WASHINGTON — A secret investigative team established in 1994 to identify the source of a series of damaging intelligence losses played a crucial role in the counterespionage probe that led to last Sunday's arrest of an FBI agent, Robert Philip Hanssen, officials said Friday.
The mole-hunting unit — a joint operation of the FBI and the CIA whose existence has never before been disclosed — was created because investigators could not explain why intelligence operations against Russia continued to be compromised after the arrest of Aldrich Ames, a senior CIA covert officer. Shortly after Ames' capture, they concluded it was unlikely he was responsible for all of the intelligence losses of the previous few years.
The most damaging was the apparent disclosure to the Russians of an elaborate and costly technical intelligence program targeting their activities in the United States, officials said. The apparent compromise of that program — which remains highly classified and which officials refused to describe — may have cost the United States hundreds of millions of dollars, according to current and former U.S. officials.
Other unexplained intelligence problems, including the 1989 disclosure to Moscow that the FBI was conducting an espionage investigation of State Department official Felix S. Bloch, played a role in prompting officials to begin a new search for a spy inside the U.S. government, officials added.
Yet some officials said that the driving force behind the creation of the new counterespionage unit was the need to find out what had happened to the costly technical intelligence program, and they believe that Hanssen's arrest may solve that mystery. In addition to the KGB officers working for the FBI that he betrayed, officials charge that the loss of that one technical program represents the most severe damage he did to the United States during his alleged 15-year career as a Russian spy.
The special investigative unit, which works within the Counterespionage Group at the CIA's Counterintelligence Center, was created by Paul Redmond, the CIA counterintelligence expert who had led the earlier effort to apprehend Ames. The unit was responsible for a series of espionage investigations that led to the arrests of other significant spies apprehended after Ames, officials now say.
They include both Earl Edwin Pitts, an FBI agent sentenced to 27 years in prison in 1997 for spying for the Soviet Union, and Harold J. Nicholson, a former CIA station chief in Romania who was also sentenced to more than 23 years in prison in 1997 for spying for Moscow.
Officials indicated that the Pitts and Nicholson cases were byproducts of the desire by both the CIA and FBI to solve the mysteries that remained in the wake of the arrest of Ames. Most notably, U.S. intelligence officials began an aggressive effort to recruit Russian intelligence officers who could identify the source of the leak of U.S. secrets. That effort to find talkative current or former Russian intelligence officers was made easier by the collapse of the Soviet Union and the severe economic and political troubles of post-Soviet Russia.
That effort paid dividends in the Pitts case. Information from a Russian source led the FBI to undertake a 16-month sting operation against Pitts, with FBI agents posing as Russian spies. Source information also played a role in the Nicholson case, although his troubles in passing a polygraph examination helped identify him as a spy, officials say.
But the Pitts and Nicholson cases were unable to provide answers to the earlier unexplained losses, and so the mole hunt continued after their arrests, officials said.
Officials say that the continued investigation took a series of wrong turns. Some reports from Russian sources prompted investigators to look for another Russian spy within the CIA, former officials said. In fact, the post-Ames hunt for spies within the agency led to what some former intelligence officials believe were crippling excesses, with CIA officers who had worked on Russian operations forced to undergo repeated polygraph examinations. One officer was placed on administrative leave and has been the subject of a counterintelligence investigation to determine whether he had spied for Russia. The status of that case is now uncertain in the wake of the arrest of Hanssen, officials said.
But there were also some indications received over the years suggesting that the losses could be attributable to a source inside the FBI. There was evidence, for example, that the Russians knew about one FBI-run technical intelligence operation that probably was not compromised by someone at the CIA.
"It was plain that the KGB knew what it was and went right to it and found it, and it was obvious that a source had to have told them about it," said one former intelligence official. "That was completely an FBI operation, which had produced very good counterintelligence information for the bureau, and it was inconceivable that Ames knew about it."
In the wake of the Ames case, however, the FBI did not undergo the rigorous scrutiny that was imposed upon the CIA, officials now acknowledge.
The efforts of the joint mole hunting operation were finally rewarded late last year, when a Russian source provided what appears to be virtually the entire KGB file on the Hanssen case.
The special investigative unit was a successor to an earlier and equally secretive CIA internal investigative team that helped uncover Ames. It is still in existence today, even after Hanssen's arrest, because officials believe it is possible there are additional foreign agents inside the U.S. government.