A Look Back At FBI Agent And Russian Spy Robert Hanssen

The International Spy Museum in Washington D.C. offers a look back at former FBI agent and Russian spy Robert Hanssen

Was the son of a Chicago police officer and a housewife. Howard Hanssen was part of a special division called the Red Unit, created to ferret out communist sympathizers during the Red Scare.

Attended Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois, majoring in chemistry while also taking Russian as a foreign language. After being rejected for a position as a cryptographer with the NSA, enrolled in the Dental School of Northwestern University in 1966. At Northwestern, Hanssen became known for his penchant for wearing Black suits to class every day. In 1968, halfway through the Dental program, Hanssen grew tired of it and decided he would rather become a psychiatrist. After growing tired of this pursuit he returned to Northwestern and earned an MBA in accounting and information systems.

  

 Met Bonnie Wauck, a student nurse at a state mental facility in Chicago in 1965. The two married on August 10, 1968. Wauck was the daughter of a University professor and a practicing Catholic, and member of the Opus Dei organization. Four years later Robert enrolled in the Chicago Police Department and was soon assigned to a special training class for a new division of the department that focused on police corruption.

Was distrusted by many within the division, including his boss, John Clarke. Was considered a devoted family man in his community, spending time with his children, teaching them to excel at academics. He also became an enthusiastic member of Opus Dei, which was deemed a cult by many. The organization instructed its members to attend Catholic church services every day and confession once each week. Applied twice to the FBI and was accepted the second time in January 1976. Was assigned to the Bureau’s Gary, Indiana office but was transferred two years later to New York City. Living with his wife and four children in Scarsdale, New York, Hanssen was having a tough time making ends meet and decided to exploit his position with the FBI.

 Disenchanted by the lackadaisical attitude of fellow FBI agents, Hanssen approached Russian agents and offered to sell secret documents. He was rewarded famously for his efforts but was caught by his wife while counting $20,000 and writing a letter to the Soviets in his basement. Thinking he was writing a love letter to a girlfriend, she demanded to know what was going on. He admitted to her where he had gotten the money but claimed that he had only given the Soviets useless information. Instead, he had actually provided the Soviets with very valuable information , including the identity of Dmitri Polyakov, a top-level Soviet double-agent. Rather than turn him into the authorities, she convinced him to confess his actions to an Opus Dei priest. The priest instructed him to give up his activities and to donate the money he received to Mother Theresa’s charities.

Was considered a highly intelligent agent, but his tepid interpersonal skill as well as his continued preference for black suits caused many to tag him with the nickname “the Mortician.” Unfortunately, the perception that he was an aloof, introverted worker hindered his upward mobility within the Bureau. Was transferred to the FBI headquarters in Washington, DC where he was initially assigned to develop a budget for the Bureau that was to be presented to Congress. Was moved to the Soviet Analytical Unit in 1983 and given a high security clearance. After a four year stint, was transferred back to New York.

Decided to re-establish his link to the Soviets. Knew that the FBI was not conducting surveillance on Victor Degtyar, a KGB Colonel living in Alexandria, Virginia. Hanssen therefore sent a letter to Degtyar, with instructions to pass another letter on to Victor Cherkashin, the head of Soviet espionage efforts in Washington. In this letter, Hanssen offered to turn over classified and highly sensitive information to the Soviets in return for $100,000. He also provided the name of three Russian agents who were working for the United States. Two of the agents were executed and one was imprisoned.

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://spymuseum.com/robert-hanssen/ 

Note: To Learn more about the Robert Hanssen case I suggest you read David Wise's outstanding book Spy: The Inside Story of How the FBI's Robert Hanssen Betrayed America.   

A Private Tour Of The CIA's Incredible Museum

David Wise, a veteran journalist and author of numerous books on espionage, offers an interesting piece on the CIA's spy museum for Smithsonian magazine.

A chill wind whipped off the Warnow as a retired railroad worker shuffled through the streets of the port city of Rostock one winter night in 1956. He wore the drab clothes typical of East German residents. But when a second man appeared from the shadows, the elderly German revealed that he was wearing a pair of distinctive gold cuff links embossed with the helmet of the Greek goddess Athena and a small sword.

The second man wore an identical pair. Wordlessly, he handed the German a package of documents and retreated back into the shadows. The German caught a train for East Berlin, where he handed the package and the cuff links to a CIA courier. The courier smuggled them to the agency’s base in West Berlin—to George Kisevalter, who was on his way to becoming a legendary CIA case officer.

The man who retreated back into the shadows was Lt. Col. Pyotr Semyonovich Popov, an officer of the GRU, the Soviet military intelligence agency. Three years earlier, Popov had dropped a note into an American diplomat’s car in Vienna saying, “I am a Soviet officer. I wish to meet with an American officer with the object of offering certain services.” He was the CIA’s first Soviet mole, and Kisevalter was his handler. Popov became one of the CIA’s most important sources through the 1950s, turning over a trove of Soviet military secrets that included biographical details on 258 of his fellow GRU officers.

