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

by David Wise

  * * *

  When Hanssen was arrested, his wife, Bonnie, immediately called Plato Cacheris, the celebrated Washington defense attorney, and asked him to represent her husband. Cacheris agreed. He was used to high-profile cases; he had represented Aldrich Ames, the CIA spy, and Monica Lewinsky, among others. Cacheris asked Dr. David L. Charney, a Washington psychiatrist, to evaluate Hanssen, who talked at length to him about his father. Charney spent more than thirty hours with Hanssen, visiting him in jail in the months after his arrest.

  “If I had to pick one core psychological reason for his spying, I would target the experience he had in his relations with his father,” Charney said. “Hanssen’s father seemed to be fundamentally impatient with him.” His father, Charney concluded, was “borderline abusive.” Among the various punishments he imposed on his son, “he forced him to sit with his legs spread in some fashion. I’m not implying a sexual element to the abuse. But he was forced to sit in that position and it was humiliating.”

  Jack Hoschouer, Hanssen’s closest friend, said Howard constantly put his son down, and frequently complained that he would never be a success in life.

  These accounts might be discounted as efforts to explain away Hanssen’s espionage by apportioning some of the blame to his dead father. In American society, people who commit crimes often seek to paint themselves as victims. Whether Hanssen’s treatment by his stern father was linked to his later betrayal of his country can be debated, but the relationship was without doubt a troubled one.

  Jack’s mother, Jeanette Hoschouer, said she had a clear memory of several encounters with Howard Hanssen, in which he openly and repeatedly bad-mouthed his son. She remembers running into Howard at the Jewel grocery store in Norwood Park. “He would say, ‘Oh, my son, my son, is he ever going to amount to anything?’ Always something belittling about Bob. No matter what Bob did, it wasn’t right. I’ve never seen a father like that. He would never have a kind word to say about his only child.”

  Aside from putting down his son, Howard Hanssen’s chief interest seemed to be betting on the horses. He spent almost all of his free time at the track. Even family vacations were planned around a day at the races in whatever city they were visiting.

  People tend to edit out the bad experiences in the past and remember the good times. Hanssen knew his father was deeply disappointed in him. But in later life he preferred to cling to happier memories: his father taking him fishing, teaching him to shoot, building things together with Lincoln Logs. He remembered how he had tried to please his father by bringing him solutions to algebra problems.

  As a boy, Bob Hanssen attended Norwood Park Grammar School and went on to Taft High School. It was there, in chemistry lab in his sophomore year, that he and Jack Hoschouer met, beginning their lifelong friendship. Jack, whose family owned a printing business, had grown up next door to Norwood Park in Edison Park.

  Hanssen’s high school years sounded fairly normal. “We liked to look at girls, go out; we sometimes dated the same girls,” Hoschouer recalled. It was all casual, he said. “Bob did not have a particular girlfriend.”

  Auto racing also captured their imagination. Trying to emulate their hero, Stirling Moss, the legendary British racing driver, the two teens ran their own version of the Grand Prix on the back streets of Chicago. “We broke a few traffic laws,” Hoschouer said, “but we never got caught. We found some real curvy streets and saw how fast we could go. Testing our cornering skills.” These antics usually took place in a Corvair that belonged to Hoschouer’s mother.

  In 1962, at age eighteen, Hanssen graduated from Taft. His photograph in the Aerie, the high school yearbook, reveals a crew-cut young man, wearing a tie, looking perhaps slightly younger than his age. Near his picture, he listed only three extracurricular activities—the Radio Club, the Honor Club, and Teacher’s Helper—far fewer than many other students.* For his motto, he chose: “Science is the light of life.”

  Hanssen won a scholarship to Knox College, a small liberal arts school in Galesburg, Illinois. Hoschouer went off to St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota. Although the two friends were separated geographically, they remained in close touch. “We spent our vacations almost every minute together,” Hoschouer recalled. “He came up to St. Olaf once to see me and I went to Knox once.”

  At Knox, Hanssen majored in chemistry and math but also studied Russian. Momcilo Rosic, Hanssen’s Russian teacher, was an anti-Communist Yugoslav. “I taught him only language, a requirement,” he said. “Three or four hours per week, probably four.

