Curator's Corner: Robert Hanssen - An Inside View with Eric O'Neill

[Music] hi welcome to curators corner with the International Spy Museum I'm Amanda all key director of adult education at the International Spy Museum and I'm really excited to welcome you here today to what's going to be an incredible conversation we have two great speakers we have the curator in question from the title Vince Houghton who is our curator and historian at the International Spy Museum and we have Eric O'Neill who is a great friend of the museum we've been working with Eric for a long time he does these wonderful surveillance workshops in the streets with me and we cannot wait to get back out there and chase our rabbits and Eric is featured in two places in the new Spy Museum he's both in our turncoats and traitors gallery where he is used to explore Robert Hanssen who were talking about today and give his perspective on this terrible traitor and he also appears in license to thrill we're where he talks about the film breach which is about him that is so wild to have a movie made about you and it's a really good movie so I'm gonna turn this over to Vince and you tell me when you want that PowerPoint we'll see what I can do fire it up all right all right good you can go to the next slide sorry all you get to hear me tell Amanda to go slide by slide because if I put the PowerPoint up I can't see anything and then I'll forget that I'm on camera and I'll I'll start nodding off or something reading a book always wanted to tell me what to do anyway it's important that I can see myself in Eric so I don't bore Eric either so what you're seeing on the screen if you want to know more about this story we only have a certain amount of time you should check out Eric's book gray day which came out recently surprisingly it took them a long time to get all this down a lot of a lot of introspection a lot of thinking about the case I'd show you my personal copy but a good friend of mine Grayson borrowed it and he's reading it because he loves this story and hi Grayson hi Sloane I'm sure they're listening to Eric yeah you want to say hello sure yeah hello everybody to everybody who didn't get to make our last surveillance operation I hope you're here and listening apologies but you know coronavirus we will redo that once we're all out of our homes I want to say hi to my family who's actually watching downstairs in the same home which is sort of weird to Hannah and Lucas and Emma and yeah I want to say hi to my special friends Grayson and Sloane hey man I hear that you guys have been watching breach and I hope you love it well thank you Eric so a man if you kick the slide up 100 the ugly mug so yeah well this man Robert Hanssen who probably doesn't look like this right now is he's spent the last couple decades of his life in a pretty horrible place and we'll talk about that later on but this is an official photo of Hanson when he was an FBI agent and he is the man who we are focusing on today but the person we're talking to you a man if you kick us one more slide and this will be fun because it and see that this is a much younger picture of Eric O'Neill this is probably very close to when you were doing this operation let's talk a little bit about what you did at FBI because I think there's some all the different jobs that FBI has there certainly one that are in the movies and the TV shows all the time of the special agent running around the gun but there are intelligence analysts there are forensics people and then what you did which was called the ghost these are the surveillance experts so give us a little bit of perspective of what you did at FBI sure so I was an investigative specialist and also called also known as aka the ghosts my job was to surveil to track to investigate encounter intelligence and counterterrorism so that means following spies and terrorists finding out which people were the spies who were the terrorists and stopped them before they could do whatever bad act they were gonna do we were called ghosts cuz we were trained to work in the shadows primarily primarily we worked in surveillance which men meant that I could follow you from the moment you woke up in the morning until you went to sleep at night and I could listen to you snore if you snored by the way that was great because I knew you were still in your bed I'd know through the course of the day how many times you checked your watch or tied your shoes I would know how many times you stopped to eat whether you like fast food or fancy restaurants whether you shop at budget places or high-end places whether you like coffee or tea every single person you met every license plate that surrounded you whenever you stopped I'd know the make model and type of your car who your friends were everything about you because in order you have to know everything about your target in order to follow them successfully and I would do it all without being seen so ghosts have very specific training at the FBI Academy in Quantico Virginia our training is primarily how to work without being scenes how to blend into situations all sorts of disguise we had got some great CIA disguise training but we also learn to be masters of photography of driving because obviously you have to follow a lot of people in cars and that's the most dangerous part of your job are people with road rage or people who aren't careful on the road and most importantly the tradecraft so the very amazing thing about being a ghost the best part of the training was to learn all of the different tradecraft the way that spies and terrorists operates for all of the different kinds of operatives that we would be pursuing and so the next thing about learning that tradecraft is we could deploy it against others and this isn't something the FBI just made up as they went along you you work with our partners overseas doesn't mean mi5 develops going back at least a hundred years ago that you learn so the mi5 had this here the problem the FBI had a problem with surveillance we just weren't able to follow anyone because way back in the day in the origins the FBI it was a lot of buzz cut beefy you know strong white guys walking down the street white males walking down the street after a target and all that Russian had to do is turn around and see a bunch of clones and black suits like that the original men in black and know they were being followed so America does what America always does let's look at how everybody else does it make it better so we looked at mi5 and my five had this group called the Watchers and they were awesome they still are they would do all sorts of crazy tricks there there was a story about a group of Watchers who cut a hole in the side of a water tank in a water tower and floated a canoe in the water tower and sat in that canoe and watched out the whole to watch their target I mean stuff like that and that's what we wanted in the FBI so the FBI way back in the day and the origins of the ghosts sent some trainees over to learn from the Watchers and they brought it back and and we did everything we could to to make it our own that's where the ghosts come from and and so one of the one of the most interesting thing