- We knew
that there was still a mole
who had
not been identified.
- This wasn't just a spy.
It was the spy.
- Oh, my God.
The mole is an FBI agent.
- Mm-hmm.
The information that he gave
caused irreparable damage
to the US government.
- This is the worst possible
place for a spy.
He says, "I understand.
I was in that place
when I was young."
I mean, he was recruiting me.
- He did leave a mark
on the Foxstone Park sign.
- I go to his bag
and I find the PalmPilot.
In seconds he was on me.
He grabs me by the lapel.
He lifts me up onto my toes.
- Did he have a weapon on him?
Would he try to use it?
- And I'm thinking to myself...
What do I do?
In the FBI
we make a lot of headlines.
Drug busts, mob stings...
...t*rror1st takedowns.
We understand why people
want to tell stories about us.
- Mark it.
- Freeze!
- FBI.
- FBI!
- Action!
But they don't know
the half of it.
What really goes down?
We save that for each other
when we're talking
agent to agent.
This is FBI True.
- If Hanssen discovers
that his PalmPilot is gone
or determines
that you betrayed him,
he would have
a rageful incident
and potentially
commit violence against you.
- My handler comes to the door,
hands me all three devices
and says, "Run."
And I do. I ran up three flights
of stairs at a mad sprint,
got into the main door
of the office
and slammed it behind me.
I go into his office,
kneel down in front of his bag
and realize, rookie mistake...
I've got three devices
and there are four pockets
and I have no clue
which I've pulled each
of the things out of.
And as I'm trying
to cast back in my mind,
I hear him
coming through the door.
They had a data card
and a punch key,
and you could hear the chimes as
he was punching in the key code.
And I heard that and I just
dropped all three devices,
kind of like best guess,
ran back to my desk and put that
original poker face right there
and tried to not sweat.
And he comes in the office
in a mad rush,
glares at me on his way
to his office, slams his door.
And as I'm sitting here,
I hear, zip.
And I'm thinking to myself,
"What do I do?
How do I recover from this?
There's no way I got this right.
The odds are impossible."
I go into his office,
he pulls me down
by the collar to the ground.
Our faces are inches
away from the bag.
And he says, "See that?
I know everything."
- Phew!
- And he leaves for the day.
Hanssen was definitely
testing me.
So just as I was trying to gain
his trust and gather
information from him,
he was testing me to see
how much he could trust me.
And so he gave me
these odd tasks
and one was incredibly strange.
He would complain about a lot
of different people in the FBI,
and there was an assistant
director he hated,
absolutely hated.
And he told me, "I want you
to go steal his art."
And I looked at him like,
"That's really funny, boss."
And he's like,
"No, you don't understand.
I want his art."
He's got a conference room
on the 7th floor, which is
the executive floor.
Someone at my level,
you don't go there.
- The 7th floor is where
the director lives.
- That's where
the director lives.
And you don't go there.
And he said, "I want
you to steal the art."
And I said, "Okay."
And he said, "I want to see that
art in this room by tomorrow."
- So, 'cause I was at law school
every night.
- Right.
- I came back, it might have
been 10:00 at night.
I grabbed a computer card,
I went down to the 7th floor
and I stole the art
off the wall
in an assistant director
of the FBI's conference room.
- Oof!
- Three paintings.
We actually hung them
on the wall in our office.
I even stole
the hooks off the wall,
and then I hammered them in.
I put a fox hunt painting
over my desk.
And I put two men
in a boat in peril
at sea over Hanssen's desk.
It was a little bit on the nose.
And when he came in
the next day,
the first thing he did was
look at the wall and then smile.
And I smiled back.
And there was this connection,
this exchange.
He had given me a task,
you know, an ill*gal task,
you know, of stealing.
And I'd done it.
- Rich, what does that mean?
- Well, that means that
he might be trying to recruit
Eric for the future.
But the evidence we can get
for him pitching him
to be a spy.
- Yeah.
- It just kind of seals the deal
what we needed in order
to arrest him, too.
So we know Hanssen
had specially encrypted
his PalmPilot,
and we're in the process
of breaking that.
