Friday, April 08, 2005

A Interview with a Whistleblower - The John O'Neil 9/11 Untold Story Part 1

this is an audio post - click to play
Who was John O'Neill Click and ENTER HERE

John O’Neill had requested special clearance with the FBI,
a woman who saw, and knew too much about corruption and
protection of a major drug trafficking ring in Boston. 
The protection of this criminal enterprise reached into 
the high levels of government and has been documented by
grand jury hearings and a US congressional hearing.   
The criminal operation was known to have protection 
for its operatives who transported money and drugs right
 of a major airport!
The Trafficking may have involved the brother of a terrorist
suspect, whereby all the government agencies seem to
have taken hands off view of...  why?



Retired FBI agent John Roberts, who was a unit chief within
the bureau’s disciplinary office, the Office of Professional
Responsibility (OPR), in his own memo to members of Congress,
describes efforts by the FBI to retaliate against employees
who point out misconduct within the bureau.  
There have been a string of whistleblowers from the
intelligence community who have been silenced about 911 – 
including Former FBI translator Sibel Edmonds, Former FBI
Special Agent Michael German, Former FBI Special Agent FBI
Robert Wright, Former FBI Special Agent John Vincent and
others. What is not generally known is the FBI Special Agent
John O’Neill was a whistleblower in regards to his own
counterterrorism investigation.   
 
John O’Neill was a man who was in a position to know as
he was head of the Bin Laden Station and the FBI expert
on al Qaeda. 
The investigation by John O’Neil and other agents who worked with him, 
began over 10 years ago, but it seemed like it was a hands off game.....the operation,
until this day is still on going, with no arrest made ....why?

Without her only protector ”John O’Neill” who was a special
FBI Agent for over 30 years who was killed
within building “2",  WTC. Terrorist Disaster”, 
she was left without another to help her, a spy, left in
the cold.... There were stories about John O’Neil within
the major press, when journalists were not being controlled,
and could get out information to the public, that was only
for a moment in the beginning... 
 
But was it by accident or design that he ended up killed
as the head of Security within the towers during the 9/11
hit?....
She spoke of him, on his cell phone, spoke to her friend
for years and man who was devoted to protect her, who
respected her and wanted her safe!  
 
They had discussed setting up a situation to catch the
criminals before 911.  John had the suspects under
surveillance.  
 
Then records started disappearing, files erased and
an internal investigation placed John O’Neill under
suspicion.  After being cleared in the OPR investigation
he was then exposed by someone leaking confidential
documents of the OPR investigation to the press.  
Why this sudden desire to discredit the top counterterrorist
expert on Osama Bin Laden???  
 
Unable to effectively pursue the terrorists Special
Agent John O’Neill retired from the FBI. 

On the day of 911 she received confusing phone calls
possibly from suspects John O’Neill had been pursuing.
She heard later that he had died in the collapse of
building two.
 
John was still on a hot pursuit on the terrorists without his 
agency.....
John indeed had devotion to his country, and to his
special friend, “Susan” (name I have given her)
the woman you will hear, on my blogger, 
 
Now Susan’s life is in danger, and she has no one,
they are attempting to do what they do well, bankrupt
and make her seem crazy by rape and despair to cover up
crimes against the US, crimes against the world. 
 
Those who knew John O’Neil, are speaking out, and one
is the woman who we will call Susan to protect her
from more harm, because she as been raped by those
involved in the cover-up and the drug conspiracy!

All to make her crazy in the public eyes, to shut her up,
and cover-up a lie with another lie, so that their
secrets of 9/11 stay away from an unaware public,  
who can do nothing now... other than just merely
watch as their country is turned into a worse nightmare
 than Hitler’s Germany.  
 
Come visit my blogger site and listen to the untold story
about John O'Neill FBI Agent who was murdered in
the WTC. The facts are he was hired two days before,
to head up security within the buildings.

John O’Neil was to receive nearly $300k a year to head
up security for buildings which were for sale because
they were causing NYC to go into Bankruptcy from the
first WTC bombing in 1993. 
 
Fact, Lloyds of London refused to insured the buildings
anymore, so a company held by the Bush family held the
insurance binder on the property which was being sold and transferred into the hands of a
name Silverman. 
 
John O’Neill, was hired by a security company which
was operated by a member of the Bush Family as well. The
same member who insured the towers it!
 
Fact, John was still involved in investigating the
trafficking of drugs by al-Qaeda cells into the US.
Via Boston Airport. One suspected of being involved in
this trafficking was the brother of Bin Laden right out
of Boston's Airport which was alleged by some, to be one
of the major reasons for his removal from the FBI..... 
and why was he removed huh?
Bin Laden family members were removed by a special plane out
of the US and delivered into the hands of the Saudi Royal
Family, without question or investigation again why?
They were in Boston area, why were they removed so
quickly even after it was started that Bin Laden was involved in the WTC Attack?  This
goes without investigation and question. 
 
And why did the so call War of Terrorist turn into a
war against Hassan of Iraqi, who was not involved in
what was reported as an terrorist act committed by Bin
Laden....

Hassan the President of Iraqi, was not a friend to
Bin Laden, so why was a  change in targets? 
 
Who was behind all this, and why did all investigation STOP.
 And no one in congress and or the Senate will do anything to stop another
type of terror which is growing within this country. 
 
A terror which is stealing the resources out of the
hands of the American people and moving large sums
of wealth into foreign banks and controls by
privatization and other acts which maybe alleged by some
as treason...
Come to my site and listen to a woman who was the spy left
out in the cold without a net of protection.
Nothing! And even with all this information,
more and more coming out...... 
 
 
Come listen to Susan, and hear her on Tuesday’s program. 
Peace!

 
Please send a donate to D’Anne Burley, P.O. Box 13019, 
Chicago, Illinois 60613 we need your support in our
campaign to stop terrorist and report the truth to the
world. And my doing so you are being a member
to our team effort to develop media and launch
court reform before it’s too late.
 
I feel that they will be planning another Terrorist
event in May or June 2005, to get the public off
this and on to another thing so that they can get their
agenda done before we can do anything or notice....

posted by The D'Anne Burley Show @ 7:01 PM 

9 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

A Review of the FBI's Performance in Deterring, Detecting, and Investigating the Espionage Activities of Robert Philip Hanssen

August 14, 2003
Office of the Inspector General

UNCLASSIFIED EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

I. Introduction

In this report, the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) of the Department of Justice (DOJ) examines the performance of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in deterring, detecting, and investigating the espionage of Robert Philip Hanssen, a former FBI Supervisory Special Agent. Hanssen's espionage began in November 1979 - three years after he joined the FBI - and continued intermittently until his arrest in February 2001, just two months before his mandatory retirement date. In addition to its management responsibility to detect espionage among its employees, the FBI is the lead agency for detecting and investigating espionage committed in the United States.

Hanssen became an FBI agent in 1976. During his 25-year FBI career, he principally served in Soviet counterintelligence assignments in New York City and Washington, D.C. In the 1980s and 1990s, Hanssen held positions at FBI Headquarters and the State Department that gave him access to a broad range of highly sensitive counterintelligence and military information. On February 18, 2001, after a three-month investigation of Hanssen, he was arrested and charged with committing espionage on behalf of the KGB (Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti, the intelligence service of the former Soviet Union) and its successors. On July 6, 2001, Hanssen pled guilty to espionage charges pursuant to a plea agreement in which he agreed to cooperate with the U.S. government and submit to debriefings. On May 10, 2002, Hanssen was sentenced to life imprisonment.

Hanssen's espionage spanned three separate time periods: 1979-81, 1985-91, and 1999-2001. Over more than 20 years, Hanssen compromised some of this nation's most important counterintelligence and military secrets, including the identities of dozens of human sources, at least three of whom were executed. Hanssen gave the KGB thousands of pages of highly classified documents and dozens of computer disks detailing U.S. strategies in the event of nuclear war, major developments in military weapons technologies, information on active espionage cases, and many other aspects of the U.S. Intelligence Community's Soviet counterintelligence program.

Shortly after Hanssen's arrest, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) and the Attorney General asked the OIG to review the FBI's performance in connection with the Hanssen case. This report details the results of the OIG's investigation.

II. Summary of the OIG Investigation and Structure of the Report

The OIG assembled a team of three Special Investigative Counsel, a project director, three OIG Special Agents, two analysts, and a consultant to conduct this review. The team reported directly to the Inspector General.

The team obtained, reviewed, and analyzed more than 368,000 pages of material from the FBI, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the Justice Department, the National Security Agency (NSA), and the State Department. The team also conducted more than 200 interviews in 12 states and the District of Columbia. We interviewed Hanssen's former colleagues and supervisors at the FBI and State Department, as well as family, friends, and acquaintances who knew Hanssen throughout his life. We interviewed much of the operational hierarchy of the FBI's Intelligence/National Security Division (NSD) during the 1979 to 2001 period. In addition, we interviewed CIA and Justice Department personnel who had substantial involvement with the FBI regarding "penetration" matters - that is, investigating whether a foreign intelligence service has infiltrated or recruited agents within U.S. organizations. The team also interviewed Hanssen extensively.

Our full 674-page report is classified at the Top Secret/Codeword level because it contains extremely sensitive classified information regarding sources involved in the Hanssen case and FBI counterintelligence activities. We also produced a 383-page report, classified at the Secret level, which does not contain the detailed information on the sensitive sources that is included in the Top Secret/Codeword version. In addition, we produced this 31-page unclassified executive summary to provide a public summary of the main findings in the more extensive classified reports. We previously provided a copy of all three reports to the FBI for its comments on their factual accuracy and classification, and we made changes where appropriate.

In our reports, we divide Hanssen's FBI career into three phases that roughly correspond with the three periods of his espionage and with key FBI penetration-related efforts. One chapter is devoted to each phase, and within each chapter there are three parts: Hanssen's career, Hanssen's espionage, and the FBI's penetration efforts.

Chapter One covers the time period between 1976, when Hanssen joined the FBI, and 1985, when he completed his first tour in the Soviet Analytical Unit at FBI Headquarters. This chapter also includes background information concerning Hanssen's childhood, education, and employment prior to becoming an FBI agent. Hanssen's first espionage - conducted on behalf of the GRU (Glavnoye Razvedyvatelnoye Upravleniye, the Soviet Union's military intelligence arm) - took place between 1979 and 1981. The FBI's investigation of Soviet-related penetration leads during this time period was minimal.

Chapter Two covers the time period between 1985 - when Hanssen became the supervisor of an FBI technical surveillance squad in New York and volunteered to the KGB - and 1992. Hanssen's FBI career progressed normally during these years, which also constituted his most active period of espionage. With respect to the penetration issue, both the CIA and the FBI suffered catastrophic and unprecedented losses of Soviet intelligence assets in 1985 and 1986, which suggested that a mole was at work in the Intelligence Community. The FBI conducted several analytical efforts - including a major joint project with the CIA - that were unsuccessful at determining the cause of these compromises.

Chapter Three begins in 1992 and ends with Hanssen's arrest in February 2001. In January 1992, Hanssen became the Chief of the National Security Threat List Unit at FBI Headquarters, the highest ranking position he held at the FBI. Hanssen's failings as a supervisor and his inability to properly handle classified information led the FBI to remove Hanssen from his Unit Chief position, and he was subsequently detailed to the State Department as the FBI liaison to the Office of Foreign Missions (OFM). He served for six years in the OFM, until shortly before his arrest. With respect to espionage, Hanssen made a clumsy and aborted approach to the GRU in 1993 and then successfully re-volunteered to the KGB in 1999. Hanssen's espionage - which during this period relied heavily on his improper use of the FBI's Automated Case Support (ACS) computer system - continued until his arrest in February 2001.

The FBI's penetration-related investigations increased dramatically in the 1992 to 2001 period. The FBI substantially increased the resources it devoted to the penetration issue and successfully identified and prosecuted several individuals who spied for Russia, including CIA officer Aldrich Ames. The most significant espionage investigation that the FBI pursued after the 1994 arrest of Ames, however, was the search for the penetration of the U.S. Intelligence Community who was later determined to be Hanssen. The FBI believed early on that the mole worked at the CIA and subsequently pursued a lengthy investigation of a CIA employee. We now know that from the outset the FBI was focused on the wrong suspect at the wrong agency.

Chapter Four of our report examines deficiencies in the FBI's internal security that were apparent during our investigation of the Hanssen matter. This chapter discusses how flaws and deficiencies in the FBI's programs and policies concerning background reinvestigations, financial disclosures, polygraph examinations, computer security, classified document handling, and procedures for reporting and documenting security violations made it easier for Hanssen to commit espionage and more difficult for the FBI to detect him. It also describes the changes that have been made, or not made, to the FBI's internal security program since Hanssen's arrest in 2001.

Lastly, Chapter Five summarizes our principal factual findings and sets forth our recommendations for changes in the FBI's counterintelligence and security programs.

III. Principal Findings of the OIG Investigation

In the following paragraphs, we summarize the report's principal findings concerning Hanssen's career at the FBI, his espionage, and the FBI's penetration-related efforts from 1978 to 2001.

A. Hanssen's FBI Career

During his 25 years with the FBI, Hanssen was a mediocre agent who exhibited strong technical abilities but had weak managerial and interpersonal skills. Despite his failings as a supervisor, Hanssen was on the FBI's promotional track for much of his FBI career, and he generally received average to favorable performance evaluations. While Hanssen's day-to-day behavior did not suggest that he was engaged in espionage, he continually demonstrated an unwillingness to properly handle classified information. His indiscretions and security violations were largely ignored and wholly undocumented, however, and he was allowed to remain in positions offering him broad access to highly sensitive counterintelligence information. Ultimately, Hanssen's inability to effectively interact with subordinates and colleagues derailed his FBI career.

Hanssen received minimal supervision in most of his positions, was not required to produce significant work product, and had ample time to plan and commit espionage while on duty. Hanssen also encountered few security checks at the FBI. He was never asked to submit to a polygraph examination or to complete a financial disclosure form, and he received only one background reinvestigation during his 25-year FBI career.

To his FBI co-workers, Hanssen's personal life appeared completely inconsistent with that of a spy. He was married with six children, and appeared to be a devout Catholic who attended mass every day and who was actively involved in Opus Dei, a conservative Catholic lay organization. He also espoused politically conservative and anti-Communist views. Hanssen had no alcohol, drug, or gambling problems, and did not engage in ostentatious spending.

Hanssen was an only child whose father, a lieutenant in the Chicago Police Department, emotionally abused him throughout his life. Starting from a young age, Hanssen enjoyed spy-related entertainment, especially James Bond books and movies, collected items associated with espionage, such as a Walther PPK pistol, a Leica camera, a shortwave radio, and opened a Swiss bank account. Hanssen was an average student in college, majoring in chemistry. He drifted through dental school and business school - and became a certified public accountant - before joining the Chicago Police Department. After four years, Hanssen left the police department to join the FBI in January 1976.

Hanssen appeared to be an appropriate candidate for the FBI, in light of his college education, master's degree in business administration, experience as a certified public accountant, and service in the Chicago Police Department. The FBI's initial background investigation and interviews did not indicate that Hanssen was likely to commit espionage. While Hanssen came to the FBI with serious personal insecurities, low self-esteem, and a fascination with espionage, these characteristics did not emerge during the application process.

Once in the FBI, Hanssen's personality traits set him apart from his FBI colleagues. He had poor interpersonal skills and a dour demeanor, and was an awkward and uncommunicative loner who conveyed a sense of intellectual superiority that alienated many of his co-workers. Early in his career, however, Hanssen demonstrated significant initiative and organizational skills, developing, for example, a case prioritization system that remains in use today at the FBI. He also had an interest in and aptitude for computer work that was highly unusual at the time, and a number of his early supervisors regarded him as smart, technically proficient, and analytical.

After graduation from the FBI Academy at Quantico, Virginia, Hanssen served an initial two-year tour as a Special Agent in Gary, Indiana. While Hanssen sought out counterintelligence assignments in Gary, there was little such work available. At the end of his tour, Hanssen requested a transfer to the FBI's New York Office. Within six months of his arrival in New York, Hanssen arranged to be transferred from a Criminal Division squad to Soviet counterintelligence work, which remained his assignment for most of his FBI career. Hanssen quickly began exploiting weaknesses in the FBI's internal information security. While still assigned to a Criminal Division squad in the FBI's New York Office, Hanssen took advantage of the unrestricted and unmonitored access to the closed file room and spent hours reading Soviet espionage files - without any conceivable "need to know" - managing to identify some of the FBI's most significant Soviet sources in the process. Hanssen - who appeared to have little aptitude for operational work - demonstrated a strong interest in computers and in administrative assignments, and was given responsibility for managing the New York Office's counterintelligence database, a position that put him at the center of the information flow.

In the early 1980s, Hanssen served in the Budget Unit and in the Soviet Analytical Unit at FBI Headquarters - positions that provided him with broad access to sensitive information and an opportunity to use his technical and computer skills, but did not require operational work. Because the Budget Unit was responsible for preparing materials justifying the FBI's budget requests to Congress, Hanssen obtained access to sensitive information from all components of the Intelligence Division, and worked closely with the NSA and the CIA to secure joint funding for certain projects. In the Soviet Analytical Unit, Hanssen gained access to the FBI's most sensitive human assets and technical operations against the Soviet Union. He also began a noticeable pattern of mishandling classified information, primarily by disclosing the existence of Soviet sources and investigations to people with no "need to know," such as FBI employees in other divisions and personnel from other agencies. While Hanssen's tours in the Budget and Soviet Analytical Units showed that he was an intelligent, analytical agent with significant computer skills, his performance also revealed that he lacked the interpersonal skills to communicate effectively and perform supervisory duties. Nonetheless, Hanssen's career at the FBI continued to advance.

In 1985, Hanssen returned to the New York Office as the supervisor of a technical surveillance squad. Hanssen was a lackadaisical manager who did not interact effectively with his subordinates. Because the squad largely "ran itself," however, Hanssen's limited interpersonal skills did not become a significant issue. Similarly, Hanssen's mishandling of classified information was obvious to his subordinates but was not brought to the attention of his superiors.

In 1987, Hanssen returned to the Soviet Analytical Unit in FBI Headquarters as a supervisor, a position that he told the OIG he found "overwhelmingly attractive" because of the extremely broad access to sensitive information it offered. Although Hanssen received very favorable performance evaluations during his second tour in the Unit, his supervisor regarded him as the "strangest person" he had ever worked with in the FBI - a "kind of cipher who was rigid, dour, and a religious zealot." As was the case during his first tour in the Unit, Hanssen produced little work product, and his subordinates regarded him as distant and arrogant. Shortly after his return to the Unit, Hanssen committed a serious security breach by disclosing sensitive information to a Soviet defector he was debriefing. Hanssen's colleagues recognized that he could not be trusted with highly sensitive information and informally attempted to restrict his access. Although this security breach was reported to an FBI supervisor, it was not documented, and no formal action was taken against Hanssen, whose access to sensitive information remained largely unchecked.

In 1990, Hanssen became an Inspector's Aide in the Inspection Division, a position that was considered a prerequisite for advancement at the FBI. In this position, Hanssen traveled to FBI field offices to help rate their overall performance. In June 1991, Hanssen became a program manager in the Soviet Section at FBI Headquarters, where he supervised operational programs designed to counter Soviet efforts to acquire scientific and technical information. This assignment was brief and uneventful.

In January 1992, Hanssen became chief of the National Security Threat List (NSTL) Unit, a new unit at FBI Headquarters that dealt with economic espionage, theft of trade secrets and critical technologies, and nuclear proliferation. This position required significant management skills and an ability to work effectively with the FBI's field offices, and Hanssen's deficiencies in these areas quickly became apparent. Hanssen's subordinates found him disinterested in the Unit's work and were frustrated by his failure to provide guidance and direction. Rather than engage in the daily work of the Unit, Hanssen frequently sat in his office listening to foreign language tapes for hours at a time. Hanssen also had poor relations with the FBI's field offices, which complained that he rejected an inordinately high percentage of their proposals for investigations.

While in the NSTL Unit, Hanssen committed two serious and flagrant security breaches. First, he hacked into the FBI's computer system and accessed highly sensitive Soviet counterintelligence documents located on the hard drives of his colleagues and supervisors in the National Security Division. Hanssen grew nervous about what he had done and decided to report it to FBI management in the guise of revealing a flaw in the FBI's computer security. Hanssen's ruse succeeded, and no one questioned his breach of computer security. Hanssen's second significant breach occurred when, in direct contravention of a decision made by FBI management, he disclosed to the British intelligence service information about a highly sensitive FBI investigation. At about this time, Hanssen also came under investigation by the FBI's Office of Professional Responsibility because of a physical altercation with a female FBI support employee. The investigation resulted in a letter of censure and a five-day suspension. The physical altercation, the improper disclosure to British intelligence, and Hanssen's poor performance in the NSTL Unit doomed his chances for further advancement at the Bureau.

As part of an FBI-wide program in which Headquarters personnel were reassigned to FBI field offices, Hanssen was involuntarily removed from his position as NSTL Unit Chief in April 1994 and transferred to the FBI's Washington Field Office (WFO), where he was assigned to a computer squad in a non-supervisory capacity. While not an official demotion, Hanssen was no longer on the management track for higher supervisory positions at the Bureau. Hanssen largely ignored his new assignment in the field office and soon began seeking work at FBI Headquarters. For several months, Hanssen worked on computer-related projects for senior NSD officials.

In late 1994, FBI management began considering Hanssen as a candidate to fill an FBI position in the Office of Foreign Missions (OFM) at the State Department. OFM regulates selected activities of foreign missions in the United States to protect U.S. foreign policy and national security interests, and also helps foreign missions protect their diplomats and facilities. Hanssen's FBI superiors saw the OFM liaison position as a good "out of the mainstream" job for Hanssen, a supervisory agent who had proven incapable of supervising others. Hanssen started at OFM in February 1995 and remained at the State Department for the next six years.

Hanssen's work responsibilities at OFM consumed no more than a few hours a day, and he was wholly unsupervised by either State Department or FBI personnel. The job carried no significant operational or managerial responsibilities, and once Hanssen was at OFM, FBI management largely forgot about him. No one checked on him or his work - or even ensured that he was at work. No performance evaluations concerning Hanssen were completed during the entire six years that he served at OFM. Hanssen took full advantage of the light workload and complete lack of supervision, spending hours each day out of the office, surfing the Internet and watching movies on his personal laptop computer, and visiting friends and acquaintances.

