Spy: The Inside Story of How the FBI's Robert Hanssen Betrayed America Read online

  Also by David Wise

  Nonfiction

  The U-2 Affair (with Thomas B. Ross)

  The Invisible Government (with Thomas B. Ross)

  The Espionage Establishment (with Thomas B. Ross)

  The Politics of Lying

  The American Police State

  The Spy Who Got Away

  Molehunt

  Nightmover

  Cassidy’s Run

  Fiction

  Spectrum

  The Children’s Game

  The Samarkand Dimension

  Copyright © 2002 by David Wise

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright

  Conventions. Published in the United States by Random House, Inc.,

  New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada

  Limited, Toronto.

  RANDOM HOUSE and colophon are registered trademarks of

  Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Wise, David.

  Spy: the inside story of how the FBI’s Robert Hanssen betrayed

  America / David Wise

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-1-58836-261-2

  1. Hanssen, Robert. 2. Spies—Russian (Federation)—Biography.

  3. Intelligence agents—United States—Biography.

  4. United States. Federal Bureau of Investigation—Biography.

  I. Title

  UB271.R92 H3723 2002 327.1247073′092—dc21 2002031867

  [B]

  Random House website address: www.atrandom.com

  v3.1

  To Thomas B. Ross

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  1- The Mole Hunter

  2- The Man Who Was Sunday

  3- “Oh, My Son, My Son”

  4- “On Second Thought, Give the Money to Mother Teresa”

  5- Headquarters

  6- The Year of the Spy

  7- “Soon, I Will Send a Box of Documents”

  8- “For Sale, Dodge Diplomat, Needs Engine Work”

  9- Anybody Here Seen a Mole?

  10- The Spy

  11- Hanssen’s Gods

  12- Diamonds Are a Spy’s Best Friend

  13- Let’s Play MONOPOLY

  14- “A Contagious Disease Is Suspected”

  15- “Oh My God, Look What He Leaves Lying Around!”

  16- “Life Is Becoming Too Fast”

  17- Play It Again, Sam

  18- “He Was Dragging Me by the Arm, Screaming at Me”

  19- Hibernation

  20- “There Has to Be Another”

  21- Mole Wars

  22- Recontact

  23- BUCKLURE

  24- The Wrong Man

  25- GRAYDAY

  26- Sleeping Tiger

  27- The Arrest

  28- Sex, Lies, and Videotape

  29- The Plea Bargain

  30- The Mind of Robert Hanssen

  31- “You Would Have to Be a Total Stupid Fucking Idiot to Spy for the KGB”

  Author’s Note

  About the Author

  Photo Insert

  1

  The Mole Hunter

  Disaster.

  Inside the Soviet counterintelligence section at FBI headquarters in Washington, there could be no other word for what had happened: the two KGB agents who were the bureau’s highly secret sources inside the Soviet embassy in Washington had somehow been discovered. Valery Martynov and Sergei Motorin had been lured back to Moscow and executed. Each was killed with a bullet in the head, the preferred method used by the KGB to dispatch traitors.

  There would be no more visits to the candy store by the FBI counterintelligence agents; M&M, as the two KGB men were informally if irreverently known inside FBI headquarters, were gone, two more secret casualties of the Cold War. The year was 1986. The FBI quickly created a six-person team to try to determine what had gone wrong.

  Meanwhile, the CIA, across the Potomac in Langley, Virginia, was having its own troubles. It was losing dozens of agents inside the Soviet Union, some executed, others thrown into prison. The agency formed a mole hunt group.

  Two years later, in 1988, the FBI still had no answer to how Martynov, whom the bureau had given the code name PIMENTA, and Motorin, code name MEGAS, had been lost. Something more had to be done, and the FBI now began thinking the unthinkable. As painful, even heretical, as it might be to consider, perhaps there was a traitor—a Russian spy—inside the FBI itself.

