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

by David Wise

  * * *

  Freeh looked grim as he faced a huge crowd of reporters and television lights in the FBI auditorium. The CIA director, George Tenet, sat on the stage, but said nothing and stole away early, before the news conference was over.

  Attorney General John Ashcroft began with the obvious. “This is a difficult day for the FBI,” he said.

  Then Freeh took the microphone. Hanssen’s arrest, he said, was the result of a mole hunt that followed the Aldrich Ames case. It had happened, he added, because of “a counterintelligence coup by the FBI,” working with the CIA.

  Freeh was attempting to put the best face on the capture of a penetration who had spied intermittently for almost twenty-two years. Yet his words were not an exaggeration. The arrest was the result of an extraordinary counterintelligence operation.

  The FBI director did not spell out the details; he did not disclose the name of Mike Rochford, the secret meetings with the former KGB officer in the New York hotel room, the file the Russian had spirited out of SVR headquarters, or the $7 million paid to the ex-KGB man. He did let drop that the FBI had obtained “original Russian documentation” that had pointed to Hanssen. But that hint was as far as he went.

  The damage Hanssen did, Freeh admitted, was “exceptionally grave.” He added: “The criminal conduct alleged represents the most traitorous actions imaginable against a country governed by the rule of law.… I stand here today both saddened and outraged.”

  In Washington, when political figures find themselves in major hot water, they appoint a commission. Freeh announced that he had named William Webster, the respected former director of both the FBI and the CIA, to examine the bureau’s internal security and procedures and recommend improvements. But Webster was investigating his own former agency; Ashcroft ordered the Justice Department’s inspector general to launch a separate inquiry into what had gone wrong.

  Soon afterward, although there was no public announcement, Paul Redmond, the former CIA counterintelligence expert, was named to run the intelligence community’s detailed damage assessment of the Hanssen case. It was the task of Redmond’s group, working in the shadows, to determine exactly which programs Hanssen had betrayed and destroyed, how costly were the compromises, and what changes U.S. intelligence agencies would have to make to repair the breach.

  As FBI officials well understood, Congress and the public would focus on the fact that a mole had gone undetected among the counterspies for a very long time, not on the resourceful and imaginative way he was unmasked. For Freeh and the FBI, the public revelation that the bureau had harbored its very own Aldrich Ames in its ranks for more than two decades was only the latest in a seemingly endless series of disasters.

  The string of debacles had begun at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, in 1992, when the wife of the white supremacist Randall Weaver was mistakenly shot and killed by an FBI sharpshooter. That was followed in 1993 by the FBI siege of the compound in Waco, Texas, that left seventy-five members of the Branch Davidian religious sect dead. Freeh did not become FBI director until later that year, but he was criticized for failing to crack down on subordinates in the cover-up that followed Ruby Ridge.

  Then came the FBI’s pursuit of Richard Jewell, initially a suspect but later cleared, in the bombing at the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta; the disclosure of sloppy work in the bureau’s crime lab, resulting in skewed testimony in court; and the mishandling of the case of Los Alamos scientist Wen Ho Lee.

  During his eight-year tenure, Freeh had criticized President Clinton about the FBI files obtained by the White House, supposedly for political purposes, and he fought with Attorney General Janet Reno, who rejected his recommendation that she appoint an independent counsel to investigate fund-raising abuses in the 1996 Clinton-Gore presidential campaign. That won him strong Republican support on Capitol Hill, but at a price; it created the perception among the public that the FBI and its director had become embroiled in politics.

  On May 1, 2001, Freeh announced he was leaving his post. He knew what was coming; nine days later, the Justice Department reported that the FBI had failed to provide what was eventually revealed to be a total of more than three thousand documents to defense lawyers for Timothy McVeigh. As a result, Attorney General Ashcroft was forced to postpone the scheduled execution of the Oklahoma City bomber for a month.*

  By the time Freeh announced he was calling it quits, public confidence in the FBI had plummeted to 24 percent, according to a CBS News poll, down from 43 percent a year earlier.†

  * * *

  Jack Hoschouer had arrived in Arizona Sunday night to visit his elderly parents, who lived in Mesa during the winter months. On Tuesday morning, they were watching television when they heard the news.

