Spy: The Inside Story of How the FBI's Robert Hanssen Betrayed America (35 page)

Then the counterspies hit on a possible solution. The FBI knew that the Russian was interested in expanding his business overseas. The bureau approached an executive of an American corporation who agreed to help by inviting the Russian to a fictional business meeting that would supposedly take place in New York in the late spring of 2000. The invitation would seem plausible because the company that issued it was in an industry related to the business that the Russian was in.

It was much easier in 2000 for a Russian citizen to travel to the West than in the days of the Soviet Union, when it was virtually impossible, except as part of an official delegation. Still, the former KGB officer had to provide a convincing explanation for his trip. The FBI, the secret sponsors of the sham meeting, arranged to have an invitation sent to the Russian on the company’s letterhead.

“It was just to give him plausible cover to make the trip,” one FBI official said. The invitation was the document that the ex-KGB spy
needed to show to the authorities in Moscow to justify his travel to New York.

The Russian may have suspected that the FBI was behind the invitation, but there was no way he could be sure of that. “We invited him,” the FBI official said, “but he did not know it was us.”

And the ploy worked. The news was electrifying when it reached FBI headquarters. The Russian was coming. The plan was operational.

Mike Rochford, because of his experience and previous contacts with the former KGB man, was selected as the agent to make the approach in New York, and if successful, to negotiate the terms with the Russian.

Rochford was not only fluent in Russian but a man who might inspire confidence in his talks with the ex-KGB officer. His appearance helped. Although only in his mid-forties, he was gray-haired, with a gray mustache. A bit heavyset, calm, and soft-spoken, Rochford looked more like an English professor at an Ivy League college than a counterspy.

Rochford had started out at age twenty-three on CI-4, the KGB squad at the Washington field office, targeting Soviet counterintelligence officers for a decade. There followed three years in Nashville, where he acquired a taste for country music. Later, he moved up to a key counterespionage post at headquarters. He went back to Washington field in 1994 and for five years was in charge of the squad assigned to find the suspected penetration inside American intelligence.

Only Rochford was to meet the former KGB man. But a support team of half a dozen FBI agents accompanied Rochford to New York in April 2000. They included Les Wiser; Jim Milburn, the veteran FBI Russian analyst; Special Agent Debra Smith, now the squad supervisor for the mole hunt at the Washington field office; and special agents Ben Gessford and Gwen Fuller from the field office. The CIA also dispatched its own officers to work with the FBI agents.

The Russian, to the enormous excitement of the counterspies gathered in New York, indicated he was willing to deal—but slowly. Such matters were difficult, the Americans should understand, and would require extended discussions. He could not be expected to make a hasty decision. Still, it was not impossible that, providing various conditions were met, some accommodation could be reached of mutual interest.

But that was not the half of it. The Russian had a sensational secret, one he had kept from the KGB and the SVR, and from everyone else.

To Rochford’s utter astonishment, he revealed that he had access to the crown jewel, the actual KGB file on the American mole.

But how could this be? The Russian had stayed on only briefly when the KGB’s First Chief Directorate, its foreign intelligence arm, was renamed the SVR after the collapse of the Soviet Union in December 1991. Then he had left the government and retired. Surely there was no way he could get back into SVR headquarters, remove one of their most sensitive files, and stroll out with it unchallenged by armed guards.

The answer was soon apparent. Before he retired, and while he still had full access, he said, he had thoughtfully removed the file from Yasenevo, the Russian foreign intelligence headquarters, as insurance against a rainy day. He well understood its potential value. He had stashed it away and he was the only person in the world who knew where it was.

He did not have the file with him in New York, of course, but if the price was right …

The news was far beyond what
GRAYSUIT’S
managers ever could have anticipated. The file! The actual mole file!

The Russian’s revelation that he possessed the file meant that the bureau, no matter how high the cost, would have to strike a deal with him.

