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

by David Wise

  * * *

  Around the same time, Hanssen was meeting regularly at an unmarked CIA installation in northern Virginia as the FBI member of a secret group dealing with nuclear proliferation. Through his work on the nuclear issue, he developed a close friendship with Barton A. Borrasca, the CIA’s specialist on how Pakistan was financing its nuclear weapons program.

  If Robert Hanssen could be said to have had a groupie in the U.S. intelligence world, it was Bart Borrasca, who became an unabashed admirer of the FBI agent. They had met in the early 1990s. At the time, Hanssen was no longer funneling secrets to the KGB. He was still working at FBI headquarters as chief of the threat list unit.

  Borrasca, who had targeted ICBMs in the Air Force, joined the CIA in 1991 to work on nuclear proliferation. With the Soviet system crumbling, the agency had begun to focus on the proliferation issue in the post–Cold War era. During the Reagan administration, Borrasca had monitored NASA’s space shuttle program in the Office of Management and Budget, then worked for Boeing’s space systems division in Washington before moving to the CIA.

  In April 1992, CIA director Robert M. Gates created the Nonproliferation Center (NPC) within the intelligence agency. It was headed for the next five years by Gordon C. Oehler, a career CIA officer. Borrasca moved over to the new center, which had the mission of monitoring and trying to control the spread of nuclear weapons in the world.

  “Borrasca worked in the Transfer Networks Group at NPC,” said one agency colleague. “They focused on unraveling all the shipping and financial networks used by proliferating countries. They were trying to figure out where to put pressure to stop that activity. They studied how countries were moving money and nuclear technology. Borrasca was the Pak guy; he was responsible for Pakistan.”

  The fact that Hanssen had worked on nuclear weapons issues was not disclosed after his arrest. As Oehler described the interagency committee on which he served as the FBI’s member, “We had a community group which we called CNPC, the Community Nonproliferation Committee. * That was headed by Bob Walpole, who was my deputy. It was a community coordination mechanism, a group of people who got together once a month to talk about problems. They met in Rosslyn in an agency facility.”

  Hanssen regularly attended these meetings in the early 1990s. “Apparently, during this period Borrasca befriended Hanssen,” said a CIA colleague of Borrasca who knew of the close friendship that had developed between the agency analyst and the FBI agent. “Borrasca used to go to Hanssen’s house for dinner. He often talked about Hanssen.”

  At the CIA, Borrasca earned a reputation for unpredictable behavior, at least among some of his coworkers. “Bart went to the Paris air show with a group of CIA analysts,” one CIA officer recalled. “Boeing had a chalet near Paris where they put up their executives at the air show. To impress his CIA colleagues, Borrasca goes up to the Boeing table and says, ‘I have some CIA people with me, can we put them up at the chalet?’—thereby blowing the cover of the CIA officers, some of whom were undercover.

  “At Paris, Borrasca became convinced that the Chinese were following him around. So he began following the Chinese delegates, taking their photographs. He had a very conspiratorial style.”

  Gordon Oehler put it more kindly. “Bart was a very sincere person who sometimes took off in the wrong direction. There was no ill intent on his part to do anything wrong. He had a lot of energy and sometimes it was hard to pull it back. He was a very hard worker.”

  At the CIA, according to one colleague, Borrasca had difficulty with sensitivity training designed to make employees aware of sexual harassment. “In sex harassment class, which everyone took, he once asked, ‘What about the rights of the harasser?’ ”

  Apparently, the sensitivity training did not make an indelible impression on Borrasca. “Once someone looked out the window and remarked, ‘What a beautiful view.’ Borrasca was looking the other way, staring at a secretary in the room, and he said, ‘The view is pretty good here, too.’ ” Two or three times, the colleague said, female CIA employees complained of alleged sexual harassment by Borrasca.

  The CIA is divided into two main directorates. The spies, the clandestine officers, are in the directorate of operations (DO), and the analysts in the directorate of intelligence (DI). “Although Bart was an analyst,” the CIA man said, “he was very heavily into anything to do with espionage, which may be why he was friendly with Bob Hanssen.” There was another link that drew the two together: both were members of Opus Dei.

