[suspenseful music]
- We knew that there was still a mole
who had not been identified.
- This wasn't just a spy. It was the spy.
- Oh, my God. The mole is an FBI agent. - Mm-hmm.
The information that he gave
caused irreparable damage to the US government.
- This is the worst possible place for a spy.
He says, "I understand.
I was in that place when I was young."
I mean, he was recruiting me.
- He did leave a mark on the Foxstone Park sign.
- I go to his bag and I find the PalmPilot.
In seconds he was on me. He grabs me by the lapel.
He lifts me up onto my toes.
- Did he have a weapon on him? Would he try to use it?
- And I'm thinking to myself...
What do I do?
[narrator]: In the FBI we make a lot of headlines.
Drug busts, mob stings...
...terrorist takedowns.
We understand why people want to tell stories about us.
- Mark it. - Freeze!
- FBI. - FBI! - Action!
[narrator]: But they don't know the half of it.
What really goes down?
We save that for each other
when we're talking agent to agent.
This is FBI True.
- If Hanssen discovers that his PalmPilot is gone
or determines that you betrayed him,
he would have a rageful incident
and potentially commit violence against you.
- My handler comes to the door,
hands me all three devices and says, "Run."
And I do. I ran up three flights of stairs at a mad sprint,
got into the main door of the office
and slammed it behind me.
I go into his office, kneel down in front of his bag
and realize, rookie mistake...
I've got three devices and there are four pockets
and I have no clue
which I've pulled each of the things out of.
And as I'm trying to cast back in my mind,
I hear him coming through the door.
They had a data card and a punch key,
and you could hear the chimes as he was punching in the key code.
And I heard that and I just dropped all three devices,
kind of like best guess,
ran back to my desk and put that
original poker face right there and tried to not sweat.
[suspenseful music]
And he comes in the office in a mad rush,
glares at me on his way to his office, slams his door.
And as I'm sitting here, I hear, zip.
And I'm thinking to myself, "What do I do?
How do I recover from this?
There's no way I got this right. The odds are impossible."
I go into his office,
he pulls me down by the collar to the ground.
Our faces are inches away from the bag.
And he says, "See that? I know everything."
- Phew!
- And he leaves for the day.
Hanssen was definitely testing me.
So just as I was trying to gain
his trust and gather information from him,
he was testing me to see how much he could trust me.
And so he gave me these odd tasks
and one was incredibly strange.
He would complain about a lot of different people in the FBI,
and there was an assistant director he hated,
absolutely hated.
And he told me, "I want you to go steal his art."
And I looked at him like, "That's really funny, boss."
And he's like, "No, you don't understand. I want his art."
He's got a conference room on the 7th floor, which is the executive floor.
Someone at my level, you don't go there.
- The 7th floor is where the director lives.
- That's where the director lives. And you don't go there.
And he said, "I want you to steal the art."
And I said, "Okay."
And he said, "I want to see that art in this room by tomorrow."
- So, 'cause I was at law school every night. - Right.
- I came back, it might have been 10:00 at night.
I grabbed a computer card,
I went down to the 7th floor
and I stole the art off the wall
in an assistant director of the FBI's conference room.
- Oof! - Three paintings.
We actually hung them on the wall in our office.
I even stole the hooks off the wall,
and then I hammered them in.
I put a fox hunt painting over my desk.
And I put two men in a boat in peril
at sea over Hanssen's desk. It was a little bit on the nose.
And when he came in the next day,
the first thing he did was look at the wall and then smile.
And I smiled back.
And there was this connection, this exchange.
He had given me a task, you know, an illegal task,
you know, of stealing. And I'd done it.
- Rich, what does that mean? - Well, that means that
he might be trying to recruit Eric for the future.
But the evidence we can get for him pitching him
to be a spy. - Yeah.
- It just kind of seals the deal what we needed in order to arrest him, too.
[Kristy]: So we know Hanssen had specially encrypted his PalmPilot,
and we're in the process of breaking that.
But to put him in prison forever,
we need to actually get hard evidence,
we need to catch him in the ac.
