by David Wise
“Some of what we got was closed files, older files,” Gallagher pointed out. “They may not have known they were missing if they had no reason to look for them.”
But they know now, he said. “There is an empty space where the file should be.”
* * *
Hanssen, still assigned to the Office of Foreign Missions at the State Department, was placed under surveillance. It had to be done cautiously, since he was, after all, a trained counterintelligence agent and might detect any watchers. But the surveillance was done by the Gs, the FBI’s Special Surveillance Group, and they were good at their jobs.
It would be much easier to track Hanssen if he could be lured back to FBI headquarters, but the problem was how to do that without arousing his suspicions. Hanssen’s interest in computers provided the answer. He prided himself on his computer skills, which were considerable, and the counterspies decided to exploit that fact and offer him a promotion and a job in computers.
Mike Waguespack called Hanssen in to headquarters in December. Hanssen seemed extremely tense at their meeting. Waguespack thought he knew the reason: he’s thinking this is it, and that’s why I called him in.
When Waguespack, a deputy assistant director of the National Security Division, offered Hanssen a cushy job in the Senior Executive Service, the elite corps of the federal government, at higher pay, he visibly relaxed. Waguespack explained that Hanssen’s new responsibility would be to ensure that as the bureau developed new computer programs they would be secure.
A few days later, Hanssen met with Gallagher, the division chief, for the final job interview. “I asked him to take the special assignment,” Gallagher said. “It promoted him into SES. It recognized him for his computer expertise. We were playing on his ego.” And Gallagher had one more inducement to throw in the pot. “Since he was approaching fifty-seven, the retirement age, I said we would extend him if he wanted to.”
Hanssen was delighted. It was about time the bureau, even belatedly, was recognizing his brilliance. The senior levels of the intelligence division were finally taking notice. He would be back at headquarters after his long exile at State, with a parking spot in the FBI garage.
In the meantime, he could not neglect his other duties. On December 12, he was seen driving four times past Foxstone Park, the site of dead drop ELLIS. It was a significant moment because, for the first time, the bureau now knew that Hanssen was an active spy. It is much harder to prove the case against a spy who has gone dormant; now there was a chance that GRAYDAY could be caught in the act.
The day after Christmas, he cruised by the park again three times, looking for the taped signal. Late in the afternoon, he stopped his car for several seconds, studying the park sign, then drove off. Then, just before 9 P.M., he parked near the park entrance, walked over to the signal site, and swept the beam of his flashlight up and down the wooden posts near the sign. He must have found nothing, because he turned and walked away, raising his arms in exasperation. He got back in his car and drove to a nearby Tower Records store.
Half an hour later, he was back. He stopped his car again in front of the Foxstone Park sign for a few seconds and then drove off. Again, there was no signal from the Russians.
After New Year’s, he had to wrap up his work at the State Department and get ready for the new job. On January 12, Tom Burns, his boss and former FBI colleague, presided over a going-away party for Hanssen. The affair was held at the China Garden restaurant, in the mall area of the Gannett Building, then the home of USA Today, just across the river in Arlington, Virginia.
His colleagues turned out to wish Hanssen well. “There were fifteen to twenty people there,” Burns said. “As his superior, I made the usual perfunctory remarks—we’ll miss you, don’t be a stranger—and I thanked him for his efforts.” He added wryly: “The full extent of which, of course, I didn’t know.”
There was no plaque. But the State Department office controls the distinctive red, white, and blue license plates issued to foreign diplomats, a familiar sight in the capital, and when a colleague left, he would traditionally be given a unique souvenir. “Usually what we would do would be to give a diplomatic license plate with his name on it, mounted on a wood background,” Burns explained. “But it had not been struck yet at the firm where we have the plates done.”
So Hanssen would have to wait a bit for the special license plate with the name BOB in big letters. It would not be ready for another month.
