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

by David Wise

  According to Galey, Hanssen was always trying to improve her spiritual life, continually urging her to go to church. He would ask, “What are you planning to do with the rest of your life? Are you getting any closer to God?” But, she said, although she passed a church every day on her way to Joanna’s, “I felt it was hypocritical for me to go to church and then go down to the club and take my clothes off.”

  Once, Hanssen drove her to his church in northern Virginia, so she would know where it was, and he urged her to attend mass there. She did go to the church one Sunday, but only got as far as the parking lot. “I saw him and his family go in, and I just couldn’t do it.”

  Hanssen also drove her by his house on Talisman Drive. “I think he was just proud to show me how he lived.” She envied the placid suburban neighborhood and the ordinary family life it evoked, a stability she had not known. But he never told his wife about her, she said. “He couldn’t explain a stripper.”

  The fact that Hanssen frequented strip clubs was a secret that none of his FBI colleagues and friends knew about, except for Jack Hoschouer, who would accompany him to the clubs when he was in town.

  Hanssen befriended other strippers besides Galey. He knew Dep Mullins, a Vietnamese woman who danced as “Brooke” at Joanna’s. They met in the summer of 1999 when Hanssen, accompanied by Hoschouer, visited the club. “I speak some Vietnamese,” Hoschouer said. “We invited her over and we spoke a little. ‘Dep’ means beautiful in Viet. She was raised in Hawaii, grew up on Maui. We saw her again early in 2000.” Both the FBI and the Justice Department investigated Hanssen’s encounters with Mullins. There was no evidence, however, that Hanssen ever developed with other strippers the same close and lengthy relationship he enjoyed with Galey.

  Often, when an FBI agent retired, his coworkers would give a farewell party for him at one of the strip clubs. The club favored by many FBI agents was the Good Guys, two blocks down from the Russian embassy.*

  Paul Moore remembered a conversation with Hanssen at FBI headquarters around 1990, the same year he met Galey. “I’ve been to strip clubs twice, once at the Good Guys, where a bureau guy who was retiring got a plaque from the club, he’d been there so much. I told Bob about it and I said it was not too tawdry, it was a fairly joyful atmosphere. He said no, it was sinful. He said, ‘You were paying women to tempt men.’ It was just the kind of thing you would get from a priest.”

  Some weeks after Hanssen gave Galey the necklace, she mentioned to him that she needed to have a tooth fixed. Before long, Hanssen left an envelope for her at the club; inside she found $2,000 in hundreddollar bills. By this time, Galey had almost convinced herself that Hanssen might be her long-lost father; it might explain his generosity. “I fantasized that he was my father, or an angel.”

  Hanssen’s inspection duties that year were arduous, but he apparently had time to see Galey between trips, for they took long walks together, she said. “We walked to art galleries. To the National Gallery, to the Hirshhorn. He did offer to take me to the National Archives, but I was more interested in art than history. I like the old masters, Leonardo especially.”

  When they were out together, Hanssen had his own ideas of how Galey should dress. “We were going to one of the art galleries. I had on very high white heels. He said, ‘You know your feet are going to hurt.’ What he really was saying was, ‘Please don’t look like this.’ We walked to a shoe store, picked out a new pair of regular blue or black pumps, and I wore them. He always wanted me to wear navy blue.”

  What was going on here? Hanssen may have been having some sort of midlife fling, except it wasn’t much of a fling by Galey’s account. More likely, it seemed he was living a weird combination of a James Bond fantasy—the spy with a pretty woman on his arm—and the My Fair Lady version of the Pygmalion myth, with himself in the role of Professor Higgins to Galey’s Eliza Doolittle. He would uplift Galey, improve her mind, and help her into a spiritual realm that somehow was lacking at Joanna’s. Or, on the other hand, as one observer suggested, “Maybe it was Opus Dei’s idea of an affair.”

