Massive Soviet eavesdropping on U.S. telephones gives the Russians vital — and potentially damaging — military, diplomatic, and business secrets.
Bugging of America: The Killenworth Case
At 12:30 A.M. Sunday morning, April 15, four teenagers on their way home from a party stopped their van at some woods on quiet Dosoris Lane in Glen Cove, Long Island. The girl waited in the van while the three boys went into the bushes to pee. When they got back in, the driver suddenly noticed a man in army fatigues, approaching the van with a pistol in his hand. Someone outside fired a shot through the rear window.
The driver, John Sperrazza, 17, stepped on the gas. Three dark cars started after him. More shots were fired, shattering the rear window and holing the windshield.
The four cars raced past the firehouse and onto Glen Cove Avenue. Sounding his horn, Sperrazza ran red lights and stop signs. But gradually, during the five-mile chase, the mysterious dark cars gained. Near the Greenvale railroad station, Sperrazza saw three men in one of the cars pointing guns at him. He pulled over.
The mysterious gun-toting men were not crazies, as the teenagers had thought, but FBI agents. They were on a stakeout to block an expected attack on Killenworth, an estate hidden behind the bushes where the teenagers had stopped. Killenworth, a Soviet weekend retreat for UN personnel, is one of Russia’s major intelligence-gathering posts in the West. In the attic of the mansion, which sits in the midst of 36 wooded acres, some 15 English-speaking Russians operate sophisticated electronic equipment that intercepts and records U.S. telephone calls.
The expected attack, by a Jewish protest group, never came off, and had nothing to do with the estate’s intelligence operations. But many other Americans are growing increasingly alarmed at the extent of Russian eaves-dropping on the United States. The details that the Soviets glean from this talk assist them in their Cold War with the West in a variety of ways.
Take, for example, the instructions that the State Department was giving to the U.S. mission to the United Nations, which revealed the American position on disarmament and official reactions to Soviet proposals. This information was passed to the Soviet delegates. “They could have time to work with another delegation to put America in a very embarrassing situation,” said a Russian defector who saw this intelligence.
Much of the intelligence gathered from the intercepts helps the Soviet Union close the technological gap between our two countries. As former Central Intelligence Agency Director William Colby said: “That’s the danger: that they will build up coverage of specific economic events.” An officer of a computer firm may report a new breakthrough in, say, computer memories to an analyst in a stock-brokerage firm to raise the price for the firm’s shares. A mathematician at M.I.T. may pick up the phone to ask a colleague in Albuquerque for help with a new algorithm. A defense contractor may hold a teleconference to discuss engineering difficulties in a new product. Intercepting such calls will not give the Soviet Union complete information about these subjects, but they will certainly save time and effort by revealing successful lines of research. And technological information is one of the main emphases of Soviet intelligence today. A CIA report says that the effort “is massive, well planned, and well managed — a national-level program approved at the highest party and governmental levels.”
The Soviets also emphasize information about economics, vital in a world where a small war in a desert can cause a gasoline crisis in America. “Increasingly, this is where the intelligence game is being played,” one U.S. official said. Another, a former code expert and deputy secretary of the navy, explained that the Soviet Union has “a significant cash-flow problem. How do you make money in a cash-flow problem? You can turn your intelligence system around and use it to get all sorts of data you can actually use in commercial ventures …. I firmly believe the Soviet Union has for years manipulated a lot of international commercial markets.”
“In the attic of Killenworth mansion, Russians intercept and record U.S. telephone calls.”
Eavesdropping on American telephones is only part of the massive Soviet COMINT, or communications intelligence, effort. Most of it is directed at military and diplomatic traffic and is conducted from ground posts, satellites, and spy trawlers, which sail up and down America’s coast-lines, getting their best catch from the airwaves. And it is “likely,” said Lieutenant General Lincoln Faurer, director of the code-making and code-breaking National
Security Agency, that the U.S.S.R. is trying to gain access to Defense Department computers. “I would not … tell you that the DOD computers are impenetrable,” he conceded, but he also declared that contrary to the plot line of the movie War Games, “it is not possible for unauthorized persons to ‘dial in’ to a classified computer from a home system due to the mandatory use of cryptographic line protection.”
