SOVIET SURVEILLANCE A FACT OF LIFE BEHIND IRON CURTAIN

JFK+50:  Volume 6, No. 1961

CABOT LODGE CLAIMED SOVIETS WERE BUGGING US EMBASSY IN MOSCOW 

New York City (JFK+50) Fifty-six years ago today, May 26, 1960 United Nations Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr.,* speaking before the Security Council at the U.N.,charged the Soviets with placing surveillance devices at the United States Embassy in Moscow.

The charge by the U.S. ambassador was intended to counter Soviet complaints about U-2 flights by the United States over Russian territory.

Henry Cabot Lodge held a wooden reproduction of the Great Seal of the United States in which he claimed was found a hidden microphone transmitter.
Lodge went on to say that more than a hundred such devices were found at the embassy.

According to Peter Grier, writing in Air Force Magazine, by the 1970s "Soviet surveillance was simply a fact of life for U.S. diplomats behind the Iron Curtain."

In 1979, a new U.S. Embassy building was begun in Moscow but by 1985 construction was stopped.  Once again, American officials found evidence of espionage.  After years of denial, the Soviets came clean in December 1991 and presented then U.S. Ambassador Robert Strauss with a file containing information on how the Embassy had been bugged as well as the "instruments that had been used."

Taking twenty-seven years to complete, the United States Embassy opened in Moscow in the year 2000.

*Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr. (1902-1985) was born in Nahant, MA, the grandson of US Senator Henry Cabot Lodge.  He graduated cum laude from Harvard in 1924 & was elected to the Massachusetts House of Representatives in 1933  and the US Senate in 1936.

HCL, Jr. served with distinction in the US Army during WWII then returned to the Senate after the war.  After he was narrowly defeated in an upset victory for JFK in 1952, Mr. Lodge served as UN Ambassador.

Lodge ran as Nixon's Vice-Presidential nominee in 1960 only to lose to the Kennedy-Johnson ticket.

SOURCE

"Cleaning the Bug House," by Peter Grier, Air Force Magazine, September 2012, www.airforcemag.com/

US New Embassy Building

Moscow

November 20, 2006

Photo by Pars

Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr.

Cabinet Room, The White House

 LBJ Library Photo (1968)