Spy: The Inside Story of How the FBI's Robert Hanssen Betrayed America (31 page)
Read Spy: The Inside Story of How the FBI's Robert Hanssen Betrayed America Online
Authors: David Wise
Tags: #Non-Fiction, #History, #Biography
[W]e do both know that money is not really “put away for you” except in some vague accounting sense. Never patronize at this level. It offends me, but then you are easily forgiven. But perhaps I shouldn’t tease you. It just gets me in trouble.
thank you again,
Ramon.
After twenty-one years as a Russian spy, Hanssen was indeed about to get into trouble, but not in a way he expected.
*
The same rules prevailed in Moscow, where for years American officials had to call the foreign ministry for airline tickets, housekeepers, television repairs, and other services. The office they called was really part of the KGB.
*
In 2001, nine countries were required to seek some type of travel approval. Three countries, Russia, China, and Vietnam, had to file a request with OFM for their diplomats to travel beyond twenty-five miles from the capital, but were then free to go after forty-eight hours unless turned down. Six other countries, Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Libya, North Korea, and Sudan, had to receive advance approval from OFM to travel beyond the twenty-five-mile limit. Ukraine and the other former Soviet republics, and the once-Communist countries of Eastern Europe, were no longer under any travel restrictions.
*
The term originated in an earlier era, before there were electric timers, when Orthodox congregations had to make sure that a gentile, perhaps a retainer engaged for that purpose, or a janitor, was available to turn on the lights.
*
In January 1993, Mir Aimal Kansi, a twenty-eight-year-old Pakistani, walked along a line of cars waiting to turn left into the CIA headquarters and systematically gunned down the occupants with an AK-47 assault weapon, killing two CIA employees and wounding two other CIA workers and an agency contractor. Kansi was arrested by the FBI in Pakistan in 1997, brought to the United States, tried and convicted of murder in a Virginia court, and in January 1998 sentenced to death.
†
The familiar quotation “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing,” often attributed to Edmund Burke, the eighteenth-century British statesman, is probably a version of a similar idea expressed in his
Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents
(1770).
*
When FBInet began in the early 1990s, all the security protections were not in place. “Later on,” Ohlson said, “the system had a server and agents were instructed to write sensitive documents to a protected segment of the server. With the password breaker he could get into the protected part.”
*
Webster commission, p. 12.
*
V.K.” was not further identified. The FBI affidavit that quoted from the Hanssen file described him only as a “senior officer” of the SVR. He was, however, Vladimir A. Kirdyanov, ostensibly the first secretary of the Russian embassy at the time.
*
Kim Philby,
My Silent War
(New York: Grove Press, 1968).
*
The stilted language in some of the correspondence contained in the KGB/SVR file suggests that perhaps some of Hanssen’s letters were translated from English into Russian and then back into English. The reference to “the colored stick-pin call” almost certainly means the yellow thumbtack that the SVR instructed Hanssen to use as an emergency signal. It would be very odd for a native English speaker such as Hanssen to call a thumbtack a “colored stick-pin.”
BUCKLURE
The Safeway in the Georgetown section of Washington is only a few blocks down the hill from the Soviet (now Russian) embassy, and many of the residents of the embassy’s apartment complex like to shop there. The store is also widely known as “the social Safeway” because it is popular with the upscale young professionals who live in the area.
In 1982, the produce section of the Safeway was the setting for an unlikely Cold War drama. Dimitri I. Yakushkin, the KGB
rezident
in Washington for the past seven years, was about to return home to Moscow. The FBI knew this, and the CI-2 squad that specialized in the KGB’s Line PR political officers decided to approach him to see if he could be persuaded to defect.
A cold pitch, as it is known in the business, to a KGB
rezident
, especially an experienced spy like Yakushkin, had almost no chance of success, but nothing ventured, nothing gained. For a week, the squad, operating out of the Washington field office, was on Yakushkin, waiting for a moment when he was alone. It came in the Safeway.
