Original subtitles

- We knew that there was still a mole

who had not been identified.

- Our nation, our free society,

is an international target, in a dangerous world.

- They said, "We want you to go undercover

in FBI headquarters to catch him."

- The espionage operations

designed to steal vital secrets of the United States

are as intense today as they have ever been.

- This is a big case, there is no getting out.

He told me, "You could make a fortune

by dropping that to a foreign intelligence agency."

- If he determines that you betrayed him,

he would commit violence against you.

- He's armed. He has a gun.

- This wasn't just a spy, it was the spy.

- Oh, my God, the mole is an FBI agent.

In the FBI we make a lot of headlines.

Drug busts, mob stings...

...terrorist takedowns.

We understand why people want to tell stories about us.

- Mark it. - Freeze!

- FBI. - FBI! - Action!

But they don't know the half of it.

What really goes down?

We save that for each other

when we're talking agent to agent.

This is FBI True.

- We're in Washington, D.C.

Spy capital of the world.

Where you worked on

one of the most important cases in American spy history.

- I lived right over there.

I was working for the FBI, working undercover,

newly married.

I worked counterintelligence and counterterror.

So I was part of the S.S.G., A.K.A. The Ghosts.

I would follow either a spy or a terrorist,

track them and investigate them.

- So it's the weekend, you have some downtime,

and your life is about to change forever.

- I was asleep in this apartment over here.

Juliana and I had been married three months at the time,

and I got a phone call early on a Sunday morning.

And it was Gene McClelland, supervisory special agent

out of the Washington field office for my entire team of ghosts.

So my boss. - Right.

- In fact, like my boss's boss.

And I said, "Okay, Gene, let me get dressed. I'll come downtown."

And he says, "I'm parked right outside."

- What are you thinking?

- I'm thinking I'm in a lot of trouble.

- Well, absolutely, because, I mean, let's face it, the FBI,

the only time people get an invitation to come outside the house and talk to us

is if we're going to arrest you.

- When I arrived on the Russian espionage squad in 2000,

they were actively searching for a mole.

- How did you get to Washington?

- Four years with counterintelligence

and one year with Russian organized crime.

- So you arrive in D.C.

What's the situation?

- There were multiple US persons

from various intelligence agencies

who were arrested for espionage.

- The FBI says Randy Jeffries sold government secrets to the Soviets.

If that sounds familiar, it should.

Randy Jeffries is the 11th American this year arrested in an espionage case.

- ...but all of those arrests didn't really account

for all of the sources that were wrapped up.

One of those sources who was neutralized

had the code name Top Hat.

- Top hat was a Russian general.

His name was Dmitri Polyakov.

He was recruited and worked for

US intelligence for approximately 17 years.

No one at the time knew exactly what happened

or why or how he was given up.

And that was always a mystery.

He risked his life not for money but for his ideals.

And the CIA director said Top Hat kept the Cold War from heating up.

But Top Hat was eventually arrested by the Russians...

...for his work with the US government.

It was said that he was executed with a gunshot to the back of the head

and his body was never found.

Like, what's going on?

Do we have a mole in the US government

that's working for the Russians?

So we knew that there was still a mole out there

who had not been identified.

The case was given the codename Graysuit.

Actually, this is the most difficult part

of this case for me to talk about.

It's because we're talking about sources and methods,

and we're literally talking about lives of individuals.

But we paid a source for information to help us

find the mole working for the United States government.

I believe it was close to 7 million.

It was a lot of money.

The most jarring piece of evidence we got was a secret audio tape

that we hoped would lead us to the identification of the mole.

It was a phone call between a Russian individual

and an unknown male.

Around 5 a.m., I received a call from the analyst,

and he said, "I need you to come into the office."

And I said, "I'll be right in."

The analyst had worked for the individual.

Knew him personally,

knew the way he spoke.

So he writes the identity of the mole

on a 3x5 card,

and he takes that card over to headquarters,

where another analyst was sitting.

The two of them listened to the recording of the phone call.

They both recognize the previously unknown individual

on that recording.

And when he finished,

I had no doubt that he was correct.

The mole was a highly placed FBI Agent

who could do a lot of damage.

- Okay. So you get dressed...

- Shaken. Heart pounding. I walked out the door.

I'm checking the corners. I'm looking up and down the street,

and I look across the street,

and there's Gene, my boss.

