Spy: The Inside Story of How the FBI's Robert Hanssen Betrayed America

by David Wise

  And at work, Hanssen was gaining access to more and more sensitive material. In the analytical unit, Hanssen now sat on the FBI’s foreign counterintelligence technical committee, which coordinated all of the division’s electronic surveillance operations.

  By late summer of 1985, Hanssen’s headquarters time was coming to a close. For the FBI, it was an eventful year; an astonishing number of espionage cases were wrapped up by the bureau with a series of arrests, so many that the news media dubbed 1985 the Year of the Spy.

  The extraordinary series of spy cases had actually begun the previous year with the arrest in October of Richard Miller, the first FBI agent ever to be charged, and later convicted, of espionage. Miller, seriously overweight and bumbling, was working as a counterintelligence agent in the Los Angeles FBI office when he began an affair with Svetlana Ogorodnikov, a Soviet émigré woman whom he was supposed to be watching. Instead, she persuaded him to spy for the KGB, promising him $65,000 and a Burberry trench coat.*

  Officials at FBI headquarters, greatly embarrassed by Miller’s arrest, closely followed developments in the case, nowhere more so than in the intelligence division. Richard Miller’s first trial opened August 5, 1985, a little more than six weeks before Robert Hanssen was to report to New York for a second tour in the city.

  So Hanssen was well aware of the Miller case, and of the highly publicized arrest by the FBI a few months earlier, on May 20, 1985, of John A. Walker, Jr., the former Navy chief warrant officer who headed a family ring of Navy spies. Walker, who sold U.S. codes to the KGB, had spied for eighteen years.†

  On August 1, 1985, as Hanssen also knew, Vitaly Yurchenko, a senior KGB official, had defected to the CIA in Rome, and information he provided led the FBI to place a former CIA officer, Edward Lee Howard, under surveillance. But Howard, aided by skills he had learned in the CIA, escaped into the New Mexico desert on September 21 and turned up in Moscow, a fugitive on espionage charges.

  On the day that Howard escaped from the FBI, Hanssen was beginning his new assignment in New York, this time as a supervisor of a counterintelligence squad.

  The march of espionage cases continued in rapid succession as Hanssen settled into his new job. On November 21, Jonathan Jay Pollard, a U.S. naval intelligence analyst, was arrested as a spy for Israel.* Only one day later FBI agents arrested Larry Wu-Tai Chin, a former CIA broadcasting analyst who had passed secrets to Chinese intelligence for thirty-three years, for which he received about $140,000.† Three days after that, on November 25, Ronald W. Pelton, a former NSA employee who sold that agency’s secrets to the Soviets, was arrested as a result of clues provided by Vitaly Yurchenko.‡

  Sometime before leaving Washington, in the months that Hanssen worked in the Soviet analytical unit, the decision to resume his career as a spy that had been forming within him became final. He knew by then of the arrests of Richard Miller and of the Walkers, the defection of Vitaly Yurchenko, the escape of Edward Lee Howard, and the fact that his counterintelligence colleagues were working overtime to close in on more spies. In the single year 1985, in fact, eleven persons were arrested for espionage and fourteen persons were convicted.

  None of this deterred Hanssen in the least. His mind was made up. This time, he decided, he would play in the majors. Despite the risks, he would volunteer his services to a different branch of Soviet intelligence: the KGB.

  *The FBI’s intelligence division was divided into operational sections, such as the Soviet (now Eurasian) section responsible for counterintelligence operations, and the analytical sections. As the names implied, the operational sections supervised operations; the analytical sections analyzed.

  *Ronald Knox, the English author and theologian, was an Anglican who converted to the Catholic Church and served as chaplain of Oxford University in the years before World War II. Although known for his translation of the Bible, he also wrote popular detective stories.

  *Miller’s first trial ended in a hung jury on November 6, 1985. Convicted in a second trial, he was sentenced to life in July 1986. His conviction was overturned in April 1989 by a federal appeals court because the trial judge had allowed testimony about lie detector tests that Miller had failed. Finally, in October 1990, Miller was found guilty in a third trial, and sentenced in February 1991 to a prison term of twenty years.

