Oral History Interview Michael T. Rochford October 1, Brien R. Williams Interviewer

Transcription

1 Oral History Interview Michael T. Rochford October 1, 2013 Brien R. Williams Interviewer This interview was produced in conjunction with the Museum s Witness to History program and generously funded by Target Corporation. National Law Enforcement Museum Brien Williams: This is an oral history interview for the National Law Enforcement Museum with Michael T. Rochford, the former chief of the FBI s Counter-Intelligence section. We re conducting this interview at the National Law Enforcement Museum offices in Washington, DC. Today is Tuesday, October 1, 2013, and I m Brien Williams. Michael, let s start with a little bit of your family background where you grew up and so forth. Michael Rochford: Sure. I m the third child of six, first boy. My father was a Chicago policeman for 28 years. He was a patrolman in the Eight District on the South Side of Chicago. I remember growing up sitting around the table in the two or three houses that we lived in, and at lunch break for him on his many shifts, or after shift, at night, he d bring home either rookies or seasoned policemen, and they d sit around the table and have coffee or a beer, and we kids, as we were growing up, would hear some of the stories about police work. We were all thrilled to hear all that, so I think it was an attraction that got eventually all six of us children involved in law enforcement in one way or another. So Dad had a little influence on us, or we just didn t have any imagination, one or the other. [laughs] Williams: Is your family background Irish? National Law Enforcement Museum 1

2 Rochford: Irish-Catholic, yes. It was interesting. I went to a Catholic grammar school, taught by the Holy Family of Nazareth nuns. Went to two Catholic high schools in the South Side of Chicago, one Brother Rice, and one, St. Leo, taught by the Irish Christian Brothers. Williams: Do you know when your family came to Chicago, how many generations back? Rochford: Just before the 1870s, 65-70, something like that. They actually moved from Xenia, Ohio, to Chicago. It was an interesting story of one of our great-great grandfathers, was plowing a field in Xenia, Ohio, his horse died, he didn t want to go home and tell his dad, he was afraid he d get hurt by his dad, so he went to Chicago to marry his second cousin or something like that. They moved out West for a while, to South Dakota, and then they came back to Chicago and that s where they settled. Williams: When you hear South Chicago you think of the University of Chicago, and a lot of crime, and what was it like growing up in that community? Rochford: It s probably not much different than it is today. Very blue collar-oriented, ethnic-oriented neighborhoods. But in my mind I learned a lot of sports. We played tackle football, we boxed, we played baseball and basketball every night across the street at Hubbard [High School]. There were always some fights that went on between folks, and some would call it gangland activity. We used to just call it neighborhoods. But we were kind of the athletes. We stayed away from that as much as we could, but sometimes cars would stop and call you names, and you d be a tough guy and say [unclear] and so it was interesting. In those days, you didn t expect folks to pull out guns. They d kind of just come out and try to see who was the toughest. It was an interesting way to grow up. Williams: What was it like racially at the time you were growing up? National Law Enforcement Museum 2

3 Rochford: This is before Martin Luther King [Jr.], Jesse [L.] Jackson [Sr.], and Father [George H.] Clements marched on Marquette Park in 68, but it s right around that time, so it was segregation. Although one of the high schools I went to was in the inner-city, at 79 th and [S.] Sangamon [streets], and so in going there for the last two years, St. Leo s, and playing basketball, racial issues to me were, like somebody else has got issues. I played ball with everybody and we re friends. But you always kind of knew where you could and couldn t walk and couldn t take a bus and things, so you become street-wise in a city like that. Williams: And your father, his whole police career was in that area? Rochford: Yes. In fact for a while we lived outside the city and then Mayor [Richard J.] Daley had an edict that all city workers, especially policemen, have to live within the boundaries of the city, so my father moved the family from Hickory Hills into 62 nd Street and Polaski [Street]. So that was kind of interesting. The rest of the world seemed to be migrating out of the city. We were migrating into it. Williams: After you graduated from high school what did you do? Rochford: Moved down to southern Illinois with my father, who had retired from the police force, and my mother and the rest of the family. My dad bought a 130-acre farm with my uncle, and they raised cattle. The house that they moved into was about 120 years old. It didn t have any indoor electricity or plumbing. So they asked me, my brother, and my cousin, who s a big, strapping fellow, and my brother s about my size, to dig pits around the house so we could put plumbing in not use the outhouse and also to help re-do the interior and put electricity in so you could actually flip a switch. So we did that for a year, during which time I studied and played basketball at Southeastern Illinois Junior College down there. But I got bored because I was used to being in the city, so my uncle and my father asked me if I was interested in trying to get back to the city, and I said yes, and my uncle introduced me to a couple of FBI agents who said they were looking for clerks to support the FBI agents in their investigations, and would I be National Law Enforcement Museum 3

