Spy: The Inside Story of How the FBI's Robert Hanssen Betrayed America (28 page)

As in most mole hunts, other innocent agents were caught up in the net. A. Jackson Lowe, the assistant counterintelligence chief in New York, was summoned to the airport at one point to meet a group of senior FBI officials from headquarters. The spy in the New York field office, they informed him, had met his Russian contact somewhere away from the Soviet Mission to the United Nations. Grimly, they informed Lowe that the suspect walked with a limp. The counterspies from headquarters had asked Lowe to come to the airport because they knew that his partner walked with a limp, the result of a degenerative bone disease. A man with a limp! It began to sound like something out of an Alfred Hitchcock movie. Lowe didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. His partner, he said, was the field office liaison with the KGB. “He goes into the mission every six weeks,” Lowe told the officials. “He wouldn’t need to meet anyone outside the mission.”

There was never any case made against Lowe’s partner, a loyal agent, and the suspicions were soon dropped. But the man had tears in his eyes when Lowe later told him what had happened. “How could they even
think
I would do something like that?” he asked.

The sweeping New York mole hunt that began in 1993 found no moles. But about two years later, with the help of a Russian defector, the FBI did uncover the agent, no longer in New York, who had been the penetration. The bureau gave him the code name
BLINDSWITCH
.

He was Earl Edwin Pitts, an FBI counterintelligence agent who spied for the KGB in New York for five years, between 1987 and 1992,
and was paid $124,000. He turned over to the Soviets details of FBI counterintelligence operations against the Russians. The Russian defector, Rollan G. Dzheikiya, told the FBI he had introduced Pitts to the KGB at the New York Public Library.

Dzheikiya had been the Communist Party chief at the mission, an unpopular job, since staffers were required to kick back a huge chunk of their salaries to the Party. After the Soviet Union collapsed, Dzheikiya stayed in New York, trying to make it on his own. He hoped to remain in the United States and needed a green card to become a permanent resident. So he was amenable to helping the FBI when the bureau, aware of his circumstances, came knocking at his door.

The bureau ran a sting against Pitts, with agents posing as Russians. He was arrested in December 1996, pleaded guilty, and was sentenced to twenty-seven years. He told investigators he began spying because he had become enraged at the FBI, in part because of his low pay and the high cost of living in New York.

* * *

In Washington, the secret joint effort of the FBI and the CIA, if it did not pick up the scent of Robert Hanssen, at least played a role in the unmasking both of Earl Pitts and of another spy, this one in the CIA.

Harold James Nicholson, the highest-ranking CIA officer ever charged with espionage, was arrested at Dulles Airport in November 1996 as he prepared to fly to Switzerland to meet his Russian handler. When Nicholson fell under suspicion, some two hundred FBI agents had been assigned to the case. The investigation of the CIA officer was at the root of some of the static between the two agencies. “A lot of people in SIU thought Nicholson was not the guy, we were picking on him,” said one FBI man. “That’s where Curran and Redmond got at odds with each other.”

Handsome, smooth, friendly, and articulate, Nicholson did seem an unlikely spy. He had been CIA station chief in Romania, then deputy chief of station in Malaysia. But divorced, with three children and short of money, he asked the SVR
rezident
in Kuala Lumpur for $25,000, eventually collecting $300,000 from the Russians. In return he gave Moscow the names of about three hundred graduates of the Farm, the CIA training base near Williamsburg, Virginia, and hundreds of documents, including a summary of the debriefing of Aldrich Ames after Ames had pleaded guilty to espionage. Nicholson, who liked to call
himself Batman, agreed to cooperate with the government and was sentenced to twenty-three years in prison.

While the mole hunters were wrapping up these high-profile spy cases, the CIA and the FBI were slowly working their way through a bureaucratic maze known inside the CIA as “the A-to-Z list.” The list was a direct fallout from the Ames case. The Counterespionage Group and CIA’s Office of Security (OS) were reviewing a huge backlog of polygraph tests to make sure another mole was not lurking somewhere inside Langley. It was a tedious, time-consuming job.