  “My mother said I turned white,” he said. “At first I thought it had to be a mistake.”

  Hoschouer dialed his wife in Germany. “I told her to turn on CNN. My parents don’t get CNN—they are in kind of a retirement community—so I went over to the clubhouse later and watched the press conference. I was devastated. I felt like Hiroshima the day after the bomb.”

  Jack Hoschouer knew the FBI would want to talk to him. He called the bureau’s field office in Phoenix and arranged to fly back to Washington, where he was interviewed at length at the Washington field office.

  In the course of the questioning, Hoschouer mentioned the Rolex that Hanssen had given to him in 1990. “They said, ‘Give us the watch.’ I didn’t have it right then. It was in repair.” The Rolex was potential evidence, and Hoschouer understood why the government wanted it, “but I told them I want it back.”

  The Rolex was being repaired in Bonn. Hoschouer had to retrieve the timepiece from Germany to give it to the FBI. Later, he said, he tried to get the watch back and could not. Randy Bellows, the lead federal prosecutor in the Hanssen case, explained the reason. “Randy Bellows told me since it was a gift, and I didn’t pay anything for it, they have a right to it. I paid $250 to get the watch fixed and had it for two days. If I’d known the government was going to take it, I wouldn’t have had it fixed.”

  * * *

  Bonnie Hanssen faced a bleak future, with no husband, six children, substantial debts, and Hanssen’s FBI salary cut off. And there was always the possibility that the FBI would change its mind and come after her, even though they seemed to buy her story that she knew nothing about his espionage after 1980. There was also a chance that federal prosecutors would begin to place pressure on her, since she had known of Hanssen’s earlier espionage, to try to get him to cooperate with the government and reveal the full extent of his treachery.

  Under the circumstances, she decided she had better get herself a lawyer. She contacted Janine Brookner, a former CIA officer who had been awarded $400,000 by the intelligence agency for gender discrimination against her. The CIA had investigated Brookner and subjected her to various false accusations after she had disciplined several subordinates while she was station chief in Jamaica. Brookner, who went to law school after leaving the CIA, agreed to represent Bonnie Hanssen.

  But who would defend her husband? When high-profile figures in Washington get into major trouble, there is one lawyer they often seek out. President Nixon’s attorney general, John Mitchell; Aldrich Ames; and Monica Lewinsky had done so, among others. Bob would need a lawyer who could play in the big leagues. Espionage was punishable by death.

  Bonnie Hanssen reached for the telephone and called Plato Cacheris.

  *In SVR parlance, this was a so-called iron site, a fixed location (i.e., one made of iron) to be used on a specified date every year. If all other means of communication should fail, the agent knows he can always make recontact at the iron site.

  *The FBI concluded that the money had been left at the LEWIS drop site as a result of a breakdown in communication between the SVR and Hanssen. Normally, Hanssen and the Russians exchanged documents and money at the same drop site. Weather may have been partly to blame. “When the Russians placed the fifty thousand dollars at the amph
itheater [at LEWIS], they put a piece of tape on a pole,” Gallagher said. “It rained, the tape shriveled up and fell off the pole. We found it about two feet away.”

  *McVeigh, who built and set off the bomb that killed 168 people and destroyed the federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995, was executed by lethal injection on June 11, 2001, at the federal penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana.

  †The telephone poll of 1,063 Americans found that only a quarter of respondents had a favorable view of the FBI. The New York Times, September 9, 2001, Section 4, p. 3.

  28

  Sex, Lies, and Videotape

  It had begun in 1970, when Jack Hoschouer was serving in Vietnam as a U.S. Army adviser to a South Vietnamese battalion. The package from the States had arrived in a plain brown envelope.

  Hoschouer remembered his amazed reaction when he opened it: holy Toledo! Out fell several photographs of Bonnie Hanssen, completely naked, some in provocative poses. Hoschouer wrote back to Bob Hanssen, asking, Did you make a mistake, sending these to me? But the next day a letter arrived from his friend. I hope you liked the little morale builder I sent you, Hanssen wrote.

