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

asking for $50,000. A month later, he returned to the embassy and met with a senior KGB officer who was almost certainly Viktor I. Cherkashin, the embassy’s chief of counterintelligence. Two days after that, he was handed $50,000. Then, on June 13, at Chadwicks restaurant in Georgetown, Ames handed over the names of virtually every CIA intelligence source in the Soviet Union, sending ten to their execution and many others to prison. For this he was eventually paid $2.7 million by the KGB and promised another $1.9 million, for a total of $4.6 million.
    Among the names provided to the Russians by Ames were Valery Martynov and Sergei Motorin, the two secret FBI sources inside the Soviet embassy in Washington. But Ames also turned over the name of General Dimitri Fedorovich Polyakov of the GRU.
    TOPHAT ’s son, a Soviet diplomat who had also been sent to New Delhi, was recalled from there in 1986 after only a year. At the CIA’s headquarters in Langley, Virginia, when the directorate of operations (or DO) learned that the son had been recalled short of tour, it realized for the first time that TOPHAT might be in trouble. But it did not knowwhy. That same year, as the CIA later learned, TOPHAT was arrested, although the Soviets did not reveal that fact until 1990. Later, Moscow said that Polyakov had been executed on March 15, 1988. *
    The CIA could not imagine what had gone wrong. Then, with the arrest and debriefing of Aldrich Ames in 1994, Langley thought the mystery was solved. In 2001, the realization that Hanssen had betrayed TOPHAT in 1979, six years
before
Ames had done so, stunned the CIA and the FBI. And it created a new puzzle.
    Counterintelligence has been aptly called a “wilderness of mirrors,” and the news that Hanssen had given away Polyakov long before Ames raised intriguing questions. Why had the Soviets not moved immediately against Polyakov in 1979? A number of answers were possible. The KGB and the GRU were bitter competitors who barely spoke to each other (somewhat like the CIA and the FBI until coordination between the two agencies improved somewhat in the post-Ames era). The KGB looked down on the GRU as “the boots,” or
sapogi
, a term of derision used by KGB officers among themselves when talking about their military rivals; the expression implied that the boot-wearing military men lacked subtlety and were their intellectual inferiors.
    Against this background, the GRU may have wished to conceal from the KGB the embarrassing fact that one of its generals had been fingered as a CIA spy. And the GRU also may have wanted to conceal from the KGB the fact that it was running a mole inside the FBI.
    Even if the GRU did share the information about Polyakov with the KGB, it is possible that the Russians did not act right away because they preferred to place the GRU general under surveillance to see where the trail might lead. Or Moscow may have wanted further confirmation, which it eventually got from Aldrich Ames. There is, of course, a more ominous possibility, that the Soviets might have used TOPHAT to feed disinformation back to the West, either having turned him or utilizing him for that purpose without his knowledge.
    * * *
    None of this was known to the CIA, the FBI, or to Bonnie Hanssen when she happened upon her husband in the basement of their home inScarsdale writing a letter. Startled, he hastily tried to conceal the letter from her.
    Bonnie Hanssen’s first thought was that her husband was having an affair. He had stopped going to communion around that time, and she had noticed it; perhaps he was seeing another woman. She confronted him with her suspicion. It was nothing like that, Hanssen assured her. Then what was it?
    Finally, Hanssen admitted to his wife that he was selling secrets to the Soviets. * He insisted, falsely, that he had not given them anything of significance; he was running a scam. But he also admitted that the Russians had paid him $30,000.
    Dismayed at the news, Bonnie