by Craig Unger
The cable came from Service A, of the First Chief Directorate in which Yuri worked. At the time, Service A was led by Major General Lev Sotskov and consisted of about 120 officers who focused on three main themes: creating material that would discredit all aspects of American foreign policy, promoting conflict between the United States and its NATO allies, and supporting Western peace movements.24
“Sometimes we were getting so-called circular cables,” says Shvets, referring to cables that were dispersed to the KGB rezidenturas in New York, Washington, and San Francisco. The term “circular,” he explained, simply meant that the cables were widely circulated throughout the First Chief Directorate. “The idea was to show us examples of craftsmanship in recruitment, in analytical work, examples to follow.”
The point of the cable, Shvets said, was not to call attention to the identity of the new asset, who wasn’t considered terribly important at the time, but to the practices: a successful active-measure operation by which full-page ads voicing KGB talking points were printed in major American newspapers.
Even though the new asset had no security clearance or access to classified documents, Shvets said, the KGB had concluded that he could still be used to channel active measures to influential people in the United States. As a result, they put together a bunch of sound bites to deliver important messages on various political issues that were relevant at the time.
“For each country, there was a specific set of sound bites, and they changed over time, depending on the situation,” said Shvets. “There was one set for America, another set with nuances for Britain, a third for Japan, et cetera. For the KGB at the time, the idea of trying to get the US to drop security relations with Japan was one of the long-lasting KGB active measures, which they were disseminating.
“The ad was assessed by the active measures directorate as one of the most successful KGB operations of that time. It was a big thing—to have three major American newspapers publish KGB sound bites.”
More specifically, the asset had paid nearly $100,000 for full-page ads in the Boston Globe, Washington Post, and New York Times calling for the United States to stop spending money to defend Japan and the Persian Gulf, “an area of only marginal significance to the U.S. for its oil supplies, but one upon which Japan and others are almost totally dependent.”
The ads, which appeared on September 1, 1987, ran under the headline “There’s Nothing Wrong with America’s Foreign Defense Policy That a Little Backbone Can’t Cure,” and they put forth a foreign policy that, for all practical purposes, called for the dismantling of the postwar Western alliance. It took the form of an open letter to the American people “on why America should stop paying to defend countries that can afford to defend themselves.”
“The world is laughing at America’s politicians as we protect ships we don’t own, carrying oil we don’t need, destined for allies who won’t help,” the ad said. “It’s time for us to end our vast deficits by making Japan, and others who can afford it, pay. Our world protection is worth hundreds of billions of dollars to these countries, and their stake in their protection is far greater than ours.”25
The positions put forth were and remain quite extraordinary in the context of the history of US foreign policy. In effect, the asset was taking the shared bipartisan foundations of American foreign policy, policies that were the basis for the astonishing ascent of American power after World War II, and throwing them out the window. No wonder the Soviets were so enamored with his ideas.
According to the ad, oil in the Persian Gulf was of “marginal significance”? Right. Of course. This, just a few years after the Carter Doctrine had proclaimed that the United States would use military force if necessary to defend its national interests—a.k.a. oil—in the Persian Gulf. And just a few years before George H. W. Bush launched the 1990–1991 Gulf War, which was entirely about control of the viscous amber fluid that powers the world.
Abandon Japan? Sure. After all, why bother to continue a relationship with one of the most pro-American nations in the world, especially when it came to containing the very real Soviet threat to Japan posed by Soviet troops stationed on nearby islands?
America’s postwar alliance with Japan was not exactly a burning issue during this period, except perhaps insofar as its auto industry brought Detroit to its knees. But Japanese–American relations were important to the Soviets. As KGB defector Stanislav Levchenko testified before Congress, the Soviets had long hoped to eliminate the possibility of an anti-Soviet triumvirate involving the United States, China, and Japan and to provoke as much distrust as possible between the United States and Japan.26 So it was indeed a triumph for the KGB to manipulate an American into attacking foundational elements of American foreign policy—and doing it with the KGB’s strategic talking points.
Tom Messner, who was part of the team that developed the ad, told the Washington Post that the man who took out the ad “wrote the letter himself. The idea of doing it was his. We were merely expediters. We designed the ad, we recommended the newspapers, handled the money and placed it. Our creative input was minimal.”27 So it is unlikely that Messner or others associated with placing the ad were aware that this was part of a much bigger disinformation campaign by the Soviets.
In an unusual twist, the cable Yuri received unavoidably gave away the name of the KGB’s latest asset. “In handling assets, security always comes first when it comes to agents. There’s always a correlation between objectives and risks,” he said. “You can’t afford to lose a very important asset in intelligence work. If he had been seen as an important asset, this cable wouldn’t have been sent at all. The fact that his name was revealed meant that at the time he was not viewed as a valuable asset. He was not someone who couldn’t be exposed.”
In this case, that was a good thing, because the attached newspaper ad was signed by the would-be candidate. “He was a nobody at that time for Russia, for the entire Soviet Union. Nobody would have been interested in him other than the intelligence community.”
