-Caveat Lector- Tools of the Trade: Affidavit Is a Handbook for Spying <http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A48759-2001Feb23.html?GXHC_gx_session_id_FutureTenseContentServer=f458861cb5e677a8&referer=email> By Vernon Loeb Washington Post Staff Writer Saturday, February 24, 2001; Page C01 He never met his KGB handlers and never told them who he was, the FBI says. But accused super-spy Robert P. Hanssen left them little doubt from the beginning 15 years ago: They were dealing with a pro. A massive government affidavit filed this week after Hanssen's arrest reads like a how-to-spy manual for anyone interested in passing highly classified government information to foreign spies without ever meeting them face to face. The document is based largely on the actual letters Hanssen allegedly sent his handlers, letters contained in a dossier that was somehow obtained by U.S. intelligence late last year. They leave little to chance, providing explicit instructions, and a rare glimpse of a major spy case as it unfolds. It's all there: how to set up "dead drops" and signal sites. How to signal your handlers and get signals in return. How to throw off counterspies using code and code names. What follows is based on allegations in the affidavit, which must ultimately be proved in court. Hanssen is expected to plead not guilty at his arraignment, which hasn't been scheduled. Hanssen's tradecraft was so meticulous, the affidavit says, that he even provided his KGB handlers a map reference"ADC Northern Virginia Street Map, #14, D3" for the location of the first dead drop he wanted to use to pass classified files: a specific corner of a wooden footbridge just west of the entrance to Nottoway Park in Fairfax County. The KGB, in return, called the site by a code word, PARK. As it turns out, PARK was less than a five-minute walk from Hanssen's home at the time on Whitecedar Court in Vienna. A dead drop is designed to defeat the lifeblood of any counterintelligence program: surveillance. Since many foreign spies are watched almost constantly, the easiest way to stay off the FBI's counterintelligence radar is to avoid face-to-face meetings. A dead drop helps solve the problem: A spy leaves documents in an obscure place, and his handler picks them up later. Often, for a drop to be arranged, spies use what is known in parlance as an "accommodation address"an address, unlike a foreign embassy, where mail is not monitored. So it is that Hanssen's alleged career as a super-spy began in 1985 with a simple letter to one such accommodation address, the Alexandria home of Viktor M. Degtyar. From his perch inside the FBI, the veteran counterspy knew both that Degtyar was a KGB officer, and that no one was monitoring his mail. In his first letter, Hanssen promised valuable documents as a means of introduction. In his second, he delivered the goods, and provided further instructions. Along with the specific map reference for the dead drop, he told his handlers to wrap his cash payments in a "green or brown plastic trash bag" and then use actual trash to cover the waterproof package. He designated a "signal site" to activate the dead drop: "The pictorial 'pedestrian-crossing' signpost just west of the main park entrance on Old Courthouse Road. (The sign is the one nearest the bridge just mentioned.)" When Hanssen was ready to pick up his first cash payment of $50,000, he explained, he would leave a vertical mark on the pedestrian crossing sign with a piece of white adhesive tape, according to the affidavit. His handlers, he wrote, should then leave a horizontal mark on the sign to indicate that the drop had been filled. And he, in return, would leave another vertical mark showing that he had picked up their package. Finally, he provided a mechanism for masking the actual dates on which drops would take place: "I will add 6, (you subtract 6) from stated months, days and times in both directions of our future communications." So began a close relationship, the affidavit says, in which Hanssen received cash and bank deposits worth $1.4 million plus three very large diamonds, and the KGB received the names of numerous Soviet agents working for America and hundreds and hundreds of pages of highly classified intelligence. At one point early on in this covert marriage of convenience, communications were broken after the KGB screwed up and left cash for Hanssen under the wrong corner of the dead drop bridge, spooking Hanssen. Tradecraft told him to pull back, watch and wait. But he re-established contact several months later in June 1986, when he sent a letter to Degtyar's home: "I apologize for the delay since our break in communications. I wanted to determine if there was any cause for concern over security." Since he still didn't know why the KGB hadn't left the package as instructed, he gave the Soviets a very elaborate test straight out of le Carre: "If you wish to continue our discussions, please have someone run an advertisement in the Washington Times during the week of 1/12/87 or 