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

by David Wise

  As director of security, Ohlson called Hanssen in and demanded an explanation. He had gone to bat for his friend and was embarrassed by what had happened. And there were echoes of the episode four years earlier when Hanssen had broken into Ray Mislock’s computer at headquarters.

  Hanssen explained that he was trying to connect a color printer to his dedicated computer and could not, because he needed an administrative password to get into the control panel of the Windows operating system to make the necessary changes. FBI computers, however, are not designed to be fiddled with. The FBI does not want users changing the settings, so administrative passwords are put in to block people from making changes. Most of the printers at the bureau are black and white. To connect to a color printer meant changing the computer’s internal settings. Hanssen said he had used the breaker to try to circumvent the password. Ohlson accepted this as a plausible enough explanation, but he warned Hanssen not to do it again. “A password breaker on your hard disk does not look good,” he cautioned his friend.

  After Hanssen’s arrest, Ohlson remembered all this, which now took on a possibly more ominous meaning. For all he knew, Hanssen might have used the password breaker to access all sorts of bureau programs and files. Ohlson contacted his former office of security and reported the incident.*

  By the summer of 1997, Hanssen was restive. Monitoring travel arrangements for foreign diplomats was dull work. At OFM, James Bond would have died of boredom. Hanssen had been stuck at the State Department for more than two years now, and there seemed no end to the dreary assignment.

  Moreover, Hanssen needed money again; at least that was the explanation he offered to government debriefers after his arrest. At the time he resumed spying, he said, he was “running up credit card debt,” had refinanced his house twice, and his mortgage payments had grown so steep that he “was losing money every month and the debt was growing.” He claimed to have set a “financial goal” for himself of obtaining $100,000 from the Russians to pay down his debt.* It was time to get into the phone booth, change costume, and—faster than a speeding bullet—become Ramon Garcia.

  On July 25, he went into the FBI’s computers, typed in his user ID and password, and accessed the bureau’s secret and highly sensitive case files. Hanssen was now logged into the FBI’s Automated Case Support System (ACS), a collection of computerized databases of investigative files and their indexes. ACS had only existed for two years. Hanssen went immediately to the largest database in the system, known as the Electronic Case File. This is truly the bureau’s inner sanctum, because it contains electronic messages and other documents from current, ongoing FBI investigations and indexes. It amounts to the FBI’s own private Internet.

  On this day, Hanssen typed in his own name. He was looking to see whether he was the subject of an FBI investigation. He found nothing. But the following year, on March 20, he went back into the computer and tried to find a reference to himself under DEAD DROP AND KGB. Over the next nine months, Hanssen searched eight times for various keywords. Among the different words he searched for were DEAD DROP AND RUSSIA, 9414 TALISMAN, AND ROBERT P. HANSSEN.

  In April 1999, he was at it again, entering his name and address, and even searching for WHITECEDAR COURT, where he had not lived since 1985, the first year he contacted the KGB. In August, he searched for FOXSTONE, the park that was the site of dead drop ELLIS. He was back into the ACS files nine more times that year, entering keywords that might point to him.

  By the fall of 1999, Hanssen, after eight years, was ready to resume his career as a Russian spy. Emboldened at having found nothing worrisome in the FBI computer files, he once more contacted the KGB—which had become the SVR after the fall of the Soviet Union. He proposed an exchange in Foxstone Park in mid-November.

  The evidence suggests that Hanssen—except for his failed attempt to recontact the GRU in 1993—had been inactive during the eight years from 1991 to 1999. After his arrest, some intelligence officials speculated that Hanssen might not have been dormant during the entire period. But on October 6, Hanssen received a reply from the SVR which, from its content and almost ecstatic tone, clearly was welcoming him back after a long absence.

  “It’s good to know you are here,” the SVR wrote. “Acknowledging your letter to V.K. we express our sincere joy on the occasion of resumption of contact with you.* We firmly guarantee you for a necessary financial help. Note, please, that since our last contact a sum set aside for you has risen and presents now about 800.000 dollars. This time you will find in a package 50.000 dollars. Now it is up to you to give a secure explanation of it.”

