entrapment, and nothing further happened. Hanssen kept an eye on the FBI computers for any hint he was under suspicion, occasionally causing questions to be asked about his behaviour when he claimed to be testing the system security or was found with a password hacker on his hard drive. Surprisingly, no one thought more of it, even when Earl Pitts mentioned Hanssen’s name during his interrogation. FBI Special Agent Thomas K. Kimmel Jr. was convinced that there was a second mole within the Bureau, but couldn’t find enough evidence to prove his theory.
Believing that he was in the clear, Hanssen contacted the Russians again in October 1999. The SVR couldn’t believe their luck: ‘We express our sincere joy on the occasion of resumption of contact with you,’ they wrote back. Delays in communication started to worry Hanssen: ‘I have come about as close as I ever want to come to sacrificing myself to help you, and I get silence,’ he wrote in March 2000. They replied in July asking him for ‘information on the work of a special group which serches [
Hanssen’s luck continued to hold. The molehunt focused its attention on CIA agent Brian Kelley, since he matched the profile they had prepared. Kelley was completely innocent, but three years were wasted investigating him; the cloud over him only began to lift after Hanssen’s arrest.
Hanssen was unaware of the molehunters’ plan to find a Russian source that might be persuaded to reveal the mole’s identity, at this stage still expected to be Brian Kelley. A retired former KGB officer, living in Moscow, was targeted: he wanted to expand his business overseas so was invited to a meeting in New York in April 2000. To the surprise of the FBI, he claimed that he had access to the KGB file on the mole, which he had removed from KGB headquarters before his retirement. It didn’t contain the name of the agent, but had all the details that he had given the KGB over the years. He even had access to a tape of the mole speaking. After considerable negotiations, he sold the file to the Americans for $7 million.
When the file was extracted from Russia by the CIA and passed to the FBI, it was treasure far beyond what the molehunters could reasonably have hoped for at any stage of their investigations: descriptions of the documents the mole had provided; computer disks with copies of the letters exchanged between the Russians and their asset. When they listened to the tape, they realized that it wasn’t Kelley speaking, but it was someone who sounded familiar — and the phrase ‘purple-pissing Japanese’ had also been heard at the FBI. To their horror, the team realized that the person they were seeking was Robert Hanssen.
At this closing stage of his career, Hanssen was assigned to the Office of Foreign Missions at the State Department, but in order to watch him properly the Bureau wanted him back at FBI headquarters. He was therefore offered a new posting, which apparently recognized his computer expertise, and brought him back in- house. There he was watched constantly, and his home phone tapped. When he went to meetings, his office was searched, where messages from the SVR were found on a memory card.
Hanssen began to get suspicious, both of the ‘make-work’ element of his new job and ‘repeated bursting radio signal emanations’ from his car. He wrote to the SVR noting that his ‘greatest utility to you has come to an end, and it is time to seclude myself from active service… Something has aroused the sleeping tiger.’
However, he still made his appointment on 18 February 2001, which the FBI knew about from the memory card. Maybe by that stage he had a death wish anyway. He had once told a friend, Ron Mlotek, ‘A person would have to be a total stupid f***ing idiot to spy for the KGB because you would be caught. Because we’re going to get you.’
And they did. Robert Hanssen was arrested as he slipped a package of documents in the dead drop location under a bridge in Foxstone Park. As Attorney General John Ashcroft said at the press conference announcing the capture: ‘This is a difficult day for the FBI.’ Hanssen pleaded guilty and promised to cooperate; it saved him from the death penalty. He was sentenced to life in prison with no possibility of parole.
Some observers, notably including former CIA chief Milt Bearden, believe that another mole has yet to be found who was operational simultaneously with Ames and Hanssen. Neither of them had access to some of the information that found its way into the KGB’s hands, and led to the arrests of, among others, Oleg Gordievsky. With the current level of tension between East and West, the spy’s identity is unlikely to be learned, at least while he or she remains alive.
Although much of their concentration was, of necessity, on countering potential and actual terrorist threats from radical extremists in the months following 9/11, MI5 were still actively involved with counter-espionage. Two sting operations successfully led to the arrest of British Aerospace employees who were trying to sell highly classified documents to the SVR. Both Rafael Bravo and Ian Parr were caught after they’d contacted the Russian Embassy offering their services, although, intriguingly, the official MI5 history doesn’t explain how the Security Service discovered their approaches! Bravo was sentenced to eleven years, Parr to eight. And MI5 received a formal protest from the SVR that their operative had impersonated a Russian intelligence officer to trap Bravo.
There was an element of humour to the first exchange between the Russian Federation and the UK in 2006. In a programme on Russian television, the FSB accused four British diplomats of spying, in concert with a Russian citizen. A fake rock on a Moscow street contained electronic equipment that was used to transmit and receive information. The FSB filmed its use and linked it to allegations that the British were making covert payments to human rights groups. Asked about the allegations at the time, Prime Minister Tony Blair commented, ‘I’m afraid you’re going to get the old stock-in-trade, of never commenting on security matters. Except when we want to, obviously.’ In 2012, his chief of staff Jonathan Powell admitted to a BBC documentary that the rock affair was ‘embarrassing’, but ‘they had us bang to rights’.
The discussions later in the year were anything but comical, and soured relations between the two countries, particularly as it seemed as if Cold War tactics were back in use. Former KGB spy Alexander Litvinenko apparently died of poisoning after drinking a cup of tea that had been laced with radioactive Polonium-210 on 1 November 2006. He had been an outspoken critic both of Vladimir Putin’s regime, and the Russian leader personally, claiming that the FSB under Putin had ordered him to assassinate Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky; that it had been responsible for a series of explosions blamed on Chechen separatists, which had been instrumental in bringing Putin to power; and even that Putin was a paedophile. He was granted asylum in the UK in 2000, where he advised both MI5 and MI6 and wrote increasingly vitriolic attacks on the FSB and Putin, accusing them of supporting terrorists, including al-Qaeda, and being responsible for the London bombings of 7/7. Two weeks before his fatal drink, he said that Putin had ordered the assassination of Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya.
Litvinenko met with former KGB agents Dmitry Kovtun and Andrei Lugovoi on 1 November and fell ill shortly afterwards. He died in hospital on 23 November. The police investigation led to the preparation of an extradition request for Lugovoi from Russia, which was not processed. Lugovoi claimed the request was politically motivated, and was even willing to undergo a polygraph test. The test was carried out by a French media company who supply tests for daytime television programmes such as
The relationship between Russia and Britain has not fully recovered from the incident. Diplomats were expelled by both countries. Long-range bomber aircraft sorties were recommenced by the Russians in 2007, requiring RAF planes to scramble from time to time when they came too near to British airspace. The following January, the Russians claimed that the British Council in Moscow was riddled with spies. That July, a ‘senior security source’ told the