1/19/87, for sale, 'Dodge Diplomat, 1971, needs engine work, $1,000.' Give a phone number and time-of-day in the advertisement where I can call. I will call and leave a phone number where a recorded message can be left for me in one hour. I will say, 'Hello, my name is Ramon. I am calling about the car you offered for sale in the Times.' You will respond, 'I'm sorry, but the man with the car is not here, can I get your number.' The number will be in Area Code 212. I will not specify that Area Code on the line." It worked. At the appointed hour, a KGB officer called the number and explained the mistake. Soon the KGB proposed two additional dead drop sites and a new accommodation address with the code name NANCY. The relationship was sound. They were back in business. Hanssen waited more than a year before sending a letter to NANCY. Tradecraft dictates caution. In the letter, he rejected a KGB suggestion that he meet his handlers abroad. More caution. "No," he wrote in September 1987, "I have decided. It must be on my original terms or not at all." There were other glitches along the way: When the KGB soon suggested another dead drop site, with the code name AN, in Ellanor C. Lawrence Park in western Fairfax County, Hanssen complained he could not find the site at night. "I am dressed in business suit and can not slog around in inch deep mud." He suggested going back to PARK, which by 1988 the KGB had renamed PRIME. As the relationship matured, Hanssen and his handlers designated numerous other accommodation addresses, signal sites and dead drops, which the KGB coded using mostly women's names, FLO, HELEN, DORIS. Eventually, PRIME was replaced as Hanssen's favorite by ELLIS, a spot under a footbridge over Wolftrap Creek near Creek Crossing Road at Foxstone Park in Vienna, a one-mile walk from Hanssen's current residence on Talisman Drive in Vienna. As an espionage practitioner, Hanssen was clearly more technologically advanced than his handlers: In 1988, he sent them the first of 26 computer diskettes containing highly sensitive classified information. The fourth diskette passed by Hanssen included a top-secret document on "The FBI's Double Agent Program." But in a return package that included $25,000 in cash, the KGB complained that the diskette was coded in some fashion and couldn't be read. The following month, Hanssen sent a letter explaining how to access the diskette: "use 40 track mode." By early 1989, Hanssen had become such an incredible gold mine that the KGB established "an emergency call-out signal site" at Q Street and Connecticut Avenue in the District which, when marked, meant that the KGB should immediately check a dead drop coded BOB. Hanssen used the site when he came up with documents hot off the press that he wanted his handlers to have right away. In the affidavit there is a gap from 1991 to 1999, with 1991 presumably marking the year when the initial KGB case file acquired by U.S. authorities ended. It remains a mystery how the U.S. got this file. In any event, once those documents surfaced last year and clearly pointed to Hanssen as a spy, the FBI executed secret searches of Hanssen's home, office, car and computers. Those searches turned up correspondence between him and his Russian handlers from 1999 to 2000. What Hanssen did in the interim isn't at all clear. But the relationship described in the later documents sounds like the earlier one. ELLIS, the dead drop in Foxstone Park near Hanssen's home, was still very much in use. Counterintelligence experts who have read the affidavit and know Hanssen say his tradecraft was at times meticulous but often flawed: He made too many drops; used PRIME and ELLIS, the dead drops near his home, far too often; and told his handlers far too much about himself in his communications. When the end came earlier this month, he was surveilled repeatedly driving past ELLIS, where he was arrested Sunday night as he stashed classified documents -- wrapped in a garbage bag as per his specifications, beneath the footbridge. By then, FBI agents had already recovered $50,000 left for him by the Russians at a dead drop coded LEWIS at the Long Branch Nature Center in Arlington. They photographed the contents, found Hanssen's fingerprints on the bag, and put it back. But it seems none of those mistakes would have been decisive if someone on the other side had not betrayed him, just as he had betrayed Russian spies working for America. Once that happened, the FBI had little trouble piecing the clues together: Hanssen was the man the Russians called "B," his tradecraft notwithstanding. He was a realist about it all. Early on in his elaborately choreographed dance with his handlers, Hanssen acknowledged that even tradecraft has its limits. "Eventually," he wrote, "I would appreciate an escape plan. (Nothing lasts forever.)" <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/">www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. Substance—not soap-boxing—please! 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