The Main Enemy

by Milton Bearden

  Hanssen spied for the GRU until his wife discovered his espionage in 1980. When she walked in on him in the basement of their home in Scarsdale, New York, he suddenly began to cover up what he was doing. Afraid that he was having an affair, she began to grill him, and he finally told her that no, there was no other woman—he was handing over information to the Soviet Union. He convinced her that he was tricking the Russians, giving them worthless information in exchange for cash.

  Bonnie Hanssen, a devout Catholic who was then pregnant with their fourth child, was stunned. She believed her husband when he said that he was “tricking” the Russians, but she still understood that Bob was playing an extremely dangerous game. She told him she thought that what he was doing was “insane” and that it might get him fired from the FBI.

  Fearful for her family’s future, Bonnie convinced her husband to go with her to talk to their priest. Bob and Bonnie were members of a small conservative Catholic organization called Opus Dei and went to see their priest at Opus Dei’s center in Westchester County, Reverend Robert Bucciarelli. Father Bucciarelli initially told Hanssen that he had to turn himself in to the FBI. That night, Bonnie cried herself to sleep, fearful of what was to become of their family. But the next morning, the priest called the Hanssens back and asked them to come see him once again. This time he suggested a way out—if Bob would give the money he had received from the Soviets to charity and agree not to spy further, he didn’t need to surrender to the authorities. Relieved, the Hanssens went home. Bob promised Bonnie he wouldn’t deal with the Russians again and would send his Soviet money to Mother Teresa.

  Bob Hanssen had one problem—he had already spent some of the money the Soviets had paid him. Bonnie was determined to fulfill their commitment to Father Bucciarelli and insisted that Bob repay the entire amount—about $30,000—and not just the cash that remained. Bob Hanssen realized that meant he would have to make installment payments to Mother Teresa for years to come. The family teetered on the verge of bankruptcy as a result.

  Bonnie tried to make sure that he was making the payments—and staying clean. She would regularly ask her husband if he was sending money to Mother Teresa and would also archly grill him about whether he had started up again with the Russians. Yes, Bob would say, I am still making the payments. No, he would say, I am not dealing with the Russians. Bob would act hurt each time she questioned him about his vow never again to work with the Soviets. Marriage is built on trust, after all.

  The Hanssens moved back to Washington when Bob was transferred to headquarters for a senior post in counterintelligence, and by 1985 he was able to tell his wife that he had finally paid off their debt to Mother Teresa. After years of barely scraping by, the Hanssens no longer had a secret financial obligation hanging over their heads.

  In October 1985, Bob was transferred back to New York, and this time Bonnie was determined to maintain a modest lifestyle so her husband wouldn’t be tempted to go back to the dirty but lucrative game of playing with the Russians. During their first tour in New York, the Hanssens had lived in Scarsdale, one of New York’s most expensive suburbs. This time, Bonnie insisted that they find a cheaper place to live, so they settled in a modest three-bedroom house in Yorktown Heights, a small town about ninety minutes north of New York City. There was no reason now that the Hanssens couldn’t make it on Bob’s FBI salary.

  But Bob Hanssen found the pull of espionage too strong to resist. So just as he was transferring back to New York he volunteered again, this time anonymously, and to the KGB in Washington rather than the GRU in New York. The Soviets never connected their new volunteer with the earlier agent working for the GRU in New York. Hanssen didn’t want any more slipups.

  At the time he sent his letter to Degtyar, Hanssen was about to take on a job with much broader access to the FBI’s counterintelligence secrets than he had had during his earlier stint as a spy. He had just been named a supervisor in a foreign counterintelligence squad in the New York Field Office, handling technical operations against Soviets operating at the United Nations and in the Soviet consulate in Manhattan.

  But more important, he had just completed an assignment as chief of the unit that analyzed information collected by the FBI on Soviet intelligence operations in the United States. He had also served on a special committee that was in charge of coordinating the FBI’s technical intelligence projects against the Soviets. So when Bob Hanssen volunteered to spy for the Soviets a second time, his head was filled with secrets, including many that the FBI had received from the Central Intelligence Agency.

