Original subtitles

[narrator] Most nations recruit foreign agents or spies

to gain intelligence on their adversaries.

[birds chirping]

Good spies are going to do a lot of damage

to the country on which they are spying.

If you look at a spy from the angle of, he's our spy, they've done a lot of good.

[narrator] Many are recruited for their access.

[man] She became the senior analyst, Cuba,

and in this position,

she was perhaps

the closest thing to the perfect spy.

[narrator] Others volunteer.

[man] He simply walked up to the Soviet embassy,

and volunteered to become a spy.

[narrator] Experts point to money, ideology,

compromise, and ego as prime motivators for spying.

[man 2] Crossing the line requires

that you reframe what you're doing

as somehow the right thing to do.

[narrator] It's the job of an intelligence officer to handle a spy.

[man 3] It's more art than science,

because you're dealing with human vulnerabilities,

and how can you best manipulate that?

[man 1] They're given a code name, ways to communicate.

They're given an escape plan.

[woman] You decided to become a traitor.

You decided to become a spy for the opposition.

We're here to keep you alive.

[theme music playing]

[suspenseful music]

[narrator] The act of gathering information from an enemy

is rarely carried out by an intelligence officer in person.

Instead, they recruit agents who have access to information they need.

[Wallace] I like to describe the CIA as an equal opportunity employer.

And the CIA's interest in a spy

is what information can the spy have access to,

and can provide United States government?

[narrator] Finding the perfect agent for the task

is the first and most crucial step in the process.

[Melton] The intelligence services of all countries recruit foreign spies

because it's the foreign spies who have access to secrets.

You spot by simply looking,

if you're in Czech Republic,

if you're in Russia, Germany, America,

there's a foreign embassy component that's there.

Well, each of those individuals is an accredited diplomat,

but we know that some of them are also spies.

[indistinct chatter]

And as that relationship develops,

one of the things an intelligence officer is looking for

is what is this person's vulnerabilities?

Do they have money problems?

Do they have marital problems? Do they have substance problems?

And you want to identify these.

[narrator] Whether it's face-to-face meetings

or identifying potential recruits via online sites like LinkedIn,

the process takes time.

A faster approach is to attack the source directly,

which is what China did when they gained access

to some of America's top secret files by installing malware into the network

of the United States Office of Personnel Management,

the OPM, in 2015.

[Bigman] OPM, Office of Personnel Management

is the organization in the United States Government that,

specifically manages the careers,

it basically is the repository

of the information for U.S. government employees,

across all government agencies.

It wasn't just State Department. It was Department of Interior.

It was Department of Treasury. It was the intelligence communities.

[narrator] Chinese hackers were then able to exfiltrate

whatever information they needed.

The audacious cyberattack wasn't just a national security threat,

but a threat for spy recruitment as well.

[Bigman] Now they know not just who has which clearances,

they now know basically from a perspective

of how much income they have, how many children they have,

what their income to debt ratio may be.

So now they can use that, potentially, as targeting.

[narrator] The benefits for a government to recruit spies may seem obvious,

but the motivation to actually become an agent

and a spy for the enemy is much more complex.

People become spies for many different reasons,

and historically, intelligence services have used the acronym MICE.

Where each letter stands for a motivation to spy.

Where "M" would be money, "I" would be ideology.

"C" would be compromise or blackmail, and "E" would be ego.

[Sano] A lot of them get money. We tell them, you know,

"Careful what you spend your money on."

You don't want them to raise their profile.

If they do, that draws attention to them.

[Melton] The Soviet Union discovered very early

that Americans' lust for money made them very vulnerable

to being bought as spies.

And one classic example of that is a U.S. Navy warrant officer

by the name of John Anthony Walker.

[narrator] Walker was a twelve-year U.S. Navy veteran

who worked at a U.S. naval base in Norfolk, Virginia,

where he had access to coded messages between fleet ships and submarines

and the Navy command center.

He was deeply in debt and figured out a way to make money quick

by selling secrets to the Soviets.

[typing]

In 1967, Walker walked into the Soviet embassy

on 16th Street in Washington, D.C.,

established his bona fides by showing his identity card,

and brought with him a stack of key cards

from the current U.S. Navy encryption system.

And the Russians immediately realized what they had

and saw the value in it,

and accepted Walker as a spy.

[narrator] Thirty-year-old Walker opened a direct pipeline to the KGB

and left copies of secret documents

at clandestine locations or dead drops around Northern Virginia and Maryland.

