WASHINGTON — Congressional leaders on Wednesday demanded to know how the FBI failed to catch a suspected Russian spy in its ranks for 15 years and what steps authorities will take to prevent a recurrence of the worst spy scandal in the agency's history.
At a three-hour closed-door briefing with the heads of the FBI, the CIA and the Justice Department, members of the Senate Intelligence Committee mulled possible spy-catching remedies that included more aggressive use of polygraph tests, financial audits and computer surveillance of FBI agents to detect suspicious activity, officials said.
But lawmakers stressed that there may be no single solution in avoiding the type of national security threat brought to light by last week's arrest of Robert Philip Hanssen on espionage charges.
"I don't think there's any silver bullet, that you do one thing and you solve your problem," Sen. Bob Graham of Florida, the senior Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, said in an interview.
"It tends to be an accumulation of techniques," he said. "It might be polygraph plus lifestyle studies plus computer surveillance plus financial records audits and more, which collectively begins to form a picture . . . [and] might send up some signals that that picture says you've got a problem" with an agent.
Hanssen, a senior FBI agent responsible for catching Russian spies, was arrested on espionage charges Feb. 18, minutes after FBI agents said they saw him leave a cache of secret documents for his Russian handlers at a park near his home in suburban Washington. He is accused of spying for more than 15 years in exchange for $1.4 million in cash and diamonds. He intends to plead not guilty to the charges.
FBI Director Louis J. Freeh, who testified before the panel, has already initiated a broad review of the agency's counterespionage measures in the wake of the Hanssen case, but members of the intelligence committee made clear that they want to press for answers on their own.
Based on what the committee heard Wednesday, said Sen. Richard C. Shelby (R-Ala.), the head of the Intelligence Committee, "we're not satisfied with anything at this point. . . . This is a very, very grave, serious case.
"This committee is going to hold Director Freeh, the director of the CIA, the attorney general, the Justice Department--whoever might be involved in any aspect of this case--we're going to hold them accountable," Shelby said.
