The Foreign Service Journal, December 2016

48 DECEMBER 2016 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL This firsthand account of a fire in the secure area of Embassy Moscow on March 28, 1991, conveys the importance and drama of Diplomatic Telecommunications Service work during the last days of the USSR. COMMUNICATIONS BEHIND THE IRON CURTAIN BY T I MOTHY C . LAWSON Timothy C. Lawson is a retired Senior Foreign Service officer. He served in the USSR twice, from 1983 to 1985 and from 1989 to 1991. In addition to Moscow, during 26 years in the Foreign Service, he served in Jordan, Lebanon, China, Hong Kong, Thailand, Pakistan, South Korea and Washington, D.C. A member of AFSA and the National Military Intelligence Association, he retired in 2007. M arch 28, 1991. Moscow’s gray Stalinist-style build- ings—adorned with red, hammer–and-sickle- emblazoned flags waving in the wind—loomed against a metallic sky. The sidewalk from the new embassy compound up to the old embassy, where I worked, was slippery with dirty, ON RUSSIA melting snow. A small church, nicknamed “Our Lady of Eternal Surveillance” or, later, “Our Lady of Perpetual Observation” because it doubled as a KGB listening post, sat directly across the street. The morning was normal but for one thing: ten- sion hung in the air like icicles, a tension felt not only by our embassy reporting officers, but by millions of Soviet citizens. Supporters of Boris Yeltsin, then president of the Russian Federation, planned to stage a demonstration that day. Even after the fall of the Berlin Wall, demonstrations inside the USSR were rare. This one, if held, would directly defy Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev. The yoke of control was still tight, with the Kremlin remaining our number-one national security threat, but fissures in the heart of communism were forming. You could see it on Arbat Street, teeming with subversive artists and FOCUS