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

by David Wise

  In another of Hanssen’s Internet fantasies, at a party in their apartment Bonnie becomes groggy when she has a few drinks and puffs on a joint. She strips in the bedroom and he orders her to stay that way as two of the male guests wander in and see her. Then Hanssen enters the bedroom. “Bonnie was there lying completely nude on her bed, with her pussy held open, her legs splayed wide, just as I had told her. She was a good obedient wife.” Was Hanssen, in his Internet fantasy, reenacting the punishment he had received when his father made him sit with his legs spread wide? The parallel was striking.

  In the spring of 2001, some three months after Hanssen’s arrest, Bonnie found out for the first time that Jack Hoschouer had been watching her make love to her husband for years, live, and on television.

  Bonnie was told the horrendous truth, not directly by her jailed husband or by Jack Hoschouer, but by a psychiatrist hired—and soon thereafter fired—by Plato Cacheris. Dr. Alen J. Salerian was a fifty-four-year-old Armenian, born in Turkey, who received his medical education in Istanbul and in the United States, to which he emigrated in 1971. He had worked for the FBI and had previously consulted on cases for Cacheris. This time, however, their relationship went rapidly downhill.

  The root cause was that Salerian, although warned not to do so by Cacheris, revealed to Bonnie that Jack had watched her for years having sex with her husband. Cacheris was also outraged that the psychiatrist planned to go on BBC television and talk about Hanssen, whom he had evaluated at the request of Cacheris.

  Salerian had learned about the photographs, the video camera, and Jack’s role when he met with Hanssen over a period of days in a small interview room at the Alexandria Detention Center.

  “You’re not a good Catholic and you cannot put this behind you until you confess to your wife,” Salerian insisted. Salerian also told Hanssen that Jack had talked to the FBI. “We can assume everything Jack knows will surface,” the psychiatrist said. “So it should also surface between you and Bonnie.”

  In mid-May, three months after Hanssen’s arrest, Salerian went to Bonnie and told all. “I came to a conclusion in my work with Bob that Bonnie’s knowledge was critical,” he said. “There would be no relief for this man without her knowing. It was just a matter of time before Bonnie had this information. I thought his wife must be told. He totally agreed with me after many hours, tearful hours in prison. This happened in a crisis over the weekend. On Monday after, I talked with Bonnie. I told her everything. I spent four hours with her. Bonnie cried and hugged me. Bob said he was very happy about what I did.”

  Only afterward did Salerian tell Cacheris what he had done. The legendary defense attorney went ballistic when he heard the news. Cacheris was a gentleman of the old school. He felt Bonnie Hanssen had suffered enough when her husband was arrested as a Russian spy; her life had already been shattered; she did not need to know the rest. Moreover, at a meeting on May 14, Cacheris had explicitly warned Salerian not to reveal the sex show to Bonnie.

  Cacheris called Salerian into his office. In a tense confrontation on the morning of May 17, Cacheris told the psychiatrist he had disclosed to Bonnie Hanssen, in Cacheris’s words, “highly sensitive matters which we had specifically directed him not to disclose to her.” According to Cacheris, Salerian replied, “It went over my head. I dropped the ball. I goofed.”

  Cacheris had also heard reports that Salerian was preparing to do an interview on BBC television to discuss the case.* It was true, and Cacheris, declaring he no longer had confidence in the psychiatrist, handed him a letter dismissing him.

  In defending his decision to inform Bonnie about what her husband had done, Salerian said, “In my mind I was part of the defense team, and I was working with them. I saw myself as a team member. I didn’t think I was reporting to him [Cacheris]. I was joining the team as a forensic expert to offer my opinions and advice, but primarily to work with Bob and Bonnie Hanssen.”

  Cacheris disagreed, suggesting that Salerian had another agenda. “He [Salerian] got the idea there was a psychiatric defense, and I think he envisioned himself as the star witness in a highly public trial,” Cacheris said.

  Having fired Salerian, Cacheris still felt he needed a psychiatrist to evaluate his client. It was then that he turned to Dr. David Charney, an Alexandria, Virginia, psychiatrist who had made a specialty of studying the minds and motivations of spies.

