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WASHINGTON - One of the most damaging espionage cases in U.S. history was more the result of poor oversight by the FBI than master spying by Robert Hanssen, said a Justice Department report released Thursday. The FBI's deficiencies, including an almost blind trust in its own agents, enabled Hanssen to spy for the Soviet Union and Russia for more than two decades, according to the investigation by inspector general Glenn A. Fine. The report concluded that Hanssen, a top FBI counterespionage official, received little supervision and the bureau had few checks in place that would deter him from spying or...

What's up in the spy world? William F. Buckley (archive) The Big Bad Russians have pulled a fast one which bears pondering. The victim is one Aleksandr Zaporozhsky, by U.S. lights a hero, by Russian lights, a traitor. We learn that in November, 2001, he was enticed to revisit his homeland, on stepping foot in which he was whisked off, tried, and sentenced to 18 years in prison. Several questions immediately arise. True, Zaporozhsky spied against Moscow, but when he did that, he was spying against a Soviet regime ultimately repudiated by the Russian people. It was ten years between...

The Moscow Military District Court has ruled that it was Colonel Aleksander Zaporozhsky who gave up Robert Hanssen to the CIA. The court ended up giving the former intelligence officer an even stiffer sentence than the prosecutor had demanded. On Wednesday the former Colonel of the Foreign Intelligence Service Aleksander Zaporozhsky was found guilty of high treason in the form of revealing state secrets to the USA. Zaporozhsky was sentenced to 18 years in a high security labour camp and stripped of his military rank and all state decorations, though his property will not be confiscated. During his service, Zaporozhsky...

WASHINGTON -- An obscure, ultra-sophisticated form of spying technology is expected to play a large role in ferreting out any suspected chemical and biological weapons in Iraq. Measurement and signatures intelligence, known in spy circles as "MASINT," identifies the production of weapons through computer analysis of infrared and radar sensors. Targets include, among other things, chemical contents of smokestack discharges from weapons factories."When this is all over and done, I think that MASINT will be very important in trying to determine where there are (weapons of mass destruction) caches," said Kenneth Pollack, a former CIA Iraq analyst who is now...

On the same day recently the New York Times and the Washington Times ran stories about the management challenges facing FBI Director Robert Mueller. The New York Times obtained internal Bureau documents that show Mueller talking tough to his managers and agents about the need for reform. The story has Mueller warning that he won’t tolerate "bureaucratic intransigence" and quotes senior Justice officials lauding his performance thus far. But the Washington Times focused more on Mueller’s actions, especially on the sensitive issues of ethics and retaliation against internal critics. On that score, Mueller doesn’t fare quite so well. For example,...

How FBI paid $12m to unmask a traitor The FBI paid $US7 million ($12.7million) to a former Russian intelligence officer to smuggle out of Moscow a secret KGB file that unmasked a veteran FBI agent as a spy for Russia, according to a new book about the case. Although it was known that the FBI got the file from a Russian source, it was not known just how much it cost the bureau to find the agent, Robert Hanssen, or that the former KGB officer, whose name is not disclosed in the book, was secretly relocated to the United States....

The networks are already lining up commentators and staking out camera positions for the sentencing of renegade FBI agent Robert Hanssen, scheduled for next Friday, fifteen months after his arrest for espionage. But the confessed spy's long-anticipated day in court, originally slated for January, could be delayed a second time, according to government sources. The hitch: after debriefing Hanssen for months, FBI agents still aren't convinced he has told the whole truth about his role in what a blue ribbon commission recently called "possibly the worst intelligence disaster in U.S. history." Hanssen's lawyer, Plato Cacheris, insists his client has done...