American Scandal - FBI Agent Turned Russian Spy | Going Undercover | 5

Episode Date: April 30, 2024

Eric O’Neill was a 27-year-old FBI surveillance operative when he first heard the name Robert Hanssen. It was the assignment of a lifetime: go undercover to bring down a mole that had been feeding secrets to the Russian government for more than two decades. O’Neill takes Lindsay behind the scenes of the operation that changed his life and led to the capture of one of the most notorious spies in American history. His book of the account is called Gray Day: My Undercover Mission to Expose America's First Cyber Spy. Need more American Scandal? With Wondery+, enjoy exclusive seasons, binge new seasons first, and listen completely ad-free. Start your free trial in the Wondery App, Apple Podcasts, Spotify or visit wondery.app.link/IM5aogASNNb now.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hi, this is Lindsey Graham, host of American Scandal. Our back catalog has moved behind a paywall. Recent episodes remain free, but older ones will require a Wondery Plus subscription. With Wondery Plus, you get access to the full American Scandal archive, ad-free, plus early access to new seasons and more. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery, I'm Lindsey Graham, and this is American Scandal. On February 18, 2001, after 22 years of espionage, FBI agent Robert Hansen was finally arrested for spying on behalf of the Russians. When camouflaged agents swarmed the park where Hansen left his final drop,

he reportedly asked his arresting officers, For years, U.S. counterintelligence officials had known there was a mole lurking in the shadows. But Hansen was a veteran agent, meticulous and detail-oriented, one who had been able to evade even the FBI's dedicated spy catchers. The agency knew they needed to come up with a remarkable operation to catch the spy red-handed. Our guest today is former FBI operative Eric O'Neill, who was crucial to Hansen's capture. The first time O'Neill heard Robert Hansen's name, he was a 27-year-old FBI agent, and when his supervisor showed up unannounced on an early Sunday morning, O'Neill was shocked to discover that he was tasked with an undercover operation that would change his life.

He was assigned to work as Hansen's assistant, spending weeks alone with him in a shared office and learning his every move. O'Neill's efforts helped the FBI gather the final evidence they needed to prove that Hansen was still actively spying for the Russians. O'Neill shares a firsthand account of this investigation in his book, Gray Day, My Undercover Mission to Expose America's First Cyber Spy. It's a story so thrilling that it made its way onto the big screen in the Hollywood movie Breach, starring Ryan Phillippe as young FBI agent Eric O'Neill. Our conversation is next. In the past decade, Boeing has been involved in a series of scandals and deadly crashes that have dented its once sterling reputation. At the center of it all, the 737 MAX. The latest season

of Business Wars explores how Boeing allowed things to turn deadly and what, if anything, can save the company's reputation. Make sure to listen to Business Wars wherever you get your podcasts. Eric O'Neill, thanks so much for speaking with me today on American Scandal. Lindsay, thanks for having me. It's great to be on the show. Let's go back all the way to the very first time you heard the name Robert Hansen. You were a young FBI agent at the time. How did you first learn about Hansen and then also come to realize what you were being asked to do? Well, Lindsay, I was a undercover operative. I was a member of the special surveillance group for the FBI. And so my job was to be undercover chasing spies and terrorists,

that's counterintelligence and counterterrorism, mostly around the Washington, D.C. area as a surveillance operative. So I had not worked the Hansen case. I had never heard of Hansen. Early on a Sunday morning, I got a phone call, and it was my boss, a supervisory special agent named Gene McClelland, who was a very decorated agent who was in charge of the entire team of FBI ghosts. And he woke me up, and he said, I need to speak to you. Okay, Gene, I'll get dressed and come downtown, and we can talk about this. And he said, get dressed, but you don't have to come downtown. I'm parked right outside. And that completely blew my mind. I didn't quite know how to compute that statement. It was unheard of for

someone that high up in the FBI to show up at my private residence, the tiny little apartment my wife and I shared in downtown DC near Eastern Market. You know, you always go to your boss, they don't come to you. So I was worried. I thought I'd gotten in trouble. I was running a lot of Russian targets. and you know what they do when they learn your identity, they can feed it back in a way that can get you in trouble. So I thought I was going to walk out of my apartment and walk right into an arrest situation. Instead, I walk out and there's Gene sitting in his big crown vic grinning at me because he had to have known how stressful and uncertain I was going

