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He was the kind of neighbor you'd expect to have in a respectable suburban community like Vienna, Virginia. He had worked for the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) for twenty-five years. Passing his driveway, you saw all the signs of comfortable -- but not ostentatious -- suburban living: a 1997 Ford Taurus, a 1993 Volkswagen van, a 1992 Isuzu Trooper. He was the kind of guy neighbors characterized as "pleasant and friendly, but quiet." The guy had started his career, after receiving his MBA in Accounting and Information Systems from Northwestern University in 1971, as a Certified Public Accountant (CPA.)
This was certainly not the kind of profile you expect of a guy who is under indictment for spying for the Soviet Union and now the Russian Federation against the United States. This is not the profile of a traitor who could face the death penalty for espionage if convicted. But this is the profile, according to court documents available on the Internet at the New York Times (registration required) and Smoking Gun Web sites of Robert Phillip Hanssen, a man alleged to have passed on important and dangerous documents to the Russians for the last fifteen years.
The most startling part of the revelations provided by FBI Special Agent Stefan A. Pluta in his affidavit to the United States District Court of the Eastern Division of Virginia which G21 reviewed is that Hanssen was not recruited by the KGB when he allegedly began turning over classified documents to the Soviets fifteen years ago, but rather he voluntarily sought them out and demanded that his first documents were worth $100,000.
According to Special Agent Pluta's 109 page affidavit, first contact was made by Hanssen in early October, 1985, to Viktor Degtyar, a KGB Line PR (Political) officer at his residence in Alexandria, Virginia, by mail. Inside the envelope was a second envelope upon which was written. "DO NOT OPEN. TAKE THIS ENVELOPE UNOPENED TO VICTOR I. CHERKASHIN." Viktor Ivanovich Cherkashin was the Line KR (Foreign Counterintelligence) Chief at the Soviet Embassy in Washington, D.C. The unsigned letter which Cherkashin received is alleged to have said, in part:
DEAR MR. CHERKASHIN:SOON, I WILL SEND A BOX OF DOCUMENTS TO MR. DEGTYAR. THEY ARE FROM CERTAIN OF THE MOST SENSITIVE AND HIGHLY COMPARTMENTED PROJECTS OF THE U.S.INTELLIGENCE COMMUNITY. ALL ARE ORIGINALS TO AID IN VERIFYING THEIR AUTHENTICITY. PLEASE RECOGNIZE FOR OUR LONG-TERM INTERESTS THAT THERE ARE A LIMITED NUMBER OF PERSONS WITH THIS ARRAY OF CLEARANCES. AS A COLLECTION THEY POINT TO ME. I TRUST THAT AN OFFICER OF YOUR EXPERIENCE WILL HANDLE THEM APPROPRIATELY. I BELIEVE THEY ARE SUFFICIENT TO JUSTIFY A $100,000 PAYMENT TO ME...
The letter went on to identify three Soviet agents who had been "compromised" by the FBI. Two of these men were eventually executed, as their identification in the furnished documents corroborated their identification by CIA double agent Aldrich Ames, who was arrested in 1994 and subsequently plead guilty to spying for the Komitet Gosudarstvenoy Bezopasnosti, or Committee for State Security (KGB) andSluzhba Vneshney Razvedki Rossii, or Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR).
How could Hanssen have avoided being found out and successfully supplied classified and highly classified information to the KGB and SVR for fifteen years?
Ironically, it is the very training in counterintelligence and the electronic and other methods employed by the United States intelligence community that Hanssen received from the FBI which served to conceal his alleged activities and identity for some many years. Further, because at the time that Hanssen allegedly began working for the Soviets the United States intelligence community was involved in greater coordination of its efforts, Hanssen was in a position not only to be privy to the intimate details of Soviet operations in the United States and abroad, but also the details of the US intelligence community's efforts and techniques to thwart those efforts.
At the time that Hanssen allegedly mailed his first letter to Viktor Degtyar in 1985, he had just been promoted from the position of Supervisory Special Agent in the Intelligence Division at FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C. -- a position he held from January, 1981 until September, 1985. While there, from August, 1983 to September, 1985, Hanssen was assigned to the Soviet Analytical Unit, according to court documents, where he supported investigations involving Soviet intelligence services and analytical support to FBI management and the intelligence community at large.
Let's pause to define terms. By "intelligence community" in this report, we are referring to the broad array of United States intelligence and security organizations which include:
In his positions with the FBI, Hanssen effectively had access to classified and highly classified documents and procedures for all of these entities at the time he was allegedly spying for the Soviets and subsequently the Russians.
During the period in which he is alleged to have supplied thousands of pages of secret documents and over 20 encrypted computer diskettes, Mr. Hanssen held the following positions in the FBI:
In January, 2001, Hanssen, now under suspicion as a double agent, was re-assigned to a newly-created division so that his daily activities could be better monitored. The FBI was closing in on their golden boy.
CONTINUES (Please follow links below.)
© 2001, GENERATOR 21.
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