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

by David Wise

  “He did not approach me in any formal sense to allege that he suspected or Bonnie suspected that he was spying for the Russians. In retrospect do I think he was talking about espionage? You bet. But we now know that she [Bonnie] already knew about espionage, so why would she be asking about money?”

  Did he recall that Wauck said Hanssen had made a remark about retiring in Poland? “I don’t remember anything about Poland. But if he said it, I would have said, ‘What is he, nuts?’ ”

  And did Wauck say he knew the FBI was looking for a mole? “If he said that to me, I would have said, ‘What mole hunt?’ I didn’t know anything about a mole hunt.”

  Still, Lyle confirmed a key element of Wauck’s story. “There was an issue about money. Bonnie didn’t know where Bob got some money.” But, he said, “I walked away thinking, What was that about?”

  After Chicago, Lyle returned to Washington in 1998 and was detailed to the CIA. A year later he was named chief of the Russian espionage unit at FBI headquarters. In 2000, he went back to the CIA as chief of the Counterespionage Group, the agency’s main unit in charge of catching Russian spies. As head of the CEG, he also was in charge of the Special Investigations Unit, which has the responsibility for ferreting out moles inside U.S. intelligence.*

  Did Wauck’s warning ever reach FBI headquarters? Lyle’s statement that he never passed Wauck’s concerns on to Washington was supported by his superiors at headquarters at the time. The senior FBI officials to whom such a report would have gone all agreed that it never reached headquarters. Robert B. Wade, the longtime deputy chief of the Soviet section, held that position in 1990 and 1992. “A report like that would go to the section and probably go to me,” Wade said. “I was the operational guy. If it didn’t go to me, I would be asked about it.” And did he recall any such report about Hanssen? “No, nothing,” he said.

  Donald E. Stukey—the same FBI agent who had gone to Paris on the Bloch case—was head of the Soviet section in 1990, and he, too, said he had never heard that an FBI agent had reported concerns about Robert Hanssen. Raymond A. Mislock, Jr., who succeeded Stukey and served for three years, said no such information had ever reached him.

  The incident of the money on the dresser was not the only time that Wauck had been surprised at Hanssen’s apparent easy access to cash. Around 1993, on one of Mark Wauck’s visits to Washington, Mark and Bob and the Hanssen boys had gone to Andrews Air Force Base for the air show held there every spring. The thousands of visitors watched as the Air Force’s Thunderbirds gave their spectacular aerial demonstration, roaring overhead in tight formation. But it was a bright day and the boys had forgotten their sunglasses. To the amazement of Mark Wauck, Bob Hanssen went to a booth and bought everyone expensive RayBans. The boys looked cool, but it was one more troubling incident; Mark Wauck was astonished that Hanssen could casually spend that kind of money.*

  FBI officials, who preferred to rely on Lyle’s version, asked why, if Wauck felt his concerns had been ignored by Lyle, did he not take it to the next level, which would have been Michael J. Waguespack, then the assistant special agent in charge (the ASAC) for counterintelligence in the Chicago office? But Wauck told investigators that he assumed his information had gone up the line. As the months turned into years and he heard nothing further from the FBI, he thought no news was good news; he was mistaken and Bob was innocent. And yet, he could hardly forget what he had done and why.

  For eleven years, until Hanssen’s arrest, Mark Wauck lived with his secret. When the news broke, he urged his superiors in the FBI to disclose that he had raised questions early on about his brother-in-law. He sent an e-mail to the new FBI director, Robert S. Mueller III, urging disclosure. Sooner or later it would become known, he argued to his superiors; better to put it out up front. He was overruled.

  Wauck’s story, despite the fact that Lyle disputed many key aspects of his account, was an embarrassment to the FBI, which knew that sooner or later it would leak out, as it did. An FBI agent had told a superior years earlier about his brother-in-law’s unexplained cash, and his concerns were not followed up. The bureau’s only public comment was to confirm that a conversation had taken place, that it had been evaluated but did not result in the discovery of Hanssen’s espionage.

