Working Out the Bugs

Under an agreement signed in Washington last week, the U.S. and the Soviet Union will begin construction of new embassy facilities in Washington and Moscow. The 550 Russians in Washington, now spread out in five buildings in the capital, will occupy a new compound that includes a twelve-story office tower and residences, to be built on a 12 1/2-acre tract some time in 1975. The 300 Americans attached to the U.S. embassy in Moscow will get a similar complex on a ten-acre plot in the center of the Soviet city.

Measured by the duration of the bargaining--it began in 1963--the embassy treaty was far tougher to negotiate than the wheat deal, or the Pepsi-Cola franchise or, for that matter, even SALT I and the nuclear test-ban treaty. It took six years merely to agree on the embassy sites. Then there was another four-year deadlock over the Americans' demand that they be allowed to "import" workers from the U.S. or some Western European country to add the plumbing, wiring and interior finishing to the structure, which would be built by the Russians. Detente or no, Washington wanted no repetition of its experience with the present nine-story chancellery on Moscow's Tchaikovsky Street. The local talent that "remodeled" the building for its new U.S. tenants in 1953 buried 40 electronic listening devices in the plaster walls. They remained undetected for twelve years.

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