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WASHINGTON - One of the most damaging espionage cases in U.S. history was more the result of poor oversight by the FBI than master spying by Robert Hanssen, said a Justice Department report released Thursday. The FBI's deficiencies, including an almost blind trust in its own agents, enabled Hanssen to spy for the Soviet Union and Russia for more than two decades, according to the investigation by inspector general Glenn A. Fine. The report concluded that Hanssen, a top FBI counterespionage official, received little supervision and the bureau had few checks in place that would deter him from spying or...

WASHINGTON — When Aleksandr Zaporozhsky, one of four Russians delivered to the West in this week’s spy swap, joins his family in the United States, it will be only the latest unexpected twist in a classic story of espionage and deception. For several years in the 1990s, Mr. Zaporozhsky, a colonel in Russian intelligence who became deputy chief of the American Department, was secretly working for the C.I.A., one of the highest-ranking American moles in history, Russian prosecutors say. After surprising his colleagues by retiring suddenly in 1997, he moved with his wife and three children to the United States...

CIA plans to purge its agency Sources say White House has ordered new chief to eliminate officers who were disloyal to Bush BY KNUT ROYCE WASHINGTON BUREAU November 14, 2004 WASHINGTON -- The White House has ordered the new CIA director, Porter Goss, to purge the agency of officers believed to have been disloyal to President George W. Bush or of leaking damaging information to the media about the conduct of the Iraq war and the hunt for Osama bin Laden, according to knowledgeable sources. "The agency is being purged on instructions from the White House," said a former senior...

<p>Two years ago, Robert Philip Hanssen, 59, a former very senior FBI official with 27 years of service, was sentenced to life in prison. Hanssen had been spying for the Russians and betrayed American intelligence sources and electronics secrets from as early as 1979.</p>

What's up in the spy world? William F. Buckley (archive) The Big Bad Russians have pulled a fast one which bears pondering. The victim is one Aleksandr Zaporozhsky, by U.S. lights a hero, by Russian lights, a traitor. We learn that in November, 2001, he was enticed to revisit his homeland, on stepping foot in which he was whisked off, tried, and sentenced to 18 years in prison. Several questions immediately arise. True, Zaporozhsky spied against Moscow, but when he did that, he was spying against a Soviet regime ultimately repudiated by the Russian people. It was ten years between...

The Moscow Military District Court has ruled that it was Colonel Aleksander Zaporozhsky who gave up Robert Hanssen to the CIA. The court ended up giving the former intelligence officer an even stiffer sentence than the prosecutor had demanded. On Wednesday the former Colonel of the Foreign Intelligence Service Aleksander Zaporozhsky was found guilty of high treason in the form of revealing state secrets to the USA. Zaporozhsky was sentenced to 18 years in a high security labour camp and stripped of his military rank and all state decorations, though his property will not be confiscated. During his service, Zaporozhsky...

A former Russian intelligence officer has been sentenced to 18 years' hard labour for treason and espionage. Colonel Alexander Zaporozhsky, 52, was found guilty of passing information about Russian overseas intelligence activities to foreign governments for five years. He was also suspected of revealing the identities of more than 20 Russian US-based spies. Since his retirement in 1997, Mr Zaporozhsky had been working for an American company in the state of Maryland, but he was arrested in Moscow in 2001. The court gave Mr Zaporozhsky a tougher sentence than the 16 years demanded by prosecutors. 'Secrets to CIA' He was...