State Department Counterintelligence: Leaks, Spies, and Lies

Introduction

Gentlemen don’t read each other’s mail.

—HENRY L. STIMSON

Secretary of State, 1929

Counterintelligence Then and Now

In August 1914, as President Woodrow Wilson publicly pledged to maintain US neutrality, the opening salvos of a world war erupted across Europe. German secret agents had already traveled to America to sabotage industrial targets, foment labor strikes at munitions plants, and promote pacifistic propaganda in the news media. Wholly one-third of the American population was foreign born or of foreign parentage—a ready-made army of fifth columnists, or so the German high command hoped. One audacious scheme called for German agents to operate a biological warfare laboratory secretly in the outskirts of Washington, DC. Its purpose was to produce anthrax delivery systems to infect American horses and mules heading to the battlefields of northern France. Other disinformation campaigns, sabotage plots, and cases of espionage, while less ambitious, were more successful.

Imperial Germany’s secret operatives needed genuine US passports that could be easily altered to cross the Atlantic successfully and operate clandestinely in the United States.

Authentic-looking travel documentation was absolutely essential in escaping detection by the British security services and America’s fledgling counterintelligence agencies. At the time, the United States and its military lacked an organized, cohesive counterintelligence program. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) didn’t exist, and other federal agencies were ill-prepared to deal with the phenomenon of passport fraud tied to espionage. Moreover America had no federal statutes on the books to arrest and convict foreign spies operating in the country. Those would come later in the form of the Espionage Act of 1917.

By 1916, it was clear that the Kaiser’s General Staff Political Section was actively engaged in numerous schemes to target unwary US citizens, both in the United States and Germany, to obtain US passports for its spies. To combat the new threat, Secretary of State Robert Lansing created the Secret Intelligence Bureau in order to investigate and identify individuals who were residing in the United States under false claims of US citizenship.

Joseph Bill Nye was appointed the first chief special agent of the Department of State, and his mission was to assist the secretary of state on all intelligence and security matters relating to the department. With a small staff of special agents and secretaries, Nye implemented changes that injected safeguards into the passport issuance program by requiring more extensive proof of US citizenship, including photographs. Secretary Lansing also authorized Agent Nye to wiretap the German ambassador’s telephone line to provide daily transcripts. Two field offices were opened: one in Washington, DC, and the other in New York City, since the Secret Intelligence Bureau agents had to work closely with their US Secret Service and Postal Inspection Service counterparts monitoring the activities of German diplomats and suspected spies.

By the mid-1920s, the Secret Intelligence Bureau, now commonly called the Force, was capitalizing on its investigative expertise in dealing with German passport fraud. It collaborated with the newly created FBI to identify and deport Russian NKVD agents who attempted to enter the United States illegally to engage in espionage. The US government was so worried about Bolshevik subversive activities that for many years American communists were denied passports. The US government feared that if American citizens traveled to Russia for revolutionary training and willingly turned over their valid passports to NKVD agents, those same passports would be used by Russian agents to enter the United States under the original owner’s identity. Secret Intelligence Bureau agents also conducted background investigations for applicants seeking employment with the department and were responsible for the protection of official guests of the United States and distinguished visitors attending international conferences on American soil, a responsibility shared with the US Secret Service.

In 1929, Secretary of State Henry L. Stimson uttered his now famous statement: Gentlemen don’t read each other’s mail. With that, he disbanded the cryptanalytic branch, the code breaking unit of the State Department. In 1919, at the conclusion of World War I, the League of Nations had been created to prevent future wars through collective security, disarmament, and settling international disputes by arbitration—a gentlemen’s club of good old boys and square shooters, or so it thought. However, the League did not foresee the likes of Hitler and Mussolini, who refused to play by the rules despite the fact they were members in good standing. The League closed its doors in failure in 1933 during the run-up to World War II when there were more than a couple of dubious gentlemen acting in bad faith on the world stage.

Perhaps Secretary Stimson simply could not deign to believe that gentlemen could be so unprincipled. In any event, the work of the department’s cryptanalytic branch was assumed by the US Army’s Signal Intelligence Service. While never part of the Secret Intelligence Bureau, the cryptanalytic branch’s demise eliminated an important intelligence resource for the department.