about the ghost is probably the most diverse group of operatives of special operatives in the FBI because if you are going to follow someone in any sort of environment you want to be able to blend in and to do that you need all races all sizes all shapes all ages so a team of ghosts would not look like your prototypical idea or Hollywood version of what a group of FBI operatives looks like well I mean they go ahead and move the slide but while she does let me let me ask you about Hanson himself in particular maybe one day there make a prequel of the breach because breach is one little part of the Hanson case of course it is the part that matters a lot because it is in the final getting the evidence that you needed to convict him but can you for the listeners out there who don't know the back story can you walk us up to the point at which you become involved how much had the FBI done leading up to that point to hook the look for this spy they knew they had what led to your participation in this case well breach is the the three-month investigation of how we caught hansom there are 22 years before that where Hanson was the most damaging spy in US history operating against the United States for the Russians and during that time no one had and no one in the entire intelligence community had any idea that it was Robert Hansen or that the mole which he was was in the FBI so let's go all the way back to the first day that Hanson decided I'm going to be a spy because he chose to be a spy he wasn't recruited by the Russians he volunteered his services to the Russians and he did it in the most clever way so Robert Hanssen way back in the day had joined the FBI he wanted to be a spy hunter he wanted to be James Bond right and he was put in charge of an analytical unit now analysts in intelligence work are our most important resource analysts take all the information that field operatives like me gather and they turn it into what we call actionable intelligence without analyst we can't do anything they literally are the most important pivotal part of intelligence gathering and counterintelligence but he wasn't happy about that in his mind he wanted to be James Bond be a field operative leading teams in the in the field and they made him a librarian so he was angry at the same time he he was married just having kids and he needed money and where most people would say I need to take a loan I need to downsize I need to borrow from family he decided I'm going to spy so you have that perfect trusted insider he is a narcissist who is angry at his employer and needed money and all he needed was that triggering event and it was a decision to spy and so what he did is he wrote a letter to the Russians and in that heat and identified a Russian intelligence officer this is a Soviet back in the day that we knew was a spy but he didn't know that we the FBI knew he was a spy right so by writing that letter to that individual he i breached an immense secret that we had in the united states and gave up two other spies that we had overseas Russians who were working for US intelligence who were then flown back to Moscow and shot and killed so in his first act of espionage he did one of the more egregious acts and he said I would like to work for you this is the amount of money I want and this is how we're gonna communicate and you'll never know who I am and he called himself be now later on in this this relationship with the Soviet Union and then later Russia because he survived the collapse the Soviet Union that's how good he was he decided that be must be a really boring name for a spy so he changed his name to Ramon Garcia now one I like to think that that in his mind and knowing Hanson the way that I came to know him he probably thought I need a really cool name cuz some point you know they're gonna learn that the great Ramon Garcia was the greatest spy in US history so we wanted a cool spy name a sexy spy name but you know we're also we're thinking about it Garcia has the the letter CIA in it so maybe he was trying to give a little clue of false flag when that came back to the US they would be hunting at the CIA and he spent most of his career finding ways to steal information that didn't lead back to him at the FBI because he knew that our spies in Russia would be trying to figure out who the mole in the intelligence community was the FBI the CIA the NSA everyone knew we had a mole in the intelligence community for this entire 22 years the FBI opened an investigation 20 years before we caught Hansen in 2007 called the grid called the gray day investigation and we were going after I'm sorry the gray suit investigation and as we found persons of interest we would assign them a derivative of that code name and Hansen's was gray day but we didn't learn about Hansen until four months before we arrested him well I think that's the interesting part is whether Ramon Garcia or not he made it to where there was a potential suspect at CIA that was the initial person you thought was the bad guy the mole in this case that's brian kelly yes so so brian kelly was an interesting individual i actually the first time I met brian kelly was after the investigation after i left the FBI and i think it was one of the first events that I did as a public speaker at the Canadian embassy in in DC and he after I was done speaking I was shaking hands and he comes up to me and reached his hand out and and said and just pulled me close he says Do You Know Who I am and I've learned a great poker poker face in the Hansa investigation I looked and I said I'm sorry sir I have no idea who you are and of course in my mind I was like I know exactly who you are I you know we've spent a year investigating you Brian Kelly was an individual who was a CIA and tell him soft sir he had worked a case called the felix bloch case who was another spy another US v for the Russians and he knew that case intimately now what had happened is the case had gone south at the very end when they were moving in to try and catch the Russian intelligence officer who was working Felix Bloch and at the last minute that person got a phone call and ran and we never were able to scoop him up in Paris no one could knew who was the mole who made that call but because Kelly had worked that case and because Kelly had a jogging route that was right near Hanson's drop sites and they thought that it must be the CIA operative Kelly and so the FBI who assumed it was the CIA the entire time and I have a whole chapter on an institutional bias in gray day decided to go full bore on Kelly and was so sure that he was the mole all of the facts even though they didn't line up the FBI was making him the mole one problem in investigations is if you go into an investigation believing that your target is a bad guy you will find a way to make them a bad guy even if they're innocent which is why you have to went in into investigations giving that person the benefit of the doubt if bi didn't do that they went after Brian Kelly for years and handsome saw that because he was in the middle of this investigation as an analyst and said this is great they're after somebody else I'm gonna reactivate myself and start spying again well