Declassified: The Flipping of Robert Hanssen (Cont’d)
Post from Declassified: The Lives and Stories of Real-Life Spies, by N. Cognito
Hanssen, under the close eye of CIA keepers, continued to feed his KGB contacts with a series of carefully selected and occasionally forged CIA documents in a dead drop in Rock Creek Park. Among the documents were a trove of false contacts, which all led to deflect KGB Counterintel suspicions from NATO assets and towards hardline Soviet agents and officials. One of the documents even worked to cast suspicions towards many of KGB head Vladimir Kryuchkov’s most loyal lieutenants, not in name, but through a trail of circumstantial evidence that planted seeds of doubt and suspicion.
While the details remain classified, limited and heavily redacted FOIA documents point to growing suspicions and disorganization arising within the halls of the KGB, with rounds of finger-pointing, investigations, and counter-investigations as various KGB and GRU agents, Russian politicians, as well as Warsaw Pact politicians, began to quietly suspect each other of colluding with Western powers in an attempt to further destabilize the Warsaw Pact and the USSR or win personal concessions in the new world order. The tense atmosphere of the collapsing Soviet Bloc was fertile ground for discord and suspicion already, with many secretly suspicious that the USSR was on the verge of collapse and many undoubtedly wondering if it was time to strike a personal deal with the west now in order to reap the rewards later. And the CIA/Hanssen games were adding a powerful fuel to this already very dangerous fire.
The plan nearly exploded in the face of the CIA. As suspicions raged, a growing undercurrent of hard-core Stalinists in the government and agencies began to plot a political coup. The conspiracy was led by Vladimir Kryuchkov himself, who strongly suspecting that Gorbachev was involved in the suspected conspiracy against the State, or at the very least being unduly influenced by Yeltsin, whom many strongly suspected of being the “Asset Y” referenced in the Hanssen Papers. Kryuchkov had become increasingly paranoid that he was suspected of being Asset Y himself, and accelerated hazy plans to counter what he saw as a dangerous liberalization of the state by “reactionary fools”. He forged the self-proclaimed State Committee on the State of Emergency (GKChP), a “Gang of Eight” with the overt aim of overthrowing the Gorbachev government and installing itself as a Neo-Stalinist government, and thereby preventing what they saw as the very disintegration of the Soviet State[1].
Meanwhile, a real “Asset Y” of sorts, who self-identified as “Shurik” (named after a
fictional Soviet spy parody from the 1960s) with his true name still highly classified, was reporting details to a special State Department field agent within Ambassador Jack Matlock, Jr.’s, embassy. The “real Y” as writers have since come to call him, informed Matlock’s staff on details of the planned coup, which, reportedly under the direct orders of President Bush himself, were passed along to Premier Gorbachev himself along with enough evidence to give Gorbachev and his loyalists all the ammunition that they needed to launch the Mayday Purge of 1991, which saw the GKChP and its sympathizers and co-conspirators rounded up and imprisoned in a massive sweep ironically named “Operation Y” (Операция „Ы“).
As the USSR officially ended, replaced by the fragile Union of Sovereign States (USS), Hanssen remained in his position, smugly citing himself to any who would listen as “the man who brought down the Soviet Union”. He continued to feed false information to the USS intelligence community and fed the Russian-led Federation some valuable insight into the actions of Chechen separatists and Russian crime lords.
But the “good times” wouldn’t last, for Hanssen’s ego just couldn’t cope with being a “kept asset”. In the spring of 1992, he attempted once again to contact the newly-rebranded FSB, this time believing, in his hubris, that he had what it took to be a
quadruple agent, playing the CIA against itself while double-profiting from the Russians. Closely watched by his CIA handlers and FBI supervisors in ways that even he didn’t suspect, he was caught red handed in the act by a phone tap. Quickly arrested, Hanssen pled guilty and ended up sentenced to over 50 years in a federal penitentiary, ultimately commuted down to 35 for his “cooperation”.
“Hanssen ultimately fell victim to his own ego,” said Special Agent Debra Evans. “He’d escaped detection for a full decade, only to be caught when he got sloppy, and rather than get his justice then and there, well,” she shrugged, “I guess that we got a few good years of real service from him before his big ego wrote a check that his limited mind could never hope to cash.”
[1] In our timeline, unopposed and hyper-organized, the GKChP successfully launched their coup in order to “save” the USSR, but this backfired spectacularly, leading to grassroots uprising in opposition to the coup, which made Boris Yeltsin into a folk hero and hastened the collapse of the Soviet Union. Thus, the coup ultimately (and ironically) led, in self-fulfilling prophesy, to the very disintegration of the Soviet Union that the conspirators had sought to prevent.