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

by David Wise

  With Hanssen working in Manhattan, his access to drop sites around Washington was limited to those times when he either visited headquarters on FBI business or could slip out of New York on his own time. Communications with the KGB and exchanges of documents and money were obviously more difficult with Hanssen away from the capital.

  In the same letter, he proposed an elaborate new scheme to resume contact with the Soviets. “If you wish to continue our discussions, please have someone run an advertisement in the Washington Times during the week of 1/12/87 or 1/19/87, for sale, ‘Dodge Diplomat, 1971, needs engine work, $1000.’

  “Give a phone number and time-of-day in the advertisement where I can call,” Hanssen instructed. “I will call and leave a phone number where a recorded message can be left for me in one hour. I will say, ‘Hello, my name is Ramon. I am calling about the car you offered for sale in the Times.’ You will respond, ‘I’m sorry, but the man with the car is not here, can I get your number.’ The number will be in Area Code 212. I will not specify that Area Code on the line.”

  Hanssen had now revealed he was in New York, but provided no other clues to his identity.

  On July 14—the KGB subtracted six months from Hanssen’s dates—an ad ran for four days in the classified pages of The Washington Times: “DODGE – ’71, DIPLOMAT, NEEDS ENGINE WORK, $1000. Phone (703) 451-9780 (CALL NEXT Mon., Wed., Fri. 1 P.M.)”

  The number given in the ad was that of a pay telephone near a shopping center in northern Virginia. On Monday, July 21, Hanssen called the pay phone. The call was answered by Aleksandr K. Fefelov, a KGB officer working out of the Soviet embassy in Washington. Hanssen gave the number 628-8047. As arranged, he did not include the New York area code.

  An hour later, Fefelov telephoned the New York number and told Hanssen that the KGB had loaded dead drop PARK. But two weeks after the phone conversation, Hanssen sent another note to Degtyar saying that he had not found the package at the dead drop and would call the pay phone again on August 18.

  Spies make mistakes; as it turned out, the KGB agent who had stashed the package put it under the wrong corner of the wooden footbridge. When the KGB realized what had happened, it corrected its mistake.

  On August 18, Fefelov was waiting by the phone. Hanssen called and the conversation was recorded by the KGB. Fourteen years later, this tape fell into the hands of the FBI when it obtained the KGB file on Robert Hanssen:

  HANSSEN*: Tomorrow morning?

  FEFELOV: Uh, yeah, and the car is still available for you and as we have agreed last time, I prepared all the papers and I left them on the same table. You didn’t find them because I put them in another corner of the table.

  HANSSEN: I see.

  FEFELOV: You shouldn’t worry, everything is okay. The papers are with me now.

  HANSSEN: Good.

  FEFELOV: I believe under these circumstances, mmmm, it’s not

  necessary to make any changes concerning the place and the

  time. Our company is reliable, and we are ready to give you a

  substantial discount which will be enclosed in the papers. Now,

  about the date of our meeting. I suggest that our meeting will

  be, will take place without delay on February thirteenth, one

  three, one P.M. Okay? February thirteenth.

  HANSSEN: … February second?

  FEFELOV: Thirteenth. One three.

  HANSSEN: One three.

  FEFELOV: Yes. Thirteenth. One P.M.

  HANSSEN: Let me see if I can do that. Hold on.

  FEFELOV: Okay. Yeah. [pause] HANSSEN: [whispering] [unintelligible]

  FEFELOV: Hello? Okay. [pause]

  HANSSEN: [whispering] Six … Six … [pause] That should be fine.

  FEFELOV: Okay. We will confirm you, that the papers are waiting for you with the same horizontal tape in the same place as we did it at the first time.

  HANSSEN: Very good.

  FEFELOV: You see. After you receive the papers, you will send the letter confirming it and signing it, as usual. Okay?

  HANSSEN: Excellent.

  FEFELOV: I hope you remember the address. Is … if everything is okay?

  HANSSEN: I believe it should be fine and thank you very much.

  FEFELOV: Heh-heh. Not at all. Not at all. Nice job. For both of us. Uh, have a nice evening, sir.

