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

by David Wise

†In later years, Hanssen had his own webpage, with photos of Bonnie’s brother being installed as a priest in Rome. Because her brother was the last born of her siblings, he was known drolly within the family as “John Paul the Eighth,” a sobriquet with a papal sound to it.

  *In 1982, the city of Chicago entered into a consent decree with the federal government, forbidding any further domestic spying by the police.

  †Vivian Hanssen said she knew nothing of any fire. Her husband, she insisted, had retired “with a very good record. There was never anything like that.” But she also said she never knew that Howard Hanssen had worked on the red squad. “I thought he worked on gangsters”.

  4

  “On Second Thought,

  Give the Money to Mother Teresa”

  After training at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia, Hanssen was assigned to the Indianapolis field office, where he worked white-collar crime at the bureau’s resident agency in Gary. The growing family, with two children, lived in nearby Munster.

  All was far from harmonious when Hanssen’s parents came to visit. According to Aya Hoschouer, who had married Jack in 1967, Bonnie Hanssen had confided to her that she finally confronted her father-in-law about the way he continued to treat Bob. “Early in their marriage when his parents would come to dinner, Bob would not come downstairs, he would get sick to his stomach and could not face his father at the table. Bonnie finally said, ‘If you are under this roof, if you cannot be respectful to Bob, then you are not welcome to come.’ ”

  In August 1978, Hanssen was transferred to the New York City field office. Now with three young children, Bob and Bonnie left the Midwest and moved into a house in Scarsdale, in Westchester County. In time, the Hanssens would have six children, three boys and three girls.

  Although a transfer to the Big Apple might have seemed a welcome move up the bureau’s career ladder, many agents shunned assignments to New York because of the high cost of living. Very few FBI agents could afford to live in the city itself. For most, the job meant a long commute by car or train from the suburbs, or being jammed into crowded subways, riding in from Queens. Scarsdale is an affluent community. The Hanssens bought a relatively modest house, and Bonnie joked to her mother that she lived “in the Scarsdale slums.” Still, it was an expensive suburb, beyond the means of a young FBI agent with a growing family.

  Nor was Hanssen’s new job inspiring; he worked at first as an accountant in the criminal division. In March 1979, however, he was moved into the intelligence division. Now, for the first time, Hanssen was in the business of counterintelligence. But he was not, then or later, a street agent. Others might be assigned to the more glamorous job of surveillance and actually catching Russian spies; Hanssen was always in the back room.

  His job was to help create a new, classified national counterintelligence database for the FBI. Much of the input came from New York, a major center of Soviet intelligence activity. In the city, the KGB operated from the Soviet Mission to the United Nations. In addition, there were Russian and other eastern bloc intelligence officers working in the secretariat of the UN itself. Both the Soviet mission and UN headquarters were thus prime targets for the FBI’s counterintelligence agents in New York. The automated database Hanssen worked on contained information about hundreds of foreign officials, including intelligence officers. Its contents were classified up to the level of SECRET.*

  In effect, Hanssen was compiling a who’s who of Soviet intelligence. The data was not limited to the KGB and its known officers. Although the KGB, the Komitet Gosudarstvennoi Bezopasnosti, or Committee for State Security, was the best-known Soviet spy agency, its rival, the GRU, the Soviet military intelligence agency, was equally active in the United States. The GRU—the initials stood for Glavnoye Razvedyvatelnoye Upravlenie—was also a major target of the FBI.

  The KGB and the GRU employed different covers overseas to conceal their espionage, a fact that Hanssen would quickly have realized. The KGB, for example, used Tass, the Soviet wire service, whose correspondents often doubled as spies. The GRU favored Amtorg, the Soviet commercial trading agency.

  Although the FBI, when it finally closed in on Hanssen, initially believed his spying for the KGB had begun in 1985, it soon learned the truth. He had in fact begun his career of betrayal in New York in 1979, almost immediately after he was transferred into the FBI’s counterintelligence arm. And he had begun as a spy not for the KGB but for the GRU.

