PERSONAL DEFENSE INITIATIVE - HOW TO RESIST SOVIET SNOOPING.

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00965R000605750005-7
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 1
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: June 12, 2012
• Sequence Number: 5
• Publication Date: April 6, 1987
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/06/12 : CIA-RDP90-00965R000605750005-7 STAT
ON PAGE NEW YORK TIMES
6 April 1987
,-'ESSAY I-,lliarn Satiire .
Personal Defense Initiative
WASHINGTON
E very American visitor staying
at a Moscow hotel comes back
with the same story. You. dis-
cover the bathroom has no soap. You
say loudly angrily to nobody in partic-
ular, "What kind of backward coun-
try is this, no soap in the bathroom!"
And a few moments later, as if by
magic, the chambermaid taps at the
door bearing a bar of soap.
The bugging of rooms, like the
knowledge of English by drivers who
profess to speak not a foreign word, is
taken for granted by Americans in
the Soviet Union.
At the 1972 summit, when the
"clean room" in the U.S. F~jntbassy
was occupied by Henry Kissinger and
his aides, a group of Nixon assistants
were forced to hold a strategy session
on public relations in a Moscow hotel
room. Ron Ziegler turned the radio up
loud. John Scali rattled his teacup in
his saucer. Herb Klein, speaking in a
whisper, kept banging his foot against
the coffee table. I was supposed to be
taking notes at that meeting but
couldn't hear a thing.
Coming back from a Moscow trip,
Treasury Secretary George Shultz
took his seat in Air Force One, sighed
deeply and remarked how good it was
to be able to talk in a different kind of
society, free of the fear of being over-
heard. (I recall thinking bitterly of that
moment when the revelations came of
the secret Nixon wiretapping and
White House taping system.)
Now, 15 years later, Secretary of
State Shultz will be going to Moscow
more worried than ever about the se-
curity of communications. Our em-
bassy was penetrated by Mata Hari's
great-granddaughters, and tiny
transmitters are suspected of infest-
ing not only the usual chandeliers and
How to resist
Soviet
snooping.
saltshakers but the typewriters and
computers.
U.S. diplomats there who used to
scoff at demands by hard-liners that
Soviet citizens be denied embassy ac-
cess are now reduced to writing mes-
sages in longhand. Visitors are urged
to bring a children's toy that enables
you to write on a slate and make the
message vanish by pulling up the plas-
tic. Secretary Shultz will have to drive
out to the airport to use his plane for
secure communications. home, unless
he can bring a trailer along with an un-
penetrated scrambler.
Even as this rape of our national pri-
vacy takes place, we are told that the.
new U.S. Embassy building is already
compromised with eavesdropping de-
vices. Senator Pat Leahy, who with
Senator Pat Moynihan led the long
fight to enhance embassy security,
suggests we tear the whole thing down
and start from scratch.
Why do we not complain, as we did
when the Russians bombarded our
embassy with radiation and dusted
doorknobs with carcinogens?
The answer is simple: We try to
eavesdrop on their communications
everywhere. That takes some of the
zing out of our moral indignation.
But the Russians are more careful
than we are. Soviet construction
men built their new embassy here;
their nationals do all the menial
chores with no foreigners employed.
What can we do to make certain
they are not stealing more from us
than we are from them? Retaliation
is an obvious answer: no opening of
the new embassy here until we are
sure of a secure embassy there.
The less obvious answer has to do
with a new strategy of communica-
tions security. For a generation, our
policy has been to stamp as top secret
anything to do with eavesdropping
countermeasures. The result has been
a good offense and a lousy defense.
When I wrote here that the Rus-
sians were using Mount Alto to direct
listening-lasers at the White House
windows, and that the White House
was attaching vibrators to the win-
dows to counter this snooping, a
caller suggested that I had breached
security. That's nonsense; the Rus-
sians can hear our windows rattling,
just as they could hear the Scali tea-
cup and the Klein stamping foot.
It's about time our technical publi-
cations began speculating about rea-
sons for weakness in the latest anti-
bugging bugging technology. Fear of our anti-
espionage laws has not led to security
but to suppression of the truth about
our weakness.
Here we have a nonexistent defense
because we have concentrated on of-
fense. And here we have an Adminis-.
tration. that in a related field has
adopted a policy of a space shield,
which has revolutionized the mad
reliance on offense.
Where is the Personal Defense
Initiative? Why have we neglected
the field of resistance to snooping?
Why can't we put an electronic shield
around our embassies, and use that
technology to let the Americans of the
future protect themselves from un-
wanted intrusion from any quarter?D
STAT
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/06/12 : CIA-RDP90-00965R000605750005-7