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

by David Wise

  Life is full of its ups and downs.

  My hope is that, if you respond to this constant-conditions-of-connection message, you will have provided some sufficient means of re-contact besides it. If not, I will be in contact next year, same time same place. Perhaps the correlation of forces and circumstances then will have improved.

  your friend,

  Ramon Garcia

  Even with his warning that “Something has aroused the sleeping tiger,” and that he was therefore in great danger, Hanssen could not quite bring himself to bid a final good-bye to his “friends.” He needed them too much. So he promised to be back in touch, next year, same time.

  In Moscow on February 17, Itar-Tass, the Russian news agency, carried a very brief news story reporting that Yevgeny Toropov had vanished from the Russian embassy in Canada in January and was believed to be in the United States. A Canadian foreign ministry official said Canadian authorities “have no information about the whereabouts of Toropov.”*

  Now, on Sunday, February 18, everything was in place for the final drama in the espionage career of Robert Hanssen. The FBI arrest team assembled, ready to move out. Hanssen, in turn, was preparing to keep his rendezvous at Foxstone Park.

  Among the FBI officials waiting for this moment was Mike Waguespack. He could not help thinking back on his encounter with Hanssen at midnight mass on Christmas Eve. “I happened to see him as I walked out of St. Andrew’s church in Clifton, Virginia,” Waguespack recalled, “and we wished each other a merry Christmas. I thought to myself, I hope you have a joyous Christmas, because this will probably be your last one.”

  *“Ann Manning” sold the house in September and vanished.

  *As it happened, December 12 was also the night that Hanssen drove three times by the Foxstone Park entrance and the FBI knew for certain for the first time that it had an active spy on its hands.

  † After Hanssen was arrested, it was John Ashcroft who would decide whether to seek the death penalty. Ashcroft had been confirmed by the Senate on February 1 by a vote of fifty-eight to forty-two, after weeks of bitterly divisive debate.

  *The last document in the KGB file brought out of Moscow is dated December 16, 1991. From 1999 on, all of Hanssen’s instructions and his letters to and from the SVR were obtained by the FBI from the 8MB Versa memory card found in the search of his office. As Hanssen later told debriefers, he had retyped the letters from the SVR into his computer to preserve their instructions and requests.

  *After Hanssen was arrested, he claimed he had heard radio transmissions from his car and had set off alarms in FBI cars. Ever the techie, Hanssen, within minutes of his arrest, warned the FBI agents who had him in custody that the bureau’s tracking equipment was faulty. “We’ve had his car tested and were not able to reconstruct what he says occurred,” Neil Gallagher said. “He was living on the edge and probably seeing surveillance that wasn’t there and hearing things that did not actually happen.”

  *Once Toropov had helped the FBI to pinpoint the Russian source who provided the file from Moscow he vanished, presumably into the CIA’s defector program.

  27

  The Arrest

  Jack Hoschouer remembered it was a little after 4 P.M. on that Sunday, February 18, when Hanssen dropped him off at Dulles Airport to catch his flight to Phoenix.

  The Special Surveillance Group, the Gs, had followed Hanssen to the airport. As he pulled out, heading east, they stayed on him. After days of preparation, everything was ready for the arrest, which officials at FBI headquarters and agents in the Washington field office expected to go down shortly after 8 P.M.

  The bureau knew that Hanssen would appear at Foxstone Park that Sunday because it had found on his computer memory storage card the July 2000 letter from the SVR designating ELLIS as the dead drop to be used once a year on February 18.* And the FBI thought it knew exactly when he would show up at the park: when agents had searched Hanssen’s Palm III computer, they found a reference to “ELLIS,” February 18, and 8 P.M.

  Neil Gallagher, the chief of the National Security Division, had arrived at FBI headquarters at 1 P.M. for a final briefing in the Strategic Information Operations Center (SIOC), the secure area on the fifth floor where officials monitor major operations. The floor of the SIOC is raised so that the space below it can be periodically swept for electronic bugs. The setting is what one might expect, with large television monitors, computers, wall clocks set for time zones around the world, and sophisticated communications equipment. FBI director Louis Freeh planned to join Gallagher there that night to await word of the arrest.