  More photos came while Hoschouer was in Vietnam. Along with them, in his letters Hanssen would ask, What kind of poses do you like? Hoschouer would tell him, and Hanssen would try to photograph Bonnie in the ways his friend would enjoy.

  Bonnie Hanssen posed willingly for her husband of two years in the privacy of their bedroom. But she had no idea that he would ever share the photos with anyone.

  At the time, Hanssen was studying accounting at Northwestern University. He looked up to Jack; there was his friend, risking his life for his country while he was safely in Chicago, getting his MBA, learning how to prepare a balance sheet and reconcile assets and liabilities. Over the years, Hanssen often told Jack he felt “rotten to the core,” and that Jack was a better person. Men like Jack who fought in Vietnam were heroes, he would say.

  Hoschouer did see combat in Vietnam; he was one of the first Americans into Cambodia when Richard Nixon ordered the incursion that led to the deadly clash between students and the National Guard on the campus of Kent State. He earned a bronze star when his unit came under heavy fire as helicopters lifted them out of Cambodia. Hoschouer decided to remain in the military and become a career Army officer. The following year, now a captain, he commanded an air infantry company in the 1st Air Cavalry Division in Vietnam; he received a purple heart after he was wounded in the left arm by shrapnel in an engagement with North Vietnamese forces.

  So Hanssen may have rationalized that by secretly sending nude photos of Bonnie to his friend, he was doing his bit on the home front, running a bizarre one-woman U.S.O. show, starring his unwitting and unclad wife. But if that was his reason, it was soon forgotten; even after Hoschouer came home from the war, Hanssen continued to send him photos of his naked wife. It went on for years.

  In Vietnam, Hoschouer had received negatives of some of the pictures so he could enlarge them, which he did. But, in time, he began to have qualms about what they were doing. He gave the negatives back to Hanssen. We’ve got to stop this, he told him.

  That was in the 1980s, and Hanssen by now was a special agent of the FBI and had begun his second career as a Russian spy. For three or four years, he did stop sending the prurient photos to Jack. But then he started up again.

  The photographs were only the beginning. In 1987, the Hanssens bought the house on Talisman Drive; Jack was a frequent visitor and would stay with them whenever he could get to Washington.

  The Hanssens’ house had three levels, with a living room, dining room, and kitchen on the ground floor. The Hanssens had added the spacious deck in the rear, just beyond the living room. Up five steps to the left of the front door were three bedrooms and two baths. The Hanssens’ bedroom was one of these; all three boys in bunk beds shared another, and the couple’s youngest daughter had her own small bedroom. Down five steps from the ground floor was another bedroom, where Jack would stay, with a den next to it and a powder room.

  And it was in the house on Talisman Drive that Hanssen’s fantasy to have other men, but Jack in particular, view his wife naked moved from photographs to reality. Again without Bonnie’s knowledge, Bob proposed that Jack watch them having sex. Why he did so only he knows, but in an Internet posting about Bonnie in June 1998 on a pornographic website, he wrote: “Bob loved having men’s tongues dangle out looking at his wife.”

  Whatever his motive, Hanssen was exposing secrets and at the same time exposing his wife. He betrayed his country and simultaneously betrayed his wife. And all the while he was confessing his sexual sins, and his espionage, to his priests, piously observing the rules and rites of Opus Dei, and urging his friends to get closer to God.

  And so, at night, Hoschouer slipped out through the French doors onto the deck where, standing on a chair, he was able to look through the bedroom window and watch the Hanssens having sex. Because the deck backed onto the woods, there was little chance that anyone would see him standing there in the dark.

