http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A20983-2001Aug16.html
Lives of CIA Man, Family Turned Into Turmoil as FBI Pursued Wrong Guy
By Dan Eggen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, August 19, 2001; Page A01
The 28-year-old CIA personnel employee was escorted into a cramped, windowless room with a small table and four metal chairs. "Please sit down," a waiting FBI agent told her. "We have some bad news for you."
"Your father is a spy," the agent told the woman. "He's working for the Russians."
In another building on the CIA campus in Langley, in another small and windowless room, her father -- a decorated agency veteran of nearly 20 years -- was being accused of espionage.
Thus began one family's ordeal at the hands of the FBI, which fingered the wrong man in its quest to unmask a spy, upending the lives of the CIA officer and his three children for the next two years.
The accusations leveled in August 1999 prompted the CIA to suspend the officer for 21 months. He remained under surveillance, and his daughter was denied a promotion. His ex-wife, two sons and two sisters were interrogated at work and at home by FBI agents who cast doubt on the man they thought they knew. Friends and colleagues whispered about the traitor in their midst.
All of it turned out to be wrong. The real spy was Robert P. Hanssen, an FBI counterintelligence agent who pleaded guilty last month to 15 counts of espionage. The CIA officer returned to work in May with all his security clearances restored. "There are no lingering doubts or suspicions here," a CIA official said.
FBI officials say that while they regret the impact on the intelligence officer and his family, the bureau's rough tactics were justified by the magnitude of the national security breach. The FBI partly blames a startling coincidence: Both the man and Hanssen lived on the same street near Nottoway Park in Fairfax County, where Hanssen left some of the secrets he compromised to the Russians.
But the CIA officer's sons and daughter said in interviews with The Washington Post last week that they are still haunted by the actions of the FBI, which left their family in limbo for two years and has rebuffed their request for a full apology. Because The Post does not identify covert U.S. intelligence operatives except in rare circumstances, the names of the man and his family have been withheld from this article.
His children wonder what would have happened if the FBI had not obtained a KGB dossier that pointed to Hanssen. The daughter says she still has nightmares about the investigation. The sons are suspicious of a government they once revered.
"We were raised to be patriotic, to love our country and respect authority," said the youngest son, 32, who co-owns a copy-machine business in Virginia. "I'm still patriotic today, but I don't feel the same way about a lot of things -- about the FBI, about people in power. They're not always telling the truth like they say they are."
'We Know What He Did'
The CIA officer's youngest child loved and revered her father. She followed in his footsteps by joining the agency, thrilled by its clandestine side and comforted by its familial culture. When the FBI accused her father of treason, her world was set on end.
Trapped in the stifling room, she began to weep uncontrollably. She stood up and turned away from the two FBI agents and the CIA representative who were there, facing the wall as the sobs came in waves. "I was hysterical," recalls the woman, now 30. "I was ashamed."
When she resumed her seat, an older male agent began the interrogation while a younger female took notes. The agent showed the daughter one of her father's jogging maps, alleging it pinpointed the location of "dead drops," hiding places for passing secrets to Russian operatives. He said her father -- who clips coupons and drives to Woodbridge for less expensive gasoline -- had a fascination with diamonds and other luxuries. He said that the man who typed with two fingers on his outdated Tandy PC was a mastermind of computer codes.
Her denials only angered him. "Come on!" the agent screamed, pounding the table repeatedly. "We know what he did!"
The story was similar from Virginia to Connecticut, from New York to Kentucky. FBI agents fanned out in pairs on Aug. 18, 1999, descending on scattered members of the family wherever they could be found.
The message was always the same: Your beloved relative, awarded five commemorative medals for his work on behalf of the United States, is really a Russian spy. We have all the proof we need, and only need to confirm a few basic facts.
In Connecticut, two agents warned one of the officer's sisters that, if she didn't cooperate, the FBI would go to a nursing home to interrogate her infirm mother, 84.
In Kentucky the next morning, two agents caught up with the officer's youngest son at his office. He had just returned to work after the birth of his second child.
They accused the son of holding property he did not really own, and of using a Social Security number that was not his. They asked about his father's alleged financial extravagance, and showed him a map he did not understand. The agents said it came from his father's den, and that it reflected a secret life of espionage.
After more than an hour, the son stumbled out of the interrogation, past whispering co-workers and into the drizzle outside.
