Spy: The Inside Story of How the FBI's Robert Hanssen Betrayed America (9 page)

Along with the money, the KGB countered with their own arrangements for future contacts with Hanssen. In the spy trade, this schedule of meetings, drops, and dates is known as a communication plan.

Six days later, on November 8, Cherkashin was given another letter from Hanssen, who did not, then or later, reveal his identity to the Russians. Once again the letter was mailed to Degtyar’s home in Alexandria. It was full of flattery for Cherkashin, praising “your courage and perseverance” in the face of what Hanssen said he assumed were the usual “bureaucratic obstacles.” He went on in the same vein:

Hanssen was using old-fashioned spycraft. As he well knew, even in the high-tech age of computers, the KGB and for that matter the CIA, perhaps surprisingly, clung to traditional methods of contacting agents and exchanging documents and money. Since both sides rightly assumed that their telephones were tapped, the use of signal sites and dead drops offered a measure of security that spies found attractive. Typically, the intelligence officer or agent would contact each other by leaving a signal, a piece of tape on a telephone pole or perhaps a chalk mark on a mailbox, to indicate that a drop had been loaded or cleared. Usually these signals were placed in such a way and at a height that someone driving by could see them without getting out of a car.

True, using hiding places to stash documents or money carried a small risk that children playing in a park might discover the secret, or someone’s dog might snuffle into a dead drop. However, that slight danger was offset by the fact that the use of these established methods meant that an officer and his agent would not be caught together with incriminating material, as could happen in a personal meeting.

But the computer-savvy Hanssen hoped to drag the KGB into the age of cyberspace. He suggested they contact each other on a computer “bulletin board,” using “appropriate encryption.” Hanssen must have realized there was little chance of changing the ways of the KGB, for he wrote that, in the meantime, “Let us use the same site again. Same timing. Same signals.” Hanssen proposed that the next exchange at a dead drop take place on March 3, 1986.
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Hanssen was not going to fuss over the money with his new paymasters. “Thank you for the 50,000,” he wrote. “As far as the funds are concerned, I have little need or utility for more than the 100,000. It merely provides a difficulty since I can not spend it, store it or invest it easily without triping [sic] ‘drug money’ warning bells.

“Perhaps some diamonds as security to my children and some good will so that when the time comes, you will accept by [sic] senior services as a guest lecturer.”

Even at this early stage, sixteen years before he was caught, Hanssen was aware that despite all of his professional precautions, the day might come when he was discovered and would have to flee. “Eventually,” he wrote, “I would appreciate an escape plan. (Nothing lasts forever.)”

In the same letter, Hanssen made clear that he had access to communications intelligence and the supersecret collection methods of the National Security Agency. He warned the KGB of a “new technique” used by the NSA, which he described in detail.

Having already betrayed Martynov, Motorin, and Yuzhin and, as far as he knew, ensuring that they would be shot, Hanssen wanted to make
certain that the KGB believed he was a genuine mole whose information could be trusted. Referring to the three FBI sources, he wrote:

This last reference surely helped to identify and send Valery Martynov to his death, because logically it was Martynov who would be the “active one.” Sergei Motorin had by then returned to Moscow and Yuzhin had gone back in 1982. And only the FBI and Martynov knew that he concealed the money he was paid by the bureau in the bottom of his travel bag. That fact was classified
SECRET
.

In the event, only Boris Yuzhin escaped the executioner. He was one of the lucky ones, if serving time in the Soviet gulag can be called that. Arrested in December 1986, he was sentenced to fifteen years for high treason. On February 7, 1992, after six years under harsh conditions in Soviet prisons, Yuzhin was one of ten political prisoners released from the notorious Perm-35 prison camp in the Urals under a general amnesty granted by Boris Yeltsin, then president of Russia. He later emigrated to the United States with his family.

Sergei Motorin had returned to Moscow on normal rotation in January 1985. After being identified to the KGB by Ames in June and Hanssen in October, he was arrested by December. A Soviet court that heard the evidence against Motorin said he had received $20,000 from the FBI, and it cited his purchase of a water bed as proof of his Western decadence.

From Moscow, Motorin had telephoned his woman friend in Washington several times. The calls continued through the late winter. The conversations were recorded and the FBI and the CIA read the transcripts. Later, the FBI concluded that Motorin was already under control and had been forced by the KGB to make the telephone calls, in an effort to deceive U.S. intelligence into thinking he had not been detected. But in February 1987, the last telephone contact took place. That month, he was executed.

Valery Martynov was lured back to Moscow on November 6, 1985, in a ploy that apparently did not arouse his suspicion. The key was Vitaly Yurchenko. The celebrated KGB defector had changed his mind about remaining in America and slipped away from his young CIA escort in a Georgetown restaurant; he then surfaced at a press conference at the Soviet embassy, claiming he had been kidnapped by the CIA, which no one believed. Martynov was ordered to escort Vitaly Yurchenko on the flight home.