  HANSSEN: Do svidaniya.

  FEFELOV: Bye-bye.

  As a trained KGB operative, Fefelov was talking as cryptically as possible, to preserve security in case anyone overheard their conversation. He was trying to sound like an American businessman, with double-talk about “our company,” papers, a meeting, “a substantial discount,” and so on. Hanssen realized this but could not resist saying good-bye in Russian—spoiling the whole effect. One can almost visualize Fefelov shaking his head in despair, sighing, and then, determined to carry on like a good soldier, saying “Bye-bye” in English.

  The KGB then put back the package containing $10,000 in cash in the PARK dead drop. Included with the money was a letter that proposed two more drop sites and a new accommodation address, a place to which it was felt Hanssen could safely send letters, code-named NANCY. The accommodation address was the home in Alexandria of Boris M. Malakhov, who was listed as second secretary of the Soviet embassy and was about to replace Degtyar as the embassy’s press secretary. In fact, his true job was that of a KGB Line PR officer. As an additional measure of security, Hanssen was told to misspell Malakhov’s name as “Malkow.” The package also contained a plan to enable Hanssen in an emergency to contact the KGB in Vienna, Austria.

  Hanssen retrieved the money on August 19, the morning after the taped phone conversation.* He sent a letter to Degtyar the same day with a return address of Ramon Garcia, 125 Main St., Falls Church, VA, a fictitious street number. Inside the envelope was a handwritten note: “RECEIVED $10,000. RAMON.”

  In using the name “Ramon Garcia” with the KGB, Hanssen was trying to send a subtle message to the Russians. He hoped that the last three letters of Garcia would mislead the KGB into thinking that he worked at the CIA. But the hint was so subtle, there is no evidence that the Russians ever understood it.†

  Hanssen’s complicated communication plan, involving the ad for a mythical used Dodge, had worked. For the next year, however, he stayed below the radar and did not contact the KGB again. He had, after all, over a seven-year period revealed TOPHAT to the GRU, betrayed Valery Martynov, Sergei Motorin, and Boris Yuzhin to the KGB, and warned the Russians how the NSA was intercepting their satellite communications. He could afford to rest a bit.

  *Hanssen’s squad was close by because of budget constraints. With the technology available at the time it was too costly to run the phone lines used for wiretaps over many blocks. “In those days, if you moved out of the area of a central telephone office, it was expensive,” one FBI man recalled.

  *Riverdale was the main target for MEGAHUT,” said one FBI man. “We worked with NSA. Before they built Riverdale, they lived in hotels, the Excelsior, the Esplanade on the west side, and it was easy for us to go after them. We could be next door or on the floor above. We could talk to the manager, the neighbors. Then in the late seventies they [the Soviets] rounded them up and put them all in one complex in Riverdale.” As secret as MEGAHUT was, at least some New Yorkers were aware that the FBI had a clandestine hideaway in their midst, even if the exact purpose remained mysterious. “Everybody in the neighborhood knew,” the FBI man said. “We had ‘No Parking’ signs. That was the giveaway; the bureau really likes its cars.”

  *Today, the surveillance data is downloaded directly to Washington from the laptop, one of Hanssen’s curious legacies.

  *Three years later, the author became personally involved in the fallout from the affair when Victor Gundarev called to complain about his treatment by the CIA. Gundarev, given a new identity and resettled in the United States by the CIA, said the agency had stalled in providing green cards for himself and his family and had tapped h
is telephone. He was so disillusioned, he said, he was thinking of redefecting. I wrote an op-ed piece for The New York Times, later expanded into a magazine article for the newspaper, warning that the agency might have another Yurchenko case on its hands. As a result of the publicity and Gundarev’s complaints, the CIA instituted certain reforms in its defector program. See “Another Soviet Defector Threatens to Go Back,” The New York Times, July 9, 1989, Section 4, p. 27, and “It’s Cold Coming Out,” The New York Times Magazine, September 17, 1989, p. 36ff.

