Word: sovietize
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...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...
...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 him few friends there, and he was nicknamed Dr. Death...
...became a clever inside man, adept at the computers the FBI was introducing to keep track of its counterintelligence activities. He helped set up the Intelligence Investigative System into which agents dumped names, addresses, likes, dislikes and other telling minutiae about Soviet targets, giving him access to the true names of every FBI intelligence source in New York. He also worked with the electronics specialists who roamed the night streets installing bugs and cameras to watch over Soviet officials. And he was very inquisitive about everything going on around him. "I just figured he was nosy," says the former colleague...
...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...
...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 me we can actually be more secure in easier modes." He refused requests to meet Soviet agents face to face or travel abroad: these could look suspicious. "I am much safer if you know little about me," he wrote in 1988. "Neither of us are children about these things. Over time, I can cut your losses rather than become...