to be by the situation he created. And I get out of my apartment, slid in the car next to him and said, what's this about? And he looked at me and he said, have you ever heard of a guy named Robert Hanson? And I hadn't. And he said, that's good because we want you to go undercover to catch him. That's quite a morning, but you had to remain undercover, and you couldn't tell anyone about it. What did you tell your wife about your boss's surprise visit and your new assignment? After Gene asked me whether I would go undercover in this case, I asked him some details about it, and he said that we had built a brand new section at FBI headquarters just for Hansen. We're putting him in charge of what we're calling the information assurance section,

and information assurance now means infosec or cybersecurity. And they needed someone who could work undercover, knew how to catch a spy, but also, and this was the kicker, knew how to turn a computer on. Embarrassingly, the FBI was not quite computerized in the year 2000, 2001. At the end of this conversation, I looked at Gene and I said, what am I supposed to tell my wife? She has to be inside terrified. And he said, well, just tell her you got some sort of new computer job at headquarters

and it's going to change your hours and it's going to be better for you because I know you're in law school, and you're always complaining about not being able to make class because you're on some high-profile national security investigation. And so this will allow you to make class at night, and that'll be one of our backstories. I later went in, and I told my wife that exact lie. And in the beginning, she was overjoyed that she thought I was going to have more time and a more normal schedule and more time to spend with her. It turned out to be the exact opposite. You were very young. Why do you think they chose you for such a significant operation? I was quite young going into the case. I just turned 27. But I think that part of it was that the FBI was faced with a pretty

significant problem in Robert Hansen. He had spied for the Soviet Union and then the Russian Federation. That's how long he spied. He survived the collapse of the Soviet Union and the reformation into the new Russian Federation. Precisely 22 years by the time we even learned that he was the top spy that the entire intelligence community had been after for all those decades. And when they learned from a former Russian source that Hansen was quite possibly our guy, hearts fell in the FBI because not only was he a decorated special agent, in the FBI, because not only was he a decorated special agent, he was also one of the top Soviet and then later Russian analysts in the FBI. The fact that he was that most damaging spy was a lot like having the manager of a bank go rogue and steal from his own bank, knowing all

of the security systems and every little flaw in security. He was the worst possible case, in other words, for a spy. And so the FBI had to find a way to trick him into working in a position that would give him access and hopefully continue to spy so we could catch him red-handed. So the FBI was taking a big risk. This is a guy who is about to retire, and they're suddenly saying, we're going to delay your retirement. We're going to give you your dream job building cybersecurity for the FBI. We're going to promote you in headquarters to executive service, and we're going to give you staff for the first time in years. He had to be incredibly suspicious. So one of the ways to allay his suspicion was to give him someone that he would have seen as incredibly junior, and his pride, his narcissism, would not allow him to

believe, at least in the beginning, that I could actually be someone that the FBI had chosen to send undercover to catch him. So you've described a little bit of the mission here. You were to be kind of a naive young agent to slip under Hansen's wing. At the same time, log his every move, learn his routine, remember every detail. What preparation did you need for this undercover process? Well, all the training that I would have gotten, Lindsay, would have come under specialized training if I was a special agent. I was never a special agent. I was what's called an investigative specialist. The distinction between a ghost and an agent is that we are not making arrests. We fade into the background and disappear when it's time for the rest because we're not supposed to be known. So my job was to follow targets without being known or make myself

known to the targets. I was never taught to go undercover in what's called an elicitation investigation. And you could think of it as you and I are having a conversation, but I have an ulterior motive to the conversation. My job is to extract information from you without you knowing that that's what I'm trying to do. So while you might think we're just having a discussion or banter or talking about hopes and dreams for the future, I'm really trying to position you into revealing information that you probably don't want me to know. That's a difficult thing to do. It takes a lot of training, and I had to learn on the job.

