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

by David Wise

  Hanssen’s access, in sum, was virtually unlimited. Major was blunt: “He knew all the secrets.”

  *New York was considered so important an office that it was headed by an assistant director of the FBI. Ohlson’s squad served under Assistant Director John Malone, known behind his back as “Cement Head” because, as one former colleague gently put it, “he was not exactly a rocket scientist.”

  †In 1993, the FBI’s intelligence division was renamed the National Security Division (NSD).

  *During this period, two FBI analysts were polygraphed before being assigned to other agencies. Tierney and two other managers took the tests as well, he said, “as a leadership gesture. We were not going to subject our own people to it without doing it ourselves.” But Tierney’s action was an exception to the bureau’s general practice at the time.

  *Podlesny, who remained with the FBI, confirmed that he had written the classified study of polygraphs for the bureau in the early 1980s. He said he did not remember Robert Hanssen.

  *The National Foreign Intelligence Program includes the budget for the FBI, CIA, NSA, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), and the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO). The other one-third of the intelligence budget goes for tactical intelligence under the control of the Defense Department in the TIARA (Tactical Intelligence and Related Activities) program.

  6

  The Year of the Spy

  In August 1983, after two years in the budget unit, Hanssen was transferred across the hall to the Soviet analytical unit, formally designated CI-3A but known in-house as the “A” unit.

  Now he would be concentrating exclusively on the FBI’s principal target, the Soviet Union. The analytical unit studied the espionage activities, methods, and agents of the KGB and the GRU in the United States. In short, in his new job, Hanssen would be analyzing who Moscow’s spies were and how they operated here.

  Hanssen’s new boss was Thomas E. Burns, Jr., an astute New Yorker from Queens who went to Catholic schools and joined the FBI in 1964 right out of St. John’s University law school. He and Hanssen got on well and sometimes lunched together in the bureau’s cafeteria. Below Burns, the unit chief, were two supervisory special agents—Hanssen was one—and about eighteen analysts.

  The A unit provided support for the FBI’s Soviet operational section, which from headquarters supervised the counterintelligence efforts of the Washington and New York field offices as well as the other field offices around the country.* Once again, Hanssen was in the back room, watching from afar as others performed the more exciting work of trailing and occasionally catching Moscow’s spies.

  But in his new assignment, Hanssen learned about the FBI’s operations using double agents. These were usually Americans, often someone in the military, who pretended to volunteer to spy for Moscow. The double agent, known in intelligence parlance as a DA, would pass along classified documents, most of them genuine, known in the trade as “feed.” The feed would be cleared at a high level after officials decided that the documents would not cause irredeemable harm to national security; the purpose of the exercise was to convince the KGB or the GRU that the double agent was genuine.

  “We were looking at feed,” Burns said, “but mostly at the product, the tasking of the DA by the hostile service.” By studying the information the Soviets asked the double agent to obtain, the unit could learn what the Russians were after, and what, by inference, they already knew.

  Since Soviet intelligence played the same game, running doubles against the United States, Hanssen’s unit would also try to determine whether any Soviet “walk-ins” to the FBI were genuine or fake. “We did reviews of the bona fides of volunteers and recruitments,” Burns said.

  The analysts studied material flowing in from defectors and received data from the Soviet operational section. “For example, a new Soviet might arrive at their embassy and based on his slot, it would be suspected he was an IO [intelligence officer]. We would look at reports on a new IO or suspected IO, looking for clues to establish whether he was in fact an IO.”

  But as important as these tasks were, the unit had another crucial mission: to pinpoint penetrations by Soviet intelligence inside the United States government. “If we identified a Soviet as an intelligence officer,” Burns said, “the operational section would take a closer look at him, which in turn could lead to identifying a penetration. Or we might find an operation had been compromised. We would pass that along to the operational section, which would conduct the investigation. A penetration would be one possible explanation for the compromise.”

  The best way to find a mole, of course, was to recruit someone in the opposition intelligence service who could reveal the name. “A recruited agent gives away people right up front, to protect themselves,” Burns pointed out.

