by David Wise
A year after her husband’s arrest, Bonnie Hanssen was thinking about an annulment. In the eyes of the church, an annulment means that a marriage never existed. They are rarely granted, and only for grave cause.
The Hanssen children made it clear to their mother they would not be opposed to an annulment. Her mother and other family members had indeed urged it. Bonnie was only fifty-five. With an annulment and a civil divorce, she could remarry and change her name. But Bonnie, despite all she had been through, might never be able to bring herself to break her marriage vows to Bob, the father of her children. In the meantime, she was back teaching full-time at Oakcrest.
In her visits to the Alexandria jail, Bonnie asked her husband why he had spied, and why he had allowed Jack to watch them in their marital bed. He had very little to say about either subject, Bonnie told family members.
When the story surfaced about his relationship with Priscilla Sue Galey, Bonnie asked him point-blank whether he had had sex with the stripper. At first she thought he admitted he had, in Hong Kong, but when she asked about it on a subsequent visit to the jail, he said no, she had misunderstood. It was noisy in the background when we spoke before, he said; nothing had happened with the stripper.
In March, Bonnie went to the Justice Department to answer questions by the lawyers conducting the internal inquiry of the case. They took her into the bubble, a soundproof, secure room, for the all-day session. They still harbored suspicions that she knew of her husband’s continued spying after he said he had stopped.
Two months later, just before her husband was sentenced, she was read her Miranda rights by the department lawyers and given a polygraph. Her lawyer, Janine Brookner, who watched through a one-way mirror, said she had passed it. During the polygraph examination, Bonnie denied she had any knowledge of Hanssen’s later spying career, which began in 1985. She also denied finding any large amount of cash on her dresser.*
Bonnie Hanssen also insisted to The New York Times that after her husband said he had stopped spying, in 1980, she repeatedly questioned him to make sure he was, over time, paying the $30,000 he had received from the Russians to the Mother Teresa charity. He said he was. According to Brookner, Bonnie Hanssen also said during the lie detector test that over the next few years she asked her husband whether he was again working for the Russians, and he always denied it, acting as though he was hurt that she did not trust him.*
Bonnie also heard from Opus Dei, which was not at all happy to be linked to Robert Hanssen, whose arrest led to a flurry of news reports about the controversial organization. Early in 2002, the prelature of Opus Dei in Rome wrote to Bonnie, urging her to make no statements about her husband. Opus Dei may have been particularly anxious to avoid more adverse publicity in the months before October of that year, when the organization’s founder, Josemaria Escriva de Balaguer, was to be elevated to sainthood by the Vatican.
* * *
A few weeks after Hanssen’s arrest, Tom Burns received the red, white, and blue diplomatic license plate with the name BOB in big black letters, the present that had been made up for Hanssen’s going-away party when he left the State Department. Wherever Hanssen was sent by the Federal Bureau of Prisons, he would not be needing it, Burns decided. “I think I will keep it as a memento,” he said.
A year later, the lives of the actors in the Hanssen drama had changed.
Neil Gallagher had retired from the FBI to an executive position in the private sector.
Tim Caruso was the bureau’s number two official in charge of counterterrorism; he had been named to that post only two months before the September 11 attacks. He retired in the summer of 2002.
Mike Rochford was the unit chief for Russian espionage at FBI headquarters.
The now-wealthy former KGB and SVR officer who produced the file that led to Hanssen’s arrest was living comfortably somewhere in the United States under a new identity. With his $7 million.
Viktor Cherkashin, who had retired from the KGB a decade earlier, was living in Moscow, enjoying his three grandchildren and, he said, “in private security business now.” Asked whether in all the years that Hanssen had spied for the KGB and the SVR they ever learned who he was, he replied: “I never heard any name, of Hanssen or any other. I don’t think anyone knew his identity.”
Brian Kelley, cleared at last, was back at work at the CIA, but in a different job. He and his lawyer had not ruled out a possible legal claim against the government to compensate him for the three lost years when he was secretly and wrongly suspected as the mole.