so it's a one thing that kind of mitigates the blame for the FBI for focusing on the CIA was the fact that kansan was heavily involved in hunting for this mole and he could push the investigation in the direction away from himself that no one at FBI could possibly suspect at the time certainly Henson was I like to say and I start my keynotes by saying that Hanson was our first cyber spy Hanson was the first spy who was able to penetrate computer systems within his organization here the FBI but also part of his job was to work on tax task forces with other agencies so he would act have access to their computer systems so when he was stealing information and dropping it under a bridge and Fox Stone Park in Virginia so that the Russian intelligence officers could pick it up he was selectively grabbing information that would lead back to the CIA or the NSA or other agencies but not the FBI because that would have got him caught and so he was able to do that by exploiting computer systems and certainly when the FBI was the small task force force looking for gray suit right the great spy the the the greatest spy that the FBI couldn't find for 22 years when they were looking for this unknown individual this mole in the intelligence community they asked the top Russian analyst for help and that was Robert Hansen and so they went to him and he said could you could you put together a list of all of the people in the intelligence community that you think could be the spy I mean you know the Russians better than anyone and he did and he sent the FBI on massive wild-goose chases that led anywhere other than to himself would have been really gangster is if he had put his name on the list also just to really throw all right I'm putting myself liscus you should look at everybody but right yeah that would have been pretty good and he was like that he he had a very snarky sense of humor so I wouldn't say I wouldn't put it past him to do something like that well let's talk about his personality because that's like any kind of you're one of the people that can really get inside the head of Robert Hansen and so what what what you're seeing on the screen right now are personal photos that come from the Hansen family that are part of the spy museum collection as you can see he did all the regular stuff that everybody else did you know what the weddings and you know hung out with the grandma and his wife and everything else but you know him better in many cases than anyone else because you got kind of almost pulled into the family a little bit I think that's one of the most interesting things about breach is that they do show that really interesting relationship between the two of you so Amanda advance the slide let me ask you this Eric you actually have a couple things in your collection Danya create a little bit of the relationship that you and Hansen had but let me ask you why were you chosen by FBI to be part of this and then you can start talking about Hansen personality right well the good news is in my research for breach I got to reconnect with many of the agents who were working the case there was a small handful and in particular gene McLellan it was a really a very dear friend but was my supervisor at the time and I got to ask him I said you know why exactly did you choose me because he was the one who proposed me the problem the FBI had is they were really behind the curve in computerization there were computer Tech's who understood computer systems they were analysts who understood how to use the computer systems but there weren't many agents if any who understood both the business of computer systems and computer security and investigations and counterintelligence I'm the old 80's hacker I mean this is what I did I built computers I wrote programs you know back in the day and I had let that lapse but I understood computer systems computers defense computer security but also how to breached systems I was working as a ghost and I had written a program for the ghosts that will out us to use to actually type our logs in in Microsoft Word instead of handwriting them this is how behind everything was and then it would upload into a database I created that did a predictive analysis and the idea was I was in law school while I was working for the FBI and I was thinking that if you know you can use Westlaw Nexus and all these sort of case file research libraries why can't we just search analysis on Russian targets we've been following for years because the interesting thing about Russians is they tend to have everything planned out for like a decade all their drops and all their meats and all their signals and so if you can see what they've done in the past you can predict what they're gonna do in the future and you know what it worked and so I got some notoriety in the FBI say notoriety because when you when you overstep your boundaries sometimes it it there's a bit of a backlash but here my supervisor said this guy knows computers and he knows how to catch spies and he'll be great for it now there were a lot of people who said he'll be terrible he's going to ruin this but I was the only choice the the other side of it is I'm Catholic Hansen you know he really did care for his family he was an upstanding family man and he was seen as a pillar over the community he went to church every single day he was a member of Opus Dei which is like that that's the top level of Catholicism like way beyond where I ever want to be and he you know he he needed I needed something we could have in common otherwise there would be nothing to talk about we couldn't just talk about computers all day otherwise we'd be bored to tears so we talked about Catholicism we talked about family his son at the time was in law school over at Notre Dame and I was in law school at GW so we could you know he had that commonality and the more commonalities you have with your target the more you can get them to talk because if you can't get them to talk you can't you can't get them to hopefully slip up and give you information that leads to that actionable intelligence that the analysts are looking for this is a unique experience for you because you had just been observing bad guys from a distance this is the first time you'd been up close and personal actually interacting with the person that you would target yes certainly the first time I've had anything more than a three-minute conversation with a target the only other time I had ever spoken to a target was an American who had spied for East Germany way back in the day and early in my ghost career we enticed him back and although my team had to do was pick him up in Dulles Airport I tell this story in grade a in detail and we lost them completely lost him and I was sort of the free safety way back at ground transportation board you know like listening to the whole team trying to find him running around the airport and add a Noah you know this middle-aged older guy walks up next to me and just asks me do you know where the Hertz gold buses and I looked and there was the target and I said why yes I do come with me I'll take you I'll show you you know I'm going there too and then that was the end of their surveillance