Spy: The Inside Story of How the FBI's Robert Hanssen Betrayed America (8 page)

The CIA technician took over and demonstrated how Yuzhin was to use the camera to photograph documents in the Soviet consulate. The special film would allow him to take ninety pictures.

The Russian had been recruited by the FBI. The bureau brought in the CIA officer who gave Yuzhin the spy camera as a result of a then-unusual level of cooperation between the two agencies on an unrelated case. A CIA source in Indonesia, code name
GTJOGGER
, had revealed that a former agency officer, David H. Barnett, had sold CIA secrets to the KGB. The CIA turned over
GTJOGGER’S
leads to the FBI,
which investigated and arrested Barnett, the first CIA officer ever to be charged with espionage. As payback for the CIA’s help in the case, the FBI invited the agency to work with it on a case, and the CIA chose Yuzhin.
^*

Boris Yuzhin had first come to the United States six years earlier as a student at the University of California, Berkeley. He was then already working for the KGB. The FBI approached Yuzhin on a pretext, with the help of a woman he knew, and discovered that he admired American society. He soon began volunteering information to the bureau. The FBI assigned Bill Smits, who spoke Russian, as Yuzhin’s case agent. In the San Francisco field office, Smits, who favored elegant three-piece suits, was known as the Count. He was earning a doctorate in public administration at Golden Gate University while handling Boris Yuzhin.

“He cooperated because he hated the KGB, the politics,” Smits said. “He had no use for it. He saw it for what it was.” Yuzhin’s FBI code name was
RAMPAIGE
. The CIA called him
CKTWINE
.

Yuzhin went back to Moscow, but returned to San Francisco in 1978. His cover as a Tass correspondent was designed to mask his true position as a KGB Line PR officer assigned to collect political intelligence. A CIA officer explained why Yuzhin continued to spy for the United States. “He had been treated well, but he was considered a country boy from an inferior background. In the KGB you got promoted because of who you knew, not what you did. Yuzhin didn’t have a protector. Even though he was a lieutenant colonel by the time he went back to San Francisco, he felt he was a quota bumpkin. They pushed a few along in a sort of equal opportunity program.”

Yuzhin revealed to American intelligence the existence of the KGB’s Group North, an elite unit of senior Soviet intelligence officers who specialized in recruiting American and Canadian targets worldwide. The KGB group was a kind of spy SWAT team with authority to travel anywhere on its missions.

Yuzhin also gave the FBI and the CIA leads that helped Norway to
identify and arrest Arne Treholt, a high-level Soviet spy in that country’s diplomatic corps.
^*
Bill Smits continued as his FBI case agent.

Yuzhin photographed several hundred documents and cables from Moscow with the CIA’s trick camera. When all ninety frames were shot, he would exchange the exposed film for a new roll. He was also given a small camera by the FBI; once, when using it, Yuzhin managed to take pictures of his own reflection on the documents, not a good idea had the film fallen into the wrong hands.

Some months later, Yuzhin committed a blunder that nearly cost him his life: he lost the cigarette lighter. He looked all over, but to no avail. Yuzhin, frantic, contacted his FBI handler for help. “I searched his car that night thinking he might have dropped it between the seats,” Bill Smits said. “We damn near tore the car apart.” No lighter. Yuzhin thought maybe he had dropped it at a friend’s apartment. The FBI entered the apartment, searched it, and found nothing.

In the meantime, a janitor in the Soviet consulate had found the lighter by a pool table. Trying to light a flame, he took four pictures of himself. He turned the lighter in, and the KGB immediately recognized what it was. Yuzhin and another Soviet at the consulate, Igor S. Samsonov, were the prime suspects; both were smokers and shared an office.

In 1982, Yuzhin returned to Moscow, still under suspicion and closely watched. The KGB stationed its agents in the crawl space between the ceiling of the Yuzhins’ apartment and the floor of the apartment above. The KGB had the Yuzhins under total surveillance, including their bedroom, twenty-four hours a day.

But without real evidence that the lighter was Yuzhin’s, the KGB did not arrest him. The CIA hoped to stay in communication with Yuzhin, but he was wary now. “When he returned to Moscow,” a CIA man said, “Yuzhin would only agree to give a ‘sign of life,’ such as a chalk mark. No meetings, no dead drops.” For the moment, at least, Yuzhin seemed out of danger.

But he was not, because Hanssen had learned his identity, along with the true names of Martynov and Motorin.

* * *

For the Hanssens, his new assignment in New York City meant pulling up stakes again, selling their four-bedroom house on Whitecedar Court, buying a new one, enrolling the children in new schools. They sold their house in Vienna for $175,000. But they paid almost as much for a smaller, three-bedroom, two-story house in Yorktown Heights, in Westchester County again but farther north of the city and an hour-and-a-half commute from his office.

But Hanssen had already decided how to supplement his FBI salary, then about $46,000; it had, after all, worked before. As he arranged the details of moving himself and his family to New York, he was back in Washington on Tuesday, October 1, 1985.

From somewhere in Prince George’s County, Maryland, he dropped a letter in a mailbox. Three days later, it was received by Viktor M. Degtyar, a KGB Line PR officer, at his home in Alexandria, Virginia.

