SENATOR MOYNIHAN'S SPY STORY

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00552R000404440034-0
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 1
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: June 29, 2010
• Sequence Number: 34
• Publication Date: January 1, 1986
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2010/06/29: CIA-RDP90-00552R000404440034-0
ARTICLE APP ED READER'S DIGEST
ON PAGE January 1986
Senator Moynihan's
Spy Story The Soviets routinely listen in on the
...;n;,,.,.
-C
ambassador to the United
Nations in 1975, Nelson
Rockefeller, then Vice President,
took me into a back room of his
suite in the old State, War and Navy
Building and told me a secret: the
Soviets, he said, would be listening to
every telephone call I made from our
mission or from our suite in the
Waldorf Towers. They had increas-
ingly sophisticated equipment for
doing this in their mission on 67th
Street, in their Glen Cove compound
on Long Island and, most important-
ly, in a new 19-story building they
had built on the high ground of
Riverdale in the Bronx, from which
their intercepts swept the whole of
Manhattan.
Rockefeller had just finished his
report as chairman of the Commis-
sion on CIA Activities Within
the United States (Ronald Rea-
gan was a member). Wild
charges were being made
against the CIA-and some not
entirely wild. Still, the CIA was
never involved in "large-scale spy-
ing on American citizens," or
grossly "engaged in illegal wire-
taps," as its severest critics
charged. But the Soviets most
assuredly were, and Rocke-
feller's report warned that
"Americans have a right to
be uneasy, if not seriously
disturbed, that the personal and
business activities they discuss free-
ly over the telephone could be re-
corded and analyzed by agents of
foreign powers."
This report was published that
same year. But no one in Washing-
ton seemed to care that we were
being listened to.
I did. Six months later, a mem-
ber of the mission staff came into
my office, closed the door and re-
ported that Arkady Shevchenko,
Under-Secretary General of the
United Nations, had told an Amer-
ican in the Secretariat he wished to
defect. Impossible. Shevchenko
of Americans. Asks the
Senator from New York:
Isn't it time we did some-
thing about this violation of
our constitutional rights?
Condsnssd frost
Lsa-rsa To NEW Yoaa
Sue. DANtzi. PATRICK
MOYNUSAN (D., N.Y.)
was the ranking Russian at the
U.N. It would be the highest-level
defection in Soviet history. A trap?
We would have to find out-and
we did. And we did not use the
telephone. I took to meeting people
at hockey games in Madison
Square Garden.
Anyway, Shevchenko did defect,
and last year, ten years later, his
book, Breaking With Moscow (Al-
fred A. Knopf), confirmed that in
Glen Cove alone the escalation of
electronic surveillance was striking.
"When I first came to the United
States in 1958," he wrote, "there
were three or four KGB communi-
cations technicians in the attic of
the main building. By 1973, the
specialists in intercepting radio sig-
nals numbered at least a dozen, and
a large greenhouse had to be com-
mandeered to store their equip-
ment. The rooftops of Glen Cove,
the apartment building in River-
Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2010/06/29: CIA-RDP90-00552R000404440034-0