  †Walker pleaded guilty and was sentenced on November 6, 1986, to life in prison. His son, Michael, drew twenty-five years, and his brother Arthur and friend Jerry A. Whitworth were sentenced to life. All had served in the Navy.

  *Pollard had spied for the Israelis during 1984 and 1985. He pleaded guilty in June 1986 and was sentenced to life on March 4, 1987.

  †Chin was convicted in February 1986 and committed suicide on February 21, 1986, by tying a plastic bag over his head while he was in jail awaiting sentencing.

  ‡Pelton was convicted of espionage in 1986 and sentenced to life in prison

  7

  “Soon, I Will Send a Box of Documents”

  The tiny CIA camera, disguised as a cigarette lighter, was like something straight out of a James Bond movie, a gadget that Q might have handed over solemnly to a nonchalant 007. Only this one was real.

  In a San Francisco hotel room in 1981, Boris Yuzhin, a KGB officer assigned to the Soviet consulate in that city, met with a veteran CIA officer and an agency technician. The officer gave the miniature camera to Yuzhin, whose cover was that of a correspondent for Tass, the Soviet news agency.

  The CIA camera, known as a tropel, was tube-shaped, with the lens at the opposite end from the flint. The specially designed lens was not much bigger than a dime. Yuzhin smoked, so a cigarette lighter would not be expected to arouse suspicion. The device actually worked, if only briefly, as a lighter.*

  The CIA technician took over and demonstrated how Yuzhin was to use the camera to photograph documents in the Soviet consulate. The special film would allow him to take ninety pictures.

  The Russian had been recruited by the FBI. The bureau brought in the CIA officer who gave Yuzhin the spy camera as a result of a then-unusual level of cooperation between the two agencies on an unrelated case. A CIA source in Indonesia, code name GTJOGGER, had revealed that a former agency officer, David H. Barnett, had sold CIA secrets to the KGB. The CIA turned over GTJOGGER’S leads to the FBI, which investigated and arrested Barnett, the first CIA officer ever to be charged with espionage. As payback for the CIA’s help in the case, the FBI invited the agency to work with it on a case, and the CIA chose Yuzhin.*

  Boris Yuzhin had first come to the United States six years earlier as a student at the University of California, Berkeley. He was then already working for the KGB. The FBI approached Yuzhin on a pretext, with the help of a woman he knew, and discovered that he admired American society. He soon began volunteering information to the bureau. The FBI assigned Bill Smits, who spoke Russian, as Yuzhin’s case agent. In the San Francisco field office, Smits, who favored elegant three-piece suits, was known as the Count. He was earning a doctorate in public administration at Golden Gate University while handling Boris Yuzhin.

  “He cooperated because he hated the KGB, the politics,” Smits said. “He had no use for it. He saw it for what it was.” Yuzhin’s FBI code name was RAMPAIGE. The CIA called him CKTWINE.

  Yuzhin went back to Moscow, but returned to San Francisco in 1978. His cover as a Tass correspondent was designed to mask his true position as a KGB Line PR officer assigned to collect political intelligence. A CIA officer explained why Yuzhin continued to spy for the United States. “He had been treated well, but he was considered a country boy from an inferior background. In the KGB you got promoted because of who you knew, not what you did. Yuzhin didn’t have a protector. Even though he was a lieutenant colonel by the time he went back to San Francisco, he felt he was a quota bumpkin. They pushed a few along in a sort of equal opportunity program.”

  Yuzhin revealed to American intelligence the existence of the KGB’s Group North, an elite unit of senior Soviet
intelligence officers who specialized in recruiting American and Canadian targets worldwide. The KGB group was a kind of spy SWAT team with authority to travel anywhere on its missions.

  Yuzhin also gave the FBI and the CIA leads that helped Norway to identify and arrest Arne Treholt, a high-level Soviet spy in that country’s diplomatic corps.* Bill Smits continued as his FBI case agent.

  Yuzhin photographed several hundred documents and cables from Moscow with the CIA’s trick camera. When all ninety frames were shot, he would exchange the exposed film for a new roll. He was also given a small camera by the FBI; once, when using it, Yuzhin managed to take pictures of his own reflection on the documents, not a good idea had the film fallen into the wrong hands.

