Kings Of Cold War Treachery: Robert Hanssen and Aldrich Ames
Deception, seduction, betrayal. The tricks of the spy trade are condoned in the service of friends, condemned when in aid to an enemy. The latter we call treason. And throughout history, we have punished it with death.
Robert Hanssen and "Rick" Ames were arguably the worst traitors in the history of the Cold War. You name it, they gave it away. The names of nearly a dozen Soviet double agents? Sold by Ames, the CIA analyst. The existence of a multimillion-dollar eavesdropping tunnel under the Soviet Embassy in Washington, D.C.; the secret spot where America's leaders would hide in a crisis; U.S. estimates of Soviet missile strength? FBI agent (and onetime cop) Hanssen told the Soviets all that and more. Ames earned top dollar for his scoops: $2.7 million and a promise of an additional $1.9 million, the biggest reward for any spy, says David Wise, author of Nightmover, a book about Ames. But Hanssen wasn't exactly underpaid. He raked in $600,000 from the Russians, with a promise of $800,000 more.
But you can't put a dollar value on the damage they did. "Ames gave away the CIA's network inside the Soviet Union," says Wise. "The CIA went blind for a while because all their agents were rolled up." Ten of the "rolled up" agents were recalled to Moscow and executed. Hanssen, however, compromised CIA and FBI intelligence operations to a far greater degree by betraying strategic information, including codes and ciphers. "The material was much more broad-ranging in its importance," says Wise, who has also written a book on Hanssen called Spy. A highly classified, 600-page Justice Department report will assess the damage, as will a formal review by CIA Director George Tenet.
Both agents volunteered to spy for the KGB within six months of each other in 1985. (Hanssen spied for a rival Soviet agency years earlier but switched to the KGB after a hiatus because he thought it paid better.) And that's not the only commonality. Three unlucky Soviet double agents were compromised just months apart, first by Ames, then by Hanssen. Two were executed. Yet the KGB handler for both Hanssen and Ames so expertly compartmentalized the spies that "they never knew of each other," says Timothy Bereznay, deputy assistant director in the FBI's Counterintelligence Division.
Mr. CIA. Nor did the KGB know everything about Hanssen, who never revealed his real name or employer. Bereznay told U.S. News that Hanssen threw off the KGB (and the FBI) by selling information that seemed to come from the CIA and by sharing false personal details. According to Bereznay, in one of 38 post-arrest debriefings, Hanssen said he even used the code name Ramon Garcia because it ended in "C-I-A." Hanssen spied for the Russians for 22 of his 25 years in the FBI's counterintelligence division before Michael Rochford, now chief of the FBI's counterespionage section, made a crucial contact with a former KGB agent and purchased the mole's identity for millions of dollars. The agent handed over Hanssen's original KGB dossier: 15 years of correspondence, the titles of compromised documents, a taped conversation between a KGB officer and the unknown mole. The package also included a black plastic trash bag Hanssen used to wrap secrets for his dead drops, with two of his fingerprints on it.
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