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

by David Wise

  Although the term is little known to the public, MASINT, which stands for measurement and signature intelligence, applies to a wide variety of data scooped up by satellites and by secret sensors around the globe and under the seas. MASINT includes, for example, satellites equipped with gamma ray trackers and X-ray spectrometers to measure radioactive fallout from a nuclear explosion, as well as infrared sensors to detect antiballistic missile tests. It includes powerful phased array radars, such as COBRA DANE at Shemya, Alaska, which was built to watch for a possible Soviet missile attack and measure Soviet missile test launches. And MASINT includes as well the hundreds of hydrophones planted on the ocean floor in a program called SOSUS to measure the distinctive acoustic signature of Soviet (now Russian) submarines.

  The document passed to the KGB by Hanssen was significant because it reflected the consensus of the intelligence community on the secret operations and goals of the MASINT program. The report was crammed with specifics and highly technical information.* Hanssen must have been unusually nervous about transmitting it to the KGB, because for the first and only time he asked that it be returned. Typically there would be numbered copies of a highly classified report of this nature; Hanssen would have a difficult time explaining why the copy he had removed had vanished if he did not get it back.

  Hanssen’s second package contained another computer disk and more than five hundred pages of documents, many of them classified. In return, the KGB package was generous; it held $18,000 in cash and a third diamond, worth $11,700.

  He had now received diamonds valued at a total of $54,168, and the KGB began to fret about whether Hanssen was concealing the gems or flashing them around. The Russians asked what security precautions he was taking to avoid suspicions about the diamonds. Not to worry, Hanssen told the KGB; if anyone asked, he would say the diamonds came from his grandmother.

  But on reflection Hanssen himself decided the gems were risky, or that cash was more practical, because only two months later he returned the first and third diamonds, valued at a total of $35,920, and asked for cash instead, which he received the following Christmas Day.

  Although Hanssen was unaware of it, the fact that he was paid in diamonds was the first clue obtained by the FBI about an unknown spy that ultimately fit him. According to John F. Lewis, Jr., the former assistant FBI director in charge of the intelligence division, the bureau learned of a “diamond connection” years before it suspected Hanssen.

  “We had heard from a defector that somebody was being paid in diamonds,” Lewis said. “At least ten years ago or more.” That information, while tantalizing, was also frustrating, because the defector, who may have heard corridor gossip at KGB headquarters, had no information about who was receiving the gems, or even in which agency the spy worked.

  Four days after receiving the MASINT report, the KGB tried to return it, but for some reason Hanssen failed to retrieve the document the first time it was placed in a dead drop for him. A second attempt also failed, but on the third try, in late May, he got it back.

  In Moscow, meanwhile, the KGB officers who had been handling the Hanssen case were recognized in a formal ceremony in April. Among the medals handed out at headquarters were the coveted Order of the Red Banner, as well as the Order of the Red Star and the Medal for Excellent Service.

  For Hanssen, there was still the problem of what to do with the cash flowing in from Moscow. Depositing the money in banks or investing it in the market was risky, since to do so would leave a paper trail of unexplained, unreported income.

  So when he returned the two diamonds for cash in May, he included a floppy disk on which he broached the idea of the KGB setting up a bank account in Switzerland for him and transferring bonds into it. The traditional secrecy of Swiss banking laws, Hanssen knew, would mask the source of the funds as well as the identity of the account holder.

  A few months later, the KGB turned down Hanssen’s idea of establishing a Swiss bank account. At some point, however, he went ahead and opened two bank accounts in Switzerland on his own, one at Credit Suisse and the other at Bank Leu. How much money passed through the accounts is not clear, but only a small amount remained in Switzerland at the time of his arrest.

  * * *

  Bill Houghton, who worked for Hanssen in the Soviet analytical unit during these years, liked him but remembered some odd conversations they had. “We would occasionally travel on business; we went out to Los Alamos once. He told amusing stories. He always used to kid. If we were waiting in an airport he’d say, ‘That guy’s walking funny. My dad always said to me, Always beware of people walking funny. If you see people walking funny they aren’t normal.’

