by David Wise
After Hanssen, a twenty-four-year-old Lutheran, married into Bonnie Wauck’s family, he become a convert to Catholicism. The family was deeply involved with the church. Not only was Bonnie’s brother John Paul a priest of Opus Dei, but her uncle Robert Hagarty, her mother’s brother, was a monsignor, and both her parents were active, as Bonnie was, in “the work,” as Opus Dei was sometimes called by its members. Another of Bonnie’s brothers, Mark A. Wauck, although an FBI agent, found time to translate the entire New Testament from the original Greek, a volume approved by the National Conference of Catholic Bishops.*
Surrounded as he was by vigorously enthusiastic Catholics, Hanssen’s decision to become a convert was, if the term may be used, predestined. But he was strongly influenced, he told at least one close friend, by long conversations with his father-in-law, Professor Leroy Wauck, who later invited and accompanied Hanssen to his first Catholic retreat at Shelburn, Indiana.
Once Hanssen had converted, he became, to all appearances, a true believer who wore his faith on his sleeve and never lost an opportunity to urge people to go to mass or, if they were lapsed Catholics, to return to the fold. He also persuaded many of his friends to attend one or more Opus Dei “evenings of recollection” at the Tenley Study Center in Washington.
“He always tried to get me to church,” said James Bamford, the author of two bestselling books about the National Security Agency who met Hanssen while working as an investigative journalist for ABC News. “One night he took me to an Opus Dei meeting at Tenley. There were prayers and some priest got up and talked about how to support the bishop. The priest talked about other church-type stuff. I couldn’t wait to leave. It was like being back in Sunday school. I’m Catholic but I’ve gotten away from it. He really wanted to get me back in the church.”
Similarly, Hanssen persuaded Tom Burns, a fellow Catholic and his boss during his first tour in the FBI’s Soviet analytical unit, to accompany him to Opus Dei meetings. “At Hanssen’s invitation, I spoke at Opus Dei at Tenley. They get people in to speak on various subjects. I had done a paper for the Army War College on terrorism in Western Europe. At Bob’s invitation I spoke on that subject at the Opus Dei meeting. I did not join Opus Dei. I just didn’t have the luxury of the time.”
The Hanssens attended church at St. Catherine of Siena Catholic Church in Great Falls, Virginia, for a while. Burns was a member of the parish and Hanssen, first as a visitor, had been impressed with Father Jerome Fasano, the charismatic priest who was the pastor at the time. “That’s why Hanssen came to St. Catherine’s,” Burns said.
But the Hanssens had problems at the church. In 1997, Father Franklyn M. McAfee became the new pastor. Reviewing the membership the following year, he noticed, as he wrote to Hanssen, that there had been “no activity financially.” The family was invited, politely but firmly, to return to their own parish.* Bonnie Hanssen wrote back for the family, asking to rejoin.
“They were reinstated,” McAfee said. “They still didn’t give anything. When they came back they made a pledge to the building fund, which they didn’t have to do, and didn’t act on that.” Bonnie’s letter also pledged to give St. Catherine a minimum of forty dollars a month. “They did not keep the commitment,” McAfee said. The Hanssens, nevertheless, were not disinvited by the church a second time, and attended mass there some Sundays.
Father C. John McCloskey III, the Opus Dei priest and director of the Catholic Information Center in downtown Washington, knew Bonnie Hanssen well, through her involvement in Opus Dei. But he also got to know Hanssen when the FBI man, often accompanied by his oldest son, Jack, would occasionally go to noon mass at the center’s chapel.
Normally, Father McCloskey celebrated the mass and heard confessions before and afterward. “He would take Holy Communion,” McCloskey said. “If he did confession, I would not know because I would not see him. I hear confession in a confessional which preserves anonymity.”
McCloskey had an unusual background for a priest. He had worked for five years on Wall Street, then decided to leave the stock market for the seminary. “I was a lay member of Opus Dei for many years,” he said. “A small percentage are called to the priesthood.” McCloskey was ordained in Spain in 1981, then did pastoral work in New York, Princeton, and Washington before becoming director of the Catholic center that brought him into contact with Hanssen.