for the day for me but you know I I got the target I caught him I put him in his Hertz car and read out the license plate to my team and got to go home early the only other conversation I had with a target with Hanson it was 8 to 10 hours a day locked in a room with him just talking about things and our idea our over job my covert job was find out how we can arrest him if he is the spy were after the overt job was build cyber security for the FBI so there was a lot of work we had to do and and we did some very good work so what you're looking at the screen there's a reason there's a pistol on the screen this is Robert Hansen's Walther PPK she looked familiar anyone who's seen a James Bond movie when Eric talked about yeah I need to be a special agent in the field and wanted to be James Bond here's some evidence of that he went out even though he had a service pistol that was issued to him by the FBI he went out and bought the bond gun the Walther PPK and this is something that you can see on display at the Spy Museum but Eric let me ask you what little mementos have you kept and what did they tell us about Hanson's personality sure yeah I'll show you a few well one the Walther PPK he also had a Leica camera you know James Bond you know from the the Bond days and he could he could cite Bond movies chapter and verse he was sort of a WOD guy look I love mod movies and honestly the other thing that he absolutely loved that he could cite was Monty Python he loved the Monty Python movies and I love those too so you know more things that were commonalities and as we became more friendly and he started trusting me more there was a lot more joking around the office in the beginning it was terrible here's a couple things like I said we went he went to church every day he took me to church with him a number of times and the first time he took me to the to the Catholic Information Center a Christian bookstore that has a chapel in the back and he bought me this copy of the way and if you can see that it's still in the plastic bag because it probably still has his fingerprints on it but the way was a small book of small prayers and and intentional so that you could read you read every day by the founder of Opus Dei at the end of the investigation right I mean if you watch the movie breach it's absolutely true I was standing in that office in 99 30 with Kate alamin who is the Kate kid almond and my book and she has a different name in the movie but she was the special agent who was basically in charge of making sure I didn't screw up and we were looking at the office and I was looking around the office and I said where's all his stuff and she said well you know the end of cases like this agents all come in and take a memento I said really and she said yeah and I said they just come in and take his things she said yes I looked at his desk and I grabbed this pen you can see it it's it's in this little case it's a doctor pilot grip sport pen this pen is a character in the investigation it was Hansen's favorite pen in the world he talked about the pen constantly and what he did with this pen I'll I'll use a different pen to demonstrate as X my microphone is this all day every day every hour constantly couldn't stop he had this nervous compulsive habit he would cut cut cut cut cut cut cut cut click or he would jiggle his keys in his pants so he was sitting down he's clicking if he's standing his jiggling his piece he's and I I swear I wanted to just grab this pen out of his hand and stab him with it so tired of that but I went to gate and I said well I'd like to take something too and I want that pen and she said I think you've earned it and I've kept it ever since so let me let me ask you at this point about how the case finally broke to your position because we talked about how good Hanson was at protecting his decades-long spying and how he was able to push the investigation other directions time a spy is caught there's something you can point to as that's the moment or that's the particular time where they screwed up or happenstance screwed them up so what happened in the Hanson case that led them to bring someone like you on to finish things off yeah well the thing about the Hanson case is the FBI was going after Brian Kelly but Brian Kelly was not you know the CIA operative but Brian Kelly wasn't giving them anything they they tried to recruit him with a false flag operation they had a they had a Russian who was working for the FBI for 10 years Russian intelligence officer they tried to give him diamonds they tried to do all sorts of things and in heat they gave him a polygraph and he passed and so they were very confused as to why they couldn't catch this guy so we started working sources overseas the FBI this tiny little group that was investigating gray suit worked with a task force in the CIA to try to recruit a source who would give him information it turned out there was one back at when the KGB when the when the Soviet Union fell and it reformed into the Russian Federation near the store and you talk more about this than me but these KGB guys were out of a job a lot of the KGB was disbanded some of them reformed into yes psvr and the FSB it's a whole nother issue but many of them were out of a job and they were the kings in a place where everybody was supposed to be equal so they weren't just gonna go work a farm or retire they stole secrets they stole all sorts of secrets out of file cabinets in the bowels of Moscow right and many of them sold them right away to the US or the UK and made a ton of money a fortune they defected you know they're public speakers here today in the u.s. a lot work with the spy museum right they have great lives but others went into business became sky UNS and in this new democratic republic of was supposed to be of russia and and kept their secrets in their attic for a rainy day well one of these guys did and he sold it based on this source recruitment by the CIA and the FBI in in very early 2006 and he sold one little file of secrets and got a ton of money and got to defect to the US and bring his whole family and here's the other kicker he also got free college tuition paid for his kids i don't think it's too late for that joke right so yes you can get free entrance into college and tuition all paid if you're a russian spy yeah see there goes that works anyway it works a lot better with a whole audience laughing in front of me when i'm on stage but that little envelope and he's gone why tritanus protection see you later that little envelope had all of Hansen's mistakes the two biggest ones one he called the Russian embassy once very early when he couldn't find his money so he would put his drop on her Fox stone bridge and then he would collect his money ten or fifty thousand dollars under a platform in uh in nearby amphitheater all right near where he lived and he went to the amphitheater one night he'd go at night with a flashlight when it was closed and walked through and didn't find the money so he called the embassy said hey guys this is Ramon Garcia where's my money and they were flustered because they'd never talked to him had no idea who he was but the Russians the Soviets recorded