In return, he'd receive a bag of cash as payment.

On one exchange, the bag also contained a rotor reader,

designed to assist in deciphering the KL-47 cipher rotors.

The KL-47 cipher rotors

were used at the naval base that Walker was stationed at.

Each rotor had internal wiring that had further permutations.

The reader given to Walker was designed to help him map the rotor

so the Soviets could build a duplicate cipher machine.

Walker was also given a subminiature Minox A camera and some film.

The German-made Minox was a go-to spy camera of the cold war.

It could take 50 pictures without reloading,

and its high resolution lens captured a remarkable amount of detail.

The camera, made of aluminum, is slightly bigger than an index finger.

The spy would snap it open by pulling the ends,

which extended the body to reveal the lens and viewfinder.

Then, he'd press the shutter button, close and open it again for the next shot.

[Melton] John Walker set up his own spy ring,

and began not only to spy himself,

but, ultimately, recruited his brother, Arthur.

He recruited his son, Michael, to actively join the Navy

and take a position where he could obtain secrets.

[narrator] John and his spy ring also included Jerry Whitworth,

all communications men with access to coded message channels

between U.S. fleets.

[Melton] He compromised our communication keys

that enabled the KGB to decipher

more than one million classified, or secret messages.

He betrayed how we would communicate secret orders

to submerged submarines,

and instruct them to launch their ballistic missiles.

[narrator] John Walker and his spy ring activities

continued for 17 years

until Walker's ex-wife allegedly began leaving messages

about her ex-husband's activities with the FBI,

triggering an investigation, code named Windflyer.

After tapping phones and conducting surveillance,

the FBI set a trap to catch Walker red-handed.

The FBI followed Walker from Norfolk to the outskirts of Washington D.C.,

and watched as he placed a cache of secret documents

on the roadside in Maryland.

The evidence gathered included 129 classified documents

hidden in a milk carton passed to him by his son, Michael,

while working on the Nimitz naval ship.

The other members of Walker's spy ring were quickly rounded up and arrested.

Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger

concluded that the Soviet Union made significant advances

in naval technology as a result of Walker's treason.

His espionage provided Moscow

with access to weapons, and sensor data and naval tactics,

among other wartime secrets.

[Melton] John Walker became the first man we know of

that made more than one million dollars as a result of his espionage.

He received silver bars from the KGB.

Silver is a storehouse of value.

John very cleverly realized that silver bars don't have serial numbers.

There's no tracking of them.

Most Americans that have spied for foreign governments,

only 20% of them ever last more than five years.

And to have someone last from 1967 to '85 is almost unheard of.

[narrator] At his prison interview soon after his arrest,

Michael explains how he was able to get away with being a spy

on the inside for so long.

Nobody ever suspected me of stealing documents

from any of the commands that I was assigned to,

mostly because of the way I carried myself.

I, uh…

didn't look like a spy.

[narrator] John Walker and his brother Arthur

were sentenced to life in prison for treason.

His son Michael received 25 years,

but was released after 15.

Walker wasn't the only high profile American spy

vulnerable to the lure of money.

In 1991, CIA officer Sandy Grimes was assigned to a task force

to investigate a possible mole

suspected of revealing the identities of CIA agents to the KGB.

[Grimes] It was the Cold War between the Russians,

they were our main enemy, and the United States of America.

So we were looking for a traitor in CIA.

[narrator] The CIA had lost 12 of its most valued Soviet agents,

they had been compromised, caught, and many had been executed by the KGB.

[dramatic music playing]

[Melton] And they began to systematically look at the cases,

look at the people that had access to them.

And on almost every short list they drew up,

the name at the top was Aldrich Ames.

[atmospheric music playing]

[narrator] Ames was a CIA case officer

assigned to the Soviet East European division

at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia.

Ames had fallen in love with a wealthy Colombian national named Rosaria.

He was also in the middle of a divorce.

Ames needed money.

[Grimes] He was never going to be able to keep Rosario

in the fashion she wanted to be kept.

And this is a woman who put Imelda Marcos at shame

with the number of shoes she had.

And Rick was running out of money.

He had to pay for the divorce settlement.

He just didn't see a way out.

It's not a nice way to phrase it,

but Rick had a product to sell.

And in this case, that product

were human lives.

[Melton] He had an official, established relationship

between the CIA and the KGB.

That was part of his job.

He had a cover name.