So you really have a big task ahead of you. You are a young agent who's, by your own admission, not really trained for the job they give you. You have to lie to your wife. And the gravity of Hansen's actions had really significant impact on U.S. intelligence over the decades. What exactly was he providing them? What do we know now? providing them? What do we know now? It was some of the most egregious secrets that have ever been given to a foreign power. Things like during the Cold War, he provided the Russians, the Soviet Union, our nuclear warfare plan. So what we would do if they fired, what we do if we fired first, all the way down to providing the full continuity of government plan, where we would send the president and the vice president and the cabinet and everyone who matters in politics, the leadership of the United States if there was a catastrophic attack, which by the way, doesn't have to just be a nuclear arms exchange. He also gave up undercover operatives that then could not work anymore because their covers were burned. And most disastrously, he gave up the identities of our assets in Russia, our spies, Russians who were working for the United States for any number of reasons, but were giving us an eye into the plans and asset in the Soviet Union. So if you can imagine how

devastating that could be to intelligence gathering, and Hansen was a huge part of it. He shares a good bit of that with a CIA spy called Aldrich Ames. Now, throughout our series, we've painted Hansen as a bit of a tortured man, certainly an arrogant man who had a lot of deep desires. What was he like on a personal level to you, having spent so much time with him? I've learned that he's called you names like idiot and moron often. How do you keep your composure and your cover in moments like this? It's difficult to keep your cover in general, but when you're working face-to-face with a target, sometimes you almost fall so deeply into the cover, you don't react the way

that you are trained to react. So for example, I had to believe that my job was to be part of Hansen's staff working in cybersecurity and counterintelligence for the FBI, and actually do the overt work of trying to figure out how we were going to secure systems. That's what we were doing day to day. I also had to remember that my job was to talk to him a lot and pull information out. So when he called me an idiot or a moron, I had to react in a way that a normal person would, but not overreact in a way that could cause the whole relationship to fall apart. So for example, if he calls me a name, a normal person would be upset about that. Someone who was trying to be undercover might react differently, pretend it didn't happen, or react in a way that would arouse his suspicions.

And I think right now it's kind of important to describe this tension between suspicion and paranoia. One of my big jobs was to keep him firmly in suspicion. Everyone who works in counterintelligence, whether you're a spire or a spy hunter, you're always suspicious. That's actually a good thing. You're checking your six, you're watching the corners, you're analyzing everything that happens around you. That training is so embedded in me that it's the way I function from day to day anyway. What you don't want to be is paranoid. Paranoid means that everyone's following you, everyone's after you, everybody's got a hidden agenda, and you just can't function. So I had to keep him in that healthy zone of suspicion and never let him fall into paranoia.

And to do that, I had to play a role, which was incredibly difficult. It just turns out, maybe the FBI rolled the dice. Maybe they're really as good in profiling as they say, and they profiled me. It turns out I was very good at it. I was able to get Hansen to talk about things, to talk about himself, to talk about his family. My biggest win was after Hansen decided on the spur of a moment in the middle of the day that he and I were going to church together. And I'll tell you this. I was raised Catholic, and I have never been scrutinized by a nun or a priest in my life as closely as Hansen was watching me when we said the Our Father in the middle of church. Because he was verifying that that part of my personality was true.

He was also hunting to see if I was a spy spying on him. You know, once we establish some of these connections, like our faith, the fact that we were both computer programmers, the fact that I was in law school at the time, and one of his sons was in law school around the same year I was, all those connections, whether a person is a spy or a criminal or whoever, they create a bond between people. There are things to talk about, and they lead to other things. And that was the job. You raise the fact that he's a very prideful person.

He was actually a textbook narcissist, and he had to be correct and true in everything he said. And so I started challenging him on things he said, especially when he was talking about old FBI cases. And so he would bluster and he would boast. And the more I challenged him, the more he dug for facts. And I started learning that he knew things about cases that he shouldn't have known. He knew things about cases that I never knew. But I had the advantage of taking everything that I learned from him, recording it, and providing my logs, my memoranda, to the best FBI analysts who were going through it with a fine-tooth comb and looking for any clues that they could pull out of

it. And we slowly started to learn that this person, Robert Hansen, knew far too much. Well, that's interesting because you knew that Hansen was perhaps a spy, and that's why you were on the case. But you did not know that he was the spy, the mole that the FBI had been trying to catch for decades. That's correct. When the FBI learns that someone might be a potential foreign counterintelligence threat, in other words, a spy, that individual has an

investigation open on them. It's called a full field investigation. A magistrate gives permission to the FBI to basically look at every aspect of their life. And the FBI assigns a code name to the case. When you don't have an individual, you just know that there's a mole somewhere in the intelligence community. You still assign a codename to the case. There's just no person behind it. So decades before, the name Gray Suit was assigned to this legendary mole that existed somewhere in the intelligence community, but the FBI had no clue where.