4 interested in such a thing. I said, Sure. Could I go to school at night? Yes. So he did that, and then I moved to [Washington] D.C. with empty luggage. My mom took me out to JCPenney s. We bought one suit, two shirts, three pairs of Levi s, one pair of jeans, a pair of shoes and a tie and $200. So I got on a plane, came to D.C., and as I remember I was a GS-2 clerk for the Bureau at that time, in June of 74. I stayed at one of these places that s not open anymore right near the [Old] Ebbitt [Grill]. Of course you get sworn in, and the Bureau gives you a mandatory lump of $600, because they know as a GS-2 clerk you don t have anything and you can t afford anything. So, in their goodness. they try and give you some cash so that you can at least pay for some deposits, find a roommate, and live somewhere. Of course, they re burdening me with a payment immediately that you have to make back to the Federal Credit Union. But I was making about $135 every two weeks, and I was a file clerk at the Washington field office, which was then located in the Old Post Office Building, which became condemned 12 years later or so. I can t remember. That was my exposure to Washington. Within a month I was told that there was a J. Edgar Hoover grant available at Southeastern University, at 501 Eye Street, SW, and it was an accounting school, so you d go to school at night, and I did. I took 18 hours a semester for three semesters there and joined their basketball team. It was fun. We played some locals schools and lost every game, but it was very nice. After three semesters there the FBI decided that they were going to change a policy on sending its personnel out to Monterey, California, to study languages. They found it too costly to transfer agents and their families, so they thought it would be a cost savings if they could start sending clerks, who aren t married, out there and have them room together, and instead of paying a GS-10 or 11 or 12 salary out there, they d be paying a GS-2, 3, 4 a salary for a year, and what savings, right? So they gave an aptitude test to the clerk population and I took a test and scored pretty high, and the Bureau went to the top 12 people who they tested on this, they were clerks I can t remember, four or five from New York, four or five from the Washington field office, a couple from San Francisco. And they offered us the opportunity to go out to Monterey, California, for a year and study Russian at the Presidio of Monterrey Defense Language Institute. So I went there, got a motorcycle, lived with two other guys who were also GS-3 clerks at that time, got a promotion, from New York is where my roommates were from, and the National Law Enforcement Museum 4

5 understanding was once you come back from California you would get a promotion to a GS-5 as long as you passed your language test, and I did. On coming back from California I applied to American University, I only had another three semesters left. They took all my credits from my Southeastern Illinois College and my Southeastern University, and they also gave me some credit for the year in Monterey, I don t know, 60 hours of credit. So Russian became my minor and accounting was my major, and I graduated from American University in three semesters after that with a Bachelor s degree. Williams: What prompted your move from Chicago as a clerk in the Chicago field office to Washington? Was that on your own initiative, or what? Rochford: I m sorry. I might have misspoken. I was not in the Chicago field office at the FBI. I was always in the Washington field, yes. The decision to move to D.C. was strictly based on I was not comfortable, being so young, having been raised in Chicago, a big city, helping my dad out on the farm in southern Illinois. So my uncle saw that and that s when he introduced me to the agents who got me the job in D.C.. I went there in June of 74. Williams: When you took the test to become eligible to go out to Monterey, you were, in a sense, committing yourself to the FBI. You were ready to do that. Rochford: Yes, I really was. I saw it as a challenge, and you have to sign an agreement to stay there for a year with the Bureau, because they move you, and then a year after you leave California, because then they move you back to Washington. But then I figured that s only a year. I wasn t sure I wanted a career in the FBI, but I thought Well, a Russian-speaking accountant, maybe I can make some money when I leave the Bureau. What I saw was, upon becoming a clerk, was that many people had come to the Bureau as clerks with degrees already, and they had been promised, or thought they were promised, the opportunity to become and FBI agent after two or three years, depending on what program they came under. So I saw a lot of frustrated people who weren t National Law Enforcement Museum 5

6 getting in. It was kind of like today, not sequestration, but it was a freezing of hiring for FBI agents. So some really good people were clerks, and I looked around and said, Well, I m not married to the idea of becoming an agent. Quite frankly I ll go somewhere else if this doesn t work out." So I get my degree, and I apply to be an agent. I pass the psychological test, the investigative test, the background, and I take the interview and it s an interview panel. I m sent to Richmond, Virginia. There are three agents there. Judge [William H.] Webster had just, he d been the director. I guess this is Judge Webster had made an edict that every FBI agent can only serve to the age of 57 and a half. Almost everybody on this three-person panel was over 57 and a half. I noticed immediately in the questions that they were kind of targeting me with questions that seemed as though they were offended at my age. I was 23 years old, and [they] didn t think that I was going to be able to replace them, and some of the interview was about being provocative and trying to illicit a stronger-willed person. So I answered the questions, and then my marks came back as though I couldn t talk, and was not a good interviewer. So I thought, Well, I have accounting, passed their accounting test. I have Russian, passed their Russian test, and I put my three, four, five years in as a clerk, so I meet the requirements on all angles and also age. So I started evaluating it, and within a week and a half I came to the conclusion that maybe these guys were just angry because of the new rule from the director. So I thought, Well, I ll just write a letter to the director, because I was young and brash, and I typed it myself on a piece of paper that I m kind of ashamed of now, it s not very legible and there are mistakes in it, but I sent it to the office of the director, and I said Dear Judge Webster, I think you ve got an issue with the Richmond office. They just I don t think were very fair to me in my interview. Thank you for the opportunity five years at the Bureau. Enjoyed it. I got my degree, learned Russian and I m off to other things. So, you might look into this. I couldn t believe it. Within a month I got a registered letter back from the office of the director and it said, Dear Mr. Rochford, We looked into your allegations and it looks like you re right. They did kind of have a history down there of not giving high scores in their interviews to anybody under 25, but we consider your issue moot. We re going to give you another interview in Baltimore if you ll show up on this date. I said, Sure. I showed up, and at this time I m still thinking, This is kind of frustrating. I m not sure I National Law Enforcement Museum 6