  Recruiting KGB agents was the responsibility not of the analysts but of the Soviet operational section of division 5, the intelligence division. “The highest purpose of a bureau recruitment would be to try to identify penetrations in the U.S. government,” Burns added. This dovetailed nicely with the goal of the analytical unit. “The primary goal of our unit was to find where the Soviets were getting their information.”

  There was enormous excitement in 1983 in the intelligence division and in the Soviet analytical unit, because the FBI, unknown to Moscow, had recruited two KGB officers inside the Soviet embassy in Washington.

  Lieutenant Colonel Valery Martynov had arrived in the capital in November 1980 with his wife, Natalya. A big man, over six feet tall and 190 pounds, he did not fit the stereotype of the glum Russian agent; he was jovial, with a friendly, cheerful manner, and spoke fluent English. He and his wife lived in Alexandria, Virginia, with their two children, a twelve-year-old son in junior high school and a daughter of five.

  Martynov was a Line X officer, which meant that his job was to collect scientific and technical secrets for the KGB’s Directorate T. In 1982, a CIA officer spotted Martynov at a technical meeting. A former CIA man recalled how the dance began. “Martynov showed up at a meeting, one in a series, and our guy chatted with him. Martynov missed the next meeting, but at one of the subsequent meetings he was there. The agency officer came back and said, ‘This guy is different. This is a very unusual Russian.’ ”

  At that point, COURTSHIP, a joint FBI-CIA unit created to recruit Soviets, moved in and took over. The operation was successful. Before very long, Martynov agreed to work for U.S. intelligence. The FBI gave him the code name PIMENTA; the CIA called him GTGENTILE. As his contact, the CIA assigned one of its most experienced case officers, Rodney W. Carlson. A tall, thin man with dark hair and a Lincolnesque face, Carlson in Moscow had handled the CIA’s most celebrated spy, Colonel Oleg Penkovsky of the GRU. For the FBI, Martynov’s case agent was Jim Holt, a white-haired Virginian and a veteran counterintelligence specialist. Over a period of three years, they met with Martynov more than fifty times, on the average of once every three weeks, in safe houses and other locations. His motives for spying for the FBI were not clear, although he was paid for his information and told that a much larger amount was being held in escrow for him in the United States should he ever decide to defect.

  One intelligence officer who read the file on the case discounted money as Martynov’s primary motive. Rather, he thought, “it was the excitement, and the idea of doing something really secret. You can’t believe what you are told about motivation anyway, because people don’t understand their own motivation. Martynov was intrigued by the game. He did not think spying for the Americans was wrong. Because he did not regard us as an enemy.”

  In a separate, parallel operation that also began in 1982, the FBI recruited Sergei Motorin, a young KGB major from Archangel, a port city in Russia’s far north, who had arrived in Washington in 1980. Motorin was a Line PR officer, which meant he collected political intelligence. Sandy-haired, with a small mustache, Motorin, like Martynov, was a big man, a six-foot-two tennis player. He lived in an apartment in Arlington with his wife, O
lga, and their two young girls.

  But Motorin had a wandering eye; the FBI knew he was seeing a prostitute and had a mistress at the Soviet embassy as well, the wife of a diplomat. “He got into a wreck in his car with the hooker in the car,” said a former FBI agent. “The insurance adjustor tipped us off. That’s how it all started.”

  FBI counterintelligence agents in the Washington field office began keeping closer track of the KGB officer. Soon afterward, they watched Motorin walk into a store in downtown Washington and trade his operational allowance of vodka and Cuban cigars for stereo equipment. The vodka and cigars were supposed to be used to help recruit American agents for the KGB. The major was not only cheating on his wife, he had now committed an indiscretion that could get him into serious trouble with his superiors.

  It was time for a chat. With the leverage it now had over Motorin, the FBI did not have too much difficulty in persuading him to listen, although it took several months and constant pressure to recruit him.

  In April 1983, the FBI met with Motorin for the first time in a safe house, an apartment in Crystal City in northern Virginia. He was given the code name MEGAS. To the CIA, Motorin was GTGAUZE.