He simply walked up to the Soviet embassy,

and volunteered to become a spy.

[atmospheric music playing]

[narrator] To prove his access and willingness to commit espionage,

Ames handed over nearly a dozen names of active CIA agents.

In return, the KGB paid Ames $50,000.

[Grimes] And he walked in and he got the money.

He and Rosario were married.

[suspenseful music]

[narrator] Ames was walking out of the CIA headquarters

with bags of classified documents,

or downloading them to computer discs in his office

to pass to his Soviet handler face-to-face at a Washington D.C. restaurant.

Later, Ames delivered the intelligence information via dead drops.

In return, he was getting rich.

In just four years, Ames made almost two million dollars.

[Melton] He transitioned from being a mid-level government bureaucrat

to someone who had his teeth redone,

began driving a Jaguar, wore custom-tailored suits,

decorated their home very lavishly,

and gave his new bride

the life he had promised her.

All of this by being a spy.

[Grimes] When Rick came back from a tour in Rome in '89,

the Rick Ames that I had known…

was gone.

That day I saw him walking down the hall, he wasn't stooped over,

had his shoulders back,

and he had an air, "I know something that you don't."

I mean, there was a change in personality.

[narrator] The newly styled and confident Ames

had caught the attention of the CIA mole-hunting team

along with the FBI who were suspicious of his newfound wealth.

[Melton] One of the lead FBI agents by the name of Les Wiser

made a decision

to authorize a trash cover operation.

Once you put your trash out on the curb,

you surrender any rights to it, and your loss of privacy is lost.

So if it's there, basically it's public property.

Now, the trash units that were there in the area that Ames lived

are all serial numbered.

So the FBI obtained and fabricated a duplicate trash unit.

[narrator] Under the cover of darkness,

the FBI switched out Ames' trash cans so they could search its contents.

[Melton] Well, bingo.

They found a torn yellow Post-it note

and on it had a draft of an operational message

from Ames to his handler discussing a meeting in Columbia,

and the terminology was spycraft.

[narrator] To add to the evidence, Grimes found matching bank deposit slips

in Ames' accounts corresponding to the dates of the lunches he had

with his Soviet contact.

[suspenseful music]

The FBI continued round-the-clock surveillance on Ames.

They bugged his house, installed microphones,

searched his computers, and put a beacon on his car to track him.

With mounting evidence proving Ames to be their mole,

the FBI made their arrest on February 21st, 1994.

[Melton] Ames' reaction was a combination of bewilderment and denial.

Because he was a professional, he was well-trained.

His wife, however, was not.

She confessed immediately. Of course, blamed everything on her husband.

[narrator] Ames had been a KGB mole for nine of the 30 years.

He's believed to have been paid 2.4 million dollars in cash,

and another two million kept in reserve in Russia for his treason.

[Grimes] In the end, it was pretty sickening.

This happened to be somebody that I had known since I was a young officer.

Proceeded to give his KGB handlers with the names of or identifying information

on every one of our active Soviet assets,

as well as those who were dormant or long retired from service.

And Rick knew exactly what was going to happen to these men.

[dramatic music]

It was a bullet to the back of the head.

[gunshot]

And these were the cases that I had spent,

many of them, I had spent my life working on.

[Ames] I knew that they would be, eventually,

perhaps not immediately, but that they would eventually,

some of them would eventually be prosecuted,

and certainly that some of them could be executed,

that they had capital punishment.

Aldrich Ames betrayed every CIA operation he knew of in Moscow.

He betrayed everyone he came in contact with.

He cost the lives of at least 13 people.

There is blood on his hands.

We hope he's the most damaging spy in the history of the CIA,

we truly hope there's no one worse.

[narrator] Ames has spent the last 26 years of a life sentence

without the possibility of parole

at the Alan Wood Penitentiary in Pennsylvania.

Money isn't the only reason someone becomes a spy.

Ideology is also a powerful incentive.

This was true especially during the Cold War,

when spies were motivated by support

for the ideological positions of either

the western world or the Communist bloc.

The Cubans took advantage of this vulnerability

when they recruited Ana Bailyn Montes.

Montes was a highly respected analyst

at the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency, the DIA,

who became a spy for Cuba's Intelligence Agency, the DGI, in 1984.

Like Aldrich Ames,

Montes blindsided the intelligence community

with brazen acts of treason.

[Melton] She ultimately became the senior analyst on Latin America

and on Cuba.