7 want to be an agent. I saw my dad having to give so much up of his private time away from family when he was a policeman in Chicago, so I thought, Let s do it. Let s go through the interview. So I did, and they gave me great marks, probably more than I deserved, and they offered me an appointment to become an agent. So I went to Quantico [Virginia] and on August 4, 1979, I think it was, went through training. And during that training, you kind of start feeling like you re part of a club, but a very elite club. Everybody wants you to succeed: the instructors, your classmates, your counselor. You re given situations that test your mettle, but also they are teaching you skills like shooting, interviewing, interrogation, arrest situations, handcuffing, forensics, how to take fingerprints of a person, also crime scene photography, all these various skills and, you know, as a 23, 24 year old kid it s like wow, it s eye-opening. And I got out. I wasn t sure what I would do. I had this accounting background. My father was a policeman, I thought, Well, I ll probably work criminal investigations even though I have this Russian language stuff. They immediately assigned me to the Washington field office on a squad that was called CI [Criminal Investigation]-4, and their responsibility was to investigate Soviets who were assigned to Washington, D.C. and who were KGB [Komitet gosudarstvennoy bezopasnosti Soviet security agency] officers. And one of the lines of the KGB that that squad was supposed to investigate was Line KR [counterintelligence and security], which was their counter-intelligence element. They re charged with trying to recruit people in the FBI, CIA [Central Intelligence Agency], NSA [National Security Agency], U.S. intelligence community. And on CI-4 at that time there was this legend of a guy who was a supervisor, [W.] Lane Crocker. Lane s dead now. He was a fantastic mentor. He told me, Mike, you know, all the new agents are going to the applicant squad, but you speak Russian and we think that you re young, and we ve got some seasoned guys here. I want you every day to think about how are we going to affect the recruitment of a Russian intelligence officer. I said, Well, geeze, Lane, I don t know. I m just a stupid young guy. He said, But you speak it and you were in the place called the hole, which is where you do some translating for the Bureau. You get to know the Russian colony. He goes, You re familiar with their culture, and some of these guys that are agents on the squad, they just kind of need the interaction with young, new ideas. Mix with them and give them ideas. So I said, National Law Enforcement Museum 7

8 Okay, I could do that. I said, I don t know what I m going to do. These guys all have been in it for years and years. In fact, they were investigating an allegation of espionage against a CIA officer in Jakarta [Indonesia], and his name was David Henry Barnett on that squad, a very sensitive case. Over the next year and a half I start working with them on that case. A guy named [Michael J.] Mike Waguespack was the senior agent on that squad and he was the case agent of that matter. He used everybody on the squad, even me, to do surveillances and different support of the case. And so I learned real fast how an interesting big case, of magnitude that s pretty big a CIA officer involves not just a single person, it s not like a policeman just doing his beat, it s teamwork, and so it intrigued me. And the possible result of Mike putting Barnett in jail after he and two others interviewed him was really interesting. I thought, Wow, this is amazing stuff. So I kind of got, I don t know, I don t want to call it seduced, but kind of, by the work and the nature and the importance of counter-intelligence early in my career, and with a supervisor like Lane Crocker and the agents that were on that squad it kept me very interested. There s also an esprit de corps that you kind of develop among other agents and fellow agents and there s always the testing of a new agent by senior agents, but I found that all welcome. They welcomed me and they were very good to me, and every agent on that squad that I interacted with seemed to find a way to help mold me from a brash, young, egocentric kind of pig-headed kid into somebody who could actually help them in their cases, be an asset to the Bureau and actually have a career in the Bureau, and I thought. Hmm, this is pretty cool. So I stayed on that squad for 10 years, I was a CI-4, and then in 89 I had some facial paralysis that occurred due to a tumor on my face in 1989, so I had applied to be a GS [General Schedule civil service pay scale]-14 at FBI Headquarters, and right after my operation on my face I was offered that opportunity to go to Headquarters, or I had the choice, because my office of preference opened up, to go to the Memphis division of the FBI in the Nashville resident agency. So, I looked at the two and I thought, Well, I always liked the field, so I went, I took the Nashville transfer and moved my family by then I was married and had two children, Megan and Laura. I got married in 81, and my daughters were born in 83 and 86. So we moved to Nashville, Tennessee, and spent three years there, and worked some interesting stuff there. Then I got a call from some folks at Headquarters in 92, and he says, Hey, why National Law Enforcement Museum 8