During Hanssen's detail to the State Department, the FBI provided him with a desktop computer that was connected to the FBI's ACS computer system. The ACS system gave Hanssen access to thousands of internal FBI classified documents for which he had no "need to know." To determine whether he was under investigation by the FBI, Hanssen also frequently searched the ACS system for references to his own name and address. In addition, he successfully mined the system for information concerning the FBI's most sensitive espionage investigations. While the ACS system had audit capability, Hanssen's improper searches went undetected because the FBI did not conduct audit trail reviews absent an allegation of wrongdoing.

Hanssen continued to commit security violations while at the State Department. He improperly disclosed classified information to others - including NSA and State Department employees, close friends, and members of the press. Hanssen's most egregious security breach at OFM - an attempt to install password breaker software on his FBI computer - was discovered by the FBI's computer specialists, who documented the incident and referred it to the FBI's Security Programs Manager. Hanssen told the Security Programs Manager that he had installed the hacking program in order to connect to a color printer, however, and he suffered no negative consequences as a result of this misconduct. As with Hanssen's other security violations, nothing about the matter was recorded in either his personnel or security file.

In late 2000, after the FBI received information identifying Hanssen as a Russian mole, the FBI offered him a Senior Executive Service position at FBI Headquarters, where he could be closely monitored. Hanssen was arrested on February 18, 2001.

B. Hanssen's Espionage

Hanssen was the most damaging spy in FBI history, and he betrayed some of this nation's most important counterintelligence and military secrets, including the identities of dozens of human assets, at least three of whom were executed. Hanssen committed espionage intermittently, starting and stopping several times during his 25-year FBI career. He engaged in three discrete periods of espionage - 1979-81, 1985-91, and 1999-2001 - and unsuccessfully attempted to renew his espionage on behalf of the GRU in 1993. The reasons why Hanssen initially began committing espionage, and repeatedly returned to it, are complex and, as we explain below, changed over time. Many of the factors that have motivated or influenced traitors in the past - such as greed, ideology, career disappointments and resentment, and drug and alcohol abuse - do not apply to Hanssen or do not fully explain his conduct.

Our review of the Hanssen case revealed that there was essentially no deterrence to espionage at the FBI during the 1979 to 2001 time period and that the FBI's personnel and information security programs presented few obstacles to Hanssen's espionage. His removal of hundreds of classified documents from the FBI - including original and numbered Top Secret documents - and improper searches of the Bureau's computer system for references to himself and to the Bureau's most sensitive espionage investigations went unnoticed. Because of lax supervision, Hanssen felt free to conduct many of his espionage-related activities while on duty, including creating encryption devices for communicating with the Russians, servicing dead drops, and counting his cash payments from the Russians. These deficiencies in deterrence, detection, and supervision played a major role in Hanssen's willingness and ability to commit espionage over a more than 20-year period.

1. First Period of Espionage: 1979 - 1981

Hanssen first began spying for the Soviets in November 1979, just eight months after he transferred to a counterintelligence squad in the FBI's New York Office. While on duty, Hanssen volunteered his services to the GRU by delivering a package to a GRU officer at a Soviet trade organization. In his correspondence with the GRU, Hanssen revealed that he was an FBI agent, but offered no other identifying information. Over the next year and a half, Hanssen conducted clandestine exchanges with the GRU, receiving cash payments totaling at least $21,000.

Hanssen's initial decision to commit espionage arose from a complex blend of factors, including low self-esteem and a desire to demonstrate intellectual superiority, a lack of conventional moral restraints, a feeling that he was above the law, a lifelong fascination with espionage and its trappings and a desire to become a "player" in that world, the financial rewards he would receive, and the lack of deterrence - a conviction that he could "get away with it." We believe that the personality flaws and background that Hanssen brought with him into the FBI likely played a more significant role in his decision to commit espionage than anything that happened to him after he became an agent.

Hanssen's first period of espionage ended in the spring of 1981, when his wife Bonnie inadvertently discovered him reviewing a GRU communication in the basement of their home. Although Hanssen minimized his espionage in discussions with his wife, he says that he confessed his espionage to an Opus Dei priest within days of Bonnie's discovery. According to Hanssen, the priest granted him absolution and told him that he did not have to turn himself in, but suggested that he donate the money he had received from the GRU to charity. Hanssen said that he broke off contact with the GRU and made multiple $1,000 donations to Mother Teresa's "Little Sisters of the Poor."

The most significant information that Hanssen passed during this period concerned the identity of a long-time FBI asset in the GRU. Hanssen's first period of espionage was less damaging to the U.S. intelligence effort than his next two periods of espionage.

2. Second Period of Espionage: 1985 - 1991

Hanssen remained a dormant spy from 1981 until October 1985, when he volunteered to the KGB, the Soviet Union's principal intelligence service. In his letter to the KGB's Washington Residency, Hanssen was careful to maintain his anonymity and did not disclose his prior espionage on behalf of the GRU. Using the alias "Ramon" or "Ramon Garcia," Hanssen provided the KGB with information concerning the Intelligence Community's most important Soviet counterintelligence and military secrets, much of which he had learned while assigned to the Soviet Analytical Unit. Although Hanssen was working in New York from September 1985 to August 1987, all of his operational espionage activity during this period took place in the Washington area. According to Hanssen, he chose to volunteer to the KGB because he believed it was more professional, had a longer-term outlook, and paid more money than the GRU.

We believe that Hanssen's decision to resume espionage was motivated by many of the same factors at play in 1979. His obsession with espionage (which he referred to as an "addiction"), his lack of self-esteem and desire for recognition, his belief that he could commit espionage without being detected, and the lack of effective deterrence all played a role. The fact that Hanssen had done it before made it easier for him to do it again. Hanssen's return to espionage also was likely fueled by his knowledge that he had successfully evaded detection in the past and was in a position to demand a large payment from the Russians for the highly sensitive information he had obtained in the Soviet Analytical Unit.

During the next six years - the last stages of the Cold War - Hanssen delivered thousands of pages of highly classified documents and dozens of computer disks to the KGB detailing U.S. strategies in the event of nuclear war, major developments in military weapons technologies, identities of active and historical U.S. assets in the Soviet intelligence services, the locations of KGB defectors in the United States, analytical products from across the Intelligence Community, comprehensive budget and policy documents, and many other aspects of the Soviet counterintelligence program. He passed some of the most damaging information within his first two months of espionage, including the true names of the FBI's most significant Soviet sources at the time, KGB officers Sergey Motorin and Valeriy Martynov. Other significant operations that Hanssen compromised during this period included the FBI's espionage investigation of Felix Bloch, a senior State Department official suspected of providing information to the KGB, and an FBI analytical report regarding possible Soviet penetrations.

Toward the end of Hanssen's second period of espionage, he became increasingly careless, passing documents that clearly marked him as an FBI employee. For example, when he was assigned to the Inspection Division, he gave the KGB FBI inspection reports and documents that he took from field offices while on inspection assignments. Hanssen also compromised Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) wiretap applications prepared by the FBI. In a particularly reckless move, Hanssen suggested to the KGB that it attempt to recruit Jack Hoschouer, Hanssen's closest friend, who was then serving as a military attaché at the U.S. Embassy in Bonn.

Hanssen's second period of espionage contributed to the execution of at least three human sources - including Motorin and Martynov - and caused hundreds of millions of dollars worth of damage to U.S. intelligence programs. In return, the KGB gave Hanssen cash payments of at least $500,000, as well as three diamonds. He stored the cash, as much as $100,000 at a time, in a gym bag in his bedroom closet. He also deposited large amounts of the KGB's money into a passbook savings account in his own name at a bank located a block from FBI Headquarters. While Hanssen has not accounted for much of the money he received from the KGB, it is clear that he spent some of it on an addition to his home, cars, tuition payments for his children's private schools, gifts, a loan to his brother-in-law, and at strip clubs. In late 1989, Hanssen began a year-long relationship with a stripper, Pricillia Sue Galey. Hanssen paid for Galey to accompany him on an FBI Inspection Division trip to Hong Kong, bought her a Mercedes Benz, provided her with an American Express card, and gave her jewels, cash, and other gifts.

In August 1990, Hanssen's brother-in-law, FBI Special Agent Mark Wauck, heard that Hanssen's wife Bonnie had found $5,000 in unexplained cash in Hanssen's dresser drawer. Wauck reported this and other incidents he found suspicious to a supervisor in the FBI's Chicago Field Office. Although Wauck and the supervisor now have significantly different recollections of their conversation, we believe that Wauck provided the supervisor with enough information to warrant some follow up. Instead, the supervisor readily dismissed Wauck's concerns, in part because there was no policy or procedure mandating that he pass the information on for analysis and possible investigation. This incident highlights deficiencies in the FBI's protocol for the receipt and investigation of derogatory information about an agent. There was no standard procedure for reporting and collecting such information, nor was there a central repository at the FBI responsible for collecting this information.

After picking up a $12,000 KGB payment in December 1991, Hanssen again broke off contact with the Soviets. Hanssen told us that he took this action because of his increasing guilt and after confessing his espionage to Catholic priests. We are skeptical of this explanation, however, because Hanssen's decision to halt his espionage coincided with the fall of the Soviet Union, as well as with the initiation of a new FBI/CIA molehunt effort that Hanssen knew about. Both events increased the risk that Hanssen's espionage would be detected or disclosed.

3. Unsuccessful Approach to the GRU: 1993

A year and a half after breaking off contact with the KGB in late 1991, Hanssen made an awkward and unsuccessful attempt to reestablish contact with the GRU. The risks Hanssen took in approaching the GRU in 1993 far outweighed any he had taken during his first two periods of espionage. In July 1993, Hanssen approached a GRU officer in the garage of the officer's apartment building. Hanssen identified himself as an FBI agent, explained that he had worked for the KGB under the name Ramon Garcia, and tried to give the officer a package containing summaries of double agent cases that the FBI was running against the GRU. The GRU officer refused to accept the package, and then reported the approach to his superiors. The Russians filed a protest with the U.S. government - apparently believing that the approach had been an officially sanctioned provocation - and the FBI opened an investigation. Although Hanssen's approach to the GRU officer was reckless in a variety of ways, the FBI's investigation of this incident - which Hanssen monitored through the FBI's computer system - was unsuccessful.

Hanssen claimed that two factors motivated this approach to the GRU. First, he wanted an explanation as to why the GRU was still running double agent cases that he had previously compromised to the KGB. Second, he "felt pity" for the GRU and wanted to ensure that it knew which of its sources were actually double agents. Although Hanssen denied that this approach was motivated by a need for money, he sought funds from a wide variety of sources at about this time. Indeed, the day of the failed approach, Hanssen asked his mother for $10,000. In addition, even though Hanssen made this approach the day after his father died, he claimed not to remember the proximity of these two events during his debriefings and OIG interviews.

Hanssen's 1993 approach to the GRU was remarkable for its recklessness and self-destructive quality. Unlike his prior periods of espionage, Hanssen had face-to-face contact with a Russian intelligence officer, asked other FBI employees to conduct computer searches concerning this officer, and demonstrated virtually no regard for his personal security. Hanssen told the OIG that when the approach failed, it "shocked [him] back out of that mental state."

4. Third Period of Espionage: 1999 - 2001

In 1999, Hanssen revolunteered to the KGB. Over the next two years, Hanssen provided the Russians with information concerning some of the FBI's most significant KGB sources and most sensitive espionage investigations. Hanssen had obtained most of this information from improper searches of the FBI's ACS computer system. As with his second period of espionage, Hanssen used the pseudonym "Ramon Garcia" and communicated through dead drop exchanges, but passed many documents that were unmistakably FBI products. Hanssen's decision to resume espionage in 1999 was driven by two factors: (1) his discovery - through the ACS system - of the FBI's effort to identify a significant KGB mole believed to be a CIA officer; and (2) his deteriorating finances.

While searching the ACS system in the spring of 1999, Hanssen stumbled upon the FBI's most significant ongoing Russian espionage investigation. This case was a search for the KGB mole who turned out to be Hanssen. At the time, however, the FBI's investigation was focused on a CIA officer. Although the FBI did not intend for documents related to this highly sensitive investigation to be uploaded into the ACS system - because of widespread concerns about the system's security - many such documents were uploaded due to failures in training, simple human error, and insufficient concern about maintaining operational security. Within a day of discovering the existence of the investigation, Hanssen obtained the CIA suspect's true name. Hanssen decided to warn the KGB about the investigation and thereby "save" the CIA suspect. Hanssen also stated that the case offered him all of the "excitement" and "stimulation" from espionage that he craved.

At the same time, Hanssen's financial situation was the worst it had ever been. Although Hanssen was close to the top of the FBI pay scale, his spending continually outstripped his income. He had significant credit card debts, car loans, bank loans, and tuition payments for his children. While Hanssen's mother had previously supplemented his income, giving him more than $94,000 in the mid-1990s, she told Hanssen in 1997 that she was running out of money. Hanssen claimed that he set a goal of obtaining approximately $100,000 from the KGB, believing that this amount would stabilize his finances, at least until he retired from the FBI and entered the private sector.

When Hanssen reestablished contact with the KGB in July 1999, he did so as "Ramon Garcia." Hanssen indicated that he needed money and provided a communications plan using a drop site from his second period of espionage. In August 1999, the KGB paid Hanssen $50,000. Over the next year, Hanssen made several attempts to pass information through dead drop exchanges, but the KGB failed to retrieve his packages. Accordingly, Hanssen resorted to mailing the KGB a disk and a letter which provided the true names of several individuals under investigation for espionage, as well as information concerning two FBI assets in the Russian intelligence services and two significant FBI technical operations. Hanssen's last successful dead drop exchange occurred in November 2000, when he gave the KGB a large stack of classified documents from the ACS system that he had been collecting for over a year.

In late 2000, the FBI identified Hanssen as a spy and lured him back to FBI Headquarters - where he could be more easily monitored - with the offer of a temporary Senior Executive Service position involving computer security. Hanssen began his new position on January 13, 2001. On February 12, 2001, the FBI discovered a package containing $50,000 that the KGB had left for Hanssen in a dead drop site. Six days later, on February 18, 2001, after Hanssen had left a package for the KGB in a different dead drop site, he was arrested and charged with espionage offenses.

Although Hanssen escaped detection for more than 20 years, this was not because he was a "master spy." While Hanssen took some important steps to maintain his security - such as refusing to reveal his identity to his Russian handlers - and used his knowledge of the FBI's counterintelligence practices and poor internal security to his advantage, much of Hanssen's conduct when committing espionage was reckless. For example, Hanssen (1) set up an FBI camera on a drop site he used for exchanges with the GRU during his first period of espionage; (2) used an FBI telephone line and answering machine for communications with the KGB in 1986; (3) deposited much of the KGB's cash directly into a passbook savings account in his name in the late 1980s; (4) suggested to his Russian handlers in 1991 that they attempt to recruit Jack Hoschouer, his best friend; (5) directly approached a GRU officer in 1993 and revealed that he was an FBI agent who had previously committed espionage for the KGB - an approach that led to a diplomatic protest from the Russians and an FBI investigation that could have identified Hanssen as a mole; and (6) searched the FBI's computer system, during his last period of espionage, for references to his own name, address, and drop and signal sites - conduct that would have been difficult to explain if the FBI had utilized the computer system's audit feature. In sum, Hanssen escaped detection not because he was extraordinarily clever and crafty, but because of longstanding systemic problems in the FBI's counterintelligence program and a deeply flawed FBI internal security program.

A. FBI Analytical and Investigative Penetration Efforts: 1978 - 2001

The FBI's penetration efforts in the late 1970s and 1980s suffered from a lack of cooperation with the CIA and from inattention on the part of senior management. In 1985 and 1986, the CIA and FBI lost nearly every significant human asset then operating against the Soviet Union. These losses were unprecedented in scope, quantity, significance, and timing, yet the FBI undertook no sustained effort to determine their cause. Senior management was almost entirely unaware of the scope and significance of these losses, and throughout the 1980s the FBI failed to work cooperatively with the CIA to resolve the cause of these losses or to thoroughly investigate whether an FBI mole could be responsible for these setbacks. We now know that Hanssen compromised many of the assets and operations lost during the mid-1980s.

The early 1990s saw significant improvement in FBI/CIA cooperation, with the two agencies undertaking a joint investigation concerning the cause of the 1985-86 asset losses. The FBI drastically increased the number of squads and personnel devoted to espionage investigations, and the FBI's senior management took a much more active role in supervising penetration investigations. The energized penetration efforts led to successful espionage prosecutions of CIA officers Aldrich Ames and Harold Nicholson, FBI Special Agent Earl Pitts, and NSA detailee David Boone. While the FBI worked closely with the CIA's Special Investigations Unit (SIU) on most of these cases, the SIU was not an equal partner. The FBI's failure to keep the CIA apprised of information concerning non-CIA espionage investigations - such as the case involving FBI agent Earl Pitts - undermined the effort to identify Hanssen.

In attempting to identify the mole who turned out to be Hanssen, the FBI intensively pursued a CIA suspect. This investigation culminated in the submission of a report to the Justice Department that appeared to seek the prosecution of that CIA suspect, despite the fact that some senior FBI managers had serious reservations about the conclusions of the report and doubted whether the officer - who has since been exonerated by the FBI - was the correct target.

Although the FBI pursued penetration leads in the 1990s that we now know related to Hanssen, he received no investigative scrutiny until late 2000. Indeed, the FBI never opened even a preliminary inquiry on any FBI employee in connection with the search for the mole ultimately identified as Hanssen. This was true even though the FBI had access to information suggesting that the mole might be an FBI employee, and believed that the mole had compromised certain FBI assets and operations.

Longstanding systemic problems in the FBI's counterintelligence program played an important role in the FBI's failure to uncover Hanssen. Most importantly, the FBI demonstrated a reluctance to consider itself as a possible source for a penetration in the absence of leads identifying a specific FBI target. Thus, the FBI maintained a focus on the CIA as the mole's employer despite information indicating that the mole might be an FBI employee.

Ineffective oversight by FBI management and poor coordination with the Justice Department also contributed to the length of the FBI's investigation of the wrong suspect and the failure to pursue alternative avenues. The FBI managers with supervisory authority over the investigation often deferred to line personnel - even when the managers harbored serious doubts about the progress of the investigation - resulting in a tacit endorsement of erroneous analysis and conclusions. This problem was compounded by the FBI's poor coordination with the Justice Department components responsible for overseeing intelligence investigations - the Office of Intelligence Policy and Review (OIPR) and the Criminal Division's Internal Security Section (ISS). Because the FBI did not provide the Justice Department with complete information about its investigation - omitting crucial information about weaknesses in proof and investigative setbacks - the Justice Department could not properly evaluate the strength of the FBI's case against the CIA suspect.

1. Ad Hoc Analytical and Investigative Efforts from the 1970s to 1993

In the 1970s and early 1980s, the FBI investigated several source reports of Soviet penetrations of the FBI and CIA. None of the leads from this time period appears to have any connection to Hanssen's espionage.

In the 1980s and early 1990s, the FBI's response to learning that an important FBI Soviet asset was compromised or to receiving information indicating that a human penetration was at work was often to create an ad hoc team to examine the issue. These efforts were typically analytical rather than investigative. While each study considered the possibility of an FBI mole, none involved an actual investigation of this issue, and none resulted in an investigation being opened on a specific FBI employee. Likewise, none of these efforts concluded that a penetration of the FBI was responsible for the ongoing compromises that the FBI's Soviet program experienced from the mid-1980s to early 1990s.

In late 1986, the FBI learned that its two most significant Soviet assets - KGB officers Motorin and Martynov - had been arrested for espionage within the previous year. This appears to be the first notice the FBI received concerning compromises attributable to Hanssen, who we now know compromised both assets in October 1985, confirming information that CIA officer Aldrich Ames had provided to the KGB in June 1985.

After learning that its two most important KGB assets had been arrested, the FBI formed a six-person task force to determine how they had been compromised and whether an FBI mole was responsible. In the course of its review, the Task Force discovered that because of poor document controls and violations of the "need to know" principle it was impossible to determine who within the FBI had had access to the Motorin and Martynov cases. Accordingly, no FBI employee with knowledge of these assets was investigated. Nonetheless, in September 1987 the Task Force issued a final report stating that there was no evidence of a Soviet spy in the FBI. The Task Force, however, did not resolve how the assets had been compromised.

During the Task Force effort, the FBI learned that the CIA had likewise suffered catastrophic and unprecedented losses in its Soviet program. Yet, the FBI failed to work cooperatively with the CIA to resolve the cause of these losses.

Between 1987 and 1991, the FBI suffered continuing losses of Soviet human assets and technical operations that it could not explain. During this period, the FBI conducted two analytical studies that considered the penetration issue, but neither study led the FBI to investigate the possibility of an FBI mole. The first study was a two-year effort aimed at resolving historical allegations of an FBI penetration. The project proceeded chronologically, and by late 1988 the team had analyzed leads only from the 1950s and 1960s. In an interim report, the team concluded that two penetrations of the FBI existed before 1964, but the team never reached the time period relevant to the FBI's more recent and unprecedented losses. The project was abandoned in the summer of 1989.

The second study systematically examined more than 50 FBI operations that had been compromised since 1986, including human assets, technical operations, double agent programs, and recruitment operations. The final report, issued in November 1988, described the continuing, across-the-board problems within the FBI's Soviet operations, but was equivocal with respect to the possibility of an FBI mole. The report suggested that a CIA penetration was a more likely explanation for the FBI's losses. We now know that Hanssen compromised most of the significant operations discussed in the report.

In 1991, the FBI and the CIA formed the SIU, which was directed to analyze the numerous FBI and CIA cases lost after 1985 and to prepare a list of suspects who could account for the losses. Simultaneously, the FBI created a new investigative squad at WFO to pursue investigative leads generated by the SIU and, in the meantime, to reanalyze many of the same FBI compromises and penetration leads considered during the FBI's earlier analytical efforts. By the end of 1992, after reviewing numerous FBI and CIA historical compromises without any investigative progress, the squad began to disband while awaiting new leads from the SIU.

While the SIU obtained compelling evidence that CIA officer Aldrich Ames was a Russian mole and was likely responsible for many of the compromises at issue, the team's March 1993 final report merely stated that there was a KGB penetration in the CIA who began his espionage in 1985. The report failed to highlight Ames as a suspect worthy of special investigative attention. Instead, Ames was presented simply as one of 40 CIA employees who had access to the Soviet operations compromised in the 1985-86 period. The report did not include a comparable list of FBI employees. Although the SIU's final report raised the possibility of a KGB penetration of the FBI, the team did not undertake or recommend any meaningful action concerning this possibility.