  In 1979, Hanssen had walked into the Amtorg office in Manhattan and offered his services to the GRU. Interviewed by a government commission after pleading guilty to espionage, Hanssen claimed that his motive was money. “I wanted to get a little money and to get out of it,” he said. The commission, headed by former FBI director William H. Webster, said in its report that Hanssen asserted he had spied because of “the pressure of supporting a growing family in New York City on an inadequate Bureau salary.”*

  The information Hanssen turned over to the GRU was sensational, one of the most guarded secrets of both the FBI and the Central Intelligence Agency. Hanssen gave away no less than the identity of TOPHAT—the most important U.S. intelligence source inside the GRU.

  From his access to the FBI’s files, Hanssen was able to identify TOPHAT as the bureau’s code name for Dimitri Fedorovich Polyakov. At the time, Polyakov had been passing secrets to the United States for seventeen years. He was considered by Washington as an agent of supreme importance.

  Hanssen had a chilling reason for his action; he wanted to turn in Polyakov to the GRU before the Russian might learn his identity and reveal it to the FBI. He had to be well aware that his information would probably result in TOPHAT’S execution—that was the whole point. As the Webster panel put it, “Hanssen disclosed Top Hat’s identity because he feared that the Soviet officer might be a threat to him.” †

  Hanssen passed three batches of secrets to the GRU. In his first approach, he disclosed that the FBI was bugging a Soviet residential complex. He also turned over a list of suspected Soviet intelligence officers. In a letter to the GRU complaining that his first payment was too low, he even revealed he was an FBI agent. He communicated with the GRU through encoded radio transmissions and through one-time pads, an unbreakable cipher system favored by the Russians. But of the various secrets Hanssen passed to the GRU, none compared to his betrayal of TOPHAT.

  John F. Mabey, an FBI counterintelligence agent in New York, had recruited Polyakov in January 1962 at a clandestine meeting at midnight at Grant’s Tomb. A few months before, Polyakov had let it be known he wanted to talk, but then said he had changed his mind. The FBI agent, an astute, wiry man who had joined the bureau right out of Notre Dame, kept after Polyakov. Finally, the Russian agreed to meet at Grant’s Tomb. In that cinematic setting, at the dark, deserted resting place of the eighteenth president of the United States, John Mabey, then thirty-eight, had landed one of the biggest recruitments of the Cold War.

  It was Mabey who chose the name TOPHAT.* Polyakov said he was willing to spy for America because he felt his talents had gone unrecognized by the GRU. He provided Mabey with the names of four Americans who were spying for the Soviet Union.†

  When TOPHAT was posted overseas, the CIA took over handling him. TOPHAT, previously known as BOURBON by the CIA, was given a new code name by the intelligence agency: GTBEEP.

  In 1973, Polyakov turned up in India as a Soviet military attaché. Polyakov would go fishing on the banks of the Yamuna River in New Delhi. He would seem to pay little attention to a heavyset, dark-haired man with a fishing pole who joined him on the riverbank. But the big man was Waldimir “Scotty” Skotzko, a veteran case officer whom the CIA had dispatched to India to handle the agency’s most important asset.

  In 1977, as they fished on the riverbank, TOPHAT reported that he had been ordered back to Moscow, news that alarmed Skotzko. What will happen to you if your work for us is discovered? he asked, knowing the answer.

  “Bratskaya mogila,” was Polyakov’s grim reply. A
n unmarked grave.

  In Moscow, Polyakov used a high speed “burst” transmitter given to him by the CIA to radio messages from a streetcar traveling past the American embassy. He was also given a clock for his apartment in Moscow that lit up in response to a radio signal to inform him that a dead drop where he had left documents had been cleared by the CIA.

  In 1979, TOPHAT was posted back to New Delhi again, promoted by this time to the rank of lieutenant general. Over the years, Polyakov provided extremely valuable political-military information to the CIA, including data on Soviet strategic missiles, nuclear strategy, and chemical and biological weapons. In all, the material Polyakov stole for the CIA filled more than twenty-seven file drawers at Langley.

  In 1980, General Polyakov returned to Moscow for the last time. Retired and surrounded by his family in Moscow, TOPHAT appeared to have escaped the fate that he predicted would await him if his spying was discovered. He was unaware that in New York, Robert Hanssen had already betrayed him to the GRU. But the Russians, for reasons still uncertain, took no action against him at that time.

