(Photo: Mary and Vytas Bandziukas, 1994)

In 1969 the Soviet Union signed an eighty-five-year lease on the site that had been occupied in the latter years of the 19th century by Benjamin F. Hunt, a prominent butcher, and for much of the 20th century by the Mount Alto Veterans Hospital. (Gazette, March, April 2006)

A 1972 agreement stipulated simultaneous construction of an American embassy in Moscow, and that neither party could move into its embassy until the other was also ready for occupancy; construction took place between 1977 and 1985. In 1980 the Soviets charged the United States with having planted listening devices on the premises, and in 1984 the United States discovered that its new Moscow embassy had been similarly bugged.

Since 1994 the Wisconsin Avenue compound has housed the embassy of the Russian Federation, the successor to the Soviet Union. The site includes a consulate, an administrative building, an apartment building, a school, a gymnasium, and apparently, somewhere underneath it all, a conceptual monument to the Cold War, in the form of a tunnel for electronic eavesdropping. (Washington Post, March 5, 2001)

–– Carlton Fletcher