  Borrasca held Hanssen in such high regard that he kept urging his boss in the Transfer Networks Group, Jack Duggan, to meet him. Finally the three went to lunch. Duggan, a six-foot, white-haired Boston Irishman, was unimpressed. He came back from lunch and remarked dryly: “Birds of a feather.”

  But it was in 1993 or 1994, the CIA man said, that Borrasca dropped a small bombshell. He reported to a CIA superior that “Hanssen said he was running an operation against President Clinton. They were using cameras, microphones, the whole bit.” Borrasca implied that Hanssen was personally involved in the supposed FBI operation directed at the president, “because Borrasca said Hanssen talked about showing him an audio- or videotape from the surveillance.”

  The sensational allegation that the FBI was bugging and taping the Oval Office alarmed Borrasca’s superior, who insisted he repeat it to Suzanne Spaulding, the CIA attorney assigned to the Nonproliferation Center. The CIA officer recalled Spaulding’s alarm.

  “She told Borrasca to cut off his relationship with Hanssen. ‘Stop it! Stop it right away,’ she said. ‘This is totally outside your job responsibility.’ Borrasca said, ‘Please don’t say anything about this that would ruin my relationship with Hanssen, it’s very important to me.’ ”

  Spaulding, a well-respected figure in the intelligence world, had served as a senior staff member of the Senate Intelligence Committee and was later executive director of National Commission on Terrorism, a panel established by Congress.

  She recalled the meeting with Borrasca. “Bart spent a lot of time with the bureau, and I cautioned him we were not a law enforcement agency. I don’t remember that story [about Clinton].” Asked whether a report that the FBI was bugging the president of the United States was something she would easily forget, she replied: “He maybe didn’t say it that way. Or I didn’t take it seriously.”

  Hanssen, however, told a similar story to his close friend Jack Hoschouer. The Clinton White House, he assured Hoschouer, was under electronic surveillance.

  There is no doubt that Hanssen was interested in Clinton, whom he did not admire. More than twenty times, he searched the FBI’s computerized case files for the names “Hillary Rodham Clinton,” “Hillary,” “Chelsea,” and “Clinton.”*

  But several former high-level FBI counterintelligence officials said they doubted that the surveillance of Clinton had occurred. “We wouldn’t wiretap the president,” said one. “Maybe somebody working in the White House. Maybe [Borrasca] misunderstood what Hanssen said.” If it was a criminal matter, he added, Hanssen, as an agent in the intelligence division, would not have been involved.

  “We did have some trouble” with White House officials, the FBI man acknowledged. One senior presidential adviser had concealed certain questionable contacts, he said. And during the Clinton administration, the National Security Agency’s handling of politically sensitive intercepts involving high administration officials led to a bureaucratic battle with the FBI. As one example, the FBI man said, the name of Secretary of Commerce Ron Brown, who died in a plane crash in the Balkans in 1996, turned up in a number of NSA electronic intercepts. “NSA was sending transcripts to the very people who were mentioned. Brown’s name would appear in an NSA transcript and they would routinely send it to Brown at Commerce. The bureau and NSA fought over this practice.”† But, he repeated, he knew of nothing to support Hanssen’s story that President Clinton was a target of FBI electronic surveillance.

  It was during this same period early in t
he Clinton administration that Bart Borrasca introduced James Bamford to Hanssen. Bamford was working at the time as an investigative reporter for ABC News, but he is best known as the author of two bestselling books about the NSA.‡

  Bamford had known Borrasca, a native of Orchard Park, New York, a suburb of Buffalo, since childhood. “My family lived for a time outside Buffalo, and I met him when I was about five years old. Years later, both of us ended up in Washington. I was working for ABC News. He was in the CIA. I would see him from time to time, and he said, ‘I have this friend who works for the FBI.’ ”

  A soft-spoken man with a gentle, low-key manner, Bamford was happy to add an FBI counterintelligence agent to his remarkable number of contacts in the spy world. Bamford, whose father served in the merchant marine, was a Navy veteran and had lived on a houseboat on the Potomac for a while. When Borrasca brought Hanssen around, Bamford was living on a sixty-foot cabin cruiser appropriately named the Safehouse.

