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Subject: Undercover, Out Loud; Aqua Pontiacs Add Color to Spy Game<By Andrew
Date: Thu, 29 Oct 92 04:29:59 EST
Message-ID: <20.1992Oct29.042959@AmeriCast.com>

Undercover, Out Loud; Aqua Pontiacs Add Color to Spy Game<By An-
drew Brownstein<Washington Post Staff Writer=

For months, the shiny turquoise Pontiacs were parked across the
street from some of Washington's classiest hotels: the Madison,
the Jefferson, the Capital Hilton. The cars' occupants could be
seen peering out the windows with high-powered binoculars, wires
dangling from gadgets in their ears, oversized metal attache'
cases on the back seats.

In addition to their high-technology gear, the people in the tur-
quoise cars seemed to have a low threshold for irony.

"Please leave, before someone sees you," the driver in dark sung-
lasses said urgently to an inquiring pedestrian. "Don't call any
more attention to yourself."

Strange.  The three Grand Am rental cars have done nothing but
attract attention since their arrival about four months ago. They
baffled doormen and hotel employees who watched as the cars made
their rounds near 16th and L streets NW, always parking illegal-
ly, yet somehow never getting tickets.

Robert Robertson, a doorman at the nearby Presidential office
building, heard rumors about "undercover operations" and "govern-
ment surveillance" but remained skeptical.  "I thought they were
supposed to keep those things secret," he said.

Not necessarily.

FBI officials say the cars are part of a counterintelligence
operation to identify spies among the people who go in and out of
the Russian Embassy on 16th Street NW. Despite the thawing of the
Cold War and the public show of friendship between the two na-
tions, the game of "I Spy" continues. The currency now is mostly
economic and scientific secrets, the FBI says.

"If they perform intelligence here, we are going to perform coun-
terintelligence," said R. Patrick Watson, deputy assistant chief
for FBI counterintelligence.  Asked several times whether the
Russians were meant to notice the not-so-subtle surveillance,
Watson smiled. "Right," he said finally.

For the record, the Russians say they haven't. "I have suspi-
cions, but no information," said Sergey Konovalenko, acting press
attache' at the embassy.  "I haven't seen these people," said
Anatoli Shurygin, first secretary for science and technology.

Konovalenko said later that the Russian ambassador would not be
available to discuss "the rude activities of U.S. special ser-
vices" because that is a "touchy subject" about which the ambas-
sador has "no information."

Another FBI official who asked not to be named said the operation
was created in the mid-1980s when the Walker spy case and several
others embarrassed the bureau. John Anthony Walker, a Navy off-
icer, volunteered his services at the embassy in 1967, eventually
recruiting his family into a spy ring that endured for 18 years.

Since then, according to the official, agents have staked out the
embassy in everything from rent-a-wrecks to turquoise Pontiacs.

"It doesn't take a rocket scientist to see this isn't a tourist
group," the official said. "We know who they are, they know who
we are, and we kind of wink as we go by."

Kenneth Jeffries is no rocket scientist, but the Hilton doorman
knows people's "hooks" - the styles of the suits, trench coats
and furs that pass through the hotel door.  Last year, be began
noticing people who parked outside the Hilton day after day.
Dressed a little shabbily, they sat long hours in old Chevies and
rusty Buicks. As far as Jeffries could tell, all they did was
read the newspaper.  FBI all the way, he decided.

One day last year, Jeffries spent a double shift watching a rust-
ed yellow Chevy Nova that was parked on K Street "all day and all
night. But the people worked in shifts," he said. "There was an
Indian, a Caucasian, a black guy, a black lady. They all took
turns sitting in the front seat, reading the paper."

If they were FBI, he said, "they could do a heck of a lot better
to try and hide what they're doing."

Assistant hotel manager Tina Haley never had to wonder who they
were. She started talking to one of the men in the cars, and they
became friends. Eventually indentifying himself as an FBI agent,
he told "It doesn't take a rocket scientist to see this isn't a
tourist group."<

-FBI official>

her they were "monitoring the routine comings and goings" at the
former Soviet Embassy.  In time, she said, they blended into the
scenery. Once when a couple skipped out on a tab at the hotel
restaurant, an agent put a bubble light on the dashboard and
chased them half a block. "We all laughed because the FBI had
pulled them over for a $46 check," she said.

But last Christmas, she stopped seeing them - a sign, she as-
sumed, of better times. Actually, the FBI official said, the sur-
veillance has continued on a "constant, but not 24-hour" basis
since the mid-1980s.

The Pontiac people arrived in early summer, according to the
watchers. They had a different "hook": quieter, more official
and, some said, less friendly. When a reporter asked recently if
they were from the FBI, their reply was sphinxlike: "If we were
from the FBI, we'd tell you."

On one of the District's busiest thoroughfares, virtually in The
Washington Post's back yard, office workers on their way to lunch
have seen them exchanging briefcases, documents, sometimes lining
up in succession - three identical turquoise Pontiacs with Thrif-
ty rental stickers - and talking on what appear to be CB radios.

Robertson, the Presidential doorman, said he would see them snap-
ping pictures of "something at the Hilton." They park illegally
in front of his building all the time, he said, but when the pol-
ice come by, they flash their little black books and nothing hap-
pens.

But Robertson and other car watchers say they haven't seen the
turquoise Pontiacs since Oct. 16, the day a Post reporter began
asking about them.

The official explanation for the FBI's presence, to deter another
Walker case, is greeted with great skepticism by national securi-
ty specialists, who say FBI counterintelligence rarely looks like
this.

"There's a possibility that you've been dragged into the filming
of Police Academy 5," joked Loren Thompson, deputy director of
the National Security Studies Program at Georgetown University.

"For years, it has been known that they have done electronic sur-
veillance of the embassy and checked its mail," said William
Lewis, a political science professor at George Washington Univer-
sity. "But parked cars painted turquoise - that's such a blatant
act of intimidation. There's probably more to this than meets the
eye."

On the other hand, Thompson said, it is entirely possible that
the FBI is running "an undercover operation that even the doorman
at the Madison knows about." He recalled the KGB agents in Cuba
who tried to disguise themselves in tropical shirts during the
missile crisis, but gave themselves away by walking the beach in
lockstep.

"You can take them out of their suits, you can take them out of
the J. Edgar Hoover Building," Thompson said of the FBI agents,
"but you can't take them out of their culture. You've heard of
the culture of poverty? This is the culture of bureaucracy."

Embassy officials continue to insist that they know nothing about
the enterprise. "This is not conversation for telephone," Russian
security chief Vyacheslav N. Zhukov said in answer to the ques-
tion.

But in an interview at the embassy, he seemed eager to hear about
the strange vehicles parked outside. No, no, of course he hadn't
seen them, he said. No, no reports from any of the embassy's 80
diplomats either.  But one FBI official, citing intelligence re-
ports from double agents, said the Russians routinely prepare
descriptions of the surveillance teams for visiting diplomats.

Asked about the FBI's claim that the embassy is still recruiting
spies, Zhukov laughed. "It's the song of old times," he said.
"The Russians aren't going to make contacts with anybody . . . .
We are running out of money in our country. What for now, these
contacts?"

The FBI official was less sanguine. "Perhaps this is the twilight
of the Cold War," the official said.  "It may not be completely
frozen anymore, but perhaps there's a few chunks of ice floating
in the tray somewhere."02:15 10-29C9999-----

Copyright 1992, The Washington Post.  This story is from the
Washington Post's Capitol Edition On-Line and is not to be ar-
chived or redistributed.

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