  Five years later, on April 16, 1985, Aldrich H. Ames, a CIA clandestine officer, walked into the Soviet embassy in Washington and left a letter with the KGB, offering information and asking for $50,000. A month later, he returned to the embassy and met with a senior KGB officer who was almost certainly Viktor I. Cherkashin, the embassy’s chief of counterintelligence. Two days after that, he was handed $50,000. Then, on June 13, at Chadwicks restaurant in Georgetown, Ames handed over the names of virtually every CIA intelligence source in the Soviet Union, sending ten to their execution and many others to prison. For this he was eventually paid $2.7 million by the KGB and promised another $1.9 million, for a total of $4.6 million.

  Among the names provided to the Russians by Ames were Valery Martynov and Sergei Motorin, the two secret FBI sources inside the Soviet embassy in Washington. But Ames also turned over the name of General Dimitri Fedorovich Polyakov of the GRU.

  TOPHAT’s son, a Soviet diplomat who had also been sent to New Delhi, was recalled from there in 1986 after only a year. At the CIA’s headquarters in Langley, Virginia, when the directorate of operations (or DO) learned that the son had been recalled short of tour, it realized for the first time that TOPHAT might be in trouble. But it did not know why. That same year, as the CIA later learned, TOPHAT was arrested, although the Soviets did not reveal that fact until 1990. Later, Moscow said that Polyakov had been executed on March 15, 1988.*

  The CIA could not imagine what had gone wrong. Then, with the arrest and debriefing of Aldrich Ames in 1994, Langley thought the mystery was solved. In 2001, the realization that Hanssen had betrayed TOPHAT in 1979, six years before Ames had done so, stunned the CIA and the FBI. And it created a new puzzle.

  Counterintelligence has been aptly called a “wilderness of mirrors,” and the news that Hanssen had given away Polyakov long before Ames raised intriguing questions. Why had the Soviets not moved immediately against Polyakov in 1979? A number of answers were possible. The KGB and the GRU were bitter competitors who barely spoke to each other (somewhat like the CIA and the FBI until coordination between the two agencies improved somewhat in the post-Ames era). The KGB looked down on the GRU as “the boots,” or sapogi, a term of derision used by KGB officers among themselves when talking about their military rivals; the expression implied that the boot-wearing military men lacked subtlety and were their intellectual inferiors.

  Against this background, the GRU may have wished to conceal from the KGB the embarrassing fact that one of its generals had been fingered as a CIA spy. And the GRU also may have wanted to conceal from the KGB the fact that it was running a mole inside the FBI.

  Even if the GRU did share the information about Polyakov with the KGB, it is possible that the Russians did not act right away because they preferred to place the GRU general under surveillance to see where the trail might lead. Or Moscow may have wanted further confirmation, which it eventually got from Aldrich Ames. There is, of course, a more ominous possibility, that the Soviets might have used TOPHAT to feed disinformation back to the West, either having turned him or utilizing him for that purpose without his knowledge.

  * * *

  None of this was known to the CIA, the FBI, or to Bonnie Hanssen when she happened upon her husband in the basement of their home in Scarsdale writing a letter. Startled, he hastily tried to conceal the letter from her.

  Bonnie Hanssen’s first thought was that her husband was having an affair. He had stopped going to communion around that time, and she had noticed it; perhaps he was seeing another woman. She confronted him with her suspicion. It was nothing like that, Hanssen assured her. Then what was it?

  Finally, Hanssen admitted to his wife that he was selling secrets to the Soviets.* He insisted, falsely, that he had not given them anything of significance; he was running a scam. But he also admitted that the Russians had paid him $30,000.

  Dismayed at the news, Bonnie Hanssen insisted they see a priest. Because both Bonnie and her husband were members of Opus Dei—Bob had joined in 1978—they chose to see a priest from that organization. Founded in Spain in 1928, Opus Dei, which means God’s Work, was approved by the Vatican in 1950 and given special status by Pope John Paul II in 1982 as a “personal prelature,” independent to some extent of local dioceses. The organization claims three thousand members in the United States and eighty-four thousand worldwide.

  Typically, Opus Dei priests do not operate from churches but from what the group calls “study centers” in a number of cities. Together, the Hanssens in the fall of 1980 went to one of these, the Crawford Center, later called the Overlook Study Center, at 99 Overlook Circle in nearby New Rochelle.