John Lewis had retired from the FBI. He wondered sometimes, in the middle of the night, whether Moscow was playing mind games with American intelligence. “Pelton and Howard were handed to us. Their usefulness was at an end, as was true for Ames and Hanssen. Could it be that every so often they throw one our way? And look what it does to the community; we’re disrupted. There’s a part of you that has to ask, could a small group orchestrate these things on a periodic basis when someone has exhausted his usefulness?” Lewis didn’t pretend to know the answer, just the question.
When Cherkashin was asked whether Hanssen could have been given up deliberately to protect another mole, he replied: “No, no, no, I have heard these theories before. It is out of the question, in general. That is not the way the intelligence community operates, in general, either Russian or American. If you start giving up sources deliberately, sooner or later that will become the practice, and no one will believe you. Even if a source is not important at all. With an important source, it is more ridiculous. The most important thing is to protect him in any way possible. It’s out of the question.”
Boris Yuzhin, who survived although betrayed by both Ames and Hanssen, was living quietly in northern California with his wife, Nadya, and daughter, Olga. Gray-haired at sixty, he was trying to forget his years in the harsh Soviet prison camps and build a new life in America.
Milt Bearden, the former head of the CIA’s Soviet division, had been Aldrich Ames’s boss for a time. He did not claim to understand Robert Hanssen. “There is an old Russian proverb,” he said. “ ‘Another man’s soul is darkness.’ Does anybody ever really know anybody else?”
David Major headed the CI Centre, a private institution, and Paul Moore taught courses there. “I know what I see when I look at Bob Hanssen,” Moore said. “But what does Bob Hanssen see when he looks in the mirror?”
Ron Mlotek was still at the State Department. Hanssen’s arrest had been a terrible shock to him for months; the two had been so close. Something Hanssen once told him was particularly hard for him to forget.
“Bob said, ‘A person would have to be a total stupid fucking idiot to spy for the KGB because you would be caught. Because we’re [the FBI] going to get you.’ ”
* * *
In the Alexandria jail, Hanssen was housed in a separate wing reserved for federal prisoners. Because he did not want to mingle with the other inmates, guards awoke him at midnight to shower alone.
From the jail, Hanssen wrote long letters to his family. At first they were moralizing in tone: always live in the present, he advised his children, never in fantasy. He offered advice to his son-in-law on how to be a good husband and father. After a time, the letters were more practical; he counseled Bonnie on how to take care of the house, when to check the gutters. He wrote lengthy, technical letters to the children about computers.
In December 2001, Zacarias Moussaoui, a French citizen of Moroccan descent, was brought to the Alexandria facility to await trial in federal court on charges of conspiring in the September 11 terrorist attacks. Moussaoui, who authorities said was meant to be the twentieth hijacker, was arrested a month before the attacks after he aroused suspicion at a flight school in Minnesota, where he wanted to train to fly jumbo jets. When Moussaoui arrived, Hanssen was moved from his cell to another floor to make room for the new prisoner, and his privileges were curtailed; for a time, at least, he had no access to books or TV.
“I’m being trea
ted like a common criminal,” he complained to Bonnie.
Most of the debriefings had gone without incident, until he was given a polygraph test that same month. Afterward, the FBI polygraph operator sat down with Hanssen and said there were problems with the results. There was a conflict between his account and that of Priscilla Sue Galey.
The trouble started when the first question the polygrapher asked was whether Hanssen had a sexual relationship with the stripper. Hanssen angrily denied it, and his anger apparently affected his responses to other questions as well. Later, Hanssen explained to the Webster commission that he felt a one-time event in Hong Kong was not a sexual relationship, a rationale that echoed President Clinton’s famous finger-wagging denial of sex with Monica Lewinsky.
