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phone number in a used car ad Except for putting money into a dead drop, the KGB played only a passive role in the espionage. “Could Hanssen really be called a mole?” I asked.
“A mole is a term used in spy fiction,” he said. “We prefer to the more general term ‘espionage source.”
“So anyone who delivers state secrets to the KGB, for whatever reason, is an espionage source?” I asked.
“Certainly, if the information is valuable to us,” Cherkashin answered. “Hanssen delivered secrets exposing American human and electronic operations against Russia. He was our most valuable espionage source. It is the delivery of secrets, not the methods used, that counts.”
“Tf some unknown person simply delivered a trove of top-secret communications secrets to the doorstep of Russia would they it be accepted?” I asked with Snowden in mind.
“T can’t say what the SVR would do today. I am long retired” he said, with a nostalgic shake of his head. “But in my day, we needed some reason to believe to believe the gift was genuine.”
“Would you need to vet the person delivering it?”
“With Hanssen we did not have that opportunity,” he said. “If we believed the documents were genuine, we would of course grab them.”
The final recruitment I asked Cherkashin about was that of Ronald Pelton, the civilian employee of the NSA who had retired in 1979. Pelton had left the NSA without taking any classified documents with him. After retiring, he had financial difficulties, and he sought to get money from the KGB. On January 14, 1980, he walked into the Soviet embassy in Washington DC and asked to see an intelligence officer. After he was ushered into secure debriefing room, he said that he had information that Russia would find interesting, but he wanted money in return. What interested me about the Pelton case was that Cherkashin proceeded to recruit Pelton even though he was no longer working at the NSA, and Pelton no longer had access to the NSA. In addition, since the FBI had 24 hour surveillance on the embassy, Pelton had almost certainly been photographed entering it and also possibly had been recorded asking for an intelligence officer by electronic bugs that the KGB suspected that NSA had planted in the embassy. What did the KGB do in a situation in which ex-civilian employee at the NSA possessed no documents?
Despite the risks involved, Cherkashin decided Pelton had to be debriefed by communications intelligence specialists. So he had him disguised as a utility worker and smuggled out in a van to the residential compound of the Ambassador in Georgetown. A few days later, he was dropped off at a shopping mall, “Why did you go to such effort if Pelton had neither documents nor access to the NSA?” I asked.
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