Robert Hanssen

And then Aldrich Ames taught them that that's not actually the case.

Fast forward to Robert Hansen, the FBI thought there's no way the FBI could have an insider threat like this.

It's got to be the CIA.

And they were doing the whole Spider-Man pointing in the other direction.

Yeah, we noted earlier that MI6, of course, was riddled with spies, Philby, McLean, etc., The CIA less so, but there have been some notable, notorious double agents.

We did a show a few years ago on Robert Hansen.

There's Aldrich Ames as well.

How important is this both in terms of the history of double agents within the CIA, both in terms of your experience within the CIA and in your literature?

So the FBI began investigating the CIA, and they zeroed in on Brian.

The head of the investigation was someone named Robert Hanssen.

Oh, yeah.

Robert Hanssen was the mole, and to take the heat off of himself, he directed that the investigation be of Brian.

The FBI went to Brian's daughter in Oregon, she worked in a nursing home, and they told her that if she didn't rat out her father, they were going to execute him.

He was utterly, completely, totally innocent of any crime.

were prosecuted for espionage conspiracy, not treason.

Aldrich Ames and Robert Hansen were prosecuted under espionage statutes.

Aaron Burr actually was charged with treason in 1807, but was acquitted Because Chief Justice Marshall applied the constitutional definition very strictly.

So the key distinction, and I want you to listen to this because we have to learn this.

It's not a replacement for the work that each of us has to do.

All right, Eric, I wanted to ask you to elaborate on that because you used old-fashioned human intelligence when you brought down Robert Hansen, the incredible work that you did.

Can you talk about the value and the balance of using human intelligence versus the technology that is available to us?

Yes, and that's a great question because We used any and every source of information available to us.

I worked with a couple of spies for the Soviet Union.

In New York City, Robert Hansen rode the elevators with me.

And Robert Hansen worked for the Soviets for 20 years.

And GS-15.

And when the FBI knew that it was Aldrich Ames, who was CIA, and there was two they know of.

February 2001.

U.S. counterintelligence community discovered the FBI Special Agent Robert Hansen had spent two decades exploiting fundamental flaws in the Bureau's security architecture.

The FBI's internal trust system, it was built on an assumption.

Not a fact, an assumption.

He secured Ivan's trust and arranged the scenario where Ivan agreed to look at a photo spread of possible suspects.

Wayne's undercover case, which he recounts in his true crime book, A Traitor in the FBI, The Hunt for a Russian Mole, provides a backstory to the investigation that eventually determined FBI agent Robert Hansen was the mole.

It took Wayne seven years before the FBI's Pre-Publication Review Office granted him permission to make his story public.

To learn more about the investigation of Robert Hansen, listen to FBI Case File Review Episode 31 with retired agent Mike Rochford.

Wayne Barnes spent much of his career in the Washington field office during the 1970s and 1980s, where he worked counterintelligence, successfully recruiting Eastern European intelligence targets to defect.

Wayne was also WFO's undercover coordinator.

I just finished reading your book, A Traitor in the FBI, The Hunt for a Russian Mole.

And it was fascinating.