Catching America's Most Damaging Spy | Eric O'Neill

Hey guys, it's Jack. I just wanted to talk to you today about a way that you can help support the podcast if you're not already to support the channel is to become a Patreon member. So we have Patreon memberships that start at just five dollars a month, and when you sign up, you get access to all of our episodes add free. That's the big bonus for that.

It's good to be here, Jack.

So you know, the first question I usually ask people is about their origin story. If you can tell us a little bit about like what your upbringing was like and how that sort of eventually took you towards governmental service.

Sure, no worries. I was sort of born into the government. I was born into the Navy. I was the last kid born in the Naval Hospital and Charles Navy Base in Charleston, South Carolina. My father was a submariner, you know, he sort of followed his father's footsteps. His father was in surface warfare, so it was a tin Can soldier. So I guess he went under a little different And you know, my my plan growing up was to join the Navy, just like my father and his father and two.

Uncles and assorted other family members. You know.

My father left the navy when I was rather young. We moved around a bit and he ended up going to law school. So I was raised in the DC area from about age four and had that basic suburban d C. Upbringing.

You know.

My father's Irish, my mother is Italian, so I had the Catholic from both sides, you know, so that was a big part of the upbringing. Went to high school at Gonzaga in Washington, d C. You know, it was an Eagle, and finally ended up going to college. Now, my plan was to was to go study aerospace engineering, for a year and then applied to the Naval Academy. I didn't get in right away, and went to Auburn University, studied airspace and decided after a year it wasn't gonna stick with airspace.

And I also wasn't gonna go to the Navy, which was the.

Most complicated and difficult conversation never held with my parents. My father was great about it. He was like, look, you got to find your own path through life. But I think I always regretted that decision a little bit and wanted to definitely serve my country in some way, shape or form. So when I graduated from Auburn, I started applying, and I applied to the FBI, the DA, the c i A, the NSA, you know, secret service.

You are ninety five.

You you sent a postcard and they sent you a packet, and you used to have theseus these things called typewriters. I'm not even that old, and back then you had to type this whole thing, and it was it was onerous and absolutely terrible, but I did it. I diligently sat there, typed up all those things, and I immediately heard back from the Secret Service, the FBI, and the DA.

It's it's super funny to you know, I've interviewed a lot of folks like you or in this sort of career field, and I mean talking to people who had these amazing careers like at CIA, like so, why do you join the CIA. Well, they were the first one that got back to me when I submitted to all these agencies. It's like, wow, Okay, that's how you hide up your mind. Okay, but it all worked out.

It worked out great. And look, you know, for me, I wanted to do something outside the norm. I didn't want to just you know, go be a consultant, because that's what everybody was doing in ninety five when I graduated. They were going to big cities and they were being a consultant to do something I'm not even sure what consultants do. And now I'm a bit of a consultant,

Of my life. I continued to use them.

It's a unique way of looking at the world. Working in counterintelligence. That just opened your mind to make connections that you wouldn't make if you didn't have that sort of training. And I'm pretty damn good under pressure. So I took a lot from the FBI.

You had an unconventional career at the FBI. You were not a special agent. Did you know that when you applied? Did you know that when you got recruited, that you were not going to be a special agent, that there was actually this other thing that you were going to get sucked into.

Yeah?

Well, Jack, when I applied to the FBI was twenty two, twenty one, twenty two, and that was back then you had to be twenty.

Five to be a special agent.

But they came back to me and said, we really love your application. I guess I spelled things right when I typed it. And they do these KSAs nowledge schools and aptitude and I scored really high on those. And so they said, you know, we can't offer you a spot in special agents class, but would you consider this top secret group. Now it's not top secret any longer because I wrote about it in Grade A and the FBI gave me permission to talk about the.

Special Surveillance Group.

The classification is Investigative Specialists, and the the aka is ghosts. And what we did is we worked fully undercover. See idea in the FBI was that special agents weren't doing so great at following people because those age and agents

So talk to me a little bit more about how you I mean, did you go to Quantico? Does the training even take place there? And tell us what what that training consisted of.

Yeah, so the so back when I got into the FBI, I also had a training uh slot at Quantico, and it's a it's a lot of very specialized practical training and educational training. So you know, we we saw the DA DA guys out the window while we're you know, in classroom learning counterintelligence.

And in order to learn counter intelligence, you.

Have to learn the trade craft of every other adversary, which is great if you're going to be pursuing targets because I could switch tradecraft based on all the different instructors that we had, and we had instructors from all over the place. H you know, a lot of defectors, for example, teaching us their trade craft. And then you see the DA guys running down to the rifle range and shooting and running back and thinking that could have

Those practical exercises. But look, it's it's a class it's a classroom.

It's a educational environment, and you can't you can only do so many practical exercises, but it doesn't teach you how to follow a target effectively. And I really cut my teeth once I get assigned to a squad in DC following Russians around, who are the best of the best throughout d C. And if you can follow a Russian and not be seen, you can follow pretty much anybody. Because those intelligence officers have incredibly in depth training in

And following these Russians around was these were I would assume like people who work out of the embassy, but are suspected to be like gru guys or something like that.