  Perhaps the most explosive secret that Hanssen betrayed to the Soviets was the fact that the FBI and the National Security Agency had jointly built a tunnel underneath the new Soviet embassy complex in Washington. The new embassy complex wasn’t fully occupied yet, but the FBI and NSA had already constructed the tunnel in order to eavesdrop on conversations among Russian diplomats and intelligence officers. What’s more, the American contractors working on the embassy compound had been infiltrated with FBI agents, who had worked hard to ensure that the compound was built as one big megaphone. They’d even made sure that a special sound-conducting paint had been used in the embassy, including on internal pipes, so that sound would travel more readily and be easier to pick up from the FBI tunnel.

  Hanssen betrayed so many secrets shared jointly by the FBI and CIA, in fact, that years later, when counterintelligence investigators began to hunt down the source of the leaks, they were convinced the betrayal had occurred in Langley, not at the FBI. One innocent CIA officer, who by coincidence was both involved in a case Hanssen betrayed and happened to jog in a suburban Virginia park where Hanssen made some of his dead drops, would come under intense and prolonged scrutiny.

  Even Bob Hanssen may not have been quite sure why he had decided to become a spy. He was hardly a classic case. Unlike others who had turned to espionage as a form of revenge against a system that had denied them advancement, Hanssen was not stalled in his career. He volunteered to the Soviets just as he was being given a promotion. Ideology didn’t explain it: Hanssen was a devout Catholic and avowed anti-Communist. He lived modestly with his wife and children and carpooled to work, even after he took the Soviets’ cash. The money was nice, but there was something more. Perhaps the only explanation was that Bob Hanssen had an addictive personality, and espionage somehow fed his cravings.

  A native of Chicago and graduate of Knox College, a small liberal arts school in Illinois, Hanssen took a few years to find his footing. After majoring in chemistry and studying Russian at Knox, he switched to dentistry at Northwestern, later shifting to business and accounting. Married to Bonnie by 1968, he received an MBA from Northwestern in 1971, and by 1973 he was a certified public accountant, working briefly as an accountant in Chicago and then as a financial investigator for the Chicago Police Department. By the time Hanssen finally joined the FBI in 1976, he was nearly thirty-two.

  Following a stint in a white-collar crime squad in Gary, Indiana, he was transferred to New York in 1978 to work on accounting-related matters, but the next year he volunteered to join the New York Field Office’s intelligence division. With his business and accounting background, he was assigned to help create an automated counterintelligence database for the New York office. The database would help the FBI keep track of Russian intelligence officers operating in the United States.

  In 1981, just after he had broken with the GRU, he was transferred to FBI headquarters and began to move up through the ranks. He became a supervisory special agent in the intelligence division and later moved into the budget unit there, helping to prepare the FBI’s classified intelligence budget requests to Congress. Finally, in 1983, he moved into the Soviet analytical unit. The KGB could not have asked for a more knowledgeable or better-placed spy. Years later, American investigators would discover that the KGB came to consider their anonymous new spy, B, to be more valuable than Aldrich Ames.

  The trick would be to keep him producing secrets. But
Bob Hanssen had his own inner clock that would tell him when to spy and when to lie low.

  15

  Langley, October 1985

  Edward Lee Howard had been on the run for over a week when the first solid clues of his whereabouts began to surface. The FBI had traced his travel from Albuquerque to Tucson to Helsinki, but the trail ended there. Some at the FBI thought he had linked up with the KGB in Finland, then traveled into the Soviet Union under their protection. Others in the bureau felt he had traveled to Finland to throw off his pursuers, hoping they’d believe he’d defected to the Soviets and give up the hunt, thus allowing him to travel under a false name to one of his more familiar Latin American haunts. The CIA was convinced that once in Finland, Howard would head straight to the USSR.