“The A-to-Z list had about three hundred people who had SPRs,” said one CIA official. “Significant Physiological Responses on the polygraph. Some of those on the list had nothing to do with CI. Some had contacts with foreign nationals. Several dozen were referred to the bureau, as required by law. The vast majority were sorted out by the Office of Security.”

“Gradually, over several years we cleared most of it up,” another CIA man said. There were two parallel efforts going on, he explained. “You had OS and the Counterespionage Group and the bureau working on the A-to-Z list. Simultaneously, SIU and the bureau were working on the new search for penetrations.

“There were people on the A-to-Z list whose careers were affected. Some people didn’t get to go overseas. The agency’s polygraphers got very tough because they had been criticized for having passed Ames. In the hysterical atmosphere after Ames, there were agency people referred to the bureau. And the bureau takes their time, but they were overwhelmed with the numbers.” The job of sifting through the three hundred names on the CIA list took years. Even after Hanssen’s arrest in 2001, several of the A-to-Z cases were still unresolved.

The same directive issued by President Clinton that established the Counterespionage Group also created a government-wide interagency panel to coordinate counterintelligence in the light of the Ames debacle. The National Counterintelligence Center, or NACIC, was housed at CIA headquarters, and its chief was Michael J. Waguespack, a senior FBI counterspy.

Robert Hanssen was particularly interested in the new center, perhaps because it would have afforded him access to counterintelligence information from all agencies of the government across the board, as well as information about counterintelligence activities overseas. Because NACIC was only a research and coordinating body, FBI agents
involved in operational activities were not stampeding to join the new center. But Hanssen pressed Waguespack to get him transferred into NACIC.

“You’ll have to take a polygraph,” Hanssen was cautioned.

Hanssen had never had to take a lie detector test during his entire career in the FBI. No thanks, he replied; he had been reflecting further about the transfer and thought he might just as well remain at headquarters.

Pete O’Donnell thought there was something odd about the Pitts case. O’Donnell was a veteran FBI counterspy who had worked for a dozen years in New York City on Squad 30, the unit that watched the KGB.

Earl Edwin Pitts, the FBI counterintelligence agent, had been arrested as a Russian spy in 1996. At headquarters, Special Agent Thomas K. Kimmel, Jr., was assigned to direct the damage assessment. Kimmel had little background in foreign counterintelligence, so he called in O’Donnell to help him.

At fifty-five, Kimmel was a tall, wiry man, with blond hair and blue eyes, handsome enough to be cast as the older cowhand in a Hollywood western. His consuming preoccupation, aside from his work, was to try to remove the stain on the family name. His grandfather was Rear Admiral Husband E. Kimmel, who with Army Lieutenant General Walter Short was officially blamed for the disaster when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor.

“I am the sixth graduate of the naval academy in my family,” he said in an interview in the living room of his home in northern Virginia, where he sat near an oil portrait of his grandfather.
^*

In September 1997, the damage assessment team began work. Kimmel headed a group of four agents and four analysts. Their mission was
to discover exactly what secrets Pitts had sold to the KGB, what programs might have been compromised, and how extensive the damage was to U.S. security.

As O’Donnell began examining the documents in the case, including the transcripts of the extensive FBI debriefings of the spy, it struck him that the way the Russians had run Pitts was peculiar. The KGB was not exploiting him. They were not asking for a lot of material or for specific documents. To O’Donnell, one obvious reason might be that the Russians had another source inside the FBI. If the KGB was already getting a plentiful supply of secrets from a mole in the bureau, it might explain its laid-back handling of Earl Pitts.

O’Donnell shared his suspicions with Kimmel, who agreed and demanded to see sensitive counterintelligence files that he hoped would support their theory. Kimmel soon found himself about as popular inside headquarters as the proverbial skunk at a garden party. In part, the root of the trouble was cultural.

Division 5, the intelligence division, by then renamed the National Security Division, was a cadre of specialists in counterintelligence. The spycatchers believed they knew their business, and although O’Donnell was an insider, Kimmel was not. At the time he was assigned to the Pitts damage assessment, Kimmel was working on the bureau’s inspection staff, never an admired group to begin with.

