Word: mole
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...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...
...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 on selling similar secrets. "They are from certain of the most sensitive and highly compartmented...
...with Moscow until late 1999, when he just as abruptly resumed as before. In hindsight, FBI officials believe the reason is obvious. In 1992, the FBI and CIA 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...
...Take the other night. A few minutes before George W. Bush's quasi-State of the Union speech (a speech that was given its inflated status by the networks), 51 million viewers were watching "The Mole," "JAG," "Three Sisters" and "Titus" on ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox. The minute the four networks switched over to the interior of the House for Bush's speech, they lost 15 million viewers. And they continued to lose them during the rest of the speech...
...right side of this issue - as long as artists keep depending on Big Business to find them a paying audience, Big Business deserves a cut of the loot - but that doesn't make it any less fun to watch them play corporate Whack-a-Mole with the Internet rebels...