9 don t you come back and cash in that ticket to be a GS-14 now? We could use you here. They sent me out to Middlebury [College Language Schools], Vermont, for nine weeks to refresh my Russian, then went to Headquarters. I thought I was going to get an economic espionage unit, and they sent me to Gallery Row [FBI Polygraph Unit] to be polygraphed, and I thought, This is weird. Nobody in the Bureau gets polygraphed in So, I passed the polygraph, and he sent me back, and Pat Barroco, who was the unit chief for the Russian Overseas Espionage Unit came up to me and said, Mike, you re working for me. We have this issue, it s called Major Case 43. We re looking for penetrations of United States intelligence community, and we want you to work on it with a couple of other guys. So I got to work with a guy named Jim Holt and [James P.] Jim Milburn, and we supported Washington field s efforts as they were going through the beginnings of the Aldrich Hazen Ames case. And I was the Affiant, the program manager for that case, which means any time we went to FISA [United States Foreign Intelligence Surveillance] court I had to swear out the facts the Washington field had given me about that case. Washington field makes the arrest of Rick Ames, and then there s other stuff that s still going on. In the interim, a guy named [R. Patrick] Pat Watson, who was the section chief for Russian Affairs, brings me over to lunch at, oh gosh, I can t remember. It s a place right near Navy Memorial. And we meet with somebody from the British Intelligence Service. He says, Mike, this fellow s got some stuff to tell you. We want you to represent us. It turned out to be the [Vasili] Mitrokhin Archive files. We thought we had an opportunity. He had volunteered to the British, and the British came immediately to the CIA and FBI and it said, Look, we ll share in this debriefing, but maybe you guys can make sure that you have debriefers that understand Russian. So Pat said, You re the guy. So, I was, and we kind of looked at it from the point of view, does he have input that might help us with these historical penetrations of the intelligence community. Of course, his information stopped around 1984, so there was none of that in there. Williams: I thought Mitrokhin approached you folks first. National Law Enforcement Museum 9

10 Rochford: He did. He approached the CIA two or three times in Latvia and Lithuania, and they pushed him away, and that s another story. It s much worth telling, but. It was a good lesson for the Bureau and the Agency that, you know, there s a history of sometimes not accepting volunteers, under the assumption or presumption that they might be provocateurs, or there s something squirrely about the way they act and their demeanor, and many times we make bad judgments and turn away a good asset. So that s what happened to him, and when he went to the British, the British did the right thing and still shared him with us. He was angry with us when we first met him, and he made it very well known to me and my fellow debriefer from the CIA, who was a Bureau colleague, [Robert B.] Bob Wade, that he didn t like the Agency because they didn t take him when he wanted to come. A very nice man. I ll never forget him, he was a very interesting guy. Williams: Let me do just a couple follow-up questions here. At the end of your year in Monterey, were you a confident Russian speaker? Rochford: No. And in fact, they tell you. There were four or five sections, A, B, C, D, and E, in our class. The first section, the A group, was a group that actually spoke. The others were all trained to do passive listening and working with language in the written form. So I was in the A group. I was pretty good at it. I don t know why. I guess because I took Latin in high school. So you get out of there, and you pass all their tests, and you think, Oh, I m okay. I did well in the Defense Language Institute. And then you get plugged into what the Bureau s needs are for a translator, and you realize how weak you are in the language. And so when I go back to the Washington field office and start working in the language on a daily basis, I realize I need a lot of help. So, I wore out new friends who were coworkers, who knew the language very well, and also by tapping them on the shoulder and say, What do you think? What is this? And also wore out a couple dictionaries trying to look things up. And that was a learning process too. I guess I never got really overly comfortable in it, but I felt, I actually felt that if I ever showed up in Russia I could probably speak pretty well, I could find a hotel, get to the airport. Of course I never went to Russia in my entire career. I never really wanted National Law Enforcement Museum 10

11 to. It became a situation that if the Bureau wanted to use me in any capacity where they needed a Russian speaker I felt like I could get through it. And if we needed to bring in a more expert speaker who was native, then we d do that. But at least I could get through the initial aspects. Williams: What was the role at the time of a clerk in the FBI? Rochford: They call them support personnel now, but we used to call them clerks. It is to support investigations or administrative duties within the Bureau. My function for two years was to work within closed files, which is to take old serials, old files that are in archives and kind of tend them. There were rules for destruction after five years. You tear out duplicates of, sometimes things would be filed in the paper world, and needed to be gone through. Sometimes old files would become part of new investigations if there was a history on certain things. So they had to all be retrievable and filed in a proper mechanism. If things were lost then you had to go find them, and so that s what I did. Another thing that I did as a support employee or a clerk was I worked on the reception desk on the fourth and fifth floor of the Washington field office, so I had to look at badges as people were coming in. There were no fobs or things like that, nobody keyed into anything, no computers. And I used to hand out tokens to FBI agents because some of them didn t have cars, so we bought a bunch of tokens, put them in a bowl, and they had to sign a little sheet, and they d take a handful and sign, and they handled their leads on the bus, right? And then on the fifth floor reception desk we had what we call probably inappropriate today, but we used to call the nut desk. Well, you d get outsiders that would call up and say that they wanted to report things to the Bureau. That was the first point of contact. Then there was a screener, who was a more senior clerk. I was a two or three here, and there were some senior clerks at GS-5, and he d do the interview of the person and he d determine whether or not they were suitable personnel that needed to be further identified by an FBI investigator, or turned away. A large part of that was if it was a full moon you d get people who swore that they were being communicated to by aliens or some crazy thing, so you found a way to deal with them and try and screen them so this guy here wasn t over-burdened. One day a fellow showed up downstairs and said National Law Enforcement Museum 11