2. Penetration Investigations and the Search for Hanssen: 1993 - 2001

The years between 1993 and 2001 marked one of the most active and productive periods for espionage investigations in the FBI's history. The FBI greatly expanded its counterespionage effort and successfully apprehended a number of significant Russian spies. This period was dominated, however, by the search for a KGB mole who was reportedly more damaging than Ames. The FBI poured enormous resources into this search. The FBI believed early on, however, that the mole was a CIA employee and did not change that view. We now know that the FBI was on the wrong track from the beginning, because the mole the FBI was looking for was Hanssen, an FBI employee.

As the investigation unfolded, the FBI focused on a specific CIA employee. Given the information it had at the time, the FBI's initial selection of this CIA employee as the lead suspect was understandable. Although an extensive investigation of this CIA suspect failed to yield any conclusive evidence of espionage, the FBI became convinced that he was a KGB mole. This was due in part to the suspect's ambiguous and sometimes suspicious behavior and in part to a belief that this individual had emerged as the lead suspect as the result of an objective and scientific process. Despite its lack of success in the investigation, the FBI, in a 70-page Investigative Report, informed the Justice Department that the CIA suspect was a significant KGB mole, and sought an opinion as to whether he could be prosecuted for espionage.

The FBI should have seriously questioned its conclusion that the CIA suspect was a KGB spy and considered opening different lines of investigation. The squad responsible for the case, however, was so committed to the belief that the CIA suspect was a mole that it lost a measure of objectivity and failed to give adequate consideration to other possibilities. In addition, while FBI management pressed for the investigation to be completed, it did not question the factual premises underlying it. Similarly, the CIA's SIU did not serve as an effective counterbalance to the FBI, because it was not an equal partner in the molehunt.

The supervisory failures in connection with the espionage investigation of the CIA suspect are most apparent in the context of the Investigative Report that the FBI presented to the Justice Department. Although several senior FBI managers had serious doubts that the CIA suspect was the correct target, and expected the Justice Department to decline prosecution for a lack of evidence, the Investigative Report was written as if the FBI had no doubt that the CIA suspect was a KGB mole who was the most damaging spy since Ames.

Fortunately, the Justice Department never brought charges against the CIA suspect, because while prosecutors were reviewing the case the FBI determined that Hanssen was in fact the KGB mole. In late 2000, the FBI opened an investigation of Hanssen, and on February 18, 2001, he was arrested for espionage. The FBI later exonerated the CIA suspect.

IV. Summary of the FBI's Security Programs During Hanssen's Career

The Hanssen case highlighted significant, longstanding deficiencies in the FBI's internal security program, many of which were brought to the attention of FBI management over the years but were not corrected. Historically, the FBI has not been in compliance with Executive Orders, Justice Department regulations, and Intelligence Community standards regarding internal security. Although we found that the FBI has taken many important steps to improve its internal security program since Hanssen's arrest - including the implementation of a counterintelligence-focused polygraph examination program, the development of a financial disclosure program, and the creation of a Security Division - some of the most serious weaknesses still have not been fully remedied. These weaknesses expose the FBI to the risk of future serious compromises by another mole.

Before Hanssen's arrest, the FBI's security program was based on trust. Rather than taking the sort of proactive steps adopted by other Intelligence Community components - such as requiring regular counterintelligence polygraph examinations, financial disclosures, and meaningful background reinvestigations, and utilizing audit functions regarding computer usage - the FBI trusted that its employees would remain loyal throughout their careers. The Hanssen case shows the danger of that approach.

In our review, we observed serious deficiencies in nearly every aspect of the FBI's internal security program, from personnel security, to computer security, document security, and security training and compliance. These deficiencies led to the absence of effective deterrence to espionage at the FBI and undermined the FBI's ability to detect an FBI mole. Moreover, the absence of deterrence played a significant role in Hanssen's decision to commit espionage. As he explained during debriefings: "[I]f I had thought that the risk of detection was very great, I would never have done it." Hanssen also exploited many of these weaknesses - particularly in document and computer security - to pass sensitive information to the KGB.

With respect to personnel security, Hanssen was never subject to a wide variety of basic security techniques and procedures that could have deterred or perhaps uncovered his espionage. For example, Hanssen was never asked to submit to a polygraph examination during his 25-year FBI career, despite his extraordinarily broad access to extremely sensitive human and technical intelligence information from across the Intelligence Community. After Ames's 1994 arrest, FBI National Security Division managers argued for an aperiodic, random polygraph program, but the FBI's most senior management rejected that request, largely because of concerns regarding false positives. Hanssen's arrest in 2001 finally prodded the FBI to make a polygraph examination part of the standard five-year background reinvestigation. According to the FBI, by June 2003 it had also expanded its polygraph program by implementing aperiodic, random polygraph examinations.

Hanssen likewise was never asked to complete a detailed financial disclosure form during his FBI career. During our interviews, Hanssen identified meaningful financial disclosure as the security technique that would have provided the greatest deterrence to his espionage. As it was, Hanssen felt comfortable depositing thousands of dollars of the KGB's cash in a passbook savings account - listed in his own name - at a bank located a block away from FBI Headquarters. He also safely invented stories about family wealth and successful investments to explain his spending. The FBI reported in July 2003 that a financial disclosure program "will be implemented within the next month." Given that financial gain is often an important motive for committing espionage, developing a credible financial disclosure program is a critical element in improving the FBI's personnel security with respect to both deterrence and detection.

Hanssen received his first - and only - background reinvestigation in 1996, 20 years after he had joined the FBI. The FBI has conceded that a number of "red flags" emerged during Hanssen's reinvestigation that were not resolved. The FBI's perfunctory background reinvestigation of Hanssen was not atypical, however. The system in place for background reinvestigations discouraged thoroughness. The principal investigators were not given access to the necessary source materials, such as the employee's personnel file, security file, and credit reports, and they primarily interviewed references supplied by the employee. They did not interview the employee. Moreover, the principal investigators merely collected information; they were not required to provide analysis or to make investigative recommendations. As a result, information developed through background reinvestigations received little analysis.

In committing espionage, Hanssen exploited serious weaknesses in the FBI's document and information security. His access to classified national security information - for both hard copies and computer files - was subject to little control or monitoring throughout his FBI career. As a result, he walked out of the FBI with copies and originals of some of the U.S. government's most sensitive classified material - including numbered Top Secret documents - with little fear of being stopped or detected. The FBI's inability to account for its most sensitive documents and failure to limit this information to those with a "need to know" has been noted both by the OIG and by the FBI's internal reviews in the past, but remains uncorrected. This deficiency is significant with respect to both deterrence and detection, because the FBI's inability to account for its most sensitive documents makes an access-based investigation for an FBI mole extremely difficult to pursue. The starting point for any such investigation is a list of those employees who had access to a compromised operation; at the FBI, that determination is often impossible to make.

During his last period of espionage, Hanssen used the FBI's ACS computer system to track the FBI's most sensitive espionage investigations - including the investigation that was looking for him. Hanssen also routinely searched the system for references to his own name and home address, and to the signal and drop sites that he used, to assure himself that he was not under investigation. Hanssen conducted thousands of searches for highly sensitive information that he had no conceivable "need to know," without fear that a computer audit would reveal his misconduct. As with his record of cash deposits, it would have been difficult for Hanssen to invent an innocent explanation for his repeated searches regarding his name, address, and signal and drop sites. Even more significantly, an audit of Hanssen's ACS activity would have identified him as someone worthy of investigation.

The serious security flaws in the FBI's ACS system - which have been discussed in prior OIG reviews and internal FBI inspection reports - have been apparent since the system's inception in 1995, but have not been remedied. Access restrictions are subject to ready override by Headquarters personnel who, like Hanssen, have no "need to know" about the sensitive operations the access restrictions are designed to protect. The system is likewise prone to human error, with documents concerning highly sensitive operations - such as the Hanssen investigation - being made available to any curious user because of improper uploading or inadequate restriction codes. The ACS system's audit function, mandated by Justice Department regulations and a principal tool against unauthorized usage as well as espionage, was rarely utilized before Hanssen's arrest.

Today, more than two years after Hanssen's arrest, the ACS system remains insecure and vulnerable to misuse. The current audit program relies on case agent review rather than third-party auditing. Moreover, the program has only retroactive effect; case agents do not receive real-time notice when someone seeks unauthorized access to their cases. The "need to know" principle is not adequately applied in the computer context within the Counterintelligence Division; all Headquarters Counterintelligence Division agents have access to all cases in the Division whether or not their section or unit is connected to the case. Finally, the system's susceptibility to human error has not been remedied. In response to the OIG's findings regarding the ACS system, the FBI reported in July 2003 that "attempting technical changes to improve ACS security would not be a smart business decision" in light of plans to implement a new automated case system known as the Virtual Case File (VCF). The FBI stated that the first delivery of VCF is scheduled for December 2003. In developing and implementing VCF, it is vital for the FBI to rectify the types of security flaws that have been evident in the ACS system for many years.

The FBI's lax approach to personnel and information security also was apparent in its handling of security violations. Hanssen's career was replete with security breaches, none of which were documented in his personnel or security file or (with one exception) reported to the FBI's Office of Professional Responsibility, the Security Programs Manager, the NSD's Security Countermeasures Section, the Justice Department Security Officer, or any other central location for review and consideration of appropriate disciplinary action. While these security breaches did not necessarily show that Hanssen was engaged in, or was predisposed to engage in, espionage, they demonstrated that he was unfit to have access to sensitive information. Our review revealed unwillingness within the FBI to report security violations and take them seriously, even when highly sensitive information was involved. The Hanssen case also highlighted the absence of a centralized reporting program for security violations at the FBI, as well as the absence of a unit at FBI Headquarters responsible for collecting derogatory information concerning FBI employees, particularly in the counterintelligence context. In July 2003, the FBI reported that a security incident program had been instituted that will be managed by a new Security Compliance Unit. According to the FBI, the Security Division and the Counterintelligence Division will meet on a monthly basis to discuss counterintelligence-related issues.

Many of the security issues that emerged from our review of the Hanssen case stem from deficiencies in training. For example, FBI personnel specialists responsible for employee background reinvestigations did not have the necessary analytical training to assess issues that commonly arise during background investigations. FBI employees using the ACS system did not have sufficient knowledge and training to use the security controls that were built into the system to regulate access to sensitive cases. FBI employees were not knowledgeable regarding the requirements for handling classified materials, particularly at the Sensitive Compartmented Information (SCI) level. And employees and supervisors were not properly trained in how to report and document security violations. We believe that the FBI will not see significant improvement in its internal security until its employees are better trained on security issues.

In sum, the absence of adequate security controls at the FBI made espionage too easy for Hanssen to commit. Because of inadequate document security, he felt comfortable removing thousands of pages of classified documents from FBI offices. Because of lax controls over even the most sensitive information and violations of the "need to know" principle, he knew that he could compromise the FBI's most important Soviet/Russian assets and operations with little risk that the loss of these cases would be traced to him. Because of inadequate computer security, he felt free to conduct thousands of searches on the ACS system for references to himself and for information concerning the FBI's most sensitive counterintelligence cases. Because of the absence of financial disclosure, he felt comfortable depositing thousands of dollars in espionage proceeds into his bank accounts. Because of the absence of polygraph examinations for onboard employees, he never had to confront the issue of what would happen when he failed polygraph questions aimed at determining whether he was or had ever been an agent of a foreign power. And because of a flawed and inadequate background reinvestigation program, he never had to fear that the FBI would uncover spending and other behavior inconsistent with his position at the FBI.

The defects in the FBI's security program were the product of decades of neglect. Historically, FBI management did not allot sufficient resources to security and rejected internal recommendations - for example, in the polygraph area - to make necessary improvements to the program. As a consequence, following Hanssen's arrest, the FBI faced enormous challenges in the areas of personnel, computer, and document security. While the FBI has made progress in many of these areas, in others - particularly computer security - problems have not been fully remedied and significant work still needs to be done. The FBI's Security Division must receive appropriate resources and support to ensure that the security program is significantly improved.

V. The Failure to Deter and Detect Hanssen's Espionage

The FBI's failure to deter and detect Hanssen's espionage over a more than 20-year period cannot be attributed to any individual FBI employee or small group of FBI supervisors. In addition, it is important to note that the agents and analysts who conducted the FBI's penetration investigations were extremely dedicated and hard-working, and demonstrated an impressive commitment to the counterintelligence mission. Their work produced many successes.

At the same time, we found overarching problems in the FBI's internal security efforts. Most of the deficiencies discussed in our report are of longstanding vintage and reflect the cumulative decisions of many FBI employees, including the Directors and senior managers who failed to remedy serious flaws in the FBI's personnel, document, and information security programs; the Directors and senior managers who failed to devote sufficient resources and attention to the penetration issue in the 1980s and early 1990s, and failed to resolve how important FBI human sources and operations had been compromised; the unwillingness of line personnel working on the espionage investigation of the CIA suspect to reconsider initial conclusions and judgments in the face of investigative failures, and senior managers' failure to insist that they be revisited; the failure of senior managers to ensure that accurate information was supplied to the Justice Department concerning the investigation of the CIA suspect; the supervisors and colleagues who ignored Hanssen's pattern of security violations and his obvious lack of suitability for handling sensitive information; and the managers who provided such lax supervision of Hanssen that he was able to spend much of his time on non-work related matters, or worse, committing espionage. These were widespread failings.

We believe that what is needed at the FBI is a wholesale change in mindset and approach to internal security. The FBI must recognize and take steps to account for the fact that FBI employees have committed espionage in the past and will likely do so in the future. A unit at the FBI must be responsible for asking every day whether there is evidence that the FBI has been penetrated, and the FBI's internal security program must shift from a program relying on trust to a program based on deterrence and detection. The following 21 recommendations are concrete steps the FBI should take to improve its internal security and ability to deter and detect espionage in its midst.

VI. Recommendations

A. Improving the FBI's Performance in Detecting an FBI Penetration

Recommendation No. 1: New Penetration Unit at FBI Headquarters
A specialized permanent unit should be created within the Counterespionage Section at FBI Headquarters dedicated to determining whether the FBI has been penetrated. This Unit would be responsible for, among other things, analyzing relevant source information, resolving how compromised assets and operations were lost, and reviewing operations that lost their productivity or effectiveness for no apparent reason, all with a view towards determining whether the Bureau has been penetrated.

Recommendation No. 2: Senior Operational Post for Intelligence Community Representative in FBI Counterespionage Section
The FBI should create a senior operational position in the Counterespionage Section at FBI Headquarters that will be filled - on a rotating basis - by senior executives from the CIA and other components of the Intelligence Community.

B. Improving Coordination with the Justice Department

Recommendation No. 3: Criminal Division Involvement in Counterintelligence Investigations
Department of Justice Criminal Division personnel should be full participants in counterintelligence investigations once suspicion has focused on a specific individual.

Recommendation No. 4: More Substantive Role for OIPR Attorneys
OIPR attorneys should have a larger oversight role in ensuring the accuracy and fairness of factual assertions in FISA applications and have direct access to the case agent and the source information relied on in the application.

C. Improving Source Recruitment, Security, and Handling

Recommendation No. 5: Greater Emphasis on and Resources for New Source Recruitment
The FBI should place greater emphasis on and provide more resources for targeting and recruiting intelligence officers in hostile intelligence services who are likely to have knowledge of penetrations of the Intelligence Community.

Recommendation No. 6: Stricter Standards for Handling and Tracking Sensitive Information from Significant Human Sources
The FBI should adopt stricter standards for handling and tracking sensitive information from significant human sources and should enforce the "need to know" policy in disseminating information from such sources. The FBI should also adopt special handling techniques to better account for dissemination of such information.

Recommendation No. 7: Guidelines for Handling Recruitments-in-Place/Defectors
The FBI should adopt guidelines for handling active recruitments-in-place and recent defectors that, among other things, limit the disclosure of sensitive information, such as details of ongoing espionage investigations, to such individuals.

D. Security Improvements

Recommendation No. 8: Central Repository for Derogatory Information
The FBI should create a central repository for the receipt, collection, storage, and analysis of derogatory information concerning FBI employees with access to sensitive information. This repository should be directly accessible to Counterespionage Section personnel responsible for determining whether the FBI has been penetrated. The FBI should mandate that information or allegations that reflect on the integrity, suitability, or trustworthiness of an employee be documented and transmitted to this central repository for analysis. The FBI should also train employees in recognizing the types of behavior that should be reported.

Recommendation No. 9: Documentation of Security Violations
The FBI should create policies and procedures designed to ensure that security violations are reported, documented in an employee's security file, and properly investigated and resolved. A database should be created to track security violations by employees and identify patterns and trends. The FBI should conduct regular security awareness training of its personnel, and this training should include clear instructions regarding the reporting of security violations.

Recommendation No. 10: Meaningful Background Reinvestigations
The FBI should adopt new procedures to ensure that background reinvestigations are thorough, meaningful, and timely. Responsibility for this program should be consolidated within the Security Division, and an automated case management system should be installed that captures, stores, and facilitates the analysis of personnel security information.

Recommendation No. 11: Financial Disclosure
The FBI should implement an annual, computer-based financial disclosure program for employees with access to sensitive information. The program - which should include disclosure of all accounts held by the employee and immediate family members in financial institutions - should be designed to detect unusual fluctuations in assets and cash flow as well as extraordinary levels of debt, and should involve both collection of information and analysis.

Recommendation No. 12: Random Counterintelligence Polygraph Program
The FBI should fully implement a counterintelligence polygraph program for employees with access to sensitive information and develop a counterintelligence polygraph program for non-FBI personnel who are given access to sensitive information.

Recommendation No. 13: Enhanced Security Measures for FBI Employees with Unusually Broad Access to Sensitive Information
The FBI should consider enhanced security measures - for example, more frequent polygraph examinations, more frequent and thorough background reinvestigations, and more detailed financial disclosures - for employees who enjoy unusually broad access to sensitive information.

Recommendation No. 14: Detecting Improper Computer Usage and Enforcing "Need to Know"
The FBI should implement measures to improve computer security, including (a) an audit program to detect and give notice of unauthorized access to sensitive cases on a real-time basis; (b) an audit program designed to detect whether employees or contractors are using the FBI's computer systems to determine whether they are under investigation; (c) procedures designed to enforce the "need to know" principle in the context of computer usage; and (d) a program designed to ensure that restricted information cannot be improperly accessed through the use of security overrides or other means.

Recommendation No. 15: Tracking Classified Information
The FBI should create and implement a program enabling it to account for and track hard copy documents and electronic media containing sensitive information. This program should also be designed to prevent the unauthorized removal of sensitive information from FBI facilities, either through the use of technology that "tags" classified documents and computer media or through other means. The FBI should likewise develop a program to prevent the improper copying of classified information.

Recommendation No. 16: Security Compliance Program
The FBI should implement a security inspection program that ensures that deficiencies in security are detected and remedied within a reasonable time. Compliance with recommendations from internal audits and inspection reviews, as well as from external oversight reviews, should be tracked and monitored until resolution.

Recommendation No. 17: Improving Security Education and Awareness
The FBI should make implementation of an FBI-wide security education and awareness program a top management priority. In addition, the FBI should track and regularly monitor the status of employee security training.

E. Management and Administrative Improvements

Recommendation No. 18: Exercise of Managerial Authority over Espionage Investigations
FBI supervisors must guard against excessively deferring to line personnel when supervising significant espionage investigations and must ensure that the Department of Justice is properly briefed on the strengths and weaknesses of potential espionage prosecutions.

Recommendation No. 19: Damage Assessments for FBI Spies
Damage assessments concerning FBI employees who have committed significant acts of espionage should be led by experienced counterintelligence personnel and be conducted by an Intelligence Community entity, such as the National Counterintelligence Executive (NCIX).

Recommendation No. 20: Recusal Procedures for FBI Employees
The FBI should adopt written policies and procedures for recusal of FBI employees and supervisors who may be suspects in an espionage investigation.

Recommendation No. 21: Supervision of FBI Detailees
The FBI should ensure that FBI detailees serving in other Intelligence Community components and elsewhere are properly supervised and receive regular performance evaluations.



Glenn A. Fine
Inspector General

August 2003


Scott M. Barden
Kevin F. Becks
Paul G. Gardephe
Stephen D. Kelly
Mei Lin Kwan-Gett
Jeffrey D. Long
Jeffrey K. Vasey
Dominic N. Russoli
L. Susan Woodside






The Centre for Counterintelligence and Security Studies (CI Centre) provides advanced and innovative CI and security training, analysis and consulting for people in the intelligence, national security and defense communities in the US Government as well as for the corporate sector. Espionage, spies and spying activities are in the news everyday. Get a professional, in-depth understanding of the issues and enhance your CI and security awareness by attending our executive-level courses taught by experts retired from the FBI, CIA, DOD, Military Intelligence, RCMP and KGB as well as renowned intelligence historians and authors. Learn more about us and our staff.





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3:40 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

A Review of the FBI's Performance in Deterring, Detecting, and Investigating the Espionage Activities of Robert Philip Hanssen

August 14, 2003
Office of the Inspector General

UNCLASSIFIED EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

I. Introduction

In this report, the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) of the Department of Justice (DOJ) examines the performance of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in deterring, detecting, and investigating the espionage of Robert Philip Hanssen, a former FBI Supervisory Special Agent. Hanssen's espionage began in November 1979 - three years after he joined the FBI - and continued intermittently until his arrest in February 2001, just two months before his mandatory retirement date. In addition to its management responsibility to detect espionage among its employees, the FBI is the lead agency for detecting and investigating espionage committed in the United States.

Hanssen became an FBI agent in 1976. During his 25-year FBI career, he principally served in Soviet counterintelligence assignments in New York City and Washington, D.C. In the 1980s and 1990s, Hanssen held positions at FBI Headquarters and the State Department that gave him access to a broad range of highly sensitive counterintelligence and military information. On February 18, 2001, after a three-month investigation of Hanssen, he was arrested and charged with committing espionage on behalf of the KGB (Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti, the intelligence service of the former Soviet Union) and its successors. On July 6, 2001, Hanssen pled guilty to espionage charges pursuant to a plea agreement in which he agreed to cooperate with the U.S. government and submit to debriefings. On May 10, 2002, Hanssen was sentenced to life imprisonment.