  Some months later, Yuzhin committed a blunder that nearly cost him his life: he lost the cigarette lighter. He looked all over, but to no avail. Yuzhin, frantic, contacted his FBI handler for help. “I searched his car that night thinking he might have dropped it between the seats,” Bill Smits said. “We damn near tore the car apart.” No lighter. Yuzhin thought maybe he had dropped it at a friend’s apartment. The FBI entered the apartment, searched it, and found nothing.

  In the meantime, a janitor in the Soviet consulate had found the lighter by a pool table. Trying to light a flame, he took four pictures of himself. He turned the lighter in, and the KGB immediately recognized what it was. Yuzhin and another Soviet at the consulate, Igor S. Samsonov, were the prime suspects; both were smokers and shared an office.

  In 1982, Yuzhin returned to Moscow, still under suspicion and closely watched. The KGB stationed its agents in the crawl space between the ceiling of the Yuzhins’ apartment and the floor of the apartment above. The KGB had the Yuzhins under total surveillance, including their bedroom, twenty-four hours a day.

  But without real evidence that the lighter was Yuzhin’s, the KGB did not arrest him. The CIA hoped to stay in communication with Yuzhin, but he was wary now. “When he returned to Moscow,” a CIA man said, “Yuzhin would only agree to give a ‘sign of life,’ such as a chalk mark. No meetings, no dead drops.” For the moment, at least, Yuzhin seemed out of danger.

  But he was not, because Hanssen had learned his identity, along with the true names of Martynov and Motorin.

  * * *

  For the Hanssens, his new assignment in New York City meant pulling up stakes again, selling their four-bedroom house on Whitecedar Court, buying a new one, enrolling the children in new schools. They sold their house in Vienna for $175,000. But they paid almost as much for a smaller, three-bedroom, two-story house in Yorktown Heights, in Westchester County again but farther north of the city and an hour-and-a-half commute from his office.

  But Hanssen had already decided how to supplement his FBI salary, then about $46,000; it had, after all, worked before. As he arranged the details of moving himself and his family to New York, he was back in Washington on Tuesday, October 1, 1985.

  From somewhere in Prince George’s County, Maryland, he dropped a letter in a mailbox. Three days later, it was received by Viktor M. Degtyar, a KGB Line PR officer, at his home in Alexandria, Virginia.

  When Degtyar opened the letter, he found another envelope inside, marked DO NOT OPEN. TAKE THIS ENVELOPE UNOPENED TO VICTOR I. CHERKASHIN. At that time, Viktor Cherkashin was the KGB’s chief of counterintelligence, or Line KR, at the Soviet embassy. Less than four months earlier, it was Cherkashin who had accepted Aldrich Ames as a walk-in to the KGB, a decision that launched Ames’s nine years of spying as the most damaging mole in the history of the CIA.

  Inside the inner envelope of the letter to Degtyar was an unsigned typed letter to Cherkashin from Robert Hanssen. The KGB, not knowing his identity, gave him the simple code name “B.” The letter said:

  Dear Mr. Cherkashin:

  Soon, I will send a box of documents to Mr. Degtyar. They are from certain of the most sensitive and highly compartmented projects of the U.S. intelligence community. All are originals to aid in verifying their authenticity. Please recognize for our long-term interests that there are a limited number of persons with this array of clearances. As a collection they point to me. I trust that an officer of your experience will handle them appropriately. I believe they are sufficient to justify a $100,000 payment to me. I must warn of certain risks to my security of which you may not be aware. Your service has recently suffered some setbacks. I warn that Mr. Boris Yuzhin (line PR, SF), Mr. Sergey Motorin (Line PR, Wash.) and Mr. Valeriy Martynov (Line X, Wash.) have been recruited by our “Special Services.”

  Having betrayed the three FBI sources and, as far as Hanssen knew, sent them to their doom, he described a classified intelligence collection program. In addition, “to further support my bona fides,” as Hanssen put it, he included information about recent Soviet defectors to U.S. intelligence.