Yeah, in the old ways that espionage used to be conducted where they would actually come over to a country and and have some sort of diplomatic covers. They'd be diplomats, you know. In the case of the Russians, you have the JU which are the military intelligence unit, and you

D C.

And their real job is to go in meet with sources, or service dead drops or set signals or recruit. You know, there was a whole line in the SVR and their entire job was to recruit Americans to spy for them, you know, using the Big three ideology.

You think more like me, so help me?

Or the best two blackmail I'm going to give you a lot of money and you're gonna help me, or bribery. I've learned something about you that you don't want your wife, or your mom or your grandma to know. And if you don't help me, they're all going to know that. Nowadays it's all cyber attacks. The game has changed. There's a complete change to the old days when I started doing this, to the to the cyber spies that I'm working against right now.

I'd like to drill down a little bit more to what the job was of this squad. I mean, you mentioned this counterintelligence surveillance. I mean, is the intent to catch these guys conducting operational acts so they can be arrested, or is it to follow them and see who their sources are, what is it that you're trying to accomplish out there.

All of the above, and it was different every day. I can't get into too many of the particulars. I got to be really careful to stay on sort of the script that I submitted to the FBI in grade day and they greenlit. Because much of what the ghosts do remains top secret. It's very classified. And also the ways and means in a particular way you do it.

You know.

There are many different ways to do that until you catch them in the act. And that was always the goal, to catch them in the act, because otherwise you don't really have a case. You can't catch an intelligence officer as diplomatic community in the act. Well, then you can't use that to embarrass the other country and PGM, which means persona nogarada, they're not allowed to come back to the US, so their careers basically over. We were always

I'm talking about.

Foreign intelligence officers or assets who are working for foreign intelligence who come over here without any diplomatic cover and without telling anybody that you're working on behalf of a foreign government. So that's a person who comes over to the US somehow that is actually a spy, but isn't using any diplomatic covers. They're truly hidden. And if you remember about ten years ago, there was a case called Operation Ghost Stories. It was the eleven illegals who are

And correct me if I'm wrong. But as far as this portion of your career that we're talking about, it sounds like you were following around foreign nationals, but at some point the FBI asked you to start looking at American citizens who you know, were suspected spies. I mean, that's got to be like a whole different can of worms, like looking at suspected foreign spies versus an internal investigation.

Yeah.

No, I certainly worked other Americans as we went along. I mean, the the spies were the ones that we were after. The first case that I worked as a as a ghost was Earl Pitts, who was a Cold War spy that and I detail him in my book Grade Day. Earl Pitts had spied during the Cold War and so the union then gone completely inactive and continued to work for the FBI and the behavioral science unit at Quantico.

So he was a profiler.

And Pitts was given up by a former KGB source who wanted a better life, sold his identity as a former spy for a bunch of secrets of some great analysts learned all about him, and a team was put on him to investigate him, and he was what's called false flag. So when you learn when you have an American that's inactive and they've spied in the past, it's a lot harder to pin them down and build a legal case for something that happened, you know, like ten twenty years ago.

So what the FBI did was they sent a.

Russian speaking special agent who was trained to go undercover and pretend he was a Russian intelligence all.

Comrade, we need you for one approached them and said.

You know, we need your head, you know, and uh and you know, would you spy for us? And activated him and he thought he was spying for Russia and he was actually spying for the FBI. And everything was handing over. And the FBI does this all the time.

Uh.

You know, a corporation, for example, might might realize that they you know, they're working for the US government and they have a uh an employee who starts stealing secrets and they reported to the FBI because they think of maybe he's trying to give it to a.

Foreign palor power.

Well, the FBI will pretend they're that foreign power and roll the guy up once he's given a bunch of secrets over and they hand them money, and now you've got a case.

So it got all pits.

And there were others that I can't talk about that we investigated, both both counterintelligence spies and terrorists. And then finally, at the what ended up being the end of my career at the FBI, I was asked to go undercover to catch a very particular style.

So, yeah, tell us about that. And I sense that this was also sort of a shift in roles for you because you'd never been an agent. You'd always been sort of on the outside and the periphery, but now you're going inside the bureaucracy. I mean, tell us about how you got recruited for that particular job and why you.

Yeah, so I might have been in Washington Field office and headquarters five times in five years. I worked in off sites, you know, behind seven eleven's, you know, wherever my target was. I remember one morning setting up on a target, you know, of interest. And this is before I met my wife, and it was difficult to date. So I was really lucky I met my wife. And here's why I would. I know, I'd set up this

This'd be great.

And then I ended up having a caller from from a phone hours later. You know, I'm not gonna make it tonight. I'm in I'm in Miami. Dude got his car, drove south and we just kept driving. You move or your target moves. You eat when they eat, you sleep when they eat, they sleep, and uh, and she's like, what are you doing in Miami? And I was just like, I didn't have an answer. I didn't want to lie, so I can't.

Tell you that. You know. That was the end of that.

So yeah, it's like that. So this case, it was incredibly unique, not only for me but for the entire FI. There was never a case that'd been run like this. But Hanson was unique because for decades the FBI had been after this mole that everybody knew, and I'm talking the entire intelligence community that we had this massive mole somewhere within the intelligence community.

