In retrospect, Bamford is now looking for hidden meanings in his various contacts with Hanssen. Several years ago, Bamford, then working as a producer for ABC News, went to Moscow to conduct an on-camera interview with one of the former Soviet Union’s most legendary spymasters, Viktor Cherkashin. A colonel in the KGB, the now-defunct Soviet intelligence service, Cherkashin had been the “handler” of the CIA’s most damaging known turncoat, Aldrich Ames.
Upon his return to Washington, Bamford told some of his friends in the intelligence community, including Hanssen, about his interview with Cherkashin. Hanssen wanted to know every detail of what the ex-Soviet spymaster told the American reporter. He expressed an interest in seeing a raw transcript of the interview. Bamford told Hanssen he could not give him a transcript of the interview but he described to Hanssen much of the detail. Bamford says he thought nothing more about Hanssen’s interest in the Cherkashin interview until last week, when he was confronted with the stunning accusation that for the last 15 years, Hanssen had been acting as a Soviet mole inside the FBI. More astonishing still was the revelation that Hanssen’s likely spymaster in Moscow, who he never personally met, was one Viktor Cherkashin.
A WORRIED MOLE?
At the time, it was perfectly logical for Hanssen to be interested in the details of an American interview with one of the Russians’ top spymasters, since Hanssen was one of the FBI’s most experienced Soviet counterintelligence analysts. But in reality, Bamford now wonders, was Hanssen worried that Cherkashin had inadvertently, or intentionally, said something to ABC that could have compromised Hanssen’s activities as a Russian mole?
Bamford says he never noticed anything that would, on the surface, have tipped him off to the fact that Hanssen was living a double life as an FBI Soviet analyst and Russian mole. But in hindsight, Bamford acknowleges that some of Hanssen’s behavior over the years seemed strange and conceivably may have reflected the fact that he was leading a secret life. For a start, Bamford says, Hanssen was regularly writing papers for the FBI about the evil machinations of Marxism, unclassified versions of which he occasionally shared with Bamford. Bamford says he found the papers dogmatic and anachronistic, like “something out of the 1950s,” and eventually threw them out. He says that to his recollection, Hanssen continued to write these outdated analyses about the communist menace into the 1990s, well after the Soviet Union and, by extension, the international communist movement that it supported, had fallen apart.
Bamford was coy about reflecting on the fact that he apparently was using Hanssen as a news source, which caused some consternation behind the scenes last week at ABC News, whose employ he left several years ago. Bamford says he did not meet Hanssen until long after the FBI gave up its unsuccessful espionage investigation of State Department diplomat Felix Bloch, a story that Bamford broke exclusively for ABC News; the FBI alleges that the investigation fell apart because Bloch got a tip from a Soviet mole inside the U.S. government, now suspected to have been Hanssen.
RECRUITING FOR OPUS DEI
Bamford says he was also struck by Hanssen’s ostentatiously pious devotion to the Catholic faith, and his involvement in the society of lay Catholics called Opus Dei, a worldwide movement devoted to promoting the religion and converting nonbelievers. A nonpracticing Catholic, Bamford says that Hanssen was “almost obsessed” with his participation in the church and the Opus Dei movement and tried to get Bamford involved in his religious activities. At one point five or six years ago, Bamford said, Hanssen “dragged me along” to an Opus Dei meeting in Washington, D.C., which involved religious rituals and prayers. He said he found the event unremarkable and boring.
A couple of years ago, he decided to end the friendship with Hanssen. It was too much of a bother, he said, dealing with Hanssen’s obsessions with religion and communism.