  The two psychiatrists who saw Hanssen disagreed sharply on whether his sexual obsessions were related in any way to his espionage. Salerian thought there was a link. “He felt extremely guilty about his psychological behavior,” he said. “He wanted to get rid of and contain his sexual demons. He found some comfort in religion and in Opus Dei. Opus Dei told him to pray to heal the demons. He prayed and failed. He became increasingly despondent over his inability to help himself. He was a tormented soul as a result of his psychological wounds and sexual demons.

  “The spying in some symbolic and psychological way was an attempt to keep his sexual demons at bay. The spying was a diversion, keeping his mind preoccupied. Spying was less of an evil than his own illness. It would keep him busy and away from his own demons.”

  Dr. Charney, on the other hand, saw little relationship between the kinky goings-on at Talisman Drive and Hanssen’s spying for the KGB. “The sexual stuff has very little to do with the espionage,” he said. “I’m not going to say zero, but I think it’s very incidental to the true dynamics of his involvement with spying. He had a great hunger for not being lonely, and Jack was so valuable to him, he had to do with Jack what he thought it took to keep Jack’s interest sustained. Jack had the same struggle within as Hanssen did, and one or the other would get very remorseful.

  “Bob valued Jack’s friendship a tremendous amount, and their relationship was sealed at the time they were eighteen years old. When you are eighteen, relationships are coarse, physical, athletic, towel-snapping in the locker room, bragging, sexual. I believe their relationship was arrested at that time psychologically. It [the live and video sex show] was a very middle-adolescent or late-adolescent thing.”

  Except for Jack, no one knew of Hanssen’s infatuation with pornography. To his colleagues, he went out of his way to appear straitlaced and even prudish, as he did when he told Paul Moore that strip clubs were sinful.

  “Bob never indicated any interest in sex,” said Ron Mlotek, Hanssen’s friend at the State Department. “He was to all intents and purposes almost asexual. In the cafeteria we’d see a short skirt go by. I’d say, ‘Wow, look at that.’ From Bob, no reaction, never.”

  There was one exception, however. When the FBI searched Hanssen’s car, agents found two photographs of the sultry Welsh actress Catherine Zeta-Jones. “The only time I ever heard him talk about sex,” Mlotek said, “was when he described the actress in the movie with Sean Connery about the bank heist. Catherine Zeta-Jones. He teams up with her because she is also a thief.* She was wearing tight-fitting bodysuits in the movie. He talked a lot about that. He said she looked really hot. He saw the movie five times. She did something for him.”

  But to Bonnie, Hanssen revealed nothing about his sexual escapades, the visits to strip clubs, his relationship with Priscilla Sue Galey, the trip to Hong Kong, the pornography on the Web, or, most of all, how he had turned their bedroom into an X-rated video for the amusement of his friend Jack.

  One can only imagine Bonnie Hanssen’s deep humiliation and anger, her utter devastation, when she learned the truth about what her husband had done to her. The intimacies they had shared in the privacy of their bedroom were not only seen by Jack but described by Hanssen and posted around the world on the Internet. Yet she continued to visit her husband in jail. She remained fully supportive of the man to whom she had been married for more than thirty-two years. Friends said she had forgiven him. “Her mission now is to save his soul,” said one.

  But there was an even more shocking sexual scheme hatched by Hanssen, worse, if that is possible, than allowing his friend Jack to watc
h him having sex with Bonnie.

  Jack had no children, and over several years, Hanssen, the father of six, had often said how sad he was that the Hoschouers were childless. He suggested that if Bonnie and Jack could, one way or another, make love and have a baby boy—it was always a baby boy—they would be a three-person family. Hoschouer did not take these musings seriously; he knew there was no way that Bonnie would ever agree to it.

  But in 1997 Hanssen sent the first of two e-mails on the subject to Jack in Germany. Suppose, Hanssen wrote, there were a relaxed, quiet evening, just the three of them. In the scenario Hanssen imagined, they would all be having drinks. The night would turn romantic, and lead to group sex. Bonnie would be impregnated with Jack’s child.

