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A quorum being present, the Committee on Government Reform will come to order. I ask unanimous consent that all Members' and witnesses' written opening statements be included in the record. I ask unanimous consent that all articles, exhibits, and extraneous or tabular material referred to be included in the record. It's been a little more than 10 years since the Berlin Wall came tumbling down. We've been through eras of Glasnost and Perestroika in Russia. We've seen economic reforms come and go and we've watched the Russian economy come close to collapsing. The conventional wisdom since the end of the cold war has been that the Russian threat to our national security has evaporated. Some people have gone so far as to say that Russia is now our ally. The purpose of this hearing is to examine that question. I'm very glad that we're able to hold this session here in Los Angeles today. A lot of what we do in the Capital never gets out beyond the Washington beltway. So when we have a recess period, I think it's a good thing to get out of Washington and give people and local media in other parts of the country some exposure to the congressional process and the issues that are important. Two weeks ago we held a field hearing in Miami about international drug trafficking. We've held field hearings in my home town of Indianapolis. One of our subcommittees held a field hearing in New York on health care not too long ago. So I think it's good for the committee and good for the people we represent to do this once in a while. One of the problems with doing field hearings is that not many members of the committee can attend. The 44 members of this committee are from all over the country, and we always have a lot of commitments. So you won't see many members of the committee here today. However, that doesn't take anything away from the importance of this subject at hand. National security and our relationship with Russia are very important issues. By holding this hearing, we're creating a permanent record that every committee member will be able to review. And I want to particularly thank Representative Scarborough who came all the way from Florida to be with us today as well as Congressman Curt Weldon who's from Pennsylvania. Campbell is here from California, and we appreciate his attendance as well. This is an issue we're going to continue to look at down the road. So I want to thank all of today's witnesses for being here and participating. Now returning to the question at hand: Is Russia still a threat? One thing we know is that Russia is still conducting espionage against the United States. A lot of people in Washington were shocked when they picked up their newspapers about a month ago and discovered that a Russian spy had bugged the State Department. A spy who is stationed at the Russian Embassy had planted a tiny listening device in a chair in the conference room. It was right down the hall from the Secretary of State's office. The FBI caught him red-handed sitting in his car outside the State Department trying to listen in on a meeting. Nobody has any idea how long that bug was there or what the Russians might have learned. Security is so lax at the State Department that they couldn't tell you today if there are any other listening devices in the building. One of our witnesses today is a former Russian intelligence agent, Colonel Stanivlav Lunev. He is the highest ranking GRU officer ever to defect to the United States. The GRU is Russia's premiere military intelligence agency. Colonel Lunev is in the witness protection program and special arrangements have been made to conceal his identity. So I apologize to the media who's here, we'll have to have him come in and be covered up so that his identity is maintained so he won't be in any jeopardy. Lunev worked out of the Russian Embassy in Washington for 3\1/2\ years. I had a chance to read Colonel Lunev's testimony when he was before Congressman Weldon's subcommittee in 1998. He said, I can say to you very openly and very firmly that Russian intelligence activity against the United States is much more active than it was in the time of the former Soviet Union's existence. It looks to me like Colonel Lunev knows what he's talking about. It makes me wonder if there are more bugs in more conference rooms waiting to be discovered. It's not really surprising that Russia is still actively spying on us. So it's very clear that the Russian Government at the highest level still sees us, the United States, as a threat and an enemy. I recently read a quote from former CIA Director John Deutch. Here's what he said: Russia continues to be our top security concern, even without the adversarial relationship of the cold war. Wide-spread corruption and the absence of honest and accountable internal governmental administrative functions threatens Russia's slow and erratic evolution toward democracy. Pry states that the Russian military and intelligence agencies still take a very hostile view toward the United States. He states that decisionmakers in those agencies still consider us their foremost adversary and that this paranoia is fueled by the growing disparity between our economy and their economy and between our defense capabilities and theirs. That brings me to one of the issues I'd really like to focus on today. According to Colonel Lunev, a key component of Russia's strategy against the West for decades has been sabotage and assassination. In his previous testimony, he stated that one of his jobs at the Russia Embassy was to collect information about elected leaders in this country. This information would be used to assassinate them in a time of war or crisis. Another of Colonel Lunev's jobs was to scout out sites where weapons or explosives could be prepositioned. From time to time he would travel to the Shenandoah Valley to photograph areas where dead drops'' would be established. Weapons would be placed in these dead drop areas so that in times of crisis Russian agents could come into the country to commit sabotage against power plants, military bases, and communications facilities. According to Colonel Lunev, part of the Soviet's plan called for the use of, portable tactical nuclear devices,'' to be used to commit sabotage against highly protected targets. If has now been widely reported that the Soviet Union manufactured portable briefcase-size nuclear devices that cannot all be accounted for. Were conventional or nuclear weapons prepositioned in the United States? Colonel Lunev doesn't know if the sites he identified were ever used. However, a second Russian defector says drop sites were established all over the United States and Western Europe. When he defected to the West he brought with him pages and pages of handwritten notes about KGB activities. He says that for decades the Soviet Union deployed sabotage and intelligence groups whose mission it was to commit assassinations or acts of sabotage in times of crisis or impending war. In his book, The Sword and the Shield,'' he states that drop sites for explosives were scattered all over Western Europe and the United States. They contained everything from communications equipment to handguns to explosives. At one point in his book, he states that a standard arms package to be placed in a drop site would include mines, explosive charges, fuses, and detonators. Mitrokhin brought information on the exact locations of several sites in Europe, in Belgium, and Switzerland. Local police found these sites exactly where Mitrokhin said they would be. That's significant because a lot of people tried to pooh-pooh what we're talking about here today but several sites have been located in Europe. The bombs had to be set off with water cannons before the caches could be opened. Mitrokhin states that many drop sites were established here in the United States. In his book, he also mentions the possibility of drop sites in New York, Pennsylvania, and Texas. Some people have asked why we're holding this hearing here in Los Angeles, CA. Well, I had a chance to review the hearing transcript from Congressman Weldon's subcommittee on this same subject. It's my understa...
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