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

by David Wise

  23

  BUCKLURE

  The Safeway in the Georgetown section of Washington is only a few blocks down the hill from the Soviet (now Russian) embassy, and many of the residents of the embassy’s apartment complex like to shop there. The store is also widely known as “the social Safeway” because it is popular with the upscale young professionals who live in the area.

  In 1982, the produce section of the Safeway was the setting for an unlikely Cold War drama. Dimitri I. Yakushkin, the KGB rezident in Washington for the past seven years, was about to return home to Moscow. The FBI knew this, and the CI-2 squad that specialized in the KGB’s Line PR political officers decided to approach him to see if he could be persuaded to defect.

  A cold pitch, as it is known in the business, to a KGB rezident, especially an experienced spy like Yakushkin, had almost no chance of success, but nothing ventured, nothing gained. For a week, the squad, operating out of the Washington field office, was on Yakushkin, waiting for a moment when he was alone. It came in the Safeway.

  Special Agent Dale H. Pugh sidled up to the KGB man who was in the produce section, carefully feeling the oranges for any soft spots. The Russian made a striking figure. He was six foot four, about 220 pounds, and wore a beret, which made him look like a cross between an artist in Montmartre and a Redskins linebacker. Yakushkin came from a prominent Russian family. Urbane and well-educated, fluent in English, he had been the KGB rezident at the Soviet Mission to the United Nations for six years before he was sent to Washington.

  The KGB man had come shopping with his wife, Irina. In the store, they split up. Another FBI agent, Grover Gibson, was trailing her, keeping Pugh in his line of sight so that he could signal his partner if Mrs. Yakushkin suddenly decided to rejoin her husband. The FBI men were dressed in belted trench coats; they had not expected to end up in a supermarket, and Pugh felt conspicuous among the grocery shoppers.

  Pugh introduced himself to Yakushkin, identified himself as an FBI agent, and gave a fake name that he often used operationally. Yakushkin asked to see his ID. Pugh, a rookie at the time, produced it, realizing with a sinking feeling that it wouldn’t match the name he had given. Yakushkin, examining Pugh’s credential, saw that right away, and smiled.

  The FBI man tried to persuade Yakushkin to meet him somewhere so they could talk privately, but the KGB agent would have none of it. Finally Pugh, following instructions from his squad supervisor, James O. Stassinos, offered the Russian $20 million to defect to the United States.

  “Young man,” Yakushkin said, “I appreciate the offer. Twenty years ago I might have been interested.” And with that, he walked away.

  Yakushkin appeared more amused than offended by the encounter. But there was an unspoken subtext to the dialogue by the orange bin at the Georgetown Safeway. Yakushkin had a girlfriend from North Carolina the entire time he was in the United States. As he may have suspected, she was an FBI source. What he told her, and it was not much, she told the FBI.

  Dale Pugh did not mention the woman when he made his pitch. Nor was it a question of coercion; Yakushkin was too big a figure in the KGB to worry about how the liaison would look in Moscow if the FBI revealed it. But the bureau hoped that Yakushkin liked his woman friend well enough that she might be an additional incentive for him to defect and remain in the United States. The FBI even asked the woman to give Yakushkin a copy of Graham Greene’s novel The Honorary Consul in the hope that it might put ideas in his head.*

  The novel, set in a provincial town in the north of Argentina, has the usual array of expatriate, tormented Greene characters. Charley Fortnum, the British honorary consul, is sixty-one and a drunk. He marries a twenty-year-old prostitute; when he is kidnapped by leftist revolutionaries who mistake him for the American ambassador, the British government does not even consider him worth the ransom. After he is rescued by police, London rewards his years of service by dismissing him. The bureau may have thought that the theme of an older man in love with a younger woman, living in a foreign country and unappreciated by his government, might resonate with Yakushkin.

