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

by David Wise

  After enclosing a schedule of dates and times for the signals and dead drops, Hanssen said he would acknowledge receipt of the money with his next package of documents.

  The KGB gave the dead drop site in Nottoway Park the appropriate, if unimaginative, code name PARK. It was to become Hanssen’s favorite drop site; over the next four years he used it seventeen times.

  On Saturday, November 2, less than a week after receiving Hanssen’s letter, the KGB loaded the PARK dead drop with $50,000 in cash, half of what he had requested. Because Hanssen’s motives for spying for Moscow were complex, varied, and enigmatic, among those who knew him in the intelligence community it became the accepted wisdom after his arrest that he had not acted for money alone, or even primarily. While that may well be true, it should be noted that $50,000—and he was to receive a great deal more—was an amount greater than his annual FBI salary at the time. Hard cash was certainly not an insignificant factor in his mix of motives, as Hanssen himself later told his FBI debriefers and the Webster commission.

  Along with the money, the KGB countered with their own arrangements for future contacts with Hanssen. In the spy trade, this schedule of meetings, drops, and dates is known as a communication plan.

  Six days later, on November 8, Cherkashin was given another letter from Hanssen, who did not, then or later, reveal his identity to the Russians. Once again the letter was mailed to Degtyar’s home in Alexandria. It was full of flattery for Cherkashin, praising “your courage and perseverance” in the face of what Hanssen said he assumed were the usual “bureaucratic obstacles.” He went on in the same vein:

  I would not have contacted you if it were not reported that you were held in esteem within your organization, an organization I have studied for years. I did expect some communication plan in your response. I viewed the postal delivery as a necessary risk and do not wish to trust again that channel with valuable material. I did this only because I had to so you would take my offer seriously, that there be no misunderstanding as to my long-term value, and to obtain appropriate security for our relationship from the start.

  Hanssen was using old-fashioned spycraft. As he well knew, even in the high-tech age of computers, the KGB and for that matter the CIA, perhaps surprisingly, clung to traditional methods of contacting agents and exchanging documents and money. Since both sides rightly assumed that their telephones were tapped, the use of signal sites and dead drops offered a measure of security that spies found attractive. Typically, the intelligence officer or agent would contact each other by leaving a signal, a piece of tape on a telephone pole or perhaps a chalk mark on a mailbox, to indicate that a drop had been loaded or cleared. Usually these signals were placed in such a way and at a height that someone driving by could see them without getting out of a car.

  True, using hiding places to stash documents or money carried a small risk that children playing in a park might discover the secret, or someone’s dog might snuffle into a dead drop. However, that slight danger was offset by the fact that the use of these established methods meant that an officer and his agent would not be caught together with incriminating material, as could happen in a personal meeting.

  But the computer-savvy Hanssen hoped to drag the KGB into the age of cyberspace. He suggested they contact each other on a computer “bulletin board,” using “appropriate encryption.” Hanssen must have realized there was little chance of changing the ways of the KGB, for he wrote that, in the meantime, “Let us use the same site again. Same timing. Same signals.” Hanssen proposed that the next exchange at a dead drop take place on March 3, 1986.*

  Hanssen was not going to fuss over the money with his new paymasters. “Thank you for the 50,000,” he wrote. “As far as the funds are concerned, I have little need or utility for more than the 100,000. It merely provides a difficulty since I can not spend it, store it or invest it easily without triping [sic] ‘drug money’ warning bells.

  “Perhaps some diamonds as security to my children and some good will so that when the time comes, you will accept by [sic] senior services as a guest lecturer.”

  Even at this early stage, sixteen years before he was caught, Hanssen was aware that despite all of his professional precautions, the day might come when he was discovered and would have to flee. “Eventually,” he wrote, “I would appreciate an escape plan. (Nothing lasts forever.)”

  In the same letter, Hanssen made clear that he had access to communications intelligence and the supersecret collection methods of the National Security Agency. He warned the KGB of a “new technique” used by the NSA, which he described in detail.