Hanssen's espionage spanned three separate time periods: 1979-81, 1985-91, and 1999-2001. Over more than 20 years, Hanssen compromised some of this nation's most important counterintelligence and military secrets, including the identities of dozens of human sources, at least three of whom were executed. Hanssen gave the KGB thousands of pages of highly classified documents and dozens of computer disks detailing U.S. strategies in the event of nuclear war, major developments in military weapons technologies, information on active espionage cases, and many other aspects of the U.S. Intelligence Community's Soviet counterintelligence program.

Shortly after Hanssen's arrest, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) and the Attorney General asked the OIG to review the FBI's performance in connection with the Hanssen case. This report details the results of the OIG's investigation.

II. Summary of the OIG Investigation and Structure of the Report

The OIG assembled a team of three Special Investigative Counsel, a project director, three OIG Special Agents, two analysts, and a consultant to conduct this review. The team reported directly to the Inspector General.

The team obtained, reviewed, and analyzed more than 368,000 pages of material from the FBI, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the Justice Department, the National Security Agency (NSA), and the State Department. The team also conducted more than 200 interviews in 12 states and the District of Columbia. We interviewed Hanssen's former colleagues and supervisors at the FBI and State Department, as well as family, friends, and acquaintances who knew Hanssen throughout his life. We interviewed much of the operational hierarchy of the FBI's Intelligence/National Security Division (NSD) during the 1979 to 2001 period. In addition, we interviewed CIA and Justice Department personnel who had substantial involvement with the FBI regarding "penetration" matters - that is, investigating whether a foreign intelligence service has infiltrated or recruited agents within U.S. organizations. The team also interviewed Hanssen extensively.

Our full 674-page report is classified at the Top Secret/Codeword level because it contains extremely sensitive classified information regarding sources involved in the Hanssen case and FBI counterintelligence activities. We also produced a 383-page report, classified at the Secret level, which does not contain the detailed information on the sensitive sources that is included in the Top Secret/Codeword version. In addition, we produced this 31-page unclassified executive summary to provide a public summary of the main findings in the more extensive classified reports. We previously provided a copy of all three reports to the FBI for its comments on their factual accuracy and classification, and we made changes where appropriate.

In our reports, we divide Hanssen's FBI career into three phases that roughly correspond with the three periods of his espionage and with key FBI penetration-related efforts. One chapter is devoted to each phase, and within each chapter there are three parts: Hanssen's career, Hanssen's espionage, and the FBI's penetration efforts.

Chapter One covers the time period between 1976, when Hanssen joined the FBI, and 1985, when he completed his first tour in the Soviet Analytical Unit at FBI Headquarters. This chapter also includes background information concerning Hanssen's childhood, education, and employment prior to becoming an FBI agent. Hanssen's first espionage - conducted on behalf of the GRU (Glavnoye Razvedyvatelnoye Upravleniye, the Soviet Union's military intelligence arm) - took place between 1979 and 1981. The FBI's investigation of Soviet-related penetration leads during this time period was minimal.

Chapter Two covers the time period between 1985 - when Hanssen became the supervisor of an FBI technical surveillance squad in New York and volunteered to the KGB - and 1992. Hanssen's FBI career progressed normally during these years, which also constituted his most active period of espionage. With respect to the penetration issue, both the CIA and the FBI suffered catastrophic and unprecedented losses of Soviet intelligence assets in 1985 and 1986, which suggested that a mole was at work in the Intelligence Community. The FBI conducted several analytical efforts - including a major joint project with the CIA - that were unsuccessful at determining the cause of these compromises.

Chapter Three begins in 1992 and ends with Hanssen's arrest in February 2001. In January 1992, Hanssen became the Chief of the National Security Threat List Unit at FBI Headquarters, the highest ranking position he held at the FBI. Hanssen's failings as a supervisor and his inability to properly handle classified information led the FBI to remove Hanssen from his Unit Chief position, and he was subsequently detailed to the State Department as the FBI liaison to the Office of Foreign Missions (OFM). He served for six years in the OFM, until shortly before his arrest. With respect to espionage, Hanssen made a clumsy and aborted approach to the GRU in 1993 and then successfully re-volunteered to the KGB in 1999. Hanssen's espionage - which during this period relied heavily on his improper use of the FBI's Automated Case Support (ACS) computer system - continued until his arrest in February 2001.

The FBI's penetration-related investigations increased dramatically in the 1992 to 2001 period. The FBI substantially increased the resources it devoted to the penetration issue and successfully identified and prosecuted several individuals who spied for Russia, including CIA officer Aldrich Ames. The most significant espionage investigation that the FBI pursued after the 1994 arrest of Ames, however, was the search for the penetration of the U.S. Intelligence Community who was later determined to be Hanssen. The FBI believed early on that the mole worked at the CIA and subsequently pursued a lengthy investigation of a CIA employee. We now know that from the outset the FBI was focused on the wrong suspect at the wrong agency.

Chapter Four of our report examines deficiencies in the FBI's internal security that were apparent during our investigation of the Hanssen matter. This chapter discusses how flaws and deficiencies in the FBI's programs and policies concerning background reinvestigations, financial disclosures, polygraph examinations, computer security, classified document handling, and procedures for reporting and documenting security violations made it easier for Hanssen to commit espionage and more difficult for the FBI to detect him. It also describes the changes that have been made, or not made, to the FBI's internal security program since Hanssen's arrest in 2001.

Lastly, Chapter Five summarizes our principal factual findings and sets forth our recommendations for changes in the FBI's counterintelligence and security programs.

III. Principal Findings of the OIG Investigation

In the following paragraphs, we summarize the report's principal findings concerning Hanssen's career at the FBI, his espionage, and the FBI's penetration-related efforts from 1978 to 2001.

A. Hanssen's FBI Career

During his 25 years with the FBI, Hanssen was a mediocre agent who exhibited strong technical abilities but had weak managerial and interpersonal skills. Despite his failings as a supervisor, Hanssen was on the FBI's promotional track for much of his FBI career, and he generally received average to favorable performance evaluations. While Hanssen's day-to-day behavior did not suggest that he was engaged in espionage, he continually demonstrated an unwillingness to properly handle classified information. His indiscretions and security violations were largely ignored and wholly undocumented, however, and he was allowed to remain in positions offering him broad access to highly sensitive counterintelligence information. Ultimately, Hanssen's inability to effectively interact with subordinates and colleagues derailed his FBI career.

Hanssen received minimal supervision in most of his positions, was not required to produce significant work product, and had ample time to plan and commit espionage while on duty. Hanssen also encountered few security checks at the FBI. He was never asked to submit to a polygraph examination or to complete a financial disclosure form, and he received only one background reinvestigation during his 25-year FBI career.

To his FBI co-workers, Hanssen's personal life appeared completely inconsistent with that of a spy. He was married with six children, and appeared to be a devout Catholic who attended mass every day and who was actively involved in Opus Dei, a conservative Catholic lay organization. He also espoused politically conservative and anti-Communist views. Hanssen had no alcohol, drug, or gambling problems, and did not engage in ostentatious spending.

Hanssen was an only child whose father, a lieutenant in the Chicago Police Department, emotionally abused him throughout his life. Starting from a young age, Hanssen enjoyed spy-related entertainment, especially James Bond books and movies, collected items associated with espionage, such as a Walther PPK pistol, a Leica camera, a shortwave radio, and opened a Swiss bank account. Hanssen was an average student in college, majoring in chemistry. He drifted through dental school and business school - and became a certified public accountant - before joining the Chicago Police Department. After four years, Hanssen left the police department to join the FBI in January 1976.

Hanssen appeared to be an appropriate candidate for the FBI, in light of his college education, master's degree in business administration, experience as a certified public accountant, and service in the Chicago Police Department. The FBI's initial background investigation and interviews did not indicate that Hanssen was likely to commit espionage. While Hanssen came to the FBI with serious personal insecurities, low self-esteem, and a fascination with espionage, these characteristics did not emerge during the application process.

Once in the FBI, Hanssen's personality traits set him apart from his FBI colleagues. He had poor interpersonal skills and a dour demeanor, and was an awkward and uncommunicative loner who conveyed a sense of intellectual superiority that alienated many of his co-workers. Early in his career, however, Hanssen demonstrated significant initiative and organizational skills, developing, for example, a case prioritization system that remains in use today at the FBI. He also had an interest in and aptitude for computer work that was highly unusual at the time, and a number of his early supervisors regarded him as smart, technically proficient, and analytical.

After graduation from the FBI Academy at Quantico, Virginia, Hanssen served an initial two-year tour as a Special Agent in Gary, Indiana. While Hanssen sought out counterintelligence assignments in Gary, there was little such work available. At the end of his tour, Hanssen requested a transfer to the FBI's New York Office. Within six months of his arrival in New York, Hanssen arranged to be transferred from a Criminal Division squad to Soviet counterintelligence work, which remained his assignment for most of his FBI career. Hanssen quickly began exploiting weaknesses in the FBI's internal information security. While still assigned to a Criminal Division squad in the FBI's New York Office, Hanssen took advantage of the unrestricted and unmonitored access to the closed file room and spent hours reading Soviet espionage files - without any conceivable "need to know" - managing to identify some of the FBI's most significant Soviet sources in the process. Hanssen - who appeared to have little aptitude for operational work - demonstrated a strong interest in computers and in administrative assignments, and was given responsibility for managing the New York Office's counterintelligence database, a position that put him at the center of the information flow.

In the early 1980s, Hanssen served in the Budget Unit and in the Soviet Analytical Unit at FBI Headquarters - positions that provided him with broad access to sensitive information and an opportunity to use his technical and computer skills, but did not require operational work. Because the Budget Unit was responsible for preparing materials justifying the FBI's budget requests to Congress, Hanssen obtained access to sensitive information from all components of the Intelligence Division, and worked closely with the NSA and the CIA to secure joint funding for certain projects. In the Soviet Analytical Unit, Hanssen gained access to the FBI's most sensitive human assets and technical operations against the Soviet Union. He also began a noticeable pattern of mishandling classified information, primarily by disclosing the existence of Soviet sources and investigations to people with no "need to know," such as FBI employees in other divisions and personnel from other agencies. While Hanssen's tours in the Budget and Soviet Analytical Units showed that he was an intelligent, analytical agent with significant computer skills, his performance also revealed that he lacked the interpersonal skills to communicate effectively and perform supervisory duties. Nonetheless, Hanssen's career at the FBI continued to advance.

In 1985, Hanssen returned to the New York Office as the supervisor of a technical surveillance squad. Hanssen was a lackadaisical manager who did not interact effectively with his subordinates. Because the squad largely "ran itself," however, Hanssen's limited interpersonal skills did not become a significant issue. Similarly, Hanssen's mishandling of classified information was obvious to his subordinates but was not brought to the attention of his superiors.

In 1987, Hanssen returned to the Soviet Analytical Unit in FBI Headquarters as a supervisor, a position that he told the OIG he found "overwhelmingly attractive" because of the extremely broad access to sensitive information it offered. Although Hanssen received very favorable performance evaluations during his second tour in the Unit, his supervisor regarded him as the "strangest person" he had ever worked with in the FBI - a "kind of cipher who was rigid, dour, and a religious zealot." As was the case during his first tour in the Unit, Hanssen produced little work product, and his subordinates regarded him as distant and arrogant. Shortly after his return to the Unit, Hanssen committed a serious security breach by disclosing sensitive information to a Soviet defector he was debriefing. Hanssen's colleagues recognized that he could not be trusted with highly sensitive information and informally attempted to restrict his access. Although this security breach was reported to an FBI supervisor, it was not documented, and no formal action was taken against Hanssen, whose access to sensitive information remained largely unchecked.

In 1990, Hanssen became an Inspector's Aide in the Inspection Division, a position that was considered a prerequisite for advancement at the FBI. In this position, Hanssen traveled to FBI field offices to help rate their overall performance. In June 1991, Hanssen became a program manager in the Soviet Section at FBI Headquarters, where he supervised operational programs designed to counter Soviet efforts to acquire scientific and technical information. This assignment was brief and uneventful.

In January 1992, Hanssen became chief of the National Security Threat List (NSTL) Unit, a new unit at FBI Headquarters that dealt with economic espionage, theft of trade secrets and critical technologies, and nuclear proliferation. This position required significant management skills and an ability to work effectively with the FBI's field offices, and Hanssen's deficiencies in these areas quickly became apparent. Hanssen's subordinates found him disinterested in the Unit's work and were frustrated by his failure to provide guidance and direction. Rather than engage in the daily work of the Unit, Hanssen frequently sat in his office listening to foreign language tapes for hours at a time. Hanssen also had poor relations with the FBI's field offices, which complained that he rejected an inordinately high percentage of their proposals for investigations.

While in the NSTL Unit, Hanssen committed two serious and flagrant security breaches. First, he hacked into the FBI's computer system and accessed highly sensitive Soviet counterintelligence documents located on the hard drives of his colleagues and supervisors in the National Security Division. Hanssen grew nervous about what he had done and decided to report it to FBI management in the guise of revealing a flaw in the FBI's computer security. Hanssen's ruse succeeded, and no one questioned his breach of computer security. Hanssen's second significant breach occurred when, in direct contravention of a decision made by FBI management, he disclosed to the British intelligence service information about a highly sensitive FBI investigation. At about this time, Hanssen also came under investigation by the FBI's Office of Professional Responsibility because of a physical altercation with a female FBI support employee. The investigation resulted in a letter of censure and a five-day suspension. The physical altercation, the improper disclosure to British intelligence, and Hanssen's poor performance in the NSTL Unit doomed his chances for further advancement at the Bureau.

As part of an FBI-wide program in which Headquarters personnel were reassigned to FBI field offices, Hanssen was involuntarily removed from his position as NSTL Unit Chief in April 1994 and transferred to the FBI's Washington Field Office (WFO), where he was assigned to a computer squad in a non-supervisory capacity. While not an official demotion, Hanssen was no longer on the management track for higher supervisory positions at the Bureau. Hanssen largely ignored his new assignment in the field office and soon began seeking work at FBI Headquarters. For several months, Hanssen worked on computer-related projects for senior NSD officials.

In late 1994, FBI management began considering Hanssen as a candidate to fill an FBI position in the Office of Foreign Missions (OFM) at the State Department. OFM regulates selected activities of foreign missions in the United States to protect U.S. foreign policy and national security interests, and also helps foreign missions protect their diplomats and facilities. Hanssen's FBI superiors saw the OFM liaison position as a good "out of the mainstream" job for Hanssen, a supervisory agent who had proven incapable of supervising others. Hanssen started at OFM in February 1995 and remained at the State Department for the next six years.

Hanssen's work responsibilities at OFM consumed no more than a few hours a day, and he was wholly unsupervised by either State Department or FBI personnel. The job carried no significant operational or managerial responsibilities, and once Hanssen was at OFM, FBI management largely forgot about him. No one checked on him or his work - or even ensured that he was at work. No performance evaluations concerning Hanssen were completed during the entire six years that he served at OFM. Hanssen took full advantage of the light workload and complete lack of supervision, spending hours each day out of the office, surfing the Internet and watching movies on his personal laptop computer, and visiting friends and acquaintances.

During Hanssen's detail to the State Department, the FBI provided him with a desktop computer that was connected to the FBI's ACS computer system. The ACS system gave Hanssen access to thousands of internal FBI classified documents for which he had no "need to know." To determine whether he was under investigation by the FBI, Hanssen also frequently searched the ACS system for references to his own name and address. In addition, he successfully mined the system for information concerning the FBI's most sensitive espionage investigations. While the ACS system had audit capability, Hanssen's improper searches went undetected because the FBI did not conduct audit trail reviews absent an allegation of wrongdoing.

Hanssen continued to commit security violations while at the State Department. He improperly disclosed classified information to others - including NSA and State Department employees, close friends, and members of the press. Hanssen's most egregious security breach at OFM - an attempt to install password breaker software on his FBI computer - was discovered by the FBI's computer specialists, who documented the incident and referred it to the FBI's Security Programs Manager. Hanssen told the Security Programs Manager that he had installed the hacking program in order to connect to a color printer, however, and he suffered no negative consequences as a result of this misconduct. As with Hanssen's other security violations, nothing about the matter was recorded in either his personnel or security file.

In late 2000, after the FBI received information identifying Hanssen as a Russian mole, the FBI offered him a Senior Executive Service position at FBI Headquarters, where he could be closely monitored. Hanssen was arrested on February 18, 2001.

B. Hanssen's Espionage

Hanssen was the most damaging spy in FBI history, and he betrayed some of this nation's most important counterintelligence and military secrets, including the identities of dozens of human assets, at least three of whom were executed. Hanssen committed espionage intermittently, starting and stopping several times during his 25-year FBI career. He engaged in three discrete periods of espionage - 1979-81, 1985-91, and 1999-2001 - and unsuccessfully attempted to renew his espionage on behalf of the GRU in 1993. The reasons why Hanssen initially began committing espionage, and repeatedly returned to it, are complex and, as we explain below, changed over time. Many of the factors that have motivated or influenced traitors in the past - such as greed, ideology, career disappointments and resentment, and drug and alcohol abuse - do not apply to Hanssen or do not fully explain his conduct.

Our review of the Hanssen case revealed that there was essentially no deterrence to espionage at the FBI during the 1979 to 2001 time period and that the FBI's personnel and information security programs presented few obstacles to Hanssen's espionage. His removal of hundreds of classified documents from the FBI - including original and numbered Top Secret documents - and improper searches of the Bureau's computer system for references to himself and to the Bureau's most sensitive espionage investigations went unnoticed. Because of lax supervision, Hanssen felt free to conduct many of his espionage-related activities while on duty, including creating encryption devices for communicating with the Russians, servicing dead drops, and counting his cash payments from the Russians. These deficiencies in deterrence, detection, and supervision played a major role in Hanssen's willingness and ability to commit espionage over a more than 20-year period.

1. First Period of Espionage: 1979 - 1981

Hanssen first began spying for the Soviets in November 1979, just eight months after he transferred to a counterintelligence squad in the FBI's New York Office. While on duty, Hanssen volunteered his services to the GRU by delivering a package to a GRU officer at a Soviet trade organization. In his correspondence with the GRU, Hanssen revealed that he was an FBI agent, but offered no other identifying information. Over the next year and a half, Hanssen conducted clandestine exchanges with the GRU, receiving cash payments totaling at least $21,000.

Hanssen's initial decision to commit espionage arose from a complex blend of factors, including low self-esteem and a desire to demonstrate intellectual superiority, a lack of conventional moral restraints, a feeling that he was above the law, a lifelong fascination with espionage and its trappings and a desire to become a "player" in that world, the financial rewards he would receive, and the lack of deterrence - a conviction that he could "get away with it." We believe that the personality flaws and background that Hanssen brought with him into the FBI likely played a more significant role in his decision to commit espionage than anything that happened to him after he became an agent.

Hanssen's first period of espionage ended in the spring of 1981, when his wife Bonnie inadvertently discovered him reviewing a GRU communication in the basement of their home. Although Hanssen minimized his espionage in discussions with his wife, he says that he confessed his espionage to an Opus Dei priest within days of Bonnie's discovery. According to Hanssen, the priest granted him absolution and told him that he did not have to turn himself in, but suggested that he donate the money he had received from the GRU to charity. Hanssen said that he broke off contact with the GRU and made multiple $1,000 donations to Mother Teresa's "Little Sisters of the Poor."

The most significant information that Hanssen passed during this period concerned the identity of a long-time FBI asset in the GRU. Hanssen's first period of espionage was less damaging to the U.S. intelligence effort than his next two periods of espionage.

2. Second Period of Espionage: 1985 - 1991

Hanssen remained a dormant spy from 1981 until October 1985, when he volunteered to the KGB, the Soviet Union's principal intelligence service. In his letter to the KGB's Washington Residency, Hanssen was careful to maintain his anonymity and did not disclose his prior espionage on behalf of the GRU. Using the alias "Ramon" or "Ramon Garcia," Hanssen provided the KGB with information concerning the Intelligence Community's most important Soviet counterintelligence and military secrets, much of which he had learned while assigned to the Soviet Analytical Unit. Although Hanssen was working in New York from September 1985 to August 1987, all of his operational espionage activity during this period took place in the Washington area. According to Hanssen, he chose to volunteer to the KGB because he believed it was more professional, had a longer-term outlook, and paid more money than the GRU.

We believe that Hanssen's decision to resume espionage was motivated by many of the same factors at play in 1979. His obsession with espionage (which he referred to as an "addiction"), his lack of self-esteem and desire for recognition, his belief that he could commit espionage without being detected, and the lack of effective deterrence all played a role. The fact that Hanssen had done it before made it easier for him to do it again. Hanssen's return to espionage also was likely fueled by his knowledge that he had successfully evaded detection in the past and was in a position to demand a large payment from the Russians for the highly sensitive information he had obtained in the Soviet Analytical Unit.

During the next six years - the last stages of the Cold War - Hanssen delivered thousands of pages of highly classified documents and dozens of computer disks to the KGB detailing U.S. strategies in the event of nuclear war, major developments in military weapons technologies, identities of active and historical U.S. assets in the Soviet intelligence services, the locations of KGB defectors in the United States, analytical products from across the Intelligence Community, comprehensive budget and policy documents, and many other aspects of the Soviet counterintelligence program. He passed some of the most damaging information within his first two months of espionage, including the true names of the FBI's most significant Soviet sources at the time, KGB officers Sergey Motorin and Valeriy Martynov. Other significant operations that Hanssen compromised during this period included the FBI's espionage investigation of Felix Bloch, a senior State Department official suspected of providing information to the KGB, and an FBI analytical report regarding possible Soviet penetrations.

Toward the end of Hanssen's second period of espionage, he became increasingly careless, passing documents that clearly marked him as an FBI employee. For example, when he was assigned to the Inspection Division, he gave the KGB FBI inspection reports and documents that he took from field offices while on inspection assignments. Hanssen also compromised Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) wiretap applications prepared by the FBI. In a particularly reckless move, Hanssen suggested to the KGB that it attempt to recruit Jack Hoschouer, Hanssen's closest friend, who was then serving as a military attaché at the U.S. Embassy in Bonn.

Hanssen's second period of espionage contributed to the execution of at least three human sources - including Motorin and Martynov - and caused hundreds of millions of dollars worth of damage to U.S. intelligence programs. In return, the KGB gave Hanssen cash payments of at least $500,000, as well as three diamonds. He stored the cash, as much as $100,000 at a time, in a gym bag in his bedroom closet. He also deposited large amounts of the KGB's money into a passbook savings account in his own name at a bank located a block from FBI Headquarters. While Hanssen has not accounted for much of the money he received from the KGB, it is clear that he spent some of it on an addition to his home, cars, tuition payments for his children's private schools, gifts, a loan to his brother-in-law, and at strip clubs. In late 1989, Hanssen began a year-long relationship with a stripper, Pricillia Sue Galey. Hanssen paid for Galey to accompany him on an FBI Inspection Division trip to Hong Kong, bought her a Mercedes Benz, provided her with an American Express card, and gave her jewels, cash, and other gifts.

