In this episode, retired agent Wayne Barnes reviews a 1998 espionage investigation where he was assigned to ferret out a suspected mole within the FBI spying for the former Soviet Union and Russia. This involved recruiting Ivan Fyodorovich Kurylenko, a former Soviet intelligence operative who was believed to be aware of the mole’s identity.
Ivan, who was seeking American backers for a film project, was going to be at the American Film Market, an industry sales and marketing event held in California. Wayne went undercover as a representative for wealthy Texans looking to invest in films. He secured Ivan’s trust and arranged the scenario where Ivan agreed to look at a photo spread of possible suspects.
Wayne’s undercover case, which he recounts in his true crime book, “A Traitor in the FBI: The Hunt for a Russian Mole,” provides a backstory to the investigation that eventually determined FBI agent Robert Hanssen was the mole.
Between 1979 and his arrest in 2001, Hanssen spied for the Soviet Union and the post-Cold War Russian government, selling to Moscow operatives roughly 6,000 classified documents.
It took Wayne seven years before the FBI Prepublication Review Office (PRO) granted him permission to make his story public.
“And Mike got right to it. He was obviously in charge. He said, ‘We have penetration of US intelligence. It could be someone in the FBI. There is a Russian coming to a film festival in two months in Santa Monica. We want you to go to the festival, find him, meet him, befriend him, recruit him, and then show him these photos of a dozen senior US intelligence people and have him point out the mole in the FBI.’”—Retired Agent Wayne Barnes
To learn more about the investigation of Robert Hanssen, listen to FBI Case File review episode 031: Mike Rochford – FBI Betrayal, Robert Hanssen.
Special Agent (Retired)
Wayne Barnes
1971 – 2000
Wayne Barnes served in the FBI for 29 years. He was initially assigned to the Los Angeles and New York Divisions and language school in Monterey, CA.
However, he spent much of his career in the Washington Field Office (WFO) where he worked counterintelligence, successfully recruiting Eastern European intelligence targets to defect during the 1970s and 1980s. Wayne was also the undercover coordinator.
He later relocated to the San Diego Field Office to accommodate his daughter’s medical treatments for spina bifida. While on the West Coast, much of his work involved investigations into healthcare fraud, where he had a significant role in the multi-agency San Diego Regional Healthcare Fraud Task Force. It was during this period he was assigned to a sensitive counterintelligence undercover role no one in in the San Diego Division was aware he was working .
Currently, Wayne works in Florida as a licensed private investigator and operates Wayne Barnes Investigations.
The following is an FBI article about the investigation of former FBI agent Robert Hanssen for selling classified information to the former Soviet Union and Russia:
FBI Website Famous Cases and Criminals – Robert Hanssen
.