everything cuz they were desperate to find out who he was and they kept it on a cassette tape because that's how longer this was and it's the conversation so it was his voice they can't do anything with it the other was he would wrap his drops that he put under that bridge in a trash bag and his fingerprints were on it that was a mistake he should have wiped it down better the Russians kept all those trash bags so this intelligence officer who defected this former intelligence KGB intelligence officer defected sold this file and sold a pen that tape some old letters that he had written in a trash bag for something like 14 million dollars it's pretty good for a bunch old junk not the FBI could run prints and they listen to the tape and they recognized his voice and they got the partial prints back and collectively in that room that small little room compartmentalized room of FBI agents their stomachs felt because one of the guys that they had used on this team was the mole and had been the mole for 22 years and had been intricately involved in so many aspects of the FBI's counterintelligence work it was one of the worst people who could be the mole if you were gonna make a list and then it became let's figure out how we're gonna catch him and that is how I got involved in part of catching him was to make sure he didn't know that he was being suspected of this so you can see this this is something also that we have in the spy museum collection that's on display you can see the date on this is January 2001 so this is after the FBI was pretty dang sure actually right before he was arrested so how yeah I was pretty sure that he was the bad guy but the last thing you wanted to do for someone like Hanson was that lead on that you suspected him so they kept giving him a words they kept promoting him the job that you were put into wasn't really created for him to make him think that he was moving up in the FBI yes so we learned about him in the middle of 2000 and it wasn't until December that we really had built this idea December of 2000 this idea to create a new department in the FBI means really brilliant by the FBI they created an entire new section in the FBI called the information assurance section which now is what we call cybersecurity and they said we need somebody who's going to they told Hanson we need somebody who understands computer systems you've been complaining about this your whole career we realize that we're way behind the curve and computerization and you're the only one who can save us because you're an agent who understands the FBI intrinsically and you understand computer systems and databases you've built as a base as your whole career we want to put you in charge of building cyber security for the FBI and they flattered him a huge ego and they said you won't need to retire he was gonna retire in April of 2001 and little will put you in place and you'll have access to everything and you tell us how to protect our systems and by the way we also want you to go out to all the other agencies and find out how they do information assurance so that we can do it better than they do so there they were giving him access to everything so he could spy so we could catch him red-handed in the act of espionage so man if you do the slide to the first one you'll see that you'll go by right there is a sign to an amphitheater that we have in the collection that was one of the Dead drops that Hanson used the picture on the right is a FBI photo of recovered $100 bills that Hanson was paid by the Russians in this case go one more there it is okay so anyone who knows the story will recognize this in fact this is the actual Palm Pilot in the you come to the Spy Museum you can see the real one you're intimately familiar with us can you walk us through the importance of this particular artifact sure I'm sure if you dusted that Palm Pilot for prints you'd find mine on there too yeah this Palm Pilot was how I broke the case we were having trouble because we just didn't have anything that would link Robert Hanssen in the year 2000 right with Ramon Garcia or B from the 80s when he did most of his espionage we had to find a way to link the two even if he made a drop in 2000 we wouldn't be able to prove that he was actually the spy he could just say well this is the first thing I've ever done and we'd have conspiracy to commit espionage maybe in 25 years which he he'd do in a heartbeat but we really needed to catch him red-handed and Lincoln to all his espionage from all those years so that we could put the pressure on him to get him to tell us what he did so we could fix it that was the most important thing it was actually more important than punishing him uh so I was supposed to look for clues and you know I've said this many times but criminals have routines right we all have routines but criminals especially every teens to protect information and Hansen's was he would take this device the pompe that he loved more than anything else he he would tell me that in order to be any kind of executive to be efficient to organize your life you have to have a digital assistant and if you don't you're back in the stone Age's and you're gonna be left behind by everyone else who's better than you are um I said okay and as I was watching him I realized that he kept in his left back pocket all the time whenever he was he stood up but it was such that I mean you can't see the side of this device but it's like that thing so that's a big thing to have in your back pocket every time he sat down he'd have to pull it out and he'd put it in his back which he kept right at the neck next to his desk and when he stood up he would grab it like clockwork and put it back in his back pockets who is never away from it and I asked him about it and I said what's the story with that and you know he said well you'll never understand because you're just a do-nothing no good lousy clerk I said really and he said yes and you know if you wanted to ever organize your life you would you would have something like that's not that paper thing you kept on your desk I had like one of the old-school big paper things I would write notes about everything we needed to do so I went to the Office of Science and Technology I requisitioned a Palm Pilot the pond5 was out this is a 3x so I got a palm five and I got another one for him I tried to give it to him and he pushed it back across the table and he said I don't need that thing I'll keep my baby right here you know I've written the encryption on this myself that's a big clue and so I said we gotta get that away from him we have to and so we went into what I call him my book but we call him the FBI at the operational term shinanigans we needed to find a way to get him away from the pompadour the Palm Pilot away from him was sufficient time to copy it and get it back before he knew it was gone so we needed what what you call in more technical terms a pretext we needed to hack pants and we needed to social engineer him want me to go into that story yeah so here's what we did we used everything we learned about him he seriously had a disrespect for authority anyone above him in the chain of command he thought was a complete