I walked over. I got in the car next to him.

He puts the windows up.

What the hell is happening right now?

He told me that this was a decorated agent,

a supervisory special agent,

somebody who they suspected of espionage.

He told me that they wanted me to go undercover

and he says, "Have you ever heard of a guy named Robert Hanssen?"

I said, "No."

He said, "Good, because we don't want you to ghost him.

We want you to go undercover

in FBI headquarters to catch him.

Where does he go? Who's he meeting with?

What kind of data is he trying to access?" Anything I could see.

I asked him, "Do I get a legend?

How am I going undercover here?"

And he said, "No, you have to go in as yourself.

We believe he's able to penetrate computer systems.

So what happens if he learns your identity?"

So I felt uncomfortable.

- Did you understand that you had the ability

to say, "No, I don't think I should do this."

- I felt like Gene was giving me a choice until he said,

"Look, Eric, I've got to know right now

if you're in or out. Not tomorrow, not next week, right now.

Because my next meeting is downtown

with the Director of the FBI,

and he wants to know if you're in or out.

I'm thinking, "The director of the FBI knows who I am?"

Of all the agents in the Bureau,

they chose me to be the eyes and ears

of the FBI inside an elaborate mouse trap.

What are you supposed to say to that?

- "I'm in." - I said, "I'm in."

- The decision was made to create a job for Hanssen.

- Deborah, what did you think of that idea?

If you're near the end of your career,

you didn't apply for a promotion,

but you're given a promotion...

...and it just doesn't ring true.

I felt that it would cause suspicion

and my biggest fear is that he would bolt.

- What are some of the assets and players we brought into that?

- We needed someone who Hanssen wouldn't know.

So someone maybe fairly new to act as his assistant.

And that's where Eric O'Neill came into play.

The FBI is giving us rare access

to film inside Headquarters,

where the spy hunt went down.

So Eric, your first day coming into the Hoover Building, what's that like?

- It was early in December 2000

and I come in to the 9th floor and meet Rich Garcia.

- And Rich, do you remember that moment when you met Eric?

- I do. I was fighting H.R.

because they said we have qualified people in our building

to put in there with Hanssen,

and I couldn't tell them why I needed Eric.

- So the only two people

that I knew were Rich Garcia and my handler.

She would debrief me, she would give me different tasks,

Rich was right down the hall.

So we converted this two-room office.

- He brought me into this room that was at that point just a skeleton.

There were barely walls. There was all this tech.

There were wires everywhere.

And he says, "This is where you're going to be working."

- What kind of assets are we putting in to help us out?

We were getting various technology

to capture a conversation and video.

We had to move the wiring from that floor down to lower floors,

where we had a monitoring room.

- So the job that you're now walking into,

what kind of job is this?

- I was told that Hanssen's been exploiting computer systems

and because I had a background in computers,

they put me on the case.

- Hanssen was going to retire

that following year in April, mandatory.

And so we were concerned, investigative-wise,

that he was going to leave before we had evidence

in order to convict him and arrest him.

So we had to create a job,

enough of a carrot to keep him around.

It's a new job

because we have antiquated computer systems at the time,

we were in the process of renovating all these systems,

but we weren't there yet.

- So Robert Hanssen, he was in charge of the Analytic Unit,

- Correct. Those analysts were looking for the mole.

- So being that he was the bad guy,

seeing some of the investigative results

of some of the investigations,

looking for a variety of moles to include himself,

he would have access to see that.

- It increased the complexity tremendously.

So he knew the players, he knew the Russian players.

He knew how they operated.

He knew how to investigate the cases. He knew a lot.

- So Rich is your new boss.

What does he tell you your job is?

- The first was, "Don't screw up."

Number two was to gain Hanssen's trust.

If I didn't gain his trust, then he was never going to talk to me.

And I had this other task I was supposed to do that I really didn't want to do,

which was make him angry,

we want to see how he reacts when he's stressed.

- Day one, you walk in the office for your new job.

- He comes strolling in. Doesn't even say a word to me.

Goes in his office and shuts the door.

He was a very large man,

a lot taller than me and physically imposing.

And after a few minutes, I thought, "I got to talk to this guy."

- You gotta say hi.

- I sat down across the desk from him

and he told me, "I didn't tell you could sit."

