The Secrets of the FBI

by Ronald Kessler

  “We had every reason to believe that the penetration was in the CIA,” Rochford says. “We were just blatantly wrong in not looking hard enough inside the bureau.”

  But Rochford points out that the CIA officers working the case also believed the penetration was in the CIA.

  “We teamed up with the agency on this analysis, and their analysts were every bit as competent as ours,” Rochford says. “And we’d sit around a table at the CIA’s Counterintelligence Center and actually vote about who the most culpable suspect was. And to a person, everyone at the voting table pressed for individuals within the agency. So it wasn’t just us.”

  At one point, the FBI gave Kelley a polygraph test.

  “They came to me and said, ‘Listen, we’ve got a spy, we know we have a spy,’ ” Kendall Shull, the FBI polygrapher, says. “They said, ‘These programs have been compromised. So we know who it is, Brian Kelley, he works for the CIA.’ And they’d had everything bugged in his house and his car.”

  However, contrary to expectations, Kelley passed the polygraph test.

  “I explained to them that the test was accurate, and they basically told me that he had beaten my test,” Shull says. “They just felt like, ‘Well, it’s impossible. It’s just too much evidence to prove that this guy is the guy that did it.’ I said, ‘Well, I’m not changing the results of my test.’ And they did not ask me to. I said, ‘I’m sticking with no deception indicated. And I think you’ve got the wrong guy.’ ”

  Rochford confirms that Kelley passed the polygraph test, but he says that after the test, Shull wrote in his FD-302 report about the test results that Kelley showed no deception when asked to purposely lie during what is known as a stimulation test, a pretest to get acquainted with procedures for the real test. According to Rochford, Shull wrote that meant that a polygraph test would not pick up his deception, casting doubt on the test results.

  Shull says he can’t recall that result or what he wrote in the still-classified document. But he says—backed up by former FBI polygrapher Richard Keifer—that the pretest is only to get subjects acquainted with the real polygraph test and has nothing to do with the validity of the final results.

  While Rochford still considered Kelley the prime suspect, he continued to pursue other leads. Desperate to find the spy, Rochford decided to try cold pitches to current or former Russian intelligence officers who might have relevant information and be tempted by big bucks. Specifically, Rochford would offer a million dollars per scalp handed over. Rochford got the idea from KGB officer Vitaly Yurchenko, who revealed to Rochford when he defected to the CIA that the KGB was trying that approach.

  “Nobody likes cold pitches because they’re the worst technique in the profession of intelligence,” Rochford says. “It’s going up to somebody whom you don’t know and asking them to do the equivalent of going to bed with you. It’s very intimate, and if you’re not developing it from a practical interrelationship human kind of way, 99.9 percent of folks will say no.”

  Rochford drew up a list of two hundred potential targets, either current or former KGB or Russian Foreign Intelligence Service officers. The list updated one previously devised by Tim Caruso, Jim Holt, James Milburn, and Art McLendon and was put together with their help and the help of other case agents on Rochford’s MC-43 squad.

  CIA officers around the world were assigned to pitch some of the potential assets, while Rochford and other FBI agents went after others. FBI agent Wayne Barnes, for example, says he recruited an intelligence asset whom he believed to be the source who gave up Hanssen. That was a mistaken assumption, Rochford says.

  Before making a pitch, the FBI agents and CIA officers studied everything about the individual. Even if they came up empty-handed, the intelligence officers who were pitched would report back on their encounters, in effect advertising to others that money was to be made by giving up the elusive spy.

  Rochford made twenty-eight such pitches before he finally hit pay dirt. In that case, he had the FBI set up a phony company to lure to a friendly country a Russian SVR officer who was a businessman. The head of the phony company, who was working for the FBI, pretended to offer the Russian an opportunity to start a business enterprise. Once the Russian made the trip, the head of the company told him the deal had fallen through. As the man was leaving the meeting where he was given the bad news, Rochford stepped out of a van and walked up to him on the street.

  “Hey, how are you?” Rochford said.

  The intelligence officer looked at Rochford oddly and said, “Well, who are you?”

  Normally Rochford would use an alias. But, breaking with his normal practice, he openly identified himself as an FBI agent, displayed his credentials, and gave him his FBI business card.

  “This is a provocation!” the man said.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Rochford said. “Let’s sit down and have a drink.”

  “No, no,” the officer said. “I don’t drink with strangers.”

  Nonetheless, the man agreed to have a glass of water with Rochford at the restaurant in the man’s hotel.

  “Let me tell you what I’m going to do with this business card,” the man said. “I’m going to take this to the nearest Russian establishment, I’m going to talk to the security officer, he’s going to take it to a major newspaper, and your business card and your picture are going to be on the front page.”

  “Great, don’t flatter yourself,” Rochford replied. “You’re not that important.”

  “You set me up with this business, I know you did,” the officer said.

  Denying that, Rochford said, “I’m not trying to hurt your business, I’m not trying to hurt you, I’m not trying to hurt your country.” But, Rochford said, “Here’s what I want to do. I want to make you the most successful Russian businessman who’s doing business in the post-Soviet era.”

