U.S. Authorities Question FBI Spy’s Candor

Federal prosecutors charged Monday that convicted FBI spy Robert Phillip Hanssen has “blood ... on his hands” and may have lied to government interrogators about his two-decade career as a Russian spy, but they grudgingly agreed to honor their plea deal with him anyway.

Authorities are “troubled and concerned” about assessments that Hanssen has feigned memory loss concerning his finances and his motives as a spy, officials said in a court filing. But they said that there is a legitimate split among interrogators about his candor and that there is not enough evidence to justify scrapping the deal they struck with Hanssen last year that spared him a possible death sentence in exchange for his guilty plea.

That conclusion clears the way for Hanssen, one of the most damaging spies in U.S. history, to be sentenced to life in prison Friday in federal court.

“We don’t expect [the judge] will do anything other than give him a life sentence. That’s what we’re expecting,” said defense attorney Plato Cacheris.

“He gave something like 75 days of interviews over 200 hours, so we think he has fully complied with the terms of his plea agreement,” Cacheris said in an interview. “The fact that some people don’t think he’s been fully candid, we don’t agree with that.”

The previously undisclosed questions about Hanssen’s candor threaten to prolong efforts by U.S. intelligence agents to determine how much damage he did to national security and what exactly he gave the Russians.

Hanssen’s testimony is a vital part of that process, and questions about his truthfulness “complicate it in the sense that it will require more time to resolve issues where there are questions and inconsistencies,” according to a U.S. official involved in the process.

Another U.S. official who asked not to be identified said officials conducting the damage assessment on behalf of the CIA are seeking to corroborate Hanssen’s testimony. The issue of Hanssen’s candor “colors how you view it, but you would never take what he says at face value anyway,” the official said.

Everyone involved in the case agrees that the former FBI supervisor did massive damage to U.S. national security by giving the Russians information on U.S. nuclear capabilities, intelligence-gathering systems, the identities of double-agents and other secrets.

In unusually biting and personal language for a government court filing, prosecutors Monday branded Hanssen “a traitor” whose “brazen and reckless conduct ... is almost beyond comprehension.”

“By his treachery, he made this a more dangerous and volatile world in which to raise our families,” prosecutors said in a sentencing memorandum filed by the U.S. attorney’s office in U.S. District Court in Alexandria, Va., before Friday’s hearing.

“For his betrayal of our country, and for the unpardonable consequences of his misconduct, Hanssen deserves to forfeit his right ever to live again within our community and within our society,” the filing said. Noting two KGB double-agents who were executed by the Russians after Hanssen helped reveal their identities, prosecutors said: “Their blood is on his hands.”

The plea deal that Hanssen struck with prosecutors in July required that he “cooperate fully, truthfully and completely with the United States.” It offered U.S. authorities the chance to find out what state secrets Hanssen had given the Soviets beginning in 1979--without having to go through a trial that risked public disclosure of national security data. It also allowed him to avoid the death penalty while ensuring that his wife would retain an FBI pension worth nearly $40,000 a year.

Since the deal was struck, Hanssen has met almost weekly with government debriefers.

One session several months ago became heated, according to sources close to the case, when interrogators grilled Hanssen about the questionable results of a polygraph he had taken and Hanssen appeared to lunge at one of his interrogators.

Nonetheless, two groups involved in the interrogation--the FBI and the Webster Commission, which issued a report last month that was critical of FBI security flaws--gave generally positive assessments of Hanssen’s cooperation, according to Monday’s court filing.

The FBI concluded that Hanssen was “in substantial compliance with the terms of his plea agreement,” the filing said. According to the FBI, he “provided information during the debriefings that was identical or consistent with independent investigative results, and in some cases was previously unknown to us and damaging to himself.”

Indeed, sources have previously told The Times that Hanssen revealed to his debriefers that he had given up to the Russians the identity of one of Washington’s most valuable double agents--a disclosure that U.S. authorities had not known about. The double agent, a top Soviet intelligence official named Dimitri “Top Hat” Polyakov, was later killed by the Soviets.

But two other agencies involved in the Hanssen debriefings--a CIA-led damage assessment team and the Justice Department inspector general’s office--had “serious reservations” about Hanssen’s candor, the court filing said.

The damage assessment team “questioned Hanssen’s claims of a poor memory as an excuse for either not engaging fully in the debriefing or as a means to hide facets of his activity,” the filing said.

And the inspector general “found that Hanssen’s answers were often contradictory, inconsistent, or illogical, and found Hanssen’s cooperation concerning his finances, the significance of his espionage and his motives to be ‘particularly problematic,’” prosecutors said in the filing.

Hanssen told Webster Commission members that money drove him to become a spy, according to the group’s report last month, but questions have persisted about how much money he actually received and what he did with it.

The government charges that the Russians paid Hanssen $1.4 million in cash and diamonds, but some of that was in a foreign bank account that Hanssen may never have collected. He also spent large amounts of cash on a Washington stripper whom he had befriended and tried to turn to Christianity.

Prosecutors said evidence of “a complete failure to cooperate” would be needed to try to void a plea agreement.

“We do not believe we have that here,” prosecutors said. Given the disagreements about Hanssen’s candor, “the government cannot carry its burden of proving a breach of the plea agreement.”

Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft, who appeared eager to seek the death penalty against Hanssen early in the case, signed off on the decision to favor a life sentence, a Justice Department official said.