Spy: The Inside Story of How the FBI's Robert Hanssen Betrayed America Read Online Free PDF Page A

the GRU before the Russian might learn
his
identity and reveal it to the FBI. He had to be well aware that his information would probably result in TOPHAT’S execution—that was the whole point. As the Webster panel put it, “Hanssen disclosed Top Hat’s identity because he feared that the Soviet officer might be a threat to him.” †
    Hanssen passed three batches of secrets to the GRU. In his first approach, he disclosed that the FBI was bugging a Soviet residential complex. He also turned over a list of suspected Soviet intelligence officers. In a letter to the GRU complaining that his first payment was too low, he even revealed he was an FBI agent. He communicated with the GRU through encoded radio transmissions and through one-time pads, an unbreakablecipher system favored by the Russians. But of the various secrets Hanssen passed to the GRU, none compared to his betrayal of TOPHAT .
    John F. Mabey, an FBI counterintelligence agent in New York, had recruited Polyakov in January 1962 at a clandestine meeting at midnight at Grant’s Tomb. A few months before, Polyakov had let it be known he wanted to talk, but then said he had changed his mind. The FBI agent, an astute, wiry man who had joined the bureau right out of Notre Dame, kept after Polyakov. Finally, the Russian agreed to meet at Grant’s Tomb. In that cinematic setting, at the dark, deserted resting place of the eighteenth president of the United States, John Mabey, then thirty-eight, had landed one of the biggest recruitments of the Cold War.
    It was Mabey who chose the name TOPHAT . * Polyakov said he was willing to spy for America because he felt his talents had gone unrecognized by the GRU. He provided Mabey with the names of four Americans who were spying for the Soviet Union. †
    When TOPHAT was posted overseas, the CIA took over handling him. TOPHAT , previously known as BOURBON by the CIA, was given a new code name by the intelligence agency: GTBEEP .
    In 1973, Polyakov turned up in India as a Soviet military attaché. Polyakov would go fishing on the banks of the Yamuna River in New Delhi. He would seem to pay little attention to a heavyset, dark-haired man with a fishing pole who joined him on the riverbank. But the big man was Waldimir “Scotty” Skotzko, a veteran case officer whom the CIA had dispatched to India to handle the agency’s most important asset.
    In 1977, as they fished on the riverbank, TOPHAT reported that he had been ordered back to Moscow, news that alarmed Skotzko. What will happen to you if your work for us is discovered? he asked, knowing the answer.
    “Bratskaya mogila,”
was Polyakov’s grim reply. An unmarked grave.
    In Moscow, Polyakov used a high speed “burst” transmitter given to him by the CIA to radio messages from a streetcar traveling past the American embassy. He was also given a clock for his apartment in Moscow that lit up in response to a radio signal to inform him that a dead drop where he had left documents had been cleared by the CIA.
    In 1979, TOPHAT was posted back to New Delhi again, promoted by this time to the rank of lieutenant general. Over the years, Polyakov provided extremely valuable political-military information to the CIA, including data on Soviet strategic missiles, nuclear strategy, and chemical and biological weapons. In all, the material Polyakov stole for the CIA filled more than twenty-seven file drawers at Langley.
    In 1980, General Polyakov returned to Moscow for the last time. Retired and surrounded by his family in Moscow, TOPHAT appeared to have escaped the fate that he predicted would await him if his spying was discovered. He was unaware that in New York, Robert Hanssen had already betrayed him to the GRU. But the Russians, for reasons still uncertain, took no action against him at that time.
    Five years later, on April 16, 1985, Aldrich H. Ames, a CIA clandestine officer, walked into the Soviet embassy in Washington and left a letter with the KGB, offering information and