*Although detailed and valuable, Mitrokhin’s notes did not go beyond 1984, the year that he retired, and did not, therefore, point to the current KGB mole that GRAYSUIT was trying to uncover. Mitrokhin turned over only a portion of his materials in his initial contacts with the British. MI6 is said to have then slipped into Mitrokhin’s apartment in Moscow and made off with six large suitcases containing the rest of his cache. See Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB (New York: Basic Books, 1999).
*For example, the FBI declined to discuss the location of the meeting with the Russian source. A senior counterintelligence official would say only that it took place “in a city on the East Coast.”
*“We were not going to hand him all the money at once,” one official said, “and have it misspent and he turns around and says he is poor. Or compromise the security of himself and his family by spending a lot of money.”
*NROC has more than four hundred defectors on its rolls, and a total, with dependents, of about 1,800 people. Many are Russian, but the defectors include thirty nationalities. The CIA avoids the word “defector”; NROC instead prefers the term “resettlees” or “defector-hero.” Some of the more valuable ones are supported for life.
*In the mists that surround the world of counterintelligence, there are always questions that may never be answered. How did the Russian manage to make off with the file undetected? Did no one suspect him for eight years? By what great good fortune did he receive and save the plastic bag with the fingerprints of Robert Hanssen? For that matter, how did the FBI manage to find and recruit the one person in all of Russia who had the file it needed? It is possible to speculate infinitely about these mysteries, but the bottom line is the FBI got the file, learned in great detail what secrets had been lost to Moscow, and caught Hanssen.
26
Sleeping Tiger
On January 15, 2001, Hanssen reported to Room 9930 at FBI headquarters in his newly created position in the Information Resources Division. Gone were the days of sharing cubicles. “We gave him a nice office,” Gallagher said.
Three times in January, he searched the FBI database again, looking for his name, for FOXSTONE, and for other indicators that he might be under investigation. But the mole hunters had made sure there was nothing there to be found.
Once the FBI was satisfied that the KGB file brought from Moscow was that of Robert Hanssen, it moved quickly to present the evidence to the Justice Department’s Office of Intelligence and Policy Review. It asked that office to apply to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court for permission to begin electronic eavesdropping on GRAYDAY, and secretly to enter and search his home, his office, his computers, and his cars.
Although Hanssen was unaware of it, he was under observation at all times in his ninth-floor FBI office. A tiny, concealed video camera had been secretly installed there before he moved in. The images were relayed by closed-circuit television to the FBI’s Washington field office, where they were constantly monitored.
The FBI also tapped Hanssen’s home and office telephones. But the bureau was foiled in its attempts to get inside his house to search it, download his home computers, and plant bugs to pick up room conversations. “We couldn’t get into the house,” one FBI agent said. “There were kids at home, someone [was] always in that house; she [Bonnie] didn’t work that much.”
However, the FBI found a fortuitous way to keep the Hanssen residence under round-the-clock surveillance. A house across the str
eet was put up for sale in December 2000. Perry and Laura Hood, the owners, could hardly believe their good luck when a woman who called herself “Ann Manning” paid $362,500, all cash, on December 22, only twelve days after the place went on the market. She did not seem to care about the loose bathroom tiles or other problems that buyers fuss about; her only proviso was that the Hoods clear out within two weeks. One neighbor was curious when a telephone lineman let drop that he had installed eight lines for the new tenant; apparently Ms. Manning really liked to talk on the phone a lot. In the process, the installer had inadvertently managed to cut the phone lines briefly to other houses in the neighborhood.*
On the evenings of January 9, 23, and 26, the FBI watched Hanssen as he drove by the signal site at Foxstone Park, either slowing down or coming to a stop. Although his next exchange was set for February 18, he seemed desperate to pick up a signal from the Russians, the little white piece of tape that would indicate they were still there, but he saw nothing. Perhaps he was looking for a warning, a message in dead drop ELLIS that would confirm his worst fears, but the signal never came.
