American Spies: Espionage against the United States from the Cold War to the Present

19 The Spy in the FBI: Robert Hanssen

205 1 9 The Spy in the FBI ROBERT HANSSEN My security concerns may seem excessive. I believe experience has shown them to be necessary. I am much safer if you know little about me. Over time I can cut your losses rather than become one. ROBERT HANSSEN, in a letter to his KGB handlers, July 1988, quoted by Rafalko, Counterintelligence Reader, 4:111 Throughout the Cold War, the FBI had proven less vulnerable to penetration than its sister agencies, but it too had suffered damage from Soviet espionage. In 1984, Richard Miller—an overweight, slovenly, and bumbling FBI agent in Los Angeles—had an affair with Svetlana Ogorodnikova, a Soviet émigré who recruited him for the KGB.1 Miller was lured by the dual thrills of spying and romance, but he was also motivated by the extra money that would come in handy to support his family of eight children. Financially strapped, he initially sold Amway products from his car before he discovered the more lucrative side job of a spy.2 He turned out to be as inept a spy as he was an FBI agent and was nabbed early in the operation. He was sentenced to twenty years in prison for his ham-handed spying and became the first FBI agent convicted of espionage.3 In the late 1990s, the intensive search for a mole besides Ames resulted in the capture of another FBI agent. Edward Earl Pitts had worked in FBI counterintelligence in the New York field office in the 1980s. Pitts experi- Espionage and the New World Order: The 1990s 206 enced financial problems from the high cost of living in New York. To overcome them, he volunteered to spy for the KGB in 1987 and passed them FBI information for five years. Pitts’s espionage for the Russians ended after he was reassigned to the FBI’s Legal Division in Washington, where he had little access to information of interest to his spymasters.4 The FBI decided to run a sting operation against Pitts because he was no longer spying for the Russians. An FBI agent with native Russian recontacted him, ostensibly to renew the spy relationship. Pitts took the bait and began passing more classified information until the FBI had enough evidence to arrest him in December 1996.5 Pitts pled guilty and was sentenced to twenty-seven years imprisonment after promising full cooperation about his spying activities. Pitts, however, had no access to the unexplained compromises . The second spy had to be someone else. A small team at the FBI and CIA trudged ahead in the search for the elusive second spy.6 By White House mandate, CIA counterespionage officers in the hunt were now supervised by a senior FBI agent. The first years of the new arrangement were occasionally marked by bitter clashes and flared tempers. The conflict was, in many ways, cultural. FBI and CIA officers working together in the same close quarters belonged to the same religion , counterespionage, but were from radically different sects. The CIA jealously guarded the secrets from its agents, even when that information related to the FBI’s job of prosecuting spies. The FBI, conversely, needed to use evidence in an open court, even if that evidence came from CIA sources that could be compromised. Time heals all wounds, and it eventually did so in the scarred FBI–CIA relationship. Besides the FBI chief of CIA counterespionage, other FBI agents were assigned on tours to the CIA, and soon CIA officers were working in FBI offices. The rotational policy, jokingly dubbed the “hostage exchange” program, gradually increased understanding and cooperation between the two onetime rivals. Although there were still occasional skirmishes over turf, FBI and CIA officers were cooperating on espionage cases as never before. Working in the same office, sharing similar stories about governmentserviceoverabeer,travelingthroughthesamerushhourtraffic, the officers found there was more that united than divided them. The one unfortunate by-product of this cooperation is that both sides developed a mindset about the spy hunt.7 Like the CIA before Ames, the The Spy in the FBI 207 FBI was culturally resistant to the notion that an FBI agent could be the major spy they sought. FBI spy hunters believed the second mole was in the CIA, and CIA officers shared the same theory. The CIA had already experienced two major Soviet spies in its midst, Howard and Ames, and in 1996...