In August 1990, Hanssen's brother-in-law, FBI Special Agent Mark Wauck, heard that Hanssen's wife Bonnie had found $5,000 in unexplained cash in Hanssen's dresser drawer. Wauck reported this and other incidents he found suspicious to a supervisor in the FBI's Chicago Field Office. Although Wauck and the supervisor now have significantly different recollections of their conversation, we believe that Wauck provided the supervisor with enough information to warrant some follow up. Instead, the supervisor readily dismissed Wauck's concerns, in part because there was no policy or procedure mandating that he pass the information on for analysis and possible investigation. This incident highlights deficiencies in the FBI's protocol for the receipt and investigation of derogatory information about an agent. There was no standard procedure for reporting and collecting such information, nor was there a central repository at the FBI responsible for collecting this information.

After picking up a $12,000 KGB payment in December 1991, Hanssen again broke off contact with the Soviets. Hanssen told us that he took this action because of his increasing guilt and after confessing his espionage to Catholic priests. We are skeptical of this explanation, however, because Hanssen's decision to halt his espionage coincided with the fall of the Soviet Union, as well as with the initiation of a new FBI/CIA molehunt effort that Hanssen knew about. Both events increased the risk that Hanssen's espionage would be detected or disclosed.

3. Unsuccessful Approach to the GRU: 1993

A year and a half after breaking off contact with the KGB in late 1991, Hanssen made an awkward and unsuccessful attempt to reestablish contact with the GRU. The risks Hanssen took in approaching the GRU in 1993 far outweighed any he had taken during his first two periods of espionage. In July 1993, Hanssen approached a GRU officer in the garage of the officer's apartment building. Hanssen identified himself as an FBI agent, explained that he had worked for the KGB under the name Ramon Garcia, and tried to give the officer a package containing summaries of double agent cases that the FBI was running against the GRU. The GRU officer refused to accept the package, and then reported the approach to his superiors. The Russians filed a protest with the U.S. government - apparently believing that the approach had been an officially sanctioned provocation - and the FBI opened an investigation. Although Hanssen's approach to the GRU officer was reckless in a variety of ways, the FBI's investigation of this incident - which Hanssen monitored through the FBI's computer system - was unsuccessful.

Hanssen claimed that two factors motivated this approach to the GRU. First, he wanted an explanation as to why the GRU was still running double agent cases that he had previously compromised to the KGB. Second, he "felt pity" for the GRU and wanted to ensure that it knew which of its sources were actually double agents. Although Hanssen denied that this approach was motivated by a need for money, he sought funds from a wide variety of sources at about this time. Indeed, the day of the failed approach, Hanssen asked his mother for $10,000. In addition, even though Hanssen made this approach the day after his father died, he claimed not to remember the proximity of these two events during his debriefings and OIG interviews.

Hanssen's 1993 approach to the GRU was remarkable for its recklessness and self-destructive quality. Unlike his prior periods of espionage, Hanssen had face-to-face contact with a Russian intelligence officer, asked other FBI employees to conduct computer searches concerning this officer, and demonstrated virtually no regard for his personal security. Hanssen told the OIG that when the approach failed, it "shocked [him] back out of that mental state."

4. Third Period of Espionage: 1999 - 2001

In 1999, Hanssen revolunteered to the KGB. Over the next two years, Hanssen provided the Russians with information concerning some of the FBI's most significant KGB sources and most sensitive espionage investigations. Hanssen had obtained most of this information from improper searches of the FBI's ACS computer system. As with his second period of espionage, Hanssen used the pseudonym "Ramon Garcia" and communicated through dead drop exchanges, but passed many documents that were unmistakably FBI products. Hanssen's decision to resume espionage in 1999 was driven by two factors: (1) his discovery - through the ACS system - of the FBI's effort to identify a significant KGB mole believed to be a CIA officer; and (2) his deteriorating finances.

While searching the ACS system in the spring of 1999, Hanssen stumbled upon the FBI's most significant ongoing Russian espionage investigation. This case was a search for the KGB mole who turned out to be Hanssen. At the time, however, the FBI's investigation was focused on a CIA officer. Although the FBI did not intend for documents related to this highly sensitive investigation to be uploaded into the ACS system - because of widespread concerns about the system's security - many such documents were uploaded due to failures in training, simple human error, and insufficient concern about maintaining operational security. Within a day of discovering the existence of the investigation, Hanssen obtained the CIA suspect's true name. Hanssen decided to warn the KGB about the investigation and thereby "save" the CIA suspect. Hanssen also stated that the case offered him all of the "excitement" and "stimulation" from espionage that he craved.

At the same time, Hanssen's financial situation was the worst it had ever been. Although Hanssen was close to the top of the FBI pay scale, his spending continually outstripped his income. He had significant credit card debts, car loans, bank loans, and tuition payments for his children. While Hanssen's mother had previously supplemented his income, giving him more than $94,000 in the mid-1990s, she told Hanssen in 1997 that she was running out of money. Hanssen claimed that he set a goal of obtaining approximately $100,000 from the KGB, believing that this amount would stabilize his finances, at least until he retired from the FBI and entered the private sector.

When Hanssen reestablished contact with the KGB in July 1999, he did so as "Ramon Garcia." Hanssen indicated that he needed money and provided a communications plan using a drop site from his second period of espionage. In August 1999, the KGB paid Hanssen $50,000. Over the next year, Hanssen made several attempts to pass information through dead drop exchanges, but the KGB failed to retrieve his packages. Accordingly, Hanssen resorted to mailing the KGB a disk and a letter which provided the true names of several individuals under investigation for espionage, as well as information concerning two FBI assets in the Russian intelligence services and two significant FBI technical operations. Hanssen's last successful dead drop exchange occurred in November 2000, when he gave the KGB a large stack of classified documents from the ACS system that he had been collecting for over a year.

In late 2000, the FBI identified Hanssen as a spy and lured him back to FBI Headquarters - where he could be more easily monitored - with the offer of a temporary Senior Executive Service position involving computer security. Hanssen began his new position on January 13, 2001. On February 12, 2001, the FBI discovered a package containing $50,000 that the KGB had left for Hanssen in a dead drop site. Six days later, on February 18, 2001, after Hanssen had left a package for the KGB in a different dead drop site, he was arrested and charged with espionage offenses.

Although Hanssen escaped detection for more than 20 years, this was not because he was a "master spy." While Hanssen took some important steps to maintain his security - such as refusing to reveal his identity to his Russian handlers - and used his knowledge of the FBI's counterintelligence practices and poor internal security to his advantage, much of Hanssen's conduct when committing espionage was reckless. For example, Hanssen (1) set up an FBI camera on a drop site he used for exchanges with the GRU during his first period of espionage; (2) used an FBI telephone line and answering machine for communications with the KGB in 1986; (3) deposited much of the KGB's cash directly into a passbook savings account in his name in the late 1980s; (4) suggested to his Russian handlers in 1991 that they attempt to recruit Jack Hoschouer, his best friend; (5) directly approached a GRU officer in 1993 and revealed that he was an FBI agent who had previously committed espionage for the KGB - an approach that led to a diplomatic protest from the Russians and an FBI investigation that could have identified Hanssen as a mole; and (6) searched the FBI's computer system, during his last period of espionage, for references to his own name, address, and drop and signal sites - conduct that would have been difficult to explain if the FBI had utilized the computer system's audit feature. In sum, Hanssen escaped detection not because he was extraordinarily clever and crafty, but because of longstanding systemic problems in the FBI's counterintelligence program and a deeply flawed FBI internal security program.

A. FBI Analytical and Investigative Penetration Efforts: 1978 - 2001

The FBI's penetration efforts in the late 1970s and 1980s suffered from a lack of cooperation with the CIA and from inattention on the part of senior management. In 1985 and 1986, the CIA and FBI lost nearly every significant human asset then operating against the Soviet Union. These losses were unprecedented in scope, quantity, significance, and timing, yet the FBI undertook no sustained effort to determine their cause. Senior management was almost entirely unaware of the scope and significance of these losses, and throughout the 1980s the FBI failed to work cooperatively with the CIA to resolve the cause of these losses or to thoroughly investigate whether an FBI mole could be responsible for these setbacks. We now know that Hanssen compromised many of the assets and operations lost during the mid-1980s.

The early 1990s saw significant improvement in FBI/CIA cooperation, with the two agencies undertaking a joint investigation concerning the cause of the 1985-86 asset losses. The FBI drastically increased the number of squads and personnel devoted to espionage investigations, and the FBI's senior management took a much more active role in supervising penetration investigations. The energized penetration efforts led to successful espionage prosecutions of CIA officers Aldrich Ames and Harold Nicholson, FBI Special Agent Earl Pitts, and NSA detailee David Boone. While the FBI worked closely with the CIA's Special Investigations Unit (SIU) on most of these cases, the SIU was not an equal partner. The FBI's failure to keep the CIA apprised of information concerning non-CIA espionage investigations - such as the case involving FBI agent Earl Pitts - undermined the effort to identify Hanssen.

In attempting to identify the mole who turned out to be Hanssen, the FBI intensively pursued a CIA suspect. This investigation culminated in the submission of a report to the Justice Department that appeared to seek the prosecution of that CIA suspect, despite the fact that some senior FBI managers had serious reservations about the conclusions of the report and doubted whether the officer - who has since been exonerated by the FBI - was the correct target.

Although the FBI pursued penetration leads in the 1990s that we now know related to Hanssen, he received no investigative scrutiny until late 2000. Indeed, the FBI never opened even a preliminary inquiry on any FBI employee in connection with the search for the mole ultimately identified as Hanssen. This was true even though the FBI had access to information suggesting that the mole might be an FBI employee, and believed that the mole had compromised certain FBI assets and operations.

Longstanding systemic problems in the FBI's counterintelligence program played an important role in the FBI's failure to uncover Hanssen. Most importantly, the FBI demonstrated a reluctance to consider itself as a possible source for a penetration in the absence of leads identifying a specific FBI target. Thus, the FBI maintained a focus on the CIA as the mole's employer despite information indicating that the mole might be an FBI employee.

Ineffective oversight by FBI management and poor coordination with the Justice Department also contributed to the length of the FBI's investigation of the wrong suspect and the failure to pursue alternative avenues. The FBI managers with supervisory authority over the investigation often deferred to line personnel - even when the managers harbored serious doubts about the progress of the investigation - resulting in a tacit endorsement of erroneous analysis and conclusions. This problem was compounded by the FBI's poor coordination with the Justice Department components responsible for overseeing intelligence investigations - the Office of Intelligence Policy and Review (OIPR) and the Criminal Division's Internal Security Section (ISS). Because the FBI did not provide the Justice Department with complete information about its investigation - omitting crucial information about weaknesses in proof and investigative setbacks - the Justice Department could not properly evaluate the strength of the FBI's case against the CIA suspect.

1. Ad Hoc Analytical and Investigative Efforts from the 1970s to 1993

In the 1970s and early 1980s, the FBI investigated several source reports of Soviet penetrations of the FBI and CIA. None of the leads from this time period appears to have any connection to Hanssen's espionage.

In the 1980s and early 1990s, the FBI's response to learning that an important FBI Soviet asset was compromised or to receiving information indicating that a human penetration was at work was often to create an ad hoc team to examine the issue. These efforts were typically analytical rather than investigative. While each study considered the possibility of an FBI mole, none involved an actual investigation of this issue, and none resulted in an investigation being opened on a specific FBI employee. Likewise, none of these efforts concluded that a penetration of the FBI was responsible for the ongoing compromises that the FBI's Soviet program experienced from the mid-1980s to early 1990s.

In late 1986, the FBI learned that its two most significant Soviet assets - KGB officers Motorin and Martynov - had been arrested for espionage within the previous year. This appears to be the first notice the FBI received concerning compromises attributable to Hanssen, who we now know compromised both assets in October 1985, confirming information that CIA officer Aldrich Ames had provided to the KGB in June 1985.

After learning that its two most important KGB assets had been arrested, the FBI formed a six-person task force to determine how they had been compromised and whether an FBI mole was responsible. In the course of its review, the Task Force discovered that because of poor document controls and violations of the "need to know" principle it was impossible to determine who within the FBI had had access to the Motorin and Martynov cases. Accordingly, no FBI employee with knowledge of these assets was investigated. Nonetheless, in September 1987 the Task Force issued a final report stating that there was no evidence of a Soviet spy in the FBI. The Task Force, however, did not resolve how the assets had been compromised.

During the Task Force effort, the FBI learned that the CIA had likewise suffered catastrophic and unprecedented losses in its Soviet program. Yet, the FBI failed to work cooperatively with the CIA to resolve the cause of these losses.

Between 1987 and 1991, the FBI suffered continuing losses of Soviet human assets and technical operations that it could not explain. During this period, the FBI conducted two analytical studies that considered the penetration issue, but neither study led the FBI to investigate the possibility of an FBI mole. The first study was a two-year effort aimed at resolving historical allegations of an FBI penetration. The project proceeded chronologically, and by late 1988 the team had analyzed leads only from the 1950s and 1960s. In an interim report, the team concluded that two penetrations of the FBI existed before 1964, but the team never reached the time period relevant to the FBI's more recent and unprecedented losses. The project was abandoned in the summer of 1989.

The second study systematically examined more than 50 FBI operations that had been compromised since 1986, including human assets, technical operations, double agent programs, and recruitment operations. The final report, issued in November 1988, described the continuing, across-the-board problems within the FBI's Soviet operations, but was equivocal with respect to the possibility of an FBI mole. The report suggested that a CIA penetration was a more likely explanation for the FBI's losses. We now know that Hanssen compromised most of the significant operations discussed in the report.

In 1991, the FBI and the CIA formed the SIU, which was directed to analyze the numerous FBI and CIA cases lost after 1985 and to prepare a list of suspects who could account for the losses. Simultaneously, the FBI created a new investigative squad at WFO to pursue investigative leads generated by the SIU and, in the meantime, to reanalyze many of the same FBI compromises and penetration leads considered during the FBI's earlier analytical efforts. By the end of 1992, after reviewing numerous FBI and CIA historical compromises without any investigative progress, the squad began to disband while awaiting new leads from the SIU.

While the SIU obtained compelling evidence that CIA officer Aldrich Ames was a Russian mole and was likely responsible for many of the compromises at issue, the team's March 1993 final report merely stated that there was a KGB penetration in the CIA who began his espionage in 1985. The report failed to highlight Ames as a suspect worthy of special investigative attention. Instead, Ames was presented simply as one of 40 CIA employees who had access to the Soviet operations compromised in the 1985-86 period. The report did not include a comparable list of FBI employees. Although the SIU's final report raised the possibility of a KGB penetration of the FBI, the team did not undertake or recommend any meaningful action concerning this possibility.

2. Penetration Investigations and the Search for Hanssen: 1993 - 2001

The years between 1993 and 2001 marked one of the most active and productive periods for espionage investigations in the FBI's history. The FBI greatly expanded its counterespionage effort and successfully apprehended a number of significant Russian spies. This period was dominated, however, by the search for a KGB mole who was reportedly more damaging than Ames. The FBI poured enormous resources into this search. The FBI believed early on, however, that the mole was a CIA employee and did not change that view. We now know that the FBI was on the wrong track from the beginning, because the mole the FBI was looking for was Hanssen, an FBI employee.

As the investigation unfolded, the FBI focused on a specific CIA employee. Given the information it had at the time, the FBI's initial selection of this CIA employee as the lead suspect was understandable. Although an extensive investigation of this CIA suspect failed to yield any conclusive evidence of espionage, the FBI became convinced that he was a KGB mole. This was due in part to the suspect's ambiguous and sometimes suspicious behavior and in part to a belief that this individual had emerged as the lead suspect as the result of an objective and scientific process. Despite its lack of success in the investigation, the FBI, in a 70-page Investigative Report, informed the Justice Department that the CIA suspect was a significant KGB mole, and sought an opinion as to whether he could be prosecuted for espionage.

The FBI should have seriously questioned its conclusion that the CIA suspect was a KGB spy and considered opening different lines of investigation. The squad responsible for the case, however, was so committed to the belief that the CIA suspect was a mole that it lost a measure of objectivity and failed to give adequate consideration to other possibilities. In addition, while FBI management pressed for the investigation to be completed, it did not question the factual premises underlying it. Similarly, the CIA's SIU did not serve as an effective counterbalance to the FBI, because it was not an equal partner in the molehunt.

The supervisory failures in connection with the espionage investigation of the CIA suspect are most apparent in the context of the Investigative Report that the FBI presented to the Justice Department. Although several senior FBI managers had serious doubts that the CIA suspect was the correct target, and expected the Justice Department to decline prosecution for a lack of evidence, the Investigative Report was written as if the FBI had no doubt that the CIA suspect was a KGB mole who was the most damaging spy since Ames.

Fortunately, the Justice Department never brought charges against the CIA suspect, because while prosecutors were reviewing the case the FBI determined that Hanssen was in fact the KGB mole. In late 2000, the FBI opened an investigation of Hanssen, and on February 18, 2001, he was arrested for espionage. The FBI later exonerated the CIA suspect.

IV. Summary of the FBI's Security Programs During Hanssen's Career

The Hanssen case highlighted significant, longstanding deficiencies in the FBI's internal security program, many of which were brought to the attention of FBI management over the years but were not corrected. Historically, the FBI has not been in compliance with Executive Orders, Justice Department regulations, and Intelligence Community standards regarding internal security. Although we found that the FBI has taken many important steps to improve its internal security program since Hanssen's arrest - including the implementation of a counterintelligence-focused polygraph examination program, the development of a financial disclosure program, and the creation of a Security Division - some of the most serious weaknesses still have not been fully remedied. These weaknesses expose the FBI to the risk of future serious compromises by another mole.

Before Hanssen's arrest, the FBI's security program was based on trust. Rather than taking the sort of proactive steps adopted by other Intelligence Community components - such as requiring regular counterintelligence polygraph examinations, financial disclosures, and meaningful background reinvestigations, and utilizing audit functions regarding computer usage - the FBI trusted that its employees would remain loyal throughout their careers. The Hanssen case shows the danger of that approach.

In our review, we observed serious deficiencies in nearly every aspect of the FBI's internal security program, from personnel security, to computer security, document security, and security training and compliance. These deficiencies led to the absence of effective deterrence to espionage at the FBI and undermined the FBI's ability to detect an FBI mole. Moreover, the absence of deterrence played a significant role in Hanssen's decision to commit espionage. As he explained during debriefings: "[I]f I had thought that the risk of detection was very great, I would never have done it." Hanssen also exploited many of these weaknesses - particularly in document and computer security - to pass sensitive information to the KGB.

With respect to personnel security, Hanssen was never subject to a wide variety of basic security techniques and procedures that could have deterred or perhaps uncovered his espionage. For example, Hanssen was never asked to submit to a polygraph examination during his 25-year FBI career, despite his extraordinarily broad access to extremely sensitive human and technical intelligence information from across the Intelligence Community. After Ames's 1994 arrest, FBI National Security Division managers argued for an aperiodic, random polygraph program, but the FBI's most senior management rejected that request, largely because of concerns regarding false positives. Hanssen's arrest in 2001 finally prodded the FBI to make a polygraph examination part of the standard five-year background reinvestigation. According to the FBI, by June 2003 it had also expanded its polygraph program by implementing aperiodic, random polygraph examinations.

Hanssen likewise was never asked to complete a detailed financial disclosure form during his FBI career. During our interviews, Hanssen identified meaningful financial disclosure as the security technique that would have provided the greatest deterrence to his espionage. As it was, Hanssen felt comfortable depositing thousands of dollars of the KGB's cash in a passbook savings account - listed in his own name - at a bank located a block away from FBI Headquarters. He also safely invented stories about family wealth and successful investments to explain his spending. The FBI reported in July 2003 that a financial disclosure program "will be implemented within the next month." Given that financial gain is often an important motive for committing espionage, developing a credible financial disclosure program is a critical element in improving the FBI's personnel security with respect to both deterrence and detection.

Hanssen received his first - and only - background reinvestigation in 1996, 20 years after he had joined the FBI. The FBI has conceded that a number of "red flags" emerged during Hanssen's reinvestigation that were not resolved. The FBI's perfunctory background reinvestigation of Hanssen was not atypical, however. The system in place for background reinvestigations discouraged thoroughness. The principal investigators were not given access to the necessary source materials, such as the employee's personnel file, security file, and credit reports, and they primarily interviewed references supplied by the employee. They did not interview the employee. Moreover, the principal investigators merely collected information; they were not required to provide analysis or to make investigative recommendations. As a result, information developed through background reinvestigations received little analysis.

In committing espionage, Hanssen exploited serious weaknesses in the FBI's document and information security. His access to classified national security information - for both hard copies and computer files - was subject to little control or monitoring throughout his FBI career. As a result, he walked out of the FBI with copies and originals of some of the U.S. government's most sensitive classified material - including numbered Top Secret documents - with little fear of being stopped or detected. The FBI's inability to account for its most sensitive documents and failure to limit this information to those with a "need to know" has been noted both by the OIG and by the FBI's internal reviews in the past, but remains uncorrected. This deficiency is significant with respect to both deterrence and detection, because the FBI's inability to account for its most sensitive documents makes an access-based investigation for an FBI mole extremely difficult to pursue. The starting point for any such investigation is a list of those employees who had access to a compromised operation; at the FBI, that determination is often impossible to make.

During his last period of espionage, Hanssen used the FBI's ACS computer system to track the FBI's most sensitive espionage investigations - including the investigation that was looking for him. Hanssen also routinely searched the system for references to his own name and home address, and to the signal and drop sites that he used, to assure himself that he was not under investigation. Hanssen conducted thousands of searches for highly sensitive information that he had no conceivable "need to know," without fear that a computer audit would reveal his misconduct. As with his record of cash deposits, it would have been difficult for Hanssen to invent an innocent explanation for his repeated searches regarding his name, address, and signal and drop sites. Even more significantly, an audit of Hanssen's ACS activity would have identified him as someone worthy of investigation.