  The next e-mail took on a much more sinister cast. There was a drug, Hanssen wrote, called Rohypnol. The date-rape drug.* It was called that because teenagers and others have used it to sedate women and then have sex with them. Usually, the women who have been drugged cannot remember what happened. It might be the perfect solution to the problem. As Hanssen knew, Rohypnol is illegal in the United States, but the pills can be obtained by prescription in Europe. Could Jack get some?

  Although the drug, if prescribed, is available in Germany, Jack had heard that it could be bought over the counter in the Netherlands. To his later regret, instead of saying no, Hoschouer sent an e-mail back to Hanssen saying he lived near Holland and would look for it.

  As it happened, Hoschouer was teaching in Belgium that summer, on the Dutch border. He got on his bike and rode fifteen miles over the border to Eindhoven. “I had no intention of doing it, of buying the drug,” he said. “I did not look for the drug. The only way would have been if someone jumped out of the bushes and gave it to me.”

  As for drugging and having sex with Bonnie, Hoschouer said, “There is no way I would do that. It would be rape.” He also said he told Hanssen he could not participate in the scheme.

  After Hanssen’s arrest, Hoschouer did tell the FBI about watching the marital scenes in the Hanssens’ bedroom over the years, both through the window and on TV, but he did not reveal the plan to drug Bonnie. At the request of the FBI, however, he turned over his computer hard drive to the bureau.

  Jack usually deleted his e-mail exchanges with Hanssen about sex, and he thought he had done so with the two from 1997. But the bureau’s computer technicians were able to retrieve them.

  Much later, almost a year after Hanssen’s arrest, Hoschouer thought he had figured out why his friend wanted him to father a child with Bonnie Hanssen. Maybe, he speculated, Hanssen reasoned that if Jack had the child he would be emotionally bound to the family, so that if Hanssen were caught and sent to prison, Jack would step in as a surrogate father and take care of his family. Their family.

  It was a bizarre concept, but Hanssen’s e-mail intrigue with Hoschouer to acquire Rohypnol and sedate Bonnie for sex with Jack was an almost natural progression from the still photos, the visual watching, and the video show. There was not much more Bob could do. He had already violated Bonnie in every other way.

  Robert Hanssen, who took a stripper to Hong Kong, used his own wife as an unwitting porn star, and plotted to drug her for sex with his friend, had come a rather long way from the wide-eyed twenty-two-year-old who told Aya Hoschouer in the Playboy Club in Chicago that it was against the rules to touch the cottontails on the waitresses.

  *There were videotapes as well; at least one, of poor quality, was obtained by the FBI.

  *CBS’s 60 Minutes reported on the video sex show in the Hanssens’ bedroom, and Hoschouer’s role, on December 16, 2001.

  *Salerian flew to London nine days later and taped an interview about Hanssen with Tom Mangold, the prominent British television journalist. The program, one in a series called The Correspondent, aired in England on June 17. Salerian liked to appear on television; his résumé devotes one whole page to “Media Experience.”

  *Entrapment, a 1999 caper film, starred Connery, Zeta-Jones, and Ving Rhames in a plot to steal $8 billion from a Malaysian bank.

  *Rohypnol, the generic name for which is flunitrazepam, is similar to Valium but approximately ten times more potent. It is manufactured by Hoffmann-LaRoche and is prescribed widely in Europe and other countries as a sleeping pill and tranquilizer. Known as “roofies,” the pills are often abused in combination with alcohol or other drugs. Rohypnol has no taste or odor and if slipped into a drink cannot be detected.

  29

  The Plea Bargain

  Hanssen was denied bail—the federal judge said he posed “a severe risk of flight”—and he was locked up in the Alexandria Detention Center, the same redbrick jail where Aldrich Ames had been housed in the months after his arrest.

  Plato Cacheris went to see Hanssen there after receiving the phone call from Bonnie Hanssen. “He asked me to be his lawyer,” Cacheris said. “The government got a court order immediately freezing all his assets. So I am doing this pro bono.” There was no way that Bonnie Hanssen could have afforded Cacheris’s fees in any event; but few criminal defense lawyers would turn away from the public attention that inevitably accompanies a high-profile international spy case.

