Spy: The Inside Story of How the FBI's Robert Hanssen Betrayed America (11 page)

Washington, which was built on a swamp, can be ghastly in the dog days of summer. Yet in the first week of August 1987, Robert Hanssen voluntarily returned to FBI headquarters. He had a facile explanation for his colleagues about why he had come back from New York short of tour.

Jim Ohlson recalled the circumstances. “Normally he would have stayed longer and returned as a GS-15 at higher pay. But he came back as a GS-14, because he said he wanted his children to attend an Opus Dei school, the Heights. Of course, in retrospect, we can speculate he may also have wanted to be back at headquarters, where he had more valuable access for the Russians.”

Hanssen was reassigned to his old shop, the Soviet analytical unit on the fourth floor, again as a supervisory special agent. Now he was once more in charge of the team of analysts studying the modus operandi of Soviet intelligence agents in the United States.

The Hanssens bought their modest house in Vienna on Talisman Drive and settled in again to the familiar northern Virginia suburb. By now they had six children. To most of the neighbors, Hanssen seemed the perfect father, shepherding his flock to church every Sunday, keeping the lawn well trimmed.

And at headquarters, he resumed his friendship with Paul Moore, the bureau’s China expert. As an analyst, Moore understood how his colleagues in the Soviet unit went about their work. “They are looking for anomalies, possible penetrations. They have read all the defector debriefings. And they might see something and say, Well, this is strange,
isn’t it? A typical thing would be it takes X amount of time to go from lieutenant to major in the KGB. Why was this one promoted early? Was anybody else promoted who worked in Washington at a certain time period? Maybe a bunch of secrets were passed to the KGB.

“It was the same with medals,” Moore explained. If the FBI learned that certain KGB officers had received medals, that could be another tip-off that someone was passing documents to Moscow; such awards were often given for the successful handling of an American source.

“The people in the analytical unit were specialized,” Moore added. “Some might look at Line X, the S&T officers, some specialized in illegals, and so on.” It was exacting work, and about to get more so.

Very soon after Hanssen’s return from New York, he was assigned to prepare a highly sensitive study, classified
TOP SECRET
. The FBI had lost its two assets in the Soviet embassy in Washington to the KGB executioners; the CIA’s sources in Moscow were being rolled up, imprisoned, or shot.

The situation was intolerable, and it gave Hanssen’s assignment a special urgency. He was to examine past penetrations of the FBI; he would carefully analyze every allegation about a possible traitor in the bureau ever recorded in the FBI’s voluminous counterintelligence files.
^*
The goal was to help the bureau’s operational side pinpoint and arrest the mole, if one existed.

No more delicious assignment could have been handed to Hanssen. Since he controlled the mole study, he would make sure to deflect any analysis that might even remotely point in his own direction.

There was an enormous amount of material to sift through. Over a period of several years, Soviets recruited by U.S. intelligence, and defectors who came over to the West, often talked about gossip they had heard, or tidbits of information they possessed, that might point to the existence of a mole inside the FBI. Reviewing every report from every source containing such allegations would be a lengthy and painstaking task.

Hanssen assigned the research to the FBI’s two top Soviet analysts, Jim Milburn and Bob King. The two sat on each side of Hanssen, all in the same cubicle, as they prepared the study.

James P. Milburn was not a name known outside of the closed world of intelligence, but he enjoyed immense respect within the FBI for his knowledge of Soviet intelligence and his analytical skills. If the bureau had a complex problem involving the KGB, it would more often than not turn to Milburn.

Red-haired and freckled, powerfully built and about six feet tall, Milburn liked to play basketball on his lunch hour in the bureau gym. “He would get into games with guys from records and fingerprinting,” Paul Moore said. “He’s a thirtysomething going up against these young guys from the ident division. He got injured a lot, he got some bad injuries doing that sort of stuff.”

