Catching the Spy Catcher

摘要

Those who betray must always fear betrayal. It happened to Robert Philip Hanssen a little after 8 p.m. on a Sunday night, just five weeks shy of his planned retirement from the spy game. Ten armed fbi agents shivered in the cold as they watched Hanssen walk up to a "dead drop" code-named Ellis, a spot under a bridge in a quiet suburban Virginia park where he hid a plastic garbage bag full of secret U.S. documents. As he emerged from the woods of Foxstone Park, the agents, guns drawn, surrounded fellow fbi spy catcher Bob Hanssen, clapped handcuffs on his wrist and began reading him his Miranda rights. Some fbi men plunged into the darkness, backtracking along Hanssen's path to recover the bag. Not far away, in nearby Arlington, another team of agents was covertly watching a second drop site called Lewis, to see if Russian intelligence officers showed up to reclaim a package Hanssen had not picked up. It contained $50,000 in $100 bills that the fbi believed was the payment for Hanssen's purloined material. When the Russians didn't show, the agents collected the cash as evidence.