NBC NIGHTLY NEWS (6:30 PM ET) February 26, 2001, Monday
ROBERT HANSSEN REPORTEDLY SOLD ELECTRONIC EAVESDROPPING SECRETS TO RUSSIANS
ANCHORS: BRIAN WILLIAMS
BRIAN WILLIAMS, anchor:
Now, to what NBC News has learned tonight that may have been the single most damaging secret allegedly passed on by that accused FBI agent-turned-spy Robert Hanssen. Here's NBC News justice correspondent Pete Williams.
PETE WILLIAMS reporting:
The single biggest secret betrayed by Robert Hanssen, American intelligence officials say tonight: an operation headquartered here in the Maryland suburbs north of Washington, the supersensitive Special Collections Service, jointly run by the CIA and by the National Security Agency. Its mission, intelligence experts say: mainly electronic eavesdropping on foreign government facilities overseas; placing bugs on phones and computers, for example, to capture information before it's encrypted, rendering it unreadable. When revealing the case against Hanssen, the FBI declined to call the program by name, describing it instead as a quote, "technical program of enormous value, expense and importance to the US Government." An intelligence researcher says revealing the technical details of the program, as the government now claims Hanssen did, would be devastating.
Mr. JOHN PIKE (Intelligence Expert): Giving away information about spy satellites really doesn't take the spy satellites out of the sky. But giving away information about the count--surveillance techniques that the Special Collections Service is using would make it a lot easier to defeat those techniques.
P. WILLIAMS: And what of Hanssen himself, seen here in this home video of a Washington-area wedding five years ago of author and journalist James Bamford. He says he met Hanssen nearly ten years ago. As they became friends, Bamford invited Hanssen for rides on his boat and then even to his wedding. Bamford says Hanssen became keenly interested in a trip he took to Moscow in the mid-1990s to interview Viktor Cherkashin, a former top KGB spy and the man the FBI now says was actually Hanssen's top handler.
Mr. JIM BAMFORD (Author, Body of Secrets): He got very excited and wanted to know what Cherkashin had said. And he actually wanted to see a transcript, which--I said I couldn't give him a transcript, but I'd give him a summary of basically what Cherkashin had to say.
P. WILLIAMS: Trying to check, Bamford now thinks, whether the Russian let anything slip about spies in the US.
And tonight, FBI officials say they became convinced Hanssen was selling secrets after analyzing documents found in KGB files--sent by a spy identified only by code name--and discovered Hanssen's fingerprints. Pete Williams, NBC News, Washington.
Copyright 2001 National Broadcasting Co. Inc.