Special Agent Dale H. Pugh sidled up to the KGB man who was in the produce section, carefully feeling the oranges for any soft spots. The Russian made a striking figure. He was six foot four, about 220 pounds, and wore a beret, which made him look like a cross between an artist in Montmartre and a Redskins linebacker. Yakushkin came from a prominent Russian family. Urbane and well-educated, fluent in English, he had been the KGB
rezident
at the Soviet Mission to the United Nations for six years before he was sent to Washington.
The KGB man had come shopping with his wife, Irina. In the store,
they split up. Another FBI agent, Grover Gibson, was trailing her, keeping Pugh in his line of sight so that he could signal his partner if Mrs. Yakushkin suddenly decided to rejoin her husband. The FBI men were dressed in belted trench coats; they had not expected to end up in a supermarket, and Pugh felt conspicuous among the grocery shoppers.
Pugh introduced himself to Yakushkin, identified himself as an FBI agent, and gave a fake name that he often used operationally. Yakushkin asked to see his ID. Pugh, a rookie at the time, produced it, realizing with a sinking feeling that it wouldn’t match the name he had given. Yakushkin, examining Pugh’s credential, saw that right away, and smiled.
The FBI man tried to persuade Yakushkin to meet him somewhere so they could talk privately, but the KGB agent would have none of it. Finally Pugh, following instructions from his squad supervisor, James O. Stassinos, offered the Russian $20 million to defect to the United States.
“Young man,” Yakushkin said, “I appreciate the offer. Twenty years ago I might have been interested.” And with that, he walked away.
Yakushkin appeared more amused than offended by the encounter. But there was an unspoken subtext to the dialogue by the orange bin at the Georgetown Safeway. Yakushkin had a girlfriend from North Carolina the entire time he was in the United States. As he may have suspected, she was an FBI source. What he told her, and it was not much, she told the FBI.
Dale Pugh did not mention the woman when he made his pitch. Nor was it a question of coercion; Yakushkin was too big a figure in the KGB to worry about how the liaison would look in Moscow if the FBI revealed it. But the bureau hoped that Yakushkin liked his woman friend well enough that she might be an additional incentive for him to defect and remain in the United States. The FBI even asked the woman to give Yakushkin a copy of Graham Greene’s novel
The Honorary Consul
in the hope that it might put ideas in his head.
*
The novel, set in a provincial town in the north of Argentina, has the usual array of expatriate, tormented Greene characters. Charley Fortnum, the British honorary consul, is sixty-one and a drunk. He marries a twenty-year-old prostitute; when he is kidnapped by leftist revolutionaries who mistake him for the American ambassador, the British
government does not even consider him worth the ransom. After he is rescued by police, London rewards his years of service by dismissing him. The bureau may have thought that the theme of an older man in love with a younger woman, living in a foreign country and unappreciated by his government, might resonate with Yakushkin.
It was not the first time that the FBI had tried to romance Yakushkin. A previous attempt by FBI agent Ted Gardner had taken place in downtown Washington at the Mayflower Hotel a year earlier. Gardner, then in charge of the Washington field office, accompanied by Phillip Parker, his counterintelligence chief, waited in the lobby for Yakushkin, whom they knew was due at the hotel with his woman friend, either to drop her off or join her in her room. The pair arrived, but when they reached the elevators, a third, unknown person had joined them, so Gardner did not make the approach.
Neither money, sex, nor Graham Greene influenced Yakushkin. The KGB man went home as scheduled, and rose to become head of the American department of the spy agency’s first chief directorate, its foreign intelligence arm. He was a mentor and protector of Vitaly Yurchenko, who had been security chief of the Washington embassy when Yakushkin was the
rezident
. Yurchenko was the high-level KGB man who defected in 1985, changed his mind, and returned to Moscow three months later.
*
As a senior KGB agent and top official in the Washington residency, Yakushkin would have been a huge catch for the FBI. The bureau would never have paid anything like $20 million to get him, but the field agents might have dangled that enormous sum to play on his ego and show that they were serious. Had Yakushkin defected, his knowledge of Moscow’s spying was so extensive that he could have shut down the KGB’s operations in the United States.
