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Obama’s Portable Zone of
Secrecy (Some Assembly Required)
by MICHAEL S. SCHMIDT and
ERIC SCHMITT
Nov. 9, 2013
President Obama discussing Libya inside his security tent during a trip to Rio de Janeiro in 2011.
WASHINGTON — When President Obama travels abroad,
his staff packs briefing books, gifts for foreign leaders and something more
closely associated with camping than diplomacy: a tent.
Even when Mr. Obama travels
to allied nations, aides quickly set up the security tent — which has opaque
sides and noise-making devices inside — in a room near his hotel suite. When
the president needs to read a classified document or have a sensitive
conversation, he ducks into the tent to shield himself from secret video
cameras and listening devices.
American security officials
demand that their bosses — not just the president, but members of Congress,
diplomats, policy makers and military officers — take such precautions when
traveling abroad because it is widely acknowledged that their hosts often have
no qualms about snooping on their guests.
The United States has come under withering criticism
in recent weeks about revelations that the National Security
Agency listened in on allied leaders like Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany. A
panel created by Mr. Obama in August to review that practice, among other
things, is scheduled to submit a preliminary report this week and a final
report by the middle of next month. But American officials assume — and can
cite evidence — that they get the same treatment when they travel abroad, even
from European Union allies.
“No matter where you are, we
are a target these days,” said R. James Woolsey Jr., the director of central
intelligence during the Clinton
administration. “No matter where we go, countries like China, Russia and much
of the Arab world have assets and are trying to spy on us so you have to think
about that and take as many precautions as possible.”
On a trip to Latin America in
2011, for example, a White House photo showed Mr. Obama talking from a security
tent in a Rio de Janeiro hotel suite with Hillary Rodham Clinton, then the
secretary of state, and Robert M. Gates, the defense secretary at the time,
about the air war against Libya that had been launched the previous day.
Another photo, taken three days later in San
Salvador, showed him conferring from the tent with
advisers about the attack.
Spokesmen for the State
Department, the C.I.A. and the National Security Council declined to provide
details on the measures the government takes to protect officials overseas. But
more than a dozen current and former government officials, most of whom spoke
on the condition of anonymity, described in interviews some of those measures.
They range from instructing
officials traveling overseas to assume every utterance and move is under
surveillance and requiring them to scrub their cellphones for listening devices
after they have visited government offices, to equipping the president’s
limousine, which always travels with him, to keep private conversations
private. Mr. Obama carries a specially encrypted BlackBerry; one member of his
cabinet was told he could not take his iPad on an overseas trip because it was
not considered a secure device.
Countermeasures are taken on
American soil as well. When cabinet secretaries and top national security
officials take up their new jobs, the government retrofits their homes with
special secure rooms for top-secret conversations and computer use.
In accordance with a
several-hundred-page classified manual, the rooms are lined with foil and
soundproofed. An interior location, preferably with no windows, is recommended.
One of the most recent recipients: James B. Comey, the new director of the
F.B.I., whose homes in the Washington area and
New England were retrofitted.
During the Cold War, a former
senior official said, listening devices were found embedded in the walls and
light fixtures of the hotels where American diplomats stayed. These days, the
official said, American analysts worry more about eavesdropping radio signals
beamed toward hotel rooms in the hopes of picking up officials’ conversations.
“We took it for granted that
in some of these hotels, no matter the state, that devices were built in
there,” the official said.
It is not exactly clear when
American officials began using the tents while traveling. According to several
former senior law enforcement and intelligence officials, George J. Tenet, the
director of the C.I.A. from 1997 to 2004, was one of the first officials to use
one regularly.
“Clinton and the White House
were using him as an emissary in the Middle East with Arafat, and he was always
over there and in Israel
and needed to have something secure to read and talk,” said a former senior
intelligence official who worked directly with Mr. Tenet. “He started using it
and just continued through the rest of his tenure.”
The official said that the
C.I.A. was particularly insistent that Mr. Tenet use the tent in Israel because
it has some of the most sophisticated spying software. “We would get especially
concerned when our Israeli hosts wanted to reserve the hotel rooms for us at
the King David,” the official said, referring to a famous hotel in Jerusalem.
Mr. Woolsey, an executive now
at the consulting firm Opportunities Development Group in Washington, said that when he traveled
abroad as the nation’s top intelligence official from 1993 to 1995, he had only
encrypted phones. “We were so far ahead of the rest of the world at that point
technologically,” Mr. Woolsey said. “But by the time Tenet came along in the
late ’90s, they started to get worried about China, and things were changing.”
Before the security tents are
set up, hotel rooms are checked for bugs and radio waves. A former senior
government official who read classified documents in the small tents said that
they were far less attractive than the sleek ones that sleep six and are sold
at camping stores like REI.
“I felt like I was in the
middle of the big woods, but I was in the middle of a hotel room,” said the
former official.
Many of the measures taken
for travel are for only the most senior officials because they are costly and
cumbersome. Instead of the tent, less senior officials can end up using smaller
structures that look like telephone booths. But all officials traveling in this
age of high surveillance are given one basic marching order: Use common sense.
“You follow procedures about
what to do and what not to do,” said William J. Lynn III, a former deputy
defense secretary under Mr. Obama. “It wasn’t like I had to make calls in the
shower.”
Official American visitors to
Russia and China are
warned that they should never retrieve or discuss sensitive or classified
information outside the embassy. In recent years, many private companies have
gone further, instituting policies that forbid employees to take their
cellphones to Russia and China.
But even outside countries
with histories of spying on Americans, diplomats say, they are resigned to the
fact that no electronic message sent or received is ever really private
anymore.
“We do operate with the
awareness that anything we do on a cellphone or BlackBerry is probably being
read by someone somewhere, or lots of someones,” said a senior American
diplomat.
Even with rigorous security
protocols drilled into their heads by their superiors — like rules barring some
White House and National Security Council staff members from gaining access to
social media on their computers and phones out of fear of downloading malware —
officials say it is hard to police every utterance on a mobile device.
“Given the press of events
and the ubiquity of cellphones,” said one former American diplomat with
experience in the Middle East, “it is in
practice very difficult to constantly self-edit conversations to ensure that
you don’t stray into classified information.”
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