State Department’s mistrust of Talbott

By Jon Dougherty

Amid a recent report that the Clinton administration — finally,
after nearly two full terms — is filled with staunch loyalists, thereby
ensuring that further leaks of ongoing scandals would no longer happen,
it is curious to hear that the Clinton State Department still may not
trust one of its own.

According to a December story in a recent issue of Insight
Magazine,
officials at State — including
Secretary of State Madeleine Albright — did not trust Deputy Secretary
of State Strobe Talbott enough to brief him on an investigation into the
discovery of a Russian bug in one of State’s seventh floor conference
rooms.

Insight reported that last summer FBI officials observed 54-year-old
Russian intelligence officer Stanislav Borisovich Gusev “wearing
headphones and loitering in his car and on foot on a weekly basis
outside the department.” The FBI team suspected immediately that Gusev
was receiving transmissions from a bug.

“FBI monitoring of the Russian and a bug hunt in the department led
to the discovery in August of the device — consisting of low-powered
batteries, a microphone, a recording mechanism and a line-of-sight
transmitter,” the magazine reported. “The device was concealed in a
wooden rail molding in the conference room used by the Bureau of Oceans
and International Environmental Scientific Affairs. When Gusev was
arrested, a remote-control antenna was found hidden in his car.”

Since Talbott is Albright’s deputy, it is reasonable to assume that
he would normally be briefed about such security penetrations. Insight
said, however, that “U.S. counterintelligence officers secured Secretary
of State Madeleine Albright’s agreement last August to refrain from
briefing (Talbott) … about their discovery of a sophisticated Russian
eavesdropping device concealed in a seventh-floor State Department
conference room.”

The logical question to ask, then, is why — why would
Albright decline to allow Talbott, a one-time Moscow political
correspondent for Time magazine — to be let in? The answer, it
appears, is that Albright, along with the No. 3 man at State —
Undersecretary of State Thomas Pickering — doesn’t trust him.

Insight said that a CIA source told the magazine, “Talbott has long
been widely seen at Langley as being too close to the Russians — a sort
of trusted friend, you might say.”

But who cares? To hear the Clinton administration tell it, Americans
just don’t give a damn about, say, espionage — especially
Chinese espionage — right?

That depends upon whom you listen to. A recent poll suggested that,
unlike the story told by the White House, most Americans indeed
are concerned over revelations that this administration may have
seriously compromised national security for selfish political concerns.
Given this, the news that even one high-ranking Clinton
administration official cannot be trusted by his peers to keep his trap
shut about ongoing national security violations should fuel this fire of
mistrust among skeptical (and worried) Americans as well.

“The damage-assessment operation under way consists of trying to
discover how the bug was planted and whether the Russians had inside
help; it is assumed they did,” said Insight. Surely Talbott isn’t
suspected of this — is he? Or is treating national security concerns
with disdain just a part of “business as usual” throughout the Clinton
administration?

Could be. Insight also said that “retired and current CIA officers”
alike have been concerned for years about this administration’s “open
access” policy for a number of foreign diplomats who still regularly spy
for their governments. As an example, Insight said, “More than 20
Russian diplomats (have been) accorded the status of ‘visitors not
requiring an escort,'” which means they can pretty much roam around in
some of the most sensitive forums in the U.S. government, gathering
information virtually at will. I would venture to guess that had the
Chinese espionage scandals never been revealed to the public, Beijing’s
diplomat-spies would probably have similar access. Who knows? Maybe they
do.

When the history of the U.S. is written about the current
administration, the most compelling thing future generations of
Americans may discover about Bill Clinton’s “legacy” was his almost
conspiratorial nature of providing hostile governments access to this
country’s most sacred security secrets.

Americans will no doubt have God to thank if they’re even
around to read U.S. history by then.

Jon Dougherty

Jon E. Dougherty is a Missouri-based political science major, author, writer and columnist. Follow him on Twitter. Read more of Jon Dougherty's articles here.