  It was not the first time that the FBI had tried to romance Yakushkin. A previous attempt by FBI agent Ted Gardner had taken place in downtown Washington at the Mayflower Hotel a year earlier. Gardner, then in charge of the Washington field office, accompanied by Phillip Parker, his counterintelligence chief, waited in the lobby for Yakushkin, whom they knew was due at the hotel with his woman friend, either to drop her off or join her in her room. The pair arrived, but when they reached the elevators, a third, unknown person had joined them, so Gardner did not make the approach.

  Neither money, sex, nor Graham Greene influenced Yakushkin. The KGB man went home as scheduled, and rose to become head of the American department of the spy agency’s first chief directorate, its foreign intelligence arm. He was a mentor and protector of Vitaly Yurchenko, who had been security chief of the Washington embassy when Yakushkin was the rezident. Yurchenko was the high-level KGB man who defected in 1985, changed his mind, and returned to Moscow three months later.*

  As a senior KGB agent and top official in the Washington residency, Yakushkin would have been a huge catch for the FBI. The bureau would never have paid anything like $20 million to get him, but the field agents might have dangled that enormous sum to play on his ego and show that they were serious. Had Yakushkin defected, his knowledge of Moscow’s spying was so extensive that he could have shut down the KGB’s operations in the United States.

  The two attempts to recruit the top KGB man in Washington demonstrated that the FBI was not hesitant to use cash as a weapon to recruit Russians in the Cold War. At least in some circumstances, the bureau and the CIA hoped, money might be the bait to land the big one.

  And so, in 1987, long before the arrest of Aldrich Ames in 1994, the FBI launched a joint operation with the CIA, aimed at buying Soviet intelligence officers with large amounts of cash. The program, designed by Robert Wade, the assistant chief of the FBI’s Soviet section, was codenamed BUCKLURE by the FBI; the CIA called it RACKETEER.

  “BUCKLURE was created to recruit Russians who could help us find a mole,” one veteran FBI agent explained. With the help of the CIA, the bureau began logging the whereabouts of Soviet intelligence officers who had worked in the United States at a time when American assets were being lost in the Soviet Union, and who had then gone back to Moscow. Some had been reassigned abroad, others had retired. Many were KGB “American targets” officers, the Line KR spies who had been sent to the United States to try to recruit people, especially inside American intelligence.

  Before long, BUCKLURE had compiled a list of ninety to one hundred potential recruits worldwide. “The list became very focused on those who we wanted, who would have the answers,” a former senior FBI official said. All the approaches to the KGB officers were made outside Russia.

  By the mid-1990s, however, despite the efforts of BUCKLURE and the arrests of the CIA’s Jim Nicholson and the FBI’s Earl Pitts, the Special Investigations Unit at the CIA, with the help of dozens of FBI agents, had not solved all of the anomalies still plaguing U.S. counterintelligence, including the tip-off to Felix Bloch and the troublesome technical compromises.

  The trolling for SVR agents through BUCKLURE and RACKETEER was intensified. In the beginning, the going price for a KGB officer who could identify a mole was a million dollars.* It was hard cash, ready to be paid.

  A CIA man involved in RACKETEER said the figure of a million dollars was based on actual experience. “Sometime in the early eighties,” he said, “we offered a KGB officer in Latin America five hundred thousand dollars and he turned it down. So we upped it to a million. We jointly put a million bucks into a fiscal kitty. A million per guy.”

  When a likely prospect was located abroad, the FBI might ask the CIA to make the approach. The FBI man explained what might be said to the Russian: “We know you are a good guy, you don’t want to defect or work for us. But you give us the name of a penetration, we gi
ve you a million dollars. You don’t have to defect, and nobody knows about this except the president of the United States and the two of us.”

  “We pitched a lot of people,” another senior FBI man recalled. “The Russians got wind of what we were doing around nineteen ninety-six or ninety-seven. They knew we were trying to recruit people for a lot of money.”

  The bureau set its sights high; it did not hesitate to go after even the celebrated Viktor Cherkashin, the canny KGB chief of counterintelligence in the Washington residency, who, as the CIA and the bureau later learned to their sorrow, was the key player in the handling of both Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen.

