Vince Houghton - Nuking the Moon - And Other Intelligence Schemes and Military Plots Left on the Drawing Board

And since you are this far into this book, you know “the best” is not what happened.

Interestingly, Monopoly’s failure had nothing to do with the problems outlined above. Sure, the neighbors suspected something, and if it was that obvious to untrained civilians, Soviet counterintelligence probably could have figured it out as well. And it wasn’t even the problems associated with digging the tunnel—which also included periodic flooding and glitchy eavesdropping equipment.

Notice I said failure—not cancellation.

It was a spy. One of the most wicked, malevolent, immoral, depraved, corrupt scumbags in the history of intelligence had tipped off the Soviets to the secret program. This degenerate, perverted, debauched, sad excuse for a human betrayed his country and rendered useless an ambitious intelligence operation that cost the American taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars. Did I mention he’s a horrible human being? His name is Robert Hanssen. And when he wasn’t working as an employee of the FBI, he was working as an asset for the KGB.

For most of his FBI career (which spanned from January 1976 until his arrest in 2001), Hanssen worked in the Bureau’s Intelligence Division (later renamed the National Security Division). Because of his job, he had access to classified information relating to the foreign intelligence and counterintelligence of not just the FBI, but just about every other U.S. intelligence agency as well, most notably the NSA, CIA, and DIA. According to Count 1 of his indictment, Hanssen

did knowingly and unlawfully combine, confederate, and agree with other persons, both known and unknown to the Grand Jury, including officers of the KGB/SVR [SVR is the successor agency to KGB], to knowingly and unlawfully communicate, deliver, and transmit to foreign governments, specifically the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) and its successor, the Russian Federation, and to those foreign governments’ representatives, officers, and agents, directly and indirectly, documents and information relating to the national defense of the United States, with intent and reason to believe that the same would be used to the injury of the United States and to the advantage of the USSR and its successor, the Russian Federation, such communication, delivery and transmission resulting in the identification by a foreign power.

Okay, this thing never ends. It’s like the prosecutors get paid by the letter. I’ll paraphrase: Robert Hanssen is a no-good, stinkin’ spy.

But it’s Count 13 of the indictment that we should pay special attention to. On September 25, 1989, at a dead drop site in Canterbury Woods Park in Fairfax, Virginia, Hanssen transmitted to the Soviets “Documentary material containing details of a United States program of technical penetration of a particular Soviet establishment, which information was classified TOP SECRET/SCI [Sensitive Compartmented Information] and directly concerned communications intelligence.”

This is our Operation Monopoly. Hanssen gave it up in 1989. The (now) Russian embassy didn’t even open until 1994. We didn’t know it, but the scheme was doomed from the beginning.

AND THEN WHAT?

To avoid the death penalty, Robert Hanssen pleaded guilty to fourteen counts of espionage and one count of conspiracy to commit espionage. He is currently serving fifteen consecutive life sentences at a federal “supermax” prison near Florence, Colorado (known as ADX Florence, or alternately as “the Alcatraz of the Rockies”). Joining Hanssen at ADX Florence are Zacarias Moussaoui, the so-called twentieth hijacker of 9/11, Faisal Shahzad, the perpetrator of the 2010 Times Square car bombing attempt, and Ramzi Yousef, mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing (and uncle to 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed). Don’t forget the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski. Timothy McVeigh, who carried out the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, was housed at ADX before he was sentenced to death in 1997 and transferred to federal death row. McVeigh’s coconspirator, Terry Nichols, is still there, serving 161 life sentences. One of the most recent arrivals is Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the perpetrator of the Boston Marathon bombings.

You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy. But it’s not like these guys all hang out and talk about… what? I don’t know. Knitting? Downton Abbey ?

Hanssen and his buddies are held in what is known as “administrative segregation.” They are confined in a specifically designed single-person cell for twenty-three hours a day. For that last hour, they are brought out of their cells to shower and exercise. Then back in their cells for another twenty-three hours. What a horrendous way to live.

And you thought this story wouldn’t have a happy ending.

But what about the tunnel? Since we didn’t know about Hanssen, we still finished it and put it to use. One of the questions that still remains is whether the Soviets/Russians were able to use the knowledge of the tunnel to their advantage. One thing they could have done is to pass disinformation along as though it were real intelligence. While there is no direct evidence of this, some analysts have argued that the possibility warrants serious consideration.

But did the tunnel provide the Americans any kind of useful intelligence? Probably not. According to John F. Lewis, the former assistant director of the FBI, Operation Monopoly was a bust.

In the 1990s, the FBI decided to seal the entrance to the tunnel, but not fill it in completely. Maybe it could prove useful in the future… When asked why they decided to seal it off at all, Lewis quipped, “Of course you’d want to seal it up. How would you like to be living in the house and suddenly the Russians walk in?”

When Russia’s ambassador to the United States, Yuri Ushakov, was asked about the tunnel, he couldn’t resist sticking it to the FBI: “If we find it, perhaps we can use it as a sauna.”

Every so often, there is a story in the Washington Post or one of the local magazines about Operation Monopoly and the secret tunnel in Glover Park. The FBI has never fully acknowledged the locations of either the observation houses or the specific house that held the entrance to the tunnel. Maybe you could live in them one day and not even know it. There are a lot of people who think they know. The International Spy Museum thinks we know. Maybe, maybe not.

In 2009, the U.S. Navy began construction on the world’s largest warship. USS Gerald R. Ford is the first new type of American aircraft carrier in more than three decades, and it is a behemoth: 1,106 feet long, and weighing in at approximately one hundred thousand tons.

The ship, as you might expect, comes fully loaded with all of the most modern systems. It is powered by two newly designed nuclear reactors, which together create six hundred megawatts of electricity—enough to power a midsized city. That means the Ford can reach a top speed of more than thirty knots, and still have electricity to spare to power its new Electromagnetic Aircraft Launch System (EMALS) and its Advanced Arresting Gear (AAG). EMALS uses electric currents to create magnetic fields that can zoom combat aircraft into the air (instead of the old-fashioned steam catapult system on other carriers), and the AAG uses a water turbine and induction motor system to slow the momentum of aircraft landing on the carrier’s flight deck (instead of old-fashioned arresting lines… just watch Top Gun for an explanation).