by Dan Eggen and Walter Pincus, The Washington Post
The FBI’s “pervasive inattention to security,” including a failure to monitor the computer use and personal finances of its agents, enabled Robert P. Hanssen to pass secrets to Moscow for more than 20 years, according to a special commission’s sharply worded report released yesterday.
“Simply put, security is not as valued within the Bureau as it is in other agencies,” concluded the commission, headed by former CIA and FBI director William H. Webster. The report quoted an FBI Internal Security Task Force that found “security policies are too often viewed as a nuisance to negotiate around, rather than [as] edicts with which to comply.”
Hanssen, whom the commission interviewed and quoted publicly about his spying for the first time, told investigators that he passed secrets to the Soviets and Russians because of financial pressures that created “an atmosphere of desperation.” He gloated over the lack of scrutiny by his superiors at the FBI.
“The only thing that possibly could have uncovered my espionage activities was a complete investigation of my financial positions and deposits to bank accounts,” which would have revealed wealth that his salary couldn’t explain, Hanssen said. “If I had been a more malevolent spy than I was,” the FBI “would have had a very difficult time finding me.”
“I could have been a devastating spy, I think, but I didn’t want to be a devastating spy,” he told the commission. “I wanted to get a little money and to get out of it.”
Webster said in an interview that he believed Hanssen’s espionage activities were fueled by money “plus anger,” which came from his not receiving the recognition and advancement he believed he deserved. Webster, who was FBI director when Hanssen carried out some of his espionage activities, will brief the Senate Judiciary Committee on the report on Tuesday.
The report caps a 13-month investigation into how the FBI managed to overlook a spy in its midst for more than two decades. The report, ordered by Attorney General John D. Ashcroft, recounts numerous details already publicly known about the Hanssen affair, including the scope of classified information that he handed over.
In a November 2000 delivery, three months before his arrest, Hanssen gave the Russians “between 500 and 1,000 sheets of photocopied material,” the report said. Hanssen crowed to the panel about poor security on the FBI’s Automated Case Support program, the backbone of the bureau’s chaotic computer system and the source of most of the material delivered that month.
“Any clerk in the bureau could come up with stuff on that system,” Hanssen said. “It was pathetic . . . It’s criminal what’s laid out. What I did was criminal, but it’s criminal negligence . . . what they’ve done on that system.”
He also told the panel, “Security was lax . . . [in] that you could bring documents out of FBI Headquarters without . . . ever having a risk of being searched, or looked at, or even concerned about.”
The 107-page report provides new details about Hanssen’s illicit activities, including an anonymous overture to a Russian intelligence officer in 1993 that prompted an official diplomatic complaint from Moscow but never led the FBI to Hanssen.
In another missed opportunity, Hanssen was caught with unauthorized hacking software on his computer while serving as an FBI liaison to the State Department in the late 1990s. He claimed he used it only to bypass the system administrator, who was often unavailable; Hanssen was not questioned further about the incident.
The report noted the conflict between law enforcement, which requires wide sharing of information to aid investigations, and intelligence, which demands compartmentalization of material. “The two will never fully co-exist in the Bureau unless security programs receive the commitment and respect the FBI gives criminal investigations,” the panel said.
As an example, the report said the FBI actually loosened security restrictions on the bureau’s automated system of records in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks to help speed terrorism probes. But the change, undertaken without consulting FBI security experts, inadvertently allowed general users to access classified information from secret wiretaps, the report says.
The report calls for a security office that would centralize security matters in one place. Noting the responsibility had been “dispersed across eight headquarters divisions and many field offices,” the panel found, “no single group is responsible for developing and implementing security policy.”
The report says that while FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III has implemented some needed reforms, “senior management has not fully embraced the changes necessary to bring Bureau security programs up to par with the rest of the intelligence community.”
In a statement last night, Mueller said, “I also agree that we have much more to do, but I am confident we are on track to accomplish what this report envisions.”
Hanssen, 57, was arrested by fellow FBI agents in February 2001 after he dropped a cache of classified documents for his Moscow handlers under a footbridge in a park near his Vienna, Va., home. The Soviet Union and Russia paid Hanssen $643,000 in cash and diamonds, and promised deposits totaling $800,000 in a Russian bank account in exchange for information that included the betrayal of two U.S. double agents, both of whom were later executed, according to investigators.
Hanssen, a 25-year FBI veteran and married father of six, pleaded guilty in July to 15 counts of espionage as part of an agreement to avoid the death penalty. He recently completed months of interrogation by the FBI and CIA and is scheduled to be sentenced in federal court in Alexandria on May 10.