  Further evidence that Hanssen was being embraced after a long absence was provided by the growth of the escrow account and by the next sentence in the SVR’s letter: “As to communication plan, we may have need of some time to work out a secure and reliable one.” Here again, the language indicates that Hanssen had been long out of contact.

  The SVR’s message reviewed the signals, the strips of white adhesive tape that they and Hanssen were to use on the post by the park sign. Hanssen’s tape was to be vertical, the SVR’s horizontal, just as before. Then, in case he had become rusty from lack of practice, his handlers added: “After you will clear the drop don’t forget to remove our tape that will mean for us—exchange is over.”

  The SVR also proposed a new signal site in one of Washington’s most exclusive residential neighborhoods, an electric utility pole at the intersection of Foxhall Road and Whitehaven Parkway. In the same letter, the Russians also suggested it was time to move on from adhesive tape to thumbtacks, and they went into extraordinary detail about the size and color, even telling Hanssen what drugstore chain carried the right ones:

  At any working day put a white thumb tack (1 cm in diameter, colored sets are sold at CVS) into the Northern side of the pole at the height of about 1.2 yards. The tack must be seen from a car going down Foxhall Road. This will mean for us that we shall retrieve your package from the DD [dead drop] Foxstone Park at the evening of the nex [sic] week’s Tuesday (when it’s getting dark).

  In case of a threatening situation of any kind put a yellow tack at the same place. This will mean that we shall refrain from any communication with you until further notice from your side (the white tack).

  Apparently, five months went by before Hanssen heard from the Russians again, and judging by the letter he sent on March 14, 2000, he was becoming unglued.

  “I have come about as close as I ever want to come to sacrificing myself to help you, and I get silence. I hate silence.… Conclusion: One might propose that I am either insanely brave or quite insane. I’d answer neither. I’d say, insanely loyal. Take your pick. There is insanity in all the answers.

  “I have, however, come as close to the edge as I can without being truly insane. My security concerns have proven reality-based. I’d say, pin your hopes on ‘insanely loyal’ and go for it. Only I can lose.”

  On the same day, he went back into the FBI computer and searched for the keywords DEAD DROP AND SVR. Again, he found nothing. But clearly Hanssen had persuaded himself that time was running out on his career as a spy, as evidenced not only by his desperate words but also by his repeated searches in the FBI computer, which continued throughout the year.

  The searches were dangerous, because at any time the computer systems operators might spot his excessive and highly suspicious usage by auditing the retrieval logs. FBI counterintelligence agents do not normally enter their own names and addresses in the ACS. They are expected to be the hunters, not the hunted.

  Finally, in his letter to the SVR in March 2000, Hanssen added, dubiously, that he had made his decision to become a spy as a teenager, inspired by the autobiography of Kim Philby, the Soviet mole inside British intelligence.

  I decided on this course when I was 14 years old. I’d read Philby’s book. Now that is insane, eh! My only hesitations were my security concerns under uncertainty. I hate uncertainty. So far I have judged the edge correctly. Give me credit for
that.

  Set the signal at my site any Tuesday evening. I will read your answer. Please, at least say goodbye. It’s been a long time my dear friends, a long and lonely time.

  Ramon Garcia

  Were Hanssen not a traitor to his country, the last words of his letter would be poignant. And his claim that Philby’s memoir influenced him to spy was bogus. Philby’s book was not published until 1968, when Hanssen was twenty-four.*

  Half a dozen times during 2000, Hanssen continued to search the FBI database for his name, as well as for TALISMAN DRIVE and, several times, the keywords DEAD DROP. Once he entered SVR AND DEAD DROP NOT GRU. And as he had done before, he searched DEAD DROP AND RUSSIA.

