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

by David Wise

  Not long after, another KGB officer in New York, Valentin Lysov, also warned U.S. intelligence of a mole in the FBI. Lysov approached the CIA and said he was in trouble, about to be recalled to Moscow, and needed money. The KGB man said there was a penetration in the FBI and told the CIA it had just twenty-four hours to meet his terms. Since Lysov was still on U.S. soil, the CIA turned the case over to the FBI. The bureau already knew that Lysov was in hot water; FEDORA had tipped off the FBI that Lysov got drunk in a bar and lost his wallet, and was being sent home on a pretext of attending a meeting.

  When Lysov flew first-class to Copenhagen the next day, en route to Moscow, an FBI counterintelligence agent sat next to him. On the plane, the FBI man pressed the Russian about the alleged mole in the FBI. Lysov was vague and would provide no details. But he promised to return in six months with more information. He never did.

  That still left the FBI with a problem; how to identify UNSUB DICK? Perhaps, the bureau’s counterintelligence agents reasoned, a technique used by both sides could lead to the answer. Just as the bureau tried to recruit officers of the KGB, the Russians targeted the FBI’s agents in New York. “We know they tried to make contacts, put people in bars near our office. FEDORA told us that.”

  The ongoing recruitment game, the FBI concluded, might be turned to its advantage in the search for UNSUB DICK. The FBI decided to dangle one of its agents to the KGB. He would hint that he needed money and might be amenable to recruitment.

  One of the bureau’s watchers, a street agent assigned to surveillance of the Soviet Mission, was chosen for the operation, code-named VALBEL. According to a former FBI man, the agent showed up at the apartment of Boris Ivanov, the KGB resident in New York, and rang the bell. “Ivanov slammed the door, but not before the agent said he would meet them at such-and-such time and place. In fact, a Line KR Soviet showed up. We ran the operation for six months; there were three or four meetings. We hoped we could tell from their questions who DICK was.”

  If, for example, the KGB asked for information about a specific FBI counterintelligence operation, it would mean they had learned about it already, which could narrow the list of suspects in the bureau who knew of that activity. Conversely, if the KGB did not ask certain questions, it might be because the mole had already provided the answers. VALBEL was a long shot. “We were trying to get them to show their hand,” the former FBI agent said, “but they never asked the right questions.” The KGB, wary of the dangle, did not bite.

  The search for UNSUB DICK was complicated by the fact that there was intense controversy over whether FEDORA was a true agent in place for the FBI or a KGB plant. J. Edgar Hoover had total faith in FEDORA, although some of his counterintelligence agents who knew the case were skeptical. And the skeptics reasoned that if FEDORA was a plant, then perhaps there was no UNSUB DICK and the supposed mole was a phantom who did not really exist.

  Although some in the FBI continued to have their doubts about Aleksei Kulak, he provided a good deal of useful information to the bureau, including the names of KGB officers and which U.S. military weapons and defense plants Moscow wanted him to collect data about. KGB walk-ins do not turn up every day; over a sixteen-year period during two tours in New York, the FBI paid him approximately $100,000. Kulak/FEDORA returned to Moscow for the last time in 1977.*

  James J. Angleton, the CIA’s controversial counterintelligence chief, considered FEDORA a fake, but then Angleton was a true believer in only one KGB defector, Anatoly M. Golitsin, who had come over in 1961 in Helsinki. All others were suspect to Angleton, most especially a later defector, Yuri I. Nosenko, who was imprisoned and brutally treated by the CIA in an effort to break his story. Nosenko never wavered, and in the end was rehabilitated by the CIA.† Angleton’s suspicion, fueled by Golitsin, that the CIA was deeply penetrated led him on a destructive mole hunt for more than a decade that paralyzed the agency’s Soviet operations and destroyed the careers of many loyal CIA officers. Finally, in 1974, Angleton was fired by CIA director William E. Colby.

  In the FBI, the frustrating search for UNSUB DICK went on for years, but was never resolved. “We never found him,” a former FBI official admitted. “Some people think they figured out who he was, but he is dead.” In the files of the FBI, however, UNSUB DICK is still an open case.

