The Spy Next Door by Elaine Shannon & Ann Blackman

Author:Elaine Shannon & Ann Blackman [SHANNON, ELAINE]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: CUR000000
ISBN: 9780316055598
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2008-12-14T05:00:00+00:00

Hanssen's February 8 report was the first of many messages he would send the KGB about Sheymov's work at the NSA. It was not until Hanssen's arrest that Sheymov realized the crushing truth. Hanssen had been cynically cultivating him and his wife, socially as well as professionally, while quietly reporting their activities back to the KGB. Hanssen was selling out Sheymov to the very agency he and his wife had risked their lives, and their daughter's life, to destroy.

Not surprisingly, the KGB was grateful. The Soviet spy-catchers filled the drop with another token of appreciation: $25,000, and a letter of thanks from Kryuchkov that included a request for more detail about the FBI's agent network in New York City.

On March 16,1988, Hanssen's second computer diskette arrived at a KGB “accommodation address,” the home of a minor Soviet diplomat who was serving as a go-between for Hanssen's mail. The return address was again “Jim Baker, Chicago.” Another diskette came by mail ten days later.

On March 28, the KGB deposited $25,000 in the dead drop, along with a request for strategic information on codes, U.S. submarine movements, and the Strategic Defense Initiative, the hugely expensive, and mostly theoretical, plan for a missile shield. The note added that the diskettes left earlier were blank. Still using the “Jim Baker” alias, Hanssen fired back an impatient note bristling with computer-geek exasperation. “Use 40 TRACK MODE.” Translated into laymen's terms, this meant that the data had been hidden on certain tracks that could be found only with software employing the same codes. Someone who found the disk and tried to read it the normal way would think it was blank.

A few days later, Hanssen sent a diskette with extensive information about a KGB officer who was being studied by the FBI, two more Russians recruited by the FBI, and more on Sheymov. For the Soviets, Bob was the sort of spy they had dreamed about. The goods just kept coming, and coming, and coming.

Hanssen, meanwhile, was using his computer skills to ingratiate himself with “seventh floor,” bureau-speak for the suites occupied by the director and his senior aides. Hanssen often volunteered to do the sort of computer work that other agents disliked. In early 1988, the seventh floor was in a swivet over the CISPES affair. This was an overly long, overly zealous Intelligence Division probe of the leftist Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador, which an FBI informant had wrongly claimed was plotting terrorist acts. The division had run an undercover informant into CISPES and kept the case open long after it was clear the group was not involved in criminal activity. This had violated the Justice Department's post-Church Committee guidelines prohibiting FBI monitoring of peaceful dissident groups. Director William Sessions, the former federal judge from Texas who had succeeded Webster, and Executive Assistant Director Oliver B. “Buck” Revell had to brief Congress about what the FBI had done, and when, in the CISPES case. This was not as easy as

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