Following the end of World War II, the Secret Intelligence Bureau was renamed the Office of Security (SY). A small number of its agents were assigned to manage the security operations of the larger European embassies while their domestic colleagues continued to investigate passport and visa fraud, protect visiting foreign dignitaries, and conduct pre-employment investigations.

Given espionage concerns, the Office of Security created a counterintelligence arm to combat foreign spies, especially those of the NKVD. Department officials, including Alger Hiss, Noel Field, Laurence Duggan, and Michael Straight, were investigated in the mid to late 1940s on suspicion of spying for the Soviet Union. From 1960 to 1975, SY expanded its presence through security officers assigned to our embassies and assumed the dignitary protection responsibilities for foreign heads of state visiting the United States, all the while vigorously conducting counterintelligence investigations. In the late eighties and early nineties, three State Department officials were investigated for spying for a foreign power. Steven Lalas was convicted of spying for Greece, and Geneva Jones was convicted of passing classified information to an African journalist. The third, Felix Bloch, the deputy chief of mission at the US embassy in Vienna, escaped prosecution after being warned by the Russian KGB (Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti—Committee for State Security)* via a coded telephone conversation to cease his clandestine activities. Bloch’s protector was none other than the notorious FBI traitor Robert Hanssen, who alerted the SVR (Sluzhba Vneshney Razvedki—the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service) to the intelligence community’s interest in Bloch.

The department’s Office of Security changed its name in 1985 to the Bureau of Diplomatic Security. The special agents of the bureau were properly part of the Diplomatic Security Service, a subset of professionals in the bureau, but the names were often used interchangeably. The letters DS or Diplomatic Security were commonly used as shorthand for anything or anyone associated with either organization.

DS now has over eighteen hundred special agents and many more civil service employees and contractors who are responsible for the physical, operational, and personal protection of department employees assigned to the department’s 285 diplomatic facilities overseas, including our diplomatic facilities in war-torn Baghdad and Kabul, as well as its domestic offices and operations throughout the US, including passport offices, Foreign Missions offices, and its own twenty-five field offices.

Today the DS Counterintelligence Division (DS/CI) conducts a robust counterintelligence program designed to deter, detect, and neutralize the efforts of foreign intelligence services targeting Department of State personnel, facilities, and diplomatic missions worldwide. It conducts aggressive counterintelligence inquiries and counterespionage investigations with other US government agencies. All counterespionage investigations are conducted in close coordination with the FBI in accordance with its statutory mandate to prosecute instances or allegations of suspected espionage. The division also provides counterintelligence and security awareness briefing sessions for US government personnel traveling overseas, including Cabinet level officials and their staffs on official visits to foreign countries. Most recently, the division has provided support to the US embassy in Baghdad in a highly successful effort to identify attempts to infiltrate the US embassy with workers affiliated with terrorist groups and foreign intelligence agencies.

In addition, the division relies on a cadre of security engineers to mitigate attempts by foreign intelligence services to technically penetrate Department of State office buildings and certain residences. These efforts range from detecting a simple listening device in a wall to countering the most sophisticated electronic eavesdropping devices and systems. To this end, audio countermeasures inspections are routinely conducted by the engineers in controlled access areas and other sensitive working spaces within department facilities worldwide.

One DS mission that has not changed over the past ninety or so years is the protection of classified foreign affairs information from unauthorized disclosures by its own employees.

Unlike espionage, leaks to media organizations are fairly common events and are most often used as vehicles for promoting opposing policy views in and outside the department. For whatever motives and rationales, the employees disclosing such information have violated both their oaths of office and nondisclosure agreements. These unauthorized disclosures are rarely treated as criminal offenses but rather as administrative inquiries involving a breach of regulations subject to disciplinary action

Make no mistake, the State Department and its employees working in the US and abroad continue to remain a coveted target for many foreign intelligence services. The end of the Cold War has not changed this dynamic. As long as other countries attempt to secure advantage by discovering and stymieing America’s sensitive foreign relations, there will be an ever-present risk to our national security. While the Information Age with its sophisticated technology has opened up new methods of acquiring secrets, the human spy is still the best source of a nation’s plans and intentions. The human agent provides critical perspective, context, and sense to things.

