Spy Handler

by Victor Cherkashin

  Two weeks later, Martynov’s wife and children were informed that he’d hurt his leg. They too returned to Moscow. Now the Americans would almost certainly know their agent had been caught. Years later, Martynov’s wife told journalists that her husband had expressed no concern about his final trip home and even seemed happy.

  The CIA filmed Yurchenko’s departure at Dulles. Watching the footage the same day, several officers, Paul Redmond among them, saw Martynov and immediately suspected he’d been exposed.1 The FBI learned about his exposure a year later. FBI special agent Jim Holt, who worked with Martynov, later told me the bureau became concerned about his disappearance in the spring of 1986 and finally heard of his arrest from an informer that fall. The bureau launched a six-person probe called ANLACE to explain the loss of Martynov, Motorin and other agents. But ten months trying to find a leak produced nothing. The group was disbanded in September 1987, near the time of Martynov’s execution.

  Back in Moscow when he was tried in 1987, I was called as a witness. Pleading guilty, Martynov detailed his spying activities. After his execution, I was among several officers reprimanded for failing to expose him earlier. It was my only reprimand in forty years of service.

  4

  The Year of the Spy, 1985, was a watershed in espionage, a stunning succession of recruitments and betrayals for both sides in the Cold War. The immediate effects came later, the exposures of spies leading to arrests in 1986 and after—and to repercussions still playing out today. Much still remains unknown to both sides.

  The main facts, however, are clear. One wave of betrayals that took place against us included the exposures of the Americans John Walker, Ronald Pelton and Edward Lee Howard. Although the revelations actually hurt the KGB, news of their espionage struck a stunning blow to U.S. intelligence, initially defining the Year of the Spy for the Americans. Among the agents exposed in 1985 was a spy with whom we had nothing to do: U.S. Navy intelligence analyst Jonathan Pollard. One of eleven agents the FBI arrested in 1985, he sold classified information to Israel. He and his wife were arrested on November 21, 1985, outside the Israeli embassy in Washington while trying to gain asylum. He was sentenced to life in prison; his wife, Anne, received five years. The case became a cause célèbre. Pollard claimed to have passed along intelligence vital to Israeli security, which the Pentagon had been withholding. It included information about Soviet arms shipments to Arab countries, chemical weapons in Syria, a Pakistani project to build a nuclear bomb and Libyan air defenses.

  Pelton, Howard and Walker were exposed by Soviets—Yurchenko and Martynov, who dealt the KGB heavy blows. Having spied for years, their stories and fates entwined in 1985. It would have been an extraordinary time of high-stakes twists and turns even without Ames and Hanssen, who provided the year’s third wave of betrayals. Their intelligence exposed the extensive network of CIA agents in the KGB and the GRU. That shocking fourth series of revelations defined the Year of the Spy for us, resulting in the arrests that would continue to baffle the CIA for many years.

  So much had happened by the October day on which I received Hanssen’s letter that I didn’t believe it possible another once-in-a-lifetime recruitment had come my way. But exactly that had happened. The provider of the promised extraordinary secrets turned out to be real enough. Hanssen’s unsolicited approach, his astounding “walk-in” self-recruitment, began a spying stint during which he betrayed more FBI secrets than anyone else in the agency’s history. So much of his information also concerned the CIA that when U.S. counterintelligence officers began tracking down the source, they looked first to Langley. Hanssen allowed us to penetrate U.S. intelligence to such a degree that we came to regard him as our greatest asset, surpassing even Aldrich Ames.

  9

  WASHINGTON STATION: THE BIGGEST CATCH: HANSSEN

  1

  Operational intelligence work conjures images of clandestine meetings, dead drops, disguises and other means of evading and penetrating the other side’s agencies. Actually, as I’ve suggested, at least 90 percent of my job consisted of routine, including hours at my desk reading everything from newspaper articles to agent files and cables from the Center. Even active case officers rarely met with agents. Operations were usually preceded by weeks of detailed planning and coordination with the Center. Everything had to be written up in volumes of reports to Yasenevo. Venues had to be found, security and countersurveillance provided, supporting officers picked to participate. In our trade, the more contingencies were anticipated and provided for, the less risky the operations.

  Some cases, however, didn’t afford the luxury of time. The opened letter delivered to Victor Degtyar that exposed Martynov demanded quick action to stem further security breaches. In Androsov’s absence, Degtyar, to bypass me, could only have taken the letter to Androsov’s second deputy, whom I suspected of unsealing it. That would mean both he and Degtyar had probably seen its contents. I knew I couldn’t rely on either’s sense of ethics. I couldn’t tell them we already knew Martynov was collaborating with the FBI, or that we were preparing an operation to get him back to the USSR. I also couldn’t prevent them from talking to others about the letter. That meant I could no longer guarantee that Martynov, who was still in the rezidentura, wouldn’t find out he’d been fingered. Even if the letter were seen as a joke, a single word about it in the embassy would tip him off.

  Writing to Kryuchkov, I described exactly what had happened and proposed inventing a cover story to obscure the letter’s nature and make sure all future communications from the anonymous volunteer would come directly to me. I suggested the Center send the rezidentura’s second deputy a cable saying the KGB was cooperating with the Bulgarian intelligence service, the DS, in an operation meant to provide cover for one of its agents.