"I felt like I didn't want to be alive," recalls the man, who has since moved back to Northern Virginia. "You believe your father and all that. But when they come in like that and say they have it all locked up, it's hard not to wonder: Could it be true?"
By the end of the second day, Aug. 19, the FBI had tracked down the last of the CIA officer's direct relatives. His oldest son was in Manhattan on business, and was about to catch a flight back to Washington when his phone rang. Three FBI agents insisted on giving him a ride to LaGuardia Airport, quizzing him while trapped in rush hour traffic.
He called his father the minute he got home that night, and drove over to his Vienna house, which happens to be on the same street as Hanssen's. His father met him in the driveway.
"I just want to make sure you believe me," the father said.
"You never have to worry about that," the son replied, and they hugged.
'Wrong Conclusions'
The investigation that eventually netted Hanssen was not the first time that the FBI, or any other intelligence agency, has been so terribly wrong.
Just last week, the Justice Department released portions of a report on the investigation of Los Alamos nuclear scientist Wen Ho Lee. It concluded that the FBI and the Energy Department may have gotten the wrong man, and for a crime that might not even have been committed in the first place. Meanwhile, a fugitive abortion clinic bomber is now the suspect in the Atlanta Olympics bombing case, first pinned on security guard Richard Jewell.
Yet many intelligence experts are particularly discomfited by the emerging details of the case against the CIA officer, which sources said was based largely on the man's circumstantial connections to several cases that later turned out to have been compromised by Hanssen.
One of these was the investigation of Felix Bloch, a State Department official suspected of, but never charged with, spying. The CIA officer was awarded a medal for his role in unmasking a Soviet agent who had telephoned Bloch and thus cast Bloch under suspicion. But Bloch was soon warned by the KGB, derailing a planned arrest.
The interrogations also indicate that the FBI placed a great deal of stock in the mysterious map recovered from the officer's home, which turned out to be the jottings of an avid distance runner with meticulous record-keeping habits. He also keeps a list of radio stations he tunes in during trips to Connecticut, and maps out all journeys before departing, his family says.
The man jogged in Nottoway Park near his home, an area that the FBI learned had been used for exchanges with Russian agents. In hindsight, there are other connections between the CIA officer and Hanssen -- besides living near each other, they were companions on an intelligence-related trip, for example -- but those connections were coincidences learned after the probe shifted to Hanssen, sources said.
"There are a whole litany of examples throughout the western world of counterintelligence services jumping to the wrong conclusions," said David Major, a former FBI counterintelligence official. "This phenomenon of putting people on lists and investigating them goes with the territory. But if you can't prove it, you have a responsibility not to go too far in your tactics."
The tactics used against the CIA officer were many and varied. Before the FBI confronted him as a suspect, for example, the man was subjected to a polygraph test under false pretenses, which he passed, according to his attorney, John Moustakas of Shea & Gardner. Later, a person posing as a Russian emissary was sent to his house to say that his espionage had been detected and to offer an escape plan; the CIA officer reported the incident the next day, the lawyer said.
The FBI also engaged in secret searches of the man's garbage and of his home, which turned up the alleged spy map. He was put under physical and electronic surveillance. His family says they had chronic telephone problems during that period, and a Bell Atlantic technician discovered a bug on the line at his Vienna home.
FBI officials did not respond to three telephone calls seeking comment for this article. But in a June letter to the man's attorney, Acting FBI Director Thomas J. Pickard said that while he regretted the investigation's impact on the officer and his family, "I do not doubt the necessity of the investigation, nor the integrity of the personnel who carried it out."
Moustakas compared that response to the form letter that an airline would send a passenger whose flight was delayed. "My client was not merely inconvenienced," Moustakas wrote Pickard. "His life was turned upside down."
The FBI had no other contact with the officer or his family after he was placed on paid administrative leave in August 1999, according to his relatives and Moustakas. For 18 months, the family said, they were left hanging, wondering when a knock would come on the officer's door or if his name would suddenly flash on television.
"What hurts most is having to keep it all inside," said the officer's eldest son, 36, who is married and has a young daughter. "You can't tell anyone what you're going through."
Six months ago, on Feb. 18, a friend of the oldest son asked if he had seen the news: The FBI had arrested a spy. The son caught his breath. "What was the name?" he asked. His friend couldn't recall.