If the SVR ever realized that its file on the mole was missing, along with the former officer who had left Moscow and not returned, it never warned Hanssen that he was in trouble. But the Russians may not have known that the file was gone and that their prime source had been identified and his days were numbered.
Hanssen’s precautions in never disclosing his name to Moscow had helped to protect him all these years, but that same secrecy may now have worked against him. Even if the SVR was aware that Hanssen had been betrayed, it had no fast, direct way to communicate with a mole whose identity it may not have known.
On November 7, 2000, around the time the file on the mole reached FBI headquarters, the voters of America had elected a president, although it was not at all clear that it was George W. Bush of Texas until December 12, when the United States Supreme Court intervened in the disputed Florida election results and by a vote of five to four blocked a recount, a decision that awarded the presidency to Bush.*
Now, in January, Bush was about to be inaugurated. For attorney general, he had chosen John Ashcroft, the conservative former Republican senator from Missouri, who had been defeated for reelection. Ashcroft’s appointment to the cabinet was highly controversial, and was strongly opposed by a wide variety of liberal and minority groups because of his strong religious convictions, his opposition to abortion, and his views on race. Just before inauguration, Hanssen exchanged his last e-mails with his friend and former FBI colleague Jim Ohlson; the subject was John Ashcroft.
On January 18, Ohlson e-mailed Hanssen that the next day The Wall Street Journal would carry an op-ed piece by Jim Skillen, president of the Center for Public Justice, where Ohlson worked, that defended Ashcroft and began: “Do deeply held religious convictions pose a threat to government? May we trust a man like John Ashcroft, whose outlook appears to be saturated by faith, to serve as U.S. attorney general?”
In reply Hanssen messaged back: “Read Lord of the World, by Robert Hugh Benson. You are seeing the logical consequences of an idea as he predicted, an idea injected into a healthy society. The book is futuristic fiction from the past. In the end belief in God is the ultimate ‘hate crime.’ ‘When the Lord comes will there be any faith left in the world.’ ”†
Later in January, when Hanssen had been in his new computer job less than two weeks, he began meeting with his friend Victor Sheymov, the KGB defector whom he had befriended in 1988—and betrayed by reporting about him to Moscow. Sheymov, a communications expert, had consulted with the NSA and then formed his own computer security company, Invicta, which claimed its new technology could protect computer networks from hackers.
Former CIA director James Woolsey was a prestigious board member of Invicta. Woolsey had represented Sheymov in a long-running battle with the CIA over money; Sheymov thought he had been promised a million dollars when he defected in 1980 with his wife and child. Woolsey won a settlement in 1994, but the terms were not revealed.
Hanssen led a team of FBI experts to inspect the technology, and he told Sheymov the bureau was interested in buying it, which would have been a big break for the new company. Experts who tested Invicta’s system were impressed. According to one company official, the software embodied a new concept. “All virus protections build a firewall that lets some things through but not others. Clever hackers make bad stuff look like good stuff. Invicta’s software moves the IP address of the computer, the Internet Protocol, and constantly changes it, so that a hacker can’t find the computer. The system automatically tells who you are communicating with, the computer on the other end, when you change the IP address. The people who have tested this say, ‘Huh, we can’t find the computer.’ ”
On January 30, around the same time that Hanssen was dangling the prospect of a bureau contract to Sheymov, FBI agents secretly searched Hanssen’s car, a Taurus. In the glove compartment they found a roll of white adhesive tape and a Crayola box with a dozen pieces of colored chalk. Both the tape and the chalk could be used for signaling. In the trunk, they found several dark-colored Hefty garbage bags of the sort that had arrived from Moscow with Hanssen’s fingerprints. And in the trunk the agents also discovered a box containing seven classified documents that Hanssen had printed out from the FBI’s Automated Case Support (ACS) system. Several related to then-current FBI counterintelligence investigations and were classified SECRET.