  To find out the truth was the job of the bureau’s intelligence division, which was in charge of arresting spies, penetrating foreign espionage services, and, when possible, recruiting their agents to work for the FBI. The division was divided into sections, one of which, CI-3 (the CI stood for counterintelligence), housed the Soviet analytical unit, the research arm of the bureau’s spycatchers. Perhaps, the division’s chiefs reasoned, something might be learned if the analysts, looking back to the beginning of the Cold War, carefully studied every report gleaned from a recruitment or a defector that hinted at possible penetrations of the FBI by Soviet intelligence. Perhaps a pattern could be seen that might point to a current penetration, if one existed.

  Within the Soviet unit, two experienced analysts, Bob King and Jim Milburn, were assigned to read the debriefings of Soviet defectors and reports of Soviet intelligence sources who had, over the years, been recruited as spies by the FBI. The two shared a cubicle in Room 4835 with their supervisor.

  The supervisor, a tall, forty-four-year-old, somewhat dour man, was not a popular figure among his fellow special agents, although he was respected for his wizardry with computers. He had been born in Chicago, served for a while as a police officer in that city, and joined the FBI twelve years before, in 1976. Now he was responsible for preparing and overseeing the mole study.

  For the supervisor, directing the analysis to help pinpoint a possible mole inside the FBI was a task of exquisite irony. For he knew who had turned over the names of Valery Martynov and Sergei Motorin to the KGB. He knew there was in fact an active mole inside the FBI, passing the bureau’s most highly classified secrets to Moscow. He knew the spy was a trusted counterintelligence agent at headquarters. He knew, in fact, that the spy was a supervisory special agent inside the Soviet analytical unit. He knew all this but could tell no one. And for good reason.

  Robert Hanssen was looking for himself.

  2

  The Man Who Was Sunday

  Jack was visiting that Sunday in February 2001, as he did every chance he got when business took him to Washington from his home in Trier, Germany. He was, as usual, staying with Bob and Bonnie Hanssen in their modest brown-shingle home in Vienna, Virginia.

  Jack Delroy Hoschouer—“Uncle Jack” to the Hanssens’ six children—was Bob Hanssen’s closest friend; they had met in high school in Chicago. Hanssen was an only child, but Jack considered himself closer than a brother. He had been best man at Bob and Bonnie’s wedding and was godfather to one of their children. He was so close that he telephoned Hanssen every day, without fail, from wherever he was.

  They had bonded almost immediately at Taft High School in Chicago’s Norwood Park, the bookish, bespectacled Hoschouer and his taller, somber friend. Both were quiet and not drawn to sports, but they shared an interest in Formula One racing and girls. As adults, both were avid surfers of Internet porn sites; they were connoisseurs of the wide range of naked women, appealing
to various sexual appetites, depicted in cyberspace. Hanssen would e-mail Hoschouer in Germany: had Jack seen this or that website? Check it out, Hanssen would suggest, the women and the sexual acrobatics on display were awesome.

  Bob Hanssen, as Hoschouer well knew, was fascinated by sex and pornography, and not only on the Internet. When Jack was in Washington, they often secretly slipped away to visit strip clubs.

  They also spent hours discussing philosophy, religion, and literature. Their career paths had diverged. Hoschouer was a military man; he had commanded an air infantry company in Vietnam and went into the arms business after he retired from the Army. Hanssen, meanwhile, was in Washington and New York, building his career in FBI counterintelligence.

  The two friends talked about more than sex and salvation. Intelligence was another subject of mutual interest. At the bureau, it was Hanssen’s daily preoccupation. And Jack had served five years as an Army attaché at the United States embassy in Bonn, a job in which he had a lot to do with intelligence. In Germany, Hoschouer had often met with his Soviet opposite number in an accepted, familiar game of trading intelligence tidbits.