Didn't know if it was the.

NSA, FBI, CIA, where this person was, or if he was a he or she, but knew that some of them most egregious secrets that have ever been handed to a foreign power were being handed over. And uh, and this the rush reading our lunch. They knew our operations before we even got them off the ground. So there was this manhunt for this spy that was only known

Is the kicker.

The guy's so brilliant. I have a sixteen year old and so we completely understand. Guaranteed school of his choice for his two college age kids.

Full ride.

I mean that's gold that's worth more than the millions. And he's gone.

He's in witness protection.

The FBI opens this slim file of information and it's a cassette tape, you know, going way back, a bunch of letters and a trash bag. It's like the worst game of clue ever trying to figure out who done it. And the FBI is pretty good at this. So they run prints on the trash bag and you know, the FBI can do that, the KGB and the SBR can't.

Cassette tepe and it was the one big.

Mistake Hanson ever made. He called the consul at once to say, where's my money. He'd left the secrets under a bridge, and he'd gone over to where he was supposed to go pick up his fifty grand and it wasn't there, and he called Daskuare and he had looked at the wrong side of a platform out in a park Amphitheater.

Because the interesting thing about Hanson, right is that he had he kept his identity concealed from his handlers in the Soviet Union and then Russia.

Right, Yeah, Jack, You're completely right. One thing that I attributed his longevity to as a spy, and he was one of the most effective spies in history, was the fact that he called the shots. He made sure that the Soviets and then the Russians were not in charge. He told them when, where, and how he would make his drops, and he never let them know his identity.

Was Robert Hanson.

So they give him the code named gray Day, and they got this huge problem. He has stolen information from the FBI for decades because he penetrated computer systems of the FBI that were just never built to defend from a trusted insider within. It was just institutional bias in

Don't know if I in curse on this.

Yeah, sure I got at it.

Yeah we're shooting the shit, But I have this agenda.

I'm pulling information out of you. I'm gaining your trust, I'm learning all about you. I'm getting you to tell me things that you don't want to tell me. But I'm just great at this. And they couldn't find a single agent trained to do that, who knew how to turn on a computer, who could sell the role which was building cybersecurity. So hey, look, the FBI is good at this. They went deeper, They went into the realm of the ghosts and I had written a program that

So I said, look on the you know, I need to go to law school at nights.

So when my school does knights, can I, you know, work on this program during the day and then get to class. And the target analysis program worked. We were finding targets by looking at what they did over time. I won't go into all the details, but it got me some notoriety in the FBI as somebody who knows how to turn on a computer and use it. So they said, this guy kind of knows how to hunt a spy. And look, he knows how to turn a

Now, are are they giving you a badge and a gun? That part of your undercover identity is that you're an actual special agent.

Now, no, I didn't.

I went undercover as myself, and that was the most disconcerting.

Part about this whole thing. Yeah, typically you go undercover with a legend.

So I would have a different name, i'd have different documents, I'd be something totally differ I didn't want a spy who's dropping information to the Russians to know who I was. But I couldn't do that because I'm investigating face to face a fellow FBI employee, you know, a decorated supervisory special agent who is going to be my boss. And think about it, we're walking down the hall in the FBI HQ together.

Now.

I didn't know a lot of people in the FBI because they kept us separate because we would investigate the rogue agents. I was really known only by a code name.

Uh you know it was if you read my book.

You have to read my book, and my code name was wherewol If I tell why, you don't pick your code name, it's not because I'm Harry. There's a story behind it. But I tell the story in the book. But that's who That's how I was known in the FBI. You know, I asked O'Neil to some but but I didn't know people. So all all that had to happen is he and I are walking down the hall and somebody says, hey, Eric, and I've got this other name, and Hanson knows it's gone.

Also, the FBI, I was so.

Worried about his ability to penetrate the computer systems that they didn't know if he could identify who I was in a computer system that was going to tell him something different.

So I didn't go under cover as myself.

If I recall correctly, Hanson had a background in FBI counter intelligence too, right, he was a spy hunter.

In fact, yeah, not only did he have a background encounter intel, he was an counter intel trainer.

He was a counter intel auditor.

He would go to all the legal attache offices around the world and audit them to make sure they were doing their job right. And at one point, at one point the squad looking for Gray Suit, remember Gray Suit was the spy that it turned out Hanson was asked their top Soviet analyst to help them identify the spy. So they went to Hanson and asked him to catch himself. I mean, it's just crazy. He must have just loved that and loved it and loved it, and he sent

He was suspicious, but he just couldn't make himself believe it.

Tell us about your first meeting with Robert Hanson, and tell us about him a little bit about who he was, because I mean, beyond his FBI professional life. I mean, I imagine, as you came to learn over time, he's kind of an interesting guy, not necessarily in a good way.

Yes, so he was. He had been in the FBI at that point, almost twenty five years, he is about to retire with his twenty five year pension gold watch and disappear and go take.

A job somewhere else.

Probably during that time he'd had a number of roles and went through some of them. He was also one of the most damaging spies in US history and certainly FBI's history. He gave up some of the most egregious information that's ever been given to a foreign power. If you think about the height of his espionage was during the Cold War between the years of eighty four and eighty five.

