Read Spy: The Inside Story of How the FBI's Robert Hanssen Betrayed America for Free Online

disclosure might cause. But, in addition, there are code words for various categories of sensitive data that are, in effect,
above
TOP SECRET .
    * “A Review of FBI Security Programs,” Commission for Review of FBI Security Programs, U.S. Department of Justice, March 2002, p. 7. The Webster commission was created in response to Hanssen’s arrest.
    † Webster commission, p. 8.
    * As far as Mabey could recall, he derived the name from Top Cat, a rakish alley cat who wore a little hat and was the hero of a Saturday morning Hanna-Barbera cartoon popular on television in the 1960s.
    † They were Jack E. Dunlap, an Army sergeant working at the National Security Agency; Nelson C. “Bulldog” Drummond, a Navy yeoman; William H. Whalen, an Army lieutenant colonel assigned to the Joint Chiefs of Staff; and Herbert W. Boeck-enhaupt, an Air Force sergeant who betrayed the secrets of the Strategic Air Command. Dunlap committed suicide; the others were arrested, convicted, and given long prison sentences.
    * General Polyakov was arrested on July 4, 1986, interrogated for twenty months, and shot.
    * On the night of Hanssen’s arrest on February 18, 2001, the FBI spoke to Bonnie Hanssen at her house and then escorted her to a hotel in Tysons Corner, in northern Virginia, and questioned her at length. She cooperated with the FBI and revealed to agents the encounter with her husband in the basement. It was the first time that the FBI learned that Hanssen’s spying had begun not in 1985 but in 1979.
    * Congress has not recognized privileges for priests, lawyers, psychiatrists, and other professionals, but the United States Supreme Court, in
United States
v.
Nixon
, the famous Watergate tapes decision, declared that generally, “an attorney or a priest may not be required to disclose what has been revealed in professional confidence.” By 1963, all fifty states had laws recognizing a confidentiality privilege for the clergy, but the laws varied a great deal and it was not always clear whether a priest or a person confessing was the holder of the privilege.

5
Headquarters
    Jim Ohlson had joined the FBI in 1972, after serving with the 101st Airborne Division in Vietnam and earning a master’s degree in math at the University of Pittsburgh. The bureau sent him to the defense language school in Monterey to learn Arabic, then to New York to work on Middle East counterterrorism investigations, “concentrating on Palestinian matters.” *
    After five years, Ohlson was promoted to the budget unit at FBI headquarters in Washington. The unit, with only four special agents and two clerks, was part of the bureau’s intelligence division. † Small and unglamorous it might have been, but in any bureaucracy the people who work on the budget know everything, and this was true in the FBI.
    In January 1981, a newcomer arrived at the unit from New York. Supervisory Special Agent Robert Hanssen, like Ohlson, was doing his first tour at headquarters. Because Hanssen was a CPA, the budget unit was a logical place for him to be assigned. He commuted to work from a house the Hanssens bought on Whitecedar Court in Vienna, Virginia.
    “When I first met him,” Ohlson recalled, “I asked where are you from? Chicago. What high school? Taft. My gosh, I was there. And it turned out we were just one class apart. A week or so later I brought inthe yearbook to show the secretaries and Bob and have a good laugh over our old pictures.
    “We hit it off instantly,” Ohlson said. Aside from their friendship, he respected Hanssen’s technical ability. Ohlson was leaving the budget unit that spring, but before going he managed to wangle approval to buy a Texas Instruments programmable calculator. “We had no desktop computers yet, that was the closest thing to one. I was glad to hand it over to Bob. He put a financial program on it.”
    At the time, Joseph L. Tierney, a gray-haired Irishman from Long Island, was chief of CI-3, the counterintelligence support