  Whatever Hanssen’s motive, his involvement with Galey went on for more than a year, and he risked taking her to places where they could be seen together. “One time he took me to lunch at a cop club, a private club. He said they were policemen and FBI agents. You had to be buzzed in. It was in Washington somewhere. On the way to the club, I discovered he was carrying a gun. He said, ‘I wonder if they’ll make me check this.’ ”

  It was en route to the same lunch that Hanssen made a remark that startled Galey. She had asked him a question about something—she did not recall what—“and he said, ‘I could tell you, but I’d have to kill you.’ You could see it was a joke. He was smiling.” Still, Galey was unsettled by the remark.

  Sometimes, Hanssen talked politics. “He explained Communism. He said it’s not like America, where you have individual rights; in Russia, the government has control of everything. But the way he explained it, it didn’t sound as bad as everyone made it out to be. It probably did have its good aspects. Because no one went hungry. It was like Communism is not all bad, but they did control every aspect of your life.”

  In April 1991, Hanssen told Galey he was going on a trip to Hong Kong. Galey had a genuine enthusiasm for anything Asian, not just because of the eight-hundred-dollar night and how the Japanese patrons had appreciated it when she set her nipples on fire, and she pleaded with Hanssen to bring her back a souvenir. To her amazement, he asked if she would like to go with him.

  She said she could not afford the trip, but Hanssen asked her to walk with him to a travel office. There, he picked up his airline reservation, and before she knew it, he had handed her a round-trip ticket to Hong Kong. When she tried to hug him for the gift, he shrank back. “He said, ‘Oh no, that is not necessary, it’s not necessary,’ and he smiled, like he didn’t want to hurt my feelings.” If she changed her mind about going, he said, she could turn in the ticket and keep the cash. “It was all magic,” Galey remembered.

  If she asked him where all the money was coming from, “he would explain it away by telling me it was his inheritance.” Her time with Hanssen “was the most wonderful thing that ever happened to me. I really didn’t want to question it too much. It might make it go away.”

  And so they flew to Hong Kong, on separate flights, and stayed at the same hotel in separate rooms for two weeks. They had breakfast together every morning and dinner at night. Once, they took the ferry to Kowloon, and Hanssen showed her around the streets and shopping malls. Galey was thrilled when they visited a sailing ship in the harbor. On most days, however, while Hanssen went about his inspection duties for the FBI, Galey shopped and went sight-seeing.

  “Over cheesecake in Hong Kong, I said, ‘Mr. Hanssen, you must have done something wrong in your life.’ He thought for a while and said, ‘Well, I changed some test scores in college.’ That was it. I said, ‘You never cheated on your wife, you never went out with the guys and did something crazy?’ He said, ‘No, I’ve never done any of that.’ He lived a very sterile life as far as I could see.

  “He was very straitlaced. He had compassion. You could see it, and you could tell that he was a good man.”

  She was baffled as to what Hanssen wanted. “I never met any man who didn’t deep down want to screw me,” she said, matter-of-factly. “I had to find out.” She had wondered, she said, “if he was repressed because of his family and church.” She had to know “if he really wanted sex.”

  So in Hong Kong, far from Talisman Drive, Galey made her move. “I had a lot of souvenirs and needed a bigger suitcase to get them home,” she said. “I asked him to come to my room to see the souvenirs and see how big a suitcase I would need. He came to my room.”

  Galey was circumspect at first in describing what happened, but said that in the hotel room, she came on to him. What occurred next, she said, wasn’t “finished.” She regards sex, she added, as “meaning intercourse between two consenting persons that is fi
nished,” a definition almost Clintonian in its precision. “There was no consent,” she said.

  When asked to explain what all these elaborate semantics meant, she was more direct. “I was very drunk,” she recalled. She had, she said, begun with oral sex. “And when I started, he said, ‘Where in the world did you learn how to do that?’ I thought, ‘Oh my God, he’s never even had a blow job.’ I think he stopped me when I was ready for intercourse. I came up for that but he was not consenting, he did not want it. I never dreamed that he wouldn’t. As I remember it, that’s what happened. I felt a little bit ashamed, a lot of hurt. I knew what I did had never been done to him before.”

  On the trip, there was not much talk about Hanssen’s work. “In Hong Kong,” Galey recalled, “he mentioned the Chinese mafia, and he mentioned the Russians, but he never went into any details.”