  There the couple with the unusual problem consulted Robert P. Bucciarelli, a genial Opus Dei priest from New Canaan, Connecticut, who was a graduate of Harvard College and a theologian fluent in three languages. Father Bob, a somewhat short, dark-haired cleric, was also an enthusiastic tennis player with a serving motion that tended to disconcert his opponents.

  That the Hanssens went to see Father Bucciarelli was not a random choice. Bonnie Hanssen already knew him from her involvement in Opus Dei. In October 1980, Father Bucciarelli had moved to New Rochelle from Chicago, the city where the first Opus Dei center in the United States was established. Bonnie’s mother had known him in Chicago.

  Now Hanssen had something to confess. He had, he told the priest, turned over information to the Soviets, and had received $30,000 in exchange.

  Father Bucciarelli, contacted by the author, declined to discuss any details of the visit by the Hanssens, although he confirmed, obliquely, that it had taken place. “I really don’t remember when he came to see me,” he said. Roman Catholic priests are forbidden by canon law from disclosing what is revealed in a confession. However, a visit by a couple might be considered a consultation, rather than a sacramental confession, so the legal status of the Hanssens’ visit was unclear.*

  After listening to the Hanssens, Father Bucciarelli recommended that the FBI man turn himself in to the authorities. The next day, however, the priest telephoned the Hanssens and asked them to come back again.

  At this next visit, according to the account later given to the FBI by Mrs. Hanssen, Father Bob said he had been pondering the problem and had second thoughts. The matter could be resolved, he said, if, instead of surrendering to the authorities, Hanssen gave the Soviet money to a worthy charity.

  Plato Cacheris, Hanssen’s lawyer after his arrest for espionage, confirmed the account of the couple’s visit to Father Bucciarelli. “The priest told him he should turn himself in, then called Hanssen and said he could give the money to the church. He [Hanssen] told Bonnie he gave a certain amount each month to Mother Teresa.”

  Hanssen also told his wife that he would not sell any more secrets to the Russians, that he was done spying. “He said he would stop,” Cacheris said. “She believed him.”

  There is, of course, a wond
erful irony if Moscow’s money was laundered in this fashion and in fact ended up with Mother Teresa through the Solomon-like intervention of Father Bob, the Harvard priest with the disconcerting tennis serve.

  Although Hanssen insisted to Bonnie that he had given the money to Mother Teresa, there is no easy way to confirm that he actually did so. Sister Mary Dominga, director of the eastern region of Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity, declined to discuss contributions to the charity.

  “We don’t fund-raise, we don’t ask for money,” she said. “We depend on divine providence.”

  *Presidents since Harry S Truman in 1951 have issued executive orders allowing documents to be classified CONFIDENTIAL, SECRET, or TOP SECRET, depending on how much damage their disclosure might cause. But, in addition, there are code words for various categories of sensitive data that are, in effect, above TOP SECRET.

  *“A Review of FBI Security Programs,” Commission for Review of FBI Security Programs, U.S. Department of Justice, March 2002, p. 7. The Webster commission was created in response to Hanssen’s arrest.

  †Webster commission, p. 8.

  *As far as Mabey could recall, he derived the name from Top Cat, a rakish alley cat who wore a little hat and was the hero of a Saturday morning Hanna-Barbera cartoon popular on television in the 1960s.

  †They were Jack E. Dunlap, an Army sergeant working at the National Security Agency; Nelson C. “Bulldog” Drummond, a Navy yeoman; William H. Whalen, an Army lieutenant colonel assigned to the Joint Chiefs of Staff; and Herbert W. Boeck- enhaupt, an Air Force sergeant who betrayed the secrets of the Strategic Air Command. Dunlap committed suicide; the others were arrested, convicted, and given long prison sentences.

  *General Polyakov was arrested on July 4, 1986, interrogated for twenty months, and shot.

  *On the night of Hanssen’s arrest on February 18, 2001, the FBI spoke to Bonnie Hanssen at her house and then escorted her to a hotel in Tysons Corner, in northern Virginia, and questioned her at length. She cooperated with the FBI and revealed to agents the encounter with her husband in the basement. It was the first time that the FBI learned that Hanssen’s spying had begun not in 1985 but in 1979.