Smoke seen pouring from Russian consulate in San Francisco after U.S. orders its closure – The Denver Publish

SAN FRANCISCO – On Friday, a day after the Trump administration ordered the shutdown amid escalating tensions between the US and Russia, sharp black smoke was seen pouring from a chimney at the Russian consulate in San Francisco.

Firefighters arriving on site were turned away by consulate officials who came from inside the building.

An Associated Press reporter heard people coming from inside the building tell firefighters that there was no problem and that consulate staff were burning unidentified items in a fireplace.

Mindy Talmadge, a spokeswoman for the San Francisco Fire Department, said the department received a call about the smoke and sent a crew to investigate, but found the smoke was coming from the chimney.

“They had a fire in their fireplace,” she said.

Talmadge said she didn’t know what burned them on a day when San Francisco’s normally chilly temperatures had risen to 95 degrees by midday.

“It wasn’t unintentional. They burned something in their fireplace, ”she said.

Workers are rushing to close Russia’s oldest US consulate before the Saturday deadline.

The order to Russia to vacate the consulate and an official diplomatic residence in San Francisco – home to a long-standing community of Russian emigrants and technology workers – escalated an already tense diplomatic standoff between Washington and Moscow.

On Friday morning, a handful of people with embassy businesses were allowed into the building. A day earlier, Russian citizens said they could pick up and renew their passports if they already had appointments. Consular officers made no comment when they got into cars with diplomatic license plates.

Sasha Sobol was among the crowd that went to the consulate on Friday morning to renew a Russian passport, but was told the document was not ready and was turned away in the early afternoon.

“It’s a shame because now we have to go to Seattle or Houston,” said Sobol, a joint US-Russian citizen who lives in Sunnyvale.

Those without an appointment have already been turned away.

The order to leave the consulate and official diplomatic residence in San Francisco – home to a longtime community of Russian émigrés and tech workers – escalated an already strained diplomatic standoff between Washington and Moscow, even for those who control activities within the closely guarded buildings.

“The government has finally realized that Russians are involved in intelligence operations at this consulate, which they have been doing for decades,” said Rick Smith, a seasoned FBI special agent who previously headed Russian counterintelligence at the San Francisco office. “It’s almost 50 years of history and part of a tit-for-tat, but that’s more like a hammer.”

In a statement posted on Facebook, the Russian consulate said the closure would harm both Russian and American citizens who need its services. The consulate issued more than 16,000 tourist visas to American citizens last year, it said.

Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Sakharova claims US special services intend to search the consulate on Saturday. She says the US is also planning to ransack apartments in San Francisco used by Russian diplomats and their families. Zakharova said that this means families will have to leave their homes for 10 to 12 hours for officers to search.

The State Department does not specifically comment on whether officials plan to search the premises. But the State Department said, as of Saturday, access to the consulate will only be granted with the permission of the State Department. It had no comment on the black smoke coming from the San Francisco embassy.

The State Department also ordered Russia to shut down trade missions in branch offices in Washington and New York. By next week, Russia will only have three consulates in the US – in Washington, DC, Seattle and Houston – as many as the US has in Russia, said department spokeswoman Heather Nauert.

The lockdowns on both US coasts were perhaps the most drastic US diplomatic measure against Russia since 1986, when the nuclear powers expelled dozens of their diplomats.

American counterintelligence officials have long kept an eye on Russia’s San Francisco outpost over concerns that people posted to the consulate as diplomats are spying.

Last December, the US kicked several Russian diplomats in San Francisco in response to allegations that Russia interfered in the presidential election. This time the State Department did not expel any consulate officer from the United States. In addition to Consul Sergey Petrov, the consulate’s website showed 13 other Russian officials working at the San Francisco Post Office.

Russia has a long history in the San Francisco Bay Area, where three Russian cathedrals mark the various facets of the Orthodox Church.

The Bay Area has more than 75,000 Russian-speaking residents, including 300,000 Russian-speakers in the greater Sacramento, California area, about 145 kilometers northeast of San Francisco.

There are shops in the streets near the consulate aimed at the city’s large community of Russian emigrants. It’s a few blocks from the Presidio, which was a US military fort and the headquarters of the US 6th Army before it was inactivated.