NewsMax.com
Monday, March 12, 2001

Federal prosecutors say that any technological advantages gained from electrical surveillance beneath the building were likely nullified when Robert Hanssen, the accused mole within the Federal Bureau of Investigation, tipped off the KGB to the tunnel's existence early in his alleged 15-year career as a spy for Moscow.

Whether Russian espionage agents learned of the tunnel that way or on their own, they are believed to have sent back ample amounts of disinformation through the FBI's bugging devices.

And it became a two-way game of cat and mouse once the United States counterespionage experts discovered that the Russians knew that they knew that the Russians knew that they knew ...

According to a story in the Boston Globe, former senior government officials with top security clearances who took the subterranean tours are now saying here's how it worked:

The government purchased a residence near the Soviet – now Russian – compound on Mount Alto, a hilltop north of Georgetown, one of the highest sites in Washington.

From the basement of that home, the tunnel was burrowed beneath the embassy.

One former government official who was offered a tunnel tour had to decline because he suffered from claustrophobia, the fear of being in enclosed places.

Tiny "bugs" planted throughout the embassy by means of the tunnel could have transmitted signals back through fiber-optic and copper lines that are difficult to detect.

Laser technology deployed in the tunnel could have been used to capture sound waves from pipes and support beams.

Minute microphones could have been inserted in toilets through water pipes to monitor conversations in bathrooms.

In addition to enabling the FBI to implant such listening devices, the tunnel made it possible to tap into telecommunications lines and even power cables, whose electromagnetic emanations can be reconstructed and deciphered.

Read more on this subject in related Hot Topics:
Hanssen Case
Russia

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