  In midafternoon, Gallagher returned to his office on the seventh floor at headquarters to grab a sandwich. Nothing was going to happen for a while.

  The FBI, from the telephone taps on Hanssen’s house, knew that his daughter, Jane, his son-in-law Richard Trimber, and their children were expected for Sunday dinner. Instead of heading back home from the airport to join them, however, Hanssen, in his silver Taurus, suddenly pulled into the Pike 7 Plaza shopping center in northern Virginia. As the Gs watched from a discreet distance, Hanssen opened his car trunk. He leaned into the trunk for a long time.

  Tim Caruso and other FBI agents were sitting in the command van in a parking lot about a mile from the entrance to Foxstone Park. An agent in the van, relaying minute-by-minute reports from the watching Gs, exclaimed:

  “He’s got some documents and he’s putting them in a plastic bag.”

  Caruso was as astonished as anyone, but he thought he knew what it meant. He looked around at the agents sitting in the van with him.

  “He’s going to do this right now,” Caruso said. “In broad daylight.”

  Hanssen had previously prepared the package for the Russians, with four classified FBI documents and his “sleeping tiger” cover letter, but he had decided at the eleventh hour, racing back from Dulles, to add three more documents. He opened the package, put them in, and re-taped the plastic bag.

  All seven documents were classified SECRET. They dealt with current and proposed FBI counterintelligence operations against Russian agents in the United States.

  At headquarters, Gallagher’s phone rang. “I get a call around 4 P.M. saying that something unusual was occurring, you may want to get down to the SIOC right away. I get down there a minute or so later.” Hanssen was at the shopping center, doing something in his trunk, he was told.

  Gallagher began trying to reach Louis Freeh.

  Hanssen slammed the car trunk shut, got back in the Taurus, and drove the short distance to Foxstone Park.

  Debra Smith, the squad supervisor for the Hanssen case at the Washington field office, had been waiting for this moment. It was Smith who was in charge of the investigation of GRAYDAY by WFO and the surveillance operations that had begun three months earlier. Smith was stationed in the command van with Caruso and Dan Cloyd, Caruso’s deputy.

  Now it was time. An FBI SWAT team was already in place, just out of sight of the entrance to Foxstone Park. They wore bulletproof vests, because no one knew whether Hanssen, who had boasted of his prowess with guns and owned an extensive personal armory, might start shooting when agents tried to arrest him.

  Caruso was right; Hanssen was not waiting for dark. He pulled up across from the park entrance and got out of his car. He placed a piece of white tape vertically on the post of the park sign to indicate to the Russians that the drop would be ready to clear within minutes.

  Washington field called the SIOC. He’s at the park, WFO reported.

  “I’m still trying to find Louie Freeh,” Gallagher recalled. “SIOC was paging him, we’re beeping him, but we still haven’t reached him. And in the next five minutes Hanssen’s world would turn upside down.”

  Carrying the package, GRAYDAY disappeared into the woods. It was 4:34 P.M.

  He walked deep into the narrow park, following the path that led to the weathered wooden footbridge that was dead drop ELLIS. It took him about four minutes. He looked around and, seeing no o
ne, slipped the package under the bridge, out of sight. Then he walked back out of the park.

  Despite Hanssen’s increasingly jittery mood of late, it had, all in all, been a pleasant Sunday: church as usual, of course, playing Frisbee with the dog, seeing Jack again—good old Jack—then a visit to the dead drop so convenient to his house, leaving documents, for which the Russians had rewarded him so well. Now it was time to head home. Bonnie would have supper waiting. He crossed the road and was only a few feet from his car.

  At that instant, two vans suddenly appeared from both directions, screeching to a halt, blocking Hanssen’s Taurus. Four agents jumped out, some carrying huge MP-5 automatic weapons, and surrounded him. Four backup agents were ready to move in if needed.

  It was the last second of freedom that Robert Hanssen would enjoy for the rest of his life.

  “You’re under arrest!” one of the FBI men said. “Put your hands in the air.”

  Hanssen did not comply immediately and the agent repeated the command.

  “Do you have a weapon?” he was asked.

  “No,” Hanssen replied. The agents made sure.

