NewsMax.com
Wednesday, Feb. 28, 2001

According to the Los Angeles Times:

U.S. spy-catchers are trying to determine whether the former FBI agent – who worked as a counterespionage expect – compromised a high-tech, super-sensitive, "black-budget" surveillance program of the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency.

In an interview with the Times, James Bamford, an author and authority on the NSA who knows Hanssen well, both personally and professionally, said:

The bugging program devised in the late 1970s during the Cold War "marries the CIA's covert people who know how to get into places – by bribing the right person or whatever is needed – with the NSA people who can design the right 'bug' to go in the right environment so the information can be secreted across the border.

"You're talking about very specific, very pointed information that's usually the gold nuggets of the intelligence community.

"Once [the Russians] find out how this eavesdropping is done and where in essence the bugs are, they could quickly do one of two things – take them apart, or worse yet, send disinformation over them."

Intelligence officials are now saying Hanssen apparently left signs that he had informed his Russian handlers where to find the planted bugs.

And, they say, he also indicated he suspected suddenly that American counterspies were onto his trail.

The FBI discovered a letter to the Russians signed by "Ramon Garcia," one of several aliases Hanssen is purported to have used, saying, "Something has aroused the sleeping tiger."

It complained that the FBI had promoted him to "a higher do-nothing" job without regular access to counterintelligence, "as if I am being isolated."

Hanssen is accused of providing classified material to Russia continually since 1985, when it was still the old Communist Soviet Union, in exchange for $1.4 million in cash and diamonds.

He was arrested Feb. 18 after FBI agents said they saw him leave a cache of secret documents at a "dead drop" in a park near his home in Vienna, Va., outside Washington.

Hanssen is known to have had intimate knowledge of, and access to, the secret eavesdropping program that was carried out under the innocuous designation of Special Collection Service, its "black budget" hidden deep within the federal budget.

So sensitive is its mission that its very existence was never acknowledged publicly until now.

Read more on this subject in related Hot Topics:
Hanssen Case
Russia

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