- Oh. - And that was our relationship.

I tried to fumble into a conversation.

He stops me, throws a legal pad over at me,

and he asks me to write down my name, my address,

my Social Security number. And then he said, "While you're at it,

put your parent's names there.

You're married, right? Your wife's name,

her Social Security number, her birth date."

What's he trying to do?

Is he trying to challenge me?

Or is he testing me? - We have the room wired,

and you're listening to everything.

How's that going? Is the system working like we thought it should?

- Uh, no.

His voice was very low,

so it was hard to pick up sometimes on the microphone.

It was very difficult because

the systems that they put in were there;

and to change it would be very disruptive and suspicious.

- How do we capture what he's saying?

- I became a human recording device.

So I started to learn how Hanssen did what he did

by talking to him about how we could fix cybersecurity.

- He's talking about ACS system.

Tell me what he told you about

the ACS system and the failures of the Bureau.

- It was a system to track cases,

and one of the big ideas

is it would have interconnectivity with other agencies.

And the way he said it is,

"I can start typing in names of individuals,

addresses of individuals.

And if it comes back in the ACS system Xed out,

it means there's an open case."

He said that you could use it to find spies.

You could use it to find investigations into spies.

And then if you learned that information, you could drop it.

Even though you can't see the information,

he said, "You could make a fortune

by dropping that to a foreign intelligence agency."

Essentially, what Hanssen was doing

was telling me how you could exploit the ACS system

if you were a spy and make a ton of money from it.

And he says, "I want to tell you the only thing you need to know

to be a successful counterintelligence agent.

The spy is in the worst possible place."

Why the hell is he telling me this?

He's clearly trying to play me but how?

And he says, "The spy is that person

who has access to the information

that will do the most damage

and the knowledge and the wherewithal

to get that in the hands of those who will pay the most for it.

And that, Eric, is what we are here to defend against."

I'm thinking, "I'm in FBI headquarters.

This is the worst possible place for a spy."

- How complex did that make doing a criminal matter

when the subject is right in your house?

- We didn't know how much Hanssen knew

about what we were doing.

So we had to find out,

what is he doing in our computer system?

What is he following?

Has he been reading about the other cases?

- How much surveillance support did we use in this case?

- We had physical surveillance and we had technical surveillance both for 24/7.

We had to go out and brief the surveillance teams

and let them know. "If you know Robert Hanssen or if there's any

chance that he knows you or your face,

you will not work this case. He's armed.

He has a gun. We know he's trained to use it."

So we had to designate him as 'A and D'.

So that meant that for each surveillance shift,

an agent with a gun had to be on that shift.

And there were over 300 people who worked it.

- How is this one different besides the fact that it was an FBI agent?

- An espionage investigation can go on for years.

This case, we didn't have that luxury.

We didn't know whether or not he was still active.

Is he still committing espionage or has he is he just

on ice and not doing anything right now?

And that was one of the burning questions.

Hanssen was a control freak.

He had to maintain control

and he wanted me to react to him.

I had a desk in the main area

and he had a separate smaller office right off that.

And there was one time I was working on something for him on my laptop,

and he came around behind me, he put his hands on my shoulders

in a real creepy way, sort of leaned his chest against my back.

And If you look here, this is my desk here, right?

This is a pit area. There was never going to be anyone here.

- Right. - Here's my desk.

I've surrounded my desk with chairs.

I actually moved a file cabinet and a computer stand

to make it impossible for him to come around behind me.

- So what did we learn about Hanssen's lifestyle?

- We learned that there was some deviancy there with Hanssen.

For instance, with his friend Jack Hoschouer,

Jack would visit their home

and Hanssen would,

you know, allow or tell Jack, basically,

where to stand outside of the home

so he could watch Hanssen and his wife together.

He set up a feed in a room that Jack stayed in

so that he could also watch them together.

- So when you say that he set up a feed so that Jack could watch

he and his wife together,

do you mean sexually? - Yes, I do mean sexually, yes.

- Does his wife know about this? - His wife did not know.

We learned too

that Hanssen befriended a dancer, a stripper...

...Priscilla Sue Galey.

Both say that it was not a sexual relationship,

but he purchased certain things for her.

He gave her money to fix her teeth.

He gave her a used Mercedes Benz. He gave her a credit card.

He was on inspection, what we call inspection at the time.

