Between 2006 and 2009, surveillance
helicopters conducted daily flights over northwest Washington, D.C., taking
high-resolution photographs of the new Chinese Embassy being constructed on Van
Ness Street. The aircraft belonged to the Federal Bureau of Investigation,
which wanted to determine where the embassy's communications center was being
located. But the Chinese construction crews hid their work on this part of the
building by pulling tarpaulins over the site as it was being constructed.
The
FBI also monitored the movements and activities of the Chinese construction
workers building the embassy, who were staying at a Days Inn on Connecticut
Avenue just north of the construction site, in the hopes of possibly recruiting
one or two of them. According to one Chinese diplomat, his fellow officials
detected individuals who they assumed to be FBI agents covertly monitoring the
construction materials and equipment being used to build the embassy, which
were stored on the University of the District of Columbia's soccer field across
the street from where the Chinese Embassy currently stands. The diplomat added
that Chinese security officials assumed that the FBI agents were trying to
determine whether it was possible to plant eavesdropping devices inside the construction
materials stored at the site.
In
recent weeks, the U.S. National Security Agency's efforts to monitor foreign
diplomats have become the stuff of worldwide headlines. But the FBI has been in
the business of spying on diplomats and breaking their codes for far longer
than the NSA has. The surveillance of the Chinese Embassy was just one piece of
a far larger espionage operation. The FBI not only endeavors to steal or
covertly compromise foreign government, military, and commercial computer,
telecommunications, and encryption systems being used in the United States, but
the FBI and NSA work closely to intercept the communications of all diplomatic
missions and international organizations located on American soil. In some
important respects, the FBI's cryptologic work is more secretive than that
being performed by the NSA because of the immense diplomatic sensitivity of
these operations if they were to ever be exposed publicly.
The
Bureau of Investigation, the predecessor to today's FBI, has been monitoring
diplomatic communications since at least 1910, when it periodically solved
Mexican government and revolutionary group cable traffic coming in and out of
the United States. And for over a century, the FBI and its predecessors have
been aggressive practitioners of the age-old art of stealing codes and ciphers.
In June 1916, Bureau of Investigations agents surreptitiously obtained a copy
of the new Mexican consular code by picking the pockets of a Mexican diplomatic
courier while he cavorted with "fast women" in one of the innumerable
border fleshpots along the Rio Grande.
Little
has changed in the intervening century. Despite the creation of the NSA in 1952
to centralize in one agency all U.S. government signals intelligence (SIGINT)
collection and processing work, the FBI, which did not respond to requests for
comment for this story, has never ceased its own independent cryptologic
efforts, especially when those efforts have been aim at diplomats on American
soil.
***
The
number of foreign government targets that the FBI monitors inside the United
States is huge and growing. State Department records show that 176 countries
maintain embassies in Washington, not including Cuba and Iran, which the U.S.
government does not have diplomatic relations with but which maintain interest
sections inside the Swiss and Pakistani embassies, respectively.
In
addition, 115 of the 193 members of the United Nations maintain diplomatic
missions of varying sizes in New York City. There are also 62 consulates in Los
Angeles, 52 in Chicago, 42 in San Francisco, 38 in Houston, 35 in Miami, and 26
in Boston and Atlanta.
All
told, there are almost 600 foreign government embassies, consulates, missions,
or representative offices in the United States, all of which are watched to one
degree or another by the counterintelligence officers of the FBI. Only eight
countries do not maintain any diplomatic presence in the United States
whatsoever, the most important of which is nuclear-armed North Korea.
Every
one of these embassies and consulates is watched by the FBI's legion of
counterintelligence officers to one degree or another. But some countries'
receive the vast majority of the FBI's attention, such as Russia, China, Libya,
Israel, Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Afghanistan, India,
Pakistan, and Venezuela. The Cuban and Iranian interests section in Washington
-- and their missions to the United Nations in New York -- of course receive
special attention as well.
Unsurprisingly,
most of the FBI's surveillance is technical in nature. For example, with
substantial technical assistance from the NSA and the "big three"
American telecommunications companies (AT&T, Verizon, and Sprint), the FBI
taps the phones (including cell phones) of virtually every embassy and
consulate in the United States. The FBI also intercepts the home phones and
emails of many diplomats. The FBI's Washington and New York field offices have
special wiretap centers that specialize in collecting all telephone, email,
instant messaging, text messaging, and cellular telephone traffic coming in and
out of all high-priority diplomatic targets in the United States 24 hours a
day, seven days a week. According to a former Justice Department source, over
the past decade these extremely sensitive intercepts have identified a number
of spies working for governments that were caught in the act of stealing U.S.
government secrets, as well as a larger number of cases involving the theft of
industrial secrets from American companies.
Since
1978, all electronic communications, both plaintext and encrypted, between
these embassies and their home countries have been routinely intercepted by the
NSA's BLARNEY fiber-optic-cable intercept program. The NSA provides copies of
all these intercepts, including telephone calls and emails, to the FBI's
secretive signals-intelligence unit, the Data Intercept Technology Unit (DITU)
at the Quantico Marine Corps base in Northern Virginia, and to the FBI's
electronic-eavesdropping centers in Washington and New York.
The
FBI also uses a wide range of vehicles and airborne surveillance assets to
monitor the movements and activities of foreign diplomats and intelligence
operatives in Washington and New York. Some of the vans, aircraft, and
helicopters used by the FBI for this purpose are equipped with equipment
capable of intercepting cell-phone calls and other electronic forms of
communication. And when that doesn't work, the FBI calls in the burglars.