  Friends say Hanssen admired James Bond and liked the movies about the exploits of Agent 007. But he may also have fantasized that he was Humphrey Bogart, living a real-life romantic role in Casablanca. Whenever they were in a piano bar together, Galey added, there was one song that Hanssen would request. “In Hong Kong,” she said, “he always asked for ‘As Time Goes By.’ ”

  Hanssen never took Galey into FBI headquarters, as far as is known, but he did take her to the bureau’s training academy in Virginia, south of Washington. “He took me to Quantico after Hong Kong. He put a CIA badge on me so I would have entry to everywhere. He said, ‘If anybody stops you, you’re to say, “I’m working on the Eisenhower project, or something like that, and it’s top secret, and I can’t talk about it.” ’ It was like a big joke. I saw the library, the shooting range, the little town they set up for training agents. I didn’t shoot in the shooting range, although I would have liked to. He didn’t shoot either, although he bragged how good a shot he was.”

  It was in August 1991, a few months after their trip to Hong Kong, that Hanssen urged Galey to get a driver’s license. She said she had not had one for five years, because there was no reason; she could not afford a car. Well, he asked, if you could afford a car, what would it be?

  “Either an old Jaguar convertible, with the spoked rims,” she replied, “or it has to be a Mercedes.” Those are good choices, Hanssen said.

  Galey got her license and at their next lunch, on August 5, at Jaimalito’s, a Mexican restaurant in Georgetown, Hanssen had some surprises for her. First, he handed her an envelope. “It was an American Express card with my name on it. I never had a credit card. I thought that was wonderful. And then he handed me a pair of keys, and I knew they were nice keys, because they had the little leather holders on them, so they had to be to a nice car, and I was like, ‘What are these for?’

  “And he says, ‘This is for your new car.’ And he said, ‘I looked for a Jaguar, but I got to thinking that the maintenance on that might be too much for you. It’s a Mercedes, a champagne silver Mercedes, and it’s being cleaned up, and when we’re through eating, we’ll go pick it up.’ And I’m like, ‘You bought me a Mercedes!’ I couldn’t finish eating, I couldn’t even eat. I kept asking questions, and said, ‘Do we have to eat, can’t we just go?’ ”

  Afterward, they drove out to Alexandria to pick up the car, a 1985 Mercedes-Benz 190E Sedan, for which Hanssen had paid the dealer $10,500 in cash. Galey could not believe it; she drove fifty miles out of her way when she went back to her apartment in Silver Spring, Maryland, just to be in the car.

  Around the same time, Hanssen gave Galey an expensive laptop. She said Hanssen indicated that if she could learn how to use the computer it would help her out of the strip club and on the path to an office job. But Galey was not able to get the laptop to work, and decided that Hanssen had put in some kind of code to lock the computer and test her abilities. “My mother is good at computers and could not make it work. She couldn’t boot it up, which led me to believe it was protected.”

  In retrospect, she wondered if the laptop was part of a plan that Hanssen had to enlist her to help him spy. “It became an obsession that I learn how to use computers. He wanted me to learn how to e-mail, to send him messages from afar. I used to think he was just trying to improve me. Now I think he wanted me as an asset. He was preparing me for something.”

  That Hanssen would risk having anyone else to assist him in his espionage for Moscow seems highly improbable. But Galey’s speculation was not dismissed out of hand by the FBI, which interviewed her after Hanssen’s arrest. “I think he was trying to develop her, Galey, into some kind of cutout,” said one veteran counterintelligence expert. “He gave her the computer, he was trying to test her skills. Otherwise, and assuming there was no sex, why did he spend all that time with her?”

  Toward the end of the year, Galey said, Hanssen told her that he wanted to send her to France to see “the incorrupt saint.” Although he did not elaborate, “There is such a shrine in France. He was going to send me there. He always told me, miracles happen every day.”*

  Aside from the necklace, the trip to Hong Kong, the Mercedes, and the laptop, all big-ticket items, Hanssen had another, small present for Galey. “He gave me a video of Casablanca around the time he gave me the computer. He said it was a classic. I took it home for the holidays in 1991.” But before she left, they had dinner together at a club in Maryland. There was a piano bar, and once again, Galey said, Hanssen asked for “As Time Goes By.”