When Degtyar opened the letter, he found another envelope inside, marked
DO NOT OPEN. TAKE THIS ENVELOPE UNOPENED TO VICTOR I. CHERKASHIN
. At that time, Viktor Cherkashin was the KGB’s chief of counterintelligence, or Line KR, at the Soviet embassy. Less than four months earlier, it was Cherkashin who had accepted Aldrich Ames as a walk-in to the KGB, a decision that launched Ames’s nine years of spying as the most damaging mole in the history of the CIA.

Inside the inner envelope of the letter to Degtyar was an unsigned typed letter to Cherkashin from Robert Hanssen. The KGB, not knowing his identity, gave him the simple code name “B.” The letter said:

Having betrayed the three FBI sources and, as far as Hanssen knew, sent them to their doom, he described a classified intelligence collection program. In addition, “to further support my bona fides,” as Hanssen put it, he included information about recent Soviet defectors to U.S. intelligence.

He added:

Hanssen had no way of knowing that less than four months earlier, Aldrich Ames had already given up Martynov, Motorin, and Yuzhin to the KGB.
^*
The fact that Ames had been down that path before him, and for the same reason, did not alter Hanssen’s intent. At the very least, his betrayal provided important confirmation to the Soviets of the information they had already received from Aldrich Ames.

On June 13, 1985, Ames had wrapped up between five and seven pounds of cable traffic and other secret documents in plastic bags in his fourth-floor office at CIA headquarters. He took the elevator down, used his laminated ID card to get through the turnstiles that block every exit, and walked to his car in the parking lot. No guard asked to look inside the plastic bags; the CIA, as Ames knew, did not examine packages being carried out of the building.

Ames drove across the river to Chadwicks, a Washington saloon and restaurant under the K Street Freeway on the Georgetown waterfront.
There he met Sergei D. Chuvakhin, a diplomat listed as a first secretary of the Soviet embassy. The KGB was using Chuvakhin as a cutout, or intermediary; Ames in turn was ostensibly developing Chuvakhin as an agency source.

At lunch, Ames handed Chuvakhin the plastic bags containing Langley’s most precious secrets—the names of more than ten of the most important Soviet sources working for the CIA and FBI, including the three that Hanssen would betray four months later. Ames knew that many of them would die.

Long after, when he pleaded guilty to espionage in federal court, Ames described that day: “I did something which is still not entirely explicable even to me: without preconditions, or any demand for payment, I volunteered to the KGB information identifying virtually all Soviet agents of the CIA and other American and foreign services known to me. To my enduring surprise, the KGB replied that it had set aside for me two million dollars in gratitude for the information.”
^*
His decision to betray the CIA’s agents, Ames later said, “was like the leap into the dark.”

Hanssen, in betraying the three FBI sources, was not merely establishing his credibility with the KGB. He was also protecting himself against what in his letter he had called “certain risks to my security.” The danger to Hanssen was that one or more of the three FBI sources might learn of his existence from their vantage point inside the KGB and reveal it to the FBI. The best way to eliminate that possibility was to kill them.

As Hanssen had promised, his first package of documents arrived in the mail at Viktor Degtyar’s house in Alexandria ten days after the KGB man had received his letter. Inside were a large batch of classified intelligence documents, although not all were originals as he had said in his letter.

At 8:35
A.M
. the next morning, October 16, FBI agents routinely watching the Soviet embassy from their lookout post across the street saw Degtyar arrive for work. He was carrying a large black canvas bag which the KGB man did not normally have with him. This was duly noted and recorded, but of course the FBI agents on surveillance duty
had no way to guess what was in the bag. The contents could just as easily have been books, a change of clothes, or Degtyar’s lunch.

A week later, this time from New York City, Hanssen mailed another letter to Degtyar’s house. Perhaps not wanting his wife to surprise him again, Hanssen seldom wrote to the KGB in his den at home; he composed most of his letters on a laptop in his car.

In the message to Degtyar, Hanssen, the consummate professional, was not
asking
the KGB for instructions on where they wanted to leave the $100,000 he had asked for, or where he was to stash documents in the future, or how to signal the Russians—he was
telling
them.

The letter crisply laid out his plan:

After enclosing a schedule of dates and times for the signals and dead drops, Hanssen said he would acknowledge receipt of the money with his next package of documents.

The KGB gave the dead drop site in Nottoway Park the appropriate, if unimaginative, code name
PARK
. It was to become Hanssen’s favorite drop site; over the next four years he used it seventeen times.

On Saturday, November 2, less than a week after receiving Hanssen’s letter, the KGB loaded the
PARK
dead drop with $50,000 in cash, half of what he had requested. Because Hanssen’s motives for spying for Moscow were complex, varied, and enigmatic, among those
who knew him in the intelligence community it became the accepted wisdom after his arrest that he had not acted for money alone, or even primarily. While that may well be true, it should be noted that $50,000—and he was to receive a great deal more—was an amount greater than his annual FBI salary at the time. Hard cash was certainly not an insignificant factor in his mix of motives, as Hanssen himself later told his FBI debriefers and the Webster commission.