by David Wise
*Congress has not recognized privileges for priests, lawyers, psychiatrists, and other professionals, but the United States Supreme Court, in United States v. Nixon, the famous Watergate tapes decision, declared that generally, “an attorney or a priest may not be required to disclose what has been revealed in professional confidence.” By 1963, all fifty states had laws recognizing a confidentiality privilege for the clergy, but the laws varied a great deal and it was not always clear whether a priest or a person confessing was the holder of the privilege.
5
Headquarters
Jim Ohlson had joined the FBI in 1972, after serving with the 101st Airborne Division in Vietnam and earning a master’s degree in math at the University of Pittsburgh. The bureau sent him to the defense language school in Monterey to learn Arabic, then to New York to work on Middle East counterterrorism investigations, “concentrating on Palestinian matters.”*
After five years, Ohlson was promoted to the budget unit at FBI headquarters in Washington. The unit, with only four special agents and two clerks, was part of the bureau’s intelligence division.† Small and unglamorous it might have been, but in any bureaucracy the people who work on the budget know everything, and this was true in the FBI.
In January 1981, a newcomer arrived at the unit from New York. Supervisory Special Agent Robert Hanssen, like Ohlson, was doing his first tour at headquarters. Because Hanssen was a CPA, the budget unit was a logical place for him to be assigned. He commuted to work from a house the Hanssens bought on Whitecedar Court in Vienna, Virginia.
“When I first met him,” Ohlson recalled, “I asked where are you from? Chicago. What high school? Taft. My gosh, I was there. And it turned out we were just one class apart. A week or so later I brought in the yearbook to show the secretaries and Bob and have a good laugh over our old pictures.
“We hit it off instantly,” Ohlson said. Aside from their friendship, he respected Hanssen’s technical ability. Ohlson was leaving the budget unit that spring, but before going he managed to wangle approval to buy a Texas Instruments programmable calculator. “We had no desktop computers yet, that was the closest thing to one. I was glad to hand it over to Bob. He put a financial program on it.”
At the time, Joseph L. Tierney, a gray-haired Irishman from Long Island, was chief of CI-3, the counterintelligence support section for the division. As such, Tierney supervised both the budget unit and the bureau’s Soviet analytical unit. Tierney, too, was impressed with Hanssen. “He was a very bright guy, and his assignment was very broad. He had an ability to explain technical stuff to people like myself who needed to know it.”
It was almost inevitable, therefore, that within the budget unit Hanssen was detailed to the bureau’s secret and highly sensitive Dedicated Technical Program. The name was deliberately vague, designed to mask the fact that it was the FBI’s system for developing and refining bugs, wiretaps, and even more exotic spy gadgetry used against foreign embassies and other counterintelligence targets. “He worked on DTP, which paid for everything technical, chiefly electronic surveillance,” Tierney confirmed.
“The program paid for R and D and acquisition of equipment. DTP would make the proposal and spend the money when it came through.” In some instances, Hanssen would learn where a bug or other device was to be planted. “He would not necessarily know where it was going. But if it was a custom-made device for one installation, he would probably know where it was going in.”
When the bureau’s technical experts came up with suggestions for more sophisticated bugging devices, they would have to go to Hanssen. “They’re always trying to make transmitters consume less power, make them smaller and better disguised,” Tierney said. “He’s taking the ideas and running them by the execs in the division; have the engineers gone gaga? Is this something we really need or is it marginal?”
As a result of his position, Hanssen knew the full array of the FBI’s surveillance equipment, from miniature video cameras that could be concealed in a wall or ceiling, to tiny transmitters able to broadcast room conversations, even whispers. “He would have a pretty good grip on what were the strengths and inadequacies of our technical capacity,” Tierney said. “He knew what we were dreaming of having and didn’t have yet.”
