In March 1979, Hanssen started a two-year tour at the FBI’s Soviet Counterintelligence Division in New York...
...Hanssen’s supervisors had discovered his one outstanding talent a few weeks after he arrived on duty: he was one of the very few people in the FBI who understood how computers worked. They assigned him to create an automated database about the Soviet contingent of diplomats and suspected spies in New York.
...In November 1979, Hanssen walked undetected into the midtown Manhattan offices of Amtorg, the Soviet trade mission that had served as an espionage front for six decades. The office was run by senior officers of the GRU. Hanssen knew where to go and who to see at Amtorg. That day, he volunteered his services as a spy. He turned over a sheaf of documents on the FBI’s electronic surveillance of the Soviet residential compound in New York, and he set up a system for delivering new secrets every six months through encoded radio communications. Hanssen’s next package contained an up-to-date list of all the Soviets in New York who the FBI suspected were spies. He delivered another revelation that shook the Soviet services to their roots: a GRU major general named Dmitri Polyakov had been working for America since 1961. He had been posted at the United Nations for most of those years. The Soviets recalled Polyakov to Moscow in May 1980. It is likely—though the question is still debated at the FBI—that Polyakov served thereafter as a channel of disinformation intended to mislead and mystify American intelligence.
Hanssen’s responsibilities grew. He was given the task of preparing the budget requests for the Bureau’s intelligence operations in New York. The flow of money showed the FBI’s targets for the next five years—and its plans for projects in collaboration with the CIA and the National Security Agency. His third delivery to the Soviets detailed those plans. And then he decided to lie low.
If Hanssen had stopped spying then and there, the damage he wrought still would have been unequaled in the history of the FBI. William Webster himself would conduct a postmortem after the case came to light in 2001. He called it “an incredible assault,” an epochal disaster, “a five-hundred-year flood” that destroyed everything in its path.
Hanssen suspended his contacts with the Soviets in New York as a major case against an American spy was about to come to light. The investigation had reached across the United States into France, Mexico, and Canada before the FBI began to focus on a retired army code clerk named Joe Helmich in the summer of 1980. He was arrested a year later and sentenced to life in prison after he was convicted of selling the Soviets the codes and operating manual to the KL-7 system, the basic tool of encrypting communications developed by the NSA. He was a lowly army warrant officer with a top secret clearance; his treason had taken place in covert meetings with Soviet intelligence officers in Paris and Mexico City from 1963 to 1966; he was paid $131,000. He had sold the Soviets the equivalent of a skeleton key that let them decode the most highly classified messages of American military and intelligence officers during the Vietnam War.
Hanssen understood one of the most important aspects of the investigation: it had lasted for seventeen years. The FBI could keep a case of counterintelligence alive for a generation. There was no statute of limitations for espionage.
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The Miller case was an unsavory affair. He was a twenty-year FBI counterintelligence veteran whose life was falling apart in the months before he became a spy. The father of eight children, he had been excommunicated by the Mormon Church for adultery. He had been suspended by the FBI for two weeks without pay because he was obese. Shortly after that disciplinary action, he had willingly been recruited by a woman he knew to be a KGB agent. Svetlana Ogorodnikov enticed Miller into trading a copy of the FBI’s twenty-five-page manual on foreign counterintelligence investigations in exchange for $15,000 in cash and her sexual favors. Miller was convicted and received a twenty-year sentence.
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The secrets spilled because the covert operations of the United States were so badly conceived, and so poorly executed, that they began to break down in public. First the crash of a cargo plane maintained by Southern Air Transport exposed the role of the White House in arming the contras in defiance of the law. Then a newspaper in Beirut revealed that the White House was smuggling weapons into Iran.
The president denied it in public. But Revell knew it was true.
On the afternoon of November 13, 1986, the White House asked Revell to review a speech that President Reagan would deliver to the American people that evening. As he pored over the draft of the speech in North’s office, he pointed out five evident falsehoods.
“We did not—repeat, did not—trade weapons or anything else for hostages, nor will we,” the president’s draft said. The United States would never “strengthen those who support terrorism”; it had only sold “defensive armaments and spare parts” to Iran. It had not violated its stance of neutrality in the scorched-earth war between Iran and Iraq; it had never chartered arms shipments out of Miami.
Revell knew none of this was true. He warned Judge Webster, who alerted Attorney General Meese. He was ignored.
...The president delivered the speech almost precisely as drafted, word for dissembling word.
Colonel North and his superior, the president’s national security adviser, Admiral John Poindexter, began shredding their records and deleting their computer files as fast as they could. But within the White House, one crucial fact emerged: they had skimmed millions of dollars in profits from the weapons sales to Iran and siphoned off the money to support the contras.
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