  The bureau fared only slightly better in another episode. Several years ago, the FBI closed in on a suspected mole, and again the entire affair was handled quietly and out of public view. A former FBI counterintelligence official recalled how the case had involved stolen documents and a phone booth in suburban Maryland.

  “We got a package addressed to Hoover or the bureau saying, in stilted English, that a bureau agent was selling documents and would be at a phone booth in Rockville at a certain time. Inside the package there were a couple of surveillance reports from the Washington field office. We checked and found they were missing from the files.

  “We figured the Soviets were feeding him back; they thought he was a dangle. But he wasn’t. Sullivan had Baltimore run the case since the agent was in WFO [the Washington field office].” Sullivan was William C. Sullivan, then the FBI’s assistant director for intelligence. Because the suspect had to be someone working in the Washington field office, he asked the FBI field office in Baltimore to take over, to avoid the awkward possibility that one of the agents assigned to surveillance of the phone booth might be the mole.

  At the appointed hour, the agents from Baltimore were discreetly in place, watching the phone booth. But the stakeout was disappointing. “The guilty agent spotted the surveillance all around, knew they were from Baltimore, and did not go to the phone booth. Later, he called a friend in the Baltimore office and said, ‘You must have something going on, I saw your whole group out on the street.’ They said, ‘Yeah, we were all out there,’ but they didn’t realize it was him.”

  The comedy of errors ended when the agent in Baltimore remembered the phone call from his friend, the FBI man in Washington, and sheepishly came forward with the name. “Once we learned who had called Baltimore, we took a look at him. The guy liked to play the horses and was having marital troubles. And he had worked the case where the two documents were missing.” Still, the bureau had no proof, and the agent denied everything. “He was eased out,” the former FBI official said. “By now, he is long dead.”

  When Hanssen directed the mole study, only one bureau turncoat had actually been caught and convicted. That was Richard Miller, the FBI agent arrested in 1984. But the Miller case in Los Angeles could not explain why the FBI and the CIA were losing agents in Washington and Moscow.*

  Not only UNSUB DICK but all allegations of moles in the bureau, however vague, were in a real sense open cases. “Counterintelligence never stops trying to identify leaks, even years later,” said Paul Moore. “CI is still looking for a guy who sold a document from the Manhattan Project to the Russians for $750. He’s probably dead by now, but eventually the FBI will identify him. It’s relentless, and it’s all about details.”

  In 1988, after months of intensive work, the research and writing were done. What made the finished product so extraordinarily sensitive was the fact that it specifically identified each Soviet recruitment and defector who had alleged that the FBI was penetrated, and it described the information they provided. Thus, if the study were to fall into the hands of the KGB, it could endanger the safety of any living sources who had been secretly recruited by the FBI. It was, in short, a bombshell.

  When the study had been completed, classified TOP SECRET, reviewed, and approved by Hanssen, the volatile, critical nature of its contents was protected by a stern warning on the first page:

  IN VIEW OF THE EXTREME SENSITIVITY OF THIS DOCUMENT THE UTMOST CAUTION MUST BE EXERCISED IN ITS HANDLING. THE CONTENTS INCLUDE A COMPREHENSIVE REVIEW OF SENSITIVE SOURCE ALLEGATIONS AND INVESTIGATIONS OF PENETRATION OF THE FBI BY THE SOVIET INTELLIGENCE SERVICES THE DISCLOSURE OF WHICH WOULD COMPROMISE HIGHLY SENSITIVE COUNTERINTELLIGENCE OPERATIONS AND METH
ODS. ACCESS SHOULD BE LIMITED TO A STRICT NEED-TO-KNOW BASIS.

  Better than anyone else in the FBI, Robert Hanssen knew how valuable his mole study would be to the KGB. Whose need to know could be greater?

  *Although the initial affidavit in the Hanssen case referred to the study in broad terms as looking for penetrations in “the United States Intelligence Community,” the indictment of Hanssen made clear that it was a detailed study specifically of whether “the Soviet intelligence services had penetrated the FBI.”

  *When the author asked David Major about UNSUB DICK, he declined to discuss it and replied: “You make my hair stand on end when you say that name. How do you know about UNSUB DICK?”