  *The KGB tape did not indicate Hanssen’s or Fefelov’s names; they are included here for the sake of clarity. A transcript of the conversation appears in the FBI affidavit seeking a court warrant for Hanssen’s arrest, a document made public when the FBI announced the arrest on February 20, 2001.

  *That the exchange went off as scheduled was a small miracle. The beginning of the conversation was not recovered by the FBI and parts of the tape were unintelligible. Near the start of the tape was the phrase “tomorrow morning,” so Hanssen must have understood that is when he was to go to the drop. But Fefelov set the time and date as February 13 at 1 P.M. In his first letter to the KGB in 1985 Hanssen seemed to propose that in future communications the sender would add six to the month, date, and time, and the recipient would subtract. If Hanssen subtracted six from the month, date, and time, as he and the Russians had apparently agreed, the exchange would have taken place on August 7 at 7 A.M., an impossibility, since it was already August 18. Conversely, if he added six, the exchange would have occurred on August 19, at 7 P.M. In order to get it right and show up at 7 A.M. the next day, “tomorrow morning,” August 19, Hanssen would have had to add six to the month and date but subtract six from the time. Somehow he must have figured out what Fefelov meant, because he got the money.

  †When Hanssen was debriefed by the FBI after his guilty plea, he disclosed his attempt to send the KGB this subliminal, albeit false, coded message.

  9

  Anybody Here Seen a Mole?

  Washington, which was built on a swamp, can be ghastly in the dog days of summer. Yet in the first week of August 1987, Robert Hanssen voluntarily returned to FBI headquarters. He had a facile explanation for his colleagues about why he had come back from New York short of tour.

  Jim Ohlson recalled the circumstances. “Normally he would have stayed longer and returned as a GS-15 at higher pay. But he came back as a GS-14, because he said he wanted his children to attend an Opus Dei school, the Heights. Of course, in retrospect, we can speculate he may also have wanted to be back at headquarters, where he had more valuable access for the Russians.”

  Hanssen was reassigned to his old shop, the Soviet analytical unit on the fourth floor, again as a supervisory special agent. Now he was once more in charge of the team of analysts studying the modus operandi of Soviet intelligence agents in the United States.

  The Hanssens bought their modest house in Vienna on Talisman Drive and settled in again to the familiar northern Virginia suburb. By now they had six children. To most of the neighbors, Hanssen seemed the perfect father, shepherding his flock to church every Sunday, keeping the lawn well trimmed.

  And at headquarters, he resumed his friendship with Paul Moore, the bureau’s China expert. As an analyst, Moore understood how his colleagues in the Soviet unit went about their work. “They are looking for anomalies, possible penetrations. They have read all the defector debriefings. And they might see something and say, Well, this is strange, isn’t it? A typical thing would be it takes X amount of time to go from lieutenant to major in the KGB. Why was this one promoted early? Was anybody else promoted who worked in Washington at a certain time period? Maybe a bunch of secrets were passed to the KGB.

  “It was the same with medals,” Moore explained. If the FBI learned that certain KGB officers had received medals, that could be another tip-off that someone was passing documents to Moscow; such awards were often given for the successful handling of an American source.

  “The people in the analytical unit were specialized,” Moore added. “Some might look at Line X, the S&T officers, some specialized in illegals, and so on.” It was exacting work, and about to get more so.

  Very soon after Hanssen’s return from New York, he was assigned to prepare a highly sensitive study, classified TOP SECRET. The FBI had lost its two assets in the Soviet embassy in Washington to the KGB executioners; the CIA’s sources in Moscow were being rolled up, imprisoned, or shot.

  The situation was intolerable, and it gave Hanssen’s assignment a special urgency. He was to examine past penetrations of the FBI; he would carefully analyze every allegation about a possible traitor in the bureau ever recorded in the FBI’s voluminous counterintelligence files.* The goal was to help the bureau’s operational side pinpoint and arrest the mole, if one existed.

  No more delicious assignment could have been handed to Hanssen. Since he controlled the mole study, he would make sure to deflect any analysis that might even remotely point in his own direction.