  Privately, however, some bureau officials sought to discredit Wauck’s account, hinting that some of what he claimed to have said to Lyle might have been an effort to portray himself in a favorable light after the fact. Perhaps, they implied, Wauck wanted plaudits as someone who had suspected Hanssen, and at the same time had also sought to protect himself and avoid any inference that he had failed to come forward with his suspicions.

  “Wauck was not a guy who fit in with the squad,” said one FBI agent. “He fancied himself an intellectual of sorts. He always thought he was smarter than anyone else.” That view of Wauck, remarkably similar in tone to how Hanssen himself had been perceived by his fellow agents, may have contributed to the bureau’s lack of interest in Wauck’s concerns about his brother-in-law. Because Wauck was another outsider, his words may have been discounted.

  But Wauck’s story could hardly be ignored after Hanssen’s arrest. It was investigated extensively. At the end of August 2001, the FBI sent two agents to the Beglis’s home. They questioned Jeanne Beglis closely about the cash she had seen on the dresser and how that information had been relayed to her brother.

  The FBI also questioned the Beglises about Hanssen’s remark about retiring in Poland. The agents asked whether Hanssen owned real estate in Germany, Poland, or the former Soviet Union, and whether he owned jewelry or a BMW.

  In November, at George Beglis’s office in Vienna, Virginia, Jeanne Beglis and her husband gave a deposition to the Justice Department inquiry. One of the department’s lawyers who questioned the Beglises seemed skeptical that Bonnie Hanssen had failed to connect the dots. Given Hanssen’s earlier spying in 1979, he asked, if you saw all that money, wouldn’t you say to your husband, “Hey, what’s this?”

  The differences in the recollections of Jeanne Beglis and Mary Ellen Wauck about Bonnie’s reaction to seeing the money, whether or not she had been alarmed and run across the street, was not unimportant, because it went to the question of whether or not Bonnie Hanssen suspected that her husband had gone back into the spy business.

  But Bonnie Hanssen, who was also questioned at length by the FBI, said she did not even remember the whole incident. And if I did find money, Bonnie told family members, he would have lied to me about it anyway.

  Bonnie Hanssen told her sister Jeanne that she did not remember her husband talking about retiring in Poland. She had never suspected anything about his spying, she said. But Bonnie Hanssen never revealed to her sister that she knew Hanssen had spied for the Russians in 1979.

  She would not have been upset about seeing the cash, Bonnie told her brother Greg, because by then Bob had put her on a cash budget. Perhaps he thought she had used their credit cards too often, but whatever the reason, she was to use cash, which he provided, for the family’s purchases. The Hanssen home, it would appear, was not a bastion of women’s lib; for all the enormous, overdue changes in American society wrought by the women’s movement, it seems barely to have touched the house on Talisman Drive. Bob made the decisions about money, and Bonnie was complaisant.

  Both the FBI and the Justice Department were, for good reason, attempting to find out the truth about Mark Wauck’s conversation with Jim Lyle, to unravel the details of what was actually said and why it had not been acted upon. The truth was elusive, since there were no witnesses to the conversation. But Mark Wauck had tried to raise a flag about the cash in his brother-in-law’s bedroom; no one disputes that much.

  Perhaps, as Lyle contends, Wauck had failed to make his concerns clear enough. But if his warning about the unexplained money had been followed up, Robert Philip Hanssen, the most damaging mole in the history of the FBI, might have been caught a decade sooner.

  *At the time there was no death pen
alty for espionage. The Supreme Court had outlawed capital punishment in 1972, then restored it to the states in 1976. But there was no federal death penalty for espionage from 1972 until 1994, when Congress, in the wake of the Aldrich Ames case, restored the penalty if certain criteria were met.

  *In 2002, Lyle retired from the FBI.

  *Today, Ray-Ban sunglasses can cost well over one hundred dollars, for the Aviator model, for example, but even in 1990 a pair cost up to fifty-five dollars. Hanssen reportedly bought a pair for himself as well as for the three boys. Had Hanssen bought only four pairs, he could easily have spent over two hundred dollars.