The Soviet Union extended its COMINT effort to American public telephones in the mid-1950s when the Bell System begar, transmitting most telephone calls by radio-over microwave beams. Before 1948, nearly all domestic telephone calls went by wire. But in that year Bell began sending some by microwave. Microwaves are radio waves that got their name because they are smaller — one tenth of an inch to one foot — than so-called short-waves, used in long-distance radio. They cook food — and they carry long-distance telephone conversations. Such a conversation moves from a phone over a wire to a central office, which sends it by wire to a tall, spindly tower. At the top an antenna beams a bundle of microwaves carrying that conversation and many others toward another tower. This receives the beam, “cleans” and amplifies it, and retransmits it to another tower. The process is repeated until the final tower is reached. Here wire takes over and electronic switchboards direct the call to the destination telephone.
Because it is cheaper to build and maintain microwave towers than to dig trenches and lay cable, Bell’s TD-2, a microwave system for long-haul traffic, rapidly spread over the entire country. At first the repeater towers stood some 30 miles apart. But as the better sites — on hills, or near water, which is a good conductor — became harder to get and heavy traffic demanded more routes, towers had to be built about 25 miles apart.
By 1958, the Soviet Union had begun to exploit the opportunity this presented. The work began at Killenworth, a 49-room house that was built in 1912 by George Dupont Pratt, son of the founder of Pratt Institute, and bought in 1948 by the Soviet Union as the official residence for its ambassador to the United Nations in New York, some 25 miles away. The Soviet Union chose Killenworth as an intercept post for several reasons. It was secure. It was near water — Long Island Sound could be called “microwave alley.” It was near the commercial and financial headquarters of New York and the advanced electronic and aerospace defense industries of Long Island. Two long-distance microwave towers stand within intercepting range: the Roslyn Harbor tower, five miles south, and the Stamford, Connecticut, tower, 12 miles northeast, across the Sound.
At first only two or three technicians worked in Killenworth’s 724-square-foot attic under a slanting slate roof; gradually the number increased to about 15. At the same time, the Soviets added other intercept posts. The embassy in Washington stands on 18th Street only a few blocks north of the White House. This choice location afforded excellent interception opportunities even in the noisy electronic environment of downtown. Many passersby think that the large, flat, V-shaped array of rod antennae easily visible on the roof of the structure are those used for the microwave monitoring. In fact, they are standard high-frequency (or shortwave) radio antennae, and there is no reason to doubt the embassy’s assertion that they serve, under bilateral agreements, for communication with the Soviet Union. Some monitoring antennae are probably hidden under the ugly gray hut that stands incongruously on the roof. But contrary to many reports, the new Soviet housing complex at 2601 Tunlaw Road, in northwest Washington, contains no intercept installation behind its white brick wall, according to an FBI official with knowledge of the Soviet operation.
Another intercept post is even more isolated than Killenworth. A red-and-black sign warning PRIVATE PROPERTY — NO TRESPASSING and broad, fenced fields bar access to an innocent-looking group of houses on the eastern shore of Chesa peake Bay, not far from Washington. Most are small; several are large white wooden ones; one in particular, a two-story wooden house, has three dormer windows in its attic. These buildings, together with a gazebo and a dock, cluster on a neck of land that juts into the Corsica River. The land is often called Point Pleasant or Pioneer Point, but charts and maps uniformly show it as Town Point. It is five miles northwest of Centreville, Maryland. Its isolated setting makes it a lovely retreat for Soviet diplomats in Washington — and an ideal location for the Soviet eavesdroppers who work there. The area is electronically quiet, and Chesapeake Bay, like Long Island Sound, serves as a microwave alley that enables telephone conversations between Washington and New York to maintain a strong, clear signal as they shoot from one repeater tower to another.