The serious security flaws in the FBI's ACS system - which have been discussed in prior OIG reviews and internal FBI inspection reports - have been apparent since the system's inception in 1995, but have not been remedied. Access restrictions are subject to ready override by Headquarters personnel who, like Hanssen, have no "need to know" about the sensitive operations the access restrictions are designed to protect. The system is likewise prone to human error, with documents concerning highly sensitive operations - such as the Hanssen investigation - being made available to any curious user because of improper uploading or inadequate restriction codes. The ACS system's audit function, mandated by Justice Department regulations and a principal tool against unauthorized usage as well as espionage, was rarely utilized before Hanssen's arrest.

Today, more than two years after Hanssen's arrest, the ACS system remains insecure and vulnerable to misuse. The current audit program relies on case agent review rather than third-party auditing. Moreover, the program has only retroactive effect; case agents do not receive real-time notice when someone seeks unauthorized access to their cases. The "need to know" principle is not adequately applied in the computer context within the Counterintelligence Division; all Headquarters Counterintelligence Division agents have access to all cases in the Division whether or not their section or unit is connected to the case. Finally, the system's susceptibility to human error has not been remedied. In response to the OIG's findings regarding the ACS system, the FBI reported in July 2003 that "attempting technical changes to improve ACS security would not be a smart business decision" in light of plans to implement a new automated case system known as the Virtual Case File (VCF). The FBI stated that the first delivery of VCF is scheduled for December 2003. In developing and implementing VCF, it is vital for the FBI to rectify the types of security flaws that have been evident in the ACS system for many years.

The FBI's lax approach to personnel and information security also was apparent in its handling of security violations. Hanssen's career was replete with security breaches, none of which were documented in his personnel or security file or (with one exception) reported to the FBI's Office of Professional Responsibility, the Security Programs Manager, the NSD's Security Countermeasures Section, the Justice Department Security Officer, or any other central location for review and consideration of appropriate disciplinary action. While these security breaches did not necessarily show that Hanssen was engaged in, or was predisposed to engage in, espionage, they demonstrated that he was unfit to have access to sensitive information. Our review revealed unwillingness within the FBI to report security violations and take them seriously, even when highly sensitive information was involved. The Hanssen case also highlighted the absence of a centralized reporting program for security violations at the FBI, as well as the absence of a unit at FBI Headquarters responsible for collecting derogatory information concerning FBI employees, particularly in the counterintelligence context. In July 2003, the FBI reported that a security incident program had been instituted that will be managed by a new Security Compliance Unit. According to the FBI, the Security Division and the Counterintelligence Division will meet on a monthly basis to discuss counterintelligence-related issues.

Many of the security issues that emerged from our review of the Hanssen case stem from deficiencies in training. For example, FBI personnel specialists responsible for employee background reinvestigations did not have the necessary analytical training to assess issues that commonly arise during background investigations. FBI employees using the ACS system did not have sufficient knowledge and training to use the security controls that were built into the system to regulate access to sensitive cases. FBI employees were not knowledgeable regarding the requirements for handling classified materials, particularly at the Sensitive Compartmented Information (SCI) level. And employees and supervisors were not properly trained in how to report and document security violations. We believe that the FBI will not see significant improvement in its internal security until its employees are better trained on security issues.

In sum, the absence of adequate security controls at the FBI made espionage too easy for Hanssen to commit. Because of inadequate document security, he felt comfortable removing thousands of pages of classified documents from FBI offices. Because of lax controls over even the most sensitive information and violations of the "need to know" principle, he knew that he could compromise the FBI's most important Soviet/Russian assets and operations with little risk that the loss of these cases would be traced to him. Because of inadequate computer security, he felt free to conduct thousands of searches on the ACS system for references to himself and for information concerning the FBI's most sensitive counterintelligence cases. Because of the absence of financial disclosure, he felt comfortable depositing thousands of dollars in espionage proceeds into his bank accounts. Because of the absence of polygraph examinations for onboard employees, he never had to confront the issue of what would happen when he failed polygraph questions aimed at determining whether he was or had ever been an agent of a foreign power. And because of a flawed and inadequate background reinvestigation program, he never had to fear that the FBI would uncover spending and other behavior inconsistent with his position at the FBI.

The defects in the FBI's security program were the product of decades of neglect. Historically, FBI management did not allot sufficient resources to security and rejected internal recommendations - for example, in the polygraph area - to make necessary improvements to the program. As a consequence, following Hanssen's arrest, the FBI faced enormous challenges in the areas of personnel, computer, and document security. While the FBI has made progress in many of these areas, in others - particularly computer security - problems have not been fully remedied and significant work still needs to be done. The FBI's Security Division must receive appropriate resources and support to ensure that the security program is significantly improved.

V. The Failure to Deter and Detect Hanssen's Espionage

The FBI's failure to deter and detect Hanssen's espionage over a more than 20-year period cannot be attributed to any individual FBI employee or small group of FBI supervisors. In addition, it is important to note that the agents and analysts who conducted the FBI's penetration investigations were extremely dedicated and hard-working, and demonstrated an impressive commitment to the counterintelligence mission. Their work produced many successes.

At the same time, we found overarching problems in the FBI's internal security efforts. Most of the deficiencies discussed in our report are of longstanding vintage and reflect the cumulative decisions of many FBI employees, including the Directors and senior managers who failed to remedy serious flaws in the FBI's personnel, document, and information security programs; the Directors and senior managers who failed to devote sufficient resources and attention to the penetration issue in the 1980s and early 1990s, and failed to resolve how important FBI human sources and operations had been compromised; the unwillingness of line personnel working on the espionage investigation of the CIA suspect to reconsider initial conclusions and judgments in the face of investigative failures, and senior managers' failure to insist that they be revisited; the failure of senior managers to ensure that accurate information was supplied to the Justice Department concerning the investigation of the CIA suspect; the supervisors and colleagues who ignored Hanssen's pattern of security violations and his obvious lack of suitability for handling sensitive information; and the managers who provided such lax supervision of Hanssen that he was able to spend much of his time on non-work related matters, or worse, committing espionage. These were widespread failings.

We believe that what is needed at the FBI is a wholesale change in mindset and approach to internal security. The FBI must recognize and take steps to account for the fact that FBI employees have committed espionage in the past and will likely do so in the future. A unit at the FBI must be responsible for asking every day whether there is evidence that the FBI has been penetrated, and the FBI's internal security program must shift from a program relying on trust to a program based on deterrence and detection. The following 21 recommendations are concrete steps the FBI should take to improve its internal security and ability to deter and detect espionage in its midst.

VI. Recommendations

A. Improving the FBI's Performance in Detecting an FBI Penetration

Recommendation No. 1: New Penetration Unit at FBI Headquarters
A specialized permanent unit should be created within the Counterespionage Section at FBI Headquarters dedicated to determining whether the FBI has been penetrated. This Unit would be responsible for, among other things, analyzing relevant source information, resolving how compromised assets and operations were lost, and reviewing operations that lost their productivity or effectiveness for no apparent reason, all with a view towards determining whether the Bureau has been penetrated.

Recommendation No. 2: Senior Operational Post for Intelligence Community Representative in FBI Counterespionage Section
The FBI should create a senior operational position in the Counterespionage Section at FBI Headquarters that will be filled - on a rotating basis - by senior executives from the CIA and other components of the Intelligence Community.

B. Improving Coordination with the Justice Department

Recommendation No. 3: Criminal Division Involvement in Counterintelligence Investigations
Department of Justice Criminal Division personnel should be full participants in counterintelligence investigations once suspicion has focused on a specific individual.

Recommendation No. 4: More Substantive Role for OIPR Attorneys
OIPR attorneys should have a larger oversight role in ensuring the accuracy and fairness of factual assertions in FISA applications and have direct access to the case agent and the source information relied on in the application.

C. Improving Source Recruitment, Security, and Handling

Recommendation No. 5: Greater Emphasis on and Resources for New Source Recruitment
The FBI should place greater emphasis on and provide more resources for targeting and recruiting intelligence officers in hostile intelligence services who are likely to have knowledge of penetrations of the Intelligence Community.

Recommendation No. 6: Stricter Standards for Handling and Tracking Sensitive Information from Significant Human Sources
The FBI should adopt stricter standards for handling and tracking sensitive information from significant human sources and should enforce the "need to know" policy in disseminating information from such sources. The FBI should also adopt special handling techniques to better account for dissemination of such information.

Recommendation No. 7: Guidelines for Handling Recruitments-in-Place/Defectors
The FBI should adopt guidelines for handling active recruitments-in-place and recent defectors that, among other things, limit the disclosure of sensitive information, such as details of ongoing espionage investigations, to such individuals.

D. Security Improvements

Recommendation No. 8: Central Repository for Derogatory Information
The FBI should create a central repository for the receipt, collection, storage, and analysis of derogatory information concerning FBI employees with access to sensitive information. This repository should be directly accessible to Counterespionage Section personnel responsible for determining whether the FBI has been penetrated. The FBI should mandate that information or allegations that reflect on the integrity, suitability, or trustworthiness of an employee be documented and transmitted to this central repository for analysis. The FBI should also train employees in recognizing the types of behavior that should be reported.

Recommendation No. 9: Documentation of Security Violations
The FBI should create policies and procedures designed to ensure that security violations are reported, documented in an employee's security file, and properly investigated and resolved. A database should be created to track security violations by employees and identify patterns and trends. The FBI should conduct regular security awareness training of its personnel, and this training should include clear instructions regarding the reporting of security violations.

Recommendation No. 10: Meaningful Background Reinvestigations
The FBI should adopt new procedures to ensure that background reinvestigations are thorough, meaningful, and timely. Responsibility for this program should be consolidated within the Security Division, and an automated case management system should be installed that captures, stores, and facilitates the analysis of personnel security information.

Recommendation No. 11: Financial Disclosure
The FBI should implement an annual, computer-based financial disclosure program for employees with access to sensitive information. The program - which should include disclosure of all accounts held by the employee and immediate family members in financial institutions - should be designed to detect unusual fluctuations in assets and cash flow as well as extraordinary levels of debt, and should involve both collection of information and analysis.

Recommendation No. 12: Random Counterintelligence Polygraph Program
The FBI should fully implement a counterintelligence polygraph program for employees with access to sensitive information and develop a counterintelligence polygraph program for non-FBI personnel who are given access to sensitive information.

Recommendation No. 13: Enhanced Security Measures for FBI Employees with Unusually Broad Access to Sensitive Information
The FBI should consider enhanced security measures - for example, more frequent polygraph examinations, more frequent and thorough background reinvestigations, and more detailed financial disclosures - for employees who enjoy unusually broad access to sensitive information.

Recommendation No. 14: Detecting Improper Computer Usage and Enforcing "Need to Know"
The FBI should implement measures to improve computer security, including (a) an audit program to detect and give notice of unauthorized access to sensitive cases on a real-time basis; (b) an audit program designed to detect whether employees or contractors are using the FBI's computer systems to determine whether they are under investigation; (c) procedures designed to enforce the "need to know" principle in the context of computer usage; and (d) a program designed to ensure that restricted information cannot be improperly accessed through the use of security overrides or other means.

Recommendation No. 15: Tracking Classified Information
The FBI should create and implement a program enabling it to account for and track hard copy documents and electronic media containing sensitive information. This program should also be designed to prevent the unauthorized removal of sensitive information from FBI facilities, either through the use of technology that "tags" classified documents and computer media or through other means. The FBI should likewise develop a program to prevent the improper copying of classified information.

Recommendation No. 16: Security Compliance Program
The FBI should implement a security inspection program that ensures that deficiencies in security are detected and remedied within a reasonable time. Compliance with recommendations from internal audits and inspection reviews, as well as from external oversight reviews, should be tracked and monitored until resolution.

Recommendation No. 17: Improving Security Education and Awareness
The FBI should make implementation of an FBI-wide security education and awareness program a top management priority. In addition, the FBI should track and regularly monitor the status of employee security training.

E. Management and Administrative Improvements

Recommendation No. 18: Exercise of Managerial Authority over Espionage Investigations
FBI supervisors must guard against excessively deferring to line personnel when supervising significant espionage investigations and must ensure that the Department of Justice is properly briefed on the strengths and weaknesses of potential espionage prosecutions.

Recommendation No. 19: Damage Assessments for FBI Spies
Damage assessments concerning FBI employees who have committed significant acts of espionage should be led by experienced counterintelligence personnel and be conducted by an Intelligence Community entity, such as the National Counterintelligence Executive (NCIX).

Recommendation No. 20: Recusal Procedures for FBI Employees
The FBI should adopt written policies and procedures for recusal of FBI employees and supervisors who may be suspects in an espionage investigation.

Recommendation No. 21: Supervision of FBI Detailees
The FBI should ensure that FBI detailees serving in other Intelligence Community components and elsewhere are properly supervised and receive regular performance evaluations.



Glenn A. Fine
Inspector General

August 2003


Scott M. Barden
Kevin F. Becks
Paul G. Gardephe
Stephen D. Kelly
Mei Lin Kwan-Gett
Jeffrey D. Long
Jeffrey K. Vasey
Dominic N. Russoli
L. Susan Woodside






The Centre for Counterintelligence and Security Studies (CI Centre) provides advanced and innovative CI and security training, analysis and consulting for people in the intelligence, national security and defense communities in the US Government as well as for the corporate sector. Espionage, spies and spying activities are in the news everyday. Get a professional, in-depth understanding of the issues and enhance your CI and security awareness by attending our executive-level courses taught by experts retired from the FBI, CIA, DOD, Military Intelligence, RCMP and KGB as well as renowned intelligence historians and authors. Learn more about us and our staff.





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3:41 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

SMOKING GUN: The Evidence that May Hang G.W. Bush
Part III
John O'Neill: Was He a Casualty of the Bush Administration?


By Cheryl Seal


"No longer is it just the fear of being attacked by international terrorist organizations -- attacks against Americans and American interests overseas. A lot of these groups now have the capability and the support infrastructure in the United States to attack us here if they choose to do so."
-- John P. O'Neill, 1996


Until he resigned in August of 2001, John O'Neill was the director of counterterrorism for the FBI's New York office, not far from the WTC. O'Neill investigated the bombings of the World Trade Centre in 1993, a US base in Saudi Arabia in 1996, the US embassies in Nairobi and Dar-Es-Salaam in 1998, and the USS Cole.

In the course of these investigations, he became one of the world's top experts on Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda, determined to hunt Bin Laden and his followers down and bring them to justice. Those who worked with him said he “lived, breathed and ate terrorism.” A scrappy, stubborn Irishman with a quick temper, a fondness for the ladies, and a reputation for being brutally blunt on some occasions, and pushy on others, O'Neill was often frustrated by the button-down boundaries of the modern FBI. But he was one of the best sleuths the agency had – as anyone who worked with him would be quick to acknowledge. U.S. attorney Mary Jo White says this of O’Neill: "John went at it comprehensively, yielding things from people in London or people in Yemen we never otherwise would have gotten." Another admirer, former FBI director Louis Freeh remembers O’Neill as “ the paramount, most knowledgeable agent we had in the FBI, probably in the government, with respect to counterintelligence matters."

After years of investigating OBL and Al Qaeda, O’Neill came to the conclusion that "All the answers, everything needed to dismantle Osama bin Laden's organization can be found in Saudi Arabia." That conviction went with him to his grave. Unfortunately for O’Neill and 3,000 other men and women, at every turn after January 2001, the Bush administration blocked the efforts of the “most knowledgable agent it had” to investigate Saudi ties to Bin Laden.

O’Neill saw through Bush from the start and by the summer of 2001 declared that the main obstacles to investigating Islamic terrorism were U.S. oil corporate interests and the role Saudi Arabia played in furthering those interests. Bush not only thwarted an FBI investigation of the bin Laden family, he kept the specific nature of his family's business ties to the Bin Ladens as secret as Cheney’s energy task force list. A few disturbing facts are known, however. For example, Bin Ladens were investors in the Carlyle Group, the secretive energy-and-arms corporation cofounded by George Bush, Sr.. Carlyle was earlier reputed to have been a major stakeholder in Central Asian oil interests, though they have, not surprisingly, dropped from the foreground in the past year. Bin Laden money was also sunk into George W. Bush's first oil companies. A Bin Laden was involved in BioPort, the company that G.W. Bush granted a federal contract for producing anthrax vaccine, even though the company had failed three FDA inspections. It is hard to imagine, given this cosy history, that O’Neill had much use for the Bush clan. It must have truly enraged him when he learned (as he inevitably must have, given his position inside the intelligence grapevine) that Osama bin Laden had flown to Dubai for 10 days for treatment at the American hospital, where he was visited by local CIA agent Larry Mitchell on July 12.

But let’s backtrack to the year before 9/11, back to the fall of 2000.

In October of 2000, after entering the Port of Aden off the coast of Yemen, the USS Cole was hit by suicide bomber. The blast killed 17 and injured 35 Americans. O’Neill was sent over to investigate, as head of the FBI team. Accompanying O’Neill to Yemen were over 100 FBI agents, laboratory experts and forensics specialists, as well as FBI Director Louis J. Freeh. From the earliest moments of the investigation, O’Neill was sure Bin Laden was responsible. However, from the start, his efforts to work the case were sabotaged by US ambassador to Yemen, Barbara Bodine. Bodine refused to cooperate in the investigation or to encourage Yemenis to cooperate. Despite repeated death threats against agents, she refused to allow them to carry the type of weapons O’Neill considered adequate. O’Neill reportedly called Louis Freeh in the middle of the night once expressing anxiety about the safety of his men. The clash between O’Neill and Bodine went steadily from bad to worse, peaking when Bodine publicly called O’Neill a liar. Incredibly, Bodine claimed that through her actions, she was merely trying to keep diplomatic relations running smoothly.

But a look at Ms. Bodine’s history suggests a very different motivation. Throughout her career, Barbara Bodine has served primarily under rightwing old boys and in areas where the oil interests of said old boys are being furthered. Under Reagan, she served as Deputy Principle Officer in Baghdad, Iraq. Under Bush, Sr., she served as Deputy Chief of Mission in Kuwait and was there during the Gulf War. She has also worked for Bob Dole, and far more ominously, for Henry Kissinger. So, in 2000 we find her in Yemen, and though a Clinton appointee, impeding the Clinton administration’s efforts to conduct an investigation of a crime of terrorism in which the chief suspect is the son of a Bush family business associate (see http://www.state.gov/www/about_state/biography/bodine.html.

What makes Bodine’s actions toward O'Neill particularly indefensible is that there is credible evidence that she herself was to blame, at least in part, for the Cole disaster. Kie Fallis, a Defense Intelligence Agency counterterrorism analyst, had issued a report before the disaster, warning of the danger of just such an attack in Yemen. As it turned out, the report was suppressed by senior DIA officals, and by Bodine and Gen. Anthony Zinn, who decided to allow the Cole to enter the Port under the lowest grade of secdurity permitted in the Middle East – though they were both aware of the warning. Fallis quit in protest the day after the bombing.

The report Fallis refers to was “officially” issued six hours after the attack by the NSA. The report said terrorists were known to be actively engaged in “operational planning” for an attack and had traveled to Dubai and Beirut in preparation for this attack. Yet, on Oct 29, senior intelligence officials issued a statement claiming that the warnings they had received were too vague to have justified issuing a stronger alert. (Sound familiar?) (http://navymars.org/national/publicity/Fore%20N%20Aft/2000/Days%20of%20%20Rage.htm)

The Clinton administration intervened in the investigation, and an arrangement was made that at least made it possible for agents to question suspects (thanks to Bodine, even this had been impossible before). O’Neill returned to the States for the holidays. By that time, Bush had succeeded in pulling off the theft of the presidency. O’Neill was barred from returning to Yemen to continue his investigation. Shortly after he returned, while attending a seminar in Tampa, O’Neill’s briefcase, which contained some sensitive papers, was stolen. Although the briefcase was found intact shortly afterward, with only a cigar lighter missing, the incident later proved to be something much more than a petty theft, as you shall see.

From this point on out, incidents, actions, and decisions become so complex and interwoven that a chronology seems the best way to present the information.

. CHRONOLOGY LATE JANUARY 2001 THROUGH SEPTEMBER 11 2001

Late January: Within 10 days of being sworn in until a few weeks before 9/11, Bush becomes preoccupied – obsessed, some have whispered - with trying to cut a deal with the Taliban that would make Afghanistan a new playground for American oil interests. The game plan involved swiping the oil-rich Caspian region from Russian control – proving just how loyal Bush is to his “soul mates” (Putin). From January through August, a time during which he felt sure he could cajole or pressure the Taliban into playing ball, Bush did not consider the Afghan religious despots "evil." In fact, he is reported to have described their repressive regime “as a source of stability in Central Asia" that would provide the ideal environment for the construction of an oil pipeline

February 2001: In a masterpiece of conflicting signals, Bush, after expressing interest in negotiations, orders the Taliban government offices in U.S. closed. The Taliban responds by saying it might be willing to turn over Osama Bin Laden. This suggestion is ignored.

March 2001, Laila Helms, daughter of former CIA director Richard Helms, brings one of Mullah Omar's advisors, Sayed Hashimi to Washington. During that visit, Hashimi meets with the directorate of Central Intelligence at the CIA and the Bureau of Intelligence and Research at the State Department. At one meeting, says Helms, Hashami proposes that the Taliban would be willing to hold bin Laden in one location long enough for the U.S. to locate and destroy him. However, this offer is refused by the Bush administration.

April through August: one warning after another of terrorists attack directed against the U.S. come into the Bush administration, from the UK, Russia, Egypt, Israel, France, Germany, and Russia.

Early May: FBI director Louis Freeh, after being the subject of an intensive rightwing smear campaign (see various NewsMax stories as prime samples) quits - or, more accurately, is forced out.

May: Bush gives Taliban $43 million in what is reported to be a "pot sweetening deal"

June: Freeh now gone, the last of the FBI agents investigating the Cole are suddenly pulled out of Yemen, ostensibly because of the lack of progress and danger.

June: O'Neill meets with French intelligence expert Jean-Charles Brisard in Paris and expresses his frustration at the Bush administration. He tells Brisard he believes the key to making headway against terrorism lies in Saudi Arabia, but that oil interests lie in the way of any serious investigation.

Brisard and his associate Guillaume Dasquié, an intelligence analyst and the editor of Intelligence Online, dedicated their book "Bin Laden: the Forbidden Truth" (released in France in November 2001) to O'Neill. The book has been vigorously avoided by U.S. publishers and everyone in the mainstream U.S. press except Paula Zahn, who has presented excerpts of it.

