Washington — It turns out that the federal government was underwriting quite an unusual construction project under Mount Alto.
The FBI and the National Security Administration were digging a tunnel under the Washington hilltop where the Soviet Union, thinking it would be looking down on the White House and across the Potomac to the Pentagon, planned all manner of electronic surveillance. The apparent compromise of the tunnel by accused spy Robert P. Hanssen was a grave blow to U.S. intelligence efforts.
But now the tunnel stands as a symbol not only of the ancient and enduring art of espionage, but also of the notion that aspects of the Cold War have lingered in Washington and Moscow a decade after the end of the Cold War itself.
The tunnel was abandoned years ago, but the impulse to spy on the Russians persists and so does the Russian impulse to spy on the United States. In truth, those close to the intelligence agencies argue, Russian espionage efforts against the United States have returned to Cold War levels even as American espionage efforts against Russia have persisted.
That's because espionage remains one of the principal ways of doing business around the globe. Rival governments want to know our private thoughts. We want to know theirs. Effective policymaking, even in peacetime, is the ability to anticipate the moves of other nation before they make them. Information is power.
"There is some information you would absolutely like to get and not let the other side know that you got," says Martin Faga, former director of the National Reconnaissance Office, which designs and operates spy satellites. "You have to collect things against them in ways they do not know. That's how you get the very best stuff. They're not going to protect what they don't think they need to protect."
And so the tunnel, dug under an embassy site across the street from a senator's home, is completely consistent with the way the Soviet Union and the United States did business and completely consistent with the way post-communist Russia and the United States do business.
The elimination of the Cold War, the disintegration of the Red Army, and the softening of tensions between the one-time superpower rivals might suggest there is reason to end the old spy-vs.-spy game. There are, after all, no longer 25 Soviet divisions in East Germany threatening democratic Europe.
"Russia shouldn't have anything to fear from us," says R. James Woolsey, a former director of central intelligence. "We don't want anything from Russia, and we don't want anything for them except for prosperity and democracy. We're not fomenting any revolutions across their southern tier, as some of the Moslem organizations are."
But that does not mean that there are not antagonisms between the two nations now and ample reasons for one to spy against the other.
As the sole remaining superpower, home to the biggest market in the world, breeding ground of the most sophisticated technology, and exporter of the most potent cultural trends, the United States is an obvious target for espionage, especially from a nation whose president, Vladimir Putin, is rooted in the old Soviet spy apparatus.
Since the end of World War II and the development of the Soviet bomb, Moscow has regarded itself as a co-equal power with the United States. At some points, especially when Sen. John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts argued in the 1960 presidential campaign that there was a "missile gap," Americans came to believe that Moscow was the stronger power, possessed of stronger missile-delivery systems and stronger will.
Now hardly anyone considers Russia, even with nuclear weapons, the United States' military equal. One of the ways it asserts its might to the United States is to spy on Washington.
From the American viewpoint, Russia remains a legitimate target of espionage. American officials are worried about the status of old Soviet ICBMs, troubled about the Russian efforts to work with European powers to develop an alternative anti-missile defense scheme, concerned about Russian organized crime, wary of Russian efforts to cozy up to Iran and Iraq, perhaps to create an alternative power bloc in a resource-rich, strategically critical corner of the world.
The historian Christopher P. Andrew, who specializes in espionage, believes the tensions between Moscow and the West have little to do with the Cold War and instead date to the rivalry between the Orthodox and Catholic churches beginning in the fourth century. Perhaps he is right. But the reason we don't stop spying on each other can be explained by the campaign finance debate of the 21st century: If one side could guarantee that the other would stop gathering huge campaign treasuries, the other would stop, too. The same goes for spying and for spy tunnels.
David Shribman is a columnist for The Boston Globe.
No comments
Commenting is turned off for this story.