When FBI tactical agents wielding assault rifles confronted Robert Hanssen one Sunday evening in 2001, the most dangerous spy in US history was finally put out of service.
Hanssen, a senior FBI special agent at the time, had just finished stashing a trove of classified documents under a bridge in Virginia that was intended to later be collected by his Russian handlers.
As in the similar case of former CIA officer Aldrich Ames, who had been arrested by the FBI seven years earlier after similarly passing secrets for years that led to the execution of countless Russian intelligence officials covertly working for the US government, and the later arrests of accused leakers Chelsea Manning and Reality Winner, celebration inside the intelligence community after finally catching a spy is often short-lived.
What typically follows a successful mole hunt is an intense period of public outrage, accusations of gross incompetence, and the launching of congressional and inspector general investigations aimed at determining how the US intelligence community could have been so vulnerable to compromise.
Such is the familiar situation the Defense Department and the larger US intelligence community now finds itself in as the fallout continues from the disclosure of a tranche of highly classified government secrets online with topics reportedly ranging from battlefield estimates pertaining to Russia’s war against Ukraine, internal fighting in the Kremlin, and US intelligence collection on its allies.
On Thursday, US Attorney General Merrick Garland announced that 21-year-old Massachusetts Air National Guardsman Jack Teixeira was taken into custody by federal agents and accused of “alleged unauthorized removal, retention and transmission of classified national defense information.”
While there is currently no indication that Teixeira allegedly…
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