  The plane tickets the FBI had arranged for the man through the phony business required him to remain in town for a week before he returned to Russia. If he wanted to return sooner, he would have had to pay for a much more expensive return ticket himself, and he did not have a lot of money.

  “I’m actually going to be here when you are,” Rochford said. “Why don’t we have dinner tonight, and we can talk more about this, because I can see you are upset. As long as you’re here, I’ll pick up your meals.”

  “I’ll tell you what,” the officer said. “I’ll show up, but I’m going to show up with a security officer from the Russian establishment.”

  “Well, okay, terrific, I’d like to meet him,” Rochford said. “I’ll take him to dinner.”

  The intelligence officer began a long denunciation of America, saying Communism was a superior ideology and the Soviet Union had disintegrated only because President Reagan outspent the Soviets on defense. As the man began swearing in Russian, Rochford took out a pen and began writing down what he was saying.

  “What are you doing?” the man asked, not realizing that Rochford spoke fluent Russian.

  “Very colorful language,” Rochford said. “I want to use some of this language.” Pointing to a word he had written down in Russian, Rochford said, “Did I spell that right?”

  Later, Rochford met with a group of FBI agents and analysts and CIA officers staying at another hotel and related the day’s events. He was crestfallen, saying the target really did not want to see him again. Russian analysts Jim Milburn and Carolynn Gwen Fuller, who had helped formulate the original scenario for the pitch, gave Rochford additional guidance. They and the others convinced him that it was worth another shot. Rochford agreed to go ahead with another meeting with the man at six o’clock outside his hotel.

  “You’re paying for this?” the man said when Rochford invited him to dinner. When told he was, the man said, “Let’s have a lobster dinner.”

  For the next several days, Rochford and the intelligence officer ate breakfast, lunch, and dinner together. The man alternated between acting friendly and being confrontation
al. Eventually, Rochford brought up the case of a suspected CIA spy who had never been prosecuted. He also asked if Aldrich Ames had given up more than was known. Rochford referred to them as case one and case two, respectively. The idea was to build up gradually to the unsub—case three—who was Rochford’s real target.

  Over drinks, the source began giving up some tidbits about the first two cases.

  “You could tell he was getting comfortable with me, and I was getting comfortable with him,” Rochford says.

  Yet when they were walking down a street and saw an expensive car, the man would counterpitch Rochford. “You see that person driving that Mercedes?” he would say. “If you come and visit me over in Russia, I’ll get my guys to give you all that.”

  After their meetings, Rochford expressed more doubts to his team. It seemed that every time he took a step forward, the other guy took two steps back.

  “This guy, he’s not buying into any of this stuff,” Rochford said. “He’s playing me along; I’ve seen this happen before.”

  But they encouraged Rochford, saying he was making progress.

  Eventually Rochford came out and told the SVR officer, “I’m willing to pay a million dollars for the answer to one of the cases, and I won’t bother you again.”

  The man revealed details about case one that could have potentially resulted in a prosecution. He also revealed more about case two, Ames, and the intelligence losses that occurred because of him.

  Two nights before the man was due to fly home, they were having cocktails over dinner. The man proposed a toast.

  “Mike, I’m going to make you a general, and I’m going to be the most successful Russian-American businessman in the history of our country, like you suggested,” the officer said. “We’re going to make this work.”

  They clinked glasses.

  Later, they were walking around the city. The man looked at Rochford and described a highly secret technical penetration of the Russians, unsettling the FBI agent. The man noticed his reaction. He told Rochford that his reaction confirmed to him that the FBI agent also was aware of the secret operation.

  “If that’s what my face is telling you, fine, but I’m not going to tell you I know anything about it,” Rochford said.

  “Do you want to know what we know, how we know it, the timing of the knowledge, and how it came to us?” the man asked.

  “Well, that would be very interesting,” Rochford replied, trying not to appear too eager.

  The man suggested they go to Rochford’s hotel room and draw up a contract.

  “I need several million dollars,” he said.

  “You’re living in a fantasy, I can’t make those deals,” Rochford said. “I told you a million dollars per scalp. We might be able to get you something for case one and maybe case three.” Since case two—Ames—had already been prosecuted, the FBI would be interested in additional information but would not pay a million dollars, Rochford said.

  “If I give you this, I’d have to be relocated into a safe Western country someplace and might need retraining for some private job,” the source said.

  “We can have these conversations, it’s all good, but we can’t do it here,” Rochford said.

  The man seemed to have second thoughts.

  “If we go to your hotel room, you will report everything, and one of your people will get a tape of the conversation, and then I’ll be compromised, and they’ll kill me,” the man said. But he did go to Rochford’s hotel room, where Rochford wrote out a contract by hand. At first, Rochford told him that the only two people who knew about their relationship and could sign the contract were Louis Freeh, the FBI director, and George Tenet, the director of Central Intelligence.

  “You’re lying to me, you have a team of people,” the officer said. “They’re probably right next door.”

  “You have to trust me,” Rochford said. “The director of the FBI and the DCI know, but of course others know as well.”

