Welcome to the International Spy museum and thank you so much for coming out this evening. Im peter ernest, the executive collector of the museum and im very pleased to introduce craig floyd whom ive known for a number of years who keeps trying to build a competitor museum. Although ive put obstacles in his way progress continues and im sure it will go very well. We look forward to his joining and that museum joining us here in this city of museums. Im very, very pleased to welcome him and all of you to the International Spy museum this evening. So have a great evening. Enjoy. Let me welcome everyone here tonight. This is our 8th in a series of events that we call witness to history. It gives us a very important opportunity to get a first hand glimpse of the major moments in Law Enforcement history from those who actually participated in those events. Tonight we take a look into what the u. S. Department of justice has called, quote, possibly the worst intelligence disaster in u. S. History. From 22 years from 1979 until 2001 Robert Hanssen, an fbi special agent spied for soviet and Russian Intelligence Services against the United States. Tonight we will examine this infamous case with the fbi official who was at the center of the investigation that led to hanssens arrest and with the author who wrote the definitive book about hanssen and the damage he did to america. We will look at what motivated an fbi agent and devoted family man to spy on his own country, how he was able to get away without being detected for more than 20 years, how he was ultimately discovered and what changes were put into place to prevent such an intelligence catastrophe from ever occurring again. I want to begin by thanking the sponsor of our witness to history series and that would be the target corporation, eler and paul mckab are representing target. Thank you both for what you have done for us tonight and through this series. Certainly to our hosts this evening, clearly the International Spy museum has become the premier or certainly a premier museum here in our Nations Capital and around this nation. I want to thank peter ernest, their executive director and the spy museum for hosting this event and partnering with us. I hope this is one of many opportunities well have to partner together. I also want to acknowledge and thank you for coming here tonight. This is our largest crowd weve ever had and i think it says a lot about the interest about this case as well as our partners here with the spy museum bringing some of their friends and supporters here along with our own. Thank you all for joining us. I want to acknowledge and thank cspan for filming tonights event as they have many times before so that it could be shared with a nationwide audience. Well make sure to get you that schedule of airings after tonights event. For those of you who might be unfamiliar with our work, the national Law EnforcementOfficers Memorial Fund was formed in 1984 to honor the service and sacrifice of americas peace officers. We dedicated a national mon you memt in 1991 and were building a National Museum in their honor set to open in the spring of 2016 right across the street from the national Law Enforcement officers memorial in the 400 block of e and f streets. The witness to History Program is being operated under the aus misses of the national Law Enforcement museum. Let me introduce our esteemed pannalists of the evening. Michael rochford retired. He comes from a long line of professio professionals from chicago. He began as a special agent in the 1980s the he rose to become the unit chief at the fbi for russian espionage and in march of 1992 became the Senior Executive chief for all the cases for the bureau. He worked on awe drink aims, earl pitts and Robert Hanssen. He retired from the fbi in 2004 and were honored and pleased to have him here with us tonight to share his story. David weiss, renowned author. In 1992 he wrote the book, spy. I have a copy of it here and there will be copies outside the doors here for sale for those who might want to get a copy. After you hear the story i think it will pique your interest and i think this book tells the whole story. Well only be able to touch upon the highlights tonight, spy, the inside story of how the fbis Robert Hanssen betrayed america. Hes known as the nations leading espionage writer. Hes written a total of 14 books, most of them about americas intelligence and espionage agencies. His latest book is tiger trap, americas secret spy war with china. It was one of publishers top ten books in the spring of 2011. I thank our distinguished guests here in the audience with us, too many to mention but certainly many Law Enforcement agency heads and great supporters of the national Law EnforcementOfficers Memorial Fund. Let me start with an opening question for both of our panelists. Im going to start with you, mike, if you would. Lets put this case in some perspective, the Robert Hanssen spy case. How much damage was done by Robert Hanssen, the spy . Can you hear me . Please use the microphone for our cspan. Let me tell you the assessment of the National Counter intelligence executive in 2004 when i retired from the fbi relative to this case, their assessment was that he was the fourth most damaging spy in the history of the United States because largely of the technical losses that he was responsible for. Cumulatively if you had to reproduce some of these things it might be somewhere around 20 billion to have to replace these things. Loss of three lives and multiple assets having been arrested and second source predication. Rosenberg number one, walker two and i honestly cant remember the third. I guess im getting old and feeble. Conrad . Conrad, thats exactly right. I dont know how you would assess manning or snowden when you throw them in that mix because both of those have to be looked at. Thats what it was