- We need to see physical evidence that he may have,
whether it is in his vehicle, in his desk,
and so we have to do some arrangements of how to get him away from the office,
away from his car. - Hanssen wanted to get
in other agencies' data centres.
As a spy, he would love to see those centres.
Now, one of Hanssen's tasks for me was set up meetings
with everybody who does Information Assurance
with every other agency.
I said, "So, boss. I set up a meeting for the DIA."
He was really excited. That was one of my tasks.
He said, "You finally did something right.
You're normally a moron
or an imbecile, but finally you did something right."
- Those are your nicknames? - Those are my nicknames.
And my only job was to go down to a big Tahoe
in the parking garage that Rich had set up,
to take, where I would drive Hanssen
and his car would be left behind.
That way, they could search the car.
A whole search team is ready to go.
They're going to take his car apart, look through it.
They're going to put tech in it. Find evidence.
So we went down to the garage...
[suspenseful music]
...and the SUV is not there. And I know that I'm supposed
to get him away from his car today.
And I'm feeling pretty stressed out.
And I said, "Well, maybe it's on the other level."
I go down another level; it's not there.
He says, "We've wasted enough time already.
We're going to be late. We will take my car."
And I'm thinking, "Anything but that."
So I think, great time to make him angry.
He's already really agitated.
So as he's walking to his car, I said, "Hey, boss..."
just in this snide kind of way.
He turns around and I said,
"We're not taking your ugly, beat-up silver Ford Taurus.
There's no way I'm getting into that piece of "S"." - Yeah.
- "And driving to the DIA. We're going to walk around this parking lot
until we find that SUV."
And that's it. In seconds he was on me.
He grabbed me by the lapel. He lifts me up on my toes.
And he's 6'4".
He's spitting mad, yelling in my face.
"Why are you so insistent we not take my car?"
And I'm thinking, "I've blown this operation."
- So Hanssen grabs you, he's got you up off the floor.
What happens next? - My first thought is,
"I've got two black belts."
I really wanted to hurt him, and I had to check that.
- Right. - But now I've got to win this case back.
Anything to get him away from his car.
The whole search team is ready to go,
I just needed to get him away.
[uplifting music]
So we finally find the SUV in the parking garage.
- Wow. - We get in the car,
he's in a huff, and I start driving.
- While you're driving him around and taking him to DIA...
...they're back at FBI and they're working on the car.
- Right, so they've pulled the car,
his silver Ford Taurus...
...into a hidden garage,
and they're searching the car
for anything that could be useful.
[suspenseful music]
So we finally made it to the DIA.
We parked, we go in
and we're waiting to meet
the head of Information Assurance for the DIA.
And we're waiting.
Now, Hanssen does not like to be kept waiting.
And after a while,
he decides that he's been insulted,
and we're going to abruptly leave.
And so we do. To everybody's consternation.
I'm trying to talk Hanssen into staying.
He says, "We're leaving." And won't take no for an answer.
And I end up getting in the car with him,
and we're driving, and I'm very stressed out.
I've got to make sure that he doesn't show up
at FBI headquarters and then decide, "It's late in the day.
I'm going to go right to my car and drive home." - Right.
- Game's over. They're searching the car.
And it's not like I could even send a text.
And so I knew that I had to find a way...
to keep Hanssen away from the office.
I had to do anything that I could. So what I did was...
...I drove into traffic.
And for the first moment in this case, I got a little luck.
There was a broken-down truck, and we were crawling.
I mean, I could have gotten out
and skipped faster than we were moving.
[suspenseful music]
- And what was he doing? - He got angry.
And then he started attacking me.
He said, "You keep talking about how you're such a great driver
and you did the dumbest thing you possibly could do."
And he said, "You know what? I could take a cab. I can walk."
And he gets out of the car.
- And what are you thinking at this point? You're like, "Okay."
- I'm devastated because I'm thinking, "Now what do I do?
He's out of the car. I can't control him."
So I put the car in park and I got out.
