Free Spy: The Inside Story of How the FBI's Robert Hanssen Betrayed America by David Wise

quota bumpkin. They pushed a few along in a sort of equal opportunity program.”
    Yuzhin revealed to American intelligence the existence of the KGB’s Group North, an elite unit of senior Soviet intelligence officers who specialized in recruiting American and Canadian targets worldwide. The KGB group was a kind of spy SWAT team with authority to travel anywhere on its missions.
    Yuzhin also gave the FBI and the CIA leads that helped Norway toidentify and arrest Arne Treholt, a high-level Soviet spy in that country’s diplomatic corps. * Bill Smits continued as his FBI case agent.
    Yuzhin photographed several hundred documents and cables from Moscow with the CIA’s trick camera. When all ninety frames were shot, he would exchange the exposed film for a new roll. He was also given a small camera by the FBI; once, when using it, Yuzhin managed to take pictures of his own reflection on the documents, not a good idea had the film fallen into the wrong hands.
    Some months later, Yuzhin committed a blunder that nearly cost him his life: he lost the cigarette lighter. He looked all over, but to no avail. Yuzhin, frantic, contacted his FBI handler for help. “I searched his car that night thinking he might have dropped it between the seats,” Bill Smits said. “We damn near tore the car apart.” No lighter. Yuzhin thought maybe he had dropped it at a friend’s apartment. The FBI entered the apartment, searched it, and found nothing.
    In the meantime, a janitor in the Soviet consulate had found the lighter by a pool table. Trying to light a flame, he took four pictures of himself. He turned the lighter in, and the KGB immediately recognized what it was. Yuzhin and another Soviet at the consulate, Igor S. Samsonov, were the prime suspects; both were smokers and shared an office.
    In 1982, Yuzhin returned to Moscow, still under suspicion and closely watched. The KGB stationed its agents in the crawl space between the ceiling of the Yuzhins’ apartment and the floor of the apartment above. The KGB had the Yuzhins under total surveillance, including their bedroom, twenty-four hours a day.
    But without real evidence that the lighter was Yuzhin’s, the KGB did not arrest him. The CIA hoped to stay in communication with Yuzhin, but he was wary now. “When he returned to Moscow,” a CIA man said, “Yuzhin would only agree to give a ‘sign of life,’ such as a chalk mark. No meetings, no dead drops.” For the moment, at least, Yuzhin seemed out of danger.
    But he was not, because Hanssen had learned his identity, along with the true names of Martynov and Motorin.
    * * *

    For the Hanssens, his new assignment in New York City meant pulling up stakes again, selling their four-bedroom house on Whitecedar Court, buying a new one, enrolling the children in new schools. They sold their house in Vienna for $175,000. But they paid almost as much for a smaller, three-bedroom, two-story house in Yorktown Heights, in Westchester County again but farther north of the city and an hour-and-a-half commute from his office.
    But Hanssen had already decided how to supplement his FBI salary, then about $46,000; it had, after all, worked before. As he arranged the details of moving himself and his family to New York, he was back in Washington on Tuesday, October 1, 1985.
    From somewhere in Prince George’s County, Maryland, he dropped a letter in a mailbox. Three days later, it was received by Viktor M. Degtyar, a KGB Line PR officer, at his home in Alexandria, Virginia.
    When Degtyar opened the letter, he found another envelope inside, marked DO NOT OPEN. TAKE THIS ENVELOPE UNOPENED TO VICTOR I. CHERKASHIN . At that time, Viktor Cherkashin was the KGB’s chief of counterintelligence, or Line KR, at the Soviet embassy. Less than four months earlier, it was Cherkashin who had accepted Aldrich Ames as a walk-in to the KGB, a decision that launched Ames’s nine years of spying as the most damaging mole in the history of the CIA.
    Inside the inner