential espionage.
In the Moscow case, specifically,
intelligence officials say that a
clean sweep is needed of security
experts who allowed the embassy
breach to occur. That would in-
clude high officials at the State
Department and the Marine Corps,
if necessary.
Many also call for an even
tougher attitude toward the Soviet
Union, saying that simple com-
plaints about KGB activities will
not deter Moscow from what has
long been a high-pressure effort to
penetrate diplomatic buildings
throughout the East Bloc.
That, too, is unlikely to come
about, they say. Says one disdainful
expert: "They'll probably stick a
letter of reprimand in somebody's
pocket down in Foggy Bottom and
that'll be it.
"State is especially egregious,"
that official said, "but Congress has
never held anybody's feet to the
fire when other things like this
happened. Until we get really seri-
ous about it-really serious-noth-
ing's going to happen at all."
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/02/22 : CIA-RDP90-00965R000504890002-7