Word: agente
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Hanssen actually seemed to like the slow, intricate building of counterintelligence cases and was well suited to it. If criminal agents called the other realm "Sleepy Hollow," the NSD boys scoffed at their rivals as "knuckle draggers." As an agent who worked with Hanssen in the Soviet unit put it, "The counterintelligence agents read the New York Times, and the criminal agents read the Daily News. Espionage cases are the best cases in the world because they're very cerebral." So was Hanssen. He read voraciously, everything from spy novels to Marxist tomes to the richly detailed logs filed...
...many letters he allegedly sent to Moscow, Hanssen claimed that what he really wanted was to be a double agent, like the British intellectual turned mole Kim Philby. "I'd decided on this course when I was 14. I'd read Philby's book," he wrote (although Philby's autobiography was not published until 1968, when Hanssen was 24) in a rambling discourse last March to the SVR, Russia's foreign-arm successor to the Soviet-era KGB. "My only hesitations were my security concerns under uncertainty. I hate uncertainty...
...eventually joined the FBI. At 32 he was more mature than most brash recruits, often condescending to his colleagues, and he wore his religious faith on his sleeve. "People who are super-religious, and only God meets their standards, usually have no time for mere mortals," says a retired agent who worked in the New York field office's Soviet division, where Hanssen was assigned from 1978 to '81 and again from 1985 to '87. "He thought he was mentally superior to his peers and probably his leadership," says Robert Bryant, former FBI assistant director. That subtle arrogance made...
...counterintelligence agent, Hanssen knew his gravest danger lay in betrayal. So he was obsessive about security from the start and never revealed his identity to his "friends" in Moscow. He noted that his first delivery of documents made him vulnerable because "as a collection they point to me." He said his name and position "must be left unstated to ensure my security." He used various aliases besides "B," including Ramon Garcia and Jim Baker; his handlers could address him only as "Dear Friend." When Moscow suggested more complex and distant drop sites, he refused, saying, "My experience tells...
...turncoat Aldrich Ames in 1994. Though the backroom hunt was a closely held secret, the ever curious Hanssen might have figured it out from stray details. Even after Ames' arrest, the mole ferreting went on, leading to the 1996 arrest of CIA employee Harold Nicholson, then of FBI agent Earl Pitts. That July, Hanssen started running his own name, his address and keywords such as dead drop and Foxstone through the FBI's automated database, which contained information on all investigations. Only when he found nothing indicating that he was under suspicion did he get back in touch with...