12 he wanted to give himself up, said he d been to FBI Headquarters. I said, Well, if they turned you away, we don t want you. He said, No, no we want to come here. I said, We? He said, Yes, me and my son. We just got let go from a Cuban jail, we highjacked a plane about 15 years ago after robbing some place in Richmond [Virginia] and killing some clerk, and we ve been in a Cuban jail all this time. Now we re back here, we want to give ourselves up. We know you guys want to talk to us. Right. So I said, I ll send somebody down. So we sent somebody down. There was no enclosure around the reception desk for safety or anything in those days. The guard at the door then called me up and said, You know, he s got a package. It kind of looks like a weapon. I m going to check it, okay? I said, Yes, please do. So it turns out he had. It was a long arm, I don t remember the caliber of the rifle. So we re running his name as he s coming up, and I remember this special clerk over here checking the name and he goes, That guy s wanted. He and his sons shot and killed a clerk in Richmond, they wound up taking a plane to Cuba. Yes, get the squad involved. So we got C-1 involved. They wound up interviewing him, and it was kind of interesting. Crazy stuff as a clerk that would happen to you. Williams: What year did you come back from Nashville? Rochford: 1992, I believe it was April. Williams: In 79, [Robert P. Bob ] Hanssen started dealing with the Soviets. Rochford: The GRU [Glavnoye Razvedyvatel'noye Upravleniye Soviet military intelligence agency], yes. It was either 78 or 79. I don t think we ve nailed it down, but it s one of those. Williams: Right. Were you aware of him in the early years of your career at the FBI or not? National Law Enforcement Museum 12

13 Rochford: No, not at that time. I think I met Bob Hanssen, it must have been 84, 83, when he was first in the Analytical Unit at Headquarters, before he went to New York, and I think he was putting together some analysis on some stuff, so I interacted with some of his subordinates, Bob King and Jim Milburn, who later on worked on the Hanssen case, so it s kind of interesting how those associations work. Williams: Did you take a measure of the man at the time, or not? Rochford: No, I mean just another agent, and, look, in 83, 84, don t forget, even though I d been in the Bureau since 74, as an agent, you re always kind of just trying to do your job, you know? I wasn t smart enough to assess anybody, that s probably, somebody else should have assessed. [I was] trying to find my way, so at that time, no. Williams: You mentioned the Barnett case. He was operating in Jakarta. Rochford: Right. Williams: You were here in Washington, skilled in Russian. Put those two pieces together for me. Rochford: You know, it was just an accident being assigned to Lane Crocker s squad. Well, Lane engineered it and he asked me to help him. That squad, by the way, had done a marvelous piece of getting a woman from the Soviet Embassy to defect a couple of years before, Lena Metrokina. I worked with them on that case when I was a translator, so Lane had a look at me and my abilities in the Russian language as a translator during that period, and that s when he asked me to work on that squad after I got out of Quantico. So being on that squad I was just one of 15 agents, the youngest one, so Mike Waguespack, who s a case agent of the David Henry Barnett case, needed people to do important but really kind of grunt work. Other agents were doing more complicated things and handling their own cases, so Mike just said, Hey, Mike, you do this, okay? Okay, no problem. Because I wanted to help out, and wound up learning a lot from National Law Enforcement Museum 13

14 Mike and some of the other agents on that case. He was chief of station or deputy chief of station of the CIA s office in Jakarta, and the person who gave us the information about David Henry Barnett s treason at the time was a rather sensitive source who eventually gets executed, and we didn t know why he got arrested and executed. We found out later that his demise is due to Rick Ames treason. What I learned in those early years was how you work such a complicated case and you get some dedicated agents, take all the resources of the squad, and you keep quiet the predication, because that predication is based on a sensitive source whose life and wellbeing relies on your ability to bring justice to the perpetrator over here, David Henry Barnett, but more or less keep his involvement secret. And I thought, Oh, that s pretty amazing how that would work. Williams: Define the word predicator. What does that mean? Rochford: In trying to prove the elements of any federal crime you have to look up Title 18 [Crimes and Criminal Procedure] or Title 50 [War and National Defense] in the U.S. Code, and it tells you exactly what actions a bad guy has to perform in order to be investigated and convicted for committing this felony. One of the leads in an espionage investigation that you get is usually there s very little or no crime scene, unless you catch a person in the act or at the beginning of their actions. So the investigations of import that we ve had over the years have been predicated, started, through tips by either defectors or some source in place that helps us know that this action is going on, and then revelations about time, date, place, meeting, you know, circumstances you can throw an umbrella around, and then do your investigation, start tracking. But if you hadn t had that tip to predicate your interest, the bad guy would be operating under the radar and undetected, so it becomes really, really important for us in this business to have help you know, just all kinds of help technical, and living sources, and sometimes, like in the [John Anthony] Walker [Jr.] case, you get things like the wife who knew about it. She just calls up and says Hey. You know, she s drunk, and a couple of offices she called, I think, and they didn t respond because they could tell she was drunk, and then later on National Law Enforcement Museum 14

