Robert Hanssen
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Robert Hanssen was the chief of counterintelligence at the FBI and a long-running mole for the USSR and then Russia. Per John Kiriakou, when assets Hanssen was betraying began to be executed, Hanssen, in his counterintelligence-chief capacity, pointed the FBI at his CIA counterpart Brian Kelley: "It's that CIA guy, Brian Kelley." Kiriakou says he and virtually all CIA officers were unaware of the earlier, related Aldrich Ames mole case while it was unfolding, because counterintelligence operations are the most highly classified and compartmentalized in the agency, "there is literally nothing more compartmentalized than counterintelligence operations." Kiriakou's friend Brian Kelley was the CIA's own chief mole hunter, and it was Hanssen, the actual mole, who wrongly cast him as the suspect.

The frame

Per Kiriakou: the FBI put Kelly on leave without pay and surrounded his house 24 hours a day with agents. Other FBI agents traveled to Oregon, where Kelly's daughter was working in a nursing home, and told her: "You have to get your father to confess, because if we arrest him without a confession we're going to ask for the death penalty." Kelly: "I don't know what's happening here. It's not me." Time elapsed before Hanssen was identified as the actual mole: a year and a half. In other tellings, Kiriakou describes a CIA security officer and an FBI agent making the same trip to Oregon, delivering the same ultimatum, "if you give us the information on your father, we won't execute him", and says the pressure continued for about a year, until the dead-drop recording surfaced.

The dead-drop tape

Per John Kiriakou, the operational confirmation of Hanssen as the mole came from a recording device the FBI had placed at a dead-drop site under a footbridge in Vienna, Virginia. After the drop was made and the mole did the pickup, the FBI retrieved the device and brought it back to FBI headquarters: "They were all gathered around the table with a recorder to see who it is, and they pressed play, and it was their boss, Hanssen." In a separate account, Kiriakou credits a CIA human source in Moscow with obtaining the recording that proved Hanssen was the mole and passing it to the CIA, which led to the FBI's arrest of its own chief mole hunter.

Hanssen had realized he was under suspicion when he was transferred to a lesser position; he interpreted it as a sign they were onto him. His assistant, an FBI analyst named Eric O'Neill, now connected to Kiriakou on LinkedIn, was placed there specifically to surveil Hanssen and catch him in a slip. O'Neill is the subject of the film Breach, and quit the FBI shortly after Hanssen's arrest due to the stress of the case.

The plea-deal pension

Hanssen retained Kiriakou's eventual attorney, Plato Cacheris. Per Kiriakou: "They had him dead to rights. There was no chance to ever win. And he ended up taking a plea, and the only thing he got in exchange for the plea was that his wife could have his pension. That was it." Hanssen died in custody at the Supermax ADX Florence, never having been released. Kiriakou has dated Hanssen's death to about a year to a year and a half before a 2026 interview, and separately noted that Aldrich Ames died in prison about six weeks before that same interview.

Structural lesson

John Kiriakou used the Hanssen case alongside the Aldrich Ames case to make a structural point: the chief-of-counterintelligence position requires an officer of exceptional personal integrity, no drinking, no drugs, no gambling, no infidelity, no speeding, because any vulnerability becomes a recruitment lever. People in that position are specifically targeted, and the position itself provides maximum access to sources and methods.

The third mole, Singapore station chief

Kiriakou described a postscript: a third mole, a senior officer in the Counterterrorism Center where Kiriakou worked, who had served as CIA station chief in Singapore. When Ames was arrested, this officer concluded that the KGB probably needed a new mole and volunteered himself. He contacted the KGB station chief in Singapore and offered his services: a specific financial sum and, he specified, diamonds. His motivation was money, he was paying significant alimony. He was caught, but only after outing hundreds of undercover CIA officers who had to be extracted from Russia. He was sentenced to thirty-one years and seven months.

From prison, he called his son with instructions to contact the KGB so that information passed from prison could be deposited into a secret account he could access upon release. The son walked directly to the Russian Embassy in Washington. The FBI, which maintains continuous surveillance of the embassy, arrested him immediately.

The counterintelligence mole

John Kiriakou pairs Robert Hanssen with Aldrich Ames as traitors who had each headed counterintelligence for Russian operations, and adds that the Chinese are "all over us", citing the arrest of the mayor of Arcadia as an unregistered Chinese agent.

See also

- Brian Kelley
- John Kiriakou
