The Secrets of the FBI

by Ronald Kessler

  30

  SPY SWAP

  AS THE CHIEF OF COUNTERTERRORISM AND counterintelligence, Art Cummings was responsible for protecting the country against spies and cyberthreats from foreign countries as well as from terrorists. When Mueller appointed Cummings, Mueller told him that he had a reputation for having “sharp elbows” and that he needed to be more diplomatic.

  “You need to know how to play in the sandbox a little bit better,” Mueller said.

  “You don’t pay me to not have sharp elbows,” Cummings responded. “You personally have no tolerance for a lapse in carrying out our responsibilities or for consensus on everything. Consensus is absolutely an avenue to failure. I’m not looking for a watered-down solution that everyone can agree upon. I’m looking for informed information and a final decision that’s the right decision, taking everything into account but discarding much of it.”

  In this new position, Cummings was in charge of a new Presidential Threat Task Force created to gather, track, and evaluate assassination threats that might be related to domestic or international terrorism. First disclosed in a new chapter of the paperback edition of my book In the President’s Secret Service, the task force consists of twenty representatives from pertinent agencies, including agents from the FBI and Secret Service and operatives from the CIA, NSA, and the Defense Department, along with analysts.

  Each day, more than ten thousand attempts are made by foreign governments such as China’s to penetrate U.S. military and commercial computer networks.

  “We are being flooded, absolutely flooded by predominantly Chinese cyberattacks,” Cummings says. While they originate both with the Chinese government and with Chinese companies, the government has a great ability to conceal their source, Cummings notes.

  Besides cyberintrusion, China makes use of Chinese who work in the United States and are loyal to China, Cummings says.

  “You have tens of thousands of vulnerabilities where Chinese and other foreign nationals are working on high-dollar proprietary information or intellectual property with the expectation that they’re going to take it back to China,” Cummings says.

  As a result of economic espionage, foreign companies are stealing U.S. technological breakthroughs. “Secrets, proprietary information, and technology are just flying out of the U.S.,” Cummings says. “If we lose the manufacturing rights and we’re not producing items, we’ve just lost hundreds of millions of dollars in tax revenue.”

  Until he replaced Tom Harrington as head of criminal investigations, Shawn Henry had run the FBI’s Cyber Division and then briefly the Washington field office. Although Henry has the trademark furrowed brow and crinkly eyes of the fully engaged, he is warm and relaxed. He has a dimple in his left cheek, and he’s Bruce Willis bald.

  “There are terrorist groups that would like to have the same impact on this country through an electronic attack as they did by flying planes at the buildings ten years ago,” Henry says. “To disrupt communication systems, to impact our critical infrastructure. We know for a fact that they have an interest in doing that. Even if they don’t have the capability, they can lease the capability because there are people who have the skill set who are willing to rent their services. So the threat that we face today from foreign intelligence services, terrorist organizations, and organized criminal organizations is substantial.”

  Terrorist groups tied to the jihadist cause have in fact tried to launch cyberattacks, Henry says. “They’re interested in disrupting our way of life. They’ve looked at our critical infrastructure—electrical power grids, water treatment plants.”

  At the same time, dozens of foreign countries “have an electronic collection plan in place as part of their arsenal” to learn U.S. military and corporate secrets, Henry says.

  While the United States has a national cyberstrategy, “I’m not so sure it’s effective,” Cummings says. “I would advise companies that with anything they really care about, take it off the Internet. Put it in a closed system. If it’s attached to the Internet, know you can’t protect against its loss. If it’s attached to the Internet, then you’re stating, de facto, you can afford to lose that information.”

  With the exceptions of Great Britain, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, nearly every country in the world with any power spies on the United States, and the United States spies on those countries. In particular, the Russians are just as active now as during the Cold War.

  That became evident at the end of June 2010, when the FBI arrested ten Russian spies who had been trying to ferret out intelligence about U.S. policy and secrets by making connections to think tanks and government officials. An eleventh spy was detained by authorities in Cyprus. The Russians were so-called illegals, officers or assets of an intelligence service sent to spy on another country without diplomatic cover or any overt connection to their government.

  In November 2010, the Russian newspaper Kommersant reported that an SVR official, identified only as Colonel Shcherbakov, was responsible for giving up the spies and had left Russia shortly before they were arrested by the FBI. An unidentified Russian government official was quoted as issuing death threats against him. However, it turned out that the individual in question was actually Colonel Alexander Poteyev, deputy director of Department S within the SVR, the unit that coordinates the work of illegal agents. He had been recruited by the CIA.

  What did not come out was that the case had started back in 2001, when a CIA operative was able to recruit Poteyev, the SVR official who had knowledge of the spy network, which extended to other countries besides the United States. The CIA operative was under nonofficial cover (NOC), meaning that if he had been arrested, he would have had no diplomatic immunity from prosecution and could be executed.

  In the end, the Russian spies obtained no classified information. Indeed, the Russians could have learned more secrets at less cost by going on the Internet. But the FBI kept the case going in part because it did not want to jeopardize the NOC and his source, and in part because watching the spies enabled the bureau to track Russian methods.