15 they take her seriously. So, it s interesting. These kinds of cases are complicated. Each one has a life of its own. Williams: You were possibly involved with the Edward Lee Howard case, is that one you, or the Ronald [W.] Pelton? There are all these cases that come up. Rochford: The way I got involved in both those cases was in 1985, again Pat Watson gave me a call about I was just a case agent, CI-4 and it was about 3:30 in the morning, and I remember Pat said, Hey, Mike, what s up? I go, Well, you called me, it s 3:30 in the morning, what s going on? And he was, I think a section chief, I might be wrong, and he goes, Well, you know, we ve got this thing going on. We want you to be at Fort Andrews [Joint Base Andrews] I think it was up in Maryland, by 5:30. Got a plane coming in. I said, Really? He said, Yes, and it s a Russian, pretty high-level Russian, and you used to be familiar with this guy because of your work as a translator, and we thought that you would be a logical debriefer. You ll be able to work with a really interesting CIA guy who I worked with over the years, and he works well with the Bureau. So you ll enjoy, you ll learn a lot. Would you do it? I go, Well, yeah. Should I tell my supervisor? Oh, your supervisor, I ve talked to him. He s John [N.] Meisten [III], I think. He told me I was going to be working with Reed Brose, who was my co-debriefer, and Reed was a very good man. I stay in touch with him today. He s a born-again Christian, very solid family guy. So we show up at Andrews Air Force Base at 5:30 on I think it was August 2, in 1985, and the guards all say, They left. What? What do you mean they left? Oh, well there was a big hubbub, I can t remember, C-1 or C-5 came in from Italy, actually was from Germany, and there s the plane right over there, and they left. Well, interesting. So Reed and I go What s going on? Let s call our supervisor. Let s call Meisten. Hey John, what s happening? He said, Well, they went to the safe house to start the debriefing. Here s the name of the safe house. You go there. Okay, that s fine. Of course, we didn t have cell phones. We had to go find a, I mean in those days a quarter, first of all, it might have been a dime, I don t remember. And use a pay phone. Sometimes the radios worked. Sometimes they didn t. So it was better not to use radios because we didn t have security. So I show up at this National Law Enforcement Museum 15

16 safe house, and there s a gaggle of people already engaged in the front room, debriefing. And we re kind of waiting outside in a car, me and Reed, because we don t want to be discourteous and interrupt their debriefing. And we get told on the radio to go in, just walk in. So we do, and guys like Bob Wade, who was a senior FBI assistant section chief, and Paul [J.] Redmond [Jr.], who was a senior agency guy of notoriety, are sitting in and talking to this fellow, this Russian, and he s a Russian colonel and his name is Vitaly Sergeyevich Yurchenko, and he used to be the security officer at the Embassy. And he pretty much telling the story of why he walked into the U.S. Embassy in Rome and offered his services. And he tells them about some interesting stuff, one of which was how Edward Lee Howard had been a spy and volunteer to the Russian, talks a little bit about the Pelton case, but he didn t know it was Pelton, he just talks about a volunteer from the NSA to the Soviets. And so they break after the morning and we go to the kitchen and the senior folks, who are doing the debriefings, started the debriefings, they re in the basement, they re talking to themselves about what to follow up on for the afternoon. So I m in the kitchen with Vitaly and I m trying to make small talk in pigeon Russian and he s nervous, I could tell, but I m trying to build rapport, because at that time everyone told me if you re going to be involved in this stuff you re going to have to build rapport and get to the heart of the matter, try to find out what their problems are, and spend time, just be there, and don t be strange. Be normal. Show a bit of your personality and don t be afraid to make mistakes, that s what you do, that s life. So, I m talking to him and I see this fellow over in the corner who I d not met that was off to the side in the kitchen. He was looking at me like we ve met, and I m going, Hmm, that s weird. So the guys come back up from downstairs, and we go into the side room and start the debriefing again, and this guy from the corner comes up to me and he s got glasses and short hair, and he says, Hey, who are you? I was a pretty big guy then, I mean I was in good shape not like now I mean I didn t take much crap from anybody, and he gets real close to me, and I could smell he d been drinking. And he goes, This is a CIA case. You don t belong here. You don t have permission to talk to that guy alone. Never talk to him alone again unless I or somebody else from the CIA is there, you got that? I said, I don t know who you are, but I ve been told by Pat Watson to be one of the two FBI representatives in this case, and we intend this to be a long-term National Law Enforcement Museum 16

