The embassy swap
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The embassy swap is John Kiriakou's account of the reciprocal embassy construction agreed between Washington and Moscow in the 1970s, given on the DeProgram programme in September 2025 in answer to a viewer's question about the size and siting of China's new embassy in London.

The bargain

"You know the story about the American embassy in Moscow and the Russian embassy in Washington. They were both built around the same time. The deal was struck in the 1970s that both countries would build new embassies."

The Soviet site

The American side offered a free choice, which Kiriakou presents as a mistake. "We told the Russians, go ahead and find a plot of land and go ahead and pick what you want. So they went to literally the highest point in Washington."

He lists what the elevation delivers: "oh, by the way, you can also see the White House and the Pentagon from up there", and, agreeing with the host, that "signals intelligence is wonderful" from such a position.

The building is, he notes, hard to miss: it sits "way up at the top of Wisconsin Avenue, just immediately south of the National Cathedral. You could see the Russian embassy from everywhere in Washington."

The American site

The reciprocal offer was worse. "The Russians allowed us to purchase a dry riverbed in Moscow that was actually in this culvert."

What was built there could not be used. "We ended up having to tear the new embassy down, because the Russians had put listening devices in literally every beam and every 2x4 in the entire embassy."

Kiriakou's detail about why remediation was impossible is the memorable one: "Just pulling the wires out of it would have made the building collapse."

The retaliation

The consequence was symmetrical and long-running: "So we would not allow them to occupy their new embassy."

The episode belongs to a category of story Kiriakou tells often, technical surveillance directed at diplomatic premises and the people inside them, of which his own discovery of a listening device in his bedroom in Bahrain is the personal instance.

See also

- The bug in the bedroom
- Vladimir Putin
- John Kiriakou