And that's the only way you knew of the person. community, but the FBI had no clue where. And that's the only way you knew of the person. So each time someone was a person of interest who could be Gray Suit, they got a derivative of the name. And there were many, until finally Hansen, whose codename was Gray Day. Now, I knew from his codename that he was suspected of possibly being Gray Suit, but not that he was Gray Suit. And there had been plenty of others that we'd investigated that the FBI thought was gray suit. And it wasn't until about midway through my part of the investigation that we discovered information that led us to believe that, as you said, this wasn't just a spy, but the

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You can listen to Finding Andy and Finding Natasha exclusively and ad-free on Wondery Plus. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify. Well, of course, Robert Hansen isn't the only American to have traded inside secrets or become a mole for foreign nations. From the very beginning of our history, we've had turncoats. From your observations, what motivates someone to become a spy? That's a great question. What motivates someone to become a spy? Because at the end of the day, we do want to know the why.

For the legal process, once you catch a spy, the why doesn't matter. But what matters to us is to understand why a person would decide to betray. And in Hansen's case, to portray everything that they purported outwardly to stand for, their family, their faith, the oath that they took to serve as an FBI agent, their country, all those things. You know, there are a few ingredients that create a spy because it's hard to betray. Spies are recruited or choose to become spies for really one of three ways. The first is the hardest to find, ideology. If someone believes that, for example, in the days of the Soviet Union and the Cold War, that communism is superior to democracy, they may have chosen to go spy for Russia. Now, this was not Hansen. He was not a spy because he was out to win the war for communism. But those are spies

that are very hard to find because there isn't really a trail to follow. They're doing it because they believe. The second is one of the oldest tried and true ways to not only recruit a spy, but a reason that people choose to spy. It's bribery. They want to make a buck. They want to make money. And here's why Hansen started. He needed money. Now, intelligence agencies are incredibly adept at finding weaknesses in a person. And financial weaknesses are a main goal if you want to recruit a spy. If you can find someone who desperately needs money and you offer to solve all their problems with, say, $100,000 if they exchange secrets, sometimes you can get someone to spy. The third one is blackmail. If you can learn something very damaging about a person and tell them, help me out by giving me secrets and nobody's

going to know I know this or I'll make it go away, you can also sometimes recruit a spy. In Hansen's case, he was a disgruntled employee at the FBI who needed money, was angry at the FBI for not giving him the job he wanted, and so he chose to spy. In fact, he volunteered his services to the Soviet Union. He was never recruited. When the FBI eventually finally did catch Robert Hansen, probably in no small part to your good work, he asked, what took you so long? And it's a good question. Why did it take so long for the FBI to

catch Hansen? When I'm asked this question, the question I ask is, when do you think the first time that Robert Hansen was ever polygraphed was? The first time that every special agent should be polygraphed is when they're hired that every special agent should be polygraphed is when they're hired. In fact, before they're hired to determine whether they can get a security clearance. And then by rule, by policy, to renew your clearance, you must be polygraphed again every five years. And in fact, you are polygraphed each time that you receive a higher elevation to your security clearance. So he should have been polygraphed multiple times throughout his career. But the first time he was ever polygraphed, what some people call the lie detector test,

was after his arrest, which was a huge mistake. Another problem that the FBI had is that they weren't auditing access to their systems. In other words, Hansen was spending a lot of time going into the FBI's automated case system, which is a system that tracks all the cases that the FBI was running, and pulling information about spies out of it. Also, he was looking at himself. If he put his own name in and his address and nothing came back, he felt safe that the FBI hadn't opened an investigation into him.