  *By then a news story in The New York Times reported that the FBI had recruited a Soviet KGB source in the United States, and later a book revealed the code name FEDORA. Those who doubted Kulak wondered why he was never arrested. The CIA eventually learned that Kulak had died, of natural causes, about 1983.

  †Angleton argued that FEDORA/Kulak was a plant because he had supposedly vouched for Nosenko. But a former senior FBI official said Kulak had simply reported overhearing a conversation by two colleagues who thought it was too bad that Nosenko had defected, an event they could have read about in The New York Times.

  *Earl Edwin Pitts, the second FBI agent ever arrested for espionage, had approached the KGB in New York in 1987 and began five years of spying for Moscow in July, not long before Hanssen returned to headquarters and began searching for moles. But Pitts was not arrested until December 1996, so his career as a spy was not known at the time of Hanssen’s study.

  10

  The Spy

  One month after Hanssen returned to Washington he began his most intensive period of espionage, even as he directed the study to find the penetration inside the FBI, whom he saw every morning in the mirror.

  The Soviet spy agency had, in previous messages, urged Hanssen to travel overseas to meet with them. When the KGB was fortunate enough to have a major source inside U.S. intelligence, it made every effort to meet the asset outside the country. Thus the CIA’s Aldrich Ames met the KGB in Bogotá, the NSA’s Ronald Pelton went to Vienna, others journeyed to Mexico City or Zurich.

  There was good reason for this pattern; the KGB knew it could operate much more freely in an environment where it had more control. In Washington or New York, the FBI greatly outnumbered the KGB, and the risks of surveillance were accordingly much higher. In the case of Hanssen, there was another reason that the KGB was pressuring the spy they called “B” to meet overseas. They wanted to get a good look at him, learn or verify his identity, and assess their man firsthand. As Hanssen knew, a face-to-face meeting might lead to his unmasking; he would surely be secretly photographed by the KGB, for example.

  Following the instructions he had received a year earlier, Hanssen early in September 1987 sent a letter to the accommodation address NANCY, the Alexandria home of Boris M. Malakhov. The handwritten envelope was addressed to B. N. MALKOW, with a fictitious return address.

  In the letter inside, Hanssen once again made it clear that he knew too much about counterintelligence to play the game by the KGB’s rules. Hanssen’s “Dear Friends” letter began: “No, I have decided. It must be on my original terms or not at all. I will not meet abroad or here.… I will help you when I can, and in time we will develop methods of efficient communication.”

  He told them that unless he saw “an abort signal on our post from you” he would mail “a valuable package.” He would be looking for the KGB’s signal and cash at the designated dead drop at 7 A.M. on September 16, or, if anything went wrong, on the same weekday and time in the three weeks following.*

  “If my terms are unacceptable,” Hanssen added, “then place no signals and withdraw my contact.” He closed by flattering Cherkashin, though not mentioning him by name. “Excellent work by him has ensured this channel is secure for now. My regards to him and to the professional way you have handled this matter. Sincerely, Ramon.”

  According to the FBI, the KGB never knew Hanssen’s identity until his arrest became public on February 20, 2001. Hanssen sought to preserve his anonymity for obvious reasons of self-protection: an FBI or CIA mole inside the KGB could not easily betray him if his identity remained unknown. His true name does not appear in the detailed KGB file of the case that the FBI eventually obtained. This could be seen as evidence, although certainly not conclusive, that the KGB never learned his name.

  “They didn’t know who he was,” David Major insisted. “And if they checked up on Hanssen to find out his identity, that might have been detected by us [the FBI]. He was once seen at a drop by the KGB and he saw them. They knew it was a bureau source from the material, and they didn’t need to know more.”

  Some experienced counterintelligence agents, however, snort at the idea that the KGB would not, over a period of sixteen years, have discovered Hanssen’s identity. Since he often drove his car to drop and signal sites, it would not have been difficult to write down or photograph his license plate and learn the owner from public motor vehicle records.† Or the KGB might even have followed him to his home or office.

  “The Russians always have countersurveillance which would have seen his car,” said Ed Curran, who worked on many of the major Soviet espionage cases for the FBI. If a Soviet source tried to remain anonymous in dealing with the bureau, Curran said, “we would do everything we could to find the guy’s identity.”

