Spy: The Inside Story of How the FBI's Robert Hanssen Betrayed America (12 page)

At the appointed hour, the agents from Baltimore were discreetly in place, watching the phone booth. But the stakeout was disappointing. “The guilty agent spotted the surveillance all around, knew they were from Baltimore, and did not go to the phone booth. Later, he called a friend in the Baltimore office and said, ‘You must have something going on, I saw your whole group out on the street.’ They said, ‘Yeah, we were all out there,’ but they didn’t realize it was
him
.”

The comedy of errors ended when the agent in Baltimore remembered the phone call from his friend, the FBI man in Washington, and sheepishly came forward with the name. “Once we learned who had called Baltimore, we took a look at him. The guy liked to play the horses and was having marital troubles. And he had worked the case where the two documents were missing.” Still, the bureau had no proof, and the agent denied everything. “He was eased out,” the former FBI official said. “By now, he is long dead.”

When Hanssen directed the mole study, only one bureau turncoat had actually been caught and convicted. That was Richard Miller, the FBI agent arrested in 1984. But the Miller case in Los Angeles could not explain why the FBI and the CIA were losing agents in Washington and Moscow.
^*

Not only
UNSUB DICK
but all allegations of moles in the bureau, however vague, were in a real sense open cases. “Counterintelligence never stops trying to identify leaks, even years later,” said Paul Moore. “CI is still looking for a guy who sold a document from the Manhattan Project to the Russians for $750. He’s probably dead by now, but eventually the FBI will identify him. It’s relentless, and it’s all about details.”

In 1988, after months of intensive work, the research and writing were done. What made the finished product so extraordinarily sensitive was the fact that it specifically identified each Soviet recruitment and defector who had alleged that the FBI was penetrated, and it described the information they provided. Thus, if the study were to fall into the hands of the KGB, it could endanger the safety of any living sources who had been secretly recruited by the FBI. It was, in short, a bombshell.

When the study had been completed, classified
TOP SECRET
, reviewed, and approved by Hanssen, the volatile, critical nature of its contents was protected by a stern warning on the first page:

Better than anyone else in the FBI, Robert Hanssen knew how valuable his mole study would be to the KGB. Whose need to know could be greater?

One month after Hanssen returned to Washington he began his most intensive period of espionage, even as he directed the study to find the penetration inside the FBI, whom he saw every morning in the mirror.

The Soviet spy agency had, in previous messages, urged Hanssen to travel overseas to meet with them. When the KGB was fortunate enough to have a major source inside U.S. intelligence, it made every effort to meet the asset outside the country. Thus the CIA’s Aldrich Ames met the KGB in Bogotá, the NSA’s Ronald Pelton went to Vienna, others journeyed to Mexico City or Zurich.

There was good reason for this pattern; the KGB knew it could operate much more freely in an environment where it had more control. In Washington or New York, the FBI greatly outnumbered the KGB, and the risks of surveillance were accordingly much higher. In the case of Hanssen, there was another reason that the KGB was pressuring the spy they called “B” to meet overseas. They wanted to get a good look at him, learn or verify his identity, and assess their man firsthand. As Hanssen knew, a face-to-face meeting might lead to his unmasking; he would surely be secretly photographed by the KGB, for example.

Following the instructions he had received a year earlier, Hanssen early in September 1987 sent a letter to the accommodation address
NANCY
, the Alexandria home of Boris M. Malakhov. The handwritten envelope was addressed to
B. N. MALKOW
, with a fictitious return address.

In the letter inside, Hanssen once again made it clear that he knew too much about counterintelligence to play the game by the KGB’s rules. Hanssen’s “Dear Friends” letter began: “No, I have decided. It
must be on my original terms or not at all. I will not meet abroad or here.… I will help you when I can, and in time we will develop methods of efficient communication.”

He told them that unless he saw “an abort signal on our post from you” he would mail “a valuable package.” He would be looking for the KGB’s signal and cash at the designated dead drop at 7
A.M
. on September 16, or, if anything went wrong, on the same weekday and time in the three weeks following.
^*

“If my terms are unacceptable,” Hanssen added, “then place no signals and withdraw my contact.” He closed by flattering Cherkashin, though not mentioning him by name. “Excellent work by him has ensured this channel is secure for now. My regards to him and to the professional way you have handled this matter. Sincerely, Ramon.”

According to the FBI, the KGB never knew Hanssen’s identity until his arrest became public on February 20, 2001. Hanssen sought to preserve his anonymity for obvious reasons of self-protection: an FBI or CIA mole inside the KGB could not easily betray him if his identity remained unknown. His true name does not appear in the detailed KGB file of the case that the FBI eventually obtained. This could be seen as evidence, although certainly not conclusive, that the KGB never learned his name.

