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for the Russian intelligence services from 1979 to 2001. He was a “walk-in,” who never entered the Soviet embassy or met with KGB or SVR case officers. Instead, he set his espionage in motion by passing an anonymous letter to Victor Cherkashin, the KGB spy handler working undercover at the Soviet Embassy in Washington D.C. From the start of his work for the KGB, Hanssen laid down his own rules. The KGB would deliver cash from which all the fingerprints were removed to locations, or “dead drops,” he specified. He would deliver documents exposing FBI, CIA and NSA sources and methods in another dead drop. The KGB would precisely follow his instructions. Cherkashin told me that Hanssen’s “astounding self-recruitment” was executed in such a way that the KGB never actually controlled him. “He was our most important mole and we didn’t ever know his identity, where he worked or how he had access to FBI, CIA and NSA files.” Even so, the KGB (and later SVR) paid him $600,000 in cash. In return, the anonymous spy delivered 27 computer discs containing hundreds of secret documents revealing the sources and methods of American intelligence. According to Cherkashin, it was the largest haul of top secrets documents ever obtained by the KGB (although it was only a small fraction of the number of top secret NSA, Department of Defense and CIA documents taken by Snowden in 2013.) Cherkashin told me the price paid by Moscow was a great bargain since it helped compromise “the NSA’s most advanced electronic interception technology,” including a tunnel under the Soviet Embassy. Yet, it was only after newspapers reported that Hanssen had been arrested by the FBI in February 2001 that Cherkashin learned the name and position of the spy that he had recruited. Cherkashin told me that what matters to the KGB was not “control” of an agent but the value of the secrets he or she delivered. “Control is not necessary in espionage as long as we manage to obtain the documents.” So in the eyes of the KGB, anyone who elects to provide it with US secrets is a spy.
It is also possible to exploit a walk-in even after he has left his service. For example, KGB Major Anatoli Golitsyn was an ideological self-generated spy who walked into the US embassy in Helsinki, Finland on Christmas Day 1962. He asked to see the CIA officer on duty announce to him he had collected a trove of KGB secrets, including information that could identify its key spies in the West. He offered to defect to the U.S. The CIA accepted his offer, and through this archive of secrets he had previously compiled, he became one of the CIA’s most productive sources in the Cold War.

The job of an intelligence service is to take advantage of whatever opportunities comes its way in the form of self-generated spies. If a Russian walk-in had not yet burned his bridges to his own service, US intelligence officers were under instructions to attempt to persuade the walk-in to return to his post in Russia and serve as a “defector-in-place,” or mole. “While defectors can and do provide critical information, a CIA memorandum on walk-ins during the Cold War noted, “There are very few cases in which the same individual may not have been of greater value if he had returned to his post.” Of course if a walk-in believed he was already compromises, as Golitsyn did, a decision would have to be made whether the value of his intelligence merited exfiltrating him to the United States.
This required evaluating the bona fides of the walk-in. Not all walk-ins are accepted as defectors. Some walk-ins are deemed “dangles,” or agents dispatched by the KGB to test and

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