Right in the middle of those two years, we.

Lost every single asset in the Soviet Union, all of our spies, and he shares all of those deaths and imprisonments with Ultra Games, a CIA spy, so you know, unbeknownst to each other, they were both giving up similar information, which is golden intelligence for a foreign intel service. He also gave up secrets related to our nuclear weapons program

To, but she thought he was. And he was a.

A opus day Catholic, a very strict Catholic who went to church every single day. I know, because he would make me go with him. Now that's where me being a Catholic comes in. You know, I got to pay I was foreshadowing me a little in the beginning.

Jack.

I had to pay that off.

But clearly the FBI looked at me and thought, Okay, we've got some more connections. They're both Catholic, that's something they can talk about. They're both computer nerds. They can talk about that too. Hanson's oldest son, one of his sons oldest or second oldest, was at law school at Notre Dame. I was at law school at GW. You know, there's more connections. The more connections you have, the better openings you have for conversation and dialogue and to gain trust.

So when I was in a law firm, I.

Was able to work with every asshole partner because no one was going to be worse than working with Hansen. He could belittle you, he'd yell at you. And it wasn't for a long time until I gained his trust that he started easing up on me. So it was it was grueling. It was mentally just draining to work with this guy.

How did how did you do that and build up that trust from that rocky start to the point where you're able to start to scratch beneath the surface on this guy.

It took a long time.

And you know, I see the first time that we started, you know, we got into we got into a situation where he really wanted to be a mentor to somebody, and I could see it right, but he was so reserved.

That our father. Dude, you don't have to stare at me.

And as we walked out of church, I mean, the conversation shifted suddenly. He was being very open. He's talking about his family. He's talking and asking about my wife, like when are we going to have children, and how important it is to have children. And when I said, you know we I'm broke. I got an FBI salary. I live in a crappy apartment in Eastern Market. You know it's like Section eight type housing. You know that it's like one room is subdivided into three and they

Well, I mean, what was he alluding to right there?

Well, as we started having conversations, the squad started talking to me because I was getting debriefed every night, but the agent's running this case and they and they told me he's recruiting you.

Yeah. Yeah, he's recruiting you.

He's recruiting you, and we want you to make it happen. I'd never left the FBI if he had got that far.

Wow, And I guess I want to ask a little bit about like his motivation because I mean he was getting paid off in cash and diamonds as I understand. So there's money, but was there something else going on here? I'm really I think this is like one of those really interesting things where you guys are both in the FBI, you're both Catholic, have this religious connection. Like what was it about him that made him a deviant? Essentially?

Yeah?

Well, he he he. He had this personality, narcissistic personality. It was a true narcissist. And look, I've looked at a lot of trust insiders and you know, with government but also later in my career business, and they have that they have this overinflated sense of self worth and they look at themselves and where they are in their career and they just feel like they should be doing better, and they you know, they're all sorts of narcissists. You know,

And those are his words, not mine. So he had that.

And the FBI is hard. The FBI is a bureaucracy. You either learn to swim with the tide. If you fight against it, it will drown you. It doesn't care about you. It'll let you go, it'll chew you up, it'll spit you out. I mean, people are in the FBI because they want to make a difference, because they want to change the world, because they want to make people safe. They're not, you know, at least career people might be a little different. But the people who were

He was mad.

And the way I like to put it is he joined the FBI to be James Bond and the FBI made him a librarian and.

He was mad about that.

That'll do it.

So he's mad.

He needs money. That's this triggering event. And he's got this personality that tells me, you know what I can I can show the FBI, and so he spies his first act of vespionage.

You got two people killed.

He gave up two of our top assets in the Soviet Union, and with a letter, one letter, one piece of paper, short, little piece of paper, he got two people murdered, and uh that.

He was going to use to protect himself and he became a spy.

Yeah, there's there's a level of psychopathy there also that you know you're putting that letter under the bridge, you know it's going to get two people whacked. I mean it's on you in a very profound way.

Absolutely.

I mean he has blood in his hands and when he was arrested. Finally, you know, he does get caught in the end, I survive. Yeah, he he had one one of the accounts against him was the bloody hands that he had. His actions had led to deaths, and he knew that they would lead to those deaths.

So walk us through this process. Now, now you're in this this rhythm where he's trying to recruit you. He's trying to groom you to be the next Soviet or Russian spy. I should say, how did that process take place for you? And I mean, how did you feel about that? As you're at least he thinks he's recruiting you to do something, you know, to commit acts of treason.

Well, you know, for a long time, I felt that I was just doing an amazing job that you know, I'd fooled him to such an extent that you know, he felt that he was going to leave the FBI, but he could leave some of his legacy behind.

That I was going to be like the Robin to his batman, Right.

That's what I thought, which which you know, maybe that's a little bit of my own self inflated ego, but uh, you know, a very a very an agent that I respect a lot of We were chatting not too long ago, and she told me, you know, that's not what he was doing, Eric, And I was like.

Well, what is he doing?