And in this position she was, perhaps,

the closest thing to the perfect spy.

She had license, by virtue of her position,

to meet frequently with Cubans visiting from the island that she could debrief.

And with her ability to write papers,

she could even shape some defense department policy

as it pertained to the island.

[narrator] Montes never risked taking any documents home.

Instead, she memorized them and typed them up on her laptop

which she encrypted on computer discs and slipped to her Cuban handlers.

Montes used a pager and pay phones to convey urgent messages,

and receive orders through numeric messages

transmitted anonymously over a high frequency shortwave radio band

from Cuba to her Sony ICF-2010 shortwave radio.

It would begin by declaring the words, "atención,"

followed by undetermined numbers grouped five at a time.

Montes would key the digits into her computer,

and a Cuban-installed decryption program

would convert the numbers into Spanish text.

Her pager codes and shortwave radio notes

were written on specially treated, water-soluble paper

which she could easily destroy.

Montes became a vital asset for the Cubans, revealing all she knew

about the U.S. operatives and operations to Cuba,

providing Castro direct information on U.S. Intelligence Collection systems

that had taken years to develop.

She endangered the lives of four clandestine Intel operatives

all while rising in the ranks of the DIA in her 17-year career in espionage,

until they pinpointed her for intelligence breeches

only she could have known.

[suspenseful music]

A serendipitous search of her apartment

found her to be a sloppy spy.

Investigators found her shortwave radio and laptop

with forensic evidence on its hard drives.

A search of her wallet turned up a list of coded numbers.

Montes was arrested on September 21, 2001

on conspiracy to conduct espionage on behalf of Cuba.

Montes made a full confession,

explaining that she had opposed U.S. policies in Cuba

and obeyed her conscience rather than the law.

She received a 25-year prison sentence, and is scheduled for release in 2023.

Ideology can be a great motivator for treason, and so is compromise.

Compromise is one of the most interesting topics of recruitment.

One of those would be John Vassall,

who was sent to Moscow,

one of the harshest postings in the country.

[narrator] John Vassall, a junior admiralty clerk

working at the British embassy in Moscow

fell in love with his ski instructor.

Began partying with him at the National Hotel.

It turns out, according to John,

he was drugged

and was filmed in orgies with young boys.

Based on these compromising pictures,

he began to spy for the Russians.

He was trained to use the Minox camera.

He came back to the UK and began to steal naval secrets,

photographed them with his Minox camera and provide them.

[narrator] John passed many Naval secrets with details of naval technology

which were crucial to the modernization of the Soviet navy.

Vassall continued to spy for the KGB

from 1954 until his arrest in 1962.

His downfall came after the British arrested a group of spies

and found microfilm of documents

that could have only come from the admiralty.

Vassall was convicted of espionage and served ten of an 18-year sentence.

[Melton] It's a classic example of a successful compromise operation

that was used by all services, to some extent, throughout the Cold War.

[narrator] Most experts will tell you

a compromised spy doesn't make the best agent.

Ego, on the other hand, is a powerful motivator.

Dr. David Charney is a preeminent psychologist

and an expert in the field of the insider spy.

One unignorable fact,

that over 90% of insider spies are men.

What else does it mean? What's common to all guys, me included?

Male pride and ego.

It's a really powerful driver

of what makes for men choosing to do what they do in life.

[narrator] Ego, along with greed,

may have compelled FBI special agent Robert Hanssen

to become a prime candidate for espionage.

Back in 1985,

the U.S. and Soviet Union

had been involved in a clandestine chess game

for almost 40 years.

With the end of the Cold War,

many felt the worst days of spying were finally over.

But Hanssen, a special agent assigned to counterintelligence at the FBI

soon proved them wrong.

[Charney] Robert Hanssen joined the FBI as a special agent.

He became a specialist in counterintelligence over time,

which is the job of discovering and ferreting out, of all things, spies.

And yet, over time,

he himself found his own personal reasons to cross over the line,

and he thought that he could maybe get away with it better than others

because he knew exactly how we tried to detect spies.

And the word that's applied here is "tradecraft."

[narrator] In 1979, Hanssen walked into the offices

of the trade organization Antwerp in Manhattan

that provided cover for Soviet military intelligence,

and offered to sell them U.S. government secrets.

The ability to make that sort of a move of crossing the line

requires that you reframe what you're doing

as somehow the right thing to do.

[narrator] To establish his credibility,

Hanssen betrayed one of America's most important Gru moles,

Major General Dmitri Polyakov, whose code name was Tophat.

