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 by Al Martin The Strange Case of the Infamous Hanssen Affair The arrest of FBI agent Richard P. Hanssen is a another bad FBI cover story. It also seems to be a poorly crafted media stunt. When you think about it, what kind of a crime could they prove against him? In the FBI's own counterintelligence protocols for a controlled drop, which was to get evidence to use in court, they're supposed to wait until the suspect, in this case Hanssen, has not only dropped the documents but the surveillance team is supposed to wait until his Russian handlers come to get them, so they can be arrested as well. Since this was a double dead drop site, which means that the money was at a different location than the papers, the FBI should have waited for the suspect to go and collect the money. What the FBI did, however, is videotape the suspect so all they had was a video of Hanssen walking into a public restroom in the middle of the woods in Virginia. They have a picture of him walking in. He has no papers in his hand. No briefcase. No containers. Nothing. Then the minute he walks out, the FBI arrest him. The FBI then goes back to the mens room. In the trash barrel they find a milk container stuffed full of classified documents. But they don't videotape it. Then the video doesn't start rolling again until Hanssen is in the back seat of the car. You can't really see him. Then the FBI is seen taking apart the milk carton on the hood of the car, so they don't even have any taped evidence to back up their claim that classified documents were in the trash barrel. So how do they prove that Hanssen even put them there? Secondly, how does the FBI prove motive? They didn't wait to tape him going to the second site to pick the money. Instead the FBI picked up the money ahead of time. Then they used the same money to show on TV, part of the display presentation for the media. Here's the money Hanssen supposedly got, and they show the $50,000 in hundred dollar bills. The problem is Hanssen never got that money. It was never in his hands. The whole thing was nebulous -- even the way FBI Director Louis Freeh described it. Freeh himself wasn't even clear as to what he was saying when he stated that the FBI suddenly and mysteriously ended up with KGB documents directly from Russia from a "friendly source." And that supposedly turned them on to Hanssen? No Russian intelligence officer would have any vested interest in giving documents to the FBI -- not unless they were sold. And if the FBI had bought them. But that would be another matter altogether. The FBI says they didn't buy them, that no money changed hands. Could it be that this was a manipulation by both the CIA and the Russian Federal Intelligence Service to perhaps prevent Hanssen's Russian handlers from being videotaped? Is it possible that one of these so-called Russian handlers is actually working for the CIA? Or could it be that it's one of the CIA people involved in the Hanssen Affair behind the scenes? The only way that the FBI would have gotten these documents would be if the CIA had been involved. They absolutely could not have gotten the documents otherwise. Or could it be the other way around? Could the Russians be attempting to protect somebody in the CIA? It could work both ways. When Freeh was being questioned after his press conference, some of the reporters were smart enough to know that what Feeeh was saying wasn't making any sense. When Freeh was through with his explanation and the reporters started asking him questions, Freeh couldn't even remember what he had just said 40 minutes ago. So there he was -- shuffling through papers, looking for the answers. This was the official FBI press conference on the arrest. Surprisingly enough, they didn't show Hanssen going in to place the documents allegedly there. They did show a color still shot of the men's room in the middle of the woods with nobody else in it. All the rest was simply oral representation. If you think back to the Walker Case, the Pell Case, or the Howard Case, you'll find they show the videotapes of everything right up front, during the press conference. Because they have nothing to hide. And they want to poison the atmosphere against the alleged suspect. And the Hanssen Affair? There's something very wrong. The FBI was very nebulous. When Freeh was asked about Hanssen being questioned the night before, he said that Hanssen didn't say anything. Then five minutes later, Freeh said that Hanssen revealed how much money he had received. Then they changed the statement again and said that No, he hadn't revealed that. How did the FBI know how much money he had received? They searched all his bank statements and couldn't find it. The FBI admitted that. They said they searched all his financial records over the last fifteen years and couldn't find anything out of the ordinary. The first statement was that it was $600,000. Initially the FBI said it was $1.4 million. Then they said it was $600,000 in cash and $800,000 in diamonds. How could they know that? What the FBI hasn't said is that they haven't found any diamonds anywhere in any safe deposit box. How could the FBI possibly know that? If the CIA told them, it has to be a part of an overall setup. Someone had to tell them. How could they have known that there was another $800,000 on deposit in a bank in Moscow for Hanssen? It's not even in Hanssen's name. They could not have possibly know that because Hanssen's Russian handlers didn't even know his real name, or his position in the government, or even what agency he worked for. There are only three possibilities. Either this is a Russian setup or it's a CIA setup. Or it's some combination of the two, which gets into much more nefarious territory. The next question is -- why isn't anyone in the mainstream media pressing the FBI or any other agency of government for answers to these glaring inconsistencies in FBI statements regarding the Hanssen Affair? The inference is that the word