  On June 8, Hanssen wrote the SVR a long letter in which he said, “Enclosed, once again, is my rudimentary cipher.” Hanssen was probably referring to a system of letter substitution that he had used in some of his messages to Moscow. He apologized for reusing it many times—repetition is a laxity that opens a window for code-breakers—but explained that he did so in case Moscow had lost the key, further evidence that he had been in hibernation for some time.

  Hanssen’s dependence on the Russians, his apparent psychological need for their approval, was obvious from his next sentence: “Thank you for your note. It brought me great joy to see the signal at last.”

  He went on to say, however, that they required better and faster ways of contacting each other. Hanssen now proposed that the Russians leave the era of tape and thumbtacks behind and switch to a Palm VII organizer. He owned a Palm III, he said, which wasn’t a bad little handheld computer. But “the VII version comes with wireless internet capability built in. It can allow the rapid transmission of encrypted messages, which if used on an infrequent basis, could be quite effective.… Such a device might even serve for rapid transmittal of substantial material in digital form.”

  If Hanssen sounded a little like a Palm Pilot salesman pitching a reluctant customer, it was at least consistent with his geeky, albeit knowledgeable, fascination with computers and the latest technology.

  As his letter reflected, the tone of Hanssen’s communications with the Russians had changed after he resumed spying in 1999. He was at once more desperate—“I am either insanely brave or quite insane”—and less deferential.

  For example, he not only lectured the Russians about the need for wireless transmissions, he chided the SVR for bugging a State Department conference room without letting him know. If he had been told in time, he said, he could have warned Moscow that the operation had been detected by the FBI.

  On December 8, 1999, the bureau’s agents had arrested Stanislav Gusev outside the State Department. Gusev, who was listed as an “attaché” in the Russian embassy, had arrived in March. FBI counterintelligence agents had spotted Gusev hanging around the State Department. He was seen sometimes sitting on a bench, and at other times moving his car around the building, parking at different locations and taking care to feed the meters to avoid a ticket.

  The FBI concluded that Gusev was conducting an electronic eavesdropping operation. A tiny battery-powered transmitter had been planted in a conference room on the seventh floor, the inner sanctum of the State Department. The bug was concealed inside a piece of molding about three feet above the floor, the sort of wooden strip that keeps chair backs from scuffing the wall.

  The transmitter, the FBI said, had been “professionally introduced,” which meant that the Russian spies had cut away a piece of the molding and then replaced it with an identical matching piece containing the bug. That suggested that the Russians, or a confederate on the inside, had access to the room more than once, to case and photograph it, and probably to take a paint chip so their technicians could match the color of the molding.

  Gusev activated the bug by remote control, and it broadcast to a tape recorder in his car. The Russians used low-power batteries to make the bug more difficult to detect, but that also meant that its range was limited, and someone had to be outside the building to turn on the bug and record the signals.

  Once the FBI realized what Gusev was up to, the State Department security staff, using sophisticated equipment borrowed from the CIA and other agencies, electronically swept the entire building, until finally, after months of searching, the device was found in the conference room just down the hall from Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s office. Although the room was assigned to the Bureau of Oceans and International Environmental Scientific Affairs, other officials also used it for meetings, some of them sensitive. As many as one hundred meetings may have been overheard and recorded, officials said.

  When the FBI arrested Gusev, he had the remote control on his person. Since he had diplomatic immunity, he was turned over to his embassy but ordered expelled from the country.

  The FBI, of course, wanted very much to know how the Russians managed to get the bug inside the building and how long it had been in place, broadcasting secrets. Several batteries were found inside the piece of molding, so the gadget might have been active for as long as four years, according to one intelligence source.

  “The Gusev affair didn’t help you any,” Hanssen wrote to the Russians. “If I’d had better communications I could have prevented that.

