Spy: The Inside Story of How the FBI's Robert Hanssen Betrayed America (6 page)

As the bureau debated whether to expand its use of polygraphs, it brought in Dr. John A. Podlesny, a Ph.D. psychologist from the University of Utah, to study the problem at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia. The intelligence division’s liaison with the professor, Joe Tierney recalled, was Robert Hanssen.
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The result, according to one former FBI man, is that “Hanssen influenced the bureau not to use polygraphs.” Academic studies about polygraphs tend to be abstruse, complicated documents, full of acronyms and jargon and not easily understood by those outside the polygraph fraternity. To FBI officials, Hanssen seemed particularly adept at explaining what it all meant. In Hanssen’s interpretation, the data from the study meant that polygraphs had limited value, perhaps useful to a degree only in a specific investigation. Hanssen, Tierney said, described “two different scenarios. One where there is a focused investigation and the polygrapher knows a lot about the subject and the case and the areas where possible deception might occur. But it’s different in a general, screening polygraph. It’s a grind; everybody understands that most of the people they are polygraphing are good
law-abiding citizens.” The work was so boring and unproductive, Tierney added, “You couldn’t ask people to do it [screening polygraphs] for more than three years; they’d go crazy.”

As Hanssen explained it, Tierney said, in all polygraphs “the likelihood of a false negative—the polygrapher says I see no indication of deception and the polygrapher is wrong—is higher than the likelihood of a false positive, where the polygrapher says the guy is lying and the polygrapher is wrong.”

Put simply, Hanssen was reporting that polygraphs did not work very well because people could fool the machine. As a result, more subjects could get away with lying than could tell the truth but be wrongly accused of deception.

“There was a lot of loose talk about how to beat the polygraph: take two aspirin, clamp your toes together, think of people in a movie, or pinch yourself,” Tierney recalled. “I have no idea whether any of it worked.” But because of Hanssen’s expertise about polygraphs, “he would have been in a pretty good position—better than others—to beat it, if it is possible, if he’d been given one.”

Not that there was much danger he would ever be wired to the machine. “Hanssen knew the bureau’s thinking, and that culturally it was unlikely to happen. There has been some speculation that if he had known he would have to take a polygraph, he would not have done what he did.”

During Hanssen’s time in the budget unit, he was at the nerve center of the intelligence division and its foreign counterintelligence activities. The unit managed the FBI’s portion of the National Foreign Intelligence Program (NFIP), the program that accounts for about two-thirds of the nation’s overall intelligence spending.
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It was Hanssen’s unit that prepared the division’s budget figures for Congress. As a result, he had access to the full range of the FBI’s intelligence and counterintelligence (CI) operations.

“In the budget unit,” said David Major, a longtime FBI counterintelligence agent, “Hanssen knew what worked, what we were spending money on, and what we were going to spend money on. If he had been
a street agent he would only know what was going on in his squad. But Bob understood the totality. He was one of the few people placed to know everything. Very few people know everything; maybe thirty people out of hundreds.”

Hanssen’s access, in sum, was virtually unlimited. Major was blunt: “He knew all the secrets.”

In August 1983, after two years in the budget unit, Hanssen was transferred across the hall to the Soviet analytical unit, formally designated CI-3A but known in-house as the “A” unit.

Now he would be concentrating exclusively on the FBI’s principal target, the Soviet Union. The analytical unit studied the espionage activities, methods, and agents of the KGB and the GRU in the United States. In short, in his new job, Hanssen would be analyzing who Moscow’s spies were and how they operated here.

Hanssen’s new boss was Thomas E. Burns, Jr., an astute New Yorker from Queens who went to Catholic schools and joined the FBI in 1964 right out of St. John’s University law school. He and Hanssen got on well and sometimes lunched together in the bureau’s cafeteria. Below Burns, the unit chief, were two supervisory special agents—Hanssen was one—and about eighteen analysts.

The A unit provided support for the FBI’s Soviet operational section, which from headquarters supervised the counterintelligence efforts of the Washington and New York field offices as well as the other field offices around the country.
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Once again, Hanssen was in the back room, watching from afar as others performed the more exciting work of trailing and occasionally catching Moscow’s spies.

But in his new assignment, Hanssen learned about the FBI’s operations using double agents. These were usually Americans, often someone in the military, who pretended to volunteer to spy for Moscow. The double agent, known in intelligence parlance as a DA, would pass along classified documents, most of them genuine, known in the trade as “feed.” The feed would be cleared at a high level after officials decided that the documents would not cause irredeemable harm to national security; the purpose of the exercise was to convince the KGB or the GRU that the double agent was genuine.

“We were looking at feed,” Burns said, “but mostly at the product, the tasking of the DA by the hostile service.” By studying the information the Soviets asked the double agent to obtain, the unit could learn what the Russians were after, and what, by inference, they already knew.

Since Soviet intelligence played the same game, running doubles against the United States, Hanssen’s unit would also try to determine whether any Soviet “walkins” to the FBI were genuine or fake. “We did reviews of the bona fides of volunteers and recruitments,” Burns said.

The analysts studied material flowing in from defectors and received data from the Soviet operational section. “For example, a new Soviet might arrive at their embassy and based on his slot, it would be suspected he was an IO [intelligence officer]. We would look at reports on a new IO or suspected IO, looking for clues to establish whether he was in fact an IO.”