Priscilla Sue Galey had also told the FBI that at one point Hanssen said he wanted to buy a house for her. In retrospect, she believed that was part of a plan he had to use her somehow in his spying. Hanssen, when polygraphed, denied he offered to buy her a house or intended to enlist her as a spy.
There was another problem, the polygraph operator told Hanssen, aside from the conflicts between his account and Galey’s. The peaks and valleys on the readout from the machine suggested that he had not fully disclosed what happened to all the cash he had received from the Russians. Hanssen insisted he had accounted for all of the money. But the polygraph operator was not satisfied. He told Hanssen he had failed his test, and that as a result Bonnie’s pension might be taken away.
Hanssen lost it. He lunged for the man, who jerked backward out of the way. Hanssen landed no blows and the fracas was quickly over. Afterward, Cacheris went to see Randy Bellows, the federal prosecutor, to assure him that Hanssen was cooperating fully. “There were a few glitches on the polygraph,” Cacheris said, “but there always are.”
The episode was smoothed over, and Hanssen for the most part satisfied his FBI interrogators and the Webster commission. But the Justice Department’s inspector general and Paul Redmond’s damage assessment team at the CIA suspected Hanssen had not revealed all that he knew.
The split created a dilemma for the prosecutors. The plea bargain hinged on Hanssen’s full cooperation in the debriefings. The prosecutors told the court that the government, despite the reservations of two of the four investigating groups, could not prove that Hanssen had broken the agreement. They asked that the sentencing proceed as scheduled.
On May 10, Hanssen, gaunt in his green prison uniform—he had lost seventy pounds in jail—appeared before Judge Claude Hilton in the Alexandria federal courthouse. The courtroom was packed with grim-faced FBI agents, most of whom had worked with Hanssen in counterintelligence.
Before the sentencing, Hanssen arose and read a statement. “I apologize for my behavior,” he said. “I am shamed by it. I have opened the door for calumny against my totally innocent wife and children. I have hurt so many deeply.”
Moments later, Judge Hilton sentenced Hanssen to life in prison with no possibility of parole.
Bonnie Hanssen and the children were not in the courtroom.
Afterward, Van Harp, the special agent in charge of the bureau’s Washington field office, said the sentence had brought an end to “the darkest chapter in the history of the FBI.”
Two months later, Hanssen was transferred from Alexandria to the maximum security federal prison in Florence, Colorado, a high-tech facility opened in 1994 and mainly reserved for violent and dangerous felons. In the prison, nicknamed Super Max, inmates are isolated and confined to their concrete cells twenty-three hours a day for at least two years, and, because of the prison’s design, they cannot make eye contact with other inmates. The move was a disappointment to Hanssen’s family, which hoped he would be sent to Allenwood, the federal prison in Pennsylvania, only a few hours’ drive from Washington.
More than a year earlier, in the hours before he was arrested, Hanssen had given the copy of The Man Who Was Thursday, G. K. Chesterton’s allegory, to Jack Hoschouer and urged him to read it. The elusive, supernatural figure of Sunday worked for Scotland Yard, but simultaneously seemed to be England’s leading anarchist. There is a sentence near the end of the book that might serve as an epitaph to the strange career of Robert Hanssen. Inspector Ratcliffe says to Sunday:
“It seems so silly that you should have been on both sides and fought yourself.”
The epitaph might have been written much earlier. All his life, Robert Hanssen had fought with himself. As a chemistry major at Knox, he had easy access to chemicals in the lab. For the last two years of college, he kept a vial on his dresser. He later said he never felt impelled to use it, never came close. But it was nevertheless reassuring to have it there, a silent witness to his despair and self-doubts. It was there if life became too much.
The vial contained potassium cyanide.
*Webster commission, p. 60.
*Greater use of polygraphs had been debated for years within the FBI. But the bureau was split over the issue along functional lines. Some counterintelligence officials, because of the sensitive nature of their work, pressed for more lie detector tests; the criminal division was opposed, arguing that it was unnecessary and would injure morale and tarnish the careers of innocent agents.