  Since I’d recently worked with the DS rezident in Washington, it was a natural cover. I proposed saying that our Bulgarian “friends” had asked us to assist them in checking the sincerity of their agent by gauging his reaction to information fed to him by a source in his network. If the agent was cooperating with the FBI, the bureau would find out about the letter. The Center would have to make it clear that the information about Martynov was invented, part of a ruse to see whether the FBI would follow up on the message, thereby verifying a leak. According to the cover, the operation had nothing to do with the KGB; we were participating only to help the Bulgarians.

  I suggested that the Center order all other rezidentura officers to hand all messages directly to me, since I had the best relationship with the DS rezident. I included the plan in my secret cable to the foreign intelligence chief—a communication I was sure no one else could possibly access—and gave it to the head cipher officer to send. The same day, an order arrived from the Center instructing all officers to do exactly what I’d proposed. It ordered that all unsolicited messages be handed to “Alexei,” my alias at the time. Since the idea was completely untraceable to me, there was no suspicion that it was anything other than what it purported to be—a new dictate out of the blue directly from Yasenevo. That also discredited the information in the previous day’s letter.

  The plan worked. The wily second secretary handed me documents he’d removed from the envelope sent to Degtyar (which he’d previously withheld). I never had a problem with that particular breach again.

  Next, I got to work analyzing Degtyar’s letter. There was little doubt the volunteer was an intelligence officer. That was clear right away because to prove his “bona fides,” he betrayed three agents about whom only an intelligence officer would have known. His motives, however, remained unclear. I soon ruled out a move by Ames to help provide cover for himself. There were too many nuances about which he couldn’t have known, and not enough overlap between what I pieced together about the letter writer and what I knew about Ames. He wouldn’t have known so much about NSA activities and finances. The letter also made me think its sender was located in New York rather than Washington. My best guess was we were dealing with an FBI agent
. Back at the Center, Kryuchkov agreed with my conjectures. His standing with the Politburo had dramatically improved thanks to Ames, and he was thrilled that we appeared to have pulled off the impossible by recruiting someone else potentially just as valuable.

  On October 15, a week and a half after Degtyar received the anonymous volunteer’s letter, he found another package from the same sender. As promised, it contained a large number of classified documents. The following day, the FBI had its first clue that something was up when surveillance officers spotted Degtyar showing up for work with a large canvas bag. They noted that as unusual, but the report was never followed up.1

  Coming on top of his first letter, the new documents proved the volunteer wasn’t fainthearted. He’d made a decision to spy and was doing it in full measure. From the little I could tell from his two deliveries, he was highly professional. That was why he was being so careful to obscure his real identity. He knew that CIA and FBI agents inside the KGB posed his greatest risk.

  In his initial letter, the volunteer provided a simple code to set up meetings and dead drops: “I am open to commo [communications] suggestions but want no specialized tradecraft,” he wrote. “I will add 6, (you subtract 6) from stated months, days and times in both directions of our future communications.”

  That and other aspects of his approach were unusual because he was dictating to us how to run him. It was also highly pragmatic. The volunteer had approached me because he’d seen my FBI file and knew who I was. He also seemed to trust me, which was rare in espionage. That was flattering—and a good move on his part because it made me more inclined to believe what he said. It also made his approach feel more human than a general appeal to the KGB. Above all, it provided more evidence of his experience, reinforcing my instinctive sense that my best course of action would probably be to agree to whatever he said. If the volunteer wanted to run his own case, I wouldn’t stand in his way. My most important concern was for him to deliver valuable intelligence to the KGB.

  2

  The report [on Hanssen’s espionage by the Office of the Inspector General of the Department of Justice, 2003] calling Hanssen a mediocre agent just gets it wrong. Bob Hanssen was diabolically brilliant. We would sit in my office and talk about the vulnerabilities of intelligence officers and agents and what the weaknesses were in tradecraft. Bob Hanssen knew this business. When I later read about how he operated, I said, “You diabolical bastard! You did exactly what we were talking about.” The people who say he wasn’t a master spy are those who aren’t close to what his operation was and how very, very clever it was. He never let the Soviets run him because he knew about the operational mistakes they made. Bob just turned that on its head. He knew everything we knew about what the Soviets did—and we knew a lot about how they operated. He also knew what we did. So he could operate within the cracks.

  —David Major, retired FBI supervisory special agent and former director

  of counterintelligence at the National Security Council

  Robert Philip Hanssen was born in 1944 in Chicago to a police officer and a housewife. He attended Knox College, a small school in Illinois, where he studied the Russian language. On graduating, he enrolled in a dentistry program at Northwestern University. However, he soon decided to take up accounting and earned an MBA from Northwestern. He worked as an accountant before signing up with the Chicago Police Department as a financial investigator.

  In 1968, Hanssen married Bernadette Wauck, who called herself Bonnie. She was a devout Catholic and a member of the highly conservative, secretive Opus Dei organization, said to exert influence on Pope John Paul II. Hanssen, a Lutheran, converted to Catholicism and joined the group.

