| ® || Through the Looking Glass | 261 puter disks containing hundreds of secret documents revealing the sources and methods of American intelligence. According to Cher- kashin, it was the largest haul of top secret documents ever obtained by the KGB (although it was only a small fraction of the number of top secret NSA, Department of Defense, and CIA documents taken by Snowden in 2013). Cherkashin told me the price paid by Moscow was a great bargain because it helped compromise “the NSA’s most advanced electronic interception technology,” including a tunnel under the Soviet embassy. Yet it was only after newspapers reported that Hanssen had been arrested by the FBI in February 2001 that Cherkashin learned the name and position of the spy he had recruited. Cherkashin told me that what mattered to the KGB was not “control” of an agent but the value of the secrets he or she delivered. “Control is not necessary in espionage as long as we manage to obtain the documents.” So in the eyes of the KGB, anyone who elected to provide it with U.S. secrets was a spy. “All we knew was that he delivered valuable documents to us and © asked for cash in return,” he said. “We didn’t control him; he con- re) trolled us.” An uncontrolled mole who provided secrets to the KGB and the SVR for twenty-two years was very different from fictional moles in the spy movies. I asked whether it would have been better if the KGB had him under its control. “Possibly,” Cherkashin answered. “But as it turned out, Hanssen was by far our most valuable penetration in the Cold War.” “Could Hanssen really be called a mole?” I asked. “A ‘mole’ is a term used in spy fiction,” he said. “We prefer the more general term ‘espionage source.’ ” “So anyone who delivers state secrets to the KGB, for whatever reason, is an espionage source?” I asked. “Certainly, if the information is valuable to us,” Cherkashin answered, “If some unknown person simply delivered a trove of top secret communications secrets to the door