It really is a James Bond world, my dear…
Everything I’m about to tell you is open-source information, meaning it’s already been published somewhere.
There’s an ugly steel container in Warsaw, draped in cables, hidden away in a dim, vaguely industrial, basement. It is humming with activity this morning.
It resembles nothing so much as the cargo containers trekking across the Pacific from China to the US, then loaded onto trucks and trains to carry cargo from the world’s factory floor to the consumers of a throwaway economy. It’s darker in color. It’s painted or better said, shielded, with some, likely classified, coating to absorb sound waves, to deflect spying electrons.
It sits in the basement of the US Embassy. You walk across a dank concrete floor after surrendering your cell phone, fitness watch and all other electronic devices you usually carry on your person to an unsmiling Marine guard. The six-inch door hums, clicks and clanks as an electronic reader accepts the identification and admits those few qualified to enter.
To the uninitiated the acronym sounds like skiff. It has no resemblance at all to a small, flat-bottomed row-boat. But then it’s not a skiff. It’s a SCIF. Secure Compartmented Intelligence Facility. A place where those few bearing yet another acronym on their resume, that of TS/SCI, can review, discuss and formulate plans to deal with highly classified threats to America’s security.
My resume contains that acronym. TS/SCI. Top Secret/Secure Compartmented Information. Not a lot of people hold it. In order to become a general or admiral, one must be eligible for and obtain one. The investigation process to get one can take months and even years. Mine is long since expired as I retired from the military as a major general nearly ten years ago and no longer have a need for one. You only get to have one if “you have a need to know”.
I’ve been in several SCIFs, both in the United States and abroad. The one in Warsaw is the ugliest. But then the US Embassy is the ugliest embassy I’ve ever seen. It looks like nothing so much as a 1960’s era Holiday Inn in a declining area of Chicago. Even the US Embassy in Havana looks better. The British and Japanese embassies in Warsaw, are, by contrast, works of art.
The embassy likely looks like a 1960’s era Holiday Inn because it was built in the early 1960’s. Shortly after it was occupied more than forty microphones were discovered hidden in the building. The spy devices were uncannily similar to microphones found about the same time in the US Embassy in Moscow. Likely a coincidence.
Spying is serious business in Eastern Europe. The first time I cleared through into the embassy, the American sedan driven by a young major stopped at the outside gate. Heavily armed security guards demanded our IDs. Once assured we were all US military members, the electrically controlled first gate slid open, allowing us into the sally port. More armed security guards slid long handled mirrors under the car to ensure there were no bombs or other devices attached underneath. Once cleared, the second gate slid open and we were motioned forward.
As I stepped out of the car, one of the young officers escorting me gestured up at the multistory buildings surrounding the downtown embassy and said, “See all those antennae, sir?” “Yes,” I replied. “Most of them aren’t TV antennae. They’re electronic eavesdropping antennae, spying on everything we do and say here. Even though Poland is no longer part of the Warsaw Pact and now is part of NATO, the Russians are always spying. Always be aware that anything you say or do, unless you’re in the SCIF, is being monitored.” From my experiences as a colonel on a NATO war game in Ukraine five years earlier I knew well this experience.
While I was in Ukraine, an elevator, in which I was the lone passenger, inadvertently stopped at the wrong floor. Instead of stepping off into the hallway leading to my room, I stepped into a pair of white-shirted, beefy gentlemen awaiting the elevator and a huge open floor filled with television monitors and headphone wearing men watching them. Watching events in every room of the hotel. All of which went a long way to explain why beautiful young women, thirty years my junior, kept trying to accost me on the streets of Kyiv. Unsuccessfully, I might add.
On the several occasions when the Polish government invited my wife to accompany me to military and diplomatic events in Poland we would attend glittering events at the Presidential Place, cocktail parties at embassies and dine with foreign ministers, senior generals and political leaders. At the end of each evening, we would return to our hotel room where she would excitedly want to go over the night’s events including who we talked to and the topics of our conversations.
I’d hold a warning finger to my lips to quiet her. Her irritated glance would be met with my pointing to the ceiling and a raised eyebrow. “Let’s go for a walk,” I’d say. We’d slip out of our evening attire into more casual wear and stroll down the wide city boulevards.
“You were serious about not saying anything in the hotel, weren’t you?” she’d ask. “Dead serious,” came my response. The curly-headed girl from Belleville, Illinois, clearly shaken by her entry into a James Bond novel.
With tens of thousands of Russian troops poised to invade Ukraine, Poland’s eastern neighbor, the ugly black box in the embassy basement is humming. The Russians are listening.
© William L. Enyart
Email: bill@billenyart.com