  “I think Hanssen took one year of Russian; he was a chem major, and Knox recommended that people in science should take French, Russian, or German. I am a strong anti-Communist; my students knew that. It was the Cold War; it was a struggle between two systems.” Rosic said he was surprised that Hanssen chose to spy for Moscow. “He was certainly not influenced by me.”

  Nor was he influenced by his father, at least initially, in his choice of a career. Howard Hanssen wanted his son to become a doctor. Instead, after graduating from college in 1966 with a bachelor’s degree in chemistry, he returned to Chicago and studied dentistry at Northwestern University for three years. The choice may have been calculated. “I think he went to dental school because his father wanted him to go to medical school,” Hoschouer said.

  Hanssen himself later claimed that he, too, wanted to enter medical school, but lacked the grades. In any event, cavities and bicuspids held little fascination for Hanssen. “After college I went to dental school,” he wrote years later to the editor of his high school alumni bulletin, “didn’t like spit all that much (though I was in the 98th national percentile on my Dental Board exam), and decided to get an MBA and a CPA and go into law enforcement.”*

  In one of Howard Hanssen’s encounters with Jeanette Hoschouer at Jewel’s grocery, he complained about his son’s tuition bills at dental school: “He’s not going to amount to anything; I’m spending all this money on dental school.”

  In 1966, when Hanssen was studying dentistry, Hoschouer was taking graduate courses at the University of Hawaii. Jack’s fiancée, Ayako Matsuda, was a nurse at the nearby Northwestern Memorial Hospital and lived in the nurses’ residence. “Bob came over periodically to make sure I was okay,” she recalled. “I’d feed him sandwiches, sometimes a grilled steak.

  “He was so thoughtful. He knew I had to learn how to drive. He started to teach me. He took me onto the Kennedy Expressway, but I think my driving unnerved him. There were no more lessons after that.

  “As a student at the dental school, he got a complimentary membership at the Playboy Club; all the first-year dental students did. He was so excited he called me up and said, ‘Do you want to see what the Playboy Club is like?’ And we rushed over there. And Bob was so innocent, he said, ‘See those little things like bunny tails, you’re not supposed to touch them.’ ”

  While he was in dental school at Northwestern, Bob Hanssen met Bernadette Wauck, known as Bonnie, who came from a large and staunchly Catholic family in Chicago. There were eight children in all, four girls and four boys. One of her brothers, John Paul, became an Opus Dei priest and a professor at the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross in Rome, an Opus Dei institution; before entering the priesthood, he was a speechwriter for Robert P. Casey, the Democratic governor of Pennsylvania, who was an outspoken opponent of abortion. Bonnie Hanssen’s uncle, Robert Hagarty, was a monsignor.†

  Bonnie Wauck was the daughter of Dr. Leroy A. Wauck, a Chicagoan, Navy veteran, and distinguished clinical psychologist who taught in Milwaukee at Marquette University, a Jesuit institution, and later for twenty years at Chicago’s Loyola University.

  Leroy Wauck, whose grandparents emigrated from Poland, was trained by the Jesuits in high school and seriously considered becoming a priest. He entered a seminary and studied there for two years until deciding it was not his calling. Before studying for the priesthood, he had dated Frances Hagarty, whose family roots were in Ireland, and
they were married in 1944. Bonnie, their second daughter, was born two years later.

  Except for the years in Wauwatosa, Wisconsin, when her father taught at Marquette, Bonnie grew up in Park Ridge, an upscale suburb of Chicago where Hillary Rodham Clinton also came of age. The Waucks lived at 609 Vine, in an old Dutch Colonial on a pleasant, tree-shaded street.

  Bonnie, Frances Wauck recalled, was “a normal child, nothing extraordinary, a good kid, an average student, not a brilliant student.” She went to the Mary Seat of Wisdom parish school. The Waucks, her mother said, were a close-knit family. “We all swam—summers on a lake in Wisconsin.”