And nobody was auditing the access that he was making, even though he was looking at improper places. But there was also an institutional bias. One of the biggest problems was that the FBI just didn't believe one of their own could go rogue. They believed that this spy, GraySuit, had to be in another agency. And so they were just looking in all the wrong places. Now, this was also a time right when the internet and new technology, computer technology, was becoming widespread throughout, certainly commerce and also government. But you mentioned that the FBI wasn't especially good at computerization or modernization. What was the role that technology might have played in the FBI's failure to catch

Hansen? Well, technology was something that the FBI was making a large investment in. And when I said the FBI wasn't good at computerization at the time, they were working hard to fully computerize the FBI. Special agents were still typing up memos on typewriters in 2000. And then you had Hansen. Hansen was so adept at using computer systems and actually programming himself that he was able to exploit flaws in computer systems that were just never built to defend against a trusted insider within them. He was also smart enough to get himself put on tax forces with other agencies and steal their information. And this was golden intelligence to him, because if he could steal information from, say, the

NSA or the CIA, and then clandestinely drop it to the Russians, when they receive the information, they would think that, hey, this person must be in some other agency like the CIA or NSA. And when spies that we had over in Russia were providing information back as sources, they might have said, we think that we're receiving this information from somewhere other than the FBI. In fact, Robert Hansen gave up two of our Russian sources, two people who could have potentially identified that the spy the entire intelligence community was after, GraySuit, was in the FBI. He couldn't have that. So he made sure he gave up their names knowing that they would be executed.

You eventually came to realize that Hansen likely had evidence of his communications with the Russians on his personal device, a Palm Pilot. How did you formulate a plan to get access to that? How did it play out? Yeah, Hansen had this Palm Pilot. And did you formulate a plan to get access to that? How did it play out? Yeah, Hanson had this Palm Pilot. And if you're around 50 years old, you're probably chuckling because the Palm Pilot today seems like such a clunky device. But if you had one in the year 2000, it was kind of the cool thing to have. The cool piece of technology was a personal data assistant. And it was one of these first PDAs that you could put in your pocket and have your entire calendar on it. And he loved it. He was very expressive in

how if you didn't have one of these things, you would never, you meaning me, would never rise in executive service or make anything of myself because I couldn't organize my life and that every executive had one. And he talked about it more than even talking about his children. But it wasn't what he said about the Palm, but the manner in which he protected his Palm Pilot that raised my curiosity. He had a routine, and I should say that we all have routines, and we use these routines to protect things or to make sure we don't lose them. Hans' routine was that he kept his palm pilot in his left back pocket, and when he sat down, because you couldn't sit on this thing, it was big,

he would slip it out of his pocket and put it in his bag right next to him over and over again. And I watched this. When he stood up, like clockwork, he'd reach down, grab it, and put it in his back pocket. So he was never separated with it. And because a Palm Pilot is a PDA, it has data on it, I thought, this could be really useful. Spies have to know when they're going to make their drops and signals. These are prearranged years in advance sometimes. And this is his favorite calendar. We got to get it away from him. The problem, Lindsay, was he kept it on him all the time. It was never out of his sight. And the only time that it wasn't physically on his

person is when it was in his bag next to him while we were sitting at his desk. So we had a social engineer, Hanson, and we came up with a scheme where we would use everything that I had learned about Hanson, the whole psych profile, during the investigation to date. We had an assistant director and a section chief, two individuals who he did not like at all, who he would be upset just seeing walk into his office, like at all, who he would be upset just seeing walk into his office, walk in unannounced. One of them was Richard Garcia, who was one of the few people on FBI headquarters and the only other person on the ninth floor who knew that Hansen was a spy that we were investigating. He was the person I could go to if I needed something or if things just got really heated and I had to escape. So he came in, and then an assistant director that Hansen absolutely hated for any number of reasons,

but this was the perfect person to come in who was in a position of authority over Hansen. They put $20 on his desk and said, you and us, the shooting range now, and I bet you five targets out of five, we can beat you. We used everything we knew about Hansen. He's a narcissist. He never could be wrong. He really loved to shoot, and he thought he could beat them. He was the kind of person who was disagreeable toward anyone he saw above him in the chain of command, and here were two people over him in the chain of command. He didn't like to be interrupted, and he felt really put off by the fact that they walked into his office and announced and hadn't made an appointment. And so he tries to say no, and then the icing on the cake. The assistant director looks at him and says, this wasn't a request. Now it's an order, and this really pissed

him off. So Anson stumbles to his feet. He grabs his ear protection, eye protection, holsters his firearm, and for the first time forgets to grab that Palm Pilot and shuffles off down to the shooting range after them. He's going to have to take the elevator from the ninth floor all the way down to the garage shooting range. I knew that would take him away from the office, hopefully enough time for me to go through the brag, grab the palm pallet. I also grabbed a data card and a floppy disk, run down three flights of stairs and have a tech team copy the devices and get them back before he returned from shooting. And then, of course, everything went wrong. And then, of course, everything went wrong.