He she said, he was going to leave, but he was going to he was going to leave you there to spy for him. He was just going to run you and then when he was done with you, he'd just use you up and you know, get you arrested and walk away. And I was thinking, yeah, that's probably what he was doing, you know, in the end, just try to fool me. But I think we would have got that point. We never really got there because I

That's it.

Yeah, you got to go back in time. You got to be in the two thousands. The palm pilot was the new flashy thing. It was a It was a PDA Personal Data Assistant and it was this big thick thing that flipped open and it had a screen.

But to get information into the screen, you had to stab it with a plastic stick. That was the height of technology.

Old school left it. The youth are learning something from this podcast tonight. So tell us about this PDA he had and how he used it.

Well, he loved the thing. He talked about it all the time. He kept it in his left back pocket

They were like.

Thinner, they were faster. You could send an email on them. You could play games like mind Sweeper and that kind of stuff. And I gave him one and I thought, I'll deem myself to the boss. And he pushed it back across the desk and pulled out his and he said, I've written the encryption on this myself, and these idiots of the FBI couldn't crack it on their best day. Now, that is a huge clue. It's like we say, clue, right.

But so that's my clue. Hat.

But Hanson, you know, that was the big clue that we needed to get this thing away from them and and and find out what was on it because maybe it would give us something that would lead to his arrest.

So how did you engineer concoct a situation wherein you were going to be able to do that.

Well, we had the social engineer, Hanson. We had to hack them because the guy was.

Never apart from the thing.

And maybe the movie version of me, you know in the movie Breach, Ryan Phillby playing me could like bump them and pick his pocket and you know, get it away long enough. But the problem is the second he reaches for it or sits down, it's game over.

And I'm not a magician. I don't pick pockets. I can pick a lock, not a pocket.

So we needed to to use a pretext, is what we call it.

And here's here's what it came up with.

There was an an a Dick and assistant director they're actually in the FBI called a Dix get that, and uh and and the section chief, who was the only other person I knew in FBI headquarters who knew what I was doing. He was like down the hall, this awesome guy named Richard Garcia still friends today, and you know, he was my escape plan if everything went wrong, I was going to have to try to get out of the vault and get down the hall to his office,

Of course, but he really, really, really likes to shoot. The guy was gun nut. He had all sorts of firearms. He loved it, you know.

He was always telling me like, I'm gonna take you down and we're gonna go shoot.

And I'm like, well, why don't we go do it?

I think I could have probably outshot him, but I don't know. He was He was apparently pretty amazing, and and he he can't say no. He tries, he tries to beg off, I'm busy, you don't have time, and the ADAK looks at him and says that wasn't a request. So now he's mad. He's off his game. He makes his mistake. He gets up and grabs zero protection eye protection, he holsters his firearms. No one actually walks around the FBI healed, unless you're like the greenest of green, you know, new agents.

You know, you get it.

You get to your office, you're locked in your deck, like who's going to attack the FBI headquarters. So he ulsers that thing and he follows them out, and I'm super excited because for the first time, for the first time, he's forgotten that damn Pott and Pilot, and I know it's.

Just sitting in his back, and so you snatched that thing up and you have to like drag it down the hall to Garcia's office or somewhere else to try to rip it.

Well, it took me a while to get this right. This wasn't the first time we tried, but this is the time that worked. And so I'm really excited it's there. So I go over to the bag, I check, and I wait. You know, I was a little bit smarter about this, you know, as we went in, as we were along in the case, I was learning. I was actually learning from Hansom. So I had an asset that

I was like, what are you going to do?

He's like, we're just going to copy it. We'll crack it later. And I was like, great, go for it. And you can probably tell, like i'm talking to you, you're you're like chilling out in the seat. I stand when I talk and I move around and I've I've always got this energy. So they threw me out of the room, so like this guy's distracting it. So now I'm standing in the hall like a recaltran child or something like, waiting for them to give me back the stuff.

What was going on in that room.

It was like one of those rooms with a top secret leave it, you know, stay away, and I get another page and it says out of pocket, coming to you, so, you know, gently knocking the door I'm.

Like, hey, guys, I'm gonna need that stuff.

You know, he's on his way back there, like we're almost done. You don't understand. He's armed and he's angry, and if I'm not there before him, he's gonna shoot me. And so it's not like James, you know, James Bond or Jack Bauer, Jack Ryan, you know.

I start with E, not J.

And I get the stuff and I run up three flights of stairs and I get into the office before him, and we had a main area where my office was, and then he had his own office, which was through another door. I slammed the big door to the main to the main area, which is what saved me. I go into his office and I'm feeling just cool the cucumber.

And he knows right.

So in this moment of stress, I'm like trying to cast my mind back, like self hypnotize.

I don't know. And I hear him coming through the main door.

So what do you do?

Right?

I just zipped up all four pockets, you know, like you circle see on the scantron when you don't know the answer, random my desk and put the best poker face I've ever had in my life and ever will like right here.

And he comes through the main area.

He glares at me, and then he goes into his office and I hear, of course zip.

And he busts out the PDF and starts to type in a way.

He opens his bag, and.

Then he comes out a few moments later, and he right up to my desk and he leans over and he looks at me and he says.

Were you in my office?