Bob King was a veteran foreign counterintelligence (FCI) analyst. He had come to the bureau from the CIA, a relatively rare progression that led to some good-natured needling in the Hoover building. “I used to accuse him of being a CIA penetration of the FBI,” Moore said. In his previous work at the CIA, King had also been a Soviet analyst. Dark-haired and bespectacled, he was a heavy smoker who quit cold turkey when his doctors got after him. Milburn and King were both friendly, accessible types, Moore said.

“Oddly, both Hanssen and Milburn had kidney stones. They each had these big clear plastic water pitchers on their desks, they were supposed to be drinking a lot of water. One afternoon I found them both lying on the floor to get relief from these attacks.” Moore could not resist a gibe at the sight of his two prone colleagues. “It’s more expensive at the Harrington Hotel,” he cracked, “but you’d have more privacy.”

The two analysts assigned to the mole study, and Hanssen himself, had the advantage over the others in the unit. Most analysts looked at specific targets, such as the various KGB lines, and did not know much outside their own specialized areas, Moore explained. “But a few people did ‘all source,’ and that was Milburn, King, and Hanssen.” Within the Soviet analytical unit, in other words, Hanssen was one of the very few entitled to know all the FBI’s sources and secrets.

Or as David Major, the former FBI counterintelligence official, put it, “He was at the center of the hourglass, he saw everything.”

* * *

The penetration problem had begun long before, with
UNSUB DICK
.

The story was a secret buried so deep within the FBI that it is revealed
here for the first time.
^*
UNSUB DICK
—the
UNSUB
stood for “unknown subject”—was the first suspected KGB mole inside the FBI. Any history of penetrations of the bureau must start with him. The study by Hanssen, Milburn, and King would certainly have focused on this long-secret case.

The search for the penetration began early in 1962 when Aleksei Isidorovich Kulak, a KGB officer undercover at the United Nations, walked into the FBI office on East Sixty-ninth Street in Manhattan and offered his services as a spy. He said he was discontent with his lack of progress in his KGB career. The FBI gave him the code name
FEDORA;
the CIA called him
SCOTCH
.

Kulak, then thirty-nine, married and accompanied by his wife in New York, was a short, stocky man whose name meant “wealthy farmer” in Russian. “We called him Fatso,” said an FBI man who worked the case. Kulak specialized in collecting scientific and technical secrets. He had a doctorate in chemistry and had worked as a radiological chemist in a Moscow laboratory. At the UN, he was a consultant to a committee on the effects of atomic radiation.

By walking into the FBI’s office in Manhattan, Kulak had taken a big risk; the KGB might have had the building under surveillance. The FBI agents who met with
FEDORA
challenged him on this point. “We said aren’t you worried they may be watching the FBI building?” one of the agents recalled. “He said he was not worried because all of our [KGB] people are out covering a meeting with your guy, ‘Dick.’ ”

Uh-oh. This was the first time that the FBI had heard the name “Dick.”
FEDORA
was clearly saying that the FBI harbored a mole. But he said he did not know the man’s true identity.

FEDORA’S
revelation touched off an intense, long-running secret mole hunt within the FBI. “It went on for years; it drove us crazy,” the FBI man said.

Not long after, another KGB officer in New York, Valentin Lysov, also warned U.S. intelligence of a mole in the FBI. Lysov approached the CIA and said he was in trouble, about to be recalled to Moscow, and needed money. The KGB man said there was a penetration in the FBI
and told the CIA it had just twenty-four hours to meet his terms. Since Lysov was still on U.S. soil, the CIA turned the case over to the FBI. The bureau already knew that Lysov was in hot water;
FEDORA
had tipped off the FBI that Lysov got drunk in a bar and lost his wallet, and was being sent home on a pretext of attending a meeting.

When Lysov flew first-class to Copenhagen the next day, en route to Moscow, an FBI counterintelligence agent sat next to him. On the plane, the FBI man pressed the Russian about the alleged mole in the FBI. Lysov was vague and would provide no details. But he promised to return in six months with more information. He never did.

That still left the FBI with a problem; how to identify
UNSUB DICK?
Perhaps, the bureau’s counterintelligence agents reasoned, a technique used by both sides could lead to the answer. Just as the bureau tried to recruit officers of the KGB, the Russians targeted the FBI’s agents in New York. “We know they tried to make contacts, put people in bars near our office.
FEDORA
told us that.”

