Uncle John’s Fast-Acting Long-Lasting Bathroom Reader (74 page)

The agents took the bag to the lab and succeeded in lifting two fingerprints from the bag. As they expected, the prints were Hanssen’s. Every piece of evidence in the KGB file pointed to him and him alone. He even had a thing for diamonds and strippers, just as Russian sources had been reporting for years.

GRAYDAY

The investigators put aside their investigation of GRAY DECEIVER, gave Hanssen the nickname GRAYDAY, and started investigating him. They arranged for Hanssen to be promoted to a new job at FBI headquarters, where he could be closely watched by hidden cameras. Then they tapped his office phone and searched his laptop computer. They couldn’t bug or search his house—his wife and two of his six kids still living at home were never gone long enough—but when a house across the street from Hanssen’s was put up for sale, the FBI bought it, moved in, and began watching Hanssen from there. Whenever Hanssen left home, undercover FBI agents secretly followed him.

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This time, the mole hunters’ work paid off: after about three months of constant surveillance, on the afternoon of February 18, 2001, Hanssen was caught red-handed leaving a package of computer discs and classified documents in a dead drop in Foxstone Park near his home in Vienna, Virginia. A payment of $50,000 in cash was retrieved from another dead drop in a nature center in Arlington, Virginia.

The evidence against Hanssen was overwhelming, and he knew it. He confessed immediately and later agreed to a plea bargain in which he was spared the death penalty in exchange for cooperating fully with the FBI investigation into his crimes.

Hanssen admitted that he’d been spying off and on for more than 20 years. He started in 1979, quit in 1981 when his wife caught him (a devout Catholic, she made him go to confession but never turned him in), started again in 1985, quit when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, and started again in 1999. He continued spying until his arrest in 2001.

GRAYBOOB

The FBI had long assumed they were hunting a master spy, someone who knew how to cover his tracks and would be very hard to catch. They formed that impression over time as they failed to collect any incriminating evidence against Kelley (other than his jogging map), even though they were certain Kelley was the spy.

But as the investigation into Hanssen continued, the mole hunters realized just how wrong they’d been. Hanssen was smart enough not to tell the Russians his real name, but he was no master spy—in fact, he could have been caught years earlier if the people around him had been paying attention and doing their jobs. Over the years Hanssen left so many clues to his spying that he practically glowed in the dark.

He used FBI phone lines and answering machines to communicate with his KGB handlers in the 1980s.

When the KGB paid him cash, Hanssen sometimes counted the money at work, then deposited it in a savings account
in his own name
, in a bank less than a block from FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C.

Native to Indiana? A species of spider,
calponia Harrisonfordi
, is named for Harrison Ford.

At a time when he made less than $100,000 a year, Hanssen kept a gym bag filled with $100,000 in cash in his bedroom closet. One time he left $5,000 sitting on top of his dresser. His brother-in-law, Mark Wauck, also an FBI agent, saw the unexplained cash and reported it to his superiors, also noting that Hanssen had once talked of retiring to Poland, which was then still part of the Soviet bloc. An FBI agent retiring to a Communist country? The FBI never investigated the incident.

THE PERSONAL TOUCH

The FBI, and even the KGB, had assumed that Hanssen never met with any Russian agents, but they were wrong. Hanssen launched his spying career in 1979 by walking right into the offices of a Soviet trade organization that was known to be a GRU (the military version of the KGB) front and offering his services, even though he knew the office was likely to be under surveillance. When he made his first contact with the KGB in 1985, he did so by sending a letter through the U.S. mail to a known KGB officer who lived in Virginia. Both approaches were incredibly foolhardy, but Hanssen got away with it both times.

In 1993 Hanssen botched an attempt to resume spying for GRU when he walked up to a GRU officer in the parking lot of the man’s apartment building and tried to hand him a packet of classified documents. The officer, thinking it was an FBI sting, reported the incident to his superiors at the Russian Embassy, who lodged a formal protest with the U.S. State Department. The FBI launched an investigation—which Hanssen closely followed by hacking into FBI computers—but the investigation was unsuccessful.

In 1992 Hanssen hacked into a computer to gain access to Soviet counterintelligence documents. Then, fearing he might be caught, he reported his own hacking and claimed he was testing the computer’s security. His colleagues and superiors believed his story and were grateful to him for pointing out the weakness in the system. The incident was never investigated.

AT THE STATE DEPARTMENT

But perhaps the most inexplicable breach of security came in 1994, when Hanssen was transferred to an FBI post at the State Department’s Office of Foreign Missions. As the Justice Department later described it, Hanssen was “wholly unsupervised” by either the State Department or the FBI for the next six years. In that time he didn’t receive a single job performance review. Hanssen spent much of his time out of the office visiting friends and colleagues; when he did go to the office he spent his time surfing the Internet, reading classified documents, and watching movies on his laptop. Then he resumed spying for the Russians.

Giraffes were originally known as “cameleopards.”

In 1997 Hanssen asked for a computer that would connect him to the FBI’s Automatic Case Support System (ACS) and got it, even though his job didn’t call for it. Soon after he got the computer, Hanssen was caught installing password breaker software that allowed him to hack into password-protected files. When confronted, Hanssen said he was trying to hook up a color printer. His story went unchallenged and the incident was never investigated.

Using the ACS systems, Hanssen downloaded hundreds, if not thousands, of classified documents and gave them to the Russians. At the same time, he repeatedly scanned the FBI’s files for his own name, address, and the locations of his various dead drops to check whether the FBI was onto him.

He also stumbled onto the FBI’s investigation of Brian Kelley. Assuming that Kelley, too, was a mole, he warned the Russians about the investigation. Then he did what he could to keep the FBI focused on Kelley, so that he could continue his own spying.