The building that used to house the Russian Consulate in San Francisco is a six-story, brick-fronted building that sits on a hill in Pacific Heights. When the Trump administration decided on Aug. 31 to shutter the building 48 hours later, the consulate’s chimney began wheezing black smoke, as the employees rushed to burn (Foreign Policy assumes) anything confidential or inculpatory. But what people didn’t see as the smoke billowed up, was the array of antennas and satellites and electronic transmittal devices on the rooftop. So why shut down the San Francisco consulate instead of D.C. or New York? Foreign Policy interviewed over half a dozen former high-level U.S. intelligence officials about this question. As one of those officials put it, the suspected Russian spies were “doing peculiar things in places they shouldn’t be.” San Francisco was the oldest and most established Russian Consulate in the U.S., and for many years, the U.S. knew that Russia used San Fran as the focal point for espionage activity.
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