  Leroy Wauck had once worked at the Chicago State Hospital, a psychiatric institution, and some of the children, including Bonnie, held summer jobs there. It was at the hospital that Bonnie encountered a tall dental student from Northwestern who worked there on weekends, sometimes even interviewing patients as though he were a psychiatrist. Bonnie was a sociology major at the time at Loyola, where all but one of her brothers and sisters went, taking advantage of the free tuition for children of faculty members.

  When she brought Bob Hanssen home to meet her parents, they both liked him. “He was tall, dark, and handsome,” her mother said. “He seemed to adore my daughter, he had good credentials in education—that was important to us—and treated her like a queen. That was enough for me.”

  They dated for about a year, and after Bonnie graduated from college, they were married in Park Ridge on August 9, 1968, at Mary Seat of Wisdom church. Leroy walked his daughter down the aisle. Bonnie Hanssen was twenty-one; her husband was three years older.

  The young couple moved into an apartment on Chicago’s north side. Bonnie taught grade school while Bob, who had by now abandoned dentistry, continued at Northwestern in his accounting classes.

  But within a week of their wedding, Bonnie Hanssen received a highly disturbing phone call from a woman who said she was Bob’s girlfriend and had just had sex with him. Bonnie might have married Bob, she said, but he belonged to the caller. When Bonnie confronted her new husband, he admitted he had seen the woman, but insisted there had only been some hugs and kisses. Bonnie tried to put the phone call out of her mind; she comforted herself by recalling what had occurred at a party at the state hospital. As Bonnie recounted it to family members, the woman was there and jumped onto Bob’s lap; he had stood up and dumped her unceremoniously on the floor. Still, it was not a phone call that a wife would ever forget.

  Having married into a rigorously Catholic family, it was almost inevitable that Hanssen would join the church. Before converting to Catholicism, however, he discussed the move with his mother, with whom he had always remained close. “It was shortly after they were married,” Vivian Hanssen said. “He was friends with a monsignor who was a member of Bonnie’s family; he has since died. He [Bob] asked me if it would hurt if he changed religions. I said no, I thought it was good for families to have the same religion.” After joining the church, Hanssen became, to all appearances, ultra-religious, a devout, zealous Catholic, and like his wife and in-laws a member of Opus Dei.

  Hanssen graduated from Northwestern in 1971 with an MBA in accounting and information systems. Afterward, he worked for a year as a junior associate at an accounting firm in Chicago. In 1973, he became a CPA.

  But Hanssen, even at this early stage, hoped to get into intelligence work. He applied for a job at the National Security Agency, the nation’s code-breaking and electronic eavesdropping arm. The NSA did not hire Hanssen, and he then sought work in law enforcement.

  At the time, his father’s career as a police officer was coming to an end. First a sergeant and later a lieutenant on the Chicago police force, Howard Hanssen had been for several years the district commander in Norwood Park, at the police station closest to the Hanssen home. Later, he was assigned to the notorious Chicago police “red squad,” which engaged in illegal domestic surveillance of suspected Communists, leftists, political activists, and others deemed dangerous by Mayor Richard Daley’s police force. In the early 1970s, the red squad fell into disrepute, as its activities and “subversive” targets—including the League of Women Voters and church groups—became known.*

  Bill Houghton, a senior FBI analyst, had worked with Hanssen and knew him well. “He always spoke incredibly highly about his father. At one time after his father died he brought up his father’s badge and held it like it was an icon. He used to talk about his father a lot. He would talk about his dad once a week. He always referred to his father in glowing, positive terms. He appeared to me to worship his father.”

  Hanssen told Houghton about his father’s work on the Chicago red squad in the 1950s and 1960s. “Bob was proud of all the wiretapping and the break-ins and all the stuff that the squad did back then. In the early seventies the Chicago PD was starting to look into these things. He told me the squad was under his dad’s supervision by then and a lot of the material that was collected had been gathered illegally.

  “He said his dad took full responsibility for it. He told me there was a mysterious fire that broke out in the room that contained the file cabinets, and only the cabinets that contained the material from the red squad were destroyed; the cabinets right next to it were not burned. He told me the authorities were not amused by this incident. His father retired but there was a serious cloud over him. And Bob expressed great anguish about it. ‘These liberal pinko bastards got away with everything and here they are trying to blame it on my dad.’ He was very angry and bitter over a system that would allow his father to take the heat, while a lot of these pinko liberals got away with it.”