***
Another
important part of the FBI's surveillance effort is dedicated to trying to
surreptitiously get inside these diplomatic establishments on behalf of the
NSA, which increasingly depends on the FBI to penetrate the computer and
telecommunications networks used by these embassies and compromise their information
security systems.
The
FBI perfected this clandestine technique, known as the Surreptitious Entry
Program operation, during Cold War intelligence-gathering operations directed
at the Soviet Union and its Eastern European allies. These missions remain
highly classified because of the diplomatic sensitivity surrounding breaking
into the embassies of friends and enemies alike. In one instance during the
1960s, FBI agents reportedly drove a garbage truck into the central courtyard
of the Czech Embassy in the middle of the night and spirited away one of the
embassy's cipher machines for study by the NSA's code breakers.
The
FBI is still conducting these highly sensitive operations. Specially trained
teams of FBI agents are still periodically breaking into foreign embassies and
consulates in the United States, primarily in New York and Washington. In New
York, a special team of FBI burglars is based in a converted warehouse in Long
Island City in Queens, according to a former FBI employee who worked there. The
nondescript facility is large enough that the FBI can build mock-ups of the
exteriors and interiors of embassies being targeted for break-ins. The FBI has
a similar facility in Northern Virginia, where full-size mock-ups of embassies
in Washington are constructed to train FBI teams prior to conducting black-bag
jobs of the facilities.
To
facilitate these operations, the FBI has a huge library of architectural
drawings, floor plans, building permits, and any other documents that it can
lay its hands on concerning the layouts of every embassy and consulate in the
United States. Many of these documents were obtained in close conjunction with
the diplomatic security staff of the State Department and the uniformed branch
of the Secret Service, which is responsible for providing security for foreign
diplomatic establishments in the United States. The FBI also interviews the
repair and maintenance personnel who service the leased computers and
telecommunications equipment used by a host of embassies and other diplomatic
establishments in Washington and New York.
Since
the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the tempo of FBI clandestine operations designed to
steal, compromise, or influence foreign computer, telecommunications, or
encryption systems has increased by several orders of magnitude. According to a
former Justice Department official, over the past decade clandestine
human-intelligence operations run by the FBI's Washington and New York field
offices have been enormously successful in compromising a wide range of computer
systems and encryption technology used by foreign governments and corporate
entities. In a number of important cases, these FBI operations have allowed the
NSA's code-breakers to penetrate foreign encryption systems that had defied the
ability of the code-breakers to solve through conventional cryptanalytic means.
For example, the FBI was able to give the NSA the daily changes in cipher keys
for an encryption system used by a country in the developing world. In another
case, the FBI was able to covertly insert spyware into the operating system of
a computer being used by a foreign mission in New York, allowing the NSA
to read the plaintext versions of cables before they were encrypted.
***
But by
far the most productive and sensitive intelligence source about what is going
on inside embassies and consulates in the United States is a joint FBI-NSA
electronic-eavesdropping program known as Close Access SIGINT. It enables the
FBI and NSA to listen to what is transpiring inside these buildings by using a
wide range of covert technical sensors that are monitored in real time from
covert listening posts located in close proximity to the targets.
Some
of these operations involve spyware software that has been covertly planted
inside the computer systems of embassies and consulates, which allows the NSA's
computer-hacking organization, the Office of Tailored Access Operations (TAO),
to read in real time everything that is being stored on individual computers or
on the computer network itself. Some of these implants are designed and
operated by TAO. Others are designed by the FBI's SIGINT unit, the DITU. Some
sensors periodically copy the contents of computer hard drives; another sensor
takes screen shots of documents being processed or reviewed on compromised computer
systems. The FBI is also using sophisticated laser and acoustic systems to
image and record the sounds of what is being typed on computers, according to a
source with access to the trove of documents leaked to the media by former NSA
contractor Edward Snowden.
To
pick up the signals from these clandestine sensors, the FBI uses front
companies to lease office space within line of sight of nearly 50 embassies and
consulates in Washington and New York. In other instances, the FBI and NSA have
installed disguised receivers on building rooftops near these embassies to pick
up the data signals from clandestine sensors implanted inside these embassies
and consulates. Some of these disguised receivers can clearly be seen on the
rooftop of a building located within line of sight of the Chinese, Israeli, and
Pakistani embassies on Van Ness Street in northwest Washington. It's a
neighborhood that's awfully familiar to the FBI and its eavesdroppers.
Since the 9/11 terrorist attacks,
the tempo of FBI clandestine operations designed to steal, compromise, or
influence foreign computer, telecommunications, or encryption systems has
increased by several orders of magnitude. According to a former Justice
Department official, over the past decade clandestine human-intelligence
operations run by the FBI's Washington and New York field offices have been
enormously successful in compromising a wide range of computer systems and
encryption technology used by foreign governments and corporate entities. In a
number of important cases, these FBI operations have allowed the NSA's
code-breakers to penetrate foreign encryption systems that had defied the
ability of the code-breakers to solve through conventional cryptanalytic means.
For example, the FBI was able to give the NSA the daily changes in cipher keys
for an encryption system used by a country in the developing world. In another
case, the FBI was able to covertly insert spyware into the operating system of
a computer being used by a foreign mission in New York, allowing the NSA
to read the plaintext versions of cables before they were encrypted.
(MICHAEL
BRADLEY/AFP/)
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