NEW YORK — Although alleged traitor Robert Hanssen is behind bars, counterintelligence agents are on the trail of at least one more Russian spy still inside the U.S. government, according to a magazine report.
"There's a massive mole hunt going on" in the CIA, State Department and National Security Agency, a former CIA official still closely tied to the agency says in this week's edition of U.S. News & World Report.
The FBI is said to have 400 agents on the Hanssen case and related investigations.
Although the huge probe is in its early stages, security is so tight that each agent has undergone a polygraph test.
But a senior intelligence official cautioned, "Don't expect to see anyone carted off in handcuffs soon."
The cloak-and-dagger drama was spotlighted last month with the arrest of Hanssen, a top FBI agent, on charges that he had spied for Moscow since the days of the Soviet Union.
The veteran counterspy was accused of passing volumes of top-secret information to the Russians.
The search for additional spies was triggered by an examination of evidence in the Hanssen case, the magazine said.
Agents concluded that the damage was too great to have been done by just Hanssen and earlier spies, and that other Russian agents must have been involved.
Moscow noticeably slowed its intelligence operation in the United States for two years after the breakup of the Soviet Union but cranked it up to "almost Cold War levels after 1993," a senior U.S. official said.
The spy surge continued even though Russian officials have promised since 1997 to cut the number of their agents here.