Martynov told his wife, Natalya, and his two young children that he would be back in Washington soon. Shortly after Martynov flew back to Moscow, Natalya received a note from her husband saying he had reinjured a bad knee while carrying his luggage and had been hospitalized. He asked her and their son and daughter to come back to Moscow. As soon as their plane had landed, Natalya realized that her husband was in trouble. She was taken to Moscow’s grim Lefortovo prison for interrogation. At first she thought her husband might be suspected of bringing in tape recorders or other electronic equipment and selling them. It was only then that she was told he had been charged with high treason.

Questioned repeatedly by the KGB, she was allowed to see her husband only four times during the next two years. The last time, knowing he had been sentenced to death, she brought her son with her.

Hanssen’s letter, revealing precisely how Martynov had concealed the FBI’s cash in his suitcase, reached Viktor Cherkashin on November 8, 1985. Martynov, with Vitaly Yurchenko, had left Washington only two days earlier on an Aeroflot jet to Moscow. If the KGB entertained any lingering doubts that Martynov had become a mole for U.S. intelligence, Hanssen’s letter certainly removed them. There could no longer be any question.

On May 28, 1987, Lieutenant Colonel Valery Martynov was executed by a firing squad. He was forty-one.

While Hanssen continued in New York to funnel sensitive secrets to the Russians, in his day job he spied on them.

As a squad supervisor on his second tour in the city, Hanssen spent most of his time in a highly secret FBI wiretap installation on Manhattan’s east side, a few blocks north of Grand Central Terminal. It was codenamed
POCKETWATCH
.

Hanssen’s squad was collecting electronic intelligence on Soviet commercial operations in the United States. Its primary target was Amtorg, the Soviet trading agency. For Hanssen, the wheel had come full circle; it was to Amtorg that he had volunteered in his first venture into espionage six years earlier, when he spied for the GRU.

The FBI agents under Hanssen operated discreetly out of a building near the Amtorg office.
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Their targets also included Aeroflot, the Soviet airline, and other commercial offices. The agents were, in bureau shorthand, operating “offsite,” meaning they were not working downtown at the FBI’s large New York field office at 26 Federal Plaza, known irreverently as “the anthill.”

At Hanssen’s uptown shop, FBI agents and translators with earphones clamped to their heads listened in on what the Soviets were saying, at the same time recording all the conversations on tape for future
reference. They were, in the language of the agents, engaged in “overhears” and analysis of the take. Amtorg encouraged Soviet exports, stimulating sales of Belarus tractors, for example. But the FBI was not interested in tractors; it was looking for intelligence officers.

Once again, Hanssen was toiling in a backwater, not at the center of the game. “Hanssen was a supervisor, but he had a nondescript squad,” said Ed Curran, who worked counterintelligence in the city for a dozen years. “Amtorg is not like the Soviet mission or the UN, where the action was. At Amtorg, maybe you had a few IOs in there for cover, but they never did much. If you have forty or fifty Soviets in Amtorg, what you’re looking for is two or three who are GRU or co-opted by them.

“I had illegals and KR [KGB counterintelligence], a hot trigger; you’re always doing something. What Hanssen was doing was certainly not as important as a KGB squad, working against hostile, aggressive intelligence officers.”

Hanssen’s
POCKETWATCH
wiretap operation was a subunit of a separate, much larger eavesdropping installation, codenamed
MEGAHUT
, also on the east side of Manhattan, not far from the UN. This was the bureau’s central counterintelligence surveillance site for the entire city, with telephone lines running to the Soviet Mission to the United Nations on East Sixty-seventh Street, and as far north as the Russian apartment complex in Riverdale, along the Hudson River in the upper reaches of the Bronx.
^*

In every city where the Soviets had a diplomatic presence, there was such a central facility for the bureau’s wiretappers. In Washington, it was known among the field agents as the Hole, and in San Francisco the Farm (not to be confused with the CIA’s training base near Williamsburg, Virginia, with the same name). The technicians from
MEGAHUT
had set up the smaller office that Hanssen supervised.

It was one of the multiple contradictions of Hanssen’s personality
that he appears to have worked hard simultaneously for both the KGB and the FBI. James Ohlson, who remained friendly with Hanssen after they had met at headquarters and discovered their Chicago roots, recalled a major counterintelligence breakthrough that Hanssen achieved, on his own time, to solve a troublesome problem for the bureau.

Ohlson was at headquarters in the FBI’s information systems unit, developing computer programs for counterintelligence and counterterrorism. Hanssen, in New York, helped Ohlson develop a computer program that greatly improved the FBI’s ability to track Soviet diplomats.