July: Francesc Vendrell and Tom Simmons (former ambassador to Pakistan)meet with Taliban in Berlin on Bush administration's behalf. A deal that offers a coalition government and a pipeline is proposed to the Taliban. When Tom Simmons threatens the Taliban with military action as an alternative to not accepting the deal, the Taliban reps storm out of the meetings.

July: Possibly as a way to mollify the Taliban, Bush directs FBI to back off Osama Bin Laden

July 6: In response to public pressure, the FBI is sent back to Yemen, but O'Neill is told he is barred from entering the country.

July 10: 'An FBI agent named Kenneth Williams who is based in Phoenix AZ sends a memo to John O'Neill that he suspected an OBL hijacker in training was taking flight lessons at a local flight school. The memo never gets further than whoever O'Neill transmitted it to. And, knowing O'Neill's history, there is no doubt the info was transmitted.

July: 12: Osama Bin Laden receives treatment at an American hospital in Dubai and is visited by CIA agent Larry Mitchell

Mid July: O'Neill meets with again with French intelligence analyst Brisard, this time in NYC. He again expresses frustration at Bush's refusal to pursue OBL or Saudi terrorist ties seriously. It is absolutely certain that O'Neill by now realized that even the memo from Williams would not be followed up on.

August 2. Christina Rocca director of Asian affairs at the State Department, meets the Taliban ambassador in Islamabad to reopen negotiations. Her message from Bush according to intelligence reports repeated in Brisard and Dasquie's book. "Either you accept our offer of a carpet of gold, or we bury you under a carpet of bombs." This medieval offer is refused.

August 6: The most serious terrorist attack warning is delivered to Bush. At this point, it should have been clear to the Bush that, having just four days before threatened the Taliban with military action, there would be a very good chance that something serious might happen, perhaps in the nature of a preemptive strike. Yet it is at this point that Bush decides against taking serious action on the threats.

WHY?

The answer seems painfully clear. As of August 6, we have a president who has delivered an ultimatum to the Taliban, threatening to bomb them. However, there is at this point no pretext to justify "carpeting" Afghanistan with bombs. We also have a president whose ratings have tanked to below 50% and thus needs the sort of infusion of public support a war would provide.

With the warning on his desk, Bush must have seen an opportunity. All he needed to do was... nothing. Time will tell whether or not he realized the scope of the resulting disaster.

Early August: Dick Clarke, the president's terrorism czar at the National Security Council, tells O'Neill he would like to put his name is as his successor. "It would be a powerful position," fellow agent Barry Mawn says. "That person would have direct contact with the FBI and turn around and influence top Cabinet people, and possibly even the president."

Mid-August: A flight school in Minnesota flight reports Zaccarias Moussouai to the local FBI office after Moussouai requested training in how to fly a jet, but not in how to land or take off. Although Moussaoui is arrested, agents did not search his computer and thus missed vital clues.

August 19: New York Times reports that O'Neill is suddently under investigation for the "brief case incident." Tom Pickard, second in command at FBI tells O'Neill he can pretty much kiss the promotion chance goodbye. It is clear O'Neill, like Freeh, is being squeezed out. Friends of O'Neill have said that Pickard, who was very cozy with Ashcroft and the Bush team, acted as the number one road block to O'Neill's efforts to progress in the agency. After Sept. 11, Pickard, who, unlike O'Neill and Freeh, had NO experience invetsigating terrorism (his speciality was white collar crime) was placed in charge of the Sept. 11 investigation and also the anthrax investigation. In November, Pickard retired.

Late August: O'Neill quits the FBI

Early Sept.: O'Neill takes a job as head of security for the WTC. He mentions to friends in New York that he fully expects the building to be targeted by terrorists in the future. http://www.nymag.com/page.cfm?page_id=5513

September 7: The CIA's Promis program begins picking up unusual trading activity for United and American Airlines.

September 11: On O'Neill's second day of work on the 34th floor, the WTC is hit by the first plane. O'Neill makes it out of the building safely, calls his son to say he is OK,. then goes into the other tower to help guide those still inside to safety. Minutes later, O'Neill, along with hundreds of others, is dead, killed by the terrorist the Bush administration refused to allow him to pursue to the best of his ability.




History will be kind to John O’Neill… It will not be kind to George W. Bush.

3:42 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Excerpts from the Speech of
JOHN P. O'NEILL
Chief, International Terrorism Operations
Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Presented at the National Strategy Forum on June 11, 1997
JOHN O'NEILL: Well, thank you, Richard. Thank you all. I guess my first comment is it's wonderful to be back in my adopted home of the City of Chicago. I've been in New York now for five months, and it's still not as good as Chicago from my vantage point. It is my adopted home here. I can see several friends out in the audience. One of them I'm going to single is Jack Townsend, my old partner here, First Deputy Superintendent of the Chicago Police Department. In all of my times here, we always used to say it's the finest police department in the United States and probably in the world. So you're blessed those of you that are citizens here in Chicago by the department.

And what I thought I would do in the limited time that we have is to just give you a little bit of background sort of and make sure we're all on the same playing field as we talk through this particular problem and then give you some idea about the threat today and how we got to this particular trend and what's the background behind it and a little bit of time for some of the things that we're doing, you know, to try to counter the terrorism. Well, let me just give a couple of quick definitions so that we all are on the same playing. The definition of the terrorism in its simplistic form is the use of violence or the threat of violence in furtherance of a political or a social agenda. So if someone burns down an abortion clinic in the United States because a person's pro-life, pro-choice, that would be a politically or socially motivated type of crime in which violence is employed as opposed to a father who's just had a daughter who had an abortion in the clinic and the father is retaliating for personal reasons in terms of definition.

We have the domestic terrorism side of the house which is our indigenous people and indigenous issues. The best example of that in recent times is the Oklahoma City bombing. We have our international terrorism program which deals with those acts of violence that are politically or socially motivated that deal with foreign individuals or foreign interests, some problem somewhere else in the world that comes to our doors or comes to somewhere in the world in which an American or American interest is attacked because of a political or a social agenda. Now, certainly, we have international acts of terrorism that take place in places like Dhahran in Saudi Arabia with the Khobar Towers bombing as an example or the World Trade Center bombing in New York City. So international acts of terrorism in our program can happen here on our shores or overseas if it involves Americans. I guess technically, you could have an act of domestic terrorism if there was a domestically based issue and there were attacks that started let's say in London. I know of no instance where that has happened, any domestic acts of terrorism have occurred here on our shores. Our government collectively uses what I like to say is five and a half tools to fight terrorism. As we talk through this problem and towards the end, I'd like you to keep in mind these five and a half tools and we'll revisit them in terms of how the world and the acts of terrorism have changed and how we deal with it.

The five and half tools, first of all, there's diplomacy. We use our State Department in our diplomatic world try to get countries to come to agreements, treaties and conventions on how we should deal with these problems. And we also issue (inaudible) against those countries that do not come into compliance with those areas of terrorism we're particularly interested in. We use economic sanctions to try to bring countries into some realm of compliance. The best example would be the economic sanctions right now against Libya for their alleged involvement in the Pan Am 103 disaster. We use covert actions. Since not everybody in the world has security clearance, I'll leave that up to your own devices as to what covert actions are. We have military connections. The best example of that probably in relatively recent times is the discotheque bombing in Berlin that took place several years ago when they implicated that Mohammar Qaddafi's Libya was involved and then President Reagan wanted to strike in Tripoli to retaliate for that act of terrorism against the American servicemen. And we have law enforcement. There's this tool which has become quite more involved in the last few years in particular and we'll talk about that. And that half a tool that I say is on that list is really the marriage of the public and private sector to try and fight the problem collectively together so the government would connect into a private sector which would be the other half. Law enforcement as most of you have seen in the last five years come out and law enforcement officials talked about that street crime cannot be dealt with just as a law enforcement problem. We need community policing. We need neighborhood watches. We need the activism to help us combat street crime. And it's pretty much the same way with acts of terrorism. We need to strengthen those soft targets as we investigate groups and individuals whom they try to attack us or attack our citizens. We also need to take a look at those logical places where terrorists may attack and try to strengthen them. So we take the White House and we shut down Pennsylvania Avenue. We have made the White House a much stronger target against terrorists much like a car thief who goes to a parking lot and finds the Club attached to the steering wheel -- that's not a paid endorsement for the Club -- but they see the club on the car and what do they do. They go to the next car that doesn't have the Club on it. And that's much the same mindset in terms of terrorists picking their targets. So we can marry the public and the private sector together in terms of corporate security concerns. You know those places that are logical places for terrorists to hit, we like to do that marrying there. The other job is pretty simple to see, a little bit more difficult to carry out, and our job is relatively simple. It's to prevent acts of terrorism occurring against Americans in the United States and in those situations where an act has occurred have a massive response to be able to catch those people that are involved in the event and stop the -- that word terror, and the terrorists from sometimes stalling the American way of life.

The FBI is the lead agency for terrorism in the United States. We ask you to do at least a little bit of background in terms of what is the playing field or the goal. I've seen that -- have dominated this presentation in two different areas and one is the threat that we see today from the international side, and there are many. But I'm going to devote most of my time directed to a particular significant threat that we see today. At the time of the World Trade Center bombing, the FBI and most of the intelligence community was putting most of its eggs, if you will, in the basket of -- collection, investigations in the states that sponsor terrorism. We still do that. We still look at the states today and also Iran, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Sudan. In fact, that's part of the World Trade Center. The PLO was also one that has remained in the last couple of years. But our efforts were trained towards these particular groups and individuals. The World Trade Center case made us painfully aware that there is this new realm that's out there that's growing at a pretty fast place and that's some of the religious extremism that's going on and there is religious extremism in all the major religions of the world. But one of the ones that we see growing very, very fast is Islamic extremism, and if you look at the World Trade Center bombers, people that had been charged and convicted, they are Egyptian, Pakistani and Kuwaiti and Iraqis and U.S. persons, all coming together. We'll talk a little bit about that.

These individuals are pretty much identified because of their freedom to move across borders. They are bound by a Jihad, a religious belief as opposed to any nation or state. They can quickly assemble and quickly disperse. The other theaters in conflict today include Afghanistan, Southern Sudan, Egypt, Algeria and we've seen that spill over into France with the Algerian Islamic extremists problem, Bosnia, Chechnya, Kashmir, Mindanao, the triwater areas down in South America. And when we go back to the World Trade Center case and we look at how things have changed just in the last few years, how the balance of power has shifted. No one is going to attack, no intelligent state will attack the United States in the foreseeable future because of our military superiority. So the only way that these individuals can attack us and have some effect is through acts of terrorism. The rebel state sponsors continue to be looked at to this very day.

Let's take a look at what has brought out this radical extremism and how we've gotten to where we are. We'll go back just a little bit in time and we'll go back to the time of the Crusades and that continues to be a very significant water shed in the Islamic extremist movement, if you will. We look at rhetoric that's written today in some of their publications and some of their material on the Internet, and they will publish letters from the Crusaders to the Pope in 1099. And the letter will read today, we killed all the Muslims in this town. We killed their women and their children. There will be no more Muslims born in this town ever again. Next to it, there will be an article about today's Pope and his travel schedules. So the rhetoric is trying to incite much like you see some of the incitement in the Christian world in terms of the abortion issue. A lot of incitement, a lot of rhetoric and all this. Moving up quickly in time, another major watershed and that is the Iranian revolution where a movement changed that country's form of government from one of secular nature and separation of church and state to a non-secular form of government was a major water shed event. And most of these issues that we see today in the countries where there is revolt, Islamic revolt, they are Islamic based countries, and they are trying to change the form of government from secular to non-secular form of government.

The Afghanistan conflict or war, if you will, was a major water shed event. If we could take something that we are relatively familiar with, the Viet Nam, and say if that were a Christian or a Catholic country that was being invaded by the North Communists, the North Vietnamese Communists and there was not a call to other countries to come to help but other like minded Christians or Catholics. It was a call to arms. We've got to come together and fight collectively against this scourge of communism. And people from around the world came to Viet Nam, and they were trained in insurgency, and they were trained in how to use explosives, how to assassinate, how to commit acts of terrorism. They did those things and then after the war was over with, they all went back to their homes around the world, trained with that type of technology and having that networking. Like we come together today and we exchange business cards and we know each other when we leave. Well, the same principle is happening in Afghanistan, the Jihad and Islamic players came together to fight the Russians. Branches of our government felt that that was a noble cause and supported that. They were trained in insurgency. They were trained in terrorist activity, and now, they are back in their various countries around the world with that training and having the network capabilities to know other Jihad players around the world who have the same like mind, the same fundamentalist thinking and the same type of training. A major water shed event in this particular problem. Another significant fact about the Afghanistan conflict is they won. They beat one of the largest standing armies in the world at that time which gave them a buoyed sense of success and that they could take on other countries like the U.S. and be likewise successful. The situation, depending upon which side of the isle you may sit on, is the liberation of the City of Jerusalem or the seizure of the City of Jerusalem was another water shed event and this Islamic cause. It became no longer an issue of Jerusalem being a holy shrine, a holy place of all three major religions of the world. It became no longer a conflict between the State of Israel and the Palestinian people. It became a cause between the State of Israel and Islamic people around the world. So Islamics who are in Indonesia or in Mindanao are also angered by the seizure or the liberation of Israel, depending upon which side you're on.

The assassination of Anwar Sadat in Egypt was another major water shed event. The assassination attempt by a group called ___________________ was the Islamic group. Their cause is to change the form of government in Egypt from a secular form of government as we know with separation of church and state to an Islamic non-secular form of government. That's why Sadat was killed. Re-establishment with diplomatic relations with the Vatican and the State of Israel, another major water shed event. A lot of the individuals in this extreme radical movement cannot understand why the State of Israel and the Vatican would team up together. Why would they get back together again if there were not a movement towards another Crusade and they're ganging up against us because we are Islamic extremists.

So those are some of the major water shed events that have gotten us to this place where we are today. Almost all of the extreme groups that we hear in the newspaper, various organizations have a presence in the United States today. They are heavily involved in recruiting. They are heavily involved in fund raising activity. We have found in some instances, engagement in small arms weapons training, independent tactics training and in one instance, explosives training. They talk across group lines. It's not like the old Mafia type cases or Cosa Nostra cases or organized crime cases where you pigeon hole somebody and you say he's a member of this group, he's a member of this group. You tend to figure out who they may be associated with and all of a sudden, they're talking to all of the different groups at a conference where they are all bound again by the Jihad, by their religious beliefs and extremism. And almost all of the groups today, if they chose to have the ability to strike us here in the United States. They're working toward that infrastructure. Our role is to continue to nick away at their infrastructure, their ability to strike us here in the United States and make it too costly of an effort for them to try to do that. The world is obviously getting smaller. The events that take place in France or in Bosnia or Chechnya or Kashmir or Addis Ababa,that was recently attacked, and now, President Mubarek in Egypt, can affect us directly here because in places like Chicago or places like New York -- and we tend to say that we're blessed because we have all of those ethnic make ups in our community. In a city like Chicago, there are people who will be on one side of the cause or the other in those countries around the world where there is conflict. I think that we cannot be isolationists in terms of law enforcement efforts. Our legal attachés assigned overseas continue to grow in number. We're adding another 150. Congress in '86 and '88 passed extraterritorial statutes which means that if an American or an American interest is attacked overseas, if we have the permission of the host government, we will deploy FBI agents overseas to conduct investigations or try to track individuals with this crimes and bring them back to the United States to stand trial. Last year or over the last 18 months, we've brought back six significant terrorists. Located and captured them overseas and brought them back to stand trial under the rules of law in the United States. So we've been successful in that.

When we look at, before we get to the domestic side, when we look at those five and a half tools that I talked about before and how terrorism has changed, it is very difficult now to try and prove state sponsorship of terrorism. These countries have gotten much better in concealing their involvement through a series of surrogates. So our ability to prove any nation or state is behind their funding or training is especially difficult today. When we look at the problems of terrorism in the incidents that we've looked at recently, it's very difficult for us to only employ diplomacy or military intervention or sanctions when you have the pocket of Islamic extremists in the suburbs of Paris. We're not going to bomb the suburbs of Paris. We're not going to use covert actions against them. We're probably not going to impose economic sanctions against the government of France or other like minded countries just because there is a pocket of terrorists in there. So the role of law enforcement has become much more significant over the last few years. Our abilities because of the laws that we have now had enacted and our abilities to travel overseas and make cases and bring them back to court here in the United States using the new law, law enforcement on the scale is a little bit higher in terms of its importance these last few years just because of the nature of terrorism and how it's changing. Certainly, that we can show state sponsorship of terrorism and all of those other tools have become much, much more significant in the law enforcement end. In the last few years, it's played a critical role.

Let me just spend a couple of minutes on the domestic side. And why are we concerned about the domestic side? Well, if I would just remind you all of Kennedy, Sadat, Ghandi and Rabin were all killed by their countrymen. So we need to have a presence. We need to be concerned about those people who would use violence or the threat of violence in furtherance of a domestically based political and social agenda. We have moved from the era of a lot of Ku Klux Klan investigations and Black Panther Party cases and old anti-government movements of years ago into a lot of specific type of hate groups. We have the animal rights groups, the special interest groups that are concerned about protection of the spotted owl in the Pacific Northwest. People are blowing up buildings and blowing up forest ranger's facilities and their cars. The grazing rights issues in the western states. Here in Chicago a few years ago, we had nine incendiary devices that went off in the fur departments of some major department stores here in the city, set off by animal rights activists. So we have those kind of special interests groups involved. Abortion clinics, the abortion issue in the United States, just since 1990, there have been over 500 incidents involving arson and terrorist acts and shootings regarding the pro-life and pro-choice movement in the United States. We still have the old right wing radio hate groups like supremacist groups and left wing destruction of government groups, Marxist, Leninist groups. The new challenges to this growing problem are the militia organizations and the anti-government movement in the United States which continues. They are clearly anti-federal government. They believe that the federal income tax is illegal. Now, there may be some of you here today that don't necessarily agree with the federal income tax. However, I don't think that anybody here would go out and blow out a federal office because you don't like it. They are anti-regulation. They are anti-gun control. We see them in the western states where they may not have license tags issued by the state on their car. They will have license tags issued by heaven or driver's licenses that say that they're issued by heaven. And when we try to tell police officers that are on patrol if you stop a car that has license tags issued by heaven, this is probably someone that A, is not going to recognize your authority and B, is not going to be interested in wearing seatbelts or driving the designated speed limit and those kinds of situations.

What has brought this problem about? It probably goes back to around the time of Watergate or earlier when there began to be a distrust of our government by our citizenry. Now, it is brought about by the Brady bill. These individuals believe that this is really the first step to take away all the guns that are in the United States. I would be remiss if I did not say that ------- does not play a role and some of the rhetoric in the anti-government movement, they are against the United Nations and the thought of a one world order. They believe that the UN is really running the country, that there are Soviet troops in the United States based in Kansas, that FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency has interment camps designed in places like Oklahoma to take Americans to and hold them. Other than this, we've done some outreach to try to talk to these groups and individuals. We have used the National Sheriff's Association. Most of these individuals see themselves as true constitutionalists. They go back to the founding documents like the Magna Carta. They go back to the old sheriff system, the sheriff system in English common law, and they see that sheriffs are the only duly constituted law enforcement officers in the United States. So they respect their authority. And there's another advantage. If they don't like them, they can vote them out of office in four years. But we have worked with the Sheriff's Association and we go out and we meet with some of these militia groups with the intervention of the sheriffs. We try to drink iced tea on their front porches and we tell them that FBI agents and law enforcement are, we put our pants on and our skirts on the same way as they do in the militia group. And we also try to convince them, that when they see Belgian paratroopers falling out of the sky with blue bonnets on their head that they should call the FBI first and let them take first crack at that problem as opposed to them interceding in our behalf.

Let me just give you an idea, just a quick run down of some of the incidents that we have seen which may be telling for you to some degree just in the last couple of years. At the end of 1994, there was a plane that left Manila. It was en route to Tokyo with an intermediate stop in Cebu in the Philippines. A gentleman got on the plane in Manila, got a ticket all the way through to Tokyo and got off at Cebu. And en route, a bomb went off on the plane. Killed one Japanese national and injured a number of other people in that plane. The pilot was successful in landing the plane in Okinawa. We conducted some investigation of that assisting the Philippine National Police. Shortly thereafter, in January of '95, an apartment caught on fire in Manila. And in that apartment, we found the fingerprints of a fellow by the name of Ramsi Achmed Yosef who was just convicted of his involvement in a scheme to blow up 12 U.S. jumbo jets all at the same time in southeast Asia. So those of you that travel may remember a lot of security warnings that were put into place in southeast Asia back in January, February and March of 1995. Usually, they would get on the flight and all of the components for that bomb were hand carried on and put together in the restroom of that plane. It included a battery that was in a transistor radio. It included a Casio watch on his wrist. Those components were just carried in an eye contact solution, following the other ones in a canister of liquid.

When we searched that apartment with the Philippine National Police, we found a lot of the components. We found the plans to blow up the 12 U.S. air carriers starting with a test run, if you will, to see if this could be put together on a plane and if it would work with a small charge. Much larger charges were going to be used. The plan called for all 12 jumbo jets to be blown up as they flew over major American cities throughout the United States. The case was successfully stopped, the plans were stopped. All the individuals involved have been caught at various places around the world and brought back to New York where they stood trial and one recently was convicted. Ramsi Yosef continues to get ready to stand trial for his alleged involvement in the World Trade Center bombing. Also in that apartment, we found clerical garb, priest robes, Bibles, the crucifix, rosary beads. And as you look out the window of the apartment, you realize that it was on the route for the Pope's visit.

February, '95 in Brailing, Michigan, a group of militia individuals were attempting to blow up a barracks at a National Guard Armory where they believed Soviet troops were housed. They believed that there were Soviet tanks, assuming there were, and they were captured during the Gulf War and they were being moved around the country on flat bed railroad cars for training purposes for our military. The barracks that they planned on blowing up housed U.S. military personnel. It was a completely successful intervention of a potential terrorist attack. March 8, 1995, two U.S. Consulate employees killed in a hail of machine gun fire in Pakistan. FBI agents were deployed there. March 20, 1995, a water shed event in terms of weapons of mass destruction following those (inaudible) attack in Tokyo. Two Americans were in that subway system and survived their injuries. FBI agents were deployed to Tokyo and as we said, places like Chicago and New York have the luxury -- in New York City, there was a branch of the (inaudible) regional sect that we had to (inaudible) a pretty significant intelligence collection effort against it within 24 hours after the attack.