  16

  “Life Is Becoming Too Fast”

  As the spring of 1990 approached, Hanssen was on a roll. Early in March, he passed to Moscow secret data about four Soviets who were FBI or CIA sources—a KGB officer, a Soviet illegal, and two defectors.* That raised to ten the number of sources whom he had identified, including the three who were executed.

  Before Hanssen’s espionage career came to an end with his arrest, he had betrayed an astonishing fifty human sources or recruitment targets. In addition to those who were executed, a number of others were imprisoned after he provided their names to the Russians.

  In the packet of secrets he passed in March he also gave the KGB the latest secret analysis of Soviet strategic nuclear capabilities, dated only a month earlier. The Russians in turn left $40,000 for Hanssen, which meant he had now received well over $400,000 from the KGB. Along with the cash, Moscow gave him a wish list of a wide variety of secret information they hoped he could steal.

  In May, Hanssen turned over more than two hundred pages of documents. He also informed the KGB that he was about to be promoted and would be traveling for a year. The Russians gave him another $35,000 and asked that along with any “especially hot” material he include “guidance” on what the KGB might use and act upon without pointing back to him and endangering his security.

  Certainly the KGB did not want to risk losing such a valuable source, but at the same time the request may have had the dual purpose of flattering Hanssen and making him feel in control. The operatives in the first chief directorate, the KGB’s foreign intelligence arm, showed a keen insight into Hanssen’s psyche; they may not have known his name, but they knew their man.

  A few weeks later, with Hanssen about to be out of pocket for a year and with the prospect that their contacts might dwindle, the KGB left a long letter for him under the footbridge in Foxstone Park.

  Dear Friend:

  Congratulations on Your promotion. We wish You all the very best in Your life and career.… Your friendship and understanding are very important to us.… We don’t see any problem for the system of our future communications in regard to this new circumstances of Yours. Though we can’t but regret that our contacts may be not so regular as before, like You said.

  We believe our current commo plan … covers ruther [sic] flexibly Your needs: You may have a contact with us anytime You want after staying away as long as You have to. So, do Your new job, make Your trips, take Your time. The commo plan we have will still be working. We’ll keep covering the active call out signal site no matter how long it’s needed. And we’ll be in a ready-to-go mode to come over to the drop next in turn whenever You are ready: that is when You are back home and decide to communicate.

  All You’ll have to do is to put Your call out signal, just as now. And You have two addresses to use to recontact us only if the signal sites for some reason don’t work or can’t be used.… But in any case be sure: You may have a contact anytime because the active call out site is always covered according to the schedule no matter how long you’ve been away.…

  Thank You and good luck.

  Sincerely,

  Your friends.

  Hoping to enlarge its network in America, and knowing that Hanssen might find it difficult to pass many secrets while he was busy on the road, the KGB also asked him to “give us some good leads to possible recruitments” among “interesting people in the right places.”

  Hanssen, as he had told the Soviets, was promoted in June. He joined the FBI’s inspection staff, which meant he would be traveling around the country and overseas to scrutinize the bureau’s field offices. The mole would now be checking up to make sure that everything in the field was completely secure and running according to the rule book.

  For Hanssen, it was a necessary career move. It is not easy to get promoted in the FBI. Those who remain street agents cannot rise above a GS-13 in pay grade. To become a GS-15, agents must normally pass three hurdles: they have to put in time at headquarters, run a squad in the field, and get certified as an inspector. Hanssen had met the first two requirements and now was about to embark on the third.

  “People don’t realize how difficult it is to become even a fourteen,” said David Major. “The bureau has about a hundred and seventy members of the Senior Executive Service [SES], and it has three hundred fifty GS-15s. Out of almost twenty-eight thousand employees.”

  In the culture of the FBI, doing time as an inspector is an obligatory sentence to a kind of motel purgatory. Some lucky agents are able to combine their inspection chores with assignment to a field office.