It was Kisevalter who had decided on the cuff links as a recognition signal. He gave them to Popov before Moscow recalled the GRU officer in 1955, along with instructions: If Popov ever made it out of the USSR again and renewed contact with the CIA, whoever the agency sent to meet him would wear a matching set to establish his bona fides.

Popov renewed contact after he was assigned to Schwerin, East Germany, and the cuff links worked as intended. He fed Kisevalter information through the retired railroad worker for another two years. But after Popov was recalled to Moscow in 1958, he was arrested by the KGB. There are various theories on why he fell under suspicion. However, in a series of interviews two decades ago, Kisevalter told me it was the result of a botched signal: He said George Payne Winters Jr., a State Department officer working for the CIA in Moscow, “got the instruction backward” and mistakenly mailed a letter addressed to Popov at his home. The KGB spotted him in the act and fished the letter out of the mailbox. Popov was doomed.

The Soviets expelled Winters from Moscow in 1960, the same year they executed Popov—by firing squad, Kisevalter believed. He told biographer Clarence Ashley he doubted a rumor that Popov had been thrown alive into a furnace as a lesson to other GRU officers, who were required to watch.

Today, the cuff links rest in one of the most compelling and least visited museums in the United States. The museum has an extraordinary collection of spy gadgets, weapons and espionage memorabilia from before World War II to the present—more than 28,000 items, of which 18,000 have been cataloged—and hundreds are on display.

But the museum is run by the CIA and housed at its headquarters in Langley, Virginia, eight miles outside Washington, D.C. The agency’s entire campus is off-limits to the public, and the museum is open only to CIA employees, their families and visitors on agency business.

By special arrangement, Smithsonian magazine was allowed to tour the museum, take notes and photograph select exhibits. Our guide through the looking glass was Toni Hiley, the museum’s director. “Every day, CIA officers help to shape the course of world events,” Hiley said. “The CIA has a rich history, and our museum is where we touch that history.”

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/private-tour-cias-incredible-museum-180952738/?no-ist

You can also read my Counterterrorism magazine interview with David Wise via the below link:

http://www.pauldavisoncrime.com/2011/08/q-with-david-wise-author-of-tiger-trap.html

Tinker, Tailor, Chinese Spy: China's Spies Are Catching Up

David Wise, the author of Tiger Trap: America's Secret Spy War With China, writes about the threat from Chinese espionage in the New York Times.

During the cold war, dozens of counterintelligence agents in the F.B.I. and the C.I.A. pursued Soviet and then Russian spies. The K.G.B. was seen as the enemy; China took a back seat. Only a handful of F.B.I. agents specialized in Chinese spy cases, and their work was not regarded as career-enhancing. Washington’s ongoing failure to make Chinese espionage a priority has allowed China to score a number of successes in its espionage efforts against the United States.

China’s foreign intelligence service and its military intelligence agency actively spy on the American defense industry, our nuclear weapons labs, Silicon Valley, our intelligence agencies and other sensitive targets.

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/11/opinion/sunday/chinas-spies-are-catching-up.html?_r=2&scp=2&sq=David%20Wise&st=cse

I interviewed David Wise about Chinese espionage and his book Tiger Trap for Counterterrorism magazine.

You can read the interview via the below link:

http://pauldavisoncrime.blogspot.com/2011/08/q-with-david-wise-author-of-tiger-trap.html

Brush Up On Your Mandarin, Mr. Bond

Christopher Carothers at the Wall Street Journal takes a look at David Wise's book on Chinese espionage, Tiger Trap: America's Secret Spy War With America.

The book's central case study is FBI informant Katrina Leung, a double agent who was in bed with the MSS (figuratively) and with two FBI agents (literally). Mrs. Leung confessed to stealing classified documents out of an FBI agent's briefcase on numerous occasions, but which documents and how many remains a mystery. The extent of the damage done is likewise unknown, not least because her arrest cast doubt on her FBI reports, some of which were passed on to the White House.

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111904194604576580150848391410.html

David Wise is one of America's foremost experts on espionage and intelligence.

I recently interviewed David Wise about Chinese espionage and his book for Counterterrorism magazine.

You can read the interview via the below links:

http://home.comcast.net/~pauldavisoncrime/pwpimages/DavidWiseQAndAOnTigerTrapChineseEspionage.jpg

http://home.comcast.net/~pauldavisoncrime/pwpimages/DavidWiseQAndAOnTigerTrapChineseEspionage2.jpg

http://home.comcast.net/~pauldavisoncrime/pwpimages/DavidWiseQAndAOnTigerTrapChineseEspionage3.jpg

Communist Chinese General Spills Secrets On YouTube

David Wise, the author of Tiger Trap: America's Secret Spy War With China, wrote in the Los Angeles Times about the Chinese general who spilled communist state secrets when his briefing was posted on YouTube.com.

Maj. Gen. Jin Yinan of the People's Liberation Army, in what he apparently thought was an internal briefing, revealed half a dozen cases of Chinese officials who had spied for Britain, the United States and other countries. Somehow, the video of his sensational disclosures leaked out. Clips of his hours-long talk appeared on at least two Chinese websites, Youku.com and Tudou.com, but were quickly removed by government censors.