The day after the ad appeared, a piece in the New York Times suggested that the “nobody” in question might enter the 1988 Republican presidential primaries against George H. W. Bush.28 According to Shvets, earlier that summer the KGB had likely suggested to its new asset that he run for the presidency. It may have been just a whimsical suggestion, but the new asset had actually gone so far as to set up a fall appearance at Yoken’s restaurant in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Appearing at the iconic seafood restaurant—its motto was “Thar She Blows!”—was an obligatory campaign ritual that signaled the asset’s quixotic drive to enter the New Hampshire primary for the 1988 Republican nomination, against Vice President Bush, the odds-on favorite to be the GOP nominee.
‘‘There is absolutely no plan to run for mayor, governor or United States senator,” a spokesman told the New York Times. “He will not comment about the Presidency.”29
As it happened, the new asset soon dropped out of the GOP primaries, but to the KGB he had already achieved something extraordinary. This active measure was successful enough that it was cause for a minor celebration. Even though the new asset was, relatively speaking, insignificant, Shvets remembered his name—Donald J. Trump.
PART TWO
CHAPTER SEVEN
OPUS DEI
One summer day in 1990, Bonnie Wauck Hanssen, a schoolteacher in her forties, was tidying up the Vienna, Virginia, home she shared with her husband, Bob, and their six children. To her surprise, $5,000 in cash was just sitting there in one of his dresser drawers.
Bonnie was puzzled. Something didn’t smell right. Her husband, Robert Hanssen, then forty-six, was supervisor of an FBI technical surveillance squad that specialized in Soviet counterintelligence. He was one of the people the FBI relied on to make sure Soviet spies didn’t do too much damage.
With their growing family, the Hanssens could barely scrape by on his modest salary. The amount was
far more cash than any FBI agent she knew would have on hand. Bob hadn’t mentioned any windfall. Where did it come from? Why did he hide it in his dresser? Everything about it suggested the cash was illicit.
Bonnie’s suspicions were amplified by memories of an event that had taken place ten years earlier. In 1980, when the Hanssens lived in Scarsdale, the pricey New York suburb, and Bob had been detailed to the intelligence division of the FBI’s New York field office, she came upon him unexpectedly in the basement of their home and saw him frantically trying to hide a letter he was writing.
At first, Bonnie thought that Bob was cheating on her. He had before, so she assumed that he was scurrying about to conceal a love letter to another woman.1 But when she confronted him, she was stunned by his response—namely, that he had initiated clandestine transfers of information in exchange for cash with Soviet military intelligence—the GRU.
There are conflicting versions of the particulars in that first 1980 conversation between the Hanssens, but it is widely agreed that Bob fed Bonnie a sanitized version of the truth, claiming that, yes, he had put together a deal with the Soviets—and boy, had he taken them for a ride! They had given Hanssen $20,000 or so in cash, he said, and in return he had given them only a bunch of worthless papers. “He told me he was just tricking the Russians and feeding them false information,” Bonnie told the New York Times.2 “He never said he was spying. I told him I thought it was insane.”
She didn’t acknowledge that he was spying, but that’s what it was. Robert Hanssen was spying for the Soviet Union.
Even then, Hanssen wasn’t telling Bonnie the whole truth. He first began to spy for the GRU in 1979. While he was still assigned to the Criminal Division squad in the FBI’s New York office, Hanssen would sneak into the closed file room to read Soviet espionage files, managing, in the process, to figure out who the FBI’s most significant assets were. At first, this material was outside his purview, as he had no “need to know.” But in New York he soon moved into Soviet counterintelligence work, which became his specialty for most of his FBI career.3
During that initial period, and two subsequent periods—in 1985–1991 and 1999–2001—Hanssen gave up the nation’s most important military and counterintelligence secrets, including the names of dozens of American assets in the Soviet Union and Russia. He also gave the KGB thousands of pages of classified documents and computer disks that detailed “U.S. strategies in the event of nuclear war, major developments in military weapons technologies, information on active espionage cases, and many other aspects of the U.S. Intelligence Community’s Soviet counterintelligence program,” according to a thirty-one-page unclassified executive summary report by the inspector general titled A Review of the FBI’s Performance in Deterring, Detecting, and Investigating the Espionage Activities of Robert Philip Hanssen. The report was published by the Department of Justice in August 2003.*
Even though Bonnie didn’t know the whole story, she was so stunned that she immediately insisted her husband consult a priest who ministered for Opus Dei, the Catholic prelature to which she and her husband belonged.
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The story of Robert Hanssen, the most damaging spy in the history of the FBI, is one that has been told repeatedly—in at least ten books, two movies, thousands of news stories, and countless government documents. Among them, the 2003 IG report is the most complete unclassified official account of Hanssen’s treachery, and, as such, is a valuable document. But as is often the case with government documents, even more fascinating than what it says is what it conceals, and it omits the vital subtext of one of the greatest spy dramas in American history.
By that I mean the report largely overlooks the Hanssen family’s close ties to the leadership of Opus Dei (literally “God’s work” in Latin), which learned of Hanssen’s espionage as early as 1980 and failed to report it, thereby enabling him to spy for an additional two decades.
