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Notes
1 Viktor Cherkashin with Gregory Feifer, Spy Handler: Memoir of a KGB Officer: The True Story of the Man Who Recruited Robert Hanssen & Aldrich Ames (New York: Basic Books, 2005), p. 5.
2 Ibid., p. 30.
3 Ibid., p. 225.
4 Ibid.
5 The KGB’s First Chief Directorate was responsible for foreign intelligence when Ames began spying in 1985. In December 1991, it was replaced by the Russian Federation’s Foreign Intelligence Service. With one exception, the Soviet and Russian intelligence officers cited in this article served in both agencies.
6 The Seven Million Dollar Spy was posthumously published as an audiobook and audio CD after Wise’s death in 2018.
7 Jeff Stein, “Riddle Resolved: Who Dimed Out American Traitor and Super-Spy,” Newsweek, 1 November 2018, https://www.newsweek.com/who-dimed-out-american-traitor-super-spy-robert-hanssen-1196080
8 The FBI calculated that the KGB/SVR paid Ames $2.7 million in cash and promised him $1.9 million more. David Wise, NIGHTMOVER: How Aldrich Ames Sold the CIA to the KGB for $4.6 Million (New York: HarperCollins, 1995), p. 247n3. Hanssen received more than $600,000 in cash and diamonds and was promised $800,000 held in escrow in Moscow. FBI Affidavit in Robert Hanssen Spy Case, p. 6, https://www.fbi.gov/file-repository/hanssen-affidavit.pdf/view
9 Ames began spying for the KGB in April 1985 and continued cooperating with the SVR until his arrest in February 1994. Hanssen walked into the Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU, military intelligence) office in New York in 1979 and spied until 1981. After a four-year hiatus, he contacted the KGB in 1985, resumed spying, and then briefly broke contact after the Soviet collapse. Once he was convinced that the SVR could handle him securely and pay him, he resumed spying until his arrest in February 2001.
10 Sandra Grimes and Jeanne Vertefeuille, Circle of Treason: A CIA Account of Traitor Aldrich Ames and the Men He Betrayed (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2012), p. 144.
11 Peter Maas, Killer Spy: The Inside Story of the FBI’s Pursuit and Capture of Aldrich Ames, America’s Deadliest Spy (New York: Warner Books, 1996), p. 133.
12 Grimes and Vertefeuille, Circle of Treason, p. 144.
13 Vertefeuille died in 2012.
14 Boone held top-secret/codeword clearances and spied for Soviet intelligence from 1988 to 1991 while stationed in Augsburg, West Germany. See also James Risen, “Spy Agencies’ Ex-Analyst Charged With Selling Secrets to Soviet,” The New York Times, 14 October 1998, p. A5.
15 Mass, Killer Spy, p. 135.
16 Ames chose the alias to show off his knowledge of Russian history. Kolokol was the title of a journal edited by a Russian exile, Alexander Herzen, the father of Russian socialism.
17 Ronald Kessler, The Secrets of the FBI (New York: Crown Publishers, 2011), pp. 266–267; Gordon Corera, Russians Among Us (New York: HarperCollins 2019), p. 115.
18 The full story is told in Corera, Russians Among Us.
19 For an account of Operation Monopoly, see Seven Million Dollar Spy and “Operation Monopoly” at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Monopoly.
20 Wise, The Seven Million Dollar Spy.
21 Ibid.
22 Federal Bureau of Investigation, “Veteran FBI Agent Arrested and Charged with Espionage,” https://archives.fbi.gov/archives/news/pressrel/press-releases/veteran-fbi-agent-arrested-and-charged-with-espionage.
23 Ibid., pp. 35–36.
24 David Wise, “Closing Down the K.G.B.,” The New York Times, 24 November 1991, p. A30.
25 Ronald Kessler, The Bureau: The Secret History of the FBI (New York: Crown, 2011), pp. 133–134.
26 Affidavit in Robert Hanssen Spy Case, pp. 81–82. A transcription of the phone appears on pp. 29–31.
27 Ibid., pp. 79–80.
28 Kelley was the CIA’s top expert on Soviet illegals, agents who assume false identities and spy within the benefit of official (legal) cover. The Bloch case landed on his desk after French intelligence observed Block meeting a KGB illegal in Paris and reported it to the CIA. The FBI had a tap on Bloch’s phone and overheard the illegal warning him that he was under suspicion.
29 Wise, Seven Million Dollar Spy.
30 Wise covers the Kelley saga in ibid. See also Russo and Dezenhall, Best of Enemies.
31 Kessler, “How the FBI Mishandled the Brian Kelley Spy Case.”
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Benjamin B. Fischer
Benjamin B. Fischer, the former Chief Historian of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), is a specialist in Eastern European and Soviet affairs. A graduate of Cornell University, Ithaca, New York and Columbia University, New York City, he served for nine years in the CIA’s Directorate of Intelligence as an analyst of Soviet issues, fifteen years in the Directorate of Operations in the United States and abroad, and ten years on the History Staff at the CIA’s Center for the Study of Intelligence, where he edited several of the agency’s classified publications on Cold War events, some of which have been partially or fully declassified. The author can be contacted at [email protected].