Topics of Interest

Journey into the world of high-stakes espionage with the gripping true-life tale of Robert Hanssen, the respected FBI agent who betrayed his family, his religion, and his country. He is the daring traitor who sells America's nuclear secrets to the KGB, and enters into a dangerous game of cat-and-mouse that could cost him his life.

Circle of Treason details the authors personal involvement in the hunt for and eventual identification of a Soviet mole in the CIA during the 1980s and 1990s. The search for the presumed traitor was necessitated by the loss of almost all of the CIA s large stable of Soviet intelligence officers working for the United States against their homeland. Aldrich Ames, a long-time acquaintance and co-worker of the authors in the Soviet-East European Division and Counterintelligence Center of CIA, turned out to be that mole. In April 1985 Ames walked in to the Soviet Embassy in Washington, D. C. and volunteered to the KGB, working for the Soviet Union for nine years until his arrest by the FBI in February 1994. Ames was arguably one of the most destructive traitors in American history, and is most well-known for providing information which led to the death of at least 11 Soviet intelligence officers who spied for the West. The authors participated in the majority of these cases and the book provides detailed accounts of the operational contact with the agents as well as other similar important cases with which the authors also had personal involvement.

Spying in the United States began during the Revolutionary War, with George Washington as the first director of American intelligence and Benedict Arnold as the first turncoat. The history of American espionage is full of intrigue, failures and triumphs--and motives honorable and corrupt. Several notorious spies became household names--Aldrich Ames, Robert Hanssen, the Walkers, the Rosenbergs--and were the subjects of major motion pictures and television series. Many others have received less attention. This book summarizes hundreds of cases of espionage for and against U.S. interests and offers suggestions for further reading. Milestones in the history of American counterintelligence are noted. Charts describe the motivations of traitors, American targets of foreign intelligence services and American traitors and their foreign handlers. A former member of the U.S. intelligence community, the author discusses trends in intelligence gathering and what the future may hold. An annotated bibliography is provided, written by Hayden Peake, curator of the Historical Intelligence Collection of the Central Intelligence Agency.

In his four decades as a KGB officer, Victor Cherkashin was a central player in the shadowy world of Cold War espionage. From his rigorous training in Soviet intelligence in the early 1950s to his prime spot as the KGB's head of counterintelligence at the Soviet embassy in Washington, Cherkashin's career was rich in episode and drama. In a riveting memoir, Cherkashin provides a remarkable insider's view of the KGB's prolonged conflict with the CIA. Playing a major role in global espionage for most of the Cold War, Cherkashin was posted to stations in the United States, Australia, India, and Lebanon. He tracked down U.S. and British spies around the world. But it was in 1985 that Cherkashin scored two of the KGB's biggest-ever coups. In April of that year, he recruited disgruntled CIA officer Aldrich Ames and became his principal handler. Six months later, FBI special agent Robert Hanssen contacted Cherkashin directly, eventually becoming an even bigger asset than Ames.

Robert Hanssen was a twenty-five-year veteran FBI agent whose job was to help track enemy agents and make sure that American security was maintained. He was a good man who went to daily mass, sent his kids to Catholic school, and was devoted to his wife, Bonnie." "Now, veteran reporters Ann Blackman and Elaine Shannon tell the truth about Robert Hanssen, the most damaging FBI agent in history, a sly traitor who for more than two decades eluded spy hunters while selling out his country.

The Bureau and the Mole takes you into the shadowy world of Robert Philip Hanssen, a twenty-five-year veteran of the FBI who was a devout Catholic and a devoted family man, who attended the same church and sent his children to the same school as his boss, Bureau Director Louis J. Freeh. But as he emerged from a troubled childhood in Chicago to rise to the highest ranks of America's counterintelligence experts, Hanssen was also leading another life - as a diabolically clever spy for the Russian government." "Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author David A. Vise untangles Hanssen's web of deceit to tell the story of how he avoided detection for decades while becoming the most dangerous double agent in FBI history - and how Freeh and the Bureau eventually rooted him out. Vise probes Hanssen's personal history to uncover how a seemingly All-American boy concealed a sordid sexual life from his family and ultimately became the perfect traitor by employing the very sources and methods his own nation had entrusted him with. Drawing from a wide variety of sources in the FBI, the Justice Department, the White House, and the intelligence community, Vise also interweaves the narrative of how Freeh led the government's desperate search for the betrayer among its own ranks, from the false leads, to the near misses, to its ultimate, shocking conclusion.