Hanssen, in short, was emerging as the FBI’s Wizard of Oz. But unlike L. Frank Baum’s fictional wizard, Hanssen was both real and capable. He not only had an overview of the bureau’s ability to bug and tap its counterintelligence targets, he served as a watchman over the entire program. “He would monitor what had been approved two years before,” Tierney said. “To see if the gadgets had been bought. He spent a lot of time on encrypted radio gear that we used internally.”
The encrypted radios were a vital tool for the counterintelligence agents. When the FBI places a Russian intelligence officer under surveillance, it is well aware that the KGB (and now its successor, the SVR) monitors the airwaves to see if there is unusual radio traffic in an area—a tip-off that the FBI might be tailing one of their people. The encryption at least makes it more difficult for the Russians to be sure that the traffic is the FBI’s.
Tierney appreciated Hanssen’s skills and came to rely on him. “He was a geek, but fairly polished. He was a ham radio operator. He was not a degreed electrical engineer. The people in the engineering section, in TSD, the Technical Services Division, kind of resented it because he knew so much. If they were giving us a snow job he could tell us.”
Although Hanssen’s technical skills were recognized, he remained an aloof and rather remote figure, an outsider to most of his coworkers. That was certainly how Hanssen seemed to Dick Alu, a former FBI agent who worked with him in the budget unit for two years.
“Your typical FBI agent would be a used-car salesman whom you trusted—if that’s possible. An agent to be effective has to be able to sell himself. You had to have good interpersonal skills. Bob did not have good interpersonal skills. Bob was the odd man out. Bob did not socialize after work. ‘Hey, want to go out for a couple of pops?’ Bob was not that type.”
Partly it was his appearance, and the way he dressed. Under J. Edgar Hoover, FBI agents were required to wear white shirts and conventional business attire. “But after 1972,” Alu said, “when Hoover died and he didn’t roll the stone back after three days, the dress code changed dramatically. Not for Bob; he still wore the white shirt, the dark clothes.”
Among at least some of Hanssen’s fellow agents, his somber mien and conservative attire earned him the nickname “Dr. Death” and “Dr. Doom.” Or, Alu said, “some people called him ‘the mortician.’ ”
“He kind of lived in the shadows,” said John F. Lewis, Jr., a former assistant FBI director in charge of the intelligence division. “If there was a shadow in the room, he’d be sitting in it. He was very, very bright. He was good at analytical work; his problem was he didn’t work well with others. He was the last person in the world to say let’s have a drink with.”
Like Lewis, Phillip A. Parker, who was chief of the division’s Soviet section in 1982 when Hanssen worked in the budget unit, remembered him as “a lurker,” always hovering at the side of any gathering.
Donald E. Stukey, Parker’s successor, considered Hanssen irksome. “When I was chief of the Soviet section, he’d come in once in a while. He had an annoying habit, if you were conducting a meeting in your office, he would stand in the doorway until you finally said, ‘What do you want?’ ”
One veteran FBI counterintelligence officer, Edward J. Curran, knew Hanssen both in New York and at headquarters. “I found him to be very reclusive; his demeanor was somewhat uncomfortable. He was very thoughtful, very reserved, very quiet. Very poor in groups, always liked to get you aside in a corner. He’s kind of in your space. You’d just try to get away from the guy. He’s the kind of guy, you see him in the hall at headquarters, you’d turn the other way and try to escape.”
Hanssen’s boss, Joe Tierney, thought this view of Hanssen, which was shared by many in
the division, was overdrawn, and he liked him. “He was more colorless in dress than the average agent, but not gloomy. He was a very bright guy. He was seriously religious.” He remembered Hanssen as tall and gaunt, with pale skin. “He had kind of a nervous smile, sort of self-conscious. He smiled a lot.”