  The attempt to recruit Cherkashin was made by Ray Mislock, then the special agent in charge of counterintelligence for the FBI’s Washington field office. Cherkashin had returned to Washington around 1997 to attend a conference. It was long after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and by this time senior KGB officers often fraternized with American intelligence officials, their former foes, at various international meetings.

  Cherkashin had agreed to have dinner at the Old Angler’s Inn in Potomac, Maryland, with Brent Scowcroft, who had been national security adviser to President Gerald Ford and the first President Bush. It was arranged beforehand that Mislock would show up as an unannounced added guest. At an opportune moment during dinner, Mislock let Cherkashin know what was on his mind. Relations are better, Mislock said; we would like to solve some unanswered questions. Cherkashin was noncommittal. The dinner was pleasant, the three men chatted amiably. But after dessert and coffee, by prearrangement, Scowcroft bowed out.

  Now Mislock, as he had plotted, was alone with Cherkashin. He offered to drive the former KGB man back to his hotel in Tysons Corner, across the river in northern Virginia. In the car, Mislock pitched Cherkashin. He was explicit; the FBI man wanted to know the identity of the mole inside U.S. intelligence.

  Mislock did not have to mention a million dollars—the KGB officer knew what was tacitly being offered. For Cherkashin, it could have been a very profitable ride back to his hotel.

  But Cherkashin was a tough guy, a KGB veteran with a poker face that never betrayed his thoughts or emotions. Mislock got nowhere. At the hotel, he let Cherkashin out of the car and they bade each other a pleasant good night.

  It did not end the bureau’s continued interest in Viktor Cherkashin. “We gathered all the information we had on Cherkashin,” a former senior FBI man said. “There was an event involving a bicycle that Cherkashin was riding through Rock Creek Park in the mid-1980s. We thought it might involve a penetration. Cherkashin may have been checking a signal site, getting ready to clear a drop, or perhaps meeting an individual. We reexamined those events, such as Cherkashin showing up in Rock Creek, in the post-Pitts, post-Ames time frame. The incident was being looked at very intently to see if it was a drop, a signal site, or even a brush pass.”*

  The FBI assigned Special Agent Mike Rochford to examine the Cherkashin file. He had been the case agent responsible for tracking Cherkashin in the early 1980s. He was also one of two agents who had interviewed Vitaly Yurchenko during his brief interlude as a defector. Rochford spoke Russian and knew a lot about the KGB. He was to play a central role in the unmasking of Robert Hanssen.

  “Mike Rochford began an exhaustive reexamination of everything we had on Cherkashin,” the FBI man said. “When code clerks had arrived, when the pouch was sent to Moscow, little things that might indicate something big going on.” Then, as the mole hunters focused on particular possible suspects, they could turn to Rochford’s study. “We would look to see if there was anything corresponding with the suspects’ lives that would explain intense activity in the residency.”

  Just such wisps, strands, and tiny details are the tools of counterintelligence. Often, the microscopic attention to detail ends in frustration and turns up nothing. “The Cherkashin study did not lead directly to Hanssen,” the FBI man said, “but it eliminated some suspicions.”

  * * *

  At the end of July 2000, Hanssen retrieved a letter from the SVR. It sought to reassure him that the political changes in Russia “had not affected our resources,” meaning that they still had plenty of money to pay him. After a number of upheavals in the Russian cabinet, Vladimir Putin, a former KGB officer, had been elected president six months earlier, in March. Once again, the SVR assured Hanssen that his “personal security” came first.

  His handlers then asked for information on “human, electronic and technical penetrations in our residencies here and in other countries.” Apparently the SVR knew about the active search for penetrations secretly being carried on at the CIA and the FBI, for the letter said: “We are very interested in getting … information on the work of a special group which serches [sic] ‘mole’ in CIA and FBI. We need this information especially to take necessary additional steps to ensure Your personal security.…” In effect, Moscow was asking Hanssen how close the mole hunters were getting to him.