So now the FBI Tahoe is just sitting there
in the middle of traffic on M Street...
and I'm running up the street after Hanssen.
and he turns around and I just reached deep inside
and did the one thing that until that moment I had resisted doing.
I said, "Boss, I need you to get back in the car 'cause
I need to talk to you about something.
It has to do with my relationship with my wife."
[suspenseful music]
"I finally broached the subject of her and I not having kids,
just like you've been telling me
over and over and over to do. She didn't take it well,
we're now in the middle of this massive fight,
and I just thought you could give me some advice."
- How heavy was your heart at that point
when you felt like you had to go to that
personal place to keep him engaged with you?
- I felt like I lost a part of myself.
You give so much of yourself to an undercover investigation.
It becomes the most important thing in your life.
Becomes more important than your family.
You don't want it to,
but the stakes are so high. - Right.
- And I said, "If God wants me to have children and my wife doesn't,
what do I do?"
And he jumped right at it.
He turned around.
He thought about it. He got back in the car.
And we ended up driving very slowly back to the office,
it took an enormous amount of time.
And then, of course, I was stuck
in a lengthy dialogue about
the purpose of marriage and to have children.
In fact, he told me that...
"We're going to get you into Opus Dei.
You're going to change how you worship.
We're going to church every day together now."
- My God! - "We're going to bring you into the church
that all of the people in the FBI are in."
I was telling him I was so frustrated with the FBI,
I couldn't stand the bureaucracy.
I told him, "I can't afford my life.
They're giving me the clearance to see these incredibly
valuable secrets, but they don't pay me anything.
And I'm in law school, I could go to any law firm
and make five times what I'm making in the FBI."
And he would start saying, "Well, you know, I understand.
I was in that place when I was young,
I found a way to make it work." - Right.
- "God can help you find a way to make it work."
I mean, he was recruiting me.
- So here we are on the street that Hanssen lived.
- It was pretty intense.
You know, Hanssen talked about his family all the time,
talked about his quaint little home
on Talisman Lane in Virginia.
He actually invited my wife and I here.
He was making these connections, our faith, our families.
And he really had to learn
whether he could trust me,
but not only whether he could trust me, could he recruit me.
- so, Eric, at this point, you've been very successful
at what your task was.
- Well, I'm also in my personal life falling apart,
so I'm feeling incredibly stressed out,
not having a good relationship with my wife.
And I started questioning
whether I should be in this case,
whether I was being successful at the case,
whether I was the right person for it.
I started doubting myself - Right.
- I felt my life was spinning out of control.
Sitting down with my handler,
I said, "I want out."
And I told her my concerns
and she said, "This is a big case.
You need to understand that there is no getting out."
- Right.
- And she took me to the Washington field office.
There were all these people,
analysts and computer techs
and people who are going through his records
and people who were surveilling him.
- And what's the walk home like from that,
after you've seen all this,
you know that you're not alone,
that there's hundreds of people involved?
- I had a moment of "This was big."
And then I learned how big it was.
Because I learned that
this wasn't just a spy,
it was the spy.
This wasn't just an individual
who was an FBI agent suspected of espionage.
This was the legendary Gray Suit,
the spy that the entire intelligence community
had been after for their entire careers, for over two decades.
And I was at the centre of the case. I was ready to go.
I went from investigating to determine if he was a spy
fully into he is a spy. Now, we're going to catch him.
[Kristy]: The PalmPilot that you had "borrowed"
from Hanssen while he was at the firing range...
...was eventually cracked.
It turns out there was some pretty critical information on it.
- On that PalmPilot, he not only had
some of the letters he'd written to the Russians.
He also had a formula
for how we convert dates in the PalmPilot.
And when you figured all that out,
and the people who are great at cryptography did. - Exactly.
- They were able to show not only where he would make his final drop, but when.
We knew from the recording we bought
that he was using tape signals on the Foxstone Park sign with the Russians.
[a camera shutter clicks]
And the PalmPilot told us where.
Not far from this neighbourhood, where Hanssen lived.
[hangs up phone]
- Deborah, tell me about February 18th.
You think Hanssen may make a drop.
- Quite strongly. But things could go wrong.