  He started work with the FBI in 1976 in a white-collar crime unit in Gary, Indiana. He was transferred to New York two years later to take part in accounting-related investigations. In 1979, he signed up with the New York field office intelligence division to help create an automated counterintelligence database to track Soviet intelligence officers. Hanssen was a computer and electronic technology whiz. In addition to helping create the computerized database, he worked with technicians installing eavesdropping bugs and video surveillance.

  Soon the junior FBI special agent began his first stint as a spy. Hanssen walked into the New York office of AMTORG, the Soviet trade organization serving as a front for the GRU, and volunteered to provide intelligence. During the following months, he exposed Dmitri Polyakov and gave the GRU a secret FBI list of Soviet diplomats suspected of being intelligence officers. The following year, in 1980, his wife discovered him writing a letter to the GRU in the basement of their Scarsdale house. She suspected he was hiding evidence of an affair. To convince her otherwise, he confessed to spying but told her he was tricking the GRU by providing worthless information. Still a devout Catholic, Bonnie made Bob confess to their priest. Hanssen refused to come clean to the FBI, however. Instead, he agreed to give the money the KGB paid him, about $30,000, to charity and promise never to spy again. He spent years paying installments to Mother Teresa.

  In 1981, Hanssen was transferred to the intelligence division at FBI headquarters in Washington, where he soon became a supervisory special agent. Then he was moved to the budget unit, where he helped draw up the agency’s classified intelligence budget requests to Congress. In 1983, he took an assignment to head the unit analyzing FBI information on Soviet intelligence operations in the United States. He also served on a special committee in charge of coordinating technical intelligence projects against Soviet intelligence. Much of the information to which he was privy came from the CIA.

  Hanssen was posted back to New York in 1985. He’d been promoted to supervisor in counterintelligence, giving him greater access to secret information. He’d be conducting technical operations against Soviets stationed at the United Nations and the New York Soviet consulate. Ten days later, he sent his first letter to Degtyar. Until his exposure, the KGB never knew that agent B (or “Ramon Garcia,” as he signed some of his notes) had spied for the GRU six years earlier. We gave our new agent the cryptonym KARAT but often referred to him as “the Source.”

  3

  When Johnnie Walker spied, he lived in Norfolk. For ten years, he left Norfolk and drove to where he spied. When Bob Hanssen started spying, Cherkashin said, “We’ll pick a place out here.” And Bob said, “Bullshit!” He said, “I’m not going to be walking around, sliming around in the mud wearing a suit out here.” Bob had to have cover for action. Cherkashin said, “You’ll come to us.” And Bob says, “No. You come to me.” Cherkashin was smart enough to let him run his own operations. The Soviets would find the sites—and Bob would approve them. Hanssen’s first dead drop was across the street from his house. They were all within about four or five miles from his house. He would set the signal and then go in and fill the drop. Then a Russian would come in, read the signal, clear and fill the same drop and go home. It would take one act. Then Bob would return, clear the drop, set another signal and then leave. So Bob had four or five operational acts and the Russian had one. Read and then fill, clear, then go home and the next day come out and see if the signal had been set to show it had been cleared. That minimized the officer’s action and maximized the agent’s action. No one else spies like that.

  —David Major, retired FBI supervisory special agent and former

  director of counterintelligence at the National Security Council

  On October 24, Degtyar received a third letter at his house. The envelope was postmarked “New York, NY,” which seemed to confirm at least one of my assumptions. The message indicated a drop site for the sender’s payment under a footbridge in a northern Virginia state park. I had to admit that was a good spot—isolated, but not so much that a Russian’s presence there would arouse any suspicions. The Source asked that we signal each other with white tape on a pedestrian crossing sign near the park’s entrance. A vertical strip would indicate he was ready to receive the drop. After loading it, we would tape a new strip in a h
orizontal position. He would later affix another vertical strip to signal he’d unloaded the drop. His letter indicated the operation should take place on November 2 and specified times for the signals. The Source was calling the shots. The KGB almost always designated dead drop and signal sites for our agents and did most of the preparatory work. This time the tables were turned. All we had to do was drop our package and mark a signal.

  Writing my first message to include in our package for the Source, I decided to see how far I could go toward running the agent on our terms. Although the site he’d picked was a good one, it was new to us. I proposed different ones. I’d already picked some for such occasions, and I was familiar with them. I also suggested a more complex system of communications, including high-tech radios called burst transmitters that emitted signals in short, intense spurts that were hard to intercept and decode. Finally, following Kryuchkov’s instructions, I suggested meeting outside the United States—which we were soon to do with Aldrich Ames.

  There was also the question of the money to be included in the drop. The Source had asked for $100,000, which was a lot for a first take. He’d delivered top-quality intelligence, to be sure. But we’d already known about the agents he exposed. Moreover, there had to be limits to what he dictated to us. The amount was our call. We sometimes negotiated with agents, but in the absence of meetings, we had to come to our own decision. I consulted the Center. We settled on half of what the Source had asked for. Our initial payment to Ames had also been $50,000.