The twelve Russian sleeper spies deported back to Russia in the summer of 2010 serve only to remind Americans of the continuing intelligence threat in the United States. What is not well known is the number of State Department employees who had casual contact with those twelve sleepers. And there’s no shortage of these characters knocking on the State Department’s door. Regrettably, we’ve opened it too often and let them inside.

Bona Fides with a Little Braggadocio

On October 7, 1974, as I took my oath of allegiance and swore to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies foreign and domestic, I never expected to investigate unauthorized disclosures of classified information. As a newly minted, twenty-one- year-old special agent with the State Department’s Office of Security, I envisioned protecting foreign dignitaries, conducting criminal investigations, and serving as a security officer at one of many diplomatic posts overseas.

After an initial ten-month orientation tour in the Washington Field Office, I spent the next six years as a security officer in our diplomatic facilities in Beijing, Geneva, and Tokyo. The assignments offered unique experiences. For example, while serving in the People’s Republic of China, I was the first US government official to debrief one of the twenty-two US servicemen who defected to North Korea after our first post-WWII conflict in Asia. The former serviceman had settled in China, worked in a small factory, and married a Chinese citizen. He’d come to the US mission to obtain a passport to visit his mother in the United States.

In Switzerland, I oversaw the investigation into the theft of the US Marine Corps Ball funds stolen from a locked safe inside the US Mission’s Marines’ very own office. In Japan, I assisted my CIA colleagues in clandestinely ex-filtrating an SVR clandestine intelligence officer operating under Russian journalist cover back to the United States before the Soviets realized he had defected. All of these experiences, as well as routine security duties, helped shape my professional life.

After I returned to the United States in 1980, I was assigned to the protective security details for secretaries of state Edmund Muskie and Alexander Haig and began a non-eventful eighteen-month tour as a glorified bodyguard for two totally different and interesting men. I wouldn’t suggest the assignment was boring, but I could now count the number of angels dancing on the head of that pin with my eyes closed, which they were much of the time. But my routine professional life was about to change.

From 1982 to 1986, I was assigned to the Special Investigations Branch (SIB), where I participated in numerous investigations involving leaks of information, losses of classified materials, and suspected instances of espionage. By 1985, I discovered the overlooked or otherwise hidden fifty-year history of how classified State Department documents had been disclosed to the media, purportedly lost inside foreign embassies, planes, trains, and hotels or compromised by foreign intelligence services. In some instances, secrets were compromised by design; in others, by accident. But all cases shared a common denominator: the culpable State Department officer always attempted to conceal his or her guilt with a web of lies. The incidences of convenient amnesia and prevarication in the department were especially high when employees were confronted with their sins. The long-forgotten names of those State Department employees implicated in these cases were detailed in newspaper clippings buried in the official investigative files. The files also revealed that State Department secrets were being lost and betrayed with little, if any, negative repercussions for the offending officers.

During my tour in SIB, I witnessed firsthand how aggressively the US media pursued department staffers and seniors alike in search of a sexy foreign affairs story, an exclusive sprinkled with heretofore secret information. I saw how articles published by the Wall Street Journal had a negative impact on our foreign relations with a particular South American country. I led an investigation into why an article from the May 1983 edition of the Atlantic contained sentences lifted verbatim from secret State Department cables, which earned one of our embassies a verbal rebuke from a country’s ministry of foreign affairs. I attempted to determine which government official had slipped columnist Robert Novak a sensitive department document, which he used as a basis for his 1984 Evans and Novak article, affectionately dubbed the Dear Misha letter. (Novak later gained notoriety by using sensitive information leaked by Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage for his July 2003 article outing Valerie Plame as a CIA employee.)

Over the course of my tour as a regional security officer in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, from 1986 to 1987, I investigated the murder of Paul Alexander, an American doctor working in Haiti, the stabbing of a US embassy political officer’s spouse inside the consular section’s parking lot, the rape of a young Peace Corps volunteer near Jacmel, the wounding of a Peace Corps volunteer in the leg, the stabbing death of one of our residential guards, and three specific death threats made against embassy officers by local Haitians. These incidents were in addition to a heavy workload of passport and visa fraud violations, personnel security investigations, and the ever-present threat of civil disorder with consequences for the safety of the embassy and its staff. I even supervised a protective detail of three DS agents for Ambassador McKinley for 120 days after he received a death threat from the Haitian Liberation Organization—a fun and exciting assignment!

