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

by David Wise

  On April 15, although the KGB surely understood that Hanssen would not be paying income tax on his money from Moscow, it passed along another $10,000 and a poem that, in effect, urged him to stop and smell the roses. The message was addressed as usual to “Dear Friend.” It began, “Time is flying. As a poet said:

  “What’s our life,

  If full of care

  You have no time

  To stop and stare?”

  The rest of the letter from the KGB was positively chatty:

  You’ve managed to slow down the speed of Your running life to send us a message. And we appreciate it.

  We hope You’re O’K [sic] and Your family is fine too. We are sure You’re doing great at Your job. As before, we’ll keep staying alert to respond to any call from You whenever You need it.

  We acknowledge receiving one disk through CHARLIE. One disk of mystery and intrigue. Thank you.

  Not much a business letter this time. Just formalities. We consider Site-9 cancelled. And we are sure You remember: our next contact is due at ELLIS.

  Frankly, we are looking forward to JUNE. Every new season brings new expectations.

  Enclosed in our today’s package please find $10,000. Thank You for Your friendship and help.

  We attach some information requests. We hope You’ll be able to assist us on them.

  Take care and good luck.

  Sincerely,

  Your friends.

  By early July 1991, Hanssen’s tour in the inspection division was over. He would spend the next six months at headquarters, in the Soviet operations section, as a program manager in the unit that tried to counter Soviet efforts, in particular by the KGB’s Line X, to steal U.S. scientific and technical secrets.

  As soon as Hanssen was back at headquarters, he immediately left a floppy disk with almost three hundred pages of documents for the KGB. “I returned, grabbed the first thing I could lay my hands on,” he explained in his letter. “I was in a hurry so that you would not worry, because June has passed, they held me there longer.”

  He had at least five years until he could retire, Hanssen noted, adding: “Maybe I will hang in there for that long.” He also passed along a report on a joint FBI-CIA operation and classified documents dealing with human intelligence plans and nuclear proliferation. He walked away from the drop with another $12,000 in cash in his pocket and a KGB disk that praised “Your superb sense of humor and Your sharp-asa-razor mind. We highly appreciate both.”

  Having shamelessly flattered Hanssen once more, his handlers adopted a smarmy, deferential tone: “If our natural wish to capitalize on Your information confronts in any way Your security interests we definitely cut down our thirst for profit and choose Your security. The same goes with any other aspect of Your case. That’s why we say Your security goes first.… We are sure You remember our next contact is due at ‘FLO.’ ”

  In that next exchange, in August, Hanssen actually suggested that the Soviets could learn something from a thorough study of how Mayor Richard J. Daley, whose autocratic style Hanssen greatly admired, had governed Chicago. Since the Soviet Union was only four months away from collapse, perhaps he was on to something. Still, it seemed a reach to think that a system once run by Joseph Stalin could pick up any pointers from Dick Daley.

  On August 19, the same day Hanssen suggested that the Kremlin study Mayor Daley’s leadership style, a group of plotters in Moscow, among them Vladimir Kryuchkov, the KGB chief, staged an attempted coup against Gorbachev. Russia’s president, Boris Yeltsin, astride a tank, led the countercoup that restored Gorbachev to power. Several of the Soviet republics, including Russia, declared their independence.

  This time, the KGB flattered Hanssen for his political advice. They wrote: “[T]he magical history tour to Chicago was mysteriously well timed. Have You ever thought of foretelling the things? After Your retirement for instance in some sort of Your own ‘Cristall [sic] Ball and Intelligence Agency’ (CBIA)? There are always so many people in this world eager to get a glimpse of the future.”

  Hanssen came away from that exchange with another $20,000. Finally, in October, along with providing a new secret document on the double agent program, Hanssen got around to responding to the KGB’s request that he suggest others who might be recruited to spy.

  He gave them the name of Jack Hoschouer, his closest friend, the man who was like a brother to him. Hoschouer, Hanssen wrote, was an “old friend” and a military officer who had recently been told he would not be promoted.