But as important as these tasks were, the unit had another crucial mission: to pinpoint penetrations by Soviet intelligence inside the United States government. “If we identified a Soviet as an intelligence officer,” Burns said, “the operational section would take a closer look at him, which in turn could lead to identifying a penetration. Or we might find an operation had been compromised. We would pass that along to the operational section, which would conduct the investigation. A penetration would be one possible explanation for the compromise.”

The best way to find a mole, of course, was to recruit someone in the opposition intelligence service who could reveal the name. “A recruited agent gives away people right up front, to protect themselves,” Burns pointed out.

Recruiting KGB agents was the responsibility not of the analysts but of the Soviet operational section of division 5, the intelligence division.
“The highest purpose of a bureau recruitment would be to try to identify penetrations in the U.S. government,” Burns added. This dovetailed nicely with the goal of the analytical unit. “The primary goal of our unit was to find where the Soviets were getting their information.”

There was enormous excitement in 1983 in the intelligence division and in the Soviet analytical unit, because the FBI, unknown to Moscow, had recruited two KGB officers inside the Soviet embassy in Washington.

Lieutenant Colonel Valery Martynov had arrived in the capital in November 1980 with his wife, Natalya. A big man, over six feet tall and 190 pounds, he did not fit the stereotype of the glum Russian agent; he was jovial, with a friendly, cheerful manner, and spoke fluent English. He and his wife lived in Alexandria, Virginia, with their two children, a twelve-year-old son in junior high school and a daughter of five.

Martynov was a Line X officer, which meant that his job was to collect scientific and technical secrets for the KGB’s Directorate T. In 1982, a CIA officer spotted Martynov at a technical meeting. A former CIA man recalled how the dance began. “Martynov showed up at a meeting, one in a series, and our guy chatted with him. Martynov missed the next meeting, but at one of the subsequent meetings he was there. The agency officer came back and said, ‘This guy is different. This is a very unusual Russian.’ ”

At that point,
COURTSHIP
, a joint FBI-CIA unit created to recruit Soviets, moved in and took over. The operation was successful. Before very long, Martynov agreed to work for U.S. intelligence. The FBI gave him the code name
PIMENTA;
the CIA called him
GTGENTILE
. As his contact, the CIA assigned one of its most experienced case officers, Rodney W. Carlson. A tall, thin man with dark hair and a Lincolnesque face, Carlson in Moscow had handled the CIA’s most celebrated spy, Colonel Oleg Penkovsky of the GRU. For the FBI, Martynov’s case agent was Jim Holt, a white-haired Virginian and a veteran counterintelligence specialist. Over a period of three years, they met with Martynov more than fifty times, on the average of once every three weeks, in safe houses and other locations. His motives for spying for the FBI were not clear, although he was paid for his information and told that a much larger amount was being held in escrow for him in the United States should he ever decide to defect.

One intelligence officer who read the file on the case discounted money as Martynov’s primary motive. Rather, he thought, “it was the
excitement, and the idea of doing something really secret. You can’t believe what you are told about motivation anyway, because people don’t understand their own motivation. Martynov was intrigued by the game. He did not think spying for the Americans was wrong. Because he did not regard us as an enemy.”

In a separate, parallel operation that also began in 1982, the FBI recruited Sergei Motorin, a young KGB major from Archangel, a port city in Russia’s far north, who had arrived in Washington in 1980. Motorin was a Line PR officer, which meant he collected political intelligence. Sandy-haired, with a small mustache, Motorin, like Martynov, was a big man, a six-foot-two tennis player. He lived in an apartment in Arlington with his wife, Olga, and their two young girls.

But Motorin had a wandering eye; the FBI knew he was seeing a prostitute and had a mistress at the Soviet embassy as well, the wife of a diplomat. “He got into a wreck in his car with the hooker in the car,” said a former FBI agent. “The insurance adjustor tipped us off. That’s how it all started.”

FBI counterintelligence agents in the Washington field office began keeping closer track of the KGB officer. Soon afterward, they watched Motorin walk into a store in downtown Washington and trade his operational allowance of vodka and Cuban cigars for stereo equipment. The vodka and cigars were supposed to be used to help recruit American agents for the KGB. The major was not only cheating on his wife, he had now committed an indiscretion that could get him into serious trouble with his superiors.

It was time for a chat. With the leverage it now had over Motorin, the FBI did not have too much difficulty in persuading him to listen, although it took several months and constant pressure to recruit him.

In April 1983, the FBI met with Motorin for the first time in a safe house, an apartment in Crystal City in northern Virginia. He was given the code name
MEGAS
. To the CIA, Motorin was
GTGAUZE
.

Joseph K. Eddleman, Jr., Motorin’s FBI case officer, rented the safe house. Dale Pugh, one of the FBI agents handling Motorin, was given $4,000 and told to buy furniture for the apartment so the neighbors would not wonder why it was empty. Pugh loved the hamburgers at Ollie’s Trolley across the street; he was disappointed when, to preserve security, they moved to another safe house in Alexandria, off King Street, and alternated between there and a third safe house across the
river in Paper Mill Court in Washington, in the Georgetown high-rent district. In all, there were seventy-five meetings with Motorin over two years.

Communication is the most delicate part of any spy operation; the FBI could hardly just pick up the phone and call Motorin at the embassy to arrange a meeting. To contact “Sam Olson,” the operational name Motorin chose for himself, the bureau gave him a special phone number, which was a beeper carried by FBI agent Mike Morton. “The number was just for Motorin,” a bureau source said, “so if it rang, Mike knew it was Motorin.” The arrangement was secure. “Motorin would beep him from a pay phone and Mike would call him right back at the pay phone.”