Hanssen’s ability to explain technical matters to his superiors, the quality that Tierney had admired, may have been helped by some coaching from Dick Alu. “This guy was extremely bright, one of the smartest people I’d ever run into,” Alu said. “We were trying to come up with management techniques to measure how effective we were, to justify our programs to Congress. Bob came up with terminology and I’d say to Bob, ‘I understand, you understand what you’re talking about, but you got to present it to the management here who might not understand the terms you are using.’ ”
Alu told Hanssen, “You’ve got to use words like ‘Dick and Jane carried a pail of water up the hill.’ I could just see the wry expression on his face. He just didn’t suffer fools gladly. Why should I have to reduce myself to this level? I said, ‘You gotta be able to communicate with people. You communicate with whatever level they are.’ ”
Hanssen’s friends in the bureau were few in number. To many, he came across as arrogant, someone who did not bother to conceal the fact that he thought himself brighter than his coworkers. The colleagues he did get to know well were those he apparently considered his intellectual equals.
In the bureau, Hanssen made no secret of his conservative political views. He talked about religion to anyone who would listen. He was vehemently antiabortion, and to all appearances a strong anti-Communist. He had no use for gays and lesbians.
Directly across the hall from Hanssen’s office on the fourth floor were the division’s analytical units. Paul Moore, who became one of Hanssen’s closest friends in the bureau, worked in CI-3B, one of the two analytical units. A large, thoughtful, and soft-spoken man, Moore spoke Mandarin and was the FBI’s foremost China analyst. In appearance and manner, he could easily be mistaken for an academic who had wandered into the Hoover building by accident.
Like Hanssen, Moore had grown up in Chicago and was educated by the Jesuits in high school. His father taught chemistry at Loyola University, where Bonnie Hanssen’s father taught psychology. Moore was teaching a course on China at Georgetown University and still working on his Ph.D. when the FBI, desperate for a Chinese-language translator, tapped him in 1975.
Moore met Hanssen in 1981 when he joined the budget unit; their Chicago and Catholic ties helped to cement their friendship, but personal computers, then relatively new to the world, were even more important. “I finished my doctorate in 1981,” Moore said, “and my wife, Janice, to congratulate me, says, ‘OK, I will buy you a computer.’ ” Moore had heard that Hanssen was a computer guru. “I went to Bob Hanssen and said, ‘What do you think I should get?’ He said, ‘You need to get an Apple, it would be just right for you.’ So my wife paid for an Apple II+.
“Bob says there’s a user’s group, Washington Apple Pi; he introduced me to that. We met the first Saturday of every month in Bethesda. Bob was at those meetings. They had speakers, special interest groups you could go to.
“The people I hung out with were adults playing adventure games. Bob was always showing me things you could do in the computers, with jump cables, expansion card slots. Bob was definitely part of the pocket protector group.
“We were computer buddies. I remember on a Saturday morning at the Washington Apple Pi group—this particular meeting was in Constitution Hall—and a guy took his mouse and double-clicked and a folder opened up. The whole place, including Bob, stood up and cheered. It was the first meeting where they introduced the Mac.
“One day I got a chip that would increase memory from one to four meg, and I got this kit and I’m sweating blood trying to do it; you needed a special wrench to get into the computer. There were a lot of warnings about static electricity—don’t touch this or that. Bob has his wrench going and I’m reading the instructions and Bob is working on it. Bob already had the motherboard out. The last step was to cut a wire. Bob takes the pliers and snips off the capacitor. When we turned on the power it took longer, it booted up slower, because it had more memory. And I’m saying ‘Ohmigod, we did something wrong.’ But it worked. He was fearless, and very competent.”
Hanssen’s technical talents continued to advance his status inside headquarters. He not only knew all of the FBI’s technical surveillance secrets, he became one of the bureau’s experts on the use of polygraphs.
Understanding lie detectors was, of course, an area of special interest to someone who had secretly been spying for the Soviets and might contemplate doing so again. Clearly Hanssen would not have welcomed a requirement that he take a polygraph himself; no doubt he explored ways to beat the machine in case that ever happened. Moreover, he was particularly well placed within the bureau to subtly discourage broader use of the polygraph.