  In early October, a clandestine CIA source in the Soviet embassy in Helsinki reported that over a period of two days at the end of September, there had been a flurry of activity at the KGB Rezidentura. It was whispered that a very important person was secretly spirited out of Finland and across the USSR border to Leningrad in a Soviet embassy vehicle.

  There was little doubt at the CIA that the mysterious visitor in Helsinki was Howard, though it would take the FBI a little more time to believe that Howard had actually crossed over to Leningrad. In his own book—written years later from Moscow, almost certainly with the cooperation of the KGB—Howard claimed that he had wandered the world before settling down in Moscow. He insisted that he had even spent time in the United States. But the CIA remained convinced that he was taken across the border into the Soviet Union soon after his arrival in Helsinki.

  Coventry, Virginia, 1530 Hours, October 25, 1985

  Yurchenko seemed somehow more settled. Maybe it was his recent trip to Nevada. We were outside now, walking in the cool October sunshine down to the lake that the Coventry property fronted. He was mildly animated about a beaver lodge he had been watching over the last few months, and during lunch he had insisted we walk down to take a look. Lunch had been another of Yurchenko’s quirky boiled-chicken-breast-and-carrot affairs. He still cooked for himself as if he were suffering from a terminal disease, and he still couldn’t seem to get beyond chicken breast and veal tongue. An American doctor had given him a clean bill of health; much to his astonishment, he did not have stomach cancer and was not about to die and rejoin his mother.

  Over lunch Yurchenko told me the story about Vladimir Vetrov, a KGB Line X (Science and Technology collection) officer who had volunteered to spy for the French five years earlier, only to be arrested a year and a half into his new career for a senseless murder in a Moscow park. A few years into his twelve-year prison sentence, it had been discovered that Vetrov was not only a murderer, but also a spy who had been working for the French under the code name FAREWELL. Yurchenko said he thought Vetrov had been betrayed by his letters to his wife, or perhaps by a prison informant. He wasn’t sure which story was accurate—he’d heard both at different times.

  Once Vetrov had been exposed as a spy, he was ordered to write a complete confession. When he handed the notepad containing his “confession” back to his KGB interrogators at Lefortovo, it was completely filled with a tight script that, upon close inspection by General Sergei Golubev, first deputy head of Directorate K, counterintelligence, turned out to be one of the most virulent attacks on the KGB establishment that had ever been produced inside the organization itself. Golubev, according to Yurchenko, reread Vetrov’s indictment a few times and decided just to lock it away. Yurchenko said that in addition to brutalizing the KGB, Vetrov devoted much of his statement to lionizing the French and the West. The hard-core Golubev—he’d headed the team that had interrogated Gordievsky a few months earlier and six years before that had been implicated in the infamous poisoned umbrella murder of Georgi Markov, the Bulgarian émigré writer—decided the confession should never see the light of day. Word nevertheless spread about the confession and about how Vetrov had walked to his execution without showing the slightest hint of remorse. Or fear.

  Now, proceeding down to the lake with walking sticks Yurchenko had fashioned from saplings, I decided to tell the KGB defector why I had dropped in on him unannounced. “Alex, I told you before I’d let you know if there was any unpleasantness coming in the press.”

  Yurchenko cocked an eye. “You have more unpleasantness, Tom?”

  “Yes, Alex, I have more unpleasantness. It is about Artamonov.”

  At that moment a glistening beaver broke the water’s surface beside the lodge at the point where the lake fed into a small stream. “There, Tom! See him!”

  Then, as suddenly as he had become excited at spotting his beaver, the KGB colonel became quiet again. After a moment he asked, “What is the unpleasantness about Artamonov, Tom?”

  “I said before that we would try to keep what we learned from you about Artamonov’s death out of the newspapers. But I’ve just learned that it’s going to be published within a week.”

  There was no expression on Yurchenko’s face as he listened. “Why?”

  “Because of our laws. There is a lawsuit by Artamonov’s widow against the United States, and we have no choice but to share with her and her attorney what you have told us.”

  “When will you do this?”