  “Most people thought him very aloof. We got along because we were both interested in some of the same things. He would talk to me about computers, about codes. In Los Alamos, he said, ‘Bill, you know how someone builds a nuclear weapon?’ I said, ‘No, I don’t.’ ‘It’s quite simple,’ he said. For the next hour he outlined on a paper napkin how one builds a nuclear weapon. He was a sort of renaissance man.

  “We were talking about careers one day and he said, ‘Bill, have you ever been to an autopsy? It’s fascinating, you should go some time.’ He said, ‘I did an autopsy, it’s not gruesome at all. The first time I sliced off the skull and removed the brain—to hold a person’s brain in your hand is such an awesome feeling. To think, a few days ago that was a sentient being and now you’re actually holding it in your hand.’ ” Houghton was somewhat taken aback by the conversation. But he was used to Hanssen saying strange things, and he enjoyed their mutual interest in technical matters.

  “Bob was really into shortwave. He would buy expensive equipment and bring it into the office. Apparently his friend Jack had given him an early GPS system and he thought it was really neat. I think I met Jack once. He talked about Jack a lot.”

  * * *

  In August, Hanssen passed five rolls of film on which there were copies of highly sensitive documents. He was assured that $50,000 more had been placed in his escrow account in a Moscow bank.

  It was on September 25, 1989, that Hanssen disclosed to the KGB the largest U.S. intelligence project of all. He had learned some of the details years before, in the early 1980s. When the Soviets began construction of a new embassy in Washington, the FBI had decided to launch its own secret construction project. To listen in on the Russians, the FBI built an elaborate tunnel beneath the embassy, manned around the clock by NSA technicians with the latest in sophisticated electronic eavesdropping equipment.

  When Hanssen was still in New York and spying for the GRU, he had no need to know about the tunnel project. But that changed after he was assigned to headquarters in 1981. The hundreds of millions of dollars spent in building and maintaining the tunnel was for years a huge item in the FBI’s budget, and Hanssen, working in the budget unit—and on the Dedicated Technical Program in particular—knew there was an expensive, long-term technical project.

  Why had Hanssen waited perhaps as long as eight years to reveal this huge secret? The explanation he gave to debriefers after his arrest was that his information was fragmentary. “He was aware early on, from his budget office days,” said one intelligence official, “but he didn’t have the details, the description of what it was. He knew the funding, but it wasn’t until much later he got the details.”

  Hanssen revealed the tunnel to the KGB in an exchange carried out at DORIS, a dead drop in Canterbury Park in Springfield, Virginia. Hanssen left eighty pages of documents under a footbridge in the park. One, classified TOP SECRET/SCI, was obliquely described by the government as “a program of enormous value, expense, and importance to the United States.”

  This was the embassy tunnel, although the government’s affidavit does not say that, since the FBI has never admitted to the existence of the tunnel. The project was so sensitive and so secret that even today most FBI officials will not discuss it or even acknowledge it was ever built. “What tunnel?” is the typical response to inquiri
es about it.

  On the September day in 1989 that Hanssen betrayed this multimillion-dollar secret, he received another $30,000 in cash. And the KGB for the first time put its message to Hanssen on a computer disk.

  Alas, the Russians were proving to be technically challenged; in October, Hanssen, now calling himself “G. Robertson, 1408 Ingeborg Ct., McLean VA,” wrote back, saying: “The disk is clean. I tried all methods—completely demagnetized.”

  On Halloween, the KGB, undoubtedly grateful for the electrifying news that a tunnel had been dug under their embassy, placed $55,000 in dead drop ELLIS, under the footbridge in Foxstone Park, and assured Hanssen that another $50,000 had been deposited for him in Moscow. The package also included a computer disk—this one readable—with yet another letter conveying regards from KGB chief Vladimir Kryuchkov.

