The spycraft may have been straight out of a Russian playbook, but the game first began with a stroke of pure luck on the part of US-based Soviet spooks.
Unexpectedly, in 1979, a former Chicago cop -- a devout and conservative family man -- walked into a Soviet business in New York that was famously a front for Cold War intelligence operatives. Robert Hanssen, who’d jumped from the Windy City police force to the FBI just three years earlier, offered to hand over top-secret details to the GRU, the Soviet military intelligence organization.