Okay. April 19, 1995, I think most of us remember where we were. I certainly know where I was for the next 35 days after the bombing of the Edward T. Murragh Federal Building in Oklahoma City. In May, a (inaudible) bombing attack in (inaudible) territories. An American was killed. The FBI was deployed. In June, the coverage of a person who was able to order through the mail catalog a strain involving plague and have it delivered to his home. He was apprehended. The plague sample was found in the glove compartment of his car, and he was affiliated with the Aryan Nation. In July, a bunch of hostages were taken in Kashmir. The FBI was deployed and remain since July of 1995 in Kashmir working on that case. August, another bombing attack on the Left Bank. An American killed. The FBI was deployed. In September, a grenade attack at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow. FBI agents deployed. That was interesting working with the Russians. If you (inaudible) and there was not one video camera that took pictures in front of the U.S. Embassy in Moscow. (Inaudible) of the (inaudible) on October 1st of 1995, and his father was about to blow up a number of significant facilities in New York City. October 9th, a train derailed in Hayden, Arizona where one railroad employee was killed. November of '95, the bombing of U.S. run Saudi National Guard training center in Riyadh. Six Americans killed. In June of '96, truck bombing of the Khobar Towers facility in Dhahran. July the 17th, we continue to work on the TWA crash, 800 investigation. July 27th, the bombing in Centennial Park, Olympic facilities down in Atlanta. New bombings, additional bombings in Atlanta, an abortion clinic, a nightclub. January of '97, pipe bombs placed in a synagogue in Jacksonville, Florida. Had letter bomb come to Washington, D.C. and to New York and a lot of other smaller incidents. So that just gives you kind of a quick recap on where we have been and bringing you a sense of what's the threat as we see it.

We are concerned primarily in a couple of different areas. One is the lethality of the attacks that we see. If we compare the number of terrorist attacks in mid-1980's, mid-1980's, 1985 to the mid-1990's, they're down by about 500 in total worldwide fewer attacks, but a lot of those attacks were pipe bombs, small incendiary devices. What we see now is a very large series of either sustained attacks or very, very large attacks that try to bring a large number of casualties. But opinion for that is that if you are going to engage in terrorist attacks for political or social agendas, you want to make it on the news. How many people here will remember that our embassy in Moscow was attacked by a rocket or a grenade or our embassy in Athens this past year was attacked by a rocket. Very, very few (inaudible), very, very little notoriety anymore in those common, every day attacks.

The only thing that knocked O.J. Simpson off of television, his trial, was the Oklahoma City bombing case. The larger the attack, the more newsworthy they can make it or the series of sustained attacks as you saw the bus bombings that occurred in Israel in the occupied territories or the sustained attacks that the Provisional Irish Republic Army has been committing over the last year and a half. We are concerned about the lethality of the attacks. We're very, very concerned that we seem to have a rash of both problems in the international side and the domestic side at the same time. And we are also concerned now that we have had obviously a lot of conventional types of attacks, but now, we're starting to see unconventional types of attacks like the (inaudible) attack that took place in Tokyo with an unconventional type of weapon.

So those are the areas that we're most concerned about. I think that your organization will be challenged. I think interesting times lie ahead. Certainly, we as citizens will be challenged. I know the FBI will continue to be challenged in the years to come. Unfortunately, I cannot predict that no Americans will be injured or killed as a result of a terrorist attack. And in fact, it will happen as long as violence is seen as the way to move along political or social agendas. We will have terrorism as a problem to contend with. Hopefully, working together, we will continue to reduce the amount of terrorism to its possible lowest amount. I congratulate you on the important work that you do as an organization. I think these types of forums to get the message out is healthy. The work that you're doing in this area is very, very high quality, and I salute you. Thank you for having me today.

National Strategy Forum, Chicago, IL June 11, 1997

3:43 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Feature http://newyorkmetro.com/nymetro/news/sept11/features/5513/index1.html
O'Neill Versus Osama
Most of the victims of the September 11 attack seemed tragically random -- they were just going to work. Not John O'Neill. Until last August, he'd been the FBI's top expert on Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden, a lead investigator of the USS Cole and African embassy bombings. Leaving the Bureau in frustration, he'd taken a job he thought of as retirement: World Trade Center security chief. But when he died it became clear: His own life contained as many mysteries as his enemy's.

By Robert Kolker

Memorialized: A table at Elaine's. (Photo credit: Jessica Burstein)

Monday night, we're going out, and I'll show you what you've been missing, ex-FBI agent John P. O'Neill told his friend Jerry Hauer. On O'Neill's overloaded social calendar, Mondays were reserved for Elaine's, where he was a charter member of the famously clubby crime-fighting crowd that included such legends as Bill Bratton and the late Jack Maple. His street cred carried a lot of weight, even with that group: For most of the past decade, O'Neill had been the FBI's foremost expert on Osama bin Laden. He'd been the public face of the New York field office since 1997, leading the investigation into the African embassy bombings and last year's USS Cole attack in Yemen. But his bluff, aggressive style had apparently alienated some of his superiors, and his career had stalled.


Jerry Hauer, the city's first terrorism czar under Rudy Giuliani, had just helped guide O'Neill to a soft landing in the private sector -- chief of security for the World Trade Center. The job, which could reach $300,000 with bonus, had cushioned the blow considerably. So for O'Neill, Monday, September 10, was a night to celebrate.


A typical night out with O'Neill had three or four stages. This one started with drinks at Windows on the World with his friend Robert Tucker, a former Queens assistant D.A., talking about whom he might hire at the World Trade Center. They moved on to a front table at Elaine's, where, as usual, he was noticed. "I knew he had left the FBI, so I grabbed him and said, 'John, are you okay?' " says Wallace Millard, a cop turned security expert who spotted him from a neighboring table. "He said, 'Wally, I'm the best. I've got a job that pays me three times what I got.' "


Hauer joined the party at 9:30, and they chatted about what they knew -- terrorism, security, the '93 attack on the Trade towers, the years when Hauer and O'Neill had worked closely together on bio-terror-defense strategies, the likelihood of another assault on the city. Weeks earlier, O'Neill had told one friend, "They'll never stop trying to take down those two buildings."


And as he led the charge out of Elaine's to Stage 3 at the China Club, his friends remember John O'Neill looking over and saying, "At least on my watch, I can say that there was never a terrorist attack in New York City."


'We were laughing that morning," remembers Valerie James, his girlfriend of eleven years. For once, John was in his own eleven-year-old Buick LeSabre, not a Bureau car, so he was permitted to drop her off at her job as sales director for the fashion line Sunny Choi.


He'd made it home from China Club at 2:30 -- typical -- but he was up now, and happy, and ready to take her to an 8:15 meeting she had for Fashion Week before heading to his office on the thirty-fourth floor of the north tower. "He was in a really good mood that day," James says.


James heard about the attack on the radio; it wasn't until 9:17 that a call finally came from John.


"There are body parts everywhere," he shouted. "Do you know what hit it?"James said the radio said it was a 747.


"I'll call you in a little bit," he said.


O'Neill also spoke to his 29-year-old son, J.P., who had taken the train in to visit his father at his new job but had made it only as far as Saint Vincent's Hospital. "As soon as you make it down here," he told him, "call me and I'll come and get you."


One FBI agent remembers talking with O'Neill in the lobby of Tower One, helping the Bureau and the Fire Department set up a command center. O'Neill asked him if they really got the Pentagon. He was last seen walking in the general direction of Tower Two minutes before it collapsed. His body was found a week later; it isn't clear where exactly he died. But what's not in question, at least among those who knew him, is that even before the second plane hit, O'Neill must have understood who had done it.


"I'm sure he knew who was responsible," says Teddy Leb, a friend and fan of O'Neill's who heads a foundation for law-enforcement officers. "I know that he must have been mad as hell. He must have been thinking, How in the world could we have allowed this to happen?"


In death, John O'Neill has become something bigger than he was in life -- a human embodiment of unheeded warnings. Here was a man who had studied and understood bin Laden, the cycles of his attacks, the escalation of the deaths, but whose arguments weren't followed up by government action. This had much to do with bureaucratic inertia, but it also, undoubtedly, had something to do with O'Neill -- his aggressiveness, his charisma, the fact that he didn't fit the mold of the standard-issue FBI agent.


For him, the real job started after five; his friends were his contacts, his contacts his friends. He was the only agent who could be found smoking Dominican cigars with De Niro on Tommy Mottola's yacht one night and introducing Scotland Yard spooks to the China Club's VIP level the next. He'd invariably be dressed in dark-blue pin-striped Burberry suits with white shirts and ties, his jet-black hair slicked back, his feet in size 91/2 Bruno Magli shoes, his ear to his cell phone, his hands fiddling with a BlackBerry with intelligence contacts organized by country -- Saudi Arabia, Yemen, England, Spain, France -- many of whom he'd escort to Elaine's when they came to town.


Those friends brought him intelligence that no one else in the Bureau could nail down. "You could see that come home to roost in the investigations," says U.S. Attorney Mary Jo White, whose summary arguments in the embassy-bombings case against bin Laden and others are packed with evidence that O'Neill unearthed. "John went at it comprehensively, yielding things from people in London or people in Yemen we never otherwise would have gotten."


His expertise on bin Laden was unquestioned. He took that expertise personally, and had no trouble correcting anyone, above or below him. "He was the paramount, most knowledgeable agent we had in the FBI, probably in the government, with respect to counterintelligence matters," says Louis Freeh.


"The answer would often be 'Check with John O'Neill,' " says Janet Reno. "When I walked into the room and saw John O'Neill there, I was always pleased, because I always knew I would get a reasoned analysis. He had a powerful command."


It was a life he'd chosen. As a kid, growing up in a fourth-floor walk-up in Atlantic City, O'Neill fixed in on Efrem Zimbalist Jr. in The F.B.I.


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He worked part-time at FBI headquarters while at a community college in Virginia, then at American University, then at George Washington University, where he went for a forensic-science master's, all while working as a fingerprinting clerk and tour guide.


He joined the Bureau in the seventies, tracking governmental fraud, white-collar crime, and organized crime in Baltimore and as the field-office chief in Chicago. In 1995, he was reborn again when the Bureau brought him back to Washington as the section chief for counterterrorism. It was there that he became an expert in Islamic-fundamentalist extremism. And when he came to New York in 1997, it was the realization of plans he and James had made years earlier in Chicago. O'Neill, ever the striver, wasted no time recasting himself as a New York operator, buddying up with people like Jerry Hauer and Howard Safir, local law-enforcement leaders who weren't natural allies with the FBI until O'Neill came along.


Last year, ABC reporter John Miller, the Joey Bishop of the crime-fighting Rat Pack, was sitting alone in a Middle East cantina when he heard O'Neill's swaggery voice boom from behind him, "So is this the Elaine's of Yemen?"


Of course, not every late-night phone call was Bureau business. He had a wife in Linwood, New Jersey, Christine O'Neill, whom he'd married in 1971, though the two had been living apart since he moved to Chicago in 1991. There was the girlfriend, Valerie James, he'd lived with in Chicago and now here, and the children from both relationships who all looked to him as a father. The liaisons didn't stop there. "He was living with Valerie, he had another girlfriend in Washington, and he was dating someone else here in New York," says one close friend. "Before his death, they didn't know about each other."


Among his New York friends, some jaws dropped in astonishment that the widow at O'Neill's New Jersey funeral was not Valerie James. (Christine O'Neill would not comment for this story.) "There are people here who knew him for six years but never knew he had a wife and kids in Atlantic City," James tells me. "I was talking with my friend about it, and he said, 'Let's not forget, John was a spy.' I mean, in the FBI he reinvented himself into this other person -- which is why I think he compartmentalized his life."


James says that O'Neill kept other secrets: the overwhelming debts he'd racked up living a James Bond life on a Bureau salary; a plan, complete with legal papers, to divorce his wife. But is her John O'Neill the real one? Given what James has learned about him since his death, she isn't quite sure.


"I honestly believe the main mistress in John's life was the Bureau," says Pat D'Amuro, a longtime deputy in New York. "There are times when we talked, and he wondered if that was the right decision."


As early as 1995, long before the embassy bombings and the Cole attack made Osama bin Laden a household name, O'Neill made the case up the FBI food chain and in Congress that the nation's greatest threat came from the Islamic-fundamentalist groups that were emerging from the Taliban's takeover of Afghanistan. "John had this scenario that's going on now figured out eight years ago," says an old FBI colleague, John Blaha. "That this is the way it is, and this is the way it's gonna have to be resolved."


In the 20-20 hindsight of September 11, O'Neill's confidential briefings in the mid-nineties "were right on, in terms of these kinds of people and what they could potentially do to us," says Robert Blitzer, a former deputy of O'Neill's. "Just the scope of their infrastructure in the U.S. -- and inherent to that is the fact that they could go operational at any time."


Unlike his colleagues, he went public with his opinions. In 1996, he told a conference of private-security managers about new groups that had beaten the Soviets in Afghanistan and who "can assemble quickly and can quickly disperse and are extraordinarily hard to track." The following year, he called the Islamic-fundamentalist victory in Afghanistan a watershed moment: "They beat one of the largest standing armies in the world at that time, which gave them a buoyed sense of success -- that they could take on other countries like the U.S." O'Neill's deafening clarity, however, often translated better outside the office than in the FBI. He wanted to command, direct, control, and manage everything he was responsible for, and inevitably he pissed off many of the wrong people.


"There was occasionally controversy that swirled around John," says Barry Mawn, his superior in New York. "I mean, John for the most part didn't suffer fools. And either by his direct words or maybe expressions, I think he made some people feel uncomfortable, like he was challenging them."


"He had elbows -- he'd press his point very hard," says Mary Jo White. "Others might have been more diplomatic -- but less effective when it matters."


On July 4, 1998, Jerry Hauer was riding in his car up First Avenue near 20th Street, not far from O'Neill's apartment in Peter Cooper Village, when he spotted his friend walking down the street in short pants. Hauer told his driver to slow down; he thought he'd give John some grief about showing off his knees. "How's it going?" Hauer said.


O'Neill wasn't in the mood. He leaned into the car window. "My friend's causing trouble again," he said.


"Who?"


"OBL," O'Neill said softly. "This guy's a problem."


One month later, simultaneous bombs near the U.S. embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, killed 224 people. As soon as the bombings took place, O'Neill was on the phone with colleagues, calling bin Laden the prime suspect. "John was really the first to say that maybe Al Qaeda was responsible for that," confirms the New York field-office director at the time, Lew Schiliro. "The coordination it took to hit both embassies four minutes apart, the idea of a cell operating in Kenya, their ability to strike at relatively unprotected embassies, the nature of the explosives that they used -- pretty much at the outset he had a strong belief that they were behind it."


And when it came time for Mary Jo White to expand her World Trade Center indictments to include the embassy-bombing suspects, Schiliro says, O'Neill was there to connect the dots. "The evolution from the World Trade Center to Ramzi Yousef, who was arrested in Pakistan, and the plot in the Pacific to plant explosives in twelve U.S. airliners -- and his connecting to bin Laden. When the bombings happened, John was a student of this, and he brought a lot of information to bear on it."


Last year, when Schiliro left the New York field office to be replaced by Barry Mawn, O'Neill was furious about being passed over. In his mind, he clearly outclassed most of his counterparts in Washington. He would travel with Louis Freeh to Saudi Arabia; they'd stay home. He'd be in Yemen within hours of the Cole bombing; they'd work the phones. Inside the Bureau, his impact never registered the way it had with others.


In this wildly altered political landscape, all sides are trying to lay claim to John O'Neill's legacy; he's a Rorschach test. If you lean toward the right, like some of his New York friends, you believe O'Neill quit in a fury when the diplomats neutered him. David Cornstein, who ran Finlay jewelers and now is chairman of the New York Olympic Games commission, used to tailgate with O'Neill at Giants and Jets games. "We concurred," he says, "that the country after the Cold War had really fallen a bit asleep, and there was a liberal movement toward more and more civil rights, and the country wasn't observant enough to realize that the world had changed and our view of the way security should be should change, too."



But if you lean to the left, like the French authors Guillaume Dasquié and Jean-Charles Brisard, who feature a July interview with O'Neill in their new book, Ben Laden, La Vérité Interdite, you've outed O'Neill as a sort of smoking gun -- a man who they say all but confirmed in his final months that George W. Bush's oil-industry-bred administration was so worried about alienating Saudi Arabia that it decided to negotiate with the Taliban rather than go after it. Before September 11, they argue, the United States' primary goal was to build a pipeline in Central Asia -- tapping oilfields in Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Kazakhstan, through Afghanistan and Pakistan to the Indian Ocean.


In July, over drinks at Elaine's, O'Neill began to open up to Brisard about his frustrations, which, it turned out, stretched back to the 1996 investigation of the Riyadh army-base bombing. O'Neill made several trips to Saudi Arabia, one with Freeh, but witnesses were executed before the FBI could question them. (Brisard was also impressed by O'Neill's social clout. Elaine Kaufman herself and James Woods came by and said hello. "I had the feeling he knew everyone in the city," he says.)


O'Neill complained about the inability of U.S. diplomacy to obtain anything from King Fahd. He told the Frenchman that "every answer, every key to dismantling the Osama bin Laden organizations are in Saudi Arabia."


He ran into another diplomatic barrier last year in Yemen, after the Cole bombing. Within days of arriving, he'd knocked heads with the ambassador, Barbara Bodine. While the FBI was interrogating witnesses, the State Department was trying to coax Yemeni diplomats into pledging not to support terror. The conflicting agendas, combined with O'Neill's determination, were explosive. He wanted his agents to carry automatic weapons, like their Yemeni counterparts; she insisted they carry smaller arms, like diplomats. By the time Barry Mawn arrived, Bodine was calling O'Neill an outright liar. O'Neill's comments about the ambassador, friends say, weren't printable.


"He always had a singular focus on the people he sent into harm's way," says Freeh, who wouldn't comment directly about Bodine. "I'm sure he ruffled a couple of feathers doing that. In Yemen, he would call me literally in the middle of the night and say, 'Boss, I'm not comfortable with our situation here.' "


When O'Neill came back for Thanksgiving, James was shocked to see him exhausted and twenty pounds lighter. He never returned: Bodine told Freeh that O'Neill wasn't allowed to. One more irony came after September 11. The FBI returned after Bodine left her job, and according to Mawn, Yemeni authorities were so moved by O'Neill's death that they began cooperating with the investigation again.


The scuffle with the ambassador made the papers. And before long, O'Neill's press coverage got worse. On August 19, the Times printed that he was under investigation. A year earlier, he'd attended a retirement seminar in Tampa, left a conference room to make a call, and come back to find his briefcase had been stolen. It turned up in a nearby hotel without his lighter and cigar cutter, but still with some classified documents that he shouldn't have taken from his office. O'Neill had reported it to the police and the Bureau right away. Under normal circumstances, this never would have been made public. But O'Neill thought he knew why it had.


"He thought the leak might have come from Washington," says Mawn. That same month, O'Neill told Mawn and others that Dick Clarke, the president's terrorism czar at the National Security Council, had asked O'Neill whether he wanted his name put forward to succeed him.


"It would be a powerful position," Mawn says. "That person would have direct contact with the FBI and turn around and influence top Cabinet people, and possibly even the president. So if I was somebody who didn't like him, it would be because he is getting into a position of power that could possibly get back to the Bureau to do things his way."


But it didn't matter. After Yemen, O'Neill had started seriously thinking about getting out. Part of that was financial pressure. "He was frustrated and angry," James says. "And he needed to make money."


The other part was the bed he'd made himself. Louis Freeh's No. 2, Tom Pickard, had told him point-blank that after the briefcase incident, there'd be little chance of his getting Mawn's job in New York -- the only Bureau post he really wanted.


"I told him he had a tough row to hoe to get it," says Pickard, who retired at the end of November, and whom Jerry Hauer believes was the biggest roadblock in O'Neill's career. When it came to field-office-chief candidates, he said, "Janet Reno particularly insisted that there were no blemishes on that person's career. I think John shone best when there was a crisis. He'd put in phenomenal hours, he was completely dedicated, he wasn't distracted by anyone else. I don't know if he would have thrived on the day-to-day, 'What are we gonna do about the budget?' business. John was more of a take-charge, action guy."


On Saturday, September 8, Valerie and John attended a wedding at the Plaza -- a class reunion of old FBI men and cops. John was beaming the whole evening, and he and Valerie danced nearly every song. Valerie says that people turned to them and said, "God, if this is what retirement does . . . "


Three weeks later, there was another reunion -- O'Neill's funeral. The service in Atlantic City -- could it have been otherwise? -- was brimming with ironies. The service demanded four-star security for Louis Freeh, Mary Jo White, and a host of FBI brass -- an official place of honor given to a man who had just left the Bureau in frustration. It also featured Christine O'Neill as the widow. O'Neill's son and daughter rarely saw their father in his final years, while James's children, Jay and Stacy, were left wondering more about the man they called their father. Jay even called O'Neill "Dad" in a speech at the Elaine's wake a few days later, to the surprise of some people there.


His biological family got his memorial flags from the Bureau. Resentful about being overlooked, Stacy pinched two that the Bureau had sent to Elaine's. She's been asked to return them. She hasn't.


"I'm the one who has to reinvent myself now," Valerie James told me one afternoon recently, poking at a salad near her office in the fashion district. "My psychiatrist says I can't go on with my life if I keep talking about him, but I feel like I have to honor his memory."


She'd wanted to leave him in the fall of '99. He wasn't as much fun as he was in Chicago. The strain of the job, the embassy-bombing investigation, was getting to him. Her kids adored him, but it was not working for her, she told him. The late nights without her also had something to do with it. "He promised that when he left the FBI, he'd clean up his life," she said.


When I asked what that meant, she smiled. "Being a little straighter of a guy," she said.


The secret girlfriends aren't so secret anymore. James doesn't speak directly about them. Still, she doesn't have any illusions about the man she just lost. "John was all about his job," she said. "I don't know if John was a genius, but you look at smart people like Jack Kennedy, they don't necessarily lead Ward and June Cleaver lives. It doesn't necessarily mean they're bad people. I'll say this, though: Knowing everything I've learned since he died, I would do the last eleven years over again exactly as I did. And so would my kids. I know because I asked them."


Her John was different from everyone else's. "You see, to me, he wasn't the FBI," she said. "He was my lover and my friend." It's just that the end he met brought the many different lives he led crashing down, finally, together.


"It was a complicated death," she said, "for a complicated man."



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Blogger Roberto Iza Valdés said...

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