But to put him
in prison forever,
we need to actually get
hard evidence,
we need to catch him in the ac.
- We need to see physical
evidence that he may have,
whether it is in
his vehicle, in his desk,
and so we have to do some
arrangements of how to get him
away from the office,
away from his car.
- Hanssen wanted to get
in other agencies' data centres.
As a spy, he would love
to see those centres.
Now, one of Hanssen's tasks
for me was set up meetings
with everybody who does
Information Assurance
with every other agency.
I said, "So, boss.
I set up a meeting for the DIA."
He was really excited.
That was one of my tasks.
He said, "You finally
did something right.
You're normally a moron
or an imbecile, but finally
you did something right."
- Those are your nicknames?
- Those are my nicknames.
And my only job was
to go down to a big Tahoe
in the parking garage
that Rich had set up,
to take, where I would
drive Hanssen
and his car
would be left behind.
That way,
they could search the car.
A whole search team
is ready to go.
They're going to take his car
apart, look through it.
They're going to put tech in it.
Find evidence.
So we went down to the garage...
...and the SUV is not there.
And I know that I'm supposed
to get him away
from his car today.
And I'm feeling pretty
stressed out.
And I said, "Well, maybe
it's on the other level."
I go down another level;
it's not there.
He says, "We've wasted
enough time already.
We're going to be late.
We will take my car."
And I'm thinking,
"Anything but that."
So I think, great time
to make him angry.
He's already really agitated.
So as he's walking to his car,
I said, "Hey, boss..."
just in this snide kind of way.
He turns around and I said,
"We're not taking your ugly,
beat-up silver Ford Taurus.
There's no way I'm getting
into that piece of "S"."
- Yeah.
- "And driving to the DIA.
We're going to walk around
this parking lot
until we find that SUV."
And that's it.
In seconds he was on me.
He grabbed me by the lapel.
He lifts me up on my toes.
And he's 6'4".
He's spitting mad,
yelling in my face.
"Why are you so insistent
we not take my car?"
And I'm thinking,
"I've blown this operation."
- So Hanssen grabs you,
he's got you up off the floor.
What happens next?
- My first thought is,
"I've got two black belts."
I really wanted to hurt him,
and I had to check that.
- Right.
- But now I've got to
win this case back.
Anything to get him
away from his car.
The whole search team
is ready to go,
I just needed to get him away.
So we finally find the SUV
in the parking garage.
- Wow.
- We get in the car,
he's in a huff,
and I start driving.
- While you're driving him
around and taking him to DIA...
...they're back at FBI and
they're working on the car.
- Right, so they've
pulled the car,
his silver Ford Taurus...
...into a hidden garage,
and they're searching the car
for anything that
could be useful.
So we finally
made it to the DIA.
We parked, we go in
and we're waiting to meet
the head of Information
Assurance for the DIA.
And we're waiting.
Now, Hanssen does not like
to be kept waiting.
And after a while,
he decides that
he's been insulted,
and we're going to
abruptly leave.
And so we do.
To everybody's consternation.
I'm trying to talk Hanssen
into staying.
He says, "We're leaving."
And won't take no for an answer.
And I end up getting
in the car with him,
and we're driving,
and I'm very stressed out.
I've got to make sure
that he doesn't show up
at FBI headquarters and then
decide, "It's late in the day.
I'm going to go right
to my car and drive home."
- Right.
- Game's over.
They're searching the car.
And it's not like I could
even send a text.
And so I knew
that I had to find a way...
to keep Hanssen
away from the office.
I had to do anything that
I could. So what I did was...
...I drove into traffic.
And for the first moment in
this case, I got a little luck.
There was a broken-down
truck, and we were crawling.
I mean, I could have gotten out
and skipped faster
than we were moving.
- And what was he doing?
- He got angry.
And then he started
attacking me.
He said, "You keep talking about
how you're such a great driver
and you did the dumbest thing
you possibly could do."
And he said, "You know what?
I could take a cab. I can walk."
And he gets out of the car.
- And what are you
thinking at this point?
You're like, "Okay."
- I'm devastated because
I'm thinking, "Now what do I do?
He's out of the car.
I can't control him."