before he didn't like to be interrupted he really likes to shoot the dude had a couple of guns on him in the office he loves shooting he would talk about his weapons all the time and so we had this section chief richard garcia who worked down the hall who is the only person i knew on that floor or in the entire FBI headquarters other than the director of the FBI who knew about the case come in unannounced with an assistant director that Hampson specifically didn't like in fact this is an assistant director that Hanson had tasked me to go into this guy's office one night and steal the art from his walls and put him up in the skiff I thought this will be great because now this guy's gonna come in on a now sty I still I I said this guy's needs to be the one who does it so we would see the art on the walls right and really fluster handsome so they come in unannounced and the ADAC assistant director in FBI speak slaps $20 on Hanson's desk and says I'll bet you that 25 targets out of five I will beat you let's go shoot right now in Hanson says I'm far too busy I've got too much going on he's really flustered he's red in the face he's not looking at them he's not making eye contact and the ADAC says I don't think you understand that's not a request and so he's angry and he put he grabs his ear protection eye protection he holsters his firearm the first time he forgets to grab the pompe he goes down to shoot and I'm super excited because we tried this a few times and it hadn't worked and finally it worked finally we got it right and go into the background that Palm Pilot run down three flights of steps and hand it off to a tech team and as they're copying the palm a data card and a floppy disk I mean we're going back in time now to the year 2000 right now yearly 2001 at this point this is February he's you know he apparently and I've seen the video right so the section chief Garcia got me the video and showed me of the of the shooting range and he he hangs his target he sends it down the line he pulls out his firearm he fires a clip he holsters the fire alarm he brings the target back he looks at it and then he just turns around and leaves doesn't say a word does grab his target off the line just turns around and lead and by the way he had like the bullseye every time so this isn't the guy you want to be in a gunfight with uh and I get a page from my asset down there in the shooting range saying don't know what happened out of pocket probably coming to you so I knocked on the door and told the tech team guys I'm gonna need that those devices and I said we're almost done I said you don't understand he's on his way up I got to get there before him because he's angry and he's armed and I'm not and if we want to if we want to keep this investigation going I got to get it there so you know they don't it's not their life online Loic whatever we'll get it done and I knew I had a nine solid minutes and I got in there I slammed the big door to the skip behind me I get to his office I get to his bag and I've got like a cool two minutes so I'm sauntering in there I'm feeling good like I broke the case I know the information we need is in there it has to be on there I look in his bag and I realized there are four pockets and I have three devices and I have no clue so what do you do right I mean I'm kneeling down in front of his back I know he's on his way up he's gonna come in any minute and I decide ourself hypnotized like seriously that's what went through of my head I myself hypnotized I'm gonna remember that moment right and that doesn't work by the way he did there's no way that happens and I hear him coming through the door so I just dropped all the devices zipped up all the bags ran on my desk but the best poker face I've ever had he never will have ever I used it all up right there he glares at me goes into his office slams the door and I hear zip and I sat there knowing that if I wasn't there when he came back out I would blow this investigation because he would have heaped gone right into paranoia and he comes out and he stares at me and he says were you in my office I said sure I put a memo in your Inbox didn't you see it and I had it he looks at me and he looks at me and I kept just a face like this on and you know I'm sweating down here but I look great here and I just looked at him finally it's a putt and he says I don't want you in my office again and he leaves for the day and then three days later after a long weekend he's on the bridge in Fox Stone Park he makes his last drop to the Russians he walks back on that old trail back to where his cars parked and the FBI arrests him because we knew exactly where he'd make that drop and when because that Palm Pilot semanek you move it to my favorite picture of Robert Hanssen is in the next slide there it is the other pivoting on there are the handcuffs that arrested Hanson you can also see the sound like a broken record you can also see those on display at the International Spy Museum you go one more if you stay on that one really quick there are actually two photos to rest photos of Hanson they had to retake the arrest photo so if you look at and I mentioned this in the book to their lot Easter eggs from the case in the book if you look down where it says 65 a that's FBI code for a traitor in Hanson holding that sign the first time put his finger over the 65 egg on purpose you know even if it was subconscious you know he didn't want to be seen as the traitor and so they they didn't catch it at first then they had to go back and retake the photo where he's holding it so that's why he looks a little bit more Sun sullen there he kick it ahead to Amanda skip the next one and go to the all right so this is where Hansen is now he's still alive though no one's gonna talk to him anytime soon this is the Supermax facility in Florence Colorado to the right of the picture some of Hansen's prison mates the worst of the worst from Terry Nichols who was Tim McVeigh partner in Oklahoma City McVeigh was there before he was executed to all the whole terrorists from Dzhokhar tsarnaev the Boston Marathon to Ted Kaczynski the Unabomber to people like Richard Reid the the shoe bomber door Eric Rudolph who is the Atlanta Olympics bomber and a bunch of mob bosses and serial killers and pedophiles yeah lust it pissed Hansen off to be in a place with these scumbags he has to think that he doesn't belong here just from what you know of his personality absolutely I you know I saw a picture that was snapped when he was ushered into Supermax and he's got the smirk on his face and I saw a recent picture someone sent to you just recently mean people read the book and then you know they work there and they send me stuff where he just looks completely beaten down and broken it almost makes you feel bad because this is the worst place in the world you could be it was designed for people who are so destructive and so violent they cannot come into contact with guards which by the way works for spies because there's no one they can recruit because they have no contact with other people is he cs5 who's locked up can recruit a guard to start working for them it's happened in in the past so yes it's a really