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And what, if anything, can save the company's reputation. Now, follow Business Wars on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can binge Business Wars, the unraveling of Boeing, early and ad-free right now on Wondery Plus. Well, you left us hanging there. What went wrong? I got to the bag. I unzipped all four pockets. I found the Palm Pilot, a floppy disk, and a data card. I hoofed it down those three flights of stairs to where we had a hidden tech team just ready for the first time I was able to make this work. And I got to tell you, this was

not the first time we tried. This failed a few times, and finally we got it right. So I was very excited. Handed it off to the tech team. They started copying it. All the devices were encrypted. They decided we're just going to copy it and decrypt it later. And as I'm waiting, as I'm watching the bar move, you know, 50%, 51% of just the copy of the device, I get a page from an asset that I had put down in the shooting range, and it says, out of pocket, coming to you. I watched the CCTV footage later, and Hansen

sent a target downrange, unholstered his firearm, emptied his clip, brought the target back, took a hard look at it. Then without even pulling it off the clip, he holsters his firearm, turns around, doesn't say goodbye, and walks away. He'd realized, I think, that he left his Palm Pilot, and probably in the back of his mind, he's wondering, how much do I trust Eric? So he's on his way back, and I'm still three floors down with the tech team and I'm getting more and more anxious. So I told the team, hey, guys, I'm going to need that stuff. I got to get it back before he gets there or this investigation is over. Not only that, he's armed and he's angry and I'm not and he's going to shoot me. So it's not like, you know, Jack Bauer or James Bond. It's, you know, Jack

Ryan, all the Jacks. This is Eric O'Neill. I get there to the office with a good minute to spare. I had timed it. I knew it would take him about nine minutes to get all the way from the shooting range up to 9930. The FBI is a warren of corridors that just don't make sense at FBI headquarters. So I rushed into the office. I knelt in front of his bag. And then I realized I had no idea which pocket I'd pulled these things out of. Maybe it was just the Palm Pilot. I'd have a good guess.

But I had three devices. And I knew that they did not come from the same pocket. And as I'm just trying to figure it out, I hear him coming through the main door to the offices. So I just dropped all three, best guess possible, zipped up all four pockets, ran to my desk before he opened that main door, and put the best poker face I've ever had right across my mug. He comes through, glares at me, goes into his office, slams his door, and I hear that telltale zip. And I remember thinking to myself in that moment, I should probably run. Why am I sitting here at my desk? There's no way I got this right. This case is over. If I survive this day, I'm

going to be the laughingstock of the whole FBI. I'm never going to be able to go back to my team. And if I'm sitting here and I got it wrong, he's got nothing to lose. If I'm right and everything we need is on that and he's that spy we're after, there's no reason not to shoot me. The game is over. But I did stay. I stayed at my seat knowing that I had to be there. Because if I wasn't there, then that tension between suspicion and paranoia would redline into paranoia. I would be giving him the best clue possible that he was under investigation in the moment when he was most stressed. So I was just trying to come up with some sort of excuse, some reason why things were in the wrong pockets in his bag. Like, I kicked your bag over and

somehow the zippers popped open and everything fell out and I put it back and I'm sorry if I got it wrong. Something dumb that wasn't going to work, but I was hell-bent on trying to find my way through this. He came out of his office, he leaned over my desk, and he asked me point blank, were you in my office? Now, I had planned for this. One of the most important things in undercover work is always plan for everything because something is going to go wrong. I looked at him and I said, as cool as I possibly could, although I was sweating all the way down my back, yeah, I was in your office. I put a memo in your inbox. Didn't you see it? And he just looks at me and he holds that look for the most uncomfortable period of time possible. And he says, I never want you in my office again. And he leads for the day. Less than a few weeks

later, he's on a bridge in Foxtone Park in Vienna, Virginia. He's just loaded his final drop of secrets to the Russians, and he retraces his steps to his old car that's parked right outside the park. He's smiling to himself because he's going to make $50,000 as his final payment from the Russians. Then he's going to retire. He's already lined up a job at a cybersecurity firm, and he's going to get his full pension from the FBI. He's got it made. Problem is, as soon as he walks over to his car, two panel vans screech to a halt, doors open, FBI agents jump out.