[suspenseful music]

His wife knew that he had crossed partial line

and had actually objected to it.

[narrator] At that point, Hanssen decided to stop his espionage activities

and went dormant for the next five years,

and continued to work at the FBI.

But by 1985,

short of cash and upset at having been passed over

for a promotion at the FBI,

Hanssen decided to spy for the Soviet Union once again.

This time he betrayed three KGB officers secretly working for the FBI,

Sergei Motorin, Valery Martynov, and Boris Yuzhin.

Motorin and Martynov were both executed.

Yuzhin was thrown in prison.

Hanssen received $100,000 for the information.

Once he got the money, Hanssen was hooked.

He spied for the next 16 years, betraying the names of FBI agents

and divulging every technical program

on America's surveillance platforms in Russia,

as well as America's Continuity of Government program.

In return, he was paid more than a million dollars

by the KGB in cash and diamonds.

Hansen took advantage of the latest technology for his spycraft,

including the use of a PalmPilot electronic organizer

and computer encryption techniques,

including 40 track mode, where he could hide secret documents on standard discs

which appeared to have less capacity than regular ones.

Hanssen also used dead drops to exchange information for cash.

But he made one significant mistake.

KGB files sold to the FBI

for seven million dollars by an anonymous Russian source,

code-named Avenger,

had Hanssen's fingerprints on them.

Every time he'd made a drop, he wrapped documents in a plastic bag.

The bag held his fingerprints

and pointed the FBI to one of their own.

Only five weeks before 56-year-old Hanssen was due for retirement,

the FBI closed in

after he filled a dead drop under a wooden footbridge at Foxstone Park

near his home in Vienna, Virginia.

His first words as he's being placed under arrest,

and it was, "So this is how it ends."

And he was in shock.

Eh… He couldn't process it that quickly.

[narrator] Hanssen received life in prison,

and is currently serving his sentence at the Supermax Penitentiary in Colorado.

Although the penalty is high,

many believe that there are more foreign intelligence officers active today

than ever before.

Perhaps this is in part due to the vast resources of the internet.

What you're starting to see happen with the advent of social media

and just the interconnectivity of the world

is that person who needed to be in front of that vulnerable individual,

now can do it from 3-4,000 miles away, manipulating them through social media,

whether it's a chat room or whether it's a news feed,

but really getting into that individual's psyche and convincing him

that going down a path of extremism is actually righteous.

[Melton] As useful as the internet is for recruiting,

for counterintelligence it's a nightmare.

If you try to create a false identity and cover,

it becomes exponentially more complex.

So it's easy to go in and say,

"Well, I'm going to insert

that this person graduated from Harvard in this year,

belonged to this country club, purchased their house on this date,

pays this utility."

But if someone begins to analyze it, then they go,

"Look, all of those records were created on the same day two years ago."

Well, how could that be?

So maintaining cover

against a digital database

and someone who's skilled at using it,

has become, not impossible, but incredibly complex.

[narrator] Being a spy and being a handler

are both complex and multi-layered disciplines.

[crackling]

If I were to characterize espionage,

the term that I would immediately think of

is that of loyalty.

And this is why a spy,

particularly a spy in your own service, is so devastating.

Because we trust each other.

Who have gone over to the other side, who have become spies for the other side,

and have cost the lives of agents, and in many ways,

the careers of their colleagues to suffer.

That, that kind of disloyalty just becomes, cuts you to the quick.

[atmospheric music playing]

[Charney] However, you'll wake up one morning with a sense of remorse.

And the signature expression is, "What was I thinking?"

You are now working for your country's enemy.

Well, how do you fix this?

Let's turn the clock back.

Is that going to happen?

No, it won't happen.

[Melton] Agents are among the loneliest people in the world

because they have the burden of their espionage

with potentially a criminal sentence,

potentially even death,

destruction of their family.

[narrator] Even with all these risks, the facts remain.

Spies are vital to successful espionage.

[Wallace] Good spies are going to do a lot of damage

to the country on which they are spying.

If you look at a spy from a different angle,

if you look at a spy from the angle of he's our spy,

they've done a lot of good.

[Sano] We try and paint the adversarial ones, you know, like the KGB

or the MSS in China, et cetera,

as being evil and all that, but having met those individuals throughout my career,

they're passionate about what they do,

they happen to be in the wrong government system, that's all.

[atmospheric music playing]