Word: hanssen
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...Justice Department charges, Hanssen sent a fateful letter, addressed to a KGB officer in Washington. Inside was a second missive marked "Do not open. Take this envelope unopened to Viktor I. Cherkashin." Hanssen knew well who Cherkashin was: Moscow's chief counterspy at the Soviet embassy, a KGB colonel adept at handling double agents. (Cherkashin was already masterminding the activities of CIA mole Aldrich Ames, who was not uncovered until 1994.) Inside that second envelope was an anonymous offer to send a trove of classified papers to the KGB in exchange for $100,000, and a proposal to keep...
...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...
...assembled a "backroom" team to figure out why a series of operations had been blown. They suspected a high-level mole. Eventually their stealthy investigations led them to CIA 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...
...autumn of 2000, Hanssen needed more than luck. The back room was still digging, since none of the previous arrests explained all the blown operations of the '80s and '90s. Not too long after "B" resumed contact with the Russians, the analysts concluded that the failures were caused by leaks from FBI files. They were sure the FBI harbored another mole...
After an analysis of the NSD employees with access to data on compromised missions, Hanssen's name popped up on a short list of suspects. Yet he might never have been uncovered without betrayal from the other side--the one thing even the cleverest double agent cannot control...