Mike Rochford knew something about how important real documents and files could be. In 1992, after being turned away by the CIA, Vasili Mitrokhin had defected to MI6, the British secret intelligence service, with an unprecedented trove of documents he had copied while working as the chief archivist inside the KGB. The British had whisked him to London and given him a new identity.
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Rochford, often with Bob Wade, a veteran FBI counterspy, had flown to London a dozen times during a two-year period to debrief Mitrokhin about the materials. Mitrokhin’s files revealed dozens of previously unknown KGB operations and unmasked two spies.

Now, in a New York hotel room, Rochford began the negotiations to buy the file. For Rochford, aided by his support team, it was essential to establish a bond of trust with the Russian. “You don’t just offer the money,” said one experienced FBI counterintelligence agent. “That can be insulting. You have to give some thought about each individual. You have to build a personal relationship. Of course the money comes up.”

As the talks proceeded, the Russian cautioned Rochford that the file did not contain the name of the mole, or reveal in which agency he worked, since he had never divulged either. But there were enough clues in the documents, the ex-KGB agent said, that he was confident the file would enable the bureau to identify “Ramon Garcia.”

There were several secret meetings over the better part of a week between Rochford and the Russian, as they hammered out the agreement, including how many millions of dollars the FBI would have to pay for the file—after the bureau had a chance to examine it, of course.

That condition was one of the first hurdles to be overcome, and it was a major one, because the FBI insisted that the Russian relinquish the file before he was paid. The bureau was not about to buy a pig in a poke.

“He wanted the money up front,” one FBI source said. “The guy said he could get a tape recording with the mole’s voice, but he didn’t know who he is. It sounded fishy. Is this guy trying to scam us? ‘This is going to be a dynamite tape,’ he says.”

A tape recording! Now the FBI agents wanted to get their hands on the file more than ever. But the Russian had to be persuaded to turn over the file first, and to trust the U.S. government to keep its commitments if the file, upon analysis, proved to be what he said it was.

It was a delicate dance, because the thought must have crossed the mind of the former KGB officer that once the FBI had the file, it could walk away and leave him sitting in Moscow with no payment at all, duped by the Americans. “His concern,” one FBI official recalled, “was that he not be squeezed like a lemon and just left.”

The million-dollar bounty that
BUCKLURE
had offered more than a dozen years ago was now far too low. Aside from inflation to consider, there was the unique value of the product.

“He wanted a great deal of money without producing anything,” the FBI official said. Both sides were wary. “It was like two scorpions. He wanted more and we wanted less.”

Finally, after intense negotiations, Rochford and the Russian settled
on a price, and it was huge: the FBI paid a whopping $7 million for the file on the mole.

A good-faith initial deposit was placed in escrow in a U.S. bank. There would be a series of payments into the account over the next several months.

Aside from the negotiations over price, there were a host of other questions to be settled. Arrangements would have to be made for the file to be physically handed over in Moscow. But the FBI is largely precluded from operating overseas; the CIA would have to be brought in to manage this part.

The ex-KGB officer would then need to get out of Russia, with as many family members as possible. He would surely be imprisoned or shot if the SVR discovered what he had done.

There were details to be worked out about his life in the United States. He would have to be given a new identity, his personal safety and that of his family guaranteed for life. It would not be enough to settle him into a seaside mansion in La Jolla or some other pleasant spot; he would have to feel certain he was beyond the reach of the SVR. True, the KGB reportedly gave up assassinations more than two decades ago, but defectors, even if they do not spend every moment looking over their shoulder for a hit man from Moscow, are never entirely free of concerns about their security.

Officials were extraordinarily tight-lipped about many of the details involved in acquiring the file and getting it out of Russia.
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But when, as planned, the former KGB man returned to Moscow after the negotiations in New York, the CIA established contact with him. When all the arrangements were complete, it was to the CIA that the Russian turned over the file.