in 2004. I appreciate that. David, your thoughts . I cant put a ranking on how bad he was but he was bad and the damage he did was considerable because he passed hundreds of documents, secret documents, to the russians and did so over a long period of time. In addition, he did betray three people, two of whom were executed. They were also betrayed by al gr dritch ames in terms of people executed or imprisoned, i would think that ames had a higher number. There were ten that he detrayed who are no longer living and many others who went to prison. In the case of hanssen, as mike as pointed out, there were technical secrets that he gave away that the russians were very happy to have and are very important. The biggest, of course, was the secret tunnel under the russian soviet and then Russian Embassy on wisconsin avenue in washington which was built by the fbi, operated by the nsa. It was an incredible project. I circled that building many times looking for where the tunnel could have started because no one would tell me, and i think i know the house where it began. An fbi official for whom i have great respect, john lewis, now retired, did tell me a funny episode. He said we had to consider what we were going to do after the tunnel was betrayed and discovered, didnt we have to somehow close it down and the house might eventually be bought by somebody else. They decided they would have to cement the entrance to the tunnel because otherwise you might be sitting down to dinner and suddenly three beefy russians come up the stairs. That wouldnt do at all. So they did block the entrance to the tunnel and i think i know the house but i dont really know for sure. I did circle the building several times and also on foot trying to figure it out where the tunnel began. Ive written in the book about how they got rid of the dirt which of course was a huge, huge problem. How do you get rid of that amount of dirt when you excavate, secretly, under a building. So the technical secrets that he gave away were very important. The fact is that this went on for so long and he had access to the budget. He had access to the technical stuff. Some of the documents he gave away dealt with our estimate of the soviet nuclear capacity. This was serious stuff that he was giving away and material that im sure the kgb was very happy to have. So, yes, it was very important and he did a lot of damage. I dont know what his ranking is but its certainly right up there. To my mind james and hanssen were the two tops in our time spies who damaged the country. Thank you, david. I want to get into more about the secrets he divulged and how he did it. David, im going to come back to you, having written a book about this gentleman, Robert Hanssen, his early life. What led him to the fbi . Take us through those years briefly. He didnt set out to be an fbi agent. His father wanted him to be a doctor and he couldnt get into medical school so he studied dentistry and then he decided he didnt want to look in peoples mouths he didnt like spit i think was his quote, right . Yes. I didnt want to be too graphic but thats correct. He became an accountant and a cpa. His father was on the Chicago Police force. I guess he was commander in the norwood park area. I dont know chicago that well. But eventually he became head of the so called red squad which was investigating suspected communists including the league of women voters and other dangerous organizations. When people realized what was happening they cracked down and stopped the red squad, but then there were all these files on people. Some of them might have been communist but most of them apparently werent. So there was a mysterious fire in a file cabinet in which all these red squad files disappeared. The file cabinet next to that one was untouched, so it seemed like a very selective fire. Hanssen later told a colleague in the fbi that, yes, he was proud of the fact that his dad had run the red squad and had, in turn, destroyed the files. One of our guests tonight is dr. David charny whom ill talk about a little more. I imagine david has thought a little bit about as i have, too, about a man whose father was trying to hunt down communists in chicago and he ends up giving secrets, massive secrets, to the communist government. Thats kind of food for thought, especially like david, youre a psychiatrist. I am not. Im just an old police reporter, but still, you think about things like that. So from the police force, he was recruited into the fbi in 1976, about age 31 or 32. He was assigned at first to indiana and then to new york after the usual training and in new york he wasted no time. Three years after he had been recruited into the bureau, he walked into the gru, the soviet military Intelligence Agency office in new york, and offered his services. They paid him 30,000. His wife discovered him writing a letter to the russians down in the basement and he very guiltily turned it over and she thought he was having an affair and he was writing to his girlfriend. He explained, its all right, dear, its just the russians. Im just spying for the russians. So she made him because he converted to catholicism after he married his wife, bonnie, she made him go to father bob buccerelli. Father bob said you have to turn yourself into the authorities and return the money. It seemed like that was the end of his spying career but the next day father bob called him and said on second thought, maybe you could give that money to a worthy catholic charity, which is how the gru money ended up with mother theresa. But i think the important thing out of all this is he gives up dentistry and he doesnt get into medical school, works for the Chicago Police, becomes a cpa, joins the fbi and immediately starts working for the Russian Military service. Thats the important thing to remember. It makes you wonder, he claimed that he read kim fillbys book