  He added:

  Details regarding payment and future contact will be sent to you personally.… [M]y identity and actual position in the community must be left unstated to ensure my security. I am open to commo [communication] suggestions but want no specialized tradecraft. I will add 6, (you subtract 6) from stated months, days and times in both directions of our future communications.

  Hanssen had no way of knowing that less than four months earlier, Aldrich Ames had already given up Martynov, Motorin, and Yuzhin to the KGB.* The fact that Ames had been down that path before him, and for the same reason, did not alter Hanssen’s intent. At the very least, his betrayal provided important confirmation to the Soviets of the information they had already received from Aldrich Ames.

  On June 13, 1985, Ames had wrapped up between five and seven pounds of cable traffic and other secret documents in plastic bags in his fourth-floor office at CIA headquarters. He took the elevator down, used his laminated ID card to get through the turnstiles that block every exit, and walked to his car in the parking lot. No guard asked to look inside the plastic bags; the CIA, as Ames knew, did not examine packages being carried out of the building.

  Ames drove across the river to Chadwicks, a Washington saloon and restaurant under the K Street Freeway on the Georgetown waterfront. There he met Sergei D. Chuvakhin, a diplomat listed as a first secretary of the Soviet embassy. The KGB was using Chuvakhin as a cutout, or intermediary; Ames in turn was ostensibly developing Chuvakhin as an agency source.

  At lunch, Ames handed Chuvakhin the plastic bags containing Langley’s most precious secrets—the names of more than ten of the most important Soviet sources working for the CIA and FBI, including the three that Hanssen would betray four months later. Ames knew that many of them would die.

  Long after, when he pleaded guilty to espionage in federal court, Ames described that day: “I did something which is still not entirely explicable even to me: without preconditions, or any demand for payment, I volunteered to the KGB information identifying virtually all Soviet agents of the CIA and other American and foreign services known to me. To my enduring surprise, the KGB replied that it had set aside for me two million dollars in gratitude for the information.”* His decision to betray the CIA’s agents, Ames later said, “was like the leap into the dark.”

  Hanssen, in betraying the three FBI sources, was not merely establishing his credibility with the KGB. He was also protecting himself against what in his letter he had called “certain risks to my security.” The danger to Hanssen was that one or more of the three FBI sources might learn of his existence from their vantage point inside the KGB and reveal it to the FBI. The best way to eliminate that possibility was to kill them.

  As Hanssen had promised, his first package of documents arrived in the mail at Viktor Degtyar’s house in Alexandria ten days after the KGB man had received his letter. Inside were a large batch of classified intelligence documents, although not all were originals as he had said in his letter.

  At 8:35 A.M. the next morning, October 16, FBI agents routinely watching the Soviet embassy from their lookout post across the street saw Degtyar arrive for work. He was carrying a large black
canvas bag which the KGB man did not normally have with him. This was duly noted and recorded, but of course the FBI agents on surveillance duty had no way to guess what was in the bag. The contents could just as easily have been books, a change of clothes, or Degtyar’s lunch.

  A week later, this time from New York City, Hanssen mailed another letter to Degtyar’s house. Perhaps not wanting his wife to surprise him again, Hanssen seldom wrote to the KGB in his den at home; he composed most of his letters on a laptop in his car.

  In the message to Degtyar, Hanssen, the consummate professional, was not asking the KGB for instructions on where they wanted to leave the $100,000 he had asked for, or where he was to stash documents in the future, or how to signal the Russians—he was telling them.

  The letter crisply laid out his plan:

  DROP LOCATION Please leave your package for me under the corner (nearest the street) of the wooden foot bridge located just west of the entrance to Nottoway Park.

  PACKAGE PREPARATION Use a green or brown plastic trash bag and trash to cover a waterproofed package.

  SIGNAL LOCATION Signal site will be the pictorial “pedestrian-crossing” signpost just west of the main Nottoway Park entrance on Old Courthouse Road. (The sign is the one nearest the bridge just mentioned.)

  SIGNALS My signal to you: One vertical mark of white adhesive tape meaning I am ready to receive your package.

  Your signal to me: One horizontal mark of white adhesive tape meaning drop filled.

  My signal to you: One vertical mark of white adhesive tape meaning I have received your package. (Remove old tape before leaving signal.)