The intercept post in San Francisco is as conspicuous as Town Point is secluded. It is in the seven-story Soviet consulate at 2790 Green Street, which rises from one of the famous steep hills to overlook the city and the bay. On Christmas Day 1982, the Soviets erected a ten-foot-square gray plywood shack on the roof. Such structures often conceal dishlike microwave antennae, which in San Francisco presumably picked up the conversations of the computer firms in Silicon Valley, an hour’s drive to the south, and of the navy installations in San Francisco Bay, to the north and east. But some of the consulate’s wealthy neighbors protested that the shack blocked their view of the Golden Gate Bridge. The Soviet consul general said the structure was built as a cover for workmen repairing a leaky roof, but when the mayor wrote him that it violated zoning and planning laws, it was taken down on January 8, 1983, in what the city attorney called “a goodwill gesture.” But we can presume ’that the eavesdropping continues in other ways.
A fifth monitoring installation hides in the high-rise Soviet apartment tower in Riverdale, the expensive residential section of the Bronx, just north of Manhattan. This apparently supplements Killenworth in picking up conversations with the financial centers of Wall Street.
The expansion of the interception was fueled in part, no doubt, by the valuable data gained, and in part by growing opportunity. Microwave links now constitute 70 percent of the long-distance telephone mileage within the United States, with nearly all the rest wire. (Hardly any domestic telephone calls go by satellite.)
But interception requires more than merely buying a radio and tuning it to microwave frequencies. In the first place, the microwaves are aimed directly at the next tower. How, then, can an interceptor pick them up from outside the beam? Nearly all long-distance calls are multiplexed, or interleaved one with another, taking advantage of the natural pauses in speech to make more efficient use of a channel. At the receiving end, demultiplexers detect the frequency on which a slice of speech has been sent and directs it to the right listener. These problems are indeed difficult, but to a determined interceptor they are not insoluble.
All of the energy of the KS-15676 antenna widely used in microwave communications does not go to the next tower. Some spills to the sides and some to the rear of the antenna. An interceptor can easily pick up and demultiplex the call ten miles to either side with equipment identical to that used by the telephone company, and at greater distances with better equipment. Moreover, the new long-distance carriers, such as MCI and GTE, move their traffic either over their own towers or over leased AT&T circuits that are usually fixed in the electromagnetic spectrum. This makes their traffic easy to spot. And because 1 their circuits are often dedicated to a particular major user, the eavesdropper can gather a great deal of information from that firm in a short time.
The real problem of the eavesdroppers is not in gaining access to the calls, but in picking out the right ones from the more than 50 million long-distance calls made in the United States, every day — many of them of such insignificance as children “reaching out” to their grandparents.
At present, the Soviet Union, listening to calls on many frequencies at once, or scanning across a beam with frequency-agile equipment, picks out the calls in which it is interested by their addresses — the telephone numbers being called. Computers compare the transmitted number with a list of telephone numbers in its memory that interest the Soviet Union, such as the Pentagon, the White House, and major defense contractors. If it finds a match, it “drops” the call onto a tape recorder. Each year tons of these tapes are shipped to Russia for detailed analysis.
The method of selection means in principle that outgoing calls from target organizations are not intercepted. But many of those calls go to targets, and these are picked up. Since calls between targets are presumably the more important ones, the outgoing-call exclusion loses less than it may at first seem to lose. In addition, the eavesdroppers in the five monitoring posts also listen in on the conversations, sometimes for current intelligence, but probably more frequently to check whether the right frequencies and numbers are being listened to.
Although no Americans can know for sure tine exact intelligence that is lost to Soviet monitoring, a number of horror stories can give a good indication about the potential information available.
- On March 27, 1978, for example, James L. O’Rourke, a Washington marketing representative of the Boeing Company, prepared a summary of a Defense Department memo intended for the White House. It contained top-secret information about the MX intercontinental ballistic-missile system, then being considered as a new and powerful deterrent against the U.S.S.R. O’Rourke put the memo on a facsimile machine that transmits its signals by telephone, dialed up a similar machine in Boeing’s Seattle headquarters, and dispatched the memo. It went out, uncoded, over normal telephone lines. If the Soviet Union were targeting Boeing telephones, it might well have picked up the memo.