  Now, in northern Virginia on this February 18, Hoschouer was enjoying the last day of his visit. The quiet winter Sunday had begun like any other. The Hanssens, as usual, went to church. To those who knew the family, the Roman Catholic Church appeared central to their lives. Born a Lutheran, Hanssen had converted to Catholicism at the behest of his wife soon after their marriage. Their three boys and three girls attended Catholic schools. Hanssen not only went to mass frequently—often daily—he was a dedicated member of Opus Dei, a secretive, highly conservative, and somewhat mysterious Catholic group that emphasizes spirituality and prayer in the daily lives of its lay members. Hanssen frequently tried to persuade Catholic friends to come with him to Opus Dei meetings.

  Hoschouer was about to join the Hanssens as they were leaving for church when his wife, Aya, called from Germany. He decided to talk to her rather than accompany the Hanssens.

  After lunch, Hoschouer and Hanssen lazily threw the Frisbee for Bob’s dog, Sunday, a black mixed breed, part mastiff, part Labrador. Around 3 P.M., back inside, Hanssen handed his friend a copy of The Man Who Was Thursday, G. K. Chesterton’s novel about seven men who are apparent anarchists—the early twentieth-century version of today’s terrorists. Hanssen urged Jack to read it.

  Each of the characters in the novel is named for a day of the week. Sunday, their leader, is a massive, outsize figure with supernatural powers who represents nature or the universe. But in the dreamlike fantasy, nothing is as it first appears. All six of Sunday’s followers turn out to be undercover Scotland Yard detectives, recruited in a dark room by a mysterious, unseen man who, of course, was really Sunday. But why was a senior police official leading such a convoluted, complex double life?

  Hoschouer, later reflecting on that day, thought he understood why the book held a special attraction for Hanssen. Not one of the characters was what he first seemed to be; all were secretly somebody else. There were other intriguing bits. Of Gabriel Syme, the first police detective introduced to the reader, Chesterton wrote: “It never occurred to him to be spiritually won over to the enemy.”*

  In midafternoon, it was time for Hoschouer to head for the airport. He was flying to Phoenix to visit his elderly parents in Mesa, Arizona. The two friends climbed into the Hanssens’ three-year-old silver Ford Taurus for the trip to Dulles.

  They reached the airport, but Hanssen did not follow their customary routine. “Usually he’d park and he’d come in and we’d have a cup of coffee,” Hoschouer recalled. “Actually, he didn’t drink coffee, he’d have a Coke. This time he just dropped me off. I didn’t think anything about that because I knew his daughter Jane and his son-in-law were coming for dinner, so it seemed perfectly normal.” Richard Trimber, Jane’s husband, was a young associate in a downtown Washington law firm. The Trimbers had four children; Bob Hanssen, at fifty-six, was a grandfather.

  With a wave, Hanssen was gone. Hoschouer checked in and about 6 P.M. boarded his flight to Phoenix.

  * * *

  From the airport, Hanssen did not return directly to his home at 9414 Talisman Drive. He drove instead to Foxstone Park, a few blocks from his house.

  There, he placed a piece of white adhesive tape in a vertical position on one of the poles that supported the park sign. Like some malign doppelgänger of Clark Kent, Special Agent Robert Hanssen of the FBI had figuratively changed costume and stepped into his other, secret life as “Ramon,” ace agent of the Sluzhba Vneshnei Razvedki, or SVR, the successor to the KGB. The tape was a signal to the Russian spy agency that secret documents would be waiting at a dead drop, a hiding place inside the park, ready for them to pick up.

  This was no sudden transformation of loyalties to Moscow by Robert Hanssen. He did not have an epiphany in Foxstone Park. He had secretly been a Russian spy, on and off, for almost twenty-two years. He was Moscow’s mole, operating from within the very heart of American counterintelligence. He had turned over more than six thousand pages of classified documents, including many of the nation’s most sensitive secrets, to the Russians. In return, he had been paid more than $600,000 in cash and diamonds, and told that another $800,000 had been deposited to his account in a Moscow bank, for a total of $1.4 million.