  Because the Russian spies never obtained anything valuable, they were only charged with failing to register as foreign agents or with money laundering instead of with espionage. The maximum jail sentence would have been twenty years.

  But just after their June 27 arrests, CIA director Leon Panetta called his counterpart, Mikhail Fradkov, the head of the SVR, to propose a spy swap. Since becoming CIA director, Panetta had been dealing with Fradkov, who was appointed by Russian prime minister Vladimir Putin in 2007, and had developed a good relationship with him. Over the course of a week, they exchanged more calls and worked out a deal.

  On July 9, 2010, the United States traded the Russians at the Vienna airport for four individuals who had been imprisoned in Russia for spying. While some criticized the deal as lopsided in favor of the Russians, two of those freed from Russian prisons—Aleksandr Zaporozhsky and Gennady Vasilenko—were incredibly valuable.

  An SVR colonel who became deputy chief of the American Department, Zaporozhsky gave up Aldrich Ames, the CIA officer arrested on February 21, 1994, for spying for the Russians, according to intelligence sources.

  In 1997, Zaporozhsky moved to the United States with his wife and three children and went into business. But in 2001, former KGB colleagues lured him back to Moscow for what they promised would be a festive KGB anniversary party. Zaporozhsky thought the SVR did not realize he had been working for the CIA. He ignored FBI advice not to return.

  “The last two Americans who met with Zaporozhsky to talk him out of returning to Russia were Steve Kappes from the CIA and myself over lunch in northern Virginia just prior to Hanssen’s arrest,” says Mike Rochford, who acquired the code name “Professor” within the Federal Security Service (FSB), the Russian equivalent of the FBI. “We told him that information about his identity had been given to the Russians by Hanssen in his drop of November 13, 2000, but he refused to believe us and returned anyway.”

&
nbsp; Upon arriving in Russia, Zaporozhsky was arrested at the airport. He was convicted of espionage and sentenced to eighteen years in prison.

  Vasilenko, the other critically important asset swapped by the Russians, helped uncover Hanssen. Before Rochford recruited the SVR intelligence officer who gave up Hanssen, Vasilenko introduced him to a retired CIA officer. The retired CIA officer then introduced the SVR source to an American businessman, who set him up so that Rochford could make a cold pitch to him on the streets. Rochford is now retired from the FBI, but the Russian FSB still believes—wrongly—that when he travels abroad, he is developing assets and making pitches.

  Russian guards savagely beat Zaporozhsky and Vasilenko while they were in prison, reportedly on the direct orders of Aleksandr Zhomov of the Russian Federal Security Service. An FSB general, he runs the American Department and is obsessed with uncovering the assets who gave up Ames and Hanssen.

  “Zhomov took it personally that the FBI recruited a source who fingered Hanssen,” says an intelligence source. “He blamed Zoporozhsky and Vasilenko for this because he could not get his hands on the source who had given Hanssen up to the FBI. Zhomov picked on the two he could hurt and made sure that both Zoporozhsky and Vasilenko would suffer while in jail. Intelligence sources reported that he ordered them beaten regularly by guards before and after they were convicted and at each of five prisons each served in. Both likely would have died at the hands of their guards if they had not been traded back to us.”

  In addition to these details, what never came out is that during the negotiations, the Russians tried to include Robert Hanssen and Aldrich Ames in the swap. The United States firmly rejected that idea.

  In the summer swap, the United States got a good deal, according to John Martin, the former chief Justice Department spy prosecutor. Martin’s credentials for evaluating the spy swap are unparalleled. As part of his job, Martin helped arrange six previous spy swaps. The most notable occurred in 1986, when Soviet dissident Natan Sharansky and others were released and Karl and Hana Koecher, the two Czech Intelligence Service spies, were sent back to Prague.

  Martin says the United States was able to swap the Russian illegals for four individuals of far higher quality. The Russian illegals who were swapped were pathetic spies: they never obtained any classified information. FBI counterintelligence officials wondered if that meant the SVR was losing it and was a diminished agency compared with its predecessor, the KGB.

  “These eleven people charged with spying were useless appendages of a shattered regime,” Martin says. “They are a hangover from the old Soviet Cold War days. As part of the proceedings, they were fully exposed; they had to identify themselves by true name in open court. All of their assets—their homes, their cars, their banking accounts—were seized, and they were packed up with their children to go back to Mother Russia, never to reenter the United States again.”

  Martin points out that in the event the administration had proceeded with a trial, the political climate in Russia could have changed, and Russia might not have agreed to a swap at that point. “You strike when the iron’s hot,” Martin says.

  “At the beginning of the investigation, the FBI didn’t know what they had,” Martin observes. “Why were the Russians running it? I don’t know, because no one from Montclair, New Jersey, can get close to someone in Washington, D.C., who has access to secrets, and apparently none of these people did get close to anyone.”

  But, Martin says, “you’ve got to understand the paranoid Russian mentality. Remember, one of the things that they instructed all of their people to look out for were any signs of war. So maybe they were looking for a primitive early-warning system. That would have been part of their training.”

  The operation is an example of government bureaucrats trying to make themselves look good to their bosses, Martin says.

