THE ART OF HIGH-TECH SNOOPING

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00965R000605010002-1
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 3
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: May 10, 2012
• Sequence Number: 2
• Publication Date: April 20, 1987
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

STAT
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/05/10: CIA-RDP90-00965R000605010002-1
PAGE A-7- 20 April 1987
The Art of High-Tech Snooping
How nigh-invisible devices can get under an embassy's skin
For the past several weeks,
American technicians have
been feverishly searching
the U.S. embassy in Mos-
cow for bugs that might
have been planted by Soviet
agents let in by Marine
guards. So far, they have found nothing
tangible. "Not a microphone, not a trans-
mitter, not even a wire," says one knowl-
edgeable source.
Reassuring? No, chilling. American
experts are virtually certain that the bugs
are there, all right, but are so tiny and clev-
erly hidden that they are next to impossible
to uncover. Sources familiar
with the situation say techni-
cians have detected audio-fre-
quency emissions that they
think originate in the electronic-
coding equipment. That suggests
a device in the equipment that
enabled the KGB to read the
plain-English versions and then
the coded versions of messages,
and thus crack U.S. codes and
read American diplomatic ca-
bles throughout the world.
Moreover, inspections of the
new U.S. embassy building now
under construction have turned
up plenty of signs of bugs:
cables seemingly unconnected
to anything, odd indentations
in wall panels, steel reinforc-
ing rods so arranged as to
convert structural pillars into
antennas.
To American experts, -the
moral of these Moscow myster-
ies is distressingly plain: the
U.S.S.R. may be deficient in
many areas of high technology,
but its spying techniques are as
sophisticated as its missiles. Says
former Defense Secretary James
Schlesinger, who has been depu-
tized by the State Department to
figure out whether the new em-
bassy can ever be made secure:
"The notion that the Soviets are
a decade behind the U.S. [in
technology] certainly does not
apply to electronic snooping."
The U.S. is probably ahead in
KGB and the CIA. Moreover, U.S. counter-
intelligence experts have an uneasy suspi-
cion that the Kremlin may have come up
with devices that they are not yet aware
of. Executives in private companies that
produce snooping equipment for the U.S.
Government are under strict orders to
keep their mouths shut, but they do pro-
vide some insight into the weird world of
electronic espionage and its impressive
technology.
Microphone-transmitters these days
can be made about the size of a pinhead
and embedded anywhere (or everywhere)
in a wall, ceiling, chair or a person's cloth-
size. A standard method of finding bugs is
the electronic "sweep." A device beams
microwaves at the entire surface of, say. a
suspect wall; a bug struck by the micro-
waves emits a telltale signal, but only if it
is transmitting. Newer bugs can record
data for perhaps 15 seconds, then trans-
mit all of the stored information in a sin-
gle burst lasting a microsecond. Unless a
detection device beams microwaves at the
bug during that microsecond, the listen-
ing gadget will not be found.
In a computer age, methods of foiling
the bugs do not always work. A hoary sta-
ple of spy fiction is the conversation con-
ducted in low tones with a radio
blasting loud music and faucets
running splashily in the back-
ground. But if the sounds are
picked up by several bugs scat-
tered around a room, a computer
can compare the sound tracks
from different angles, pick out
the voice vibrations and edit out
other noise. Says one specialist
in computer enhancement who
has worked for U.S. Govern-
ment agencies: "A voice on a
tape that is completely obscured
can be reproduced so that you
hear only the voice and hardly
anything else."
Bugs can also be hidden in
,-. -.- electric typewriters, printers and
N similar machines. They pick up
? and transmit the electronic sig-
nals given off by each key or by
the ball in a Selectric-style type-
writer. Someone receiving the
transmissions outside the build-
ing can read the message almost
as easily as if he were looking
over the typist's shoulder. Amer-
ican inspectors found bugs in a
shipment of typewriters deliv-
ered to the Moscow embassy two
years ago. But did they get all? It
is common practice for buggers
to leave some devices that are
sure to be found in order to en-
gender a false sense of security in
the finders.
One way to make bugs hard
to detect is to disguise or hide the
radio frequencies of their trans-
Counterclaims: the Soviets display what they say are U.S. snooping
devices planted In their missions. Former U.S. Ambassador Arthur
Hartman shows off the new, bug-infested Moscow embassy
the art of miniaturization, but the Soviets
have more experience in applying new
technologies to snooping. A CIA veteran
suggests, only half jokingly, "Judging by
what they are producing, the Soviets spend
as much on technical bugging as they do on
their space program."
How state-of-the-art spying tech-
niques work is the province of only a few
people in the innermost recesses of the
ing. Some do not need wires to transmit;
they send out microwave signals that can
be read by equipment outside the build-
ing. They can be turned on and off by re-
mote control, or set to be activated by
heat, radiation, the vibrations of a voice or
pressure. A bug in a chair might turn itself
on when someone sits down.
These bugs are devilishly difficult to
detect, and not just because of their tiny
missions. This can be done by having them
send their data on frequencies that are very
close to those used by standard radio or TV
broadcasts, a technique known as "snug-
gling." Another method is to "frequency
hop" across a broad spectrum by transmit-
ting for a millisecond at one frequency,
then another, then another.