And they'd go out and inspect different areas of the FBI.

- He took her on a trip abroad. - So I just want to clarify.

Robert Hanssen took his stripper friend on an inspection mission?

- Yes.

He went to church during the day,

and then he would stop and see Priscilla

in the evening on his way home from work.

So he betrayed everything and everyone.

He was not loyal to anyone.

- There was another time I was sitting in one of the chairs in front of my desk,

and he comes over and he puts his leg up on the armrest of the chair.

So then I'm staring right at his crotch.

And I just got up

and I moved away and I'm like, "What are you doing?"

So I think a lot of this was power.

That's what it seems like.

It seems like he was constantly invading your personal space,

physically and emotionally as well.

- He was particularly interested in my personal life,

in my marriage, in why my wife and I,

even though we had been married, what, four months at the time,

didn't have children yet,

about my religion, about how I was disobeying

the precepts of my religion by not getting my wife pregnant.

I remember coming in once,

and he's at my desk, on my phone.

I said, "Who are you talking to?"

And he said, "Oh, I'm having a conversation with Juliana,"

my wife, and I remember feeling so angry.

It was visceral, it was a gut check.

So as we're collecting evidence for the criminal case,

what are some of the things we want ideally to get?

- We knew he was writing notes on this Palm Pilot.

- Hanssen had a routine where he kept the thing in his back pocket all the time.

Always one back left pocket. Any time he sat down,

he'd pull it out of his pocket and put it in his bag.

And I thought, there has to be information on here.

He's never separated from it.

He talks about it more than his children,

and he's told me that he's written the encryption on it himself.

- Is there a possibility that he's going to leave it behind

if he has to go someplace?

- We used everything that we learned about Hanssen.

He was a narcissist.

So, being challenged meant that he had to show superiority

and he really loves to shoot.

And we came up with this idea that

Rich and the assistant director,

were going to come in unannounced.

- So we set up a firearms shoot, at FBI headquarters.

We have a range in the basement.

- So they interrupt him and they literally

slap $20 on his desk and said, "You and me at the range now.

And I bet you that $20, 5 targets out of 5, I can beat you."

- And what was Hanssen's reaction to that?

Because now you're picking him up and you're like, "Let's go, Sparky."

- So now he's mad. He grabs his ear protection, eye protection,

he holsters his firearm, he gets up and he stumbles off after them.

And for the first time, he forgets that Palm Pilot.

- We knew Hanssen had a lot of interest in guns and weapons like that.

And he always wanted to challenge me in the shooting competition

because he figured that he's got to do something

to show that he's superior to me.

- So he's out of the office.

What are you up to?

- The Palm Pilot was in his bag, right? It was a Palm 3X.

- Wow.

- I go to his bag.

There are four identical pockets.

I open all four and I find the PalmPilot,

but I also find a data card and a floppy disk.

Remember, we're going back to 2001 at this point. - Oh, yeah.

- My heart is pounding. I'm really excited.

I really wanted to get this thing.

I believe that the information we wanted was on it.

So I just grabbed all three things, decided I don't have a lot of time,

ran down three flights of stairs where Rich had set up a tech room

where these computer techs were just ready for whatever I brought down,

any level of encryption.

They hooked up the devices and said, "Yes, it is encrypted.

We're just going to copy it now

and we'll break the encryption later."

- Right. - I could literally see

they're using a program called Norton Ghost.

They're cloning it. And I see the 83%.

And I get a text on my pager saying

'out of pocket coming to you'.

They kick me out of the room.

They're like, "You're disrupting us."

So I knock on the door. I'm like, "I'm going to need those devices."

And they're like, "We're almost done."

I said, "You don't understand. He's armed. I'm not. He's angry.

And if I don't get up there before him, he's going to shoot me!"

Next time on FBI True.

- This wasn't just a spy. It was the spy.

- The information that he gave caused irreparable damage to the US government.

- This is a big case. There is no getting out.

- He caused the death of three sources by giving up their identities.

He did leave a mark on the Foxstone Park sign

to let the Russians know that he's made a drop.

- If Hanssen determines that you betrayed him,

he would commit violence against you.

- He grabs me by the lapel. He lifts me up onto my toes.

- Did he have a weapon on him? Would he try to use it?

- There's no way I got this right.

The odds are impossible.

Subtitles: difuze