So I put the car in park
and I got out.
So now the FBI Tahoe
is just sitting there
in the middle of traffic
on M Street...
and I'm running up
the street after Hanssen.
and he turns around
and I just reached deep inside
and did the one thing
that until that moment
I had resisted doing.
I said, "Boss, I need you
to get back in the car 'cause
I need to talk to you
about something.
It has to do with my
relationship with my wife."
"I finally broached the subject
of her and I not having kids,
just like you've been telling me
over and over and over to do.
She didn't take it well,
we're now in the middle
of this massive fight,
and I just thought you could
give me some advice."
- How heavy
was your heart at that point
when you felt
like you had to go to that
personal place to keep
him engaged with you?
- I felt like
I lost a part of myself.
You give so much of yourself
to an undercover investigation.
It becomes the most important
thing in your life.
Becomes more important
than your family.
You don't want it to,
but the stakes are so high.
- Right.
- And I said, "If God
wants me to have children
and my wife doesn't,
what do I do?"
And he jumped right at it.
He turned around.
He thought about it.
He got back in the car.
And we ended up driving very
slowly back to the office,
it took an enormous
amount of time.
And then, of course,
I was stuck
in a lengthy dialogue about
the purpose of marriage
and to have children.
In fact, he told me that...
"We're going to get you
into Opus Dei.
You're going to change
how you worship.
We're going to church
every day together now."
- My God!
- "We're going to bring you
into the church
that all of the people
in the FBI are in."
I was telling him I was
so frustrated with the FBI,
I couldn't stand
the bureaucracy.
I told him,
"I can't afford my life.
They're giving me the clearance
to see these incredibly
valuable secrets,
but they don't pay me anything.
And I'm in law school,
I could go to any law firm
and make five times
what I'm making in the FBI."
And he would start saying,
"Well, you know, I understand.
I was in that place
when I was young,
I found a way to make it work."
- Right.
- "God can help you find
a way to make it work."
I mean, he was recruiting me.
- So here we are on the street
that Hanssen lived.
- It was pretty intense.
You know, Hanssen talked about
his family all the time,
talked about
his quaint little home
on Talisman Lane
in Virginia.
He actually invited
my wife and I here.
He was making these connections,
our faith, our families.
And he really had to learn
whether he could trust me,
but not only whether he could
trust me, could he recruit me.
- so, Eric, at this point,
you've been very successful
at what your task was.
- Well, I'm also in my personal
life falling apart,
so I'm feeling incredibly
stressed out,
not having a good
relationship with my wife.
And I started questioning
whether I should be
in this case,
whether I was being
successful at the case,
whether I was
the right person for it.
I started doubting myself
- Right.
- I felt my life was spinning
out of control.
Sitting down with my handler,
I said, "I want out."
And I told her my concerns
and she said,
"This is a big case.
You need to understand that
there is no getting out."
- Right.
- And she took me to
the Washington field office.
There were all these people,
analysts and computer techs
and people who are
going through his records
and people who were
surveilling him.
- And what's the walk home
like from that,
after you've seen all this,
you know that you're not alone,
that there's hundreds
of people involved?
- I had a moment
of "This was big."
And then I learned
how big it was.
Because I learned that
this wasn't just a spy,
it was the spy.
This wasn't just an individual
who was an FBI agent
suspected of espionage.
This was the legendary
Gray Suit,
the spy that the entire
intelligence community
had been after for their entire
careers, for over two decades.
And I was at the centre
of the case. I was ready to go.
I went from investigating
to determine if he was a spy
fully into he is a spy.
Now, we're going to catch him.
The PalmPilot
that you had "borrowed"
from Hanssen while
he was at the firing range...
...was eventually cracked.
It turns out there was
some pretty critical
information on it.
- On that PalmPilot,
he not only had
some of the letters
he'd written to the Russians.
He also had a formula
for how we convert dates
in the PalmPilot.
And when you
figured all that out,
and the people who are great
at cryptography did.
- Exactly.
- They were able to show
not only where he would make
his final drop, but when.
We knew from
the recording we bought
that he was using tape signals
on the Foxstone Park sign
with the Russians.