  Quickly, Hanssen was handcuffed with his arms behind his back and hustled into an SUV.

  At almost the same moment, Gallagher finally reached Freeh, who started for headquarters.

  Hanssen, meanwhile, was being driven to the FBI field office in Tysons Corner, not far from his home. Doug Gregory, the case agent for the GRAYDAY investigation, was in the car with the prisoner, along with another case agent, Stefan A. Pluta.

  Hanssen was read his Miranda rights. In the car, the agents played for Hanssen the tape of his conversation of fourteen years earlier with KGB officer Aleksandr K. Fefelov. They showed him photographs of the drop sites he had used, and copies of his letters to the SVR that had been retrieved from his computer memory card. It was a kind of psychological warfare, designed to convince Hanssen that the evidence against him was irrefutable and overwhelming.

  He was asked if he had ever spied for anyone other than the Russians. “No one but the Russians,” he replied.

  Then Hanssen claimed he had wanted to get caught.

  For how long? he was asked.

  “Since I started,” he said.

  He promised to tell everything now that it was over. He wanted to know how Bonnie would get the news.

  Two agents were on the way to his house, he was told.

  Hanssen’s life is over, Doug Gregory was thinking. Despite everything, Hanssen had been a fellow FBI agent for twenty-five years.

  “Bob, this is a sad day for all of us,” Gregory said. “This is just terrible.”

  Expressionless, Hanssen replied: “Life has its ups and downs.”

  * * *

  Bonnie was growing worried when Bob did not return home for dinner. It was getting past 6 o’clock. She waited a while, then served dinner to her daughter and son-in-law and their young children. Still no sign of Bob.

  She tried his cell phone, but it wasn’t turned on. Someone called the FBI to see if they knew where Hanssen was. No, the word came back, they had no information. Then the Trimbers left.

  Bonnie telephoned her mother in Chicago. Pray for Bob, she said, something odd is going on, he hasn’t come home. Bonnie feared there might be a medical emergency; Bob had kidney problems, and his blood pressure had been way up lately. He might be lying in a hospital somewhere, unable to contact her.

  Bonnie was becoming frantic. It was well after dark now, and Bob had still not returned from the airport. Nor had he called. What was keeping him?

  Finally, she could stand it no longer. She got in her car with a friend and drove out to Dulles to look for him. She did not know what else to do.

  The FBI followed her to the airport. In the parking lot, the Gs approached Bonnie and told her that her husband was unharmed and that an agent would be along in a minute or two to explain. The agents appeared and took Bonnie to a room inside the terminal. There she was told that her husband had been arrested for espionage.

  “She was destroyed,” one FBI man said. “She was in a very emotional state already, and more so afterward. She was devastated.”

  The agents drove Bonnie, weeping and overcome, from the airport back to her house. They stayed with her as she made a series of telephone calls to family members to tell them what had happened. She called her mother again and told her the dreadful news: Bob had been arrested. For espionage.

  Jeanne Beglis, Bonnie’s sister, and her husband, George, arrived from across the street to do what they could.

  The FBI agents, although polite, weren’t about to leave. The house was a crime scene and would have to be searched from top to bottom. The bureau had obtained search warrants two days earlier.

  Bonnie was upstairs with a female agent, Peggy Casey Cash, throwing some clothes together. Upset as she was, Bonnie wanted to talk, and they did.

  Downstairs, Special Agent Dave Lambert was already going through the house with Greg Hanssen, the couple’s seventeen-year-old son. Lambert was asking about Bob Hanssen’s guns: where were they? Greg knew exactly where they were, showing the FBI man the location of each firearm: in closets, under beds, seemingly all over the house.

  Lisa, then fifteen, the only other Hanssen child still living at home, returned from a date with her boyfriend and stepped into the chaos. When she heard that her father had been arrested as a spy, she broke down sobbing. Jeanne Beglis cradled Lisa in her arms.

  The FBI agents pointed out to Bonnie that soon the house on Talisman Drive would become the center of a media frenzy, with yellow tape stretched across the lawn, television satellite trucks clogging the street, and reporters swarming the neighborhood. They offered to take her and the two children to a hotel to escape the mob scene. She accepted, and the agents escorted her and the children to the nearby Residence Inn at Tysons Corner.