He had strong feelings about Hanssen’s espionage and did not hesitate to express them. “You cannot be a good Catholic and also be a traitor. It’s one thing to commit an act of treason, confess it, repent it, and change your life. But to continually act in a traitorous sort of way is inconceivable. It is moral schizophrenia to try to live a life dedicated to God and at the same time compartmentalizing your life to that extent. The whole point of Christianity and Catholicism is not to lead a double life, but to be transparent.
“I’m not a psychologist or a psychiatrist. I’m a Catholic priest, but I have a lot of experience dealing with souls. There must be some deep psychological trauma, there is something radically wrong. To be able to conceal that from his friends and family, in addition to the moral flaw, there must be some deep hurts and problems.”
Hanssen was able to carry this compartmentalization to extraordinary lengths. Often, to his friends and colleagues, he denounced the Soviets, to whom he was selling his soul and his secrets, as “godless.” David Major, for one, remembered Hanssen using precisely that term. “He used to say to me the Soviets will lose because they are run by godless Communists. He said, ‘You’ve got to have Christ in your life or you’re never going to get anywhere.’ ”
Hanssen carpooled with his friend Paul Moore after he returned to Washington in 1987 to rejoin the Soviet analytical unit and direct the mole study. “One day,” Moore recalled, “with just the two of us in my yellow Mercedes, we drove past the White House and somebody came on NPR talking about the implied social contract that is the basis of morality. He reached over and turned off the radio. ‘That’s enough of that,’ he said. ‘The basis of morality is not an implied social contract. It’s God’s law.’
“He made it clear he would be pleased if I became a more active Catholic, but he never said ‘Let’s go to church.’ When I had trouble one time, he said, ‘Have you ever thought about trying to bring God into the equation?’ He said, ‘Look, I know these guys in McLean who run a retreat center. Father Dan.’ He gave me the phone number the next day.
“I asked him about Opus Dei. He said it is a lay group of people within the church who were married but potentially some of them would take vows. There are some lay people who take a vow of chastity. There are various vows in the church, and seven steps to priesthood. The purpose of Opus Dei, he said, is to help people lead holier lives, to make Catholic faith a more living faith. It has its own priests assigned to it.”
Hanssen was repeating to Moore the fairly standard Opus Dei description of its goals. But he also told Moore something he had not revealed to others. “He said he had a disagreement with them over finances. They like to review your finances and say, ‘Contribute this amount.’ He said he didn’t have that amount to give.” In retrospect, Moore thought the exchange ironic: “He was probably already working for the Russians.”
For the most part, however, Hanssen extolled the virtues of Opus Dei, a group that has often been criticized as too secretive, too conservative, too powerful within the Vatican, and too intrusive in the life of its members.
One somewhat disenchanted Opus Dei member who had been active at the same Tenley Center in Washington as Hanssen recalled that the organization had strong ties to the Reagan administration. “Half of the Reagan White House would come to the meetings at Tenley House,” he said. “Opus Dei is very strong on recruiting people, and once they have you they don’t let go. They’re all over you. ‘Do you have a problem getting to church? We’ll drive you.’ The members will not say much about it to outsiders. They are strict and conventional Catholics, and therefore comfortable with Pope John Pau
l II.”
Hanssen was always encouraging his friends to learn more about Opus Dei. He gave his FBI colleague Jim Ohlson a copy of The Way, a book by the founder of Opus Dei, Josemaria Escriva de Balaguer. The slim paperback volume is a collection of homilies to guide the faithful on their way along the path of life. For example, the first teaching admonishes: “1. Don’t let your life be sterile. Be useful. Blaze a trail. Shine forth with the light of your faith and of your love.”*
Josemaria Escriva, whose movement so captured Hanssen’s imagination, was a Spanish priest who founded Opus Dei in Madrid in 1928. The organization has always had strong roots in Spain; under dictator Franco, ten Opus Dei members served at various times as cabinet ministers. After Escriva’s death in 1975 at the age of seventy-three, his supporters urged his beatification, the first step toward sainthood.