And the PalmPilot told us where.
Not far from this neighbourhood,
where Hanssen lived.
- Deborah, tell me about
February 18th.
You think Hanssen
may make a drop.
- Quite strongly.
But things could go wrong.
Something could go wrong
with the actual arrest,
they could panic.
Did he have a weapon on him?
Would he try to use it?
All of those things
were going through my mind.
I was sitting in a van
with my ASAC
and other executives
from the FBI.
And we were sitting
and listening
to the surveillance
call out and waiting.
So Hanssen exited his car,
and he did leave a mark
on the Foxstone Park sign
for the Russians, to let them
know that he's making a drop.
Once doing that,
he walked back to the footbridge
and placed
this package underneath.
He turned and walked
out of the park
just as we're walking now...
...and we heard
that he was nearing his car.
He was walking up
this very sidewalk
towards his vehicle
and the arrest team
was in a van ready to go.
When I said, "Take him,"
they exited the vehicle...
And Hanssen was right there.
They arrested him.
Robert Hanssen
was arrested right here,
in front of this house.
- What was his reaction?
- It was almost like
no reaction initially.
He was just standing there.
He didn't try to move or get
away or anything like that.
He said,
"What took you so long?"
They put him
in the back of a vehicle
between the two case agents,
who showed him some photographs
of him committing espionage.
And then they read
him his rights.
- I heard that he asked
to speak to you.
- Yes, he did.
I was willing to go in and
hear him out, whatever it was.
- Sure, absolutely.
- So I walked into the room.
He was sitting there alone.
Really no expression
on his face.
He looked at me.
I said, "I'm Deborah Smith,
I was a supervisor on the squad.
I understand you wanted
to speak with me."
And he said,
"This should help your career."
And that's all he said.
- And what did you do?
- I looked at him.
I turned and left the room.
- Yeah. Good for you.
So Deborah, what was
in that last drop?
- The most important thing
in that last drop
was a letter from Hanssen
to the Russians.
"Dear friends,
I thank you for your assistance
these many years.
It seems, however,
that my greatest utility to you
has come to an end,
and it is time to seclude myself
from active service.
Since communicating last,
and one wonders if,
because of it,
I have been promoted
to a higher, do-nothing
senior executive job outside
of regular access to information
within the counterintelligence
program.
Something has aroused
the sleeping tiger."
- It sounds like you
got him just in time,
like he was about to run.
- That's right.
- My handler called me.
I was told
that in that final drop,
he included
a piece of information
really important to me.
My name and my information.
And that I would be a perfect
person to recruit.
I was driving with my wife
and I had to pull over.
My hands were shaking
so much I couldn't drive.
My wife was like,
"What's wrong?"
I looked at Juliana,
and I told her everything.
- And was she like, "What?"
- She was shocked
and speechless.
I thought, she's going
to get out of the car,
call a taxi,
disappear from my life.
But she just turned,
looked at me, and she said...
"Now, I understand."
- Right.
- And they were the most
incredible words I could have
ever heard from her.
In court,
the government filed affidavits
saying Hanssen handed over
to Moscow,
in exchange for 1.4
million dollars in cash,
diamonds and escrowed money
in an espionage career
that spanned 15 years.
- What kind of damage
did Hanssen do?
- Extremely grave damage
to the US government.
The information that he gave
caused irreparable damage.
We know that he viewed
approximately 6,000 documents.
- I know that he had given up
that the United States
was making a listening tunnel
under the ground,
under the Russian embassy.
And he gave that up.
He gave up a lot.
The continuity of government...
And he caused the death
of three sources
who were very important
to the US government
by giving up their identities
Sergei Motorin...
...Valery Martinov...
...and Dmitri Polyakov,
codenamed Top Hat,
considered by some to be
America's most important asset.
- Deborah, how will history look
at Robert Hanssen in this case?
- I think history
will look at him as,
number one,
the most damaging spy
in the history of the FBI...
...and close to
the most damaging spy
in the history
of the United States.
That will be his legacy.
He's a betrayer.
He's betrayed everything
in his life.
He was true to no one.
And I don't know
that he had the capacity
to be true to anyone.
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