  Hoschouer’s Army career had begun in the late 1960s, after his two years of graduate courses at the University of Hawaii. The Vietnam war was in full swing and Hoschouer, who was in the ROTC, was called to active duty as an infantry officer in November 1968. He was sent to Vietnam as an adviser to a South Vietnamese battalion in 1970, and a year later was a captain in command of an air infantry company in the 1st Cavalry Division.

  After Vietnam, he served with the special forces in Germany for three years, returning there in 1989 as a military attaché in the American embassy in Bonn. Although he had been promoted to lieutenant colonel in 1985, it was clear that he would not be advancing any further than bird colonel, which Hanssen knew when he gave his name to the Russians.

  According to Hoschouer, the KGB did not follow up on Hanssen’s suggestion. “I was not contacted,” he said. “If the Russians pitched me, I was too dumb to realize it. If they wanted to approach me, I had a lot of official contacts with the Soviets in Bonn and it would have been easy to do.” But he could remember nothing that even remotely resembled a pitch.

  Hoschouer retired from the Army in 1994. What was his reaction to learning seven years later that his closest friend had offered him up as a morsel to the KGB? “I still don’t know,” he said. “I was disappointed I’d been passed over for promotion, in ninety-one, I think, that was true. Maybe he thought in some twisted way he was trying to help me out. My own feeling is he was under so much stress from his own situation, he wanted somebody he could talk to.”

  Did Hanssen really think that if the Russians ever managed to recruit Hoschouer, they could pal around as spies together, just as they had broken a few traffic laws as teenagers in a Corvair on the back streets of Chicago?

  Even if Hoschouer had agreed to become a spy, he pointed out, “I would not have been able to discuss it with him, since he was in the FBI.” Moreover, the KGB is careful not to tell one spy about another. Aldrich Ames worked for the KGB during some of the same years as Hanssen did, but there is no evidence that either was aware of the other’s role.

  By the time of the October exchange between Hanssen and the KGB, the Soviet Union was teetering on the edge of disaster. The political upheavals in Moscow had directly affected the KGB. Kryuchkov, who had sent all those nice letters to Hanssen, was sitting in prison, which must have been somewhat unnerving to the FBI man. The KGB’s first chief directorate (FCD), its foreign intelligence arm at Yasenevo, had been split off and declared an independent agency. After the final collapse of the Soviet Union, it would be rechristened the SVR.

  Hanssen’s handlers were anxious to assure him that despite all these seismic events, he could rely on business as usual. The spies had survived, and were now actually more independent.

  “There have been many important developments in our country lately,” the Russians acknowledged to Hanssen. “So many that we’d like to reassure You once again. Like we said: we’ve done all in order that none of those events ever affects Your security and our ability to maintain the operation with You. And of course there can be no doubt of our commitment to Your friendship and cooperation which are too important to us to loose [sic].…”

  The spies in the les (forest), as the officers in the first chief directorate often called their organization, were obviously deeply worried that Hanssen would decide, in light of the instability in Moscow, to disappear forever, as suddenly as he had appeared in 1985. The genie might vanish back into the bottle and be permanently beyond their
reach.

  But in the meantime, there was work to be done. The Russians provided new communications plans and asked Hanssen for a broad variety of classified information. They also requested a specific current document that analyzed Soviet knowledge of U.S. reconnaissance satellites. “It’s fun to read about the life in the Universe to understand better what’s going on on our own planet,” they wrote.

  Gently, they also asked about some pages that seemed to be missing from Hanssen’s hastily assembled July package. “Sometimes it happens, we understand,” the Russians said. “Life is becoming too fast.”

  On December 12, the KGB received a letter from Hanssen postmarked in Washington but with a bogus return address of “J. Baker, Box 1101, Houston, TX.” In it, Hanssen alerted the Russians to a new electronic eavesdropping gadget that was about to be targeted against them. “DEVICE APPROVED … COMING SOON,” he warned.