Six days later, on February 5, FBI agents searched Hanssen’s office at headquarters and hit paydirt. They found several communications to and from the SVR, from 1999 on, still retrievable on a computer memory storage card in his office; these included the “Dear Friend: welcome!” letter from the Russians in October that marked the resumption of his spying after the eight-year interval.*
Hanssen, meanwhile, continued to be spooked. Whether or not he spotted any of the Gs, he seemed to know that for him, time was running out. On the same day that the FBI searched his office, Hanssen had lunch with Sheymov and another Invicta official. Sheymov thought they would be talking about the FBI’s interest in the firm’s technology. Instead, Hanssen astonished Sheymov by asking for a job. Sheymov, embarrassed, and not wanting to offend his friend or the FBI, stalled, asking what sort of timing Hanssen had in mind. “Right now,” Hanssen replied.
Gently, Sheymov tried to explain that Invicta did not really have an opening for another executive. But Hanssen let it be known at headquarters that he was considering an offer from Invicta and would perhaps retire from the FBI.
Ominous signs may have lent fresh urgency to Hanssen’s desire to bail out. Once, when he drove into the FBI garage, he thought he set off electronic alarms or buzzers in cars nearby. He also thought he detected radio signals, transmission bursts coming from his own vehicle, which would indicate that a tracking device had been planted in his car.*
And it had also begun to dawn on him by now that there was something fishy about his transfer to headquarters and sudden elevation to a higher status within the bureau. “He was very enthusiastic for the new assignment, at least at first,” Gallagher recalled. “But he began to realize he didn’t have a meaningful job. We didn’t want him to have access to any classified or sensitive information. We gave him things to do, a lot of make-work.”
On February 12, agents again searched Hanssen’s Taurus. This time, they discovered a small plastic box in the glove compartment, and inside thumbtacks of various colors, including yellow and white, that the Russians had instructed him to use for signaling.
On the same day that the FBI found the thumbtacks, it also searched LEWIS, the new dead drop beneath the wooden stage of the amphitheater in the Long Branch Nature Center in Arlington, Virginia. They found a package inside two plastic garbage bags and took it to the FBI lab. When it was opened, they discovered it contained $50,000 in used hundred-dollar bills. The money was photographed and the package rewrapped, taped, placed inside the two bags, and put back in the dead dro
p exactly as it had been found.
On Friday, February 16, Hanssen went to a meeting he had arranged at Invicta headquarters. To try to impress Sheymov, he stood up at a blackboard and described the new technology with extraordinary accuracy. “He did it as well as I could,” Sheymov was quoted as saying.
On that same day, Hanssen dropped by the office of his old colleague Bill Houghton at headquarters. He seemed to want to chat. “We just talked for about an hour,” Houghton said. “We talked about general stuff. He was going to retire later in the year and go to work for Victor Sheymov.”
“I’m a section chief,” Hanssen said. “You bastard, you have a parking space now.”
“Yeah, it’s pretty great. I don’t have a staff yet, but I’m going to be developing better systems for the bureau to keep our stuff secure.”
By now, however, Hanssen was certain that his new job was a phony, and that his career as a Russian spy was rapidly coming to a close. He composed what was to be his last message to Moscow. It had the tone of a farewell letter—almost.
Dear Friends:
I thank you for your assistance these many years. It seems, however, that my greatest utility to you has come to an end, and it is time to seclude myself from active service.
Since communicating last, and one wonders if because of it, I have been promoted to a higher do-nothing Senior Executive job outside of regular access to information within the counterintelligence program. It is as if I am being isolate [sic]. Furthermore, I believe I have detected repeated bursting radio signal emanations from my vehicle. I have not found their source, but as you wisely do, I will leave this alone, for knowledge of their existence is sufficient. Amusing the games children play. In this, however, I strongly suspect you should have concerns for the integrity of your compartment concerning knowledge of my efforts on your behalf. Something has aroused the sleeping tiger. Perhaps you know better than I.