  There was an enormous amount of material to sift through. Over a period of several years, Soviets recruited by U.S. intelligence, and defectors who came over to the West, often talked about gossip they had heard, or tidbits of information they possessed, that might point to the existence of a mole inside the FBI. Reviewing every report from every source containing such allegations would be a lengthy and painstaking task.

  Hanssen assigned the research to the FBI’s two top Soviet analysts, Jim Milburn and Bob King. The two sat on each side of Hanssen, all in the same cubicle, as they prepared the study.

  James P. Milburn was not a name known outside of the closed world of intelligence, but he enjoyed immense respect within the FBI for his knowledge of Soviet intelligence and his analytical skills. If the bureau had a complex problem involving the KGB, it would more often than not turn to Milburn.

  Red-haired and freckled, powerfully built and about six feet tall, Milburn liked to play basketball on his lunch hour in the bureau gym. “He would get into games with guys from records and fingerprinting,” Paul Moore said. “He’s a thirtysomething going up against these young guys from the ident division. He got injured a lot, he got some bad injuries doing that sort of stuff.”

  Bob King was a veteran foreign counterintelligence (FCI) analyst. He had come to the bureau from the CIA, a relatively rare progression that led to some good-natured needling in the Hoover building. “I used to accuse him of being a CIA penetration of the FBI,” Moore said. In his previous work at the CIA, King had also been a Soviet analyst. Dark-haired and bespectacled, he was a heavy smoker who quit cold turkey when his doctors got after him. Milburn and King were both friendly, accessible types, Moore said.

  “Oddly, both Hanssen and Milburn had kidney stones. They each had these big clear plastic water pitchers on their desks, they were supposed to be drinking a lot of water. One afternoon I found them both lying on the floor to get relief from these attacks.” Moore could not resist a gibe at the sight of his two prone colleagues. “It’s more expensive at the Harrington Hotel,” he cracked, “but you’d have more privacy.”

  The two analysts assigned to the mole study, and Hanssen himself, had the advantage over the others in the unit. Most analysts looked at specific targets, such as the various KGB lines, and did not know much outside their own specialized areas, Moore explained. “But a few people did ‘all source,’ and that was Milburn, King, and Hanssen.” Within the Soviet analytical unit, in other words, Hanssen was one of the very few entitled to know all the FBI’s sources and secrets.

  Or as David Major, the former FBI counterintelligence official, put it, “He was at the center of the hourglass, he saw everything.”

  * * *

  The penetration problem had begun long before, with UNSUB DICK.

  The story was a secret buried so deep within the FBI that it is revealed here for the first time.* UNSUB DICK—the UNSUB stood for “unknown subject”—was the first suspected KGB mole inside the FBI. An
y history of penetrations of the bureau must start with him. The study by Hanssen, Milburn, and King would certainly have focused on this long-secret case.

  The search for the penetration began early in 1962 when Aleksei Isidorovich Kulak, a KGB officer undercover at the United Nations, walked into the FBI office on East Sixty-ninth Street in Manhattan and offered his services as a spy. He said he was discontent with his lack of progress in his KGB career. The FBI gave him the code name FEDORA; the CIA called him SCOTCH.

  Kulak, then thirty-nine, married and accompanied by his wife in New York, was a short, stocky man whose name meant “wealthy farmer” in Russian. “We called him Fatso,” said an FBI man who worked the case. Kulak specialized in collecting scientific and technical secrets. He had a doctorate in chemistry and had worked as a radiological chemist in a Moscow laboratory. At the UN, he was a consultant to a committee on the effects of atomic radiation.

  By walking into the FBI’s office in Manhattan, Kulak had taken a big risk; the KGB might have had the building under surveillance. The FBI agents who met with FEDORA challenged him on this point. “We said aren’t you worried they may be watching the FBI building?” one of the agents recalled. “He said he was not worried because all of our [KGB] people are out covering a meeting with your guy, ‘Dick.’ ”

  Uh-oh. This was the first time that the FBI had heard the name “Dick.” FEDORA was clearly saying that the FBI harbored a mole. But he said he did not know the man’s true identity.

  FEDORA’S revelation touched off an intense, long-running secret mole hunt within the FBI. “It went on for years; it drove us crazy,” the FBI man said.