He's arrested for espionage and ends up saying those fatal words. The guns are not necessary. And what took you so long? We not only knew exactly where he would be on that day in February on a Sunday in Foxtone Park, but the exact time that he would be on that day in February on a Sunday in Foxtone Park, but the exact time that he would make that drop. And that's because the Palm Pilot is a digital calendar. That's how you catch a spy. So finally, in 2001, Hansen pled guilty to 15 counts of espionage. And then in 2002, the next year, he was sentenced to life in prison without parole. So congratulations all around, right?

But how did U.S. counterintelligence change as a result of this conviction? Yeah, it had to transform itself. And in fact, in my book, Gray Day, I call Hansen the modern architect of the FBI, which can be surprising to Sun because he was the most damaging influence toward the FBI. He undermined the FBI for two full decades. They had to change not only the way that they hunt spies, but the way that they search for spies within their own ranks. And they had to do a large number of reforms. Now, the good news was that there was a DOJ IG investigation that identified all of the flaws and ways that Hansen was able to get away with this for so long,

and all of the things that the FBI should have seen or knew that they should have followed up on that might have led to Hansen's arrest earlier. And the FBI took that to heart, implemented all of those changes and protocols, and made themselves much stronger and more resilient to their ever being a spy like Robert Hansen again. Hansen is going to hold that record as certainly being the most damaging spy in FBI history, and quite possibly in US history for some time. Well, you call Hansen the most transformative effect on modern FBI. How did this case affect you? This case certainly changed my life.

It was one of the most unique, if not the most unique cases the FBI had ever run, and I was thrown right into the eye of the storm in the middle of the case. It certainly opened a large number of doors for me. But I think that one of the best things I took away from this case personally, it's not the ability to go speak in public or the movie that was made called Breach or my opportunity to write a book, but it was those conversations I had with Hanson, who was really a brilliant cybersecurity strategist, laid the foundations for a lot of my thought leadership on cybersecurity, hunting threats, and counterintelligence.

And that's informed an entire career in helping companies become more resilient, just like the FBI had to become against not only cyber attacks or trusted insiders, but all sorts of other outside influences that might want to cause them harm. And you can't pay for that in school. You mentioned the two pieces of media that came out of this story, your book, Gray Day, and the movie, Breach. Let's talk about your book. It covers the undercover operation in great detail. Why did you decide this was a story you wanted to tell and maybe even could tell? It's a story I always wanted to tell. And in fact, I always wanted to write a book. I thought that this was an incredible story. And I wanted to

tell the story of a great FBI achievement. I wanted to tell the story of the FBI learning about a spy and putting together an excellent operation to catch that spy in days. Even though it took 22 years to even learn about Hansen, we were able to catch him in under three months. That is extraordinary. But I wanted to do more. This wasn't just a memoir of how I caught Hansen. Gray Day tells the story of the evolution of espionage, using Hansen as the fulcrum of this great change in how espionage is conducted. And I think that story was important because Hansen was not only one of the most damaging spies in US history, but our first cyber spy. He penetrated computer systems to steal

everything he stole and dropped to the Russians. And now the majority of espionage is conducted through cyber attacks. Hearing your recollection of the Palm Pilot chase scene, it is no surprise that your story was also turned into a movie. And an actor, Hollywood actor, Ryan Phillippe, played you in the movie. I was wondering while you were actually in the mission,

before Hollywood came calling, did you ever feel like this is like a Hollywood spy thriller movie? I hadn't thought of it in the mission. In the mission, you are so focused on the mission, it's very difficult to see anything beyond the mission. It wasn't until much later, it's very difficult to see anything beyond the mission. It wasn't until much later, after the case broke, Hansen was arrested, he pled guilty. And I could start to talk a little bit about the case, not much, only that I actually worked for this guy, I was part of the investigation, and he was the most difficult boss that I've ever had in my entire career. I was discussing this with my brother, who was a Hollywood screenwriter at the time, you know, David O'Neill, and still is.

And he told me, you got to make a movie about this. And this was the first time I thought, maybe someone would want to make a movie about it. And it turns out that they really did. So suddenly with Hanson's arrest, this very intense period of your life is all over. And I presume you might be able to open up a little bit about it. Did you have an opportunity to talk to your wife at all?