  On Christmas Day of 1989, Hanssen closed out his successful year of espionage with an exchange at dead drop BOB, in Idylwood Park. It had been a less successful year for the Soviets, whose empire was crumbling. That fall, one after another, the Communist regimes of Eastern Europe were toppled. The Berlin Wall came down in November, and East Germany opened its borders to the West. So it was unsurprising that the document that Hanssen passed to the Russians, classified SECRET and dated November 1989, was a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) entitled “The Soviet System in Crisis: Prospects for the Next Two Years.”

  He also provided Moscow with the identities of three new FBI sources within the KGB and other Soviet agencies, which meant that he had now betrayed six FBI sources—Martynov, Motorin, Yuzhin, and the three new ones. In addition, he passed along information about four defectors.

  In the same exchange, the KGB gave Hanssen another $38,000 in cash as payment for the two diamonds he had returned, plus a little extra for October. The package for Hanssen also included two computer disks with Christmas greetings from the KGB.

  One wonders what he told his family as an excuse to leave home on Christmas Day. Perhaps he invented some errand and drove to the park.

  It had been a fine year, and it was nice that the KGB reimbursed him for the two diamonds. But he had expected no less; he was entirely too important an agent to be trifled with by the Russians. As he returned home with $38,000 in cash to his wife and children, his dog, and his Christmas tree with its bright lights, he undoubtedly felt a glow of satisfaction. Perhaps he thought he really was the perfect spy.

  But he did not know that seven months before, on that same day in May that he had returned the two diamonds to the KGB, the information he had passed would ultimately, if indirectly, lead to his downfall. On that day he told the KGB about a secret FBI investigation of a State Department official suspected of espionage. His name was Felix Bloch.

  *The MASINT document passed by Hanssen, dated November 1988, was entitled “DCI Guidance for the National MASINT Intelligence Program (FY 1991–FY 2000).” It was prepared for the director of central intelligence by the intelligence community’s Measurement and Signature Intelligence (MASINT) Committee.

  13

  Let’s Play MONOPOLY

  Robert Hanssen had recently joined the FBI and was working in his first office in Gary, Indiana, when on August 23, 1977, a brief story about a construction project appeared in The Washington Post. The news was not really important enough for page one. Readers would have had to browse through to page two of the Metro section to come across the headline WORK BEGINS ON NEW SOVIET EMBASSY.

  “Bulldozers have started clearing trees and dense patches of weeds from an upper Northwest site at Wisconsin Avenue and Calvert Street,” the newspaper reported. The story was little more than three hundred words long.

  But for a small group of FBI counterintelligence officials, it was big news indeed. Soon, the dump trucks, bulldozers, cement mixers, and heavy equipment of the George Hyman Construction Company would be in noisy full swing, roaring and rumbling onto Wisconsin Avenue and Tunlaw Road, behind the embassy, where a 165-unit apartment building was also being built to house the Soviet diplomats and their families. All the noise of construction and the comings and goings of the trucks would provide perfect cover for what the FBI had in mind.

  With the work under way above ground, the bureau began construction of its own secret project underneath the embassy, an elaborate tunnel for electronic eavesdropping. The FBI bought a town house nearby with a basement that would become the entrance to the tunnel. It hired its own contractor and started the digging, which went on for years at a cost said to have reached hundreds of millions of dollars. The FBI gave the highly classified, ultrasecret project a code name: MONOPOLY.

  To an extent, the tunnel project was the FBI’s answer to what the intelligence agencies considered a huge mistake by the State Department. The new embassy was going up on Mount Alto, the second highest point in Washington. From there, the technical experts warned, the Russians would have a direct line of sight and a superb vantage point for listening in on the White House, the State Department, the Pentagon, and the CIA. The location was ideal for eavesdropping on radio communications, and for capturing telephone calls carried by microwave, the technology then widely used, since those conversations could not be intercepted without a direct line of sight.

  “We were absolutely beside ourselves,” said Dick Alu, a former FBI counterintelligence agent. “They [the State Department] never bothered to consult the intelligence community, the FBI or NSA.”