  Joseph K. Eddleman, Jr., Motorin’s FBI case officer, rented the safe house. Dale Pugh, one of the FBI agents handling Motorin, was given $4,000 and told to buy furniture for the apartment so the neighbors would not wonder why it was empty. Pugh loved the hamburgers at Ollie’s Trolley across the street; he was disappointed when, to preserve security, they moved to another safe house in Alexandria, off King Street, and alternated between there and a third safe house across the river in Paper Mill Court in Washington, in the Georgetown high-rent district. In all, there were seventy-five meetings with Motorin over two years.

  Communication is the most delicate part of any spy operation; the FBI could hardly just pick up the phone and call Motorin at the embassy to arrange a meeting. To contact “Sam Olson,” the operational name Motorin chose for himself, the bureau gave him a special phone number, which was a beeper carried by FBI agent Mike Morton. “The number was just for Motorin,” a bureau source said, “so if it rang, Mike knew it was Motorin.” The arrangement was secure. “Motorin would beep him from a pay phone and Mike would call him right back at the pay phone.”

  Motorin provided the FBI with the name of every KGB agent in the Soviet embassy. But more important, the FBI man said, “he revealed the tasking he had received from Moscow Center, what they were told were priorities. But that was a joke; they were afraid of doing anything aggressively. Because they didn’t want to be caught and thrown out of Washington. They loved being in Washington.”

  The KGB expected its officers in the capital to be alert. “Motorin told us once if they could send something to Moscow Center twenty-four hours before it appeared in The Washington Post, they were heroes.”

  The FBI was paying Motorin two hundred dollars a week and putting five hundred dollars a week into his escrow account. The bureau also bought him a tennis racket and a two-thousand-dollar diamond ring that he had picked out to give to his mistress in the embassy. “But he never gave it to her,” the FBI man said. “We kept it. A big ugly diamond that really stuck out. It might have raised questions. We talked him out of it.”

  To preserve security, the FBI set up separate special rooms for the agents handling Motorin and Martynov. The room for the squad working the Martynov case was on the ninth floor of the Washington field office, then in a remote section of the capital on the Anacostia River with the unappealing name of Buzzard’s Point. Another special room was set aside on the eleventh floor, the building’s top floor, for the agents handling Motorin. Both rooms were locked and soundproofed.

  Despite these elaborate precautions, word circulated within the tight, closed world of the intelligence division that the bureau had acquired sources inside the Soviet embassy.

  And Hanssen, in the Soviet analytical unit, read the reports of the debriefings of the two KGB agents. “We got the product,” Burns said. Although the FBI documents referred to Martynov and Motorin by their code names, it would not have been all that difficult for an insider to learn their true names. For example, by comparing the biographical information the FBI routinely compiled on Soviet diplomats in the Washington embassy with internal references in the debriefings of the two sources, their identities might become clear.

  “Although it would be compartmented,” Burns conceded, “the analysts might know the identities of sources. Hanssen probably would have learned of Martynov and Motorin’s identity by name.”

  He did. Jim Ohlson, who kept up his friendship with Hanssen over the years, believes Hanssen learned their identities in subtle ways. “Even when he was in the budget unit he often talked to people in the Soviet analytical unit,” he said. “In the analytical unit, he would have learned some clues. Sometimes the bureau would list an active source as inactive as a ploy to protect the source’s identity. Hanssen could have detected this and put it together with other bits of information.

  “Then there was the Hengemuhle incident.” Joseph F. Hengemuhle was one of two top FBI counterintelligence agents working against the Soviets in New York; he was transferred to headquarters in the early 1980s to be chief of the Soviet section. But he came reluctantly, saying he would only stay until the bureau got a Soviet recruitment. His vow became known among his counterintelligence colleagues. After more than a year, Hengemuhle returned to the field in New York.

  Hanssen remarked to Ohlson: “Hengemuhle’s gone back. He must have gotten his recruitment.” And in fact the bureau had gotten two.

