Congress by exaggerating the Soviet threat.” Cherkashin evaluated

260 | HOW AMERICA LOST ITS SECRETS Congress by exaggerating the Soviet threat.” Cherkashin evaluated Ames as a man who felt not only slighted by his superiors but “help- less to do anything about it” within the bureaucracy of the CIA. “The money we gave, even if he could spend only a small portion of it, gave him a sense of worth.” He explained that the KGB had an entire team of psychologists in Moscow that worked on further exploiting Ames’s resentment against his superiors. The search for an adversary intelligence officer who resents his service was not limited to KGB recruiters. It was also the “classic attitude” that the CIA sought to exploit in its adversaries, accord- ing to a former deputy director. “ You find someone working for the other side and tell him that he is not receiving the proper recogni- tion, pay, and honors due him,” Morell said, pointing out that the same “psychological dynamic” could be used to motivate someone to “act alone” in gathering espionage material. I next turned to an even more important KGB coup with Cher- kashin: the Robert Hanssen case. From the KGB’s perspective, Hans- sen was an extraordinary espionage source. He was a walk-in who © never entered the Soviet embassy or met with KGB case officers, but © in working as a KGB mole between 1979 and 2001, he had deliv- ered even more documents to the Russian intelligence services than Ames. Cherkashin learned of this potential spy when he received an anonymous letter from him identifying an FBI source in the Soviet embassy. When that tip proved to be accurate, Cherkashin got the resources he needed from the KGB to develop this source. From the start of his work for the KGB, Hanssen laid down his own rules. The KGB would deliver cash from which all the fingerprints were removed to locations, or “dead drops,” he specified. He would deliver documents exposing FBI, CIA, and NSA sources and methods in another dead drop. The KGB would precisely follow his instructions. Cherkashin told me that Hanssen’s “astounding self-recruitment” was executed in such a way that the KGB never actually controlled him. “He was our most important mole and we didn’t ever know his identity, where he worked, or how he had access to FBI, CIA, and NSA files.” Even so, the KGB (and later the SVR) paid him $600,000 in cash. In return, the anonymous spy delivered twenty-seven com- | | Epst_9780451494566_2p_all_r1.indd 260 ® 9/30/16 8:13AM | | HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_019748