Robert Hanssen: Master Spy?

[TB Tabby]

After seeing the trailer for the new movie "Breach" about Robert Hanssen, and it reminded me of a story about the hunt for him in Uncle John's Fast-Acting Long-Lasting Bathroom Reader.

Hanssen was smart enough not to tell the Russians his real name, but he was no master spy--in fact, he could have been caught years earlier if the people around him had been paying attention and doing their jobs. Over the years Hanssen left so many clues to his spying that he practically glowed in the dark.

• He used FBI phone lines and answering machines to communicate with his KGB handlers in the 1980s.
  
• When the KGB paid him cash, Hanssen sometimes counted the money at work, then deposited it in a savings account in his own name, in a bank less than a block from the FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C.
  
• At a time when he made less than $100,000 a year, Hanssen kept a gym bag filled with $100,000 in cash in his bedroom closet. One time he left $5,000sitting on top of his dresser. His brother-in-law, Mark Wauck, also an FBI agent, saw the unexplained cash and reported it to his superiors, also noting that Hanssen had once talked of retiring to Poland, which was then still part of the Soviet bloc. An FBI agent retiring to a Communist country? The FBI never investigated the incident.
  
• The FBI, and even the KGB, had assumed that Hanssen never met with any Russian agents, but they were wrong. Hanssen launched his spying career in 1979 by walking right into the offices of a Soviet trade organization that was known to be a GRU (the military version of the KGB) front and offering his services, even though he knew the office was likely to be under surveillance. When he made his first contact with the KGB in 1985, he did so by sending a letter through the U.S. mail to a known KGB officer who lived in Virginia. Both approaches were incredibly foolhardy, but Hanssen got away with it both times.
  
• In 1993 Hanssen botched an attempt to resume spying for GRU when he walked up to a GRU officer in the parking lot of the man's apartment building and tried to hand him a packet of classified documents. The officer, thinking it was an FBI sting, reported the incident to his superiors at the Russian Embassy, who lodged a formal protest with the U.S. State Department. The FBI launched an investigation--which Hanssen closely followed by hacking into FBI computers--but the investigation was unsuccessful.
  
• In 1992 Hanssen hacked into a computer to gain access to Soviet counterintelligence documents. Then, fearing he might be caught, he reported his own hacking and claimed he was testing the computer's security. His colleagues and superiors believed his story and were grateful to him for pointing out the weakness in the system. The incident was never investigated.
  

But perhaps the most inexplicable breach of security came in 1994, when Hanssen was transferred to an FBI post at the State Department's Office of Foreign Missions. As the Justice Department later described it, Hanssen was "wholly unsupervised" by either the State Department or the FBI for the next six years. In that time he didn't receive a single job performance review. Hanssen spent much of his time out of the office visiting friends and colleagues; when he did go to the office he spent his time surfing the Internet, reading classified documents, and watching movies on his laptop. Then he resumed spying for the Russians.

• In 1997 Hannsen asked for a computer that would connect him to the FBI's Automatic Case Support System (ACS) and got it, even though his job didn't call for it. Soon after he got the computer, Hanssen was caught installing password breaker software that allowed him to hack into password-protected files. When confronted, Hanssen said he was trying to hook up a color printer. His story went unchallenged and the incident was never investigated.
  
• Using the ACS systems, Hanssen downloaded hundreds, if not thousands, of classified documents and gave them to the Russians. At the same time, he repeatedly scanned the FBI's files for his own name, address, and the locations of his various dead drops to check whether the FBI was onto him.
  
• He also stumbled onto the FBI's investigation of Brian Kelley. Assuming that Kelley, too, was a mole, he warned the Russians about the investigation. Then he did what he could to keep the FBI focused on Kelley, so that he could continue his own spying.

I don't think the movie's accurate (These "inspired by a true story" movies seldom are), but the Bathroom Readers aren't always correct either. Was Hanssen's spying really THAT obvious, and the FBI THAT clueless?!

[Southernap]

From what I have read about the Hanssen case was that Hanseen started his career about the same time as Aldrich Ames was going strong with his and just before the John Walker ring was busted. So there were a few times that Hanssen sold secrets to Soviets and the leak was attributed to either Walker or to Ames. So the FBI just closed the issue and didn't look further.

The statements about Hanssen being a bumbling idiot isn't completely true either. He was pretty smart about keeping his identity a secret from his KGB handlers and from family. It wasn't until his wife busted him writing a letter to set up the next dead drop that she learned he was a spy. According to the book, "Master Spy: the Life of Robert P. Hanssen" by Norman Mailer, Hanssen did things such as create a code with in a code for setting up his dead drops, pick his own dead drops instead of using known KGB ones, he would not take more then 100K in either cash or gems. He would then turn the cash in here and there to the banks in nothing more then a 5 or 10K amounts so as not to raise eyebrows. He would sell the gems and then wait a couple of months before taking the profits to a bank.

So it was just a situation of the coincidences that could be explained away easily with some of the other spying going on at the time.

[Meka]

Apparently, Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen were both run by the same KGB officer. So depending on where, how, and/or from whom the FBI or CIA learned of a given leak, the distinction between these two could have been even more blurred.

[Meka]

Originally Posted by Southernap

From what I have read about the Hanssen case was that Hanseen started his career about the same time as Aldrich Ames was going strong with his and just before the John Walker ring was busted. So there were a few times that Hanssen sold secrets to Soviets and the leak was attributed to either Walker or to Ames. So the FBI just closed the issue and didn't look further.

The statements about Hanssen being a bumbling idiot isn't completely true either. He was pretty smart about keeping his identity a secret from his KGB handlers and from family. It wasn't until his wife busted him writing a letter to set up the next dead drop that she learned he was a spy. According to the book, "Master Spy: the Life of Robert P. Hanssen" by Norman Mailer, Hanssen did things such as create a code with in a code for setting up his dead drops, pick his own dead drops instead of using known KGB ones, he would not take more then 100K in either cash or gems. He would then turn the cash in here and there to the banks in nothing more then a 5 or 10K amounts so as not to raise eyebrows. He would sell the gems and then wait a couple of months before taking the profits to a bank.

So it was just a situation of the coincidences that could be explained away easily with some of the other spying going on at the time.

Further complicating matters, Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen actually had the same KGB officer as a "handler." So depending on how the FBI/CIA found out about the leaks, it would have been even easier to confuse one for the other.

Sidenote: I don't know much about the case; I'll probably go see the movie just because Hanssen was an graduate of my very small midwestern college... (He's one of those alums the administration doesn't like to mention in the brochures ). Lord, you'd think they'd be more excited that there's a film about an alumnus!