And I said, yeah, you've got a plan for everything, every eventuality when you're in this business, and I had, and I said, yeah, I was in your office. I walked in there I put a memo in the inbox, didn't you see it? And in my mind, in the back of my mind, I'm saying this, and I'm sweating all down the back, but I'm like, I'm totally composed

You can go there. The bridge is still there.

It's that first bridge when you gets to the parking area and he gets back up on the bridge, he knocks the dr off.

His shoes and he smiles to himself because he's just loaded.

His final drop to the Russians, all the information that he's stolen the entire time he and I were working together.

And from the amount of detail you just used to describe that, I have to assume you guys had him under surveillance.

But we were there before him. You know, you're exactly right. We were there.

And as he's leaving the park and he walks back to his car, his old silver Ford tourist, two vans screeched to a halt, Swat jumps out. They point their guns at him. He's arrested, put in handcuffs and he says the guns are not necessary, and then he looks at them and he says, what took you so long? And he's arrested for esp not He ends up pleading guilty. We not only knew where he was going to be, but the exact time he was going to be there.

Spy, so you knew from the okay, yeah, So to rewind a little bit, how long did it take the FBI to crack his super spiffy home brewed encryption.

Not very long, a few days. And I mean it was it was strong encryption. It just FBI has very big computers. The thing about encryption is that you know, unless it's unless it's some serious military great encryption.

I mean he wrote this himself.

The bigger the computer, the faster you're going to crack it. And Lee FBI also has, you know, things like the NSA and you know, I was a part of the team that cracked it.

But they were able to crack it, and we.

Learned by reading through all his old letters and other information that I had found earlier, in the case his special code for how he translated dates so he would transpose them. He didn't just put the date in his calendar. There was Matthew had to do to the date to

I mean, that's pretty wild. So he had all the like dead drops that he would service, all those locations, and the times and whatever whatever time delay they were using, that was all in the PDF that was in the PA.

I mean, you have to put it somewhere because these things are planned out one two years at a time, and unless you want to make a call like he did that one time and risk your life essentially by breaking protocol, you know, you have to have it somewhere. And so you know, there's different ways to do it. There's one time pads, you know, there's all sorts of things modern no, modern spies probably used a lot of

So from this point we had talked a little bit earlier. You were not required to testify in court because of all this hard evidence they had on him at that point. I mean, were you off the case at this point? I mean, were you do you have a visibility on the prosecution and how that was going.

No, at this point, I wasn't actively part of the case. It was it was all part of the It was the Department of.

Justice's case at that point.

And so the indictment was written by the FBI, by the API case officer and then case agent, and then the Department of Justice took it off. Handsome lawyered up and then he decided to plead guilty. And because he decided to plead guilty, I didn't have to testify. I would have, and I was I was nervous about that. I'd have to face him and yeah, and watch him glare at me as I talked about all of the

What did they sentence him to.

He was sentenced to life in prison, so without any opportunity for parole. I don't even think he could have been pardoned. And he had consecutive life turns, you know, and part of the deal was that he would have to submit to constant interrogation.

You know. It was like they didn't have an end date.

So the FBI, the NSA, and two commissions that were put together were given access to Hanson so that they could ask everything that he'd done so that it could.

Be fixed, like a damage assessment.

Well yeah, but the damage was incredible. He blew with He blew holes, so many holes, and counterintelligence US counterintelligence.

It was basically Swiss cheese. You know, our.

Adversaries knew everything we were doing before we did it, and everything else he did. But also the ways in the manner that he was able to penetrate the FBI so deeply in other agencies and how he did that, because that had to all be corrected. So in great AI call Hanson the modern architect of the FBI, because essentially he is certainly the architect of the FBI's security. I don't think it would be very difficult for a

Before we move on to the next thing. Any final takeaways about the Robert Hanson case that you like to get across to the American public or even to these bureaucracies FBI, CIA, about the nature of these infiltrations.

Certainly, I mean, there were always be spies, even even in an era where ninety nine percent of espionages is conducted through computer systems. I mean, why leave Moscow or Beijing or Tehran or peng Yang when you can just attack a government official through a computer system, but you're attacking the person, you're fooling them. I mean, it's all the same deceptive, deceptive techniques in a modern environment. Even

So you after finishing this case, you only had you spent three more months at the FBI and then went to law school. What motivated that change that life change to leave the bureau and go to school.

Yeah.

So I've been in school for about two years at this point, a little over two years while I was in the FBI. So I was you know, I was desperately trying to make classes and keep my grades up, and you know, chasing spies and terrorists all over the place. And it's one of the reasons I picked George Washington University.

Most of the professors as a night student.

Most of the professors are practitioners, you know, their attorneys, they're judges. They understand in a way that you know, the tenure day student professors don't when you can't make it to class or you show up and you're half dead, because everybody's working a job. And so, you know, five years of working under cover straight without ever coming out of cover, I decided that that was enough.

Now.

A big part of it was the Hands In case burned me out a little.

And I was married, you know.