  As she left the house, Bonnie remarked: “He did it. He just did it.”

  While still at the house, and again in more detail at the hotel, Bonnie volunteered startling new information. Until then, the bureau’s counterspies believed that Hanssen had begun spying in October 1985. That was the date on the first letter from Hanssen to the KGB in the file that the FBI, with help from the CIA, had purloined from Moscow.

  Now, for the first time, the FBI learned from Bonnie that Hanssen had begun his espionage career in 1979 in New York. She revealed how she had come upon her husband in the basement of their home in Scarsdale writing a letter, which he had hastily tried to conceal. She told how he claimed he had been scamming the Soviets, providing worthless information—which, although she did not know it, was a lie. She had insisted he see Father Bucciarelli and said that Hanssen later contended he had given the money, $30,000, to Mother Teresa.

  Not until months afterward, when Hanssen had pleaded guilty and was being debriefed, did the bureau learn from him that in 1979 he had betrayed to the GRU not worthless information but the identity of TOPHAT, General Dimitri Fedorovich Polyakov, one of the most important U.S. agents inside the Soviet military. TOPHAT was executed after he was also betrayed, in 1985, by the CIA’s Aldrich Ames.

  And it was only then, during the debriefing, that the FBI learned why the KGB’s file on Hanssen contained no evidence of his earlier spying. The reason, Hanssen told the FBI, was that in 1979 he had volunteered his services to the rival GRU.

  At the Residence Inn, Bonnie continued to talk and respond to questions almost until dawn. The agents seemed satisfied with her answers. The FBI appeared persuaded that she had really believed her husband’s promises in 1980 that he would never spy again. She was clearly distraught and shocked by his arrest. It was 4 A.M. Monday before she fell, exhausted, into bed.

  So far, the public knew nothing of the arrest of yet another world-class mole, this time not within the CIA, like Aldrich Ames, but inside the FBI itself. And to make matters worse, the spy was not only in the FBI, he was a counterintelligence agent in the National Security Division, the very part of the b
ureau responsible for catching spies. The FBI braced for the storm that was sure to come.

  After the arrest, the FBI retrieved the package that Hanssen had left under the footbridge and substituted another, prepared in advance, containing only blank paper. It kept the drop site in Foxstone Park under surveillance, hoping to catch an SVR officer in the act of retrieving the package that Hanssen had left under the footbridge. Nabbing a Russian officer in the act would, at least a little, offset the bad news about Hanssen.

  But no Russian showed up Sunday night, or the next day. On Monday night, the FBI continued to keep the drop site under surveillance. “We were hoping a Russian would come out,” Gallagher said. “It didn’t happen.”

  The FBI was not able to determine why. Perhaps, it was thought, the Russians were spooked. They might have had countersurveillance in the vicinity of the park and spotted the FBI cars in the area. That Sunday afternoon, the FBI knew, a number of Russians had left the embassy complex on Wisconsin Avenue. At 6 P.M., around the time that Bonnie and the Trimbers were having dinner, Gallagher said, “we still had some Russians unaccounted for.”

  For a week, agents had been lying in the woods in the cold and the rain at the Long Branch Nature Center, nine miles from Foxstone Park, watching the dead drop there, code-named LEWIS, where the SVR had left the $50,000 for Hanssen. About two hours after Hanssen’s arrest agents also picked up the money at the Nature Center. Hanssen would not be needing it.*

  Word of the arrest could not be held indefinitely, and on Tuesday, February 20, FBI director Louis Freeh scheduled an afternoon press conference. He was too late; at 7 A.M. NBC’s Today show broke the story of Hanssen’s arrest.

  * * *

  Aboard Air Force One on the way to St. Louis to speak to parents and teachers at an elementary school, President Bush issued a statement about the arrest a few minutes before Freeh faced the press. It was, he said, “deeply disturbing,” but he had confidence in the FBI director and the men and women of the bureau. In language that foreshadowed the words he would use months later, after the September 11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, he added: “I thank the men and women who proudly serve our country. But to anyone who would betray its trust, I warn you—we’ll find you and we’ll bring you to justice.”