  Dick Alu, another veteran FBI counterintelligence agent, was equally emphatic. “Bullshit they didn’t know his identity! He’s driving his own vehicle. After the first year when it became obvious this was not an FBI double agent operation, they had to find out who the hell it was and I’m sure they did.”

  Whether or not the Russians ever succeeded in learning Hanssen’s identity, they were clearly convinced of the value of his information. True to his word, Hanssen mailed a package received by Malakhov on September 14 that included National Security Council documents marked TOP SECRET. The next day, the KGB placed $10,000 in cash in the PARK dead drop in Nottoway Park.

  Along with the money, the KGB also proposed two additional dead drop sites in northern Virginia. One, code-named AN, was in a park in the western part of Fairfax County, and another, code-named DEN, was at a location even farther away.

  Hanssen did not like the two new drop sites. Two weeks later, he left a note for the KGB at his favorite drop in Nottoway Park. “My Friends: Thank you for the $10,000. I am not a young man, and the commitments on my time prevent using distant drops such as you suggest. I know in this I am moving you out of your set modes of doing business, but my experience tells me … we can be actually more secure in easier modes.”

  He then suggested using a parked car as a drop; if the Russians did not think that a good idea, he agreed to clear AN “this once.” But he asked the KGB to find “a comfortable Vienna VA signal site to call me to an exchange any following Monday.” He signed the letter “Ramon.” With the letter, Hanssen left a classified document describing the U.S. national intelligence program for 1987.

  In insisting on drops close to home, and often using the same drops many times, Hanssen was breaking all the traditional rules of spycraft. But he may not have done so merely for convenience; using hiding places nearby helped him to conceal his activities. It allowed him to exchange documents for cash on the way to or from work, avoiding longer absences that he might have to explain to his family. He could even tell his wife he was going to walk the dog.

  As far as the increased risk was concerned, Hanssen may have been thinking “out of the box” in contrarian style. If the FBI knew that the KGB rarely used drops more than once, or avoided drops near a spy’s residence, then he would do just the opposite. This doubtless is what he meant by saying that “my experience tells me” easier is better.

  The KGB was not about to argue with their primo spy, who could, they realized, break off communication at any time if his feathers were sufficientl
y ruffled. In which case, the Washington residentura would have some major explaining to do to Moscow Center.

  Soon after, the KGB meekly proposed a signal site on the post of a stop sign on Courthouse Road, not far from Hanssen’s home in Vienna. And at the end of the month, the KGB deposited $100,000 into an escrow account created for “B” in a Moscow bank.

  In the first week of November, Hanssen sent another letter to Malakhov with a return address of J. Baker in Chicago. He said he had an urgent package for the KGB, and asked for a signal so he could leave it the following Monday. In future contacts, Hanssen added, whenever he used “Chicago” in a return address, it meant he wanted an exchange the next Monday.

  Hanssen had never liked dead drop AN to begin with, and in mid-November he sent a querulous letter to the KGB with a return address of “G. Robertson” in Houston. It read:

  Unable to locate AN based on your description at night. Recognize that I am dressed in business suit and can not slog around in inch deep mud. I suggest we use once again original site. I will place my urgent material there at next AN times. Replace it with your package. I will select some few sites good for me and pass them to you. Please give new constant conditions of recontact as address to write. Will not put substantive material through it. Only instructions as usual format.

  Ramon

  Hanssen was risking his life, but he wasn’t about to risk his shoes. On Monday, November 23, the KGB, properly chastised—and no doubt anxious to avoid any further irritation of their golden source—carried out an exchange at the PARK dead drop site, Hanssen’s old favorite.

  Among the documents passed by Hanssen that day was a cable, classified SECRET, that reported on a meeting the previous month of Jack Platt, a CIA officer, and Gennady Vasilenko, a KGB major. A tall, athletic man, the Russian was a world-class volleyball player who had been selected for the Soviet Olympic team in 1964 but was sidelined by a shoulder injury before he joined the KGB. Vasilenko had worked in Washington in the late 1970s and was now stationed in Guyana. Platt had become friendly with Vasilenko in Washington, where they spent years trying to recruit each other, with no success. Still, both the CIA and the FBI continued to hope that one day it might happen.