As a result of my tour in Haiti, background in overseas training, and fluency in French, I returned to Port-au-Prince in February 1997 to help supervise US security agents contracted to protect Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide and train Haitian security officers in assuming their future role as protectors of their nation’s leaders—a department ghost of Christmas future in Baghdad, Monrovia, Kabul, and elsewhere.

In 1990, I returned to SIB as chief and supervised approximately fifty unauthorized disclosure cases and personally interviewed scores of department officers who had leaked classified department information to the press or managed to lose custody of classified documents. I worked closely with the FBI to identify employees who had inadvertently or willfully provided classified information to a host of unauthorized recipients.

From 1992 to 1995, I served as a security officer at the American embassy in Paris and had the opportunity to establish the bone fides of a clandestine SVR officer, talk to a former Russian naval officer seeking US protection from the French intelligence services, identify two US-citizen Soviet penetration agents who were previously assigned to the embassy, help translate for the French police in its investigation of a US citizen who was the victim of a sexual assault, and assist the United States Secret Service’s protection for President Clinton on his visit to France to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the end of World War II.

In late 1996, I was offered the position of deputy director of the Division of Counterintelligence (DS/CI) with the department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security. Highlights of my seven-year tenure included being intimately involved in the discovery of a Russian-placed listening device inside the State Department in 1999 and assisting the FBI in its investigation of Robert Philip Hanssen before his arrest in 2001. The division worked closely with colleagues in the CIA, DOD, FBI, and NSA to identify US government employees providing secret information to foreign intelligence services. In January 2002, as I prepared for my impending retirement slated for later that year, a personnel decision delayed the arrival of the new DS/CI director until late 2002. As a result, I gladly agreed to serve as the acting director for the interim nine months.

As September approached, I reminisced about the many intriguing criminal and security cases that humbled and baffled me over the previous twenty-eight years. I found it disappointing that DS’s fascinating history of successes and failures to safeguard government secrets remained largely unheralded and unknown to the public. Adding to my feelings were the numerous books and articles authored by retired government officials lauding their personal or agency’s contributions to historical events while largely overlooking or minimizing DS’s accomplishments. The seed was sown to write this book.

My retirement from the State Department was shortly followed by the Valerie Plame/Scooter Libby leak saga. Given the public debate, I felt qualified to offer my personal opinions on the subject and wrote an op-ed piece entitled Full Disclosure on Leaks that was printed in the October 22, 2003 edition of the New York Times. Fortunately my friends were generous in their reviews of the piece despite the fact I had openly moved to the enemy’s camp to make some points.

Less than a year after the op-ed article, the Justice Department announced that Donald W. Keyser, the State Department’s principal deputy assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs, had been detained by FBI special agents in the company of two Taiwanese clandestine intelligence officers. Coincidentally Keyser and I had been professional colleagues in the United States Liaison Office in Beijing from 1976 to 1977 and the US embassy in Tokyo from 1979 to 1980. Professional contact, though sparse, continued over the next twenty-five years. Keyser would soon face serious repercussions as a result of his relationships with these foreign intelligence agents. Then in 2004, the Bureau of Diplomatic Security brought me back two days a week as a consultant with the Division of Counterintelligence, where I reunited with my DS* and FBI colleagues. I would later play a pivotal role in a multiyear counterespionage investigation into a Cuban agent working for the State Department, arguably Fidel Castro’s most damaging US citizen spy.

My book doesn’t purport to be a comprehensive compilation of all State Department unauthorized disclosures or espionage cases. It’s obviously written from my experiences of the past thirty-five years working for the department. Naturally some of my own warts and bias have crept into the writing, but I’ve done my best to portray the incidents as accurately as possible.

Simply stated, the book is one insider’s account of State Department leaks, spies, and lies, the bureaucratic machinations that went along with them, and how they have adversely affected our national security. I hope you enjoy the read.

* During the time period covered by this book, the Russian intelligence service had two names, KGB (1954-1991) and SVR (1991-present). For consistency, I use the term SVR throughout the remaining text.

* The title for the security and law enforcement component of the State Department in 1917—the Security Intelligence Bureau—was changed in 1946 to the Office of Security. In 1985, by an act of Congress, the Bureau of Diplomatic Security (and within it the Diplomatic Security Service) was established as the successor to the Office of Security. For consistency, I use the term DS throughout the remaining text.