  I was struck by the calmness with which Yurchenko was taking the news—I’d expected a much more dramatic response. “I met with the Defense Department and the FBI yesterday at the Pentagon. The lawyers there representing all three agencies agreed that now that we have the full details from you, we must pass them on to Artamonov’s wife and her attorney. It has to be done now. There’s no choice.”

  “What do I have to do about it?” Yurchenko’s question seemed odd, out of context.

  “I don’t follow, Alex.”

  “Do I have to go to your courts and speak on Artamonov?”

  “Not yet. We’re looking at our options for dealing with that problem. Nothing’s been decided as of now.”

  I hoped I sounded convincing, since the question of Yurchenko ultimately having to testify in court was far from resolved. What was certain was that within a matter of days the press would explode with the whole sordid story, the kidnapping in Vienna, the chloroforming and hefty injection of sedatives for the drive to the Czech border. Then the panic when the KGB got Artamonov on “friendly” Czech soil and discovered he had stopped breathing. The futile attempts at CPR, the brandy poured down his throat by a panicky KGB officer, the injection of adrenaline by another. Then the understanding that Nikolai F. Artamonov was dead. Finally, the details of a cover-up that included enlisting the General Secretary of the USSR to lie to two U.S. Presidents. All of that would start appearing in the newspapers in a matter of days, and the man in the hot seat, Vitaly Yurchenko, seemed calm and appeared to be taking it all in stride.

  “Will you tell me when they tell his wife?”

  “I’ll call you myself.”

  Yurchenko’s face lit up again. “Look, Tom. The beaver!”

  Driving back to Washington that evening, I thought I should be feeling pretty good about Yurchenko taking the news about going public with the Artamonov case so well. But somehow I didn’t.

  In 1959, at thirty-one, Nikolai Artamonov was the youngest torpedo-destroyer commander in the Soviet Baltic Fleet. While his ship was on station near the Polish port of Gdansk, he met a beautiful Polish dental student named Blanka Ewa Gora. Nikolai and Ewa decided to escape together and ultimately set their sights on defecting to the United States. Artamonov decided to commandeer a motor launch from his destroyer, and then he and Ewa took off for Sweden across the Baltic. They made it to Sweden and never looked back. Artamonov had left a wife and son in Leningrad.

  After his defection, Artamonov was debriefed by the CIA and given a new identity as Nicholas George Shadrin and a job serving the Defense Intelligence Agency as an analyst of Soviet naval developments. While Artamonov had been convicted of treason and sentenced to death back home in the Soviet Union, Shadrin soon blended into
suburban life in the United States.

  That all changed in 1966, when the KGB counterintelligence group responsible for tracking the Soviet Union’s traitors spotted Shadrin on the lecture circuit in Washington, where his reputation as an analyst of Soviet military power was growing. The KGB decided to mount an intricate operation to turn Shadrin back against the CIA and ultimately bring him back to the USSR to denounce the agency and the decadent West. KGB Colonel Igor Kochnov was assigned the task of approaching Shadrin and carried two personal letters from Shadrin’s ex-wife and his son to win him over. Kochnov approached Shadrin in a Virginia supermarket, and Shadrin feigned interest but then promptly reported the contact to the CIA. The agency told him to convince the Soviets that he was willing to spy for them. Shadrin would now be a triple agent.

  The case only became more confused when Igor Kochnov, the KGB colonel who had approached Shadrin, volunteered to spy for the CIA.

  The case became so complex that the FBI, CIA, and DIA all became involved, and there were competing theories within the U.S. intelligence community about Shadrin’s true loyalties, even though he and his new wife eventually became naturalized U.S. citizens.

  By the mid-1970s, the KGB had lost interest in running Shadrin as a double agent. Instead, they wanted to kidnap him and spirit him back to the USSR as a prisoner of the espionage wars. For their snatch operation, the KGB decided on the European city where they felt most at home, Vienna. Shadrin would be kidnapped in Vienna, drugged, and driven across the border into Czechoslovakia.