  And Cacheris was no stranger to the bright lights and intense pressures of a major Washington legal drama. He thrived on the combat and controversy surrounding a big case. When he represented Monica Lewinsky during the scandal that led to the impeachment of President Clinton, there were television cameras staked out in front of his office building on Connecticut Avenue. He didn’t seem to mind at all; he held sidewalk press conferences, as tourists and office workers gaped.

  The son of a Greek immigrant who worked as a streetcar motorman in Chicago and a Greek mother who insisted he be named Plato, Cacheris had built a highly successful and lucrative law practice that allowed him to indulge his taste for expensive Savile Row suits, bright suspenders, and monogrammed shirts from Denman & Goddard of London. He grew up in the Maryland suburbs and in Washington, joined the Marines, graduated from Georgetown Law School, and married his longtime girlfriend, Ethel Dominick.

  During the Watergate scandal, former Attorney General John Mitchell hired Cacheris and his partner to defend him against obstruction-of-justice charges. Cacheris got even more attention during the Iran-Contra scandal, when he represented Fawn Hall, Oliver North’s statuesque secretary, who famously hid White House documents in her décolletage.

  Despite his somewhat flamboyant public persona, Cacheris was a quiet professional who enjoyed a rock-solid reputation for integrity among his fellow lawyers. Although he might not admit it, he cared deeply about his clients, including those sentenced to prison, staying in touch with them and their families long after he would have any necessity to do so.

  Since Cacheris had represented Aldrich Ames in the last big Washington spy case, he was a logical choice for Bonnie Hanssen to contact when she needed a lawyer for her husband.

  In the tumult that followed the arrest, finding a lawyer was only one of a series of decisions that suddenly confronted her. To escape the turmoil, Bonnie moved in with her sister Peggy, who lived with her husband in Falls Church, Virginia. It was days before she was able to move back to Talisman Drive. The FBI was still there, searching every inch of the house. In any event, Bonnie did not want to reappear while the press was camped outside.

  Hanssen’s family was allowed to see him at the jail, and Bonnie was a frequent visitor. Separated by a thick glass barrier, they could talk there only by telephone. The children came to see him as well. In April, Vivian Hanssen flew up from Florida to visit her son.

  “He’s thinner but doing well,” she said. “He’s not depressed, thank God.”

  Behind the scenes, the maneuvering over Hanssen’s fate began. Soon after Hanssen’s arrest, Attorney General John Ashcroft told an interviewer: “I would not hesitate to include the death penalty among the options that are to be considered.” In a news conference the same day, Ashcroft also said that in espionage cases the government migh
t seek the death penalty to “send a signal,” but might also explore the possibility of a “plea bargain.”

  Cacheris pounced. Federal prosecution guidelines, he pointed out to reporters, prohibit using the death penalty as a threat to gain advantage in a plea bargain. He lodged an official complaint in a letter to Ashcroft, charging that the attorney general’s remarks were “not appropriate.”*

  Ashcroft’s comment had come in answer to a question about whether the government would seek the death penalty for Robert Hanssen. Through a spokesperson, he claimed he was speaking only in general terms about the death penalty. True, Ashcroft had been careful to say he did not want to discuss “specific cases.” But his blunder had given Cacheris an opening. If the government did in fact seek capital punishment, Cacheris said, “the attorney general has made himself our first witness in a motion to dismiss this case at an appropriate time.”

  A month after Hanssen’s arrest, there were high-level repercussions. The Bush administration expelled fifty Russian diplomats in retaliation for his spying for Moscow. The State Department said that four of them were intelligence officers “implicated in the Hanssen investigation.” They were declared persona non grata and told to leave immediately. The rest were given until July 1 to go. It was the largest number of Russians ordered out of the country since eighty Soviet diplomats were expelled by President Reagan in 1986. The next day, Moscow said it would expel an equal number of Americans, and it began by ordering four U.S. diplomats to leave.