  Was Robert Hanssen angry that his father was wrongfully blamed, or because his father had in fact burned the files and was condemned instead of being secretly applauded inside the department? Houghton said Bob Hanssen was clear on the point. “He said his father had instigated the fire to destroy the evidence. Exactly.” †

  It was in July 1972 that Howard Hanssen retired. He did not, according to Jack Hoschouer, want his son to follow in his footsteps as a cop, but Hanssen did exactly that, joining the department in October, three months after his father had left the force.

  The ambivalence of Hanssen’s relationship with his father was underscored by his decision to join the police force. On the face of it, Hanssen appeared to be duplicating his father’s career, perhaps trying to win his approval. In fact, his motive was just the opposite, in Jack Hoschouer’s view: “His father made fun of him because he was only a cop; he put him down. He wanted his son to be more. He may have tried to emulate his father, but I think he did it to spite his father.”

  Yet Howard Hanssen must have harbored some internal pride in his son’s decision, because of the symbolic act that followed. “His father sent him his gun when Bob joined the Chicago force,” Hoschouer said. But the gesture resulted in some complications. “The postal service found the gun and intercepted it, and Bob had to go identify himself and pick it up someplace.”

  Robert Hanssen did not start out, like most rookies, as a beat cop. Instead, he was assigned to C-5, a secretive intelligence unit that investigated police corruption. As might be imagined, the unit was highly unpopular with the rank-and-file officers. It was an elite group that paralleled the internal affairs division but was separate from it.

  Mitchell Ware, who was deputy police superintendent when Hanssen was on the force, supervised C-5. The unit’s members ran sting operations, he said, and sometimes posed as drug dealers to snare crooked cops on the take. Chicago has traditionally had a high level of tolerance for municipal corruption; it is possible that the Daley machine decided to make a show of cleaning up the police force before the federal authorities moved in and did it for them.

  Pat Camden, a spokesperson for the Chicago Police Department, said he assumes that Howard Hanssen advised his son not to go into C-5, whose members were regarded as finks. “If it was my son,” Camden said, “I would be more concerned about his becoming a policeman first. Hanssen must
have had total disregard for his father. In the unit you had qualified policemen, but he never made a street stop. How can you work in C-5 if you’ve never walked a beat?”

  By May 1973, Hanssen was listed in VCD, the vice control division. “That was just a cover because C-5 was so secret,” Camden explained. “He was never really in VCD.”

  At some point while working for the Chicago police, Hanssen was sent to a secret counterintelligence school to learn how to install bugs and other high-tech surveillance equipment. Ernie Rizzo, a Chicago private investigator, said he met Hanssen at the school, which was a storefront disguised as a television repair shop.

  Robert Hanssen’s three years as a cop were for the most part uneventful. He did receive one commendation. In June 1975, while waiting to testify in a case at the criminal courts building, Hanssen spotted a man running out of a courtroom. He was Donald Jackson, a prisoner with a long arrest record and a habit of trying to escape from the courthouse. There were hundreds of people in the halls as Hanssen and a burglary detective pursued the man through corridors and stairwells. Hanssen caught the culprit as he fled down a fire escape outside a second-floor window.

  But Hanssen had set his sights higher than Richard Daley’s police department. If the NSA would not have him, perhaps the FBI would. He applied to the bureau and was accepted. On January 12, 1976, at age thirty-one, he was sworn in as a special agent of the FBI.

  *Hanssen was a ham radio operator, an interest reflected in his membership in the Radio Club. Taft High School, like all Chicago schools at the time, did not use the traditional A through F grading system. Instead, it ranked students as S (Superior), E (Excellent), G (Good), F (Fair), or U (Unsatisfactory). To be admitted into the Honor Club, Hanssen had to have grades of E or above.

  *Letter to Geraldine Bloom from Robert P. Hanssen, May 2, 1999, in Taft Alumni Newsletter, Winter 2000.