terrible place to be he has to be completely miserable I know that the only thing he's allowed to read her paperback books and because grade a just came out in paperback a few weeks ago now I can finally send him a book I did try to get to Supermax to interview him I wanted that to be the epilogue to grade a I couldn't get that I couldn't I couldn't get to him I mean he's buried so deep I couldn't even find a way to get to him the FBI's like I don't know you Loftis attorney I talked to the attorney and he laughed at me and said you should talk to the family and I wasn't willing to do that so you know maybe I'll find a way I'll do the head of the Bureau of prison someone gave me his contact maybe who knows but um I'm definitely sending them a paper back let me wrap this up by asking about the movie people may have seen breach he talked about having a souvenir from the Hanson case do you have any souvenirs from the filming of that wounds I know you were a consultant on the movie did you grab anything off set oh yeah I worked very closely with all the departments of the movie the the director Billy Ray was awesome he really got me involved and really for me the best part of the movie was getting that inside look at all aspects of how you make a Hollywood movie it's like a mini corporation that stands up with the hundreds of people but yeah I kept all sorts of stuff the prop department gave me all sorts of things I have I have the doctor pilot's portrait pen that Chris Cooper used playing Hanson I have the Palm Pilot from the movie I have the pagers from the movie I have all sorts of stuff with Chris with Ryan Phillippe's bass on it you know pretending he's me for the movie so this is my favorite though because I had to turn in my badge and I left the FBI but I have the badge the FBI badge and credentials from breach which which I love and I'll pull them out sometimes when I'm doing presentations especially for kids and young adults in the the neat thing here is it also has the credentials or Ryan philippi playing Eric O'Neill and then we breach with it's actually my signature on there in Ryan Philippe's face so it's uh it's a pretty cool easter egg from the movie the neat thing is if you because I had I had photos of my credit credentials back in the day and I gave him to the props department and they couldn't use them they they're not allowed to recreate the batch they have to make everything a little different so if you look really carefully there you can't really see unless you look close but there's nothing on there it's just raised yeah there's no letters there's no words there's nothing and the badge the credentials are also changed although it does say investigative specialist so you know every once in a while I wonder should I just keep this in my car in case I get job by but then I'm impersonating you know federal agent and I've get a lot of trouble that would be a bad news story for everyone Oh Amanda listen up the questions I'm sure there are several from those that are out there listening yeah I will pop back okay we have some really really wonderful questions people want to know Eric do you think if it hadn't been for the ex KGB traitor do you think Hansen would have been caught or what would have been the timeline so if it hadn't been for that ex KGB trade or Hansen would have retired he was going to retire in April he was going to take a job at a cyber security company and he would still be he'd still be a spy he'd just be a corporate spy could you imagine working in a in a cyber security especially with what cyber security is today I mean I say all the time all espionage now is cyber spying almost you would not want to have one of the worst traders in US history working within a company that you trust to protect all your data but yeah he would have walked it he would have left the FBI we would have not he was not going to make that last drop he was put in a position to make that drop by being brought into the information assurance section and even if he did there's there's no sense that we would have caught him and you know you would be probably retiring right now but what about people want to know do you think it was reckless um when he made the phone call to the Russians or like by leaving the fingerprint on the garbage bag was that recklessness or what what do you talk that up to you the phone call to the Russians was very reckless there were a couple of points in his career where he made terrible mistakes and I outline all of them in grade a but the mistakes were never caught from the FBI because the FBI wasn't at that point designed to catch a traitor within they were always looking for traitors and other agencies you know the interesting thing I I say and you know in in grade a is Hansen really is the modern architect of the FBI because because of what he did the FBI had to redesign how it protects information how it protects intelligence and how it continually seeks out those within the FBI who might become trusted insiders so maybe it's more auditing you know for example if the FBI had just been auditing tracking what which people were accessing what within their databases they would have had a pretty good clue that Hansen was potentially the mole but they weren't doing it um did you people want to know did you get to participate in the interview after his arrest no I didn't in fact I I did not see him I wasn't at the arrest there were two arrest plans the first was to arrest him when he made that drop the second was to wait until we were all back in the office on a Tuesday and I was going to drive him to Quantico and hand him off to the arrest team which is what I was advocating for I thought that it would have been a better way to do it it would have been more of a genteel I just thought his personality would have felt more flattered if it was done that way in isolated place away from his neighborhood away from his parents but I think that when the FBI learned that this was the spy we've been after for 22 years there was a lot of anger and and so he was arrested right in his neighborhood after making the drop so no I the last conversation I had with Hanson was a Friday before he was arrested on a Sunday and I don't know why this popped in my head why I said it other than maybe in the future we'll have time travel and I'll go back in time and tell myself to do it because it's such a great story but in that last moment when he was leaving the office for the day on that Friday before he was about to be arrested I said hey boss and he stopped me and looked back at me and I said I'll catch you later and he kind of gave me a look and he said well okay Eric I'll I'll I'll see you on Monday or on Tuesday actually because Monday was Presidents Day weekend and he leaves for the day and I remember just putting my head down on my desk I'm thinking why did I say that I might have just ruined the whole case is he going to spend the weekend wondering why Eric said that and not make that drop that we know he's going to make because the Palm Pilot but he did make the dropping and I got a great story if you if you could ask him one question if you had gotten into Supermax to see him what what is though if you