at age 14 and decided this course of action. I dont know whether to believe a thing like that, but you have to wonder about somebody this isnt some long festering desire to get even with the bureau or something. This was three years after he joins hes spying for the gru and giving money to mother theresa. So thats more or less the background of that. Fascinating character and really contradiction of character. Mike, id ask you, i know you didnt work directly with hanssen, but tell me what few contacts you had with him, what was your opinion of this man, and what was the opinion of his colleagues at the fbi . I met him as a young agent, probably three or four years into being an fbi agent in the Washington Field office, about 1983 or 84. I met him through an analyst, Jimmy Millburn and bob king who helped me on a number of cases. I didnt think much of him. He was their supervisor and said hello. Id seen him Walking Around the halls and people say thats dr. Death, the mortician, and you hear these things about him that were kind of odd but strange and you just said, well, another kind of different guy. The rumors we had had was that he would help some of the analysts in unusual ways. There is one female agent who worked illegals that he kind of helped her understand how to work with the morris code. He helped her buy software that the bureau didnt pay for in order to make her more efficient. There were a couple of female analysts one analyst that named her son after bob. She couldnt believe it, she thought we had the wrong guy. Another analyst whom he because he was an opus dei recruit, he finds out a couple of these ladies are living with their boyfriends and he starts introducing them to Birth Control ideas, unsolicited. That made these ladies unimpressed with his political correctness. This is a back drop. Then i started working on the urchenkle case in 85 and come to find out later on that bob had been newly transferred to headquarters and he would sneak in and talk to Eddie Worthington and say joe wants these debriefings and he would like to get them faster than anybody else in the bureau. I come down every weekend, just give them to me so the mail wont make these things late. Ed said forget it, were going to do everything according to plan and how we do the regular process of disseminating information. He goes to the bathroom and there is bob at the famous xerox machine on the 4th floor xeroxing the debriefings and says what the hell are you doing. He chastises him and says dont do this again. There was no mechanism at that time to report activities of a security nature. This went unreported, a little puff of smoke. In 92 i came back from a transfer in nashville, an agency of the memphis division. I came to work on the ames case, we call it major case 43. Jimmy was assigned to work with gene and a couple people at the agency on trying to call together this list of people who might be culpable in early losses to the russians. On this list of course was ames. So jim is writing this note on the assistant director about what their findings are, joint findings and how it looks like maybe rick is a little more culpable than the rest. Bob down the hall is in the Analytical Group, and he decides to hack into jims computer. He hacks into the Section Chiefs computer, too, ray. He gets the note that jim is writing instantly and prints it. Another analyst, bob king, takes a look at it and says you cant do that, thats not right, what are you doing. He said im just trying to show how vulnerable the new Computer System is and im going to fix it. Bob says you better tell the section chief that you did that or i will. So he goes and reports it to ic smith. We heard about it. We said maybe we should fire this guy or something. They didnt because they thought, well, hes a good guy, a broken wing employees who went beyond the scope of what he was assigned to do. It took more initiative than anybody was comfortable with. Those working on the penetration issues in that unit decided if theyre not going to take action against him, lets do gorilla warfare. If we see him in lunch or the bathroom or in the hall were going to walk the other way. If we see him in our area were going to kick his ass out of our office. Weapon wont tell him anything off line because hes a little different. Not that we thought he was a spy, we just thought he was a little different. Thats kind of my back drop with him. Later when i became supervisor at wfo after the arrest of ames and were looking at allegations of penetration at an offsite, i got a call from bob some time between 96 and 98. He says im working with this defector and this fellow, hes interesting because he kind of knows as i do what your squad is doing. I said whats that, bob . He said youre looking for bad guys in the community. I go, well, how do you know that . He goes, well, it doesnt matter but, look, hes got ideas on where you can go. Let me give you some names. I said give me names, thats great but im not ill send an agent out and maybe an analyst out to talk to you. Because of his history and the back drop of what i explained earlier we didnt take him seriously and we think post arrest that he was actually trying to ill is it information from us. He might have been tasked by the russians, i dont know, but it was clearly a very bold and unusual for him to call me direct, especially since supposedly the rest of the population didnt know that we were conducting that offsite investigation. A lot of clues that seemly in hindsight might have made him more of a suspect than he was but obviously at the time you didnt have that context. We didnt put it together. The office of security didnt collect that find of information. Theyve gotten a lot better at it. I like to call them puffs of smoke, had we collected them we could have been wiser and smarter in reacting based on his activities, but at that time