  Having already betrayed Martynov, Motorin, and Yuzhin and, as far as he knew, ensuring that they would be shot, Hanssen wanted to make certain that the KGB believed he was a genuine mole whose information could be trusted. Referring to the three FBI sources, he wrote:

  I can not provide documentary substantiating evidence without arousing suspicion at this time. Nevertheless, it is from my own knowledge as a member of the community.… I have seen video tapes of debriefings and physically saw the last, though we were not introduced. The names were provided to me as part of my duties as one of the few who needed to know. You have some avenues of inquiry. Substantial funds were provided in excess of what could have been skimmed from their agents.* The active one has always (in the past) used a concealment device—a bag with bank notes sewn in the base during home leaves.

  This last reference surely helped to identify and send Valery Martynov to his death, because logically it was Martynov who would be the “active one.” Sergei Motorin had by then returned to Moscow and Yuzhin had gone back in 1982. And only the FBI and Martynov knew that he concealed the money he was paid by the bureau in the bottom of his travel bag. That fact was classified SECRET.

  In the event, only Boris Yuzhin escaped the executioner. He was one of the lucky ones, if serving time in the Soviet gulag can be called that. Arrested in December 1986, he was sentenced to fifteen years for high treason. On February 7, 1992, after six years under harsh conditions in Soviet prisons, Yuzhin was one of ten political prisoners released from the notorious Perm-35 prison camp in the Urals under a general amnesty granted by Boris Yeltsin, then president of Russia. He later emigrated to the United States with his family.

  Sergei Motorin had returned to Moscow on normal rotation in January 1985. After being identified to the KGB by Ames in June and Hanssen in October, he was arrested by December. A Soviet court that heard the evidence against Motorin said he had received $20,000 from the FBI, and it cited his purchase of a water bed as proof of his Western decadence.

  From Moscow, Motorin had telephoned his woman friend in Washington several times. The calls continued through the late winter. The conversations were recorded and the FBI and the CIA read the transcripts. Later, the FBI concluded that Motorin was already under control and had been forced by the KGB to make the telephone calls, in an effort to deceive U.S. intelligence into thinking he had not been detected. But in February 1987, the last telephone contact took place. That month, he was executed.

  Valery Martynov was lured back to Moscow on November 6, 1985, in a ploy that apparently did not arouse his suspicion. The key was Vitaly Yurchenko. The celebrated KGB defector had changed his mind about remaining in America and slipped away from his young CIA escort in a Georgetown restaurant; he then surfaced at a press conference at the Soviet embassy, claiming he had been kidnapped by the CIA, which no one believed. Martynov was ordered to escort Vitaly Yurchenko on the flight home.

  Martynov told his wife, Natalya, and his two young children that he would be back in Washington soon. Shortly after Martynov flew back to Moscow, Natalya received a note from her husband saying he had reinjured a bad knee while carrying his luggage and had been hospitalized. He asked her and their son and daughter to come back to Moscow. As soon as their plane had landed, Natalya realized that her husband was in trouble. She was taken to Moscow’s grim Lefortovo prison for interrogation. At first she thought her h
usband might be suspected of bringing in tape recorders or other electronic equipment and selling them. It was only then that she was told he had been charged with high treason.

  Questioned repeatedly by the KGB, she was allowed to see her husband only four times during the next two years. The last time, knowing he had been sentenced to death, she brought her son with her.

  Hanssen’s letter, revealing precisely how Martynov had concealed the FBI’s cash in his suitcase, reached Viktor Cherkashin on November 8, 1985. Martynov, with Vitaly Yurchenko, had left Washington only two days earlier on an Aeroflot jet to Moscow. If the KGB entertained any lingering doubts that Martynov had become a mole for U.S. intelligence, Hanssen’s letter certainly removed them. There could no longer be any question.

  On May 28, 1987, Lieutenant Colonel Valery Martynov was executed by a firing squad. He was forty-one.

  *The CIA camera contained but a small amount of flammable fluid, so it was designed to be used only sparingly as a cigarette lighter.

