High-tech tent, devices keep president’s secrets

WASHINGTON — When President Barack 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 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.

U.S. security officials demand that their bosses — not just the president, but members of Congress, diplomats, policymakers 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 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 U.S. 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., 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 Obama talking from a security tent in a Rio de Janeiro hotel suite with Hillary Rodham Clinton, then the secretary of state, and Robert Gates, 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 CIA 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 some of those measures in interviews.

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. 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 U.S. 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.

Following 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 Comey, the new director of the FBI, whose homes in the Washington area and New England were recently 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 U.S. diplomats stayed. These days, the official said, U.S. 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.

Many of the measures taken for overseas travel are only for 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 Lynn, a former deputy defense secretary under Obama. “It wasn’t like I had to make calls in the shower.”

Official U.S. visitors to Russia and China are warned that they should never access or discuss sensitive or classified information outside the embassy. In recent years, many private companies have gone further, instituting policies that forbid employees from taking their cellphones to Russia and China.

But even outside countries with long-standing 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 U.S. diplomat.