It omits the fact that Hanssen’s brother-in-law, who later became an Opus Dei priest, was working in the Justice Department under Attorney General William Barr and his associate Pat Cipollone during the George H. W. Bush administration and that, during Barr’s tenure from 1991 to 1993, Hanssen was promoted twice after having been first discovered. In light of subsequent events, the fact that one of the key sentinels guarding against Soviet—and later, Russian—espionage was a traitor is disturbing, to say the least. And it is especially disturbing in view of the fact that the Soviets were in the midst of developing Donald Trump as an asset.
The report also ignores the fact that Hanssen’s brother-in-law reported directly to Paul McNulty, the Justice Department spokesman under Barr who would later be the US attorney who prosecuted Hanssen and somehow agreed not to prosecute Hanssen’s wife, allowing her to keep most of her husband’s pension, or $39,000 per year.4
Finally, the fact that Barr himself, as well as several key associates, allegedly had such close ties to Opus Dei and that, perhaps inadvertently, they helped keep the door open to Soviet and Russian intelligence is particularly disquieting in view of Donald Trump’s close ties to Vladimir Putin and the many ways in which Trump has served Putin’s agenda.
Indeed, in light of what has transpired in Trump’s presidency, one might be forgiven for asking whether Barr had ties to Russia during his first stint as attorney general. But there’s no evidence that Barr or Opus Dei had any such ties, and Opus Dei has even declared that Barr is not a member.
Given all these unexplored conflicts, this untold chapter of the Hanssen story can be seen as crucial to opening the floodgates for the Russians. At the same time the KGB was cultivating Trump, it was also undermining the FBI from within. The very institution tasked with protecting America against Soviet espionage was under siege, and one of its key sentinels, Robert Hanssen, was a traitor.5
Moreover, during the same period, a handful of powerful attorneys who were closely tied to Opus Dei worked hand in glove with various influential conservative and libertarian members of the Federalist Society, a group that advocates a strict “originalist” interpretation of the US Constitution. Many of these attorneys were based in major white-shoe international law firms whose clients include billionaire Russian oligarchs, Russian money-laundering financial institutions such as Alfa Bank and Deutsche Bank, and the late pedophile/financier Jeffrey Epstein, and whose attorneys have, during the Trump administration, amassed extraordinary power in such formidable bodies as the Southern District of New York, the Eastern District of New York, the FBI, the White House counsel’s office, the National Security Council, the Department of Justice, and the US Supreme Court.
This was the birth of the “Praetorian Guard” that would later trample the rule of law in defense of Donald Trump.
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The reasons behind Robert Hanssen’s treachery range from the banal and money-related to the obscure and twisted motives growing out of a kind of intellectual grandiosity, resentment, and warped egoism. Money was especially likely to be a motive in the pricey New York area, where housing was so costly that agents were forced to live far away and endure marathon commutes to the city. In 1985, FBI agent Earl Edwin Pitts was transferred to Unit 19, a special FBI unit responsible for identifying KGB and GRU spies in the Soviet consulate in New York and the mission to the UN. Once he got to the New York area, the only affordable housing he could find was a two-hour drive to the city. “I earned less than a garbage man!” said Pitts.6
Aldrich Ames was paid $4.6 million by the Soviets. As for Hanssen, he was rewarded with more than $1.4 million for more than twenty years of spying. But he was so peculiar that at times the money seemed almost like an afterthought. Nicknamed “Dr. Death” by colleagues because of his grim demeanor, Hanssen was a deeply religious Catholic who attended Mass nearly every day and who was a member of one of the most prominent families in Opus Dei. The IG report characterized him as a misanthrope who was technicall
y proficient and analytical, but was also repressed, aggrieved, and intent on showing that he was smarter than his colleagues.7
One way to do that was by spying. So, the report said, “Hanssen quickly began exploiting weaknesses in the FBI’s internal information security” and before long had “gained access to the FBI’s most sensitive human assets and technical operations against the Soviet Union.”8
Among the most damaging pieces of information Hanssen said he gave the Soviets was the identity of a prized double agent named General Dmitri Polyakov. The so-called crown jewel of American intelligence, Polyakov, whose code name was Top Hat, had been spying for the United States since the sixties and supplied key intelligence on the growing rift between the Soviet Union and China, intel that led to President Richard Nixon’s epochal decision to open diplomatic relations with China in 1972. He also had delivered data on Soviet-made antitank missiles, information that became vital when Iraq used them in the 1991 Gulf War. As a result, Polyakov had been lauded by intelligence officials as the most valuable American asset of the entire Cold War. But in 1979, he was exposed by Robert Hanssen, who said he told the GRU, Russian military intelligence.9
It was not until 1986, however, after Polyakov had also been named by Aldrich Ames, who told the KGB, rivals to the GRU, that Polyakov was arrested.10 He was executed for treason in 1988 and buried in an unmarked grave by Soviet security officials.11
Bonnie, however, claimed that she knew none of this and believed exactly what Bob told her—that he had conned the Soviets into paying thousands of dollars for utterly worthless information. Whether she had been told enough to know he was spying was unclear.
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