*The prosecutors and the FBI found Bonnie Hanssen to have been “fully cooperative” with the government, as did the damage assessment group, which noted she had “met with our psychological evaluation team … to discuss various aspects of her husband’s psychological makeup and disposition.” The Justice Department’s inspector general said, more cautiously, “based on the evidence available to us now, we cannot state that she has been untruthful in answering … questions.” As a result of her cooperation, the prosecutors informed the court she was entitled to her husband’s survivor’s benefit.
*James Risen, “Spy’s Wife Speaks, after Taking a Lie Test,” The New York Times, May 16, 2002, p. A16.
Author’s Note
I began work on this book when an intelligence source alerted me to the arrest of Robert Philip Hanssen the day before it was announced publicly.
The FBI counterintelligence agent had spied for the Russians intermittently for almost twenty-two years. There were many questions to be answered, but it seemed to me that the most difficult and challenging were two: what was Robert Hanssen’s motive in betraying his country—and how was he finally caught?
To resolve the first question meant trying to understand who Robert Hanssen really was, what forces had shaped him and ultimately led him to cross a line from which there was no turning back. To pursue the second question, the real story of how he was unmasked, the trail led me deep inside the FBI’s secretive counterintelligence arm, where I discovered the extraordinary answer.
Under the terms of Hanssen’s plea bargain with the government, he could not be interviewed during the time that I researched and wrote this book. He was barred from talking to any writer or to the news media until the FBI and other federal authorities were through questioning him. However, I had the good fortune to gain access to the mind of Robert Hanssen through an unusual means. With the assent of his defense attorney, Plato Cacheris, Hanssen authorized Dr. David L. Charney, the psychiatrist who spent many hours and days with him in the months after his arrest, to speak with me at length.
Hanssen apparently held little, if anything, back in his conversations with Charney. His secret life as a spy finally revealed, he unburdened himself freely in these sessions. My access to the psychiatrist, whose views struck me as particularly incisive, provided me with exclusive insights into Hanssen’s state of mind, his personal and family background, and his complicated, interlocking web of motivations.
In researching the dramatic story of how Hanssen was finally caught, I was able to speak with a number of counterintelligence agents and officials, many of whom had directly participated in the FBI investigation that led to his arrest. My thanks go to all of them. Although the counterspies were circumspect, even silent, on some aspects of how the FBI, with help
from the CIA, managed to extract from Moscow the actual secret KGB file that enabled the bureau to identify Hanssen, I was able in a series of interviews to piece together the essentials of the story—and of the investigation that ended when Hanssen emerged from a dead drop in a park in northern Virginia on a peaceful Sunday afternoon and was captured.
Although it might be assumed that the FBI was eager to cooperate in this exercise, the truth was rather the opposite. Hanssen had gone undetected for more than two decades, and the case was seen as another in a series of disasters that had battered the bureau and its public image. It took more than six months of constant badgering, importunings, e-mails, faxes, letters, and telephone calls before I was able to sit down with the first FBI counterintelligence official to discuss the Hanssen case and the innovative operation that led to his arrest. And although I was gratified that the bureau had, in effect, expressed confidence in my objectivity, at one point the interviews temporarily and mysteriously stopped. The counterspies, I was told, were alarmed that I had found out too much!
To research this book, I conducted more than 350 interviews with approximately 150 persons. Wherever possible, they are identified by name. I drew as well on a number of court documents, including the detailed FBI affidavit in the case and the government’s indictment.
Although Hanssen was prohibited from speaking publicly while he was being debriefed, and his wife, Bonnie, declined to be interviewed, I was able to talk with several of her siblings, including her sister Jeanne Beglis, as well as with her parents, Dr. Leroy Wauck and Frances Wauck. I also spoke with Hanssen’s mother, Vivian, several times over many months. I greatly appreciate the willingness of family members to talk to me about what has surely been a painful and terribly difficult experience for all of them.