In order to reach that initial plateau on the way to canonization, a miracle had to be attributed to Escriva and approved by various papal bodies. A year after Escriva’s death, a Carmelite nun was reportedly cured of a rare disease after her family prayed for Escriva’s intercession with God. The miracle was officially accepted and Pope John Paul II, clad in golden robes, beatified Escriva in 1992 before some three hundred thousand people in St. Peter’s Square. He then became known as Blessed Josemaria.
But this elevation did not take place without considerable controversy. Critics of Opus Dei complained that the beatification process had been speeded up, and that Opus Dei had helped to elect Cardinal Karol Wojtyla as Pope John Paul II in 1978 and exercised undue influence in the Vatican. It was John Paul II who elevated Opus Dei to the unusual status of a “personal prelature” in 1982. And early in 2002, he announced that Escriva would be made a saint in October.
The critics also see Opus Dei as an elitist organization that seeks to recruit talented young people who will rise in their professions and exercise influence in society. The Opus Dei schools, in the critics’ view, play a key role in the recruitment process.
Officials of Opus Dei deny these various criticisms and claim that their influence in Rome is exaggerated. They point out that in the College of Cardinals, the body that chooses a new pope, only one of the 179 members, Juan Luis Cipriani Thorne, the archbishop of Lima, Peru, is a member of Opus Dei. “That is not a very big voting bloc,” said Brian Finnerty, the Opus Dei communications director.
Like Hanssen, about 70 percent of the organization’s eighty-four thousand members worldwide are married or about to be, and are known as supernumeraries. The rest are men and women who commit themselves to celibacy and are called numeraries, if they live in residences in Opus Dei centers, or associates, if they live with their families or on their own.
People who seek to become members must apply in writing and go through a six-month period of familiarization with Opus Dei. Before they are accepted, they must enter into an oral contract to commit to the organization’s aims of holiness and to accept its jurisdiction in religious matters. All members are expected to perform small acts of penance during the day. Some of the celibate members, as a form of penance, wear a chain around their thigh known as a cilice.* “The cilice is designed to be uncomfortable but not harmful to a person’s health,” Finnerty said. “It does not break the skin.”
Louis Freeh, who was FBI director when the bureau closed in on Hanssen and arrested him, attended the same church as did Hanssen, St. Catherine of Siena, and Freeh’s son went to the Heights, the Opus Dei school, with the Hanssen boys. However, Freeh was not himself a member of Opus Dei, according to Finnerty.†
Was Hanssen’s religion, his constant preoccupation with God, a genuine expression of deep faith, or part of his cover as a Russian spy? Although some counterintelligence officials think Hanssen’s religion was a convenient cloak, those who knew him well disagree. True, his denunciation of “godless Communism” helped to throw off suspicion that he was on the payroll of the godless Communists. But Hanssen spent far too much time in his devotions, at church and with Opus Dei, and in long discussions about religion with his friends, for it all to have been a complete sham.
Ron Mlotek, who became a good friend of Hanssen’s when they worked together at the State Department in the 1990s, had no doubt at all that the FBI man’s faith was authentic. “The first time I set foot in his office to welcome him I saw he had two open Bibles lying on his desk and a crucifix on the wall. That launched us into a deep conversation about our respective faiths.” And it was the beginning of their friendship.
Mlotek, the chief legal counsel of the Office of Foreign Missions, said they became friends “because Bob was a strongly religious Catholic who felt a kinship with an Orthodox Jew.
“Bob’s basic argument is that all Catholics are Jews. Because Jews are our elder brothers. They worship a Jew. The Last Supper was a Passover seder. But Catholics are more fulfilled because of their belief in the resurrection. Those were his arguments. He never said ‘Ron, become a Catholic,’ but he did say, ‘It would be good for you.’ I went with him to Opus Dei meetings. He thought the fact that I was Orthodox was a common link.” Mlotek added: “We had these conversations all the time—about the differences between the two religions, and about philosophy.”