- Early in 1977, shortly after Warren M. Christopher had been appointed a deputy secretary of state by President Jimmy Carter, he received a phone call from a woman who insisted on speaking directly to him. The woman said that a shortwave radio in her home was picking up the radio-telephone conversations from his official car. She was worried that foreign agents might gather sensitive information from this source. And she might have been right.
- In the fall of 1978, a radio ham in suburban Connecticut overheard some conversations from a car radiotelephone in the area. The conversations concerned an impending business deal, and the person in the car seemed to be named “Pierre.” The eavesdropper called The Wall Street Journal, which tentatively identified the firm as AMAX, Inc., a large mining firm, and the caller as its chairman, Pierre Gousseland. The newspaper printed a story that said so. The company denied it. But the deal, which had been rumored for days, never went through — and the company abandoned its mobile phone.
This type of material is not valuable because it gives the Russians one single fabulous insight. Rather, it enables them to assemble many little items into a mosaic that can depict the capabilities of American weapons and the direction of American technology … to say nothing of the potential for personal information being used to an enemy’s advantage. As a legislative aide once said, with tongue only halfway in cheek, “Anyone who listens to a senator’s phone calls for three weeks owns him.”
What are the Soviets actually getting? In an attempt to find out, U.S. agencies sometimes make “hearability” studies. Early this spring, for example, some electronic technicians showed up at the administration building of the Glen Cove School District, a converted private home on the high-school grounds only a few hundred feet from Killenworth. They flashed identification, got permission to enter, and set up their equipment in an unused room in the basement. After a while they vanished. If this was a typical hearability study, they checked only to identify the telephonic addresses that the Russians could be overhearing; the content of the calls was ignored.
Of course, this would not tell exactly how much information the Soviets are obtaining through their telephone interceptions, or exactly to what use they are putting it. A high official at Exxon admitted that “we are pretty open” to Soviet interception of messages about oil production and shipments. But he also conceded: “I don’t know that we would be able to see from their actions if they had intercepted, say, some messages or information that we might consider private.” Nevertheless, the Soviets’ maintenance of the operation implies that they are obviously finding material of value.
Isn’t the United States doing anything to counter this Soviet effort? It is — though the matter became a concern of the levels of the government at which something could be done about it almost by accident. It first came to high-level attention when an official of the National Security Agency (NSA) gave a briefing on it to the president’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. Former New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller was infuriated that the Soviet Union was intruding upon the privacy of American citizens. He told Henry Kissinger, President Nixon’s secretary of state, about it.
But Kissinger opposed making the issue public, as did the intelligence agencies. He feared that this would chill relations with the Soviet Union, which were then in a period of detente. Rockefeller and other members of the advisory board believed, however, that the priorities lay elsewhere. In June 1975, the Commission on CIA Activities Within the United States, which was appointed by President Ford after Watergate to see whether the Central Intelligence Agency had broken U.S. laws, disclosed the eavesdropping to the public: “The Communist countries also appear to have developed electronic collection of intelligence to an extraordinary degree of technology and sophistication for use in the United States and elsewhere throughout the world, and we believe that these countries can monitor and record thousands of private telephone conversations.”
Although this aroused little public concern, Ford appointed a top-secret committee to study the problem. It soon found itself grappling as much with political as with technical matters. On the one hand the communications in question were not governmental but private, which by law were regulated by the Office of Telecommunications Policy, a White House agency. On the other hand, the communications could well affect national security, which was clearly a governmental concern. In particular, the NSA supervised the security of government communications. So a bureaucratic power war broke., out and no action was taken.
After his election as president, Jimmy Carter set up his own committee to look into the Soviet interceptions, chaired by his national security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski. This body was operating quietly until news stories revealed it, and New York Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who had apparently been simmering about the Soviet intrusion for some time, exploded. He charged that the Russians were “committing crimes on a staggering unprecedented scale” and called on Carter to halt them.
In response, Carter said that the interception is “not an act of aggression or war; it’s completely passive…. And although it may be an intrusion into our security, I think we are taking adequate steps now to prevent its creating a threat to our country.”
