The Moscow Bug Hunt

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Caspar Weinberger called it "the worst spy case of the century." As Secretary of Defense in the spring of 1987, he was confronted with evidence that Marine guards at the U.S. embassy in Moscow had not only "fraternized" with Soviet women but also allowed KGB agents to break into the inner sanctum of the embassy -- the code room, from which sensitive messages are sent to Washington.

There on Weinberger's desk was a confession by Corporal Arnold Bracy, a 21- year-old Marine who had been stationed in Moscow the previous year. Bracy's statement convinced virtually the entire Government that there had been a nightmarish security breach. By planting bugs in the embassy's communications equipment, the Kremlin may have compromised CIA operations and gained advance knowledge of U.S. negotiating positions. The scandal led to paralysis, paranoia and recrimination. Electronic communication to and from the Moscow embassy stopped dead. Tons of equipment were torn out of the building and returned to the U.S. for analysis. After a distinguished career, Arthur Hartman, who was U.S. Ambassador to Moscow at the time of the suspected penetration, left the Foreign Service under a cloud. Hundreds of Marines who / had served as embassy guards in East bloc countries were grilled by agents of the Naval Investigative Service; dozens confessed to fraternizing, black- marketeering or other security violations.

But then one case after another fell apart. The Great Marine Spy Scandal had started in December 1986, when another Moscow embassy guard, Sergeant Clayton Lonetree, told a CIA officer that he had given low-grade classified information to the Soviets. And that is where it ended: Lonetree was the only Marine to be prosecuted for espionage. Whatever the reasons for Bracy's confession -- in which he claimed he had helped Lonetree let the KGB into the embassy -- it was later disclosed that he had recanted just minutes after signing it. And Government investigators eventually realized that key parts of Bracy's statement were demonstrably false. All charges against him were dropped for lack of evidence. By late 1987 security officials began to concede, a little sheepishly, that no bugs had yet been found in the equipment removed from the Post Communications Center, or PCC, as the code room is known. (The room is sometimes referred to as the CPU.)

Four months ago, however, the Moscow embassy scandal was back in the headlines: the thrust of the story was that there had been a cover-up within the U.S. Government. That allegation is at the heart of Moscow Station, a book by Ronald Kessler, a former Washington Post reporter. It was excerpted in TIME and is the basis for a television mini-series expected to air next year.

According to Kessler, the National Security Agency did indeed find Soviet bugs in the code room in August 1987. The KGB had replaced key circuit boards in the printers; it had also replaced the power line to the communications center. The reprogrammed circuit boards sent an uncoded copy of the text of all State Department and CIA message traffic to the new power line, which could carry it out of the embassy and into the hands of the KGB.