is coming out of the White House telling the media that we don't want a lot of coverage on this and we don't want a lot of questions asked. That is a power that the government always has. The White House commonly exerts this pressure by threatening to revoke White House press privileges for any network that doesn't comply. This happened quite often during the Iran-Contra Affair. Claire Shipman, the former CNN White House correspondent, went on Nightline with Ted Koppel. She was the first one to reveal that this is the way the White House pressures news organizations. When you see this and wait for more Hanssen coverage or an explanation for these glaring discrepancies, it becomes obvious. It's very similar to the recent case against Wen Ho Lee. The Department of Justice attempted to cobble together a case of some sort. At the same time they exerted pressure to keep judicial proceedings surrounding the case closed to the media. And they succeeded. The Hanssen Affair seems to be an effort to cover somebody's ass -- to prevent exposure of someone, of a person unknown at this time. This would be the most plausible explanation. What lends credence to the idea that the Hanssen Affair is a CIA deal (the CIA trying to protect someone and not the Russians) is the way the Russians acted after the arrest. They waited two days to arrest the American spy and Fulbright scholar John Edward Tobin. By the way, the CIA has controlled the Fulbright scholarship program since the 1950s, recruiting some of its best spies from the program. Senator Fulbright sat on the Intelligence Committee years ago. Today Fulbright Jaworsky is the biggest Democratically controlled law firm in Washington. The Associated Press story (or legend)called "Russians Arrest US Student on Drug Charge" (Feb 28, 2001) erroneously states that Tobin is a 24 year old graduate student. He would have received specialized intelligence training at age 17 ("military intelligence school training at Fort Huachuca, Arizona, in 1995-96, where he earned a certificate as an interrogation expert"). The AP article itself is hastily arranged and obviously fraught with error. It isn't any secret that for many years the CIA has used AP to leak things out that they want leaked out -- whether true or false. The Russians acted quickly to take this American spy into custody. Why were the Russians in such a hurry to arrest him? Why did the Russians give up their leverage and have him arrested by setting him up in a drug bust, an old KGB ploy when the Russians need a quick arrest? The Russian narcotics laws are extremely severe. Possession of a single marijuana cigarette can mandate a sentence of twenty years. Why would the Russian Federal Security Service or FSB give up a diamond in the rough which Tobin was? They wanted to let the Americans know that they knew about Tobin and his classified training and they hadn't even questioned him at the time. Tobin was later released. Is it possible that Hanssen is tradeable? Is it possible that he is much more than what he appears? Is it possible that he is even complicitous somehow in setting himself up? After all I went through that during Iran-Contra. I was told to act in a duplicitous fashion to help the FBI build a case against myself in the event that I had to be arrested, charged with a crime to maintain the deniability of those above me. By the way, the FBI admitted that the information that Hanssen had passed to the Russians over the years was information that the Russians knew about from other sources. Why didn't the FBI do something with the information earlier? And how could the FBI have known that Hanssen was passing along information that the Russians already knew about from another source? The FBI claimed that they had received this information eighteen months earlier. Furthermore, Freeh stated that the FBI, through this information, had an "airtight case." If that was true, why did the FBI wait eighteen months to set him up for the arrest? The only way the FBI could have known was if the CIA had told them. Either the CIA told them or the Russians themselves told them. In either case, it stinks to high heaven. Precipitated by this new Phony FBI Spy Story, i.e. the Hanssen Affair, it appears that the Bureau is severely disorganized and agents are very disenchanted at this point. There's fear throughout the Bureau because agents were told, before the Hanssen Affair started, that there was something coming, and that any agents, particularly the old-timers with something to hide, had better watch out. Naturally that sent a rankle of fear through the Bureau. If you had been with them for twenty years or more, of course, you're going to have something to hide. A lot of the older guys were moving their hush money offshore and burying the bribes that they'd gotten over the years, monies from drug busts that they had kept. It led to a quick shuffling of money and a sudden transfer of deeds to luxurious Caribbean cottages. Furthermore FBI agents will now be expected to take frequent lie detector tests and their credit reports will also be checked frequently. The older guys find this intolerable and many are being pushed into early retirement. It's a fact that Hanssen and his original partners were connected to Louis Freeh, currently FBI Director Louis Freeh. In fact, they all lived in the same town and attended the same church. It turns out that Freeh was an actual personal friend of Hanssen's years ago. The FBI then set up Hanssen with virtually no evidence. Why? Previous Columns: Why Iraq Was Recently Bombed & A Blast from the Past FBI Angst & the Redstone Arsenal Fraud Saga Fraud-As-Usual at the Redstone Arsenal What will it be like with George Bush Jr. as president? More Skeletons from the Bush Dynasty Closet Hitting America Below the Beltway... From Cradle to Cabal: The Secret Life of Gale Norton |
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©2000, 2001, 2002 Al Martin Raw All Rights Reserved
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