17 debriefing, and I m kind of going to ignore you, I m just going to assume you had a bad hair day. He s putting his finger right in my nose. I m thinking, I m going to grab that finger and break it if he doesn t cut it out. And I didn t. Thoughts that go through your mind, like wow, pretty good stuff. So he says, Well, I m Rick Ames. I m telling you you need to So we find out later, after Rick is arrested, he was drinking. He was assigned to meet at the airport with us at Andrews Air Force Base at 5:30. He shows up early. He puts Yurchenko in his car, because Rick had already started his treachery with the Russians in February of 85, right? So this is August of 85. He asks Yurchenko, he says, Look, I represent the DCI [Director of Central Intelligence]. You tell me, nobody else, is there a current penetration of the CIA or the FBI? I ll tell it right to the Director of the CIA. He said, Well, all I know is that Viktor [I.] Cherkashin, who s a KR Line chief that s my case, by the way flew home specially in May to meet Vladimir [A.] Kryuchkov, the head of the KGB, and to talk with him about some special case. We never heard that lead until we arrested Ames. Yurchenko never told us that story. Now, he ferreted him off to the safe house without waiting for us, and of course Yurchenko redefects in November 5 of 85, and on that plane, who s supposed to be escorting Yurchenko back to Russia, is a joint recruitment in place of ours the CIA and the FBI a guy named Valery Martynov, and we thought he was safe. When they get to Moscow, the guards from the KGB come and grab Martynov off the plane, not Yurchenko, bring him to Kryuchkov, and Kryuchkov says You re a spy. What? I m not a spy. Kryuchkov takes a razor blade, he cuts the front of the briefcase, and there s I don t remember ten, twenty thousand dollars from the FBI and instructions from CIA on how to contact him in Moscow. He says, See, you re a spy. That s the evidence that causes Martynov to be arrested and executed. Turns out we found out later that that information came from Hanssen, and that s why the Hanssen case was a death penalty case. We didn t know all this at the time. We thought it was benign. Myself and Reed Brose went out to the plane in November of 85 to shake hands with Vitaly and see if we could talk him into coming back. We didn t know all this other stuff was going on. Had no idea. Of course, Vitaly said, No, no, get out of here. But that was kind of naiveté on the part of us and the Bureau and the Agency to not know all these complicated things. National Law Enforcement Museum 17

18 Williams: When did the FBI become involved in the Ames case? Rochford: Well, we were involved when we didn t even know it. Picture an aging forest where you have mature trees and old trees, and a tree falls down. You know, the old adage, does a tree make a sound in the woods if you re not there? And these trees are sources. And we started seeing in 1986 after Yurchenko goes back, and after Edward Lee Howard defected to Russia, we started seeing these trees, solid, good oaks, really good sources, be arrested and executed, and I said, Well, some of them might be because of mistakes, but that s too many to lose. You see technical operations go south, we see developmentals where you begin a relationship with someone to try and recruit them, or them to volunteer, and then they don t show up on the second meeting, it s like, there s somebody reading our playbook. And so in 87-ish, I guess, Paul Redmond from the CIA came to the Bureau and said, Hey, we ought to start looking at this stuff and see, and he together with a couple senior people, I can t remember, I think maybe [Raymond A.] Ray Mislock [Jr.] and Bob Wade and a couple others said, Hey, let s look. So they started. The Bureau had an internal group, looked at their cases to see if there were problems, Jim Holt and [James T.] Tim Caruso said, We re on, along with Reed Brose, Art McClendon, and that was at Headquarters. They had a little analytical group. And then the CIA looked at their own operations to see what were the fruits of their own demise of different cases, and why, who had placement and access and when, and why did they go bad. And so they did their internal and we did our internal, and in the interim, we decided we were going to get a group, a joint group between the CIA and FBI, in 1987, and we were going to do what Yurchenko suggested, which is, at a time when the KGB had not enough sources in the FBI or NSA or CIA, and they were the main enemy, by the KGB s consideration, they determined that they would be willing to pay a volunteer from those services a million dollars if they would cooperate and become sources, so we said, Hm, good idea. So we made a list of people in the KGB, both retired and on board, who might, if we interviewed them, and offered them a million dollars, might give us clues to identifying and prosecuting spies in our services. What if we got an honest, fair interview from these guy? And so I got to work on that group, and it was a joint group of the CIA and the FBI. National Law Enforcement Museum 18

19 Williams: Buck Lord Rochford: Yes, exactly. So, yes, you did your research. That s good. [laughs] Williams: What was the big break in the Ames case? Rochford: Well, we put surveillance on him and were able to get him at a meeting with Yuri Karetkin, overseas in a place called Bolla Central, and we dispatched some surveillance, and that combined with a trash cover where we had some he tore up a Post-it note saying he could come to this meeting, couldn t go to the next, I can t remember the specifics on that Post-it, but it was basically a spy note. You combine those two issues, and what you have is a travel match and a meeting with Russians and then the Post-it note, you got a guy who had placement and access to some of the compromise cases in the 80s, but not all of them. And upon his arrest it became evident that it couldn t lay the seeds of destruction for all these sources just at him. So we had to look further. Williams: Did you get some good information from the Buck Lord? How many million dollars did you spend? Rochford: It s interesting. You have high hopes that these things would work. And this is some agreement that we had between the director of the CIA and the director of the FBI. Each would dedicate resources and each would kick in $500,000, whatever. The list expanded and shrunk and morphed into a more useful list, but sometimes people aren t on the list but they hear about it, and they wonder why they re not, because they know stuff. The fact that the community was out there knocking on doors [knocks on desk] and talking to people became known, and so it became a form of advertising for the United States to just say Hey, look. We need to find these answers out. We know that a problem [unclear]. So let me just say that the program was a success, it was fine, it was a smart idea. It s what the business of human intelligence is all about. And eventually, National Law Enforcement Museum 19

