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FBI Spy Investigation: National War College's Marvin Ott Discusses Role of Espionage in Post-Cold War Era

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

DARYN KAGAN, CNN ANCHOR: Congress is getting involved in the FBI investigation of alleged spying within its own ranks. A Senate committee holds a closed-door meeting/hearing next week on the Robert Philip Hanssen case. Hanssen is accused of spying for the Russians for 15 years.

Our national correspondent Bruce Morton looks at the history of the spy game and how the motives have changed over the years.

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BRUCE MORTON, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Once, spies mattered. So did secrets. The United States broke the Japanese naval code in World War II, a huge advantage for the Americans.

The Allies worked hard at building fake embarkation points along the English coast, part of an effort to confuse the Nazis about where the D-Day invasion would be. Thousands of lives at stake.

The atomic bomb was so secret Vice President Harry Truman learned of it only after Franklin Roosevelt's death. As president, Truman used the bomb to force Japan's surrender.

And then the Cold War. U-2 spy planes over the Soviet Union taking pictures of missiles, airfields and so on. The Soviets shot one down and Premier Nikita Khrushchev angrily canceled a summit meeting with President Dwight Eisenhower, who defended spying.

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DWIGHT EISENHOWER, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: No one wants another Pearl Harbor. This means that we must have knowledge of military forces and preparations around the world, especially those capable of massive surprise attack. Secrecy in the Soviet Union makes this essential.

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MORTON: And the Soviets spied back. Red-baiters like Sen. Joseph McCarthy were more hot air than sense, but Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were convicted of spying, and whatever their exact roles, spying helped the Soviets to match the West in nuclear arms. And then the world changed. The Berlin Wall came down in 1989. And on Christmas Day 1991, the Soviet Union ended. The Cold War ended.

But the spies kept spying. It was what they did. They had big budgets for it. Military secrets? The Russians had trouble building their share of the space station.

Missile defense? No one yet has a system that's been proven to work.

Now the spies spy on each other. Aldrich Ames of the CIA spied for nine years, but mostly passed secrets about spying. Robert Hanssen, the FBI alleges, passed things like a compendium of intelligence requirements, a CIA study of KGB recruitment. He allegedly named some double agents who were executed, but it's all in- house: two teams playing the only game they know in a world with different worries.

And one other change: Spies used to believe. Western Cold Warriors believed in freedom. Communist spies, the Rosenbergs, the rest may have believed in some Marxist brotherhood of man.

Not now. Aldrich Ames was a good capitalist who believed in wealth. He flaunted it. Robert Hanssen, it's alleged, got $1.4 million for his trouble, lived modestly, but supposedly asked for diamonds he could leave his kids.

(on camera): Why did they do it? Good old money, apparently. And maybe love of the game, love of having one more secret than everybody else.

Bruce Morton, CNN, Washington.

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LEON HARRIS, CNN ANCHOR: Well, the Hanssen case raises some new questions about the role of espionage in the post-Cold War era.

Joining us now to talk more about that is Marvin Ott. He is professor of national security policy at the National War College. He joins us from our Washington bureau.

Good morning, sir. Glad to have you with us today.

MARVIN OTT, NATIONAL WAR COLLEGE: Good morning, Leon.

HARRIS: You know, just listening there to the last moments of Bruce Morton's piece right there just brought up one question for me: Why is it that money does play such a big role in cases like this and not something more emotional like, say for instance, race or religion?

OTT: Well, the easy answer is that ideology, as the Bruce Morton piece suggested, the era in which people believed in ideological loyalties and the great battle of ideologies of the Cold War, is over. So if you're going to spy, what's your motivation? It's not to defeat communism. Communism has been defeated, at least in Europe and in Russia.

So what you spy for is money. You probably also spy for the thrill of the game, as your setup piece suggested. My guess is if we could peel back the onion with a man like Hanssen, it would be -- come clear that he was driven, in part, by the fact that he could get away with it, that he was good enough, that he could basically defeat his colleagues and everybody else.

HARRIS: You know...

OTT: There was a lot of reward there.

HARRIS: Well, for anyone who's charged with the mission of trying to uncover the next mole that may be found in any agency, then, they would have to look at these sort of factors to try to determine who to look at next. Based upon what we've learned and what we've heard so far about what Mr. Hanssen may or may not have done, is it fair to think that perhaps that those who are in that current department that he was in or have his position are now immediate suspects?

OTT: No, you -- I don't think so. You can't do business that way. I mean, the quickest way to destroy an intelligence organization is to convince members of the organization that there is disloyalty in the ranks, and pretty soon the organization will tear itself apart. That's a little bit of what happened with James Angleton out of the CIA.

So, as Louis Freeh, the FBI director, indicated, you have to trust your people. This one was tough because these were the people in the Counterintelligence Division that were tasked with making sure that spies couldn't operate, and so they knew all the tricks. And this man knew all the tricks.

HARRIS: Now, we're on the outside looking in and we're trying to gauge the reaction both in the U.S. community as well as in the Russian community to see where the greater fallout might be. And it doesn't seem as though we're hearing as much from Vladimir Putin or from the Russian community, an outcry there at least. It seems to be as loud and angry as what we're hearing in the U.S. Why is that, do you think?

OTT: Well, I suppose it's in part because they picked our pockets, we didn't pick theirs. The Russians...

HARRIS: But their pockets did get picked to some degree. After all, it was some source that the U.S. had within the KGB that actually...

OTT: Right.

HARRIS: ... turned over the documents that exposed Hanssen.

OTT: That's true, that's true. Nevertheless, if you're sitting in Moscow, Mr. Hanssen, if he did what he's alleged to have done, was a great success. I mean, 15 years to run somebody this inside the U.S. intelligence apparatus was a terrific coup.

So the Russians basically have to feel that they netted out pretty well on this. And, you know, they know that this game is played. They're realists about it, so they're not going to get emotional.

HARRIS: Would you bet that another one will be found, and soon?

OTT: Not necessarily in the same place. But this game is going to go on. And if I could just make an additional point, that one can make the case, despite sort of what was implied in the setup piece, that during the Cold War, spying, in the end, was on the margin, that the Cold War was decided by the relative strength of economic and political systems, not by the relative strength of intelligence networks.

But in this day and age, post-Cold War, the new threats relate to terrorism, weapons of mass destruction, rogue states, that kind of threat. And that kind of threat requires intelligence to go after it. You're really dependent on the CIA and the FBI as your line of defense against the Osama bin Ladens of the world, and that's new.

HARRIS: And it also requires much more time for us to talk about it. I'm sorry we don't have any more this morning.

Marvin Ott, thank you very much for your time this morning. Fascinating topic. Take care.

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