Part one

A Decidedly Cuban Connection

Yes, with a capital Y, was the answer given in English when asked in 2006 if Cuba would continue to send its spies to the United States.

—RICARDO ALARCÓN

president of Cuba’s National Assembly

If true, I can’t help but admire their [Kendall and Gwendolyn Myers] disinterested and courageous conduct on behalf of Cuba.

—FIDEL CASTRO

former president of the Republic of Cuba, June 6, 2009

Chapter One

He was arguably Fidel Castro’s most valuable spy within the State Department, operating undetected and with impunity for decades before we discovered him. We had been hunting him for years. Now he was about to escape.

The suspect, one Kendall Myers, had become suspicious and decided to retire from the department. Fearful that he was still being monitored by federal investigators in his retirement, Kendall and Gwendolyn, his wife and accomplice, completely divorced themselves from their clandestine life and devoted themselves to the pleasures of learning to sail their Swedish-made thirty-eight-foot Malmo sailboat complete with mahogany-lined living and sleeping quarters. The investigation by the FBI and DS had ground to a halt. By the early spring of 2009, after almost eighteen months of intensive, expensive, and exhaustive surveillance and with no obvious indications of espionage activities, the FBI decided there was nothing left to do but take a high-risk gamble.

After extensive consultation with the US Intelligence Community (IC), the FBI designed a bold, ingenious ploy: Kendall would be approached by an undercover FBI asset posing as a Cuban Foreign Intelligence Service (CuIS) agent. The meet would take place outside the Washington, DC, campus of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) where he lectured.

On April 15, after much FBI preparation, IC trepidation, Justice Department hesitation, and DS exultation, the FBI undercover asset, codenamed EK, approached Kendall on his birthday as he prepared to teach a SAIS class. It was a quiet, drizzly evening on the urban campus. Kendall, a man in his early seventies who stood six feet six inches tall, bespectacled, with a receding white hairline and a moustache that draped over a constant smile, looked every bit the professor he was. After introducing himself to his target, EK offered Kendall a Cuban Cohiba cigar and said that a Cuban agent known to Kendall had sent me to contact you and to get some information because of the change that is taking place in Cuba and the new [Obama] administration.

EK suggested they meet in an hour at the Doubletree Hotel, located a few blocks away, to continue their conversation. To the collective delight of those of us listening in, Kendall not only agreed but also soon called Gwendolyn and excitedly told her that she had to drop everything and immediately come to the hotel for an important meeting. When she asked what was so important, he told her that she would soon find out.

An hour later, over a couple of beers in the hotel lounge, Kendall and EK casually talked about the new administration’s potential approach to Cuba and who might be the future South American policymakers. Among other things, Kendall revealed espionage tradecraft and methods.

Kendall said, We have nicknames. We never use real names, even the double names. In response to EK’s questions about receiving messages in Morse code, he replied, Yes, that’s right.

Kendall said the last time that he and Gwendolyn visited Cuba was ten years before and added, We’ve been meeting in third countries (with CuIS agents) and that the last country was Mexico, like three years ago, four years ago.

When Gwendolyn spoke, she confirmed that she and Kendall still had the same shortwave Sony radio to receive messages and said, You gave us the money to buy [the radio] a hundred years ago, and it still works beautifully . . . although I haven’t listened to it in a while.

Those of us listening grew nervous at the following bits of ominous conversation. Kendall stated that the problem with this country, there’s just too many North Americans, and that it would be nice to travel to Cuba in the near future on their sailboat. He added that they already have the charts . . . , the maps, and a cruising guide [GPS]. Kendall later said that it was his and Gwendolyn’s idea to sail home.

So home was Havana, not Washington, DC. Were they preparing for an expedited departure from the US? How soon? Along with the other investigators and prosecutors, I knew that all of our efforts depended on acting quickly, or Kendall and Gwendolyn Myers would slip away. We had to tie them convincingly to specific violations of federal espionage laws, including the unauthorized transmission of classified materials to a foreign agent.

And if we could not do it fast, the American couple who had compromised the US government’s diplomatic initiatives with Cuba for the last two decades, not to mention hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of technical operations—the couple who were personally given medals for their work by Castro himself following a midnight dinner in Havana lasting over five hours—would indeed be sailing home.