  Once more, the SVR pressed Hanssen to meet outside the United States, which he had consistently refused to do. In the meantime, it set the next exchange at LEWIS, in the Long Branch Nature Center, for November 21. And the SVR proposed to use dead drop ELLIS in Foxstone Park once a year, on February 18. It was a date that would prove fateful for Robert Hanssen.

  The SVR also chided Hanssen for continuing to send letters to them through the mail. “You know very well our negative attitude toward this method,” the Russians said. But a very brief note giving a date, time, and place would be all right if he needed an “urgent exchange.”

  Again rejecting Hanssen’s pleas to deposit money in his Swiss bank accounts, the SVR argued that it was “very risky to transfer money in Zurich because now it is impossible to hide its origin.” Then, seeking to reassure their mole that there would be no leaks at Moscow’s end, the letter added that “an insignificant number of persons know about you, your information and our relationship.”

  On November 17, 2000, Hanssen wrote back, complaining that “For me breaks in communications are most difficult and stressful. Recent changes in U.S. law now attach the death penalty to my help to you as you know, so I do take some risk.”

  But, he assured Moscow, “I know far better than most what minefields are laid and the risks.” The SVR, he said, might overestimate the FBI’s abilities, but still, an overconfident Russian intelligence officer might, “as we say, step in an occasional cowpie. (Message to the translator: Got a good word for cowpie in Russian?? Clue, don’t blindly walk behind cows.)”

  He added:

  No one answered my signal at Foxhall. Perhaps you occasionally give up on me. Giving up on me is a mistake. I have proven inveterately loyal and willing to take grave risks which even could cause my death, only remaining quiet in times of extreme uncertainty. So far my ship has successfully navigated the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.

  I ask you to help me survive.…

  On meeting out of the country, it simply is not practical for me. I must answer too many questions from family, friends, and government plus it is a cardinal sign of a spy. You have made it that way because of your policy. Policies are constraints, constraints breed patterns. Patterns are noticed. Meeting in this country is not really that hard to manage, but I am loath to do so not because it is risky but because it involves revealing my identity. That insulation has been my best protection against betrayal by someone like me working from whatever motivation, a Bloch or a Philby.

  Still pushing for money in a Swiss bank, Hanssen agreed that Switzerland offered no real security, “but insulated by laundering on both the in and out sides” it could be managed. Perhaps he could set up a corporation that would lend him mortgage money to conceal his SVR payments.

  Cash is hard to handle here because little business is ever really done in cash and repeated cash transactions into the banking system are more dangerous because of the difficulty in explaining them. That doesn’t mean it isn’t welcome enough to let that problem devolv
e on me. (We should all have such problems, eh?) How do you propose I get this money put away for me when I retire? (Come on; I can joke with you about it. I know money is not really put into an account at MOST Bank, and that you are speaking figuratively of an accounting notation at best to be made real at some uncertain future. We do the same.

  Want me to lecture in your 101 course in my old age? My college level Russian has sunk low through inattention all these years; I would be a novelty attraction, but I don’t think a practical one except in extremis.)

  So good luck. Wish me luck.

  It was his last letter to the Sluzhba Vneshnei Razvedki. Unknown to Robert Hanssen, his luck had already run out.

  *Graham Greene, The Honorary Consul (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1973).

  *Yurchenko was rumored to have been in some sort of trouble in 1985, and the CIA suspected that it was Yakushkin who sent Yurchenko to Rome that year, to get him out of Moscow. It was from Rome that Yurchenko defected to the CIA on August 1, 1985, only to redefect to Moscow on November 6. Dimitri Yakushkin retired in 1986 with the rank of major general. He died at the age of seventy-one in Moscow on August 9, 1994.

  *Over the years, and allowing for inflation, the $1 million bounty increased substantially.

  *In a brush pass an intelligence officer and a source move closely by each other, usually in a crowd, and without stopping or seeming to recognize each other transfer a document or other material so quickly that an observer, even a few feet away, might not see it happen. Although normally accomplished on foot, it could be managed by two people riding bicycles.