Nuland landed in soup over Ukraine remark after using unencrypted phone
WASHINGTON A senior US State Department officer and the ambassador to Ukraine apparently used unencrypted cellphones for a call about political developments in Ukraine that was leaked and touched off an international furore, US officials said in Washington on Friday.
In the call, Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland used an expletive in apparently disparaging the idea of relying on help from the EU in negotiating a political solution in Ukraine.
The US officials said the conversation between Nuland and ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt was likely intercepted at the Ukraine end and that they believe both Ambassador Pyatt and Nuland were speaking on cellphones.
An official familiar with the matter said State Department employees, including officials at a senior level, are not issued cellphones that use encryption.
State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki confirmed this at a regular briefing. “All Department of State government-owned BlackBerry devices have data encryption. However, they don’t have voice encryption,” she said.
The US officials said Pyatt was in Ukraine at the time of the call, although it was not clear where Nuland was.
They did not give the date of the call, although they said it was recent. The issues that Nuland and Pyatt discussed occurred in the last few days of January.
The audio clip was first posted on Twitter by Dmitry Loskutov, an aide to Russian Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin, a diplomatic source said. A second intercepted audio conversation, between senior EU diplomats, was posted on YouTube around the same time.
The Obama Administration has not formally acknowledged the authenticity of the audio clip or accused any specific party of recording it.
Nuland, who met President Viktor Yanukovich in Kyiv on Thursday, described the bugging and leaks as “pretty impressive tradecraft” but said it would not hurt her ties with the Ukrainian opposition.
In the call, apparently made at a time when opposition leaders were considering an offer from President Viktor Yanukovich to join his cabinet, she suggested that one of three leading figures might accept a post but two others should stay out. In the end, all three rejected the offer. The leak coincided with accusations from Moscow of US interference in Ukraine. Washington and European countries back those opposing Yanukovich, a close Kremlin ally.
On Friday, one senior US official in Washington said: “The quality of the recording would certainly indicate that this was not the work of simple hackers, but rather an intelligence service with an interest in distracting from the efforts of the people of Ukraine to recover their own government.”
The posting of the conversation surfaced as the US faces international uproar over its own electronic eavesdropping disclosed by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden last year.