  It was not enough for Hanssen to allow his close friend to watch the most intimate, private moments between a husband and wife; he also later felt compelled to write about it on the Internet. His language was raw and crude, and a few sentences are sufficient to capture the tone:

  “He [Jack] could see her walking around the room naked and I’d position her in different ways on the bed while fucking her so he’d get a good look of my cock going in and out or of her tits bouncing. By pure chance, and his good fortune, she even bent over right in front of the window once when he was there, and he got a good view of her pussy from about a foot away. It was great. I was dying watching.… Anyway, Jack and I have our fun. Bonnie looks great. Jack and I love seeing her tits slapping together as she takes cock hard.” And so on.

  The live sex show had worked, and more than once, but Hanssen, ever the techie, decided there was a better way. Jack might get chilly standing in the night air, and there was always a chance, however remote, that one of the kids might spot him and wonder what Uncle Jack, as he liked to be called by the Hanssen children, was doing out there in the dark.

  Starting sometime in the 1990s, Hanssen hid a small video camera in his bedroom and rigged it up so that Jack, sitting in the comfort of the downstairs den, could watch on television as Bob and Bonnie had sex in the upstairs bedroom.

  Jack did, over a period of about three years. The den was cozy; there was a fireplace, a comfortable chair, and the television. Told by Hanssen on what nights to watch, Hoschouer would tune in to his own special, closed-circuit channel.*

  If Hoschouer was visiting for several days, Hanssen might ask his friend to watch the first night. Jack would agree. And the next day, Hanssen would ask, How was it? Hanssen would question his friend closely, to be sure Jack had tuned in. “I would tell him something specific I had seen,” Jack said, “so he knew I had watched.”

  And the next night, Hanssen would say again, Do you want to watch? “I was uncomfortable, and a couple of times I told him the signal went away. I said this as an excuse when I did not want to watch.”

  By now Hoschouer had retired from the Army in Germany, where he worked for an arms dealer and lived in Trier, an ancient industrial city. Hanssen always looked forward to Jack’s visits and their shared secret, of which Bonnie remained unaware.

  According to Hoschouer, he never asked to view the sex show. “I never initiated it. I was always invited to watch. And sometimes I didn’t want to. I didn’t think it was right. But he wanted me to do it so bad.” He paused, and added, “I’ve got no excuse.”

  Hoschouer could have said no, but he never did. He never told his friend to stop. And he could not deny that he was sometimes turned on by what he saw.

  Once, but only once, he asked Hanssen:

  “Why do you do this?”

  “I’m a human and I’m weak,” Hanssen replied.

  When the bizarre story of the video camera in the bedroom and the t
elevised sex show leaked to the media several months after Hanssen’s arrest, Hoschouer struggled with the notoriety it brought.* The close bond formed between two teenagers had resulted, decades later, in an outcome that Hoschouer could hardly have foreseen; his friend in prison for life as a Russian spy, and his own participation as a voyeur exposed to the world.

  In his late fifties, Hoschouer was a handsome man, still with a touch of military bearing, square-jawed but now gray haired, his face lined. He told the FBI and the Justice Department’s internal inquiry how the sexual activity had begun with still photos and moved on to live watching, and then the closed-circuit television. He was also remarkably candid, if initially reticent, in a series of more than a dozen interviews by telephone from Germany and in person in Washington. He appeared to be remorseful and vastly embarrassed by what he and Hanssen had done, but he did not attempt to deny any of it.

  Their mutual preoccupation with sex and pornography had gone on for years, not only in the house on Talisman Drive but in their exchanges of transatlantic e-mails, their visits together to strip clubs in Washington, and once to a bordello in Germany, where Jack had watched as a prostitute performed oral sex on Bob.

  Hanssen’s obsession with the idea of other men seeing his wife naked was the consistent theme of his various Internet writings. In June 1998, he posted a story on an adult website, a fantasy about Bonnie, naked and fixing her hair in their apartment near the elevated railway in Chicago, when suddenly, at least in Hanssen’s imagination, she spots a group of five men, track workers, staring at her through the window. At first, Bonnie tries to pull the shade, but it keeps rolling up, exposing her “cute little bush.” Hanssen went on: “She felt aroused. ‘If only Bob were here,’ she thought, ‘I’d show him even a better time.’ ” Then she performs a striptease for the track workers. “Bonnie was starting to enjoy this.”