  The Soviets had been pressing for years for a bigger embassy that would also allow them to consolidate in one place half a dozen offices scattered around town. The State Department approved the Wisconsin Avenue site, in a northwest residential neighborhood on a hill high above Georgetown.

  The Soviet embassy at the time was on Sixteenth Street in downtown Washington, in an ornate beaux-arts mansion built by the widow of George M. Pullman, the inventor who designed the railroad sleeping cars that bear his name. All sorts of powerful antennae sprouted from the roof of the embassy. Even before the decision was made to allow the new embassy to go up on Mount Alto, the FBI was concerned about the Soviets eavesdropping from the Sixteenth Street location on nearby U.S. government offices, including the White House.

  The two construction projects—the embassy and the tunnel—proceeded apace, one visible, the other secret. When the $70 million Soviet embassy complex was completed a decade later, it included not only the eight-story chancery building faced in white marble and the nine-story apartment building, but an eight-classroom school, a playground, a gymnasium, an Olympic-sized swimming pool, a four-hundred-seat auditorium, an underground parking garage, and a large reception hall.

  Meanwhile, work by a Soviet contractor on a new American embassy in Moscow had begun in 1979. That the Russians would try to plant microphones during the construction should not have come as an enormous surprise, given the long history of Soviet efforts to bug the American embassy. In Moscow in 1945, for example, the Soviets had presented to Ambassador Averell Harriman a carved replica of the Great Seal of the United States. The hollow wooden seal had decorated the wall of four U.S. ambassadors before the listening device it concealed was discovered by the embassy’s electronic sweepers in the early 1950s.*

  It was no ordinary bug. Peter Karlow, a CIA officer in charge of the agency’s technical staff, recalled the problems the experts faced. “We found it and we didn’t know how it worked,” Karlow said. “There was a passive device inside the seal, like a tadpole, with a little tail. The Soviets had a microwave signal beamed at the embassy that caused the receptors inside the seal to resonate. It had no current, no batteries, and an infinite life expectancy.” The CIA’s unsuccessful attempt to copy the bug was code-named EASY CHAIR.†

  Construction of the new American embassy in Moscow was halted in 1985, when it was discovered that the building was riddled with literally thousands of tiny bugs; the structure had, in effect, been turned into a giant radio transmitter by the KGB. The Russians had delivered huge slabs of precast concrete with the bugs already
embedded within. By the time the bugs were found, $22 million had already been spent on construction.

  It was worse than that. A former FBI official remembered his dismay at what he saw when he inspected the New Office Building, or NOB, as the bugged embassy was called. Not only were there bugs, but the construction was such that KGB agents could secretly gain access to the building as well as run wires and microphones into it.

  “I found it had large hollow structural support columns at each corner,” he said. “The columns had a strong exterior, but inside they were filled with dirt and broken bricks. The concern was the KGB could go in underground, take out all the bricks, drain all the fill, and climb up into the building.

  “Then they would have to get out of the columns. Perhaps there was some kind of a panel or door to allow access inside the building. All they had to do was to remove the junk, go into the pillars, and go up, and have free run of the embassy.”

  Finding the tiny transmitters embedded in the embassy’s walls had not been easy. Security experts from Washington were sent to Moscow with special X-ray equipment. They were trained rock climbers who had to hang off the side of the building as they went from floor to floor in weather that was sometimes forty degrees below zero.

  The discovery of the bugs caused a great uproar in Congress. President Reagan wanted to raze the entire structure and start over with American construction workers. After years of debate, it was finally decided to demolish the top four floors, down to the floor slab of the sixth floor. Four new, bug-proof stories and a penthouse would be constructed, and any sensitive business would be conducted in the new part; any microphones below that level would not matter. The project was called Top Hat, which may have struck Hanssen as ironic, since at the outset of his career as a spy he had betrayed the agent code-named TOPHAT, helping to send him to his death.