just evaporated and we had nothing. >> of course, we thought they were outright stealing documents, they could be planting bugs, anything like that. there was no telling what they did. that was the concern. >> we were convinced the russians had a success story. what it was, we did not know. >> in the late '90s, i was the most junior agent on my squad, so i had the work that no one else wanted. i was in charge of investigating the sbr line o.t. o.t. means operational technical. these russian technical officers were supporting operations, like our tech agents support us, but they're not doing the operations. so it wasn't the glamorous stuff. early in 1999, the state department received an accreditation package from