It was 1999. The National Security Agency (NSA) code breakers pressed their headphones to their ears as they strained to isolate every sound transmitted from a radio site in Santiago, Cuba. The CuIS was attempting to relay a coded message to a prized penetration agent in Washington, DC. The female announcer, nicknamed Havana Anna, began the broadcast by calling out Atencion! Atencion!, followed by a series of 150 five-number groups the IC had dubbed the Spanish Numbers. The high-frequency shortwave transmissions were painstakingly recorded on state-of-the-art reel-to-reel tape recorders for analysis and, hopefully, deciphering.

Since 1991, the NSA had intercepted encrypted shortwave radio messages for agents 202 and 123, including one on November 26, 1996, from the radio announcer with instructions to study the area of agent 123’s new residence. Previous NSA interceptions of similar Cuban radio transmissions had led to the FBI’s 2001 arrest and conviction of Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) Cuban analyst Ana Montes for spying for the Castro government. When the Spanish Numbers transmissions continued after her arrest in 2001, the IC knew there was at least one more high-value Cuban penetration agent operating in the nation’s capital.

By the spring of 2007, FBI special agents assigned to the Cuba squad of the Washington Field Office (called WFO for short, pronounced Woof-O) were quietly voicing their frustration over the pace of the investigation. For years, the IC had supplied the FBI with fragmentary intelligence concerning suspected Cuban espionage. As tantalizing as the Spanish Numbers were, there simply was not enough identifying data to develop investigative leads, much less identify the penetration agent. The basic facts were extremely sparse—the adversary was Cuba, the target was probably Washington, DC, and the suspect was likely someone working inside one of the US government’s foreign affairs or intelligence agencies. It was not much to go on.

However, the IC knew that the CuIS’s preferred method of communicating with its penetration agents in the United States was via shortwave radio messages sent in Morse code or relayed by a voice reading a series of numbers. Beyond that sketchy piece of information, the federal investigators could not pinpoint the location of the receiving radio, much less the employer for whom 202 and 123 were working. To those of us working the case, it was a nightmare scenario.

Separately CIA analysts had been assessing defector and field information that strongly suggested the CuIS had managed to place a long-term and presumably high-value penetration agent in one of the US government’s foreign affairs or intelligence agencies. The CIA, NSA, and FBI Cuban specialists eventually agreed that the investigation should focus on the official biographies and personal histories of all foreign affairs personnel working in metropolitan Washington, DC. Unfortunately that number could easily exceed one hundred thousand individuals.

The IC had to consider the reality that the Cuban agent could be employed by any of the federal alphabet agencies such as the CIA, DIA, NSA, and NSC. Of course, the State Department would also be high on the list. But perhaps the suspected penetration agent worked for the Department of Commerce, Treasury, or Homeland Security, whose foreign affairs responsibilities might involve access to classified information about the Caribbean island nation.

While the IC compiled its enormous list of potential suspects, the FBI’s investigation was floundering. To complicate matters, NSA internal regulations prevented the FBI from sharing certain information gleaned from the Spanish Numbers transmissions with other federal investigators, including those assigned to the State Department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security, Office of Counterintelligence (DS/CI).

DS special agents, as well as department employees, do not undergo polygraph examinations as a condition of employment, and as a result, DS/CI personnel were not authorized access to the raw intercepted data nor the IC’s analysis of the Spanish Numbers. The FBI had attempted a preliminary investigation of department employees as potential suspects; however, without DS/CI assistance and expertise, their results were highly limited.

Absent DS guidance, if left on their own to conduct further investigations of department employees, the FBI agents would be like a Humvee charging about in the proverbial china shop. And I say this with the greatest admiration and respect for my FBI colleagues.

The principal State Department building, affectionately known as Main State, Mother State, or Foggy Bottom, is situated in Washington, DC, on a site of land bordered by C Street on the south, D Street on the north, Twenty-First Street on the east, and Twenty-Third Street on the west. Three of the four streets are open to normal vehicular traffic of which two have metered parking. It was officially christened by law in 2000 as the Harry S. Truman building (HST). The primary or diplomatic entrance to the facility for employees and visitors is located at 2201 C Street. In 1957, Secretary of State Dulles helped lay the first cornerstone, and the building was