The two attempts to recruit the top KGB man in Washington demonstrated that the FBI was not hesitant to use cash as a weapon to recruit Russians in the Cold War. At least in some circumstances, the bureau and the CIA hoped, money might be the bait to land the big one.
And so, in 1987, long before the arrest of Aldrich Ames in 1994, the FBI launched a joint operation with the CIA, aimed at buying Soviet intelligence officers with large amounts of cash. The program, designed by Robert Wade, the assistant chief of the FBI’s Soviet section, was codenamed
BUCKLURE
by the FBI; the CIA called it
RACKETEER
.
“BUCKLURE
was created to recruit Russians who could help us find a mole,” one veteran FBI agent explained. With the help of the CIA, the bureau began logging the whereabouts of Soviet intelligence officers who had worked in the United States at a time when American assets were being lost in the Soviet Union, and who had then gone back to Moscow. Some had been reassigned abroad, others had retired. Many were KGB “American targets” officers, the Line KR spies who had been sent to the United States to try to recruit people, especially inside American intelligence.
Before long,
BUCKLURE
had compiled a list of ninety to one hundred potential recruits worldwide. “The list became very focused on those who we wanted, who would have the answers,” a former senior FBI official said. All the approaches to the KGB officers were made outside Russia.
By the mid-1990s, however, despite the efforts of
BUCKLURE
and the arrests of the CIA’s Jim Nicholson and the FBI’s Earl Pitts, the Special Investigations Unit at the CIA, with the help of dozens of FBI agents, had not solved all of the anomalies still plaguing U.S. counterintelligence, including the tip-off to Felix Bloch and the troublesome technical compromises.
The trolling for SVR agents through
BUCKLURE
and
RACKETEER
was intensified. In the beginning, the going price for a KGB officer who could identify a mole was a million dollars.
*
It was hard cash, ready to be paid.
A CIA man involved in
RACKETEER
said the figure of a million dollars was based on actual experience. “Sometime in the early eighties,” he said, “we offered a KGB officer in Latin America five hundred thousand dollars and he turned it down. So we upped it to a million. We jointly put a million bucks into a fiscal kitty. A million per guy.”
When a likely prospect was located abroad, the FBI might ask the CIA to make the approach. The FBI man explained what might be said
to the Russian: “We know you are a good guy, you don’t want to defect or work for us. But you give us the name of a penetration, we give you a million dollars. You don’t have to defect, and nobody knows about this except the president of the United States and the two of us.”
“We pitched a lot of people,” another senior FBI man recalled. “The Russians got wind of what we were doing around nineteen ninety-six or ninety-seven. They knew we were trying to recruit people for a lot of money.”
The bureau set its sights high; it did not hesitate to go after even the celebrated Viktor Cherkashin, the canny KGB chief of counterintelligence in the Washington residency, who, as the CIA and the bureau later learned to their sorrow, was the key player in the handling of both Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen.
The attempt to recruit Cherkashin was made by Ray Mislock, then the special agent in charge of counterintelligence for the FBI’s Washington field office. Cherkashin had returned to Washington around 1997 to attend a conference. It was long after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and by this time senior KGB officers often fraternized with American intelligence officials, their former foes, at various international meetings.
Cherkashin had agreed to have dinner at the Old Angler’s Inn in Potomac, Maryland, with Brent Scowcroft, who had been national security adviser to President Gerald Ford and the first President Bush. It was arranged beforehand that Mislock would show up as an unannounced added guest. At an opportune moment during dinner, Mislock let Cherkashin know what was on his mind. Relations are better, Mislock said; we would like to solve some unanswered questions. Cherkashin was noncommittal. The dinner was pleasant, the three men chatted amiably. But after dessert and coffee, by prearrangement, Scowcroft bowed out.
Now Mislock, as he had plotted, was alone with Cherkashin. He offered to drive the former KGB man back to his hotel in Tysons Corner, across the river in northern Virginia. In the car, Mislock pitched Cherkashin. He was explicit; the FBI man wanted to know the identity of the mole inside U.S. intelligence.