It was too late. The extraordinary video is on YouTube and can be viewed the world over, although not in China, where YouTube is blocked.

You can read the rest of David Wise' piece via the below link:

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-wise-chinaspy-20110906,0,4630211.story

I recently interviewed David Wise for Counterterrorism magazine. You can read the interview via the below links:

http://home.comcast.net/~pauldavisoncrime/pwpimages/DavidWiseQAndAOnTigerTrapChineseEspionage.jpg

http://home.comcast.net/~pauldavisoncrime/pwpimages/DavidWiseQAndAOnTigerTrapChineseEspionage2.jpg

http://home.comcast.net/~pauldavisoncrime/pwpimages/DavidWiseQAndAOnTigerTrapChineseEspionage3.jpg

My Q & A With David Wise, Author of Tiger Trap: America's Secret Spy War With China

My Q&A with David Wise, the country's leading expert on intelligence and espionage, and the author of Tiger Trap: America's Secret Spy War With China, was published in Counterterrorism magazine.

You can read the interview below:

Tiger Trap: America's Secret Spy War With China

Joseph C. Goulden, the author of several fine nonfiction books, including The Death Merchant, wrote an interesting review of David Wise's Tiger Trap: America's Spy War With China in the Washington Times.

David Wise, who has been writing about intelligence since the early 1960s and is, in my view, the best in the business, now turns his considerable talent to a little-noted facet of the espionage wars: the ongoing campaign by the People's Republic of China to steal U.S. nuclear-weaponry secrets. For years, of course, Soviet spying spawned movies, best-selling books and incessant publicity elsewhere. But since the collapse of the Soviet Union, China has become “America’s chief rival” in the intelligence wars and has scored many signal and unheralded successes.

You can read the rest of the review of this important book via the below link:

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2011/jun/7/our-chief-rival-in-intelligence-wars/

You can also read a magazine piece I wrote on Communist Chinese espionage for Counterterrorism magazine via the below links:

http://home.comcast.net/~pauldavisoncrime/pwpimages/RedFlowerChineseEspionage.jpg

http://home.comcast.net/~pauldavisoncrime/pwpimages/RedFlowerChineseEspionage2.jpg

http://home.comcast.net/~pauldavisoncrime/pwpimages/RedFlowerChineseEspionage3.jpg

http://home.comcast.net/~pauldavisoncrime/pwpimages/RedFlowerChineseEspionage4.jpg

Wild Bill Donovan: The Spymaster Who Created The OSS And Modern American Espionage

I'm reading Douglas Waller's Wild Bill Donovan: The Spymaster Who Created The OSS and Modern American Espionage.

Simon and Schuster, the publisher of Wild Bill Donovan, wrote the below description of the book:

He was one of America's most exciting and secretive generals—the man Franklin Roosevelt made his top spy in World War II. A mythic figure whose legacy is still intensely debated, "Wild Bill" Donovan was director of the Office of Strategic Services (the country's first national intelligence agency) and the father of today's CIA. Donovan introduced the nation to the dark arts of covert warfare on a scale it had never seen before. Now, veteran journalist Douglas Waller has mined government and private archives throughout the United States and England, drawn on thousands of pages of recently declassified documents, and interviewed scores of Donovan's relatives, friends, and associates to produce a riveting biography of one of the most powerful men in modern espionage.

William Joseph Donovan's life was packed with personal drama. The son of poor Irish Catholic parents, he married into Protestant wealth and fought heroically in World War I, where he earned the nickname "Wild Bill" for his intense leadership and the Medal of Honor for his heroism. After the war he made millions as a Republican lawyer on Wall Street until FDR, a Democrat, tapped him to be his strategic intelligence chief. A charismatic leader, Donovan was revered by his secret agents. Yet at times he was reckless—risking his life unnecessarily in war zones, engaging in extramarital affairs that became fodder for his political enemies—and he endured heartbreaking tragedy when family members died at young ages.

Wild Bill Donovan reads like an action-packed spy thriller, with stories of daring young men and women in his OSS sneaking behind enemy lines for sabotage, breaking into Washington embassies to steal secrets, plotting to topple Adolf Hitler, and suffering brutal torture or death when they were captured by the Gestapo. It is also a tale of political intrigue, of infighting at the highest levels of government, of powerful men pitted against one another. Donovan fought enemies at home as often as the Axis abroad. Generals in the Pentagon plotted against him.

J. Edgar Hoover had FBI agents dig up dirt on him. Donovan stole secrets from the Soviets before the dawn of the Cold War and had intense battles with Winston Churchill and British spy chiefs over foreign turf. Separating fact from fiction, Waller investigates the successes and the occasional spectacular failures of Donovan's intelligence career.

It makes for a gripping and revealing portrait of this most controversial spymaster.

David Wise, a noted author and expert on espionage, reviewed Wild Bill Donovan for the Washington Post. You can read his review via the below link:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/02/25/AR2011022503043.html