Although the FBI had traditionally resisted lie detectors, in the early 1980s it was considering their wider use. At the time, the FBI administered polygraphs only in internal investigations of employees suspected of wrongdoing, and to agents or analysts who were detailed temporarily to the CIA or the NSA.* The FBI did not want other agencies giving lie detector tests to its employees. “The bureau said, ‘We’ll do it,’ ” Paul Moore recalled. “ ‘We don’t want our people being put through who knows what.’ ” And at the time, applicants for employment in the FBI were not given polygraphs.
Nor were agents assigned to particularly sensitive counterintelligence cases given polygraphs. A decade later that policy was changed. The FBI agents working on the Aldrich Ames case in the 1990s, for example, were given lie detector tests.
Polygraphs are notoriously unreliable, and for that reason evidence developed from lie detectors is not allowed in court. In contrast to the FBI, the CIA has an almost religious faith in the polygraph. The fact that Aldrich Ames, the CIA’s most damaging mole, passed his polygraph tests (with a little advice from the KGB) did nothing to discourage that faith. Many CIA employees think that polygraphs work and are frightened of them, which makes their use at least partially effective. The agency’s clandestine officers are supposed to be routinely polygraphed every five years, or when posted overseas.
As the bureau debated whether to expand its use of polygraphs, it brought in Dr. John A. Podlesny, a Ph.D. psychologist from the University of Utah, to study the problem at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia. The intelligence division’s liaison with the professor, Joe Tierney recalled, was Robert Hanssen.*
The result, according to one former FBI man, is that “Hanssen influenced the bureau not to use polygraphs.” Academic studies about polygraphs tend to be abstruse, complicated documents, full of acronyms and jargon and not easily understood by those outside the polygraph fraternity. To FBI officials, Hanssen seemed particularly adept at explaining what it all meant. In Hanssen’s interpretation, the data from the study meant that polygraphs had limited value, perhaps useful to a degree only in a specific investigation. Hanssen, Tierney said, described “two different scenarios. One where there is a focused investigation and the polygrapher knows a lot about the subject and the case and the areas where possible deception might occur. But it’s different in a general, screening polygraph. It’s a grind; everybody understands that most of the people they are polygraphing are good law-abiding citizens.” The work was so boring and unproductive, Tierney added, “You couldn’t ask people to do it [screening polygraphs] for more than three years; they’d go crazy.”
As Hanssen explained it, Tierney said, in all polygraphs “the likelihood of a false negative—the polygrapher says I see no indication of deception and the polygrapher is wrong—is higher than the likelihood of a false positive, where the polygrapher says the guy is lying and the polygrapher is wrong.”
Put simply, Hanssen was reporting that polygraphs did not work very well because people could fool the machine. As a
result, more subjects could get away with lying than could tell the truth but be wrongly accused of deception.
“There was a lot of loose talk about how to beat the polygraph: take two aspirin, clamp your toes together, think of people in a movie, or pinch yourself,” Tierney recalled. “I have no idea whether any of it worked.” But because of Hanssen’s expertise about polygraphs, “he would have been in a pretty good position—better than others—to beat it, if it is possible, if he’d been given one.”
Not that there was much danger he would ever be wired to the machine. “Hanssen knew the bureau’s thinking, and that culturally it was unlikely to happen. There has been some speculation that if he had known he would have to take a polygraph, he would not have done what he did.”
During Hanssen’s time in the budget unit, he was at the nerve center of the intelligence division and its foreign counterintelligence activities. The unit managed the FBI’s portion of the National Foreign Intelligence Program (NFIP), the program that accounts for about two-thirds of the nation’s overall intelligence spending.* It was Hanssen’s unit that prepared the division’s budget figures for Congress. As a result, he had access to the full range of the FBI’s intelligence and counterintelligence (CI) operations.
“In the budget unit,” said David Major, a longtime FBI counterintelligence agent, “Hanssen knew what worked, what we were spending money on, and what we were going to spend money on. If he had been a street agent he would only know what was going on in his squad. But Bob understood the totality. He was one of the few people placed to know everything. Very few people know everything; maybe thirty people out of hundreds.”