  *GTJOGGER was Vladimir M. Piguzov, a lieutenant colonel in the KGB. He was one of ten persons later executed after he was betrayed to Moscow by Aldrich Ames. David Barnett was sentenced to eighteen years in federal prison and served a little over nine years.

  *In 1984, Norwegian police arrested Treholt at the Oslo airport as he was about to leave for Vienna to meet his KGB control. He carried a briefcase containing sixty-six classified documents. Treholt was convicted and sentenced to twenty years.

  *Yuzhin was also given up by Edward Lee Howard, who did not know his name but told the KGB he was a Tass correspondent working in San Francisco, which was as good as naming him.

  *Statement of Aldrich Hazen Ames in United States district court, Alexandria, Virginia, April 28, 1994. Ames was sentenced to life in prison with no possibility of parole.

  *In his letter to Cherkashin, Hanssen asked that the next meeting occur on September 9, which—under the coefficient of six that he established in his first letter to the KGB whereby to determine the true date, the KGB would subtract six months from September and six days from the date—meant that the exchange would actually take place the following March 3.

  *What Hanssen was saying here to the KGB was, Look, you don’t have to take my word for it; we paid these sources to spy, so take a look and you may discover they have more money than they could have misappropriated from the KGB funds they were allotted to pay agents they had recruited in the United States.

  8

  “For Sale, Dodge Diplomat, Needs Engine Work”

  While Hanssen continued in New York to funnel sensitive secrets to the Russians, in his day job he spied on them.

  As a squad supervisor on his second tour in the city, Hanssen spent most of his time in a highly secret FBI wiretap installation on Manhattan’s east side, a few blocks north of Grand Central Terminal. It was code-named POCKETWATCH.

  Hanssen’s squad was collecting electronic intelligence on Soviet commercial operations in the United States. Its primary target was Amtorg, the Soviet trading agency. For Hanssen, the wheel had come full circle; it was to Amtorg that he had volunteered in his first venture into espionage six years earlier, when he spied for the GRU.

  The FBI agents under Hanssen operated discreetly out of a building near the Amtorg office.* Their targets also included Aeroflot, the Soviet airline, and other commercial offices. The agents were, in bureau shorthand, operating “offsite,” meaning they were not working downtown at the FBI’s large New York field office at 26 Federal Plaza, known irreverently as “the anthill.”

  At Hanssen’s uptown shop, FBI agents and translators with earphones clamped to their heads listened in on what the Soviets were saying, at the same time recording all the conversations on tape for future reference. They were, in the language of the agents, engaged in “overhears” and analysis of the take. Amtorg encouraged Soviet exports, stimulating sales of Belarus tractors, for example. But the FBI was not interested in tractors; it was looking for intelligence officers.

  Once again, Hanssen was toiling in a backwater, not at the center of the game. “Hanssen was a supervisor, but he had a nondescript squad,” said Ed Curran, who worked counterintelligence in the city for a dozen years. “Amtorg is not like the Soviet mission or the UN, where the action was. At Amtorg, maybe you had a few IOs in there for cover, but they never did much. If you have forty or fifty Soviets in Amtorg, what you’re looking for is two or three who are GRU or co-opted by them.

  “I had illegals and KR [KGB counterintelligence], a hot trigger; you’re always doing something. What Hanssen was doing was certainly not as important as a KGB squad, working against hostile, aggressive intelligence officers.”

  Hanssen’s POCKETWATCH wiretap operation was a subunit of a separate, much larger eavesdropping installation, code-named MEGAHUT, also on the east side of Manhattan, not far from the UN. This was the bureau’s central counterintelligence surveillance site for the entire city, with telephone lines running to the Soviet Mission to the United Nations on East Sixty-seventh Street, and as far north as the Russian apartment complex in Riverdale, along the Hudson River in the upper reaches of the Bronx.*

  In every city where the Soviets had a diplomatic presence, there was such a central facility for the bureau’s wiretappers. In Washington, it was known among the field agents as the Hole, and in San Francisco the Farm (not to be confused with the CIA’s training base near Williamsburg, Virginia, with the same name). The technicians from MEGAHUT had set up the smaller office that Hanssen supervised.