  As Hanssen’s reward this day, the Russians had stashed $50,000 in used hundred-dollar bills in dead drop LEWIS, a hiding place in Arlington beneath a wooden stage in an outdoor amphitheater in the Long Branch Nature Center.

  From his car, Hanssen removed a large plastic garbage bag, tightly secured at the top with clear tape. To anyone watching, it might appear, at worst, that someone was furtively dumping unwanted trash in the park. The garbage bag, however, contained not trash but a computer disk and seven FBI documents, each classified SECRET. These would be of great interest to the SVR’s leaders in Yasenevo, the agency’s headquarters on the Moscow ring road. They revealed the FBI’s current and proposed counterintelligence operations against certain Russian officials and installations in the United States.

  It was just after 4:30 P.M. Hanssen made his way along the path through the trees to a wooden footbridge that crossed over Wolf Trap Creek, the narrow stream that meanders through the park. To the Russians and Hanssen, this was dead drop ELLIS. Carefully, he placed the bag out of sight, just under the bridge.

  It took him another four minutes to emerge from the woods and walk to his car.

  At that instant, he knew.

  The men moving toward him were armed with submachine guns.

  Hanssen had realized the risks. He had reminded the Russians in a letter just three months earlier that the espionage laws in the United States had been changed. If caught, he warned, he might not just be sent to prison.

  He might face the penalty of death.

  *G. K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday, annotated by Martin Gardner (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1999), p. 105. Originally published in 1907. In retrospect, Hoschouer wondered whether Hanssen had even named his dog for Chesterton’s character Sunday.

  3

  “Oh, My Son, My Son”

  Norwood Park is a working-class, predominantly white area on the northwest fringe of Chicago. “It was the only neighborhood in Chicago that looked like the suburbs, with one-family houses set on lawns,” recalled James D. Ohlson, who grew up nearby and later became a friend of Hanssen when both served in the FBI.

  The neighborhood’s politics reflected its demographics; Norwood Park was a conservative stronghold. “It was,” Ohlson noted, “the only Republican ward in Mayor Daley’s Chicago. Police, firefighters, teachers, and other city employees had to live in Chicago, and our ward was filled with them.”

  Howard Hanssen, a Chicago police officer, and his wife, Vivian, lived in a modest two-story white bungalow in Norwood Park at 6215 North Neva Avenue. Howard Hanssen was serving as a petty officer in the Navy during World War II when, on April 18, 1944, their son and only ch
ild, Robert Philip, was born.

  Before joining the force, Howard Hanssen had worked for the Campbell Soup Company, mixing spices for the vats. In the Navy, stationed at Great Lakes, Illinois, he had traded one police uniform for another. “He was a shore patrolman and traveled the trains, bringing back prisoners and AWOLs,” Vivian Hanssen recalled.

  The Hanssens on Howard’s side were Danish or German, Vivian Hanssen thought. “Most likely Danish because of the double ‘s.’ I was never sure which and I don’t think he was sure. He came from a part that went back and forth.” Vivian Baer Hanssen’s own family background was German.

  An intelligent and articulate woman, Vivian Hanssen was eighty-eight years old, widowed, and living in Venice, Florida, when her son was arrested as a Russian spy. Devastated by the news, she could offer no explanation for his actions. “He had a normal childhood. He was never in any trouble. Maybe a few things he wasn’t happy about that I didn’t know. But I don’t want to talk about that.

  “He had a pretty strict dad,” she added. “I was the lenient one. He never showed any problems with me.”

  But Howard Hanssen, by several accounts, was more than strict; he was a stern disciplinarian, verbally and sometimes even physically abusive toward his son. Once, his father rolled him up in an old Navy mattress so he could not move. Trapped, with his arms pinned, Robert became frightened and began to cry. According to another account, Hanssen’s father would spin him around until he became so dizzy he threw up, a bizarre punishment apparently designed to toughen him up. For much the same reason, his father, when Hanssen was a teenager, even secretly arranged for his son to fail his driving test. As a Chicago cop, Howard Hanssen could have managed this without any great difficulty.