  “We called that ‘rent-a-goon,’ as opposed to being a full-time goon,” said Dick Alu, who had worked with Hanssen in the budget unit. “It is a real pressure cooker,” Alu said, recalling his own stint in the inspection division.

  “You are unloved by the people you are seeing, and the chief inspector is evaluating you. Our symbol in the inspection division was a rat with a long tail and an oversized schwanz. Most people had nicknames. That sort of humor was our only relief. We worked from six in the morning to ten at night. My weight went up, my cholesterol went up, another year and I’d probably have been dead.”

  Some time in that summer of 1990, Hanssen gave his friend Jack Hoschouer an expensive Rolex watch. “I said no; he kept pressing it on me,” Hoschouer said. “I tried to give him money, he wouldn’t take it. He said he had bought it for himself but Bonnie thought it was clunky and ugly and insisted he take it back. So he gave it to me instead.

  “I wore the watch and Bonnie said, ‘Oh, you’ve got a watch just like the one I made Bob take back.’ ”

  “I told him he’s crazy to do this. He had said he was in debt. I gave him four hundred dollars and he gave it back to me and it went back and forth and finally I just gave up and kept the money. I said, I don’t understand this, but he’s my friend and he wants to do this.”

  Hoschouer said he puzzled over the gift but thought back on what Hanssen used to say about his father. “His father, as a policeman, knew where to get things wholesale. He always said that about his father. And since he was a cop people gave him good deals on stuff. Essentially, I thought that’s what happened here.”

  But Hanssen had bought a second Rolex for himself. Bill Houghton, who had befriended Hanssen when they worked together in the Soviet analytical unit, remembered his fascination with Rolexes. Around 1993, Houghton said, Hanssen had mentioned the sidewalk peddlers outside FBI headquarters. “People sell fake designer watches outside the building. He said, ‘Bill, you ever look at these? Look at these, they’re pretty good.’ He shows me a fake Rolex that he picked up for like twenty bucks. He said, ‘I’ve been talking to this guy and one way you can tell if it’s real is it breaks the second hand into five parts. If you see a Rolex that clicks second to second, it’s a fake. This guy can get me one for one hundred bucks that breaks it into five parts, and looks real.’

  “Later he said, ‘I’ve got a Rolex.’ I said, ‘That’s amazing.’ I turned it over and it had all the stamps on the back. It was a real Rolex, no fake. I said, ‘Bob, this is a real one.’ He said, ‘Yep, I thought I owed it to myself.’ At the time they cost about $7,500.

  “He told me he came from money, Bonnie had money, his dad left him money, and he told me he bought his house in New York for two hundred fifty thousand dollars and sold it for fiv
e hundred thousand dollars. A day or two later he had another Rolex in his hand. He said, ‘Bill, I want you to have this.’ It was one of the twenty-dollar fakes. ‘I don’t need a fake one, I’ve got a real one.’ So I said, ‘All right, I’ll take it.’ Then he told me he bought a ladies’ Rolex for Bonnie as well.”

  But by the summer of 1990, Hanssen could afford to give a real Rolex to Jack; the KGB had already paid him more than $450,000. The Russians heard from Hanssen again that August when he mailed them a floppy disk that contained a variety of classified data. The following month the KGB gave Hanssen another $40,000 in cash, and in a message assured him that some of his material had gone “to the very top,” presumably to the Kremlin and Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev. That may have been so, but again, the words were also designed to flatter and stroke their man in Washington.

  Hanssen did not contact the KGB again until February 1991, when he left an emergency call-out signal. In a message at CHARLIE, he revealed that the FBI’s chief of counterintelligence in New York had told him that the bureau had recruited a certain number of Soviet sources, presumably at the Soviet mission to the UN. And in passing, he remarked that the $40,000 he had received was “too generous.”

  In the exchange the KGB left $10,000 in cash for Hanssen and a floppy disk pinpointing two new sites. One, code-named GRACE, was located under a footbridge in Washington’s Rock Creek Park. The cash pushed Hanssen over the half-million-dollar mark in KGB income.