“They didn’t know who he was,” David Major insisted. “And if they checked up on Hanssen to find out his identity, that might have been detected by us [the FBI]. He was once seen at a drop by the KGB and he saw them. They knew it was a bureau source from the material, and they didn’t need to know more.”

Some experienced counterintelligence agents, however, snort at the idea that the KGB would not, over a period of sixteen years, have discovered Hanssen’s identity. Since he often drove his car to drop and signal sites, it would not have been difficult to write down or photograph his license plate and learn the owner from public motor vehicle records.
^†
Or the KGB might even have followed him to his home or office.

“The Russians always have countersurveillance which would have seen his car,” said Ed Curran, who worked on many of the major Soviet espionage cases for the FBI. If a Soviet source tried to remain anonymous in dealing with the bureau, Curran said, “we would do everything we could to find the guy’s identity.”

Dick Alu, another veteran FBI counterintelligence agent, was equally emphatic. “Bullshit they didn’t know his identity! He’s driving his own vehicle. After the first year when it became obvious this was not an FBI double agent operation, they had to find out who the hell it was and I’m sure they did.”

Whether or not the Russians ever succeeded in learning Hanssen’s identity, they were clearly convinced of the value of his information. True to his word, Hanssen mailed a package received by Malakhov on September 14 that included National Security Council documents marked
TOP SECRET
. The next day, the KGB placed $10,000 in cash in the
PARK
dead drop in Nottoway Park.

Along with the money, the KGB also proposed two additional dead drop sites in northern Virginia. One, codenamed
AN
, was in a park in the western part of Fairfax County, and another, codenamed
DEN
, was at a location even farther away.

Hanssen did not like the two new drop sites. Two weeks later, he left a note for the KGB at his favorite drop in Nottoway Park. “My Friends: Thank you for the $10,000. I am not a young man, and the commitments on my time prevent using distant drops such as you suggest. I know in this I am moving you out of your set modes of doing business, but my experience tells me … we can be actually more secure in easier modes.”

He then suggested using a parked car as a drop; if the Russians did not think that a good idea, he agreed to clear
AN
“this once.” But he asked the KGB to find “a comfortable Vienna VA signal site to call me to an exchange any following Monday.” He signed the letter “Ramon.” With the letter, Hanssen left a classified document describing the U.S. national intelligence program for 1987.

In insisting on drops close to home, and often using the same drops many times, Hanssen was breaking all the traditional rules of spycraft. But he may not have done so merely for convenience; using hiding places nearby helped him to conceal his activities. It allowed him to exchange documents for cash on the way to or from work, avoiding longer
absences that he might have to explain to his family. He could even tell his wife he was going to walk the dog.

As far as the increased risk was concerned, Hanssen may have been thinking “out of the box” in contrarian style. If the FBI knew that the KGB rarely used drops more than once, or avoided drops near a spy’s residence, then he would do just the opposite. This doubtless is what he meant by saying that “my experience tells me” easier is better.

The KGB was not about to argue with their primo spy, who could, they realized, break off communication at any time if his feathers were sufficiently ruffled. In which case, the Washington residentura would have some major explaining to do to Moscow Center.

Soon after, the KGB meekly proposed a signal site on the post of a stop sign on Courthouse Road, not far from Hanssen’s home in Vienna. And at the end of the month, the KGB deposited $100,000 into an escrow account created for “B” in a Moscow bank.

In the first week of November, Hanssen sent another letter to Malakhov with a return address of J. Baker in Chicago. He said he had an urgent package for the KGB, and asked for a signal so he could leave it the following Monday. In future contacts, Hanssen added, whenever he used “Chicago” in a return address, it meant he wanted an exchange the next Monday.

Hanssen had never liked dead drop
AN
to begin with, and in mid-November he sent a querulous letter to the KGB with a return address of “G. Robertson” in Houston. It read:

Hanssen was risking his life, but he wasn’t about to risk his shoes. On Monday, November 23, the KGB, properly chastised—and no doubt anxious to avoid any further irritation of their golden source—carried out an exchange at the
PARK
dead drop site, Hanssen’s old favorite.

Among the documents passed by Hanssen that day was a cable, classified
SECRET
, that reported on a meeting the previous month of Jack Platt, a CIA officer, and Gennady Vasilenko, a KGB major. A tall, athletic man, the Russian was a world-class volleyball player who had been selected for the Soviet Olympic team in 1964 but was sidelined by a shoulder injury before he joined the KGB. Vasilenko had worked in Washington in the late 1970s and was now stationed in Guyana. Platt had become friendly with Vasilenko in Washington, where they spent years trying to recruit each other, with no success. Still, both the CIA and the FBI continued to hope that one day it might happen.

When Vasilenko was leaving Washington in 1981 to return to Moscow, Platt invited him and his family to come for a farewell drink. The KGB man asked his superiors for permission. “He was told not to go and came anyway,” said Platt, who founded a private security firm after he retired from the agency. “I said then, ‘When you come out I’ll find you.’