have one question what would it daily my mission right my mission was to get in touch with him get into Supermax sit across from him you know not stutter and ask him this question why did you do it because he has never answered that for anyone all those years of being interrogated by four different Commission's who were put in place to learn what he'd done he refused steadfastly to ever answer that question and whenever he was asking has asked it hundreds of times he said you don't need to know that to fix anything to change anything to understand what I did that's mine you know I think he kept that to him from to himself because it's his last scrap of power that he had it was the last ability to shirk authority that he had and I think he'd tell me yeah do you folks no what was the review process for getting grade a published so you didn't leak any secrets yeah I before I could publish the book before actually anyone else read it I had to take the full manuscript and submit it to the FBI's office of pre-publication review there were some great agents there who their job is to read things and go to the appropriate people within the FBI and from for me it was the counterintelligence unit to give them certain things and and the idea is to make sure that someone who has left the FBI and we have a lifetime requirement to go through publication review for FBI stories that we write that there was nothing I inadvertently put in there by by mistake or or purposefully I guess some people might do that would be classified now I felt pretty confident because a lot of what I was writing was placed in the court documents to arrest Hansen and also a movie had been made about me but the the book is very intimate and it goes way deeper into the case and and what was happening behind the case especially with interviews that I that I did with people working the case then than has ever been made before there is no book that goes into the case in that detail and into that three months of the case so a lot of it was classified including the code name for Hansen which was grade a in the India the FBI decided to allow a lot of it to go through which was great they struck a lot of stuff to anything that was anything anything that talked about the CIA including some old CIA cases that I that are outlined in there I had to remove because I didn't want it to go to the agency for pre-publication review because we wouldn't have a book to read right now it would still be there good good thinking here's one that's really near and dear to your and my heart because this is in the license to thrill film in the new museum someone wants to know if that scene in breach where he takes you out into Rock Creek Park and pulls the gun is that real or is that Hollywood Eric that is Hollywood the two scenes that are the two scenes in breach that are that are most Hollywood and there's good reasons for both but the two scenes of Reisler most Holly was that shooting scene he never drove me out in the park and never shot a gun at me and the elevator scene I never saw him after his arrest I would have had to see him every day if he had not pled guilty because I would have had to testify to the entire chain of evidence we collected to arrest Hansen so I'd been on stage I would been on stage in the courtroom the whole time testifying and that would have been a little nerve-racking I was actually kind of nervous about that but but no III never saw him so those are the two scenes that are that I have to answer that question all the time but it's still an amazing movie the the central investigation the two guys in a room if you if you read grade a and you watch breach you'll see how much of that is very accurate I have one personal question and then Vince might want to have one before you wrap up but mine is you know you always say I had nine minutes to get back up the stairs and I and I realize you know as someone who had done all sorts of surveillance had you had you walked out or did you walk that at his pace how did you know it was nine minutes I literally over lunch one day ranan I ran it and I timed it so that I caught every elevator first time I hit the button I you know like I like I looked like a fool I'm running around the FBI headquarters but I wanted to I wanted to give myself a cushion so I knew that no matter how much he hurried I had nine minutes unless he could teleport or something or he had a secret way through right so there's no way you catch the elevator the first time the FBI headquarters is the most bizarre building ever built on earth it should just be I I'm I'm an advocate for getting rid of it and building a nice new headquarters building because it really is depressing you walk in and you're immediately depressed and then you get lost and you're even more depressed because you feel foolish it's a hard building to get around so I knew I had that nine minutes at least but I wasn't going to give myself any more than that timing on my watch that makes sense so it's acid there was yeah as fast as you could go running was at least how long it would take yeah when I do my surveillance courses with the spy museum I always tell all of my operatives about Murphy's Law like you're gonna be out there we're gonna be following my rabbit you're gonna be trying to do everything you feel really good and something will go wrong cuz everything something always goes wrong so you have to plan for it and you know that was me planning for something that would definitely go wrong in it it went wrong almost catastrophic ly but because I had planned we were okay well let me wrap up with a the final question that Miss I'll talk to you about this in the past but I think it's interesting enough that the audience might find something to think about as they kind of go on and finish off their day if we could shift the timeline to modern day let's say Hansen is still in the FBI today he's not yet retired he's still spying for them how much harder would have been to catch Robert Hansen in 2020 with the technology that we have today then it would going back to 2000 or the 1990s yeah Hansen understood the computerization intrinsically so he truly understood the way that the FBI secured its data in those days and was able to steal information now remember in the beginning Hansen's espionage he was still stealing paper you know as the FBI computerized he was always ahead of it today you can steal terabytes of information and enormous I'm truckloads of the equivalent in paper and and put it on one thumb drive and and now spies don't even use thumb drives they just upload it to their intelligence officer over the Internet he through all sorts of different file-sharing sites so a a Hansen in the FBI today knowing what he knew with the same sort of circumstances would be absolutely devastating [Applause] [Music] [Laughter] [Music]

Channel: IntlSpyMuseum

Views: 29,509

Rating: 4.793911 out of 5

Keywords: Spy Museum, International Spy Museum, Curator's Corner, spies, spy, Robert Hanssen, espionage, history, FBI, spy stories, Eric O'Neill, Vincent Houghton, Breach, Ryan Phillipe

Id: Oq8oKao0zBg

Length: 60min 26sec (3626 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 27 2020