The day that my my SSA, my supervisors special Agent Gi McClellan showed up at my house unannounced Sunday and asked me to work undercover, you know, to investigate Robert Hanson. I was married three years. We hadn't I mean, sorry, three months. We hadn't even had a honeymoon yet. And you know, my wife was German and had come over to the US to be with me, and we were trying to build a life together. And you know, for the entire time I was on the Hanson case, there

And see what I do with a legal shingle.

And so I hung that out there and went to work for what became one of the biggest firms on Earth, and did national security law and government contracts, all and all sorts of stuff that still had ties to the government, but I wasn't in the government anymore.

Any any notable cases or clients that you can talk about during that time.

Well you know what I did.

I can't talk about them because they were you know, they're still kind of confidential.

But I worked.

I ended up working well, you know, surprise surprise, on a number of internal investigations. So I built a pretty good practice on doing internal investigations of companies who you know, had issues or some corruption or problems. And generally it

I want to talk about your company and what you guys do now the Georgetown Group, but I got to ask about, you know, the book Grade Day and then the movie Breach that was based on art of it. I mean, how did all of that come about?

Well, the movie actually came before the book, right, So I was taking I was journaling during the Hanson case. Now I had to turn over all my notes. I had to write along every single night. So basically I

It was pretty damn difficult.

And so you know, I had to find my way through that, and you know, going to law school and doing all that was part of the big reason that, you know, I chose to leave the FBI. Now, the movie came before the book, and so when I finished,

She said, do you have a book?

I said no, and she said, I find it very insulting to literary agents everywhere that there's a movie about your story, but you've never written it in a book. And I said, well, I told her the story of like all the books that were out there, and he's like, well, you've definitely got a story to tell. If you just wrote up your keynote like you just delivered it, we'd

Were some of the significant differences between the movie and the book, And what did you think of the movie when you saw it?

I really enjoyed the I mean I have I still have chills when I see that you know, that initial Universal screen with the you know, the earth and the sun going over it. I mean every time I hear that jingle, I like, I have that same moment. The first time I watched the movie, was sitting in a screening room and Universal Studios lot, right next to Chris Cooper and Billy Ray who was the director.

Oh wow, and.

Billy brought us both out, but didn't tell either of us that we were going to watch it together for the first time. So the whole time, like every Hanson and Ryan Phillippi plays me, Chris Cooper plays Hanson. You know, every Hanson scene, he's leaning over and looking at me, you know, and I'm looking right back at him to see what he thinks. And I love the movie, and you know, I still do. It's it's taught. Scenes from that movie are taught in virtually every intelligence school in

You'll see all the elements because I helped.

It's uh, it's it's very true to life. So how we caught them that investigation, it's all very well preserved. But it's not a documentary. So Hanson never shoots me in the woods. That didn't happen in real life. That's probably the scene that is far this departure from reality. He never shows up at my apartment with his wife, Like the four of us couldn't fit in our apartment

So you could do the movie in the book and then talk to us about the Georgetown group and kind of what you're working on now.

Yeah, when I left, when I left DLA Piper Uh, the law firm I was working at, I decided that I wanted to insert myself in the middle. There something that that attorneys were missing when they worked on mergers and acquisitions. You know, the attorneys look at their thing, the accounts, look at their thing. But there's this asymmetrical information that they were missing. So unless you hired an investigator,

We don't we hire.

Them sometimes, but we wanted to go deep into into the documents and information and you know, some stuff that we know as as a group of investigators and former investigators and different agencies and work how to find that information.

But you have some crossover with the field of cyber espionage as well or cybersecurity.

Yes, I do.

So when Breach came out, I started going out in the public speaking circuit, which is my passion, which is what.

I love to do. I love I love speaking.

I like I speaking with you, Jack and being on podcasts and talking with crowds. But it was it was about the Hanson story and that's not evergreen. I mean I do, I do that keynote all the time, but

Get on stage, try and do that.

I'm gonna explain how to protect yourself from cyber attacks. I'm not going to use power point. I'm just going to tell you really cool stories that you'll remember the next time someone tries to attack you. And my next book is all about that. So yeah, but at the end of the day, I've learned all this stuff from Robert Hanson.

Do we have any questions for Eric? Yes, Uh, tell people while while we wait. Just tell people where they can find you. If they're interested in having you for a public speaking engagement where they can find your book.

Yeah, if you want to learn all about me, about my book, about you know, the work I'm doing the Georgetown Group, or a new company that I just founded with three very close friends called Nexusure, which is doing cybersecurity advisory work. You can go to www dot Eric O'Neill e R I C O N E I l l dot net, and you know, you can find me on LinkedIn. I'm really good at responding to people on LinkedIn. If you're too shot to ask a question here and

Well, we'll have some links down the description for those of you who are interested in finding Eric right on. Okay, we have a question from k X, Thank you.

I agree with FBI agent Jame host the that Marina Oswald is obviously a KGB wife, a swallow quote unquote still living her cover today in Dallas. Does the guests does the guests have an opinion on that?

Yeah, I'm sorry but that I don't. I don't really have an opinion. That's that's a little bit beyond you know, what I what I knew when I was in the FBI, and I rarely haven't looked into that case. You know, the swallows, they existed. They that's not a made up thing. In really in red sparrow, and they were very successful. And I guess the way I want to answer this

So could it be true? Sure? Do I know?

