Spy: The Inside Story of How the FBI's Robert Hanssen Betrayed America (32 page)

Mislock did not have to mention a million dollars—the KGB officer knew what was tacitly being offered. For Cherkashin, it could have been a very profitable ride back to his hotel.

But Cherkashin was a tough guy, a KGB veteran with a poker face that never betrayed his thoughts or emotions. Mislock got nowhere. At the hotel, he let Cherkashin out of the car and they bade each other a pleasant good night.

It did not end the bureau’s continued interest in Viktor Cherkashin. “We gathered all the information we had on Cherkashin,” a former senior FBI man said. “There was an event involving a bicycle that Cherkashin was riding through Rock Creek Park in the mid-1980s. We thought it might involve a penetration. Cherkashin may have been checking a signal site, getting ready to clear a drop, or perhaps meeting an individual. We reexamined those events, such as Cherkashin showing up in Rock Creek, in the post-Pitts, post-Ames time frame. The incident was being looked at very intently to see if it was a drop, a signal site, or even a brush pass.”
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The FBI assigned Special Agent Mike Rochford to examine the Cherkashin file. He had been the case agent responsible for tracking Cherkashin in the early 1980s. He was also one of two agents who had interviewed Vitaly Yurchenko during his brief interlude as a defector. Rochford spoke Russian and knew a lot about the KGB. He was to play a central role in the unmasking of Robert Hanssen.

“Mike Rochford began an exhaustive reexamination of everything we had on Cherkashin,” the FBI man said. “When code clerks had arrived, when the pouch was sent to Moscow, little things that might indicate something big going on.” Then, as the mole hunters focused on particular possible suspects, they could turn to Rochford’s study. “We would look to see if there was anything corresponding with the suspects’ lives that would explain intense activity in the residency.”

Just such wisps, strands, and tiny details are the tools of counterintelligence. Often, the microscopic attention to detail ends in frustration and turns up nothing. “The Cherkashin study did not lead directly to Hanssen,” the FBI man said, “but it eliminated some suspicions.”

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At the end of July 2000, Hanssen retrieved a letter from the SVR. It sought to reassure him that the political changes in Russia “had not affected our resources,” meaning that they still had plenty of money to pay him. After a number of upheavals in the Russian cabinet, Vladimir Putin, a former KGB officer, had been elected president six months earlier, in March. Once again, the SVR assured Hanssen that his “personal security” came first.

His handlers then asked for information on “human, electronic and technical penetrations in our residencies here and in other countries.” Apparently the SVR knew about the active search for penetrations secretly being carried on at the CIA and the FBI, for the letter said: “We are very interested in getting … information on the work of a special group which serches [sic] ‘mole’ in CIA and FBI. We need this information especially to take necessary additional steps to ensure Your personal security.…” In effect, Moscow was asking Hanssen how close the mole hunters were getting to him.

Once more, the SVR pressed Hanssen to meet outside the United States, which he had consistently refused to do. In the meantime, it set the next exchange at
LEWIS
, in the Long Branch Nature Center, for November 21. And the SVR proposed to use dead drop
ELLIS
in Foxstone Park once a year, on February 18. It was a date that would prove fateful for Robert Hanssen.

The SVR also chided Hanssen for continuing to send letters to them through the mail. “You know very well our negative attitude toward this method,” the Russians said. But a very brief note giving a date, time, and place would be all right if he needed an “urgent exchange.”

Again rejecting Hanssen’s pleas to deposit money in his Swiss bank accounts, the SVR argued that it was “very risky to transfer money in Zurich because now it is impossible to hide its origin.” Then, seeking to reassure their mole that there would be no leaks at Moscow’s end, the letter added that “an insignificant number of persons know about you, your information and our relationship.”

On November 17, 2000, Hanssen wrote back, complaining that “For me breaks in communications are most difficult and stressful. Recent changes in U.S. law now attach the death penalty to my help to you as you know, so I do take some risk.”

But, he assured Moscow, “I know far better than most what minefields are laid and the risks.” The SVR, he said, might overestimate the
FBI’s abilities, but still, an overconfident Russian intelligence officer might, “as we say, step in an occasional cowpie. (Message to the translator: Got a good word for cowpie in Russian?? Clue, don’t blindly walk behind cows.)”

He added:

Still pushing for money in a Swiss bank, Hanssen agreed that Switzerland offered no real security, “but insulated by laundering on both the in and out sides” it could be managed. Perhaps he could set up a corporation that would lend him mortgage money to conceal his SVR payments.

It was his last letter to the Sluzhba Vneshnei Razvedki. Unknown to Robert Hanssen, his luck had already run out.

In 1998, a year after Brian Kelley had returned to CIA headquarters from overseas, he was invited to join a supersecret counterespionage operation.