  A kiss is just a kiss. With the romantic melody playing in the background, Hanssen surprised Galey with an unexpected question. “That’s the evening when he asked if he wasn’t happily married, would I ever be interested in him? I was totally confused. I said, ‘Of course I would be.’ ”

  Galey said her confusion stemmed from the fact that up to that evening, Hanssen had always talked about how important his family was. “It was obvious his wife and kids were everything to him. He often spoke of his wife and children and how dedicated he was to them.”

  But as matters turned out, it was to be their last dinner together. The decision to go back to Columbus that Christmas turned into a disaster for Priscilla Sue Galey. Her life went rapidly downhill. She stayed for two months, longer than she had planned, ran up debts, and her car was wrecked in a collision with a city truck.

  “The Mercedes was smashed. Totaled. In March of ninety-two. That’s the day my life went really bad. My friends were smoking crack. There was no insurance. The guy who was supposed to pay my insurance on the car said he had smoked it, he spent the money on crack.”

  The laptop and the diamond-and-sapphire necklace were pawned for a fraction of their value. When the money ran out, she used the American Express card to buy Easter dresses for her nieces. But Hanssen had told her that the credit card, for which he paid the bills, was to be used strictly for expenses for the Mercedes or for emergencies. When he saw the dresses on the credit card statement, he flew to Columbus. There was an awkward encounter with Galey, “a very stiff meeting,” as she put it, and he retrieved the card and left.

  It was not only Galey’s friends who were into drugs. She became hooked on crack, and turned to prostitution to support her habit. She was arrested in 1993, caught in a police sting, when a friend she was with sold crack to an undercover cop. Her mother, Linda Harris, called Hanssen on his direct line at the FBI to ask for help, but he refused. Galey pleaded guilty to avoid a longer sentence and spent a year in the state reformatory for women in Marysville, Ohio. Later, she had a child out of wedlock and fell deeper into her life on the streets of Columbus.

  If she could visit Hanssen in prison, which she would like to do, she wants to ask him a question. “I just want to know, ‘Why? What could ever change you from this paragon of virtue? What could change you?’ In my eyes he was a god.”

  Still, Hanssen had helped her more than she ever dreamed any man would. “He showed me a different way of living, a whole new me.” She felt this way even though their relationship had not lasted and she had failed to better herself, as he had seemed to want, instead doing just the
opposite.

  She was deeply disappointed at the news that Hanssen was a Russian spy. “It kind of hurts my feelings that he lied to me; he was the one man who wasn’t capable of lying, it didn’t seem like, and I trusted him so much. He gave me back my faith in men. I’m just disappointed, that’s all.”

  Galey shook her head. “Hell, I’m used to it. For him to make a magical world and then … I guess it’s just, like, there goes my fairy tale again.”

  *Russians from the embassy also patronized the Good Guys, often leaving unsteadily. From time to time, “FBI agents on surveillance would approach the Russians at the Good Guys,” said one bureau counterintelligence agent. “Sometimes when the Russians were so drunk they didn’t know where they were we would try to help them to their cars. The next day we’d call them and they’d say ‘No, no, it was a mistake.’ ”

  *In the Catholic Church, the bodies of some saints are considered “incorrupt” because they have not deteriorated or have done so only partially. These relics are often credited with miraculous cures of ill or disabled persons. The most famous example is Bernadette, the celebrated French nun whose body lies in a convent in Nevers, France.

  18

  “He Was Dragging Me by the Arm, Screaming at Me”

  Kimberly Schaefer grew up in a working-class neighborhood in Ferndale, Maryland, south of Baltimore, and got a job at the FBI at age eighteen, right out of high school. She was assigned to the tour office, escorting visitors through the bureau’s headquarters in Washington.

  A bright and articulate woman, she was moved to the FBI’s intelligence division in less than a year. In 1992, she married Michael Lichtenberg, then a sales representative for a steamship company. They bought a house in Ferndale, near her parents, and in a few years started a family.