  “It is art for art’s sake,” Martin says. “They were running it because they could run it. Because it’s in their blood, it’s in their bureaucracy, it’s in the system. And they can show their bosses they’re doing something. Boss, they can say, we’ve got these people, they haven’t ever been detected or caught, and they’re all over the place,” Martin says, suggesting that other illegals probably have not been caught.

  “The Russians started this; the FBI didn’t,” he says. “The Russians trained and embedded their citizens, except for one defendant, into U.S. society, using false names, false documentation, and equipped with all of the old spycraft, but spycraft never really gets old.”

  To its credit, the FBI got on to them. Of the eleven individuals charged, one jumped bail in Cyprus, so only ten spies were swapped.

  In deciding whether to swap the ten spies immediately, “the question the administration faced was, are you going to have ten people standing trial in three separate jurisdictions under three different sets of judges, trying these cases?” Martin says. “And what do we get in return? These people have no criminal records, they have not had access to secrets. A number of them could get probation, others could get very light sentences, but the administration knew we’re not going to get a very big bang for the buck.”

  Holding trials would have meant that “we’re going to go through ten lengthy trials, showing all of the ways we got this information, all of the information regarding FISAs and surreptitious entries, and our techniques for surveillance, because not all of that stuff could be subject to secret proceedings,” Martin says.

  In this case, “the quality of the people that we got out of Russian prisons far outweighs the quality of people that we sent back,” Martin says.

  As for the attempt by the Russian government to include Hanssen and Ames in the swap, Martin calls it unprecedented. In past trades, the Russians have wanted to include Russian intelligence officers or illegals who had been arrested. But they had no interest in the fate of the Americans they had recruited to spy.

  “The Russians have always looked upon Americans who spied on their behalf as expendable and of no value,” Martin says. “The fact that during those discussions the Russians asked for the return of Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen suggests to me that the Russians feel they still have some value. The Russians would want them back to explore how they were captured and how they were detected, arrested, and prosecuted, in order to clean up any doubts about how they were compromised. They would want to know if there were other moles in the Soviet system still working for U.S. and allied intelligence services who could have compromised Hanssen and Ames.”

  In fact, the FBI learned in the late 1990s that the SVR “was planning on contacting Ames in jail, using one of its co-opted Russian media correspondents,” Rochford says. The FBI also believes that the Russians played along with a request for money from Harold James Nicholson, a former CIA officer convicted of espionage, “because the SVR thought that he could provide information, even from his jail cell, that would help them find another internal mole inside Russia,” Rochford says.

  Given the Russians’ efforts, the FBI put a permanent clamp on media requests to interview Ames. On the assumption the Russians would also try to contact Hanssen, the bureau extended special administrative measures that include a lockdown for all but one hour a week to both convicted spies, Rochford adds.

  The Russians’ effort to trade them is the death knell for both of them, Martin says.

  “Should they pursue any case in federal court, such as an appeal seeking to get them released from prison in the U.S. or an effort to seek parole at any time or to seek executive clemency, the government now can argue that they should not be released because they still have value to the Russian intelligence service,” Martin points out. “So, unwittingly, the Russians have put the final nail in Ames’ and Hanssen’s coffins, and they will never get out. That would normally be the case, but, should they feel in the future that the political atmosphere has changed so they could be released, the Russians have foreclosed that forever.”

  31

  GERONIMO

  IN DE
CEMBER 2010, THE CIA INFORMED THE FBI THAT IT HAD honed in on what the agency believed was a high-value terrorist target. To maintain the highest security, the FBI was not initially told the identity of the target. However, from National Security Council meetings, Mueller knew the target was Osama bin Laden. From then on, FBI agents played a key role in helping to train U.S. Navy SEALs for their mission, focusing on the commandos’ task of scooping up evidence about al Qaeda once inside bin Laden’s compound.

  The trail leading to bin Laden’s hideout in Abbotabad, about thirty-five miles from Pakistan’s capital of Islamabad, went back to when Abu Zubaydah was waterboarded in 2002. He gave up information about bin Laden’s couriers as well as information leading to the capture of Ramzi bin al-Shibh, a member of bin Laden’s inner circle. After being subjected to coercive techniques, Abu Faraj al-Libi, a top al Qaeda facilitator for bin Laden, provided more detail on the couriers. In turn, clues from Abu Zubaydah and bin al-Shibh led to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the architect of the 9/11 plot. After being waterboarded, KSM confirmed knowing bin Laden’s main courier, but he denied the man was connected to al Qaeda, creating suspicion that he was indeed important.

  Working with those leads and others that would materialize, the CIA zeroed in on bin Laden’s main courier, who used the pseudonym Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti. Finally, in 2010, the courier took a cell phone call that allowed NSA to pinpoint his location. Using surveillance teams and RQ-170 stealth drone aircraft, the CIA then tracked him in August 2010 to the compound where bin Laden had been hiding since 2005.

  As a matter of course, Navy SEALs and Delta Force teams work closely with the FBI’s Tactical Operations Center, which helps equip them with devices for entering premises quickly and detecting threats such as radiological, chemical, or biological weapons.