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

envelope of the letter to Degtyar was an unsigned typed letter to Cherkashin from Robert Hanssen. The KGB, not knowing his identity, gave him the simple code name “B.” The letter said:
    Dear Mr. Cherkashin:
Soon, I will send a box of documents to Mr. Degtyar. They are from certain of the most sensitive and highly compartmented projects of the U.S. intelligence community. All are originals to aid in verifying their authenticity. Please recognize for our long-term interests that there are a limited number of persons with this array of clearances. As a collection they point to me. I trust that an officer of your experience will handle them appropriately. I believe they are sufficient to justify a $100,000 payment to me. I must warn of certain risks to my security of which you may not be aware. Your service has recentlysuffered some setbacks. I warn that Mr. Boris Yuzhin (line PR, SF), Mr. Sergey Motorin (Line PR, Wash.) and Mr. Valeriy Martynov (Line X, Wash.) have been recruited by our “Special Services.”

    Having betrayed the three FBI sources and, as far as Hanssen knew, sent them to their doom, he described a classified intelligence collection program. In addition, “to further support my bona fides,” as Hanssen put it, he included information about recent Soviet defectors to U.S. intelligence.
    He added:
    Details regarding payment and future contact will be sent to you personally.… [M]y identity and actual position in the community must be left unstated to ensure my security. I am open to commo [communication] suggestions but want no specialized tradecraft. I will add 6, (you subtract 6) from stated months, days and times in both directions of our future communications.

    Hanssen had no way of knowing that less than four months earlier, Aldrich Ames had already given up Martynov, Motorin, and Yuzhin to the KGB. * The fact that Ames had been down that path before him, and for the same reason, did not alter Hanssen’s intent. At the very least, his betrayal provided important confirmation to the Soviets of the information they had already received from Aldrich Ames.
    On June 13, 1985, Ames had wrapped up between five and seven pounds of cable traffic and other secret documents in plastic bags in his fourth-floor office at CIA headquarters. He took the elevator down, used his laminated ID card to get through the turnstiles that block every exit, and walked to his car in the parking lot. No guard asked to look inside the plastic bags; the CIA, as Ames knew, did not examine packages being carried out of the building.
    Ames drove across the river to Chadwicks, a Washington saloon and restaurant under the K Street Freeway on the Georgetown waterfront.There he met Sergei D. Chuvakhin, a diplomat listed as a first secretary of the Soviet embassy. The KGB was using Chuvakhin as a cutout, or intermediary; Ames in turn was ostensibly developing Chuvakhin as an agency source.
    At lunch, Ames handed Chuvakhin the plastic bags containing Langley’s most precious secrets—the names of more than ten of the most important Soviet sources working for the CIA and FBI, including the three that Hanssen would betray four months later. Ames knew that many of them would die.
    Long after, when he pleaded guilty to espionage in federal court, Ames described that day: “I did something which is still not entirely explicable even to me: without preconditions, or any demand for payment, I volunteered to the KGB information identifying virtually all Soviet agents of the CIA and other American and foreign services known to me. To my enduring surprise, the KGB replied that it had set aside for me two million dollars in gratitude for the information.” * His decision to betray the CIA’s agents, Ames later said, “was like the leap into the dark.”
    Hanssen, in betraying the three FBI sources, was not merely establishing his credibility with the KGB. He was also protecting himself against what in his letter he had called “certain risks