  It was one of the multiple contradictions of Hanssen’s personality that he appears to have worked hard simultaneously for both the KGB and the FBI. James Ohlson, who remained friendly with Hanssen after they had met at headquarters and discovered their Chicago roots, recalled a major counterintelligence breakthrough that Hanssen achieved, on his own time, to solve a troublesome problem for the bureau.

  Ohlson was at headquarters in the FBI’s information systems unit, developing computer programs for counterintelligence and counterterrorism. Hanssen, in New York, helped Ohlson develop a computer program that greatly improved the FBI’s ability to track Soviet diplomats.

  Until then, the bureau agents watching the Soviet Mission to the United Nations would write down when employees entered and left the mission, the date and time, their names if known, and whether they were alone or accompanied. But the system was cumbersome; if the FBI agents needed to check on the time and date that a Russian IO had left the mission, it might take two days of painstaking searches through the handwritten sheets to get the answer.

  Hanssen wrote a software program on his Mac at home that allowed the agent in the observation post to record the date, time, name, place, and whether it was an entry or exit. Then, with one click of a mouse, the five fields were entered into the database. Each day the data would be downloaded from the laptop of the agent on surveillance duty to the New York field office. From there, it was relayed to Washington.*

  Normally a program of this kind would be designed by the FBI’s computer experts, but they recognized the usefulness of Hanssen’s work and adopted the program he wrote. It was then used by FBI agents watching not only the Soviet mission but Amtorg and other Soviet offices as well. Hanssen had once again proven his skill with computers.

  Listening in on the Russians at Amtorg, the FBI agents working for Hanssen would sometimes hear them exchanging jokes. Hanssen instructed his squad to collect them. Ohlson learned this when he visited Hanssen in New York in 1986. “The idea was it would shed light on what the Russians were thinking. I remember one he told me. Two Russian women are talking. One asks the other, ‘Do you like sex or New Year’s better?’ The other answers, ‘Obviously New Year’s—because it comes more often.’ ”

  * * *

  After seven months in New York, Hanssen was ready to sell more FBI secrets to the Soviets. On June 30, 1986, he sent another letter through the KGB’s Viktor Degtyar, warning that the NSA had discovered a vulnerability in Sovie
t satellite transmissions and was exploiting the loophole. That information was classified TOP SECRET/SCI.

  Always alert to threats to his own security, Hanssen was worried about a reference to Viktor Cherkashin that he had seen in the debriefing of a Soviet defector, Victor Gundarev. Gundarev, the chief of counterintelligence and security for the KGB “residentura,” its station in Athens, had defected to the CIA five months earlier, in February.* David Forden, the CIA station chief, had arranged to spirit Gundarev out of Greece to the United States.

  In his letter Hanssen explained his concern to the KGB:

  I apologize for the delay since our break in communications. I wanted to determine if there was any cause for concern over security. I have only seen one item which has given me pause. When the FBI was first given access to Victor Petrovich Gundarev, they asked … if Gundarev knew Viktor Cherkashin. I thought this unusual. I had seen no report indicating that Viktor Cherkashin was handling an important agent, and heretofore he was looked at with the usual lethargy awarded Line Chiefs. The question came to mind, are they [the FBI] somehow able to monitor funds, ie., to know that Viktor Cherkashin received a large amount of money for an agent? I am unaware of any such ability, but I might not know that type of source reporting.

  In some way, Hanssen had managed to see a classified report of the debriefing of Gundarev dated March 4, 1986, only three weeks after Gundarev had been whisked out of Athens. The FBI report noted that the bureau’s agents had shown Gundarev a photo of Cherkashin and asked if he knew him. Hanssen was clearly worried that the FBI was somehow on to the money trail from Moscow—which could lead straight to him. How Hanssen, relegated to wiretapping Amtorg in New York, had been able to read a report from headquarters on the debriefing of a KGB defector was not clear, but he had.