Hello and welcome to the witness podcast with me Mike Lanchin.

Today we go back to the late 1980s and the last years of the Cold War

when a serious diplomatic row erupted between the US and the Soviet Union. It was over allegations that the

Soviets had planted sophisticated bugging devices inside America's vast new

embassy building in Moscow.

President Reagan says the United States may have to tear down its new embassy in Moscow

unless he can be sure it hasn't been bugged by the Russians.

The building cost $200 million and it's thought to be riddled with Soviet listening devices.

And Mr Reagan said the Russians won't be allowed into their new embassy in Washington

until he's satisfied that his embassy in Moscow is secure.

The United States will not occupy our new embassy building in Moscow unless and until I can be assured

that it is safe to move into a secure embassy environment. It was meant to be America's most modern and expensive embassy in the world, but serious concerns

over electronic bugging by the Soviets now meant that the massive

half finished building overlooking the Moscow River was a serious security liability.

Well it was difficult for a period of time we literally had no electronic

communication with the outside world we used to write everything down on a

piece of paper and we would have couriers fly it out of the country to Germany and so all our correspondence was basically handwritten.

Thomas Gen Dreisik worked for two years as head of the security engineers in the U.S.

Embassy.

And we had a few rooms that we have, which I don't want to discuss how they were built, but they were designed to be free of compromise,

but they were very small.

The old U.S. Embassy building in Moscow had been erected after the Second World War, but by the 1970s it was considered

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