  Four days later, Hanssen and the KGB carried out an exchange at BOB, in Idylwood Park. Hanssen turned over a classified research paper from the CIA’s Counterintelligence Center dated November 1990 entitled “The KGB’s First Chief Directorate: Structure, Functions, and Methods.”

  He also passed to the Russians a budget summary from the office of the Director of Central Intelligence, stamped SECRET, that revealed the scope of the FBI’s foreign counterintelligence programs. And on the twenty-sixth floppy disk that he passed to the KGB, he said he was embarrassed about the pages missing from his July package.

  Hanssen was about to be promoted again; this time he would be chief of the new National Security Threat List unit at headquarters. At NSTL, he would be working on the FBI’s efforts to counter economic espionage. He had received “an increase in salary and authority,” Hanssen wrote. That was the good news. The bad news was that this moved him “at least temporarily out of direct responsibility.” He added that “a new mission for my new group has not been fully defined” but “I hope to adjust to that.… As General Patton said … ‘let’s get this over with so we can go kick the shit out of the purple-pissing Japanese.’ ”* Hanssen often quoted Patton, whom he admired almost as much as Mayor Daley.

  The technically minded Hanssen also proposed a new communications system to replace the cumbersome dead drops, the plastic bags squirreled away under footbridges, and all that unpleasant slogging around in the dark in the mud. As Hanssen outlined it, he would set up an office somewhere in Washington that would not be tapped or bugged by the FBI, since the bureau would be unaware of it. There, he and the KGB could communicate directly by computer, using special equipment with advanced encryption technology.

  From the drop in Idylwood Park, Hanssen extracted $12,000 in cash and a KGB floppy disk that contained communications plans and asked for information about various classified matters.

  But Hanssen did not reply. What the KGB had feared all along now happened. Their apprehension was always there in the background; it could be sensed between the lines of their warm and fuzzy letters to Hanssen. It was the fear that one day he would simply disappear.

  As often as the Russians might drive by the emergency call-out site near Dupont Circle, there were no chalk marks, no sign that their man was ready for another exchange of money and secrets. As often as they checked their mail at the accommodation addresses in Alexandria, there was no word from “Ramon Garcia,” no more letters from “Jim Baker” or “G. Robertson.”

  Robert Hanssen had gone to ground.

  In less than two weeks, the Soviet Union would be no more. Defectors from the KGB were already knocking at the door of the CIA, and their numbers were likely to increase. Even though Hanssen had been careful to conceal his name, perhaps one of the defectors might know something that would lead to him. He may even have wished he had not quoted General Patton, or talked about Chicago, or provided other clues that might point to his identity.

  Throughout the intelligence community there was a sense of victory, tinged with relief; the Soviet Union was history. At the CIA, Milt Bearden, the chief of the Soviet division, presided over his office’s annual Christmas gathering. The celebrants sported buttons with a hammer and sickle and star against a white background, and in big letters three words: “The party’s over!” All in all, it did not seem a good time to be spying for the Russians.

  But there was another reason that Hanssen broke off all contact in December 1991. More than a decade earlier, he had consulted Father Bucciarelli when he promised Bonnie that he would stop spying. This time, on a trip to Indianapolis, Hanssen had gone to see a second priest, who also urged him to stop betraying his country.

  And so, weighing the dangers of being caught that flowed from the imminent collapse of the Soviet empire, and armed with the importunings of the cleric in Indiana, Hanssen made his decision.

  He would go into hibernation.

  *The four were described this way in the FBI’s affidavit. The term defector is ambiguous because it normally means an intelligence officer who escapes from his country and asks for political asylum from another government. But in this instance—since the KGB would know who had left the Soviet Union and gone over to the West—it might refer to a defector or agent in place, someone who remains on the job but provides information to U.S. intelligence.

  *The quote is close to a line in one version of the fiery speech General George S. Patton, Jr., made to his men in England in 1944 just before the Normandy invasion. The FBI’s affidavit in the Hanssen case delicately omits the expletives that Hanssen attributed to Patton. But the full text, including the remarkable urological reference, later became very important, as will be seen.

