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The back room's first hard look at him produced no leads of value. Hanssen wasn't spending money. His daughter was on full scholarship. There was no drinking, no gambling in his file--in short, nothing to indicate he was selling out his country. Like most other career FBI agents, he had not been polygraphed since he joined. Once, in 1994, he had been caught fiddling with a colleague's computer, but he explained that away by saying he was testing the system for vulnerabilities. He was one of the foremost computer experts in the NSD; it seemed part of his job. The back room, says an official, needed more and "decided to find people who knew the answers."
Investigators went trolling for disaffected Russian intelligence veterans who might have had useful information, and in the fall of 2000 they delicately wooed several, targeted for their knowledge and weaknesses. One informer came in with a priceless item--a piece of a black plastic garbage bag. From that scrap, FBI lab experts lifted two latent fingerprints and ran them against every set in the agency's personnel file. Bingo: they matched two on the 10-print card filed in the name of Robert Philip Hanssen.
A second clue produced by the trolling operation was a tape recording of an August 1986 telephone conversation between a Washington-based spy named Aleksander Fefelov and "B," the highly placed volunteer double agent. Two FBI analysts who had worked with Hanssen for five years listened to the tape, enhanced to minimize noise, and concluded "without reservation" that "B" was Hanssen.
A short time later, a Russian source produced Hanssen's complete KGB dossier--the original, not photocopied, master file on the agency's 15-year relationship with "B." The paper trail of letters and documents stunned even the ferrets in the back room. Here appeared to be incontrovertible evidence that one of their own was responsible for irreparable damage to U.S. security over many years. But that was old stuff: now the agents wanted to catch him in the act, to collect hard evidence that would stand up in court--or persuade Hanssen he was better off confessing all.
Armed with secret wiretap approvals and search warrants, agents mounted intensive electronic and physical surveillance of Hanssen. They snooped into his computer files, decoded encrypted messages, read his Palm Pilot. On Dec. 12 they spotted him driving four times past the sign used to signal a drop, just a mile from his home. On Dec. 26 they watched him do it again, as he walked right up to the signpost with a flashlight to sweep its beam in search of the adhesive-tape signal, then raise his arms in a gesture of disgust. On Jan. 12 Hanssen was reassigned to an obscure office at headquarters to isolate him.
Still, he made three more passes by the signal site in January and three more in February. Finally, on Feb. 12, at another park code-named Lewis, agents discovered a package containing $50,000. They photographed and examined everything in the packet, then replaced it. And waited for Hanssen to make the red-handed exchange.