The battle between the military and civilian branches of government for control of protection against foreign eavesdropping continued within the government throughout 1978. Then on February 15, 1979, the White House issued a secret presidential directive from the National Security Council 24, the National Telecommunications Protection Policy (generally called P.O. 24), which gave everybody a piece of the pie. The NSA retained control of military and diplomatic messages. A newly created Special Projects Office in the Department of Commerce’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration, the successor to the White House’s Office of Telecommunications Policy, handled two other categories of messages: “unclassified information transmitted by and between government agencies and contractors that would be useful to an adversary” and “nongovernmental information that would be useful to an adversary.” Examples of the latter would be: changes in the prime-interest rate, crop forecasts, the availability of critical materials, developments in advanced technologies, strategies to be used by American firms in negotiations against foreign competitors.
As this article goes to press, it has been learned that the Reagan administration is preparing a replacement for P.O. 24. Probably to be issued as a top-secret National Security Council Decision Directive, it was drafted by a committee of representatives from — among others — NSA, the CIA, and the Defense, Treasury, and Commerce departments. It is a reflection of the Reagan administration’s view that the Soviet Union is an “evil empire,” which must be combated militarily as well as economically and socially. It gives control of civilian telecommunications protection to the Defense Department’s NSA. The Commerce Department, whose Special Projects Office formally expired September 30, 1983, regains none of the authority it had, and the president’s science advisor, who under P.O. 24 was charged with resolving jurisdictional disputes between Defense and Commerce (that is, between the military and the civilians), will relinquish this power to the president’s national security advisor. Within the National Security Council, the National Communications Security Committee will be replaced by a new committee that may combine telecommunications protection and data security and will have many more members because more agencies are concerned with those matters.
Some government officials view the new directive as necessary. They feel that P.O. 24’s splitting of communications security between two organizations did not work. Moreover, it did not state the government interest in the issue strongly enough to induce the private sector to take more steps in the field, and it did not define clearly enough what the various agencies should do. But some experts in communications security feel that giving all power to the NSA will be counterproductive when dealing with private industry.
But P.O. 24 was in effect for several years, and during that time the first major efforts were made to block Soviet eaves-dropping. The NSA transferred many sensitive telephone circuits from microwave to buried cable and began expanding the Executive Secure Voice Network, which uses telephone scramblers, each about the size of two file drawers, to render conversations unintelligible to eavesdroppers. The Special Projects Office surveyed the telecommunications practices of more than 20 government agencies and suggested ways of improving their security. It showed them how to identify categories of sensitive information. It held seminars and training programs at these agencies’ offices around the country to raise management’s awareness of the problem. Nearly all tightened their telecommunications security, one agency spending $21 million to protect its voice and written communications. The office encouraged training programs to maintain a high level of consciousness of the problem.
Top executives in some 100 of the nation’s larger corporations — mostly in oil, steel, and food — learned about the need for telecommunication protection from experts such as Robert Massey and Charles Wilk of the Special Projects Office. The experts distributed copies of a guide to commercial telecommunications equipment. Some of the telecommunications carriers — Satellite Business Systems for one — began to offer bulk encryption of messages to their customers. And under a new AT&T program the address signal — the clicks of dialing or the beedlybeeps of push buttons — that reveals the number being called, and under the economical new common-channel interoffice signaling system, the calling number as well has begun to be encrypted, denying this information to an interceptor.
All this has reduced the volume of information that the eavesdroppers can cull from American telephone conversations. But Soviet eavesdropping is only part of a massive effort to gain Western technology, which includes stealing secrets and illegally obtaining high-tech items such as advanced computers. While efforts to block this traffic are praiseworthy, as are those to reduce eavesdropping, most experts agree that there is no permanent solution to this problem. That’s why, they say, U.S. technology must constantly remain ahead of the Soviets’.
As for Killenworth, in 2024 it remains a controversial Russian haven, despite threats to close it from as recently as the Obama administration. These days local politicans have taken up a money angle, as compared to any espionage or political one. If Killenworth does not pay taxes, we need to kick them out so someone can move in who will pay taxes. … This could actually work. In any language, money does tend to talk.