  “I was aware of the fact that microphones had been detected at the State Department. (Such matters are why I need rapid communications. It can save you much grief.) … I had knowledge weeks before of the existence of devices, but not the country placing them.… I only found out the gruesome details too late to warn you through available means including the colored stick-pin call.* (Which by the way I doubted would work because of your ominous silence.) Very frustrating.”

  He added:

  “The U.S. can be errantly likened to a powerfully built but retarded child, potentially dangerous, but young, immature and easily manipulated. But don’t be fooled by that appearance. It is also one which can turn ingenius [sic] quickly, like an idiot savant, once convinced of a goal. The purple-pissing Japanese (to quote General Patten [sic] once again) learned this to their dismay.…”

  Then, buttering up his handlers, Hanssen said he greatly appreciated the “highly professional” references in their messages to information they had exchanged in the past as a subtle way of reassuring him “that the channel remains unpirated. This is not lost on me.” In other words, the prior references were a way to prove to Hanssen that the FBI was not running a sting against him—a favorite bureau tactic in spy cases—and that the messages he was receiving were really coming from Moscow.

  Hanssen’s mood was mercurial, because he switched in an instant from flattery to a Bogartian, tough-guy, don’t-try-to-con-me stance. All that money the Russians said they had put in escrow for him, now $800,000, was a fable.

  [W]e do both know that money is not really “put away for you” except in some vague accounting sense. Never patronize at this level. It offends me, but then you are easily forgiven. But perhaps I shouldn’t tease you. It just gets me in trouble.

  thank you again,

  Ramon.

  After twenty-one years as a Russian spy, Hanssen was indeed about to get into trouble, but not in a way he expected.

  *The same rules prevailed in Moscow, where for years American officials had to call the foreign ministry for airline tickets, housekeepers, television repairs, and other services. The office they called was really part of the KGB.

  *In 2001, nine countries were required to seek some type of travel approval. Three countries, Russia, China, and Vietnam, had to file a request with OFM for their diplomats to travel beyond twenty-five miles from the capital, but were then free to go after forty-eight hours unless turned down. Six other countries, Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Libya, North Korea, and Sudan, had to receive advance approval from OFM to travel beyond the twenty-five-mile limit. Ukraine and the other former Soviet republics, and the once-Communist countries of Eastern Europe, were no longer under any travel restrictions.

  *The term originated in an earlier era, before there were
electric timers, when Orthodox congregations had to make sure that a gentile, perhaps a retainer engaged for that purpose, or a janitor, was available to turn on the lights.

  *In January 1993, Mir Aimal Kansi, a twenty-eight-year-old Pakistani, walked along a line of cars waiting to turn left into the CIA headquarters and systematically gunned down the occupants with an AK-47 assault weapon, killing two CIA employees and wounding two other CIA workers and an agency contractor. Kansi was arrested by the FBI in Pakistan in 1997, brought to the United States, tried and convicted of murder in a Virginia court, and in January 1998 sentenced to death.

  †The familiar quotation “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing,” often attributed to Edmund Burke, the eighteenth-century British statesman, is probably a version of a similar idea expressed in his Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents (1770).

  *When FBInet began in the early 1990s, all the security protections were not in place. “Later on,” Ohlson said, “the system had a server and agents were instructed to write sensitive documents to a protected segment of the server. With the password breaker he could get into the protected part.”

  *Webster commission, p. 12.

  *V.K.” was not further identified. The FBI affidavit that quoted from the Hanssen file described him only as a “senior officer” of the SVR. He was, however, Vladimir A. Kirdyanov, ostensibly the first secretary of the Russian embassy at the time.

  *Kim Philby, My Silent War (New York: Grove Press, 1968).

  *The stilted language in some of the correspondence contained in the KGB/SVR file suggests that perhaps some of Hanssen’s letters were translated from English into Russian and then back into English. The reference to “the colored stick-pin call” almost certainly means the yellow thumbtack that the SVR instructed Hanssen to use as an emergency signal. It would be very odd for a native English speaker such as Hanssen to call a thumbtack a “colored stick-pin.”