  They went to Rochford’s hotel room and continued negotiations over seven hours, having lunch and dinner in the hotel. The final contract Rochford wrote up ran to five pages.

  The contract provided for an immediate up-front payment of $750,000. Including the cost of resettlement, training, and annuities, the total package was worth $7 million. That included the “scalps” represented by cases one and three plus additional intelligence. The man also agreed to testify if necessary in any court proceeding. His identity would be protected in court.

  “I’ll get this in the hands of the FBI director,” Rochford said. “He will convey it to the DCI, and they’ll give me an answer by the morning.”

  After the contract was approved and signed, Rochford set up ways to convey the money to the source and to meet with him and communicate with him secretly in Russia through the CIA.

  The Russians did not know Hanssen’s real name or where he worked. They knew him as Ramon. Like the FBI and CIA, they assumed he worked at the CIA. So the source expressed concern that the CIA would be involved. Rochford assured him that arrangements would be made by a CIA officer whom he had worked with for years and trusted.

  They shook hands and set up a date when a CIA officer in disguise would pick up documents from the source in Russia. But at the appointed time, the Russian didn’t show up. “The question was, did he trick us?” Rochford says. “He already had over five hundred thousand dollars. We had detractors in both agencies asking, ‘Did he take us?’ ”

  16

  “BREACH”

  AS IT TURNED OUT, THE SVR INTELLIGENCE OFFICER HAD NOT shown up for the clandestine meeting with the CIA in Russia to give up Robert Hanssen because he thought he would be spotted. He agreed to another meeting, where he turned over a package with the documents that would identify Hanssen as the spy Mike Rochford was hunting.

  The CIA flew the documents back to the United States and handled the arrangements flawlessly. As specified by the FBI, the agency made records of the transfers according to the rules of criminal procedure.

  At headquarters, FBI technicians processed and numbered every page of the documents obtained from the intelligence officer recruited by Mike Rochford. Both the FBI and the CIA believed the documents would finger Brian Kelley. But what they showed instead was that the spy had made significant drops of documents for his Russian handlers in northern Virginia at a time when Kelley was out of the country.

  “Unless he had a co-conspirator, he couldn’t have been the guy,” Rochford realized.

  One envelope turned over by the intelligence officer was marked with instructions not to open it until Rochford had checked with the source. Later, the source asked Rochford if the FBI liked what he had sent. He specifically asked about the specially marked envelope.

  “Did you open that envelope?” he asked.

  “No,” Rochford said. “You said not to open it until we talked.”

  “You dummies,” the man said. “I was hoping you’d understand. I just meant to be careful with it. Go ahead and open it.”

  Inside was a tape recording of a man talking from an FBI offsite facility in New York with a KGB officer at a pay phone in Virginia. The two agreed that if they ever lost contact, they would reconnect by having the Russians put an ad in a newspaper to sell a Plymouth model that did not exist. The Russians taped the call so they could be sure that if they ever met with the spy in person, they could verify his identity.

  Listening to the tape, FBI analysts Jim Milburn and Robert King immediately recognized the voice as that of their colleague, agent Robert Hanssen. In the meantime, the FBI was trying to match the fingerprints found on a plastic bag used for a dead drop picked up by the Russians. Like the tape recording, the plastic bag had been inside the envelope marked “Do Not Open.” The FBI quickly identified the prints on the plastic bag as Hanssen’s.

  The delay in opening the envelope proved costly. On November 13, 2000, Hanssen gave the Russians the biggest dump he had ever given them. It was a week later that the FBI opened the enve
lope, matched fingerprints, and listened to the tape recording.

  “If we had known Hanssen was the guy, we could have followed him to that drop and stopped him from giving that dump,” Rochford says. “In that dump on November 13, he gave the Russians an inch and a half of documents that gave up sources in the agency and in Canada, Australia, and Great Britain.”

  At six-thirty in the morning on November 15, the two analysts walked into Rochford’s office at the Washington Field office.

  “It’s not Brian,” Milburn said. “It’s Bob Hanssen.”

  “Oh shit,” Rochford said.

  “Somebody in my own organization—how could I have missed it?” Rochford thought. “And how could we have been so aggressive against Brian? And been so wrong? And how are we going to make this right?”

  Hanssen’s clearances not only allowed him access to secrets at the CIA, NSA, the White House, and the Defense Department but also allowed him to check an FBI database that would show if the FBI was investigating him. Even though Hanssen had access to most of the information Kelley had, he was not even listed as one of the suspects in the matrix.

  “Nobody in the bureau was listed,” Rochford says. “We screwed up, no question.” But, he insists, “Nobody thought the bureau was invulnerable.” Rochford says he vividly remembered the case of FBI agent Richard Miller, who turned out to be a spy. Rochford had personally worked the case of FBI agent Earl Pitts, who also spied for the Russians.

  As for the fact that Kelley passed the polygraph test, “In the back of my head, I remembered that Aldrich Ames took a polygraph before his arrest, and the agency said that he passed,” Rochford says. “The FBI later looked at his chart and said he failed.” Beyond that, Kendall Shull, who polygraphed Kelley, told Rochford that in the pretest, “Brian beat him,” Rochford says.