BUILDING THE ONE WHERE DIPLOMATS PLACE WALLS

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00965R000302180001-0
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 1
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: September 27, 2012
• Sequence Number: 1
• Publication Date: March 4, 1986
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

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Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/09/27: CIA-RDP90-00965R000302180001-0
ARTICLE NEW YORK TIMES
ON PAGEAML. 4 March 1986
Embassy Row
Building the One Where Diplomats
Place Walls
By BARBARA GAMAREKIAN
Special to The Now York Times .
WASHINGTON, March 3 ? The
diplomatic game can be played on
many levels in this town.
Consider, for example, the new
Soviet Embassy compound, now al-
most finished.
? "In many ways it was a microcosm
of the cold war," says H. Russell
Hanna Jr., who watched the construc-
tion and the diplomatic manuevering
from the architectural front lines.
"The relationshap would go from
friendly to cool, from frienllly to
cool."
As vice president of EDAW, an ar-
chitectural planning and landscape
company in Alexandria, Va., Mr.
Hanna has had a rare inside view of
things over the 11 years it has taken to
complete the compound. The com-
pany was initially hired by the Gen-
eral Services Administration to do an
environmental impact study for the
10-acre complex on Wisconsin Ave.
nue in Northwest Washington. It was
later asked by John Carl Warnecke,
American architect for the project, to
come on board as a site planner.
At the Soviet invasion of Afghani-
stan, Mr. Hanna recalls, construction
in the compound halted for more than
three months. "Things got very
tense," he said.
"The U.S. held up ?
building permits.
The review pro-
cess of the District
of Columbia took
longer. Americans
just generally
dragged their feet
to make things un-
comfortable.
The Soviet
Union countered,
he said, by making
access to the con-
struction site
much more diffi-
cult for American workers. Some-
times, he said, there were 30-minute
identification checks at the gate.
And while the work is now all but
finished, the Soviet mission must still
use its old 16th Street quarters. "They
can't get a certificate of occupancy
until our embassy is completed in
Moscow, which is probably some six
months off," Mr. Hanna said. "They
were supposed to go up simultaneous-
ly, brick by brick."
Augmenting the tension at one
point, the Russians protested that a
bug had been planted on the site.
"That prompted a whole new con-
struction process," Mr. Hanna said.
"Two Soviets had to be present at
every concrete pour. You can imag-
ine the headaches."
Who planted the bug, the Russians
or the Americans?
The United States denied involve-
ment, according to Mr. Hanna, and
accused the Russians of trying to
create an incident.
The site on Mount Alto, the city's
second highest point, has given the
Soviet Union unprecedented advan-
tages in electronic spying, according
to American critics.
But matters could have been worse,
Mr. Hanna said, under the original
Soviet plan. "If their administration
building had been built to Soviet
specifications," said Mr. Hanna,
"they would have had direct visual
access to the windows of the White
House from their top deck. But when
the design, rendered by the chief Mos-
cow architect, Mikhail Posokhin, was
worked over by American architects,
Mr. Hanna added, it lost a story.
Mr. Hanna dealt directly with the
Soviet chief architect rather than em-
bassy officials: "Except when things
got tense," he said:
One fairly simple problem, he said,
meant extending the Soviet boundary
one foot to utilize an existing wall.
This ended up being negotiated
through the. State Department. "It
took a 15-person meeting of diplo-
mats," Mr. Hanna said.
For all the problems, Mr. Hanna
says he found the Soviet designers
and engineers could be congenial.
They would often break out vodka
after arduous meetings over disputes.
? One day, Mr. Hanna said, the Fed-
eral Bureau of Investigation came
calling. "They wanted to look at the
plan," he said, "and it was obvious
they wanted to see what we had devel-
oped in way of plantings. Shade trees
prevent a camera from focusing on
its object, and it's fairly common
knowledge that the F.B.I. has rented
the top floor of a nearby hotel for sur-
veillance."
The Russians gave a "topping out"
party to celebrate the completion of
the steel for the tallest residental
tower, and Ambassador Anatoly F.
Dobrynin, State Department officials
and 200 people gathered for speeches
and vodka. Suddenly a helicopter ap-
peared and hovered.
"Of course everyone's reaction is to
look up, which gives you front face ex-
posure," said Mr. Hanna. "I'm sure
that I and everyone else on the site
that morning have a file someplace."
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/09/27: CIA-RDP90-00965R000302180001-0