When Hansen was arrested, I was not there. I was actually away with my wife. I was not going to be part of the arrest team because they didn't want to let Hansen know that I had any part in his downfall. But I was waiting for that call, all weekend waiting for that call. And when it finally came, the first thing that I asked the special agent who called me was, can I tell Juliana? And she said, yes, you can only tell your family. We're still trying to catch the intelligence officer when they come service the drop. Everything is still classified, but just her. And that's exactly what I did. I hung up the phone, pulled over, we were actually driving at that time, and just let everything go. And I told her what I'd been doing. Not a lot of the details, a lot of that was still classified, but why that this was an undercover investigation, that I wasn't just working a computer job, that I'd had to lie to her for all these months, and that that's why my demeanor had changed. And I was, you know, more difficult to be with. And I thought that, you know, she was going to get out of the car, you know, call a taxi and

disappear. Instead, she looked at me and she said, now I understand and gave me a hug. And it was one of the most important moments in our relationship. And we're still married almost 24 years later and have three children. So everything worked out for the best. Robert Hansen died just last year in 2023 while serving his life sentence in prison. Did you ever visit him or think to visit him? And how did the news of his death make you feel? Did you ever visit him or think to visit him? And how did the news of his death make you feel? Lindsay, I tried. I tried to visit him.

I tried everything I could. I just couldn't get in there. He was at Supermax Prison in Florence, Colorado. It is one of the most difficult places in the United States to get into. I tried writing the Bureau of Prisons, the FBI, and I just, I was confounded. And I wish I'd tried harder. When I started writing Gray Day, I wanted the last chapter to be a conversation with Hansen. And once again, I had the same difficulties in getting in to speak to him. I always felt like I needed to speak to him because I've never felt that I've had closure from the case. I later found that I was suffering some PTSD from the case.

I thought that maybe talking to him would help. I also really wanted to ask him a few questions. The last drop that Hansen made to the Russians included my information as someone the Russians should have recruited. And I don't know to this day whether he was doing that to flatter me. Had I really won him over? Did he believe that I could be a spy at his caliber, that I could take over where he was about to walk away? Or, and probably more likely, did he think that he could use me as a puppet in the FBI, that he could use me as his spy to continue to have access to intelligence and continue to spy from the outside? That's the question I really wanted to ask him. The other, of course, was why did you do it? And then, of course,

he passed away. And I was upset. He was a person who, even though he was one of the most damaging spies and not really a great person, had a huge influence on my life. And now I would never have that opportunity to have that final conversation with him and close the book on this case that changed my life in so many ways. Eric O'Neill, this has been a fascinating conversation. Thank you so much for joining me on American Scandal. Well, thank you, Lindsay. It's been my pleasure to be on American Scandal, and I can't wait to listen to the episode. That was my conversation with former FBI operative Eric O'Neill.

To learn more about this story, we recommend Eric's book, Gray Day, My Undercover Mission to Expose America's First Cyber Spy. From Wondery, this is Episode 5 of FBI Agent Turned Russian Spy from American Scandal. In our next series, in the 1970s, residents of a suburb in Niagara Falls, New York, start noticing strange substances and odors in their homes and yards. Then their children begin getting sick. And soon, a group of ordinary citizens will embark on a battle to expose the dangers of a chemical dump site under their homes called Love Canal. And in so doing, forever change the way America treats its toxic waste. If you're enjoying American Scandal, you can unlock exclusive seasons on Wondery+.

Binge new seasons first and listen completely ad-free when you join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify. And before you go, tell us about yourself by filling out a survey at wondery.com slash survey. American Scandal is hosted, edited, and executive produced by me, Lindsey Graham, for Airship. This episode was produced by Paige Heimson. Our senior interview producer is Peter Arcuni.

Sound design by Gabriel Kuhl. Music by Lindsey Graham. Produced by Paige Heimson. Our senior interview producer is Peter Arcuni. Sound design by Gabriel Kuhl. Music by Lindsey Graham. Produced by John Reed. Managing producer, Olivia Fonte. Senior producer, Andy Herman. Executive producers are Jenny Lauer-Beckman, Stephanie Jens, Marshall Louis, and Aaron O'Flaherty for Wondery.