Early in November 2000, the file, carefully guarded every moment of its clandestine journey from Moscow, arrived at FBI headquarters in Washington. According to a senior bureau official, “It came in one package, which was actually several smaller packages, all of which would fit into a medium-sized suitcase.” The file was able to fit into such a relatively small space because much of the material was on computer floppy disks.

Everything was taken immediately to the FBI laboratory on the third floor. The first order of business was a forensic examination of the file. The documents were carefully dusted for fingerprints, but there were no useful prints on them or on the floppy disks. Then every document, envelope, and disk was photographed.

One of the packages came with a note that said, “Don’t open this.” The FBI counterintelligence agents were itching to open it and overwhelmed with curiosity, but they waited. In a few weeks, they knew, the Russian would come out of Moscow and explain the mystery package.

In the meantime, there was work to be done. There were translations needed; some of the material was in Russian. For example, the KGB man had managed to compile an inventory and description in Russian of every document—six thousand pages in all—that had been passed to Moscow by the mole; the list would have to be translated back into English.

The file included the letters exchanged by the Russians and the mole over the course of fifteen years, some on computer disks, and many of the titles of the documents he had given to the KGB. The actual documents that the mole had passed to the Russians were not included in the package from Moscow. But the detailed notes taken by the KGB man described the documents in sufficient detail so that the FBI could retrieve them from its own files, as well as from the files of the NSA and the CIA.

FBI analysts began a thorough examination of the file, searching for clues that would confirm the identity of the mole at last. The letters and the disks nowhere identified the mole by name or by organization; he was referred to as “Ramon” or “B” or “Ramon Garcia.” But there were hints here and there: the KGB’s source talked about new assignments and promotions on certain dates.
GRAY DECEIVER
, it was believed, would soon be arrested.

One of the packages contained the potential treasure that the Russian had first revealed in the meetings in New York, a tape recording of a conversation labeled July 21, 1986, between a KGB officer, Aleksandr K. Fefelov, and the unknown mole. The KGB officer, speaking from a pay phone, had taped part of the conversation.

Sometime in November, Michael Waguespack listened to the tape. Wags, as he was known, was a gray-haired, congenial Louisianan who grew up in the Cajun country near New Orleans and was regarded as one of the best counterintelligence agents in the bureau. He had worked
espionage cases, including some major ones, for more than twenty years, in San Diego, Chicago, New York, and Washington. To hear the tape, Waguespack, with Mike Rochford and Tim Bereznay, went to one of the FBI lab’s secluded rooms tucked away in the basement of headquarters.

As they settled back to listen, they were certain that they would, at last, hear the voice of Brian Kelley,
GRAY DECEIVER
. “This was the piece we needed to nail it down,” Waguespack said.

No one expected to hear the voice that boomed out into the room.

“It was apparent to all three of us it was not him,” Waguespack said.

The agents were stunned and chagrined at the unexpected turn of events. Three years lost; all that effort, and now, just as Rochford was sure that the mole was within his grasp, the shocking revelation, on a fourteen-year-old snippet of magnetic tape, that the bureau had been chasing the wrong man.

But if the voice on the tape was not Brian Kelley, then who was it?

Waguespack recalled his frustration. “I kept listening and I said, ‘I know that voice. The inflection. I know that voice, but I can’t put it with anybody. That voice sounds familiar.’ We broke off that day still unsure.

“Bob King and the other analysts started to look at the material in the file. It had the Patton quote.” Twice in the KGB file, the mole had quoted General Patton as saying to his troops, “Let’s get this over with so we can kick the shit out of the purple-pissing Japanese.” And suddenly King knew where he had heard those words. “King recalled that Hanssen had used that phrase, ‘the purple-pissing,’ when King worked for him in the Soviet analytical unit,” Waguespack said. “He remembered it. He said, ‘I think that is Bob Hanssen.’

“We went back and listened to the tape again and this time I realized it was Hanssen. I said, ‘My God, that’s him!’ I went to Neil Gallagher and I said, ‘Strap on, because here we go.’ ”