  Later Bamford took Bonnie and Bob Hanssen, and Adelia and Bart Borrasca, out on the Safehouse with its two-man crew. “On the cruise and other times, we talked about Felix Bloch, a common denominator.” Bamford had dug up the Bloch story for ABC News in 1989 and Hanssen was a counterintelligence agent for the FBI, so they often traded views on the case. At the time, the great puzzle in the affair was how the KGB had known to warn Bloch that he was in danger. What Bamford did not then know, of course, was that Hanssen was a Russian spy, the very one who had tipped off the KGB to the fact that Bloch was under investigation by the FBI.

  Borrasca piloted his own plane, a Beech Bonanza, and one time Bamford and Hanssen flew with the CIA man to a gun show in Virginia near Fredericksburg. Hanssen brought along his oldest son. “Hanssen seemed right at home at a gun show,” Bamford said. “I did my best to hide my antigun feelings. He’d explain what various guns were. I’d ask what is this, what is that? He would tell me. He seemed to know his way around a gun show.”

  As the friendship between Hanssen and Bamford blossomed, they had lunch together several times, occasionally with Borrasca. Bamford remembered visiting Hanssen at his office at FBI headquarters. “He introduced me to a couple of agents who had worked on the Ames case.” Later, when Hanssen was assigned to the State Department, he visited his office there. They would lunch in the State Department cafeteria or at a restaurant nearby.

  Hanssen knew that Bamford, on a trip to Moscow, had interviewed Viktor Cherkashin for ABC in 1995. Hungry for details, Hanssen questioned Bamford closely about Cherkashin. What had he said? What was he like? Hanssen even asked to see a transcript of the interview. “I wouldn’t show him the transcript,” Bamford said, “because that was against network policy, but I did tell him what Cherkashin had told me.”

  There was good reason for Hanssen’s curiosity. If Cherkashin ever defected to the West, he was in a position to destroy Hanssen, whose life was literally in the hands of the Russian spymaster he had never met. It was to Cherkashin that Hanssen had first volunteered his services back in 1985. And when Hanssen had learned in 1986 that KGB defector Victor Gundarev had been shown a photograph of Cherkashin, he fretted that perhaps the FBI was on to the fact that Cherkashin was handling a major source—himself.

  Hanssen, Bamford recalled, was always working religion into their conversations. The FBI man would leave work sometimes to attend antiabortion rallies, Bamford said. When Hanssen finally persuaded him to attend an Opus Dei meeting, Bamford, as noted earlier, could hardly wait to escape.

  In retrospect, Bamford thought Hanssen must have had his own reasons for wanting to be his friend. Bamford’s contacts might somehow prove useful to Hanssen in his double life; the ABC man’s access to Cherkashin was one obvious example.

  But Hanssen also would sometimes urge Bamford to do news stories on certain topics. “Hanssen would say, ‘You should do a story on the infiltration of U.S. society by the Russians.’ Hanssen said Russian intelligence could come into the United States undercover as a TV crew to get secrets from a scientific lab, for example.” “You ought to look into that,” Hanssen would say.

  In April 1996, when Bamford married his second wife, Bonnie and Bob Hanssen came to the wedding. In September 1996, Bart Borrasca died of cancer at the young age of forty-nine. Robert Hanssen and Jim Bamford were pallbearers at his funeral mass.

  With their mutual friend gone, Bamford saw less of Hanssen after that. “The relationship tapered off after 1997,” Bamford said. “We just kind of drifted away.” Bamford left ABC in 1998 to write his new book on the NSA. Three years later, he was in for a shock. “On February 20, I turned on my computer and went to the Washington Post website. It said there had been a big spy arrest. I saw Hanssen’s name and said to myself, ‘Good, he’s made a great spy arrest.’ And then I saw he was the guy arrested.

  “I couldn’t believe what my eyes were seeing. It was surreal. For three years my job at ABC was finding spies. And here, all along, he was one.”

  *Webster commission report, p. 12.

  *His concern was well-founded. FBI computers are designed so every keystroke by a user can be reconstructed if necessary. But in 1993, the FBI was not investigating Hanssen or tracking his computer usage.

  *The word “community” has a benign ring to it that conjures up trim suburban lawns, town hall meetings, and church suppers. In the intelligence world, the word is commonly used to refer to the CIA, the FBI, the NSA, and various other spy agencies that together constitute “the intelligence community.”