The son picked up the phone to dial his father, fearing that he wouldn't be there because he was in jail. His father answered. Dad wasn't a spy after all.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A20983-2001Aug16.html
Lives of CIA Man, Family Turned Into Turmoil as FBI Pursued Wrong Guy
By Dan Eggen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, August 19, 2001; Page A01
The 28-year-old CIA personnel employee was escorted into a cramped, windowless room with a small table and four metal chairs. "Please sit down," a waiting FBI agent told her. "We have some bad news for you."
"Your father is a spy," the agent told the woman. "He's working for the Russians."
In another building on the CIA campus in Langley, in another small and windowless room, her father -- a decorated agency veteran of nearly 20 years -- was being accused of espionage.
Thus began one family's ordeal at the hands of the FBI, which fingered the wrong man in its quest to unmask a spy, upending the lives of the CIA officer and his three children for the next two years.
The accusations leveled in August 1999 prompted the CIA to suspend the officer for 21 months. He remained under surveillance, and his daughter was denied a promotion. His ex-wife, two sons and two sisters were interrogated at work and at home by FBI agents who cast doubt on the man they thought they knew. Friends and colleagues whispered about the traitor in their midst.
All of it turned out to be wrong. The real spy was Robert P. Hanssen, an FBI counterintelligence agent who pleaded guilty last month to 15 counts of espionage. The CIA officer returned to work in May with all his security clearances restored. "There are no lingering doubts or suspicions here," a CIA official said.
FBI officials say that while they regret the impact on the intelligence officer and his family, the bureau's rough tactics were justified by the magnitude of the national security breach. The FBI partly blames a startling coincidence: Both the man and Hanssen lived on the same street near Nottoway Park in Fairfax County, where Hanssen left some of the secrets he compromised to the Russians.
But the CIA officer's sons and daughter said in interviews with The Washington Post last week that they are still haunted by the actions of the FBI, which left their family in limbo for two years and has rebuffed their request for a full apology. Because The Post does not identify covert U.S. intelligence operatives except in rare circumstances, the names of the man and his family have been withheld from this article.
His children wonder what would have happened if the FBI had not obtained a KGB dossier that pointed to Hanssen. The daughter says she still has nightmares about the investigation. The sons are suspicious of a government they once revered.
"We were raised to be patriotic, to love our country and respect authority," said the youngest son, 32, who co-owns a copy-machine business in Virginia. "I'm still patriotic today, but I don't feel the same way about a lot of things -- about the FBI, about people in power. They're not always telling the truth like they say they are."
'We Know What He Did'
The CIA officer's youngest child loved and revered her father. She followed in his footsteps by joining the agency, thrilled by its clandestine side and comforted by its familial culture. When the FBI accused her father of treason, her world was set on end.
Trapped in the stifling room, she began to weep uncontrollably. She stood up and turned away from the two FBI agents and the CIA representative who were there, facing the wall as the sobs came in waves. "I was hysterical," recalls the woman, now 30. "I was ashamed."
When she resumed her seat, an older male agent began the interrogation while a younger female took notes. The agent showed the daughter one of her father's jogging maps, alleging it pinpointed the location of "dead drops," hiding places for passing secrets to Russian operatives. He said her father -- who clips coupons and drives to Woodbridge for less expensive gasoline -- had a fascination with diamonds and other luxuries. He said that the man who typed with two fingers on his outdated Tandy PC was a mastermind of computer codes.
Her denials only angered him. "Come on!" the agent screamed, pounding the table repeatedly. "We know what he did!"
The story was similar from Virginia to Connecticut, from New York to Kentucky. FBI agents fanned out in pairs on Aug. 18, 1999, descending on scattered members of the family wherever they could be found.
The message was always the same: Your beloved relative, awarded five commemorative medals for his work on behalf of the United States, is really a Russian spy. We have all the proof we need, and only need to confirm a few basic facts.
In Connecticut, two agents warned one of the officer's sisters that, if she didn't cooperate, the FBI would go to a nursing home to interrogate her infirm mother, 84.
In Kentucky the next morning, two agents caught up with the officer's youngest son at his office. He had just returned to work after the birth of his second child.
They accused the son of holding property he did not really own, and of using a Social Security number that was not his. They asked about his father's alleged financial extravagance, and showed him a map he did not understand. The agents said it came from his father's den, and that it reflected a secret life of espionage.
After more than an hour, the son stumbled out of the interrogation, past whispering co-workers and into the drizzle outside.