Especially hard to detect are bugs that
do not transmit through the air. Instead,
Continued
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 Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/05/10: CIA-RDP90-00965R000605010002-1
they a;e attached by wires to a listening
post outside the building. The connecting
:'wires" can be almost anything that con-
ducts electricity: metallic paint under the
surface paint of a room, a regular electric
line or even an air-conditioning vent.
Since these cannot be detected by elec-
tronic sweeps, finding them involves care-
fully X-raying every square inch of a
building or tearing apart the walls.
Some eavesdropping methods dis-
pense with bugs altogether. Computers
give off radio waves that can be picked up
by interception equipment outside a
building-in a van parked as far away as
a mile, perhaps-and then translated by
another computer. In theory at least,
words typed on a computer screen will ap-
pear almost simultaneously on a second
screen in the van. Experts differ on how
close this technique is to being usable.
One figures that a skilled technician could
put the basic interception equipment to-
gether from components that can be
bought in any electronics store for about
$300. Maybe so, counters Frank Mason,
president of a Fairfield, Conn., company
that makes countermeasure devices for
the Government, but "you would need al-
most laboratory equipment" to get a good
reproduction. Protecting computers
against such snooping is expensive. Metal
shields can be placed around computers
to contain the electronic pulses, but one
expert estimates that installing and in-
specting the shielding would cost more
than $200,000 for each machine.
The most exotic technique of all is to
play laser beams against a window
or any surface that vibrates slightly
with sound waves. The laser beam senses
the minute reverberations and transmits
them to a computer that converts them
back into sound. Richard Heffernan, vice
president of Information Security Asso-
ciates, a Connecticut firm that makes
countersnooping equipment, doubts that
this technique is all that practical-yet. A
window, he explains, vibrates not only
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from voices inside but also with sounds
that strike it from outside: jets overhead,
traffic below, birds chirping. "Picking
something off the window is difficult to do
in most locations due to the high ambient
noise outside," says he. Another expert,
however, says the Defense Department is
concerned enough about laser snooping so
that it has rigged the walls of rooms in the
Pentagon where sensitive conversations
are held to continuously give off white
noise-vibrations that might confuse the
laser beams. So far as is known, this coun-
termeasure has not been used in the Mos-
cow embassy.
For a long time American experts
have worried about mysterious low-level
microwaves that have apparently been
beamed at the embassy building. One ex-
planation involves a possible type of
snooping that does not require hidden
transmitters in the building. Mysterious
cavities along with configurations of steel
rods and wire mesh have been found in
the walls of the new embassy complex. It
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ContinuI'
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/05/10: CIA-RDP90-00965R000605010002-1
 Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/05/10: CIA-RDP90-00965R000605010002-1
is theoretically possible' that the micro-
waves could somehow pick up the rever-
berations that emanate from within the
walls of a building; a computer would
then analyze those reverberations.
Diplomats who have served in Mos-
cow insist that Americans have assumed
for decades that all their conversations
might be overheard, and made it a rule to
take precautions. George Kennan re-
members discovering a Soviet bug in the
Ambassador's residence when he was a
young foreign-service officer in Moscow
in the 1930s and finding a more sophisti-
cated one in the beak of the eagle in the
Great Seal of the U.S. when he was Am-
bassador to Moscow in 1952. (President
Eisenhower disclosed that bug years later
during the U-2 spyplane crisis.) Says Ken-
nan: For half a century at least we've
gone on the theory that the premises we
occupied in Moscow were not safe unless
special precautions were taken."
One precaution was the "bubble." a
supposedly bugproof, heavily shielded
room-within-a-room in the embassy. But
now it is assumed that Marine guards let
Soviet agents into the bubble to plant bugs
there too (two new bubbles have since
been built). The greatest damage. would
have been wrought if a bug in the encod-
ing equipment did indeed allow the Sovi-
ets to crack the U.S. code and read all
messages going into and out of the embas-
sy. Presumably these would have included
U.S. negotiating positions. Says John Bar-
ron, author of a book about the KGB:
"Give me access to your ciphers, and you
won't have any secrets."
T here is hot disagreement over
whether any part of the new U.S.
embassy can ever be made safe for
anything except the most mundane con-
versations. No one seems to think that all
the bugs in the building will ever be found.
To do so might require conducting what
one expert, calls a "destructive search"-
which means nothing less than tearing
the building apart. But some-optimists be-
lieve that at least some rooms can be
made secure, mostly by shielding them in
copper, lead or other materials that foil
electromagnetic emissions.
But there is a strong current of opin-
ion among specialists that the whole
building is hopeless and the only thing to
do is raze it and start over again with ma-
terials prefabricated in the. U.S. "Putting
up the building has just got to be a bug-
ger's dream," says one expert. Hal Lipset,
a San Francisco private investigator who
won fame in the 1960s by concealing a
bug in a martini olive, agrees: "The whole
building is one big microphone." If that
advice is followed, however, the U.S. for
many years would have to keep conduct-
ing diplomacy in the old building, which
has apparently been sown with sophisti-
cated bugs that have so far proved impos-
sible to find. -By Gsurgs4 Chwvh
Reported by Jay PMterssM/N"sahhigton and MW
Samgheaar6/Nsw York, *M o0orbvssra
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/05/10: CIA-RDP90-00965R000605010002-1