Trump Expected to Return Spy Compounds in US to Russia

Congress Should Try to Stop This

President Donald Trump is moving to return two spy compounds in the U.S. to the Russian government. In a sweeping act of retaliation over Russia’s interference in the U.S. election, last December President Barack Obama ejected 35 Russian intelligence operatives and ordered the shuttering of Russian spy compounds in Maryland and New York. 

In early April “the Trump administration told the Russians that it would consider turning the properties back over to them if Moscow would lift its freeze, imposed in 2014 in retaliation for U.S. sanctions related to Ukraine, on construction of a new U.S. consulate on a certain parcel of land in St. Petersburg,” the Washington Post reports. 

But as with all things in the Trump administration, which is not guided by policy, that position was quickly altered.

“Two days later, the U.S. position changed. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson told Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak at a meeting in Washington that the United States had dropped any linkage between the compounds and the consulate,” the Post adds.

The Russian Embassy in the U.S. actually tweeted this demand to have it returned to them last week:

The spy compounds are known as diplomatic compounds. One, in Riverdale, New York “is the residential compound for most of the diplomats of the Russian Permanent Mission to the United Nations in Manhattan,” the Daily Beast reported in January. That one was not shuttered in December by the Obama administration, but its strategic value to the Russians cannot be overstated. What goes on there?

Spying. Lots of it.

“Riverdale was sold to the Soviet Union, [author Pete] Earley writes, ‘without realizing how strategic its location was for spying,'” the Daily Beast article states.

“The high-rise was built on a steep hill that was one of the tallest points in the city. Concealed under wooden boxes on the building’s flat roof were dozens of antennas designed to snatch signals and conversations from New York City’s airwaves,” Earley wrote. 

At Riverdale, Post Impulse is situated on the 19th floor and accessible only to SVR officers who, according to Earley, use “the rooftop stations to survey a swath of 40 miles, intercepting police broadcasts, cellphone calls, and other communications throughout Manhattan and much of Long Island and New Jersey. Over time, the SVR and GRU [Russian military intelligence] had been able to identify and lock onto signals from every law enforcement operation in the area. They used the signals to keep track of the location of FBI agents and other officers. If the Russians saw that several FBI agents were in the same vicinity as one of their SVR officers, they knew he was being followed,” and thus avoid dangles and other assorted headaches of espionage in the tri-state area.

The Washington Post reports that “concessions to Moscow could prove controversial while administration and former Trump campaign officials are under congressional and special counsel investigation for alleged ties to Russia.”

Congress should try to stop this.

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