From the start, there was friction between Kimmel and the managers of the intelligence division, including John Lewis, who had taken over as the assistant director in charge in February 1997, and Ed Curran, then the chief of the Russian section.

Lewis was a husky former captain in the Marines who had served in Vietnam, as well as on the staff of the National Security Council and in the CIA. Although soft-spoken, he left no doubt about who was in charge; he allowed Kimmel to have access to some files, but kept him on a tight leash.

To Lewis, it appeared that Kimmel was trying to expand his damage assessment in the Pitts case into a mole hunt. But that was not his brief; the bureau and the CIA already had the SIU and dozens of people trying to find the penetration. Kimmel, Lewis made clear, was to stick to his task.

Kimmel was asking to see case files, including raw files, that had nothing to do with Pitts. That raised Lewis’s hackles. He did not want Kimmel and his team combing through the files of unresolved cases
and learning the names of suspects. Some of the files, Lewis said, identified bureau agents who had been scrutinized in the New York mole hunt before Pitts was caught.

“Others related to sensitive source reporting from both the bureau and the agency on walkins around the world, [SVR] hallway gossip about penetrations. We had a walk-in to the Soviet embassy in Portugal where the guy flashed CIA creds. He, Kimmel, wanted everything in the world we had on penetrations to see if it in some way related to Pitts. But his job was to see what Pitts had compromised.

“We were not about to allow him to be privy to all of those files. My job as assistant director was to protect sources and methods. I was not about to open them up to someone who had no sensitivity nor complete understanding of highly classified information relating to penetration of the U.S. government. I was not going to open up our entire innermost secrets to someone who had never even worked this stuff.” Kimmel, Lewis added, was “a good investigator” but “although well intentioned, he was very difficult to work with. He had confrontations with everyone.”

Lewis did not disagree with Kimmel’s theory that the KGB’s handling of Pitts might suggest the existence of another penetration. “The fact that the Russians had not tasked Pitts—we knew that. It was common sense there might be somebody else.”

Kimmel, for his part, strongly defended his study of the Pitts case. “My hypothesis was the greatest damage Pitts was doing was making it more complicated for FBI counterintelligence teams to uncover what turned out to be Ames. The Soviets could play one off against the other and confuse the trail. The great unknown was, are there more than Pitts?

“It was inconceivable to me that we are saying that the KGB’s number one job is to penetrate the FBI and they have Pitts as a source and are not exploiting him to a greater degree. That doesn’t make any sense to me. If the shoe was on the other foot and we had only one Soviet source, we would be falling all over ourselves to exploit every drop of blood from the guy.”

On February 12, 1999, Kimmel met in a seventh-floor conference room at FBI headquarters with Louis Freeh, the director; Neil J. Gallagher, who had become the division chief some months after Lewis retired; and other FBI officials. Freeh asked Kimmel whether he thought there were other moles in the FBI, but Kimmel said he had not had access to enough information to form a judgment.

Freeh ordered Kimmel to investigate further and authorized him to see more files. But Kimmel was not shown all that he wanted to see because counterintelligence officials continued to restrict his access to sensitive cases.

The following month, Kimmel met with Freeh again. “I did not say definitely that I thought there was a mole in the FBI,” Kimmel said. “But it was perfectly obvious I was concerned there was a mole in the FBI.”

Looking back on these events, Kimmel said that when he prepared his study he was unaware that when the FBI interviewed Pitts in prison in June 1997, the convicted spy was asked whether he knew of any other moles inside the bureau. Pitts said he did not, but he also said he suspected Robert Hanssen because Hanssen had broken into the computer of another counterintelligence official. Bureau officials assumed this was a reference to the time in 1993 when Hanssen had hacked into Ray Mislock’s computer. Since they already knew about that incident, and Hanssen had come forward and claimed to Mislock that he was simply trying to prove that the FBI computer network was vulnerable, the FBI discounted what Pitts said.