The allegation in Robert Baer’s The Fourth Man that I betrayed my country by spying for the Russians is wrong to its core and beyond contempt.
My entire professional life of over 30 years was devoted to the service of the United States. I have never worked for a foreign intelligence service or foreign government. The very idea is abhorrent to me.
The Fourth Man is a collection of outright falsehoods, misleading assertions, groundless speculation and decades-old theories that have long been disproven. There are too many errors and incorrect accusations to cover in this brief statement, but here are the facts.
In the mid-1980s, CIA suffered a devastating loss of human sources in the KGB. The CIA and FBI began investigations to determine how the KGB had learned the identity of those sources. In 1991, I became the Deputy Chief of CIA’s Counterintelligence Center. One of my first steps was to establish a Special Investigative Unit (“SIU”) to focus on my strong belief that a CIA officer might be the source of the leak to the Russians. That SIU included CIA officers and an FBI agent and analyst.
I recognized that the best way to find a spy in the CIA was to recruit a spy in the KGB. Therefore, I worked with the leadership of CIA’s Directorate of Operations in a highly compartmented program to recruit and run sources in the KGB. As a result, we were able to acquire new sources in the KGB and run them productively—even though Aldrich Ames was working in-place in CIA for the KGB. One of those sources provided crucial information assisting the investigation and arrest of Ames in 1994.
Following the debriefings of Ames, it was clear that there were still some unexplained losses and other anomalies. We referred to those losses as “loose ends,” not “the fourth man.”
We concluded we had another spy in our midst. Our sources in the KGB confirmed that, but they did not know the identity of the spy nor could they confirm whether he or she worked in the CIA or FBI. I created a post-Ames follow-on SIU to review the remaining unresolved leads.
In addition, in the wake of Ames’ arrest, President Clinton ordered important changes to enhance USG counterintelligence efforts, including assigning a senior FBI executive to manage counterespionage investigations in the CIA.Congress passed new laws to strengthen counterintelligence cooperation between the FBI and CIA, including better and more comprehensive information sharing from sensitive intelligence sources.
I fully supported those changes. A few others did not, including the CIA officer I had appointed as chief of the post-Ames, follow-on SIU. Consequently, that officer was replaced as Chief of the SIU for cause. That officer is one of Baer’s principal sources but was not in a position to know much of what transpired after she was moved to another position in 1995 and then retired in 1998.
Many at both the FBI and CIA were convinced the spy for whom they were looking was in the CIA—including Baer’s primary sources—and relentlessly pursued one particular officer. In 2000, as a result of an extraordinary joint CIA-FBI operation, we obtained forensic evidence that the spy was in fact senior FBI agent Robert Hanssen, not someone in the CIA. Hanssen was arrested by the FBI in February 2001 and is serving a life sentence.
In the years leading up to the arrest of Ames and my retirement from CIA in 1997, I was involved in many operations to recruit and run human sources in the KGB and working with the FBI to identify other spies in our midst, such as CIA officer Harold J. Nicholson, who was arrested in November 1996, and FBI agent Earl J. Pitts. These operations were highly compartmented, and access to the details was sharply limited. But all of them were fully known to and supervised by senior leadership of the Directorate of Operations.
Contrary to the false assertion in Mr. Baer’s book, I most certainly never closed down the SIU—this is an absolute lie. Scores of FBI and CIA officers know this is untrue; indeed the SIU was significantly expanded under new, more effective leadership and FBI and CIA officers did excellent work together to identify Russians spies in the US and foreign governments.
By 2005, CIA’s SIU—which was still in place and very effective—concluded that there was no “Fourth Man” for the lead that was in fact Hanssen, as they found solid answers for the remaining loose ends following debriefings of Hanssen, Earl Pitts, Nicholson and others. They had not received any reliable further reporting on a senior KGB spy in the CIA. They continued their aggressive pursuit of other Russian espionage leads.
After I retired from CIA in 1997, I continued to serve in senior positions in the U.S. Government, including as Assistant Secretary for Information Analysis at the Department of Homeland Security, a consultant to the National Counterintelligence Executive, and the Department of Energy, where I conducted a counterintelligence review of the department’s nuclear weapons laboratories. In all of these positions, I was thoroughly vetted and carried the highest security clearances.
Mr. Baer’s book and its false defamatory claims has inflicted immense anguish on my family and me. It has also given an opportunity to Russian intelligence to harm the United States through deception operations. It is possible, in fact likely, that the Russians and other hostile intelligence services will use the material in the book as a roadmap to feed disinformation to disrupt our intelligence and counterintelligence operations.
Mr. Baer has been reckless and grossly irresponsible. This book should never have been written or published.
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This statement has been cleared by CIA’s Prepublication Classification Review Board (PCRB).