20 of course, that s what got us the answer to Hanssen. I ll talk a little bit about that if you want. That was a little more public, because the fact that we got Hanssen is in that 100- page affidavit, and most of that 100-page affidavit is what my source was able to give us that supported his treachery. So that s something that s, let s call it a benefit, a positive result. Williams: The deal didn t include safe house or anything like that. It was just, you give us information, we ll give you $1 million, and you go back up to the Russian Embassy. Rochford: People are different, you know, so when you talk to them and find out what their needs are you have to be flexible. And in my mind, whenever you had conversation, you had the potential for a relationship, and so as long as there was dialogue and commonality, then relationship would continue, then you would see whether or not they were manipulating you or you were manipulating them, and then you could try and steer them toward your purpose, which is to try and find out answers. It really depended on what the circumstances were for each person. On the Hanssen issue it was a situation where he had certain information and we had a case that we had prosecuted. Uniquely he had agreed to testify in the case, and because of that he becomes a grand jury witness, and we can t, by order of the court, we can t allow him to go back, so we struck a deal, that we would like him to sit tight for the remainder of the case. And he did, he was very, very good. And that s very unique, it doesn t usually happen that way, but these were different circumstances at that time. Williams: Let s take a short break. [break] Williams: Okay, I think what I d like to ask you to do is you go ahead and tell your version of the Hanssen story. National Law Enforcement Museum 20

21 Rochford: Where to begin. Where to begin. Very complicated. What I ll do is I ll start with, if I can, our interest in him. How s that? And when I say interest, it doesn t start with the case. In 94 and this is my own personal interest in it maybe 93, we re kind of intense on looking at the beginnings of Ames, myself and this whole squad of people at Washington field office that I was supporting. And then there was another agent named Jim Holt, who s in my unit, he s kind of my office mate in a little cubbyhole like this. He s assigned to go to the CIA and work analytically with the CIA and with Jim Milburn on the beginnings of the Ames case. They develop a list of 24 or 25 suspects in that case, and it s before we get this trial match of Ames going to Colombia, or Bogota, to meet Yuri Karetkin at Bolla Central. So, Holt is coming back from the CIA one time, and he s writing this note on our computer system, to the assistant director, on the results of this internal look, these 25, 26 suspects, and he s on top of the list, and why. It s just about a page and a half long, it s a very closely held look. We didn t want it advertised throughout the Bureau or anything. Well, we find out that that note that Jim was writing in my office on his computer in the corner winds up on Hanssen s printer, and a fellow named Bob King, who worked for Hanssen at that time, in 1994 or 93, saw it and said, Bob, what are you doing? Oh, I m just trying to show everybody how vulnerable FBI computers are. And these guys are working on some stuff that they think nobody else knows about, but I m going to show them they re so vulnerable. He said, You can t do that. Who told you to do that? So he says, You ve got to report this. So he reports it to his section chief, and that section chief talks to our section chief, who is [Raymond] Ray [A.] Mislock [Jr.] who says Hey, this should never have been looked at. Bob, we re going to put you in charge and you re trying to help us fix our computers. You stay over here. Don t ever do this again. But we found out about it inside that unit. We re looking at penetrations in the intelligence community. And we go, Oh, my God. Why would he do that, but irrelevant to that is how much of the knowledge of what we re doing is going to be spread out? And we have to clamp it down. And we had no idea that he was a spy at that time. But this is when he first crosses our field of vision, and we re going, Okay, we, as folks that are looking at penetrations in this unit supporting Washington field office in their efforts and the Agency in this effort, have to make a promise to identify people like Bob and stay away from them. See him in the halls, walk National Law Enforcement Museum 21

22 away from him. He comes in our area, we kick him out. We can t have any of our computers on line. Our stuff has to be in its own separate LAN [local area network] and protected. And we have to be more vigilant. So, we kind of hardened our looks and went on about our business. And then Ames gets arrested and we start looking, and we build a huge matrix, with the help of analysts, that comes up with elements, and it changes from time to time, compromised cases that were not attributable to Ames. We knew somebody gave these things up. And we start looking. I become a supervisor from Headquarters. I was over there, program manager in the Ames case. I get assigned to Washington field office, and I m in charge of anywhere from 14 to 20 FBI agents at an off-site location away from the Washington field office, to look at continuing allegations of penetration in the community after Ames. A couple of them. It s all analytical, and on this particular allegation, and like I said, we had elements, and so we re thinking it s the CIA. We weren t smart enough to look internally at the Bureau. And some of the leads pushed us over to the Counter-Intelligence center at the CIA, so we looked at people who had access to those compromised leads, and of course we came up with one person that had great access to so many of them, and one of the primary cases we were looking at was the Felix Bloch case, and its compromise. So the person who got an award from the DCI for identifying the illegal in the Felix Bloch case was Brian [J.] Kelley, and so we thought, Oh, this is it, above all others. And we sit around, and we talk with the CIA folks, and we kind of voted on who we thought was the most culpable. We debrief our FBI director, who was Louis [J.] Freeh then, and we had to brief George [J.] Tenet on a quarterly basis on the progress of these cases. In the meantime, this other effort to try and recruit somebody for the answers is going on. Well, it s my turn to go out and talk to someone and try and recruit him, because the man would like to [unclear] that die this, and we invite this person to the United States under the guise of having a business relationship to sell some Russian artifacts, and he comes from a meeting he s here for two weeks and he comes from a meeting, and I meet him in the streets up in New York, and I pretend like I know him. I tell him, Hey, I d like to talk to you. He looks at me like I m crazy, and he should have, and tells me he doesn t talk to strangers, and I show him my business card, and we start chatting. Over the period of these two weeks on a daily basis I start taking him to lunch and dinner, and out for some drinks, and National Law Enforcement Museum 22