  17

  Play It Again, Sam

  Joanna’s 1819 Club on M Street in downtown Washington is the sort of place where businessmen slip in on their lunch hour or after work to ogle naked women gyrating to music under the bright lights. Compared to some strip clubs, it gets a fairly sedate crowd: patrons are more likely to be wearing suits and ties than bowling jackets and industrial caps.

  Knowing her audience, Priscilla Sue Galey sometimes began her act dressed as a secretary, with a briefcase and glasses. In the anonymity of Joanna’s, the customers could watch Priscilla Sue take it all off.

  “They all pictured their secretaries coming into the office that way,” Galey said. “A couple of the men told me that. But mostly it’s ego building. We come and sit and talk to them, hug them. Maybe this is the only place they can get away from their wives. They often come to watch and talk to a particular girl.”

  In the fall of 1990, she said, while she was dancing at Joanna’s, a tall man sent a waitress over to her with a ten-dollar tip. The patron had also asked the waitress to relay a compliment. “It was something like he had never expected to find such grace and beauty in a strip club.”

  Galey ran after the man as he was leaving and caught him at the door to thank him, more for his words than the money. A couple of weeks later, Robert Hanssen was back. This time, he gave her his business card, with the embossed gold seal of the FBI.

  She was awed, and a little scared at first, to find out that her admirer was an FBI agent. But perhaps, she thought, since he was, he could do her a favor. Then thirty-two, Galey said she had lost track of her father and could only remember meeting him once.

  “I asked him to find my father. He said he’d try, ‘We have ways of doing that, we can find almost anybody.’ He wrote down the name of my father, Jerry Roberts. He got my mother pregnant in the church parking lot and my grandfather ran him off with a shotgun, in Marion, Indiana.”

  She had last seen her father when she was eight, Galey said. “He came to the house only once, and played the piano with me, and he looked at me and said, ‘She’s mine.’ ” Then he was gone.

  Hanssen never found Galey’s father, but at their next meeting he had a surprise for her. He gave her a sapphire-and-diamond necklace.

  To Galey, it was as though a fairy tale had come true. Guys who came to strip clubs did not give the dancers jewelry worth thousands of dollar
s—not, at least, without wanting something in return, and she insisted Hanssen never did. There was, she asserted, except for one time, no sex, no hugs, no kisses, no physical contact.

  This was a very unusual man, Galey realized, something far outside her usual experience. She had married briefly at sixteen, acquiring the name Galey, dropped out of high school, and moved to Columbus, Ohio, where she began stripping. There, she won the title of stripper of the year in the old burlesque theater in Columbus. “Charlie Fox was his name, the owner, and he taught me how to do it. He was like a drillmaster, teaching me how to strip. ‘You have to put on a show,’ Charlie would say.”

  In 1980, with another stripper, she moved to Boston and danced at the Golden Banana under the stage name of Traci Starr. Four years later, she came to Washington and danced for a time at Archibald’s on K Street, an area notable for its lobbyists and fat cats. Then she switched to Joanna’s.

  And the money was good. “At Joanna’s, I could make two, three, four hundred a night—one night eight hundred—on tips. The eight hundred dollars on one night was with a whole bunch of Oriental men. I think they were Japanese. I lit my nipples on fire, and they were pushing all this money at me. It’s a stripper’s trick. You turn away from the audience. First you have to split the matches, wet them, then put them on your nipples, and light the matches and in the dark, it looks like your nipples are on fire. ‘Oh,’ the Japanese said, ‘Ooh, oh, oh,’ and all of them were pushing hundred-dollar bills at me. I’m still laughing about it.”

  Galey impressed Hanssen with more than her trim body and her stripper’s skills. Although she never completed high school, she was obviously very intelligent, interested in art, in life, and intellectually curious. She also had a sense of humor. “Stripping isn’t bad,” she said, “once you get over the being naked part.”