NewsMax.com
Thursday, March 8, 2001

What it boils down to is this:

A British news service quoting a Russian news agency quoting an unidentified Russian counterintelligence agent referring to a New York Times report citing anonymous United States intelligence sources saying an accused FBI mole may have informed unrevealed Moscow spymasters of an unconfirmed tunnel excavated under the then-Soviet Embassy in Washington to spy on its spies spying on America is only a U.S. disinformation tactic to put pressure on the suspected spy, who is reported by an unconfirmed source as planning to plead innocent.

To put that in unscrambled non-spyspeak:

There is a Reuters news service report out of Moscow on Thursday that some Russian counterspy has taken exception to the spy-tunnel story.

It says that the RIA news agency quoted a high-ranking source in Russian counterintelligence, whom it did not identify, as saying the Cold War-era tunnel never existed.

The report, he or she insists, was intentionally circulated by U.S. secret services to "burden Robert Hanssen with a serious guilt."

Hanssen is the name of the FBI counterspy now accused of having spied over the past 15 years for the Soviet Union and its later successor, the Russian government.

RIA said its unnamed source contended "Americans had little" concrete evidence to support the accusation about Hanssen's "being an agent" and therefore "dug [the tunnel] under him."

Besides, the Russian source is reported to have maintained, it wasn't a tunnel, it was something else.

What really happened, said the source, is that U.S. secret services used underground telephone cable lines, sewage pipes and the central pillars of the building to spy on the embassy.

So, that account goes, Moscow discovered the monitoring and put an end to it a decade ago.

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

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