The agency, he was told, had snared a Russian intelligence agent who was ready to defect, to come to the West and solve at last the mystery of who had compromised the Felix Bloch case. It was an exciting assignment, particularly for Kelley, the counterintelligence officer who was first to discover the trail that led to Bloch.

To join the secret operation, Kelley was told he would have to submit to a lie detector test. Kelley had taken a routine polygraph a year earlier and had no objections to undergoing another. Once he was strapped to the machine, the examiners questioned him, probing his reaction to the possibility that the mole who had warned the KGB about Felix Bloch was soon to be unmasked.

Kelley was assured he had passed the polygraph test. But soon afterward, his superiors in the directorate of operations told him that the anticipated Russian defector had changed his mind and would not be coming to the United States after all; as a result, Kelley was no longer needed for the special operation.

The entire business was an elaborate ruse to deceive Kelley into taking a new polygraph, where he could be questioned about the betrayal of the Bloch case. There was no Russian defector, no secret operation.

Unbeknownst to Brian Kelley, he had emerged as the prime suspect in the secret FBI and CIA mole hunt that had begun after the arrest of
Aldrich Ames four years earlier. And, ironically, it was the Bloch case that had cast the dark shadow of suspicion on Kelley, an innocent CIA officer.

The FBI gave the effort to uncover the mole a new code name:
GRAYSUIT
.

As suspects emerged, they would be given cryptonyms as a subset of the word
GRAY
. Thus it was that in the innermost sanctum of the bureau’s mole hunters, Brian Kelley became
GRAY DECEIVER
.

Kelley was well known in the counterintelligence world, for he had built his career as a specialist in illegals, the Russian spies sent to the West without benefit of diplomatic cover. Kelley had headed the illegals group at the CIA.

His was an arcane, difficult specialty, because illegals are rarely detected. They do not pose as diplomats and often steal the identities of long dead or living persons—they can be anybody.

It was Kelley who was credited with unmasking Reino Gikman, the KGB illegal who turned up in Vienna when Felix Bloch was deputy chief of mission. And it was Gikman, metamorphosing into “Pierre Bart,” who dined in Paris with Bloch in mid-May 1989 and left with the airline bag that Bloch had placed under the table. It was Gikman as well who had called Bloch a month later to warn him of “a contagious disease.”

Although Bloch was not arrested or charged with espionage, inside the CIA Brian Kelley was widely known and admired as the officer who had made the Bloch case. He received a medal at an awards ceremony, and among his colleagues he was given credit for his detective work. It was not his fault, after all, that an unknown mole inside American intelligence had warned the KGB so that it, in turn, could warn Bloch, to the great and continuing frustration of the FBI.

And it was precisely because Kelley had broken the Bloch case that he fell under suspicion. When the mole hunters hunt, they construct a matrix, matching the nature of the secrets believed to have been compromised with the names of the people who had access to those secrets. Then they attempt to winnow down the list, eliminating the names, for example, of those whose access might have occurred only after the suspected date that the information leaked.

Brian Kelley had joined the CIA after twenty years in the Air Force. He was persuaded to join the agency by Gus Hathaway, who as the CIA
chief of counterintelligence had appointed the mole hunt team that eventually unmasked Aldrich Ames as a KGB spy.

At the agency, Kelley was a career officer in the directorate of operations. He had carved out his illegals specialty almost from the start. He worked counterintelligence cases in New York City in the early 1980s, and later was posted to Panama for a time, returning to headquarters at the end of 1997. Long divorced, he had a daughter who also worked at the CIA, and two sons.

Kelley was dedicated to his work. But he told friends he felt he was never fully accepted in the agency because he had been a military man, not a career CIA employee from the start. A former colleague described him as “balding, nondescript, very serious, not outgoing, not joking, always cautious, always protective.”

When Kelley returned from Panama, he was assigned to review the Bloch case files, to go over them once again to make sure nothing had been missed. But he did not know that the task was a subterfuge, designed to keep him busy and cut off from other agency operations and secrets.

As Kelley reported to CIA headquarters each day in Langley, Virginia, his life was under microscopic examination a few miles away, across the Potomac in the Washington field office of the FBI. And the agent looking through that microscope was Mike Rochford, the FBI man who had run the Cherkashin study for the bureau that reexamined the file on the KGB counterintelligence officer, including the episode with the bicycle in Rock Creek Park.

Rochford, a tall, affable man, had a background that would turn out to be remarkably similar to Robert Hanssen’s. He was born in Chicago, where his father had been a police officer for almost three decades. He was educated at Catholic schools in that city and joined the FBI in 1974. Hanssen had studied Russian in college; the bureau had sent Rochford to language school to learn Russian.

At the field office, Rochford was in charge of the squad assigned to find the suspected penetration inside American intelligence. The more he looked at Brian Kelley’s career, the more convinced he became that Kelley,
GRAY DECEIVER
, was the mole.
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