  *Webster commission, p. 41n.

  †Brown spent much of his time as commerce secretary battling probes into his private business dealings. At the time he perished in the plane crash, he was under investigation over charges that he received improper payments from former business partners. The inquiry was dropped after his death.

  ‡ The Puzzle Palace (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1982) and Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency (New York: Doubleday, 2001). Bamford declined to identify the person at the CIA who had introduced him to Hanssen. The fact that it was Borrasca was learned independently by the author.

  20

  “There Has to Be Another”

  In February 1994, the FBI arrested Aldrich Ames, Moscow’s mole inside the Central Intelligence Agency. He had betrayed dozens of CIA agents in the Soviet Union, causing ten to be executed.

  Ames had begun his spying in 1985, while chief of the Soviet counterintelligence branch of the CIA. Although the agent losses were quickly detected by the agency, it took nine years for the CIA to conclude that Ames was the traitor.

  Late in 1986, Gardner R. “Gus” Hathaway, then the CIA’s counterintelligence chief, appointed Jeanne R. Vertefeuille to head a special task force to find the penetration who was destroying the agency’s Soviet assets. A short, gray-haired, grandmotherly woman with glasses, Vertefeuille was so unlikely-looking a counterspy that she might have been chosen by central casting for dramatic irony. But Vertefeuille had an encyclopedic knowledge of KGB cases, and it was her mole hunt unit that eventually pinpointed Ames as the spy.

  It was not the first time that the intelligence agencies were obliged to search for moles. There had been a long series of secret FBI studies, some run jointly with the CIA, aimed at discovering penetrations in the two agencies. In the 1970s, for example, the FBI had received information suggesting that an unidentified CIA officer had volunteered information to the Russians. The bureau gave that investigation the code name TRAPDOOR. The case was closed and reopened several times over the years but never resolved.

  When it was learned in 1986 that Valery Martynov and Sergei Motorin, the two FBI assets in the Soviet embassy in Washington, had been arrested in Moscow and were to be executed, the bureau formed a six-person team to try to learn how the two had been detected. James T. “Tim” Caruso, a counterintelligence supervisor at FBI headquarters, was appointed head of the task force. A tall, intense New Yorker with thinning red hair, Caruso named the task force ANLACE, after
a tapered medieval dagger. Counterintelligence is painstaking work; fourteen years were to go by before it was understood that the two Soviet assets had been betrayed by both Ames and Hanssen.

  Not until April 1991 did Jeanne Vertefeuille’s group and the FBI join forces to try to discover why the agency had lost its network inside the Soviet Union. Jim Holt, who had been Martynov’s case agent, and Jim Milburn—the pair were known as “Jim squared” inside the FBI—both worked on the joint team.

  One member of Vertefeuille’s task force was Sandy Grimes, who had come over to the mole hunt team from the CIA’s Soviet division. She had once carpooled with Ames and was struck by how his personality had changed when he came back from Rome sporting expensive Italian suits and capped teeth. It was Grimes who ultimately zeroed in on Ames by comparing the deposits in his bank account to the dates of his lunches with Sergei D. Chuvakhin, a Soviet diplomat in Washington. Ames had official approval to meet the Russian, whom he was supposedly cultivating for the CIA; but Grimes discovered that either on the same day as or the day after each lunch with Chuvakhin, Ames deposited large sums of money in his bank account. She realized then that the mole had to be Ames.

  Grimes’s persuasive analysis moved the drama toward its final act. In the spring of 1993, the joint FBI-CIA mole hunt team produced a secret report code-named PLAYACTOR/SKYLIGHT. It estimated that thirty CIA Soviet operations had been sabotaged between 1985 and 1986 and described the efforts of the KGB to deflect the search for a Soviet spy in the CIA. The mole, the report added, must have worked in the CIA’s Soviet division in counterintelligence.

  The report amounted to a virtual description of Ames, whose name was included on a list of forty people in an appendix. The joint mole hunt team actually took a vote on who the mole was. At the CIA, according to R. Patrick Watson, the FBI’s number two counterintelligence official at the time, “People sat around a table and voted who was the most likely candidate. Ames got more votes than anyone else.”