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I was a member of the Special Surveillance group in the FBI. I was a covert operative
who worked entirely undercover in counterintelligence and counterterrorism. Robert Hanssen was the
worst spy in US history. Spied for the Soviet Union and then Russia for over 22 years; and
took some of the worst secrets of the United States and gave them to the Foreign Intelligence
Service. So we wanted to catch him; and we didn't just want to just catch him, we wanted
to catch him in the act of espionage. So my job was to sit on Robert Hanssen and find
out the information we could use to catch him. One of the things that I noticed about
Hanssen was he was, supremely attached to his palm pilot. It was a device that he loved,
and it was a device that we decided we needed to take away from him. So we worked out this
trick, this pretext to get him away from his device long enough for me to steal it from
his bag, take it to a tech team, get it copied, and get it back before the spy could ever
know. I had one of his supervisors come and challenge him to shoot down in the basement
shooting gallery in FBI headquarters. Moments after he got down there to shoot, he may gotten
off a couple rounds and suddenly without notice, uh holstered his weapon, and started back
up. At this time I was still down, three flights down, waiting for the tech team to copy the
palm pilot. I made it to the office just moments before him, got it to his office, put the
palm pilot in the bag. He came into my office and asked "have you been in my office?" And
I had to look him straight in the eye, and say no. I haven't been in your office, I haven't
touched anything. Within a few weeks, he made a notorious drop, at Foxstone Park in Virginia.
And uh from that drop, from the palm pilot, we learned where he was gonna be and when;
caught him in the act of espionage, we were able to convict him.