The Foreign Service Journal, May 2007

The Lonetree-Bracy Scandal Then, in February 1987 the Lonetree-Bracy espi- onage scandal broke. The curious can read about it in Ron Kessler’s book Moscow Station (Pocket Books, 1990) which, despite inaccuracies, provides the most accessible account of one of Embassy Moscow’s worst episodes. One immediate consequence was a shutdown of all the embassy’s secure electronic communications. Another was confiscation of electric typewriters (they were presumed compromised). Amb. Hartman recalls that years later, high-ranking KGB officers admitted they hyped the Lonetree-Bracy case to cover the real intelligence leaks of Robert Hanssen and Aldrich Ames, so much of the added burden was actually not neces- sary. We were already in a chancery with an ambient tem- perature well below freezing. Without typewriters, we drafted classified and Limited Official Use telegrams on yellow legal pads using ballpoint pens, a courier flew them to Frankfurt, and a secretary there typed and trans- mitted them. At 30 below zero Celsius, ballpoint-pen ink freezes in about five minutes. We learned to keep three ballpoint pens inside our down jackets, where body heat could thaw the ink. You wrote with one pen until it froze, put it back next to your body, and continued drafting with the second pen, and so on, rotating them. International direct dialing did not exist in the USSR. There were two dedicated “Washington lines,” and each section had to sign up days in advance to get a 15-minute block of time. The alternative was to go to the post office, order international phone calls a day in advance, and pay $18 per minute. E-mail didn’t exist yet. About this time, Steve Young accompanied the chargé d’affaires, Dick Combs, to a meeting at the foreign min- istry. Steve recalls: “As we settled down to our tea and cookies, the Russian took on his best fake sympathetic tone and said, ‘Deek, how are you making out over there?’ It suddenly dawned onme that the Soviets were convinced we were near the end of our rope, and would any day come in seeking terms to resume the old arrangement. ... And a F O C U S M A Y 2 0 0 7 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 39