in order to dispel the myths that have arisen from this clever public-relations campaign aimed at transforming Pollard from greedy, arrogant betrayer of the American national trust into Pollard, committed Israeli patriot.
Pollard pleaded guilty and therefore never was publicly tried. Thus, the American people never came to know that he offered classified information to three other countries before working for the Israelis and he offered his services to a fourth country while he was spying for Israel. They also never came to understand that he was being very highly paid for his services — including an impressive nest egg currently in foreign banks — and was negotiating with his Israeli handlers for a raise as he was caught. So much for Jonathan Pollard, ideologue!
Pollard initially applied to work for the CIA in 1977, but was turned down because of drug use at university. Two years later he began working for the US Navy Investigative Service and despite lying repeatedly about his background and his abilities, he was given a high security clearance. This was downgraded after concerns were expressed about his behaviour, but he threatened legal action to have it restored. The Commander of Naval Intelligence himself, Admiral Sumner Shapiro, wanted Pollard fired or at the very least have his security clearances revoked, but Pollard was able to persuade a psychiatrist that he was OK. He was returned to the high classification in 1982.
According to NCIS investigator Ronald Olive, Pollard tried to sell secrets around this time to Pakistan and South Africa; during Pollard’s trial, an Australian Royal Navy officer, who had been part of a personnel exchange, alleged that the American had tried to pass him confidential documents, although Pollard denied this. What is certain is that in 1984 he became friendly with Israeli Air Force colonel Aviem Sella, and began passing information on to him (in exchange for cash and jewellery), including satellite imagery and details on new weapons systems in Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia. Photos of Palestine Liberation Organisation residences were also passed across, which were very helpful to the Israelis during their September 1985 attack on the terrorist organization. A forty-six-page document was prepared for Pollard’s trial by Caspar Weinberger, the US Secretary of State for Defence, detailing what Pollard had given to the Israelis, including analysis of twenty key documents, one of which was a complete guide to American SIGINT.
Pollard’s espionage activities came to light when coworkers noticed that he was leaving the office with packages of materials, and his supervisor found files on his desk that didn’t correlate with the work he was meant to be doing. During the questioning that followed, Pollard was able to get a message to his wife Anne that told her to remove any classified documents from the house before it was searched. She gave these to a next-door neighbour, who, unfortunately for the Pollards, grew suspicious and contacted Navy Intelligence. Pollard was followed to the Israeli embassy, where he tried to gain asylum but was turned away; the FBI arrested him. Anne Pollard managed to alert Colonel Sella, who left the US with his team of agents before the FBI could capture them. Anne Pollard was arrested; Pollard agreed to cooperate in a plea bargain for a lesser sentence for his wife. She served three years of a five-year term; he remains incarcerated.
Although the Israelis originally claimed he was part of a rogue operation, they have subsequently admitted he was working for them, and urged his release. However, the American government remains committed to his imprisonment: as naval intelligence legal adviser Spike Bowman wrote in
The other big surprise for the American public in The Year of the Spy was the arrest in November of Larry Wu-Tai Chin, a translator for the CIA, who had been spying for the People’s Republic of China (PRC). The PRC’s activities in the US are less well-known than those of their Soviet counterparts, but they were also interested in military and technological advances.
Chin was one of two spies within Western intelligence who were exposed by one of the few agents that the CIA managed to gain within the PRC. Yu Zhensan was the adopted son of Kang Sheng, the Soviet-trained head of the PRC Ministry of State Security Foreign Bureau (MSS), and began providing information to the Agency in 1984. He revealed the existence of a PRC spy within the CIA but the only clue he had was that on one occasion, the agent, of Asian origin, had been delayed prior to a flight to Hong Kong to meet a handler. This was enough for the FBI, who were able to trace the specific flight and identify Chin from the passenger list.
From 1952 to 1981 Chin was an employee of the CIA, working in the Foreign Broadcast Information Service; he had spent the previous decade with the US Army liaison office in China, where he had come to the attention of the MSS. In 1952, he received his first payment from the MSS for information concerning the location of Chinese POWs in Korea and the type of intelligence information that American and Korean intelligence services were seeking from the POWs. Between then and his retirement in 1981, Chin was able to pass over thousands of secret documents to the MSS from his posts in Okinawa (Japan) and California, and at the CIA Langley headquarters. Between 1976 and 1982, he was providing photographs to MSS couriers in Toronto, Hong Kong and London and continued travelling to the Far East to meet handlers up until March 1985.
No hint of suspicion attached itself to him — he was even awarded a long and distinguished service medal in 1980 — because he was very careful over the money he was given by the PRC, purporting to be a gambler for high stakes and investing in property in Baltimore to explain his income. He is believed to have been paid over a million dollars during his career. Chin was found guilty in February 1986 of spying for China and tax evasion, but before sentencing he committed suicide in his cell.
While Aldrich Ames was a useful asset for the Soviets within the CIA, the other recruit who joined the KGB during the tail end of 1985 would prove to be one of their best agents, giving them access to the FBI’s counter- intelligence efforts periodically between then and his capture in 2001. Robert Philip Hanssen was described by David Major, the former director of counter-intelligence at the US National Security Council and Hanssen’s direct superior from 1987 onwards, as ‘diabolically brilliant… He knew everything we knew about what the Soviets did — and we knew a lot about how they operated. He also knew what we did. So he could operate within the cracks.’
Hanssen joined the FBI in 1976, and three years later was assigned to the New York field office helping to create an automatic database to track Soviet intelligence officers — and promptly became one himself, volunteering his services to the GRU via their front organization, AMTORG. In return for cash, he provided the Soviets with information regarding Dmitiri Polyakov’s espionage activities for the CIA (which the GRU chose to ignore), as well as a list of Soviets that the FBI suspected were spies in the US.
His work for the GRU came to an end in 1981 after he was caught by his wife writing to the Soviets; he confessed to his priest, and passed the monies the GRU had given him to charity. Hanssen was transferred to Washington that year, where he headed up a unit analysing the FBI’s data on Soviet activities, and coordinating projects against them.
Hanssen returned to New York in 1985 as supervisor in counter-intelligence, operating against the Soviet mission at the UN, as well as the consulate. Ten days after his arrival in the Big Apple, he wrote to Victor Degtyar, a middle-level intelligence officer at the Washington residency. He enclosed a letter for KGB resident Victor Cherkashin, in which he asked for $100,000 for a box of documents of classified and top-secret material that would shortly be delivered to Degtyar’s private address, and revealing the names of three spies (all of whom, although he was unaware of it at the time, had already been betrayed by Aldrich Ames). When Cherkashin received the promised documents, they showed how valuable this anonymous spy would be.
Because he knew so much about both American and Soviet tradecraft, Robert Hanssen wasn’t prepared to fall in line with the usual KGB methodology regarding dead drops and rendezvous. He dictated how they would be handled, operating, as David Major noted, ‘within the cracks’. He made the KGB come to dead drops near his own home so that their actions were minimised — as Cherkashin admiringly notes in his autobiography, ‘All we had to do was drop our package and make a signal.’ He also refused to reveal his identity — the first time Cherkashin knew Hanssen’s name was when he was arrested in 2001.
Money didn’t seem to be his underlying motive (although he would tell his interrogators something different after his capture); Cherkashin considered that Hanssen liked showing off his expertise, and ‘was either unhappy with his job or simply bored’. He certainly didn’t see this — at that stage at least — as a long-term arrangement: ‘Eventually, I would appreciate an escape plan. (Nothing lasts forever.)’, Hanssen wrote shortly after making contact. Hanssen deliberately avoided communication with Cherkashin through the spring and early summer of