Jack Hoschouer, Hanssen’s closest friend, also believed that he was genuinely devout. “His religion is real,” he said. “When you find out where the money is, I think you’ll find a whole bunch of Catholic charities got big contributions. That’s only speculation. He often said, ‘Evil is well-funded. The forces of good are underfunded.’ He may have wanted to do something that would give him money for that reason.”
Be that as it may, the stark contrast between Hanssen’s militant Catholicism and his simultaneous service to the Soviets was so seemingly irreconcilable as to baffle his most intimate friends and family members. Even Father McCloskey, who was strongly critical of Hanssen’s betrayal of his country, considered him truly pious. So did Tom Burns, his former boss at the FBI.
“I believe he was seriously religious and a serious spy,” Burns said. “Maybe a diagnosis would find him totally bipolar, able to segment different parts of his life. Parts that to all appearances were a contradiction.”
Although Mlotek did not doubt Hanssen’s faith, he thought he had answered the wrong calling. “He should have been a priest,” Mlotek said. “I think everyone would have been better off. The whole world would have been better off.”
*Professor Gillis pointed out that, contrary to popular opinion, absolution is not contingent on performance of the penance, because in the sacrament of reconciliation, the formal name for confession, forgiveness is granted before the person does the actual penance.
*New Testament: St. Paul Catholic Edition, translated by Mark A. Wauck (Staten Island, N.Y.: Society of St. Paul Alba House, 2000).
*Because Hanssen lived outside the geographic boundary lines of the parish, McAfee could insist they contribute at least a minimal amount to the church. Persons who lived inside the parish lines were not subject to financial requirements.
*Josemaria Escriva de Balaguer, The Way (New York: Scepter, 1979), p. 21.
*The word literally means a hair shirt worn by monks or nuns in medieval times and made from Cilican goat hair. Cilicia was an ancient region of Asia Minor.
†Published reports that Freeh might belong to Opus Dei may have stemmed from confusion over the fact that his brother, John Freeh, had in the past been a celibate member of Opus Dei and director of the Tenley Opus Dei center in Washington and the Opus Dei center in Pittsburgh.
12
Diamonds Are a Spy’s Best Friend
Because Hanssen had suggested a few diamonds might be welcome, the KGB obliged with one in September 1988. Along with the third personal letter of thanks from KGB chairman Kryuchkov, which Hanssen fished out from under a bridge in Idylwood Park in northern Virginia, was a diamond worth $24,720.
A few months later, at Christmas, he received a second diamond valued at $17,748. For Hanssen, diamonds had the virtue
of being small and therefore easily concealed. The cash that kept rolling in from Moscow was getting to be bulky and more difficult to hide, especially in a house that he shared with a wife and six children.
At the end of January, soon after the inauguration of the first President Bush, Hanssen left an emergency call-out signal for the KGB in the middle of downtown Washington, just above Dupont Circle at Connecticut Avenue and Q Street. The signal alerted the KGB to clear BOB, the drop in Idylwood Park, and it did so immediately. Hanssen had left a package there with a copy of a cable and a note reading: “Send to the Center right away. This might be useful.”
Hanssen’s choice of language was revealing, for it made clear how much he sought to ingratiate himself with his unseen colleagues in the KGB. Perhaps as much or more than the money and diamonds, their respect and approval was plainly important to him. “This might be useful” had the ring of an overeager subordinate trying to make brownie points with his boss. Hanssen was signaling that he was not only the KGB’s man in Washington but always prepared and ever alert to their needs, a blend of Boy Scout and James Bond.
As spring came to the capital, Hanssen placed another signal for the Russians at a prearranged location, this time farther north on Connecticut Avenue at Taft Bridge, a heavily traveled span famously guarded by two pairs of stone lions. In the exchange that followed at dead drop CHARLIE, near his home, Hanssen left two packages. One contained a TOP SECRET/SCI document from the office of the Director of Central Intelligence that provided guidance for the next decade for MASINT, the most arcane and exotic form of the various types of intelligence collected by the CIA and other U.S. spy agencies.