I don't. We had somebody on here as a counter I think army counter intelligence guy. You said, you've got to know your number. You know, if you're a four and she's a nine, you've got to ask yourself what's going on here?

Yeah, the way I say it is, look, you know, some Nigerian princeton just doesn't want to really send you a fortune.

You know.

The cryptocurrency scheme that your new friend over a text is trying to get you investing in is not true. Like that incredibly beautiful a woman who just sat next to you at the bar and is giving you all her attention, you know, and ignoring the whole rest of the room. You're maybe not that attractive. So you just really have to look at things with the green install And what I what I like to say is think

We have another one from Andrew. Does Eric have any funny stories that he could share about spies and would be spies?

Oh, certainly there was a There was a spy called David Allen Justice, So Justice. I talked about him in Gray Day was working for a.

He was working here.

This is a really funny story. He's he's working for a contractor on the West Coast that's doing military satellite research and he's working on this program and he decides that he wants to spy. Now he's watched the show of the Americans. We know all this from the debrief. By the way, he doesn't get away with it. He's watched the show the Americans, and he loves it, and he decides, I want to be a spy like that. I'm going to spy for Russia.

So this dude.

Goes out and he orders these correspondence type courses like fight fast, Evade, detection, you know, understand espionage. And he takes three courses and he thinks, now I know everything about how to be a spy. And he's got these problems. His wife is very sick. He can't pay all her medical bills, and he's just lost his car because it broke down. He can't pay to repair it. So he needs money fast. And he's spending way too much money on his girlfriend, who's never met. He knows her completely

Now. This guy's last name is Justice.

That's pretty good. But they say, well, well, what code name would you like? And he says, I want to be known as the spy named Brian. And every money and all the money he made from them he sent right to is not real. Girlfriend didn't use any of it fix his.

Car or help his wife. Wow.

Yeah, I have like a rogue gallery of weirdo spies and he really tops the list.

Yeah that's up there, all right.

We have one last one, How would have Robert Hansen using a BlackBerry instead of a Palm pilot impacted the investigation.

Yeah, well, the interesting about a BlackBerry is you can send emails on it, and so today stealing information is in a way a lot easier.

He didn't.

You know. Now you don't have to stay save stuff on floppy disks, you don't have to you know, save it on thung drives, which is where Hanson was going. You can extract terabytes of information and upload it to dark web servers that publish it to everyone in the world. You can steal terabytes of information and dump it on WikiLeaks, and then it becomes weaponized.

So it's it's it's.

Very dangerous when a spy has access to databases. And that's why cybersecurity becomes so important. And if you have that BlackBerry, you know, and there word blackberries at the time, you know, there were the phones weren't exactly where they are now.

Obviously he may have.

Been able to get it out faster, but if you look back at the time when he was fying, intelligence officers were still trying to get stuff through holes in the ground, you know, behind the white rock under the footbridge in the hollow tree, so he would have still had to get that information in some physical form over to the intelligence officers. It's just changed now because most of it is done digitally. There's a way to get you know, this is a really cool way to get information.

I like like a modern a modern version of micro dots.

Exactly, and they just they just upload the the image to a photoshare website and their intelligence officers sitting in Russia or China wherever, downloads the image and you know, someone else might have gone through and looked at the image. But unless you have the decryption code and you know that it's intelligence, it's useless to you other than it's a really big photo.

Before we get going, I mean, Eric, I really appreciate you taking the time and telling us your story. It's pretty incredible. Anything that I failed to ask or anything that I didn't bring up that you want to make sure we cover before we get going tonight.

Well, Jack, you've been a great interviewer and that given a lot of fun. You know, one thing I want to leave with people with is maybe the first thing that Hanson told me. And in this first conversation I had with Hanson day one, where I'm I'm in there and I'm nervous and I'm trying to figure out how I'm going to endear myself to him, he looks at me and he says he wants to tell me about something called Hanson's law.

Right, this is this is like the very beginning of my book.

And I said, well, what's that and he says, it's this simple. The spy is in the worst possible place. Now, I kept this composure, like I was thinking to myself, what's he trying to do here? Like does he know that I'm trying to investigate him? Is he suspicious? And I just looked at him. I said, well, what does that mean? I remember learning about that in Quantico. And he says, this, Hanson's law is that the spy is

Jack Awesome and people can find Gray Day and then Visible Threat. Is that up for pre order or anything on Amazon Ya.

Not up for pre order yet. I finished my draft. You know, writing a nonfiction book is a difficult task. You've done it, and it's with my editor at HarperCollins. Great Day is with Crown. Great Day is available wherever books are sold. If you get to my website, you can buy it right from there. An Invisible Threat I'm hoping for first quarter twenty twenty five, but that's the publisher's decision.

And for our viewers out there, we'll be back on Friday with Damon Brown. He is a former Special Forces combat diver. Excited to talk to him. Eric, thank you so much for joining us tonight. Really appreciate having you on here and getting to hear your story.

Thanks Jag, it was cool to be on the Team House podcast. I love the podcast and thank you everything you guys are doing, so keep up the good work.

Alright, guys, we will see you on Friday. Have a nice night out there.