Something could go wrong with the actual arrest,
they could panic.
Did he have a weapon on him? Would he try to use it?
All of those things were going through my mind.
I was sitting in a van with my ASAC
and other executives from the FBI.
[ominous music]
And we were sitting and listening
to the surveillance call out and waiting.
[ominous music]
So Hanssen exited his car,
and he did leave a mark on the Foxstone Park sign
for the Russians, to let them know that he's making a drop.
Once doing that, he walked back to the footbridge
and placed this package underneath.
He turned and walked out of the park
just as we're walking now...
...and we heard that he was nearing his car.
[ominous music]
He was walking up this very sidewalk
towards his vehicle
and the arrest team was in a van ready to go.
[suspenseful music]
When I said, "Take him," they exited the vehicle...
[suspenseful music]
And Hanssen was right there. They arrested him.
[rising, suspenseful music]
Robert Hanssen was arrested right here,
in front of this house.
- What was his reaction?
- It was almost like no reaction initially.
He was just standing there.
He didn't try to move or get away or anything like that.
[eerie music]
He said, "What took you so long?"
[ominous music]
They put him in the back of a vehicle
between the two case agents,
who showed him some photographs of him committing espionage.
And then they read him his rights.
- I heard that he asked to speak to you.
- Yes, he did.
I was willing to go in and hear him out, whatever it was.
- Sure, absolutely.
- So I walked into the room.
He was sitting there alone.
Really no expression on his face.
He looked at me.
I said, "I'm Deborah Smith, I was a supervisor on the squad.
I understand you wanted to speak with me."
And he said, "This should help your career."
And that's all he said.
- And what did you do? - I looked at him.
I turned and left the room. - Yeah. Good for you.
So Deborah, what was in that last drop?
[keyboard clicking]
- The most important thing in that last drop
was a letter from Hanssen to the Russians.
"Dear friends,
I thank you for your assistance these many years.
It seems, however, that my greatest utility to you
has come to an end,
and it is time to seclude myself from active service.
Since communicating last,
and one wonders if, because of it,
I have been promoted to a higher, do-nothing
senior executive job outside of regular access to information
within the counterintelligence program.
Something has aroused the sleeping tiger."
- It sounds like you got him just in time,
like he was about to run. - That's right.
- My handler called me.
I was told that in that final drop,
he included a piece of information really important to me.
My name and my information.
And that I would be a perfect person to recruit.
I was driving with my wife and I had to pull over.
My hands were shaking so much I couldn't drive.
My wife was like, "What's wrong?"
I looked at Juliana, and I told her everything.
- And was she like, "What?"
- She was shocked and speechless.
I thought, she's going to get out of the car,
call a taxi, disappear from my life.
But she just turned, looked at me, and she said...
"Now, I understand." - Right.
- And they were the most incredible words I could have ever heard from her.
[reporter]: In court, the government filed affidavits saying Hanssen handed over
6,000 secret documents to Moscow,
in exchange for 1.4 million dollars in cash,
diamonds and escrowed money
in an espionage career that spanned 15 years.
- What kind of damage did Hanssen do?
- Extremely grave damage to the US government.
The information that he gave caused irreparable damage.
[ominous music]
We know that he viewed approximately 6,000 documents.
- I know that he had given up that the United States
was making a listening tunnel under the ground,
under the Russian embassy. And he gave that up.
He gave up a lot.
The continuity of government...
[keyboard clicks]
And he caused the death of three sources
who were very important to the US government
by giving up their identities
Sergei Motorin...
...Valery Martinov...
...and Dmitri Polyakov, codenamed Top Hat,
considered by some to be America's most important asset.
- Deborah, how will history look at Robert Hanssen in this case?
- I think history will look at him as,
number one, the most damaging spy
in the history of the FBI...
[slow heartbeat]
...and close to the most damaging spy
in the history of the United States.
That will be his legacy.
He's a betrayer.
He's betrayed everything in his life.
He was true to no one.
And I don't know that he had the capacity
to be true to anyone.
[ominous music]
Subtitles: difuze