The ongoing recruitment game, the FBI concluded, might be turned to its advantage in the search for
UNSUB DICK
. The FBI decided to dangle one of its agents to the KGB. He would hint that he needed money and might be amenable to recruitment.

One of the bureau’s watchers, a street agent assigned to surveillance of the Soviet Mission, was chosen for the operation, codenamed
VALBEL
. According to a former FBI man, the agent showed up at the apartment of Boris Ivanov, the KGB resident in New York, and rang the bell. “Ivanov slammed the door, but not before the agent said he would meet them at such-and-such time and place. In fact, a Line KR Soviet showed up. We ran the operation for six months; there were three or four meetings. We hoped we could tell from their questions who
DICK
was.”

If, for example, the KGB asked for information about a specific FBI counterintelligence operation, it would mean they had learned about it already, which could narrow the list of suspects in the bureau who knew of that activity. Conversely, if the KGB did not ask certain questions, it might be because the mole had already provided the answers.
VALBEL
was a long shot. “We were trying to get them to show their hand,” the former FBI agent said, “but they never asked the right questions.” The KGB, wary of the dangle, did not bite.

The search for
UNSUB DICK
was complicated by the fact that there was intense controversy over whether
FEDORA
was a true agent in place for the FBI or a KGB plant. J. Edgar Hoover had total faith in
FEDORA
,
although some of his counterintelligence agents who knew the case were skeptical. And the skeptics reasoned that if
FEDORA
was a plant, then perhaps there was no
UNSUB DICK
and the supposed mole was a phantom who did not really exist.

Although some in the FBI continued to have their doubts about Aleksei Kulak, he provided a good deal of useful information to the bureau, including the names of KGB officers and which U.S. military weapons and defense plants Moscow wanted him to collect data about. KGB walkins do not turn up every day; over a sixteen-year period during two tours in New York, the FBI paid him approximately $100,000. Kulak
/FEDORA
returned to Moscow for the last time in 1977.
^*

James J. Angleton, the CIA’s controversial counterintelligence chief, considered
FEDORA
a fake, but then Angleton was a true believer in only one KGB defector, Anatoly M. Golitsin, who had come over in 1961 in Helsinki. All others were suspect to Angleton, most especially a later defector, Yuri I. Nosenko, who was imprisoned and brutally treated by the CIA in an effort to break his story. Nosenko never wavered, and in the end was rehabilitated by the CIA.
^†
Angleton’s suspicion, fueled by Golitsin, that the CIA was deeply penetrated led him on a destructive mole hunt for more than a decade that paralyzed the agency’s Soviet operations and destroyed the careers of many loyal CIA officers. Finally, in 1974, Angleton was fired by CIA director William E. Colby.

In the FBI, the frustrating search for
UNSUB DICK
went on for years, but was never resolved. “We never found him,” a former FBI official admitted. “Some people think they figured out who he was, but he is dead.” In the files of the FBI, however,
UNSUB DICK
is still an open case.

The bureau fared only slightly better in another episode. Several years ago, the FBI closed in on a suspected mole, and again the entire affair was handled quietly and out of public view. A former FBI counterintelligence official recalled how the case had involved stolen documents and a phone booth in suburban Maryland.

“We got a package addressed to Hoover or the bureau saying, in stilted English, that a bureau agent was selling documents and would be at a phone booth in Rockville at a certain time. Inside the package there were a couple of surveillance reports from the Washington field office. We checked and found they were missing from the files.

“We figured the Soviets were feeding him back; they thought he was a dangle. But he wasn’t. Sullivan had Baltimore run the case since the agent was in WFO [the Washington field office].” Sullivan was William C. Sullivan, then the FBI’s assistant director for intelligence. Because the suspect had to be someone working in the Washington field office, he asked the FBI field office in Baltimore to take over, to avoid the awkward possibility that one of the agents assigned to surveillance of the phone booth might be the mole.