"I felt like I didn't want to be alive," recalls the man, who has since moved back to Northern Virginia. "You believe your father and all that. But when they come in like that and say they have it all locked up, it's hard not to wonder: Could it be true?"
By the end of the second day, Aug. 19, the FBI had tracked down the last of the CIA officer's direct relatives. His oldest son was in Manhattan on business, and was about to catch a flight back to Washington when his phone rang. Three FBI agents insisted on giving him a ride to LaGuardia Airport, quizzing him while trapped in rush hour traffic.
He called his father the minute he got home that night, and drove over to his Vienna house, which happens to be on the same street as Hanssen's. His father met him in the driveway.
"I just want to make sure you believe me," the father said.
"You never have to worry about that," the son replied, and they hugged.
'Wrong Conclusions'
The investigation that eventually netted Hanssen was not the first time that the FBI, or any other intelligence agency, has been so terribly wrong.
Just last week, the Justice Department released portions of a report on the investigation of Los Alamos nuclear scientist Wen Ho Lee. It concluded that the FBI and the Energy Department may have gotten the wrong man, and for a crime that might not even have been committed in the first place. Meanwhile, a fugitive abortion clinic bomber is now the suspect in the Atlanta Olympics bombing case, first pinned on security guard Richard Jewell.
Yet many intelligence experts are particularly discomfited by the emerging details of the case against the CIA officer, which sources said was based largely on the man's circumstantial connections to several cases that later turned out to have been compromised by Hanssen.
One of these was the investigation of Felix Bloch, a State Department official suspected of, but never charged with, spying. The CIA officer was awarded a medal for his role in unmasking a Soviet agent who had telephoned Bloch and thus cast Bloch under suspicion. But Bloch was soon warned by the KGB, derailing a planned arrest.
The interrogations also indicate that the FBI placed a great deal of stock in the mysterious map recovered from the officer's home, which turned out to be the jottings of an avid distance runner with meticulous record-keeping habits. He also keeps a list of radio stations he tunes in during trips to Connecticut, and maps out all journeys before departing, his family says.
The man jogged in Nottoway Park near his home, an area that the FBI learned had been used for exchanges with Russian agents. In hindsight, there are other connections between the CIA officer and Hanssen -- besides living near each other, they were companions on an intelligence-related trip, for example -- but those connections were coincidences learned after the probe shifted to Hanssen, sources said.
"There are a whole litany of examples throughout the western world of counterintelligence services jumping to the wrong conclusions," said David Major, a former FBI counterintelligence official. "This phenomenon of putting people on lists and investigating them goes with the territory. But if you can't prove it, you have a responsibility not to go too far in your tactics."
The tactics used against the CIA officer were many and varied. Before the FBI confronted him as a suspect, for example, the man was subjected to a polygraph test under false pretenses, which he passed, according to his attorney, John Moustakas of Shea & Gardner. Later, a person posing as a Russian emissary was sent to his house to say that his espionage had been detected and to offer an escape plan; the CIA officer reported the incident the next day, the lawyer said.
The FBI also engaged in secret searches of the man's garbage and of his home, which turned up the alleged spy map. He was put under physical and electronic surveillance. His family says they had chronic telephone problems during that period, and a Bell Atlantic technician discovered a bug on the line at his Vienna home.
FBI officials did not respond to three telephone calls seeking comment for this article. But in a June letter to the man's attorney, Acting FBI Director Thomas J. Pickard said that while he regretted the investigation's impact on the officer and his family, "I do not doubt the necessity of the investigation, nor the integrity of the personnel who carried it out."
Moustakas compared that response to the form letter that an airline would send a passenger whose flight was delayed. "My client was not merely inconvenienced," Moustakas wrote Pickard. "His life was turned upside down."
The FBI had no other contact with the officer or his family after he was placed on paid administrative leave in August 1999, according to his relatives and Moustakas. For 18 months, the family said, they were left hanging, wondering when a knock would come on the officer's door or if his name would suddenly flash on television.
"What hurts most is having to keep it all inside," said the officer's eldest son, 36, who is married and has a young daughter. "You can't tell anyone what you're going through."
Six months ago, on Feb. 18, a friend of the oldest son asked if he had seen the news: The FBI had arrested a spy. The son caught his breath. "What was the name?" he asked. His friend couldn't recall.
The son picked up the phone to dial his father, fearing that he wouldn't be there because he was in jail. His father answered. Dad wasn't a spy after all.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A20983-2001Aug16.html
