The Foreign Service Journal, December 2016

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | DECEMBER 2016 49 cafes and where, after dusk, Order of Lenin medals could be had for a handful of rubles. Change was coming. Just after 10 in the morning, a fire alarm in the embassy blared. With ongoing construction in the chancery it frequently activated for no reason. Such were working conditions inside our dilapidated embassy, one the United States had occupied since 1953. Unconcerned, I went to reset the alarm (our normal response) and to get another cup of coffee; unbeknownst to me, a thick plume of white and yellow smoke was rising from below. Like a great billowing ghost racing up the stairwell, it approached my office, gateway to the most secure area of any U.S. embassy: the Communications Programs Unit (known as the CPU). Even without a Top Secret security clearance, safe combina- tions or “Cryptographic For Use” access, the approaching fire would prove unstoppable. Back to the Future Only a year earlier, another staffer had called out to me from across our secure communications vault, “Tim, come look at this!” It was a secret, captioned cable approved by Ambassa- dor Jack Matlock for immediate transmission to Washington (e.g., the White House, State Department, CIA and Joint Chiefs of Staff). 90 Moscow 23603’s ominous subject line: “LOOK- ING INTO THE ABYSS: THE POSSIBLE COLLAPSE OF THE SOVIET UNION AND WHAT WE SHOULD BE DOING ABOUT IT.” The cable was clearly the most sensitive I’d ever seen. Because of that sensitivity, Ambassador Jack Matlock and drafting officer Ray Smith (see his article, p. 21) requested that special handling and encod- ing safeguards be applied. Known as “dou- ble encryption” (a process unique to the Foreign Service and the DTS), this involved one-time encoding augmented by “bulk encryption,” achieving a level of protection good enough to stop even today’s hackers dead in their tracks. The predictions laid out in the cable would, barely a year later, prove prophetic. Looking back, there is no question that 90 Moscow 23603 (declassified in 2007) and other cogent reporting cables proved the predictive powers of the Foreign Service. These cables showcased the substantive intellectual skills, understanding and influence that quietly drew political insights about the realities both inside and outside the Soviet politburo. The “last three feet” of one-on-one diplomacy led to astute on-the-ground analysis that even today serves as a benchmark for successful reporting. As Ambassador Matlock later wrote: “Embassy Moscow and its associated posts covered political and economic develop- ments in the Soviet Union during the years leading up to and through the breakup without the assistance of a single clandes- tine source. By 1987, every ‘human intelligence’ source in the Soviet Union had been exposed to the KGB, not through lack of security at the Embassy Moscow, as many in Washington once suspected, but—as we learned years later—by moles in the CIA (Aldrich Ames) and the FBI (Robert Hanssen). The most seri- ous security lapses by far occurred in Washington, not in Mos- cow” (see “Embassy Moscow: On the Front Lines of History” in the December 2011 FSJ ). Equally important was the support provided by our man- agement section and in particular, by the team I led: the CPU. Moscow’s CPU was responsible for secret communications involving history-making strategy. Seven days a week, 24 hours a day, we managed the department’s largest TEMPEST per- sonal computer program for classified processing and provided emergency radio, telephone and pouch services. Unlike other CPU operations, we served as the embassy’s official liaison to the Soviet Foreign Ministry for Direct Communication Link (i.e., “hotline”) issues and for a separate, fledgling Nuclear Risk Reduction Center initiative. A Moscow assignment meant earning your pay and then some. As a 32-year-old FS-4 encumbering an FS-1 information management officer position in charge of it all, I would, indeed, earn my pay. Preventing Nuclear War In support of President George H.W. Bush’s “confidence-building measures,” CPU coordinated logistical arrangements for DCL and NRRC negotiations. The nego- tiations produced important agreements, some still in force today. While the hotline could be used for any global crisis, the NRRC was specifically designed to reduce the risk of accidental nuclear war between the United States and the USSR. Article 2 of the NRRC protocol tasked my staff with a special duty: It called upon each party, through its embassy, to provide