  Robert Hanssen, as he worked in the Soviet analytical unit, was a man with an enormous secret; he was himself a Soviet penetration of the FBI. One might assume that Hanssen would have been frightened that the two KGB sources would somehow learn his identity, or learn at least that an FBI man had sold secrets to the Russians, and reveal that to the bureau. But not to worry: it was to the GRU that Hanssen had betrayed TOPHAT, and the FBI’s KGB sources in the embassy could not be expected to learn that, or indeed to know anything about a GRU asset. As long as he did not pass secrets to the KGB, his own secret was safe.

  Hanssen knew that for his past sins, Martynov and Motorin could not betray him. But he could betray them.

  * * *

  Life was pleasant on Whitecedar Court, although the Hanssens, now with two more young boys, lived frugally with their five children. To all appearances they were a typical American family. They seemed so normal, in fact, that more than one acquaintance compared them to June and Ward Cleaver, the stereotyped suburban couple in the classic 1950s TV show Leave It to Beaver.

  Vienna, Virginia, where the Hanssens lived, was a leafy bedroom community of well-kept lawns and watchful neighbors. Once a year, Bob and Bonnie and the children drove down to Florida to visit his parents. When Hanssen’s father left the police force, he and his wife could not really afford the old neighborhood in Chicago anymore. After one big snowstorm, Howard developed bursitis in both shoulders. That did it; Howard and Vivian Hanssen retired to Venice, Florida. Bonnie’s parents remained in Park Ridge, even after her father retired from the university.

  Friends did notice how little Bob Hanssen seemed to spend, how careful he was about parting with his money. “They had three mortgages and drove used cars,” said one. “The Hanssens never spent money, never went out to eat, except McDonald’s on the way to Florida to see his parents.”

  To supplement her husband’s FBI salary, Bonnie Hanssen taught religion and church history at Oakcrest, an Opus Dei Catholic school, which the couple’s girls could attend with low tuition. The boys went to the Heights, another Opus Dei school in Potomac, Maryland.

  Occasionally the Ohlsons, or Paul Moore and his wife, were invited for dinner. “When he lived out in Vienna we had dinner in each other’s homes,” Moore said. “He had this houseful of kids.”

  Hanssen seldom missed a day going to mass. Sometimes he would duck in for the noon mass at the chapel in t
he Catholic Information Center in downtown Washington, not far from FBI headquarters. The mass there was celebrated by the center’s director, Father C. John McCloskey, an Opus Dei priest who knew both the Hanssens.

  And once a month, Hanssen would go to the “evenings of recollection” at the Opus Dei Tenley Study Center on Garrison Street, just off upper Wisconsin Avenue in northwest Washington. The modern, redbrick building, formerly the high school of the Heights, houses a Catholic youth center “dedicated to the character development of young men,” its brochure explains, to help them become “committed to live by Christian principles.”

  The evenings of recollection were men-only events. According to Frank Byrne, the center’s administrator, “Typically a priest delivers a meditation, talking for half an hour, perhaps on some point of doctrine, then the men repair to the living room for readings, perhaps the works of Ronald Knox,* then they return to the chapel and the priest gives the benediction.” Sometimes guest speakers were invited as well. Twice, Hanssen persuaded Paul Moore to talk at the Tenley Center about his work for the FBI.

  One night on the way to the Tenley Center, Hanssen had a serious automobile accident. “Some young guy made a left turn in front of him,” Moore said. “Bob was badly hurt. I think his elbow was broken. He ended up with a very awkward cast, with his left arm out at an angle, and a rod sticking out. He couldn’t drive.

  “I lived in Arlington. I called him up and said, ‘How are you getting into work?’ He said, ‘The car is wrecked, we have only the one car.’ But he thought that God would provide.”

  A more secular solution ensued; Moore offered to drive Hanssen to headquarters. “It turned out I picked up not only Bob but his two girls in their high school outfits, saddle shoes and tartan skirts, and drove down Chain Bridge Road into Georgetown. At the time Oakcrest, the girls’ school, was on MacArthur Boulevard. We dropped them off, and then we went downtown to the bureau.”