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

by David Wise

  In 1993, Kimberly Lichtenberg was working in the National Security Threat List unit in the intelligence division. The unit chief, Robert Hanssen, presided over an office of about ten people on the fourth floor. There were three or four FBI agents, a few support workers, a secretary, and a typist. Lichtenberg was an intelligence assistant to Supervisory Special Agent James A. Werth.

  Hanssen could hardly have failed to notice that Kimberly Lichtenberg was tall and willowy, with long blond hair and striking, clear blue eyes. And by Lichtenberg’s account, at least, he did more than look.

  “I never really knew him until I was transferred into his unit,” she said. “I’d heard things about him: ‘Dr. Death.’ As a female, I’d never want to be alone with him. I got weird vibes. He’d make sure he’d brush against me when he passed by. The same with other females in the office. I never, ever felt comfortable around him.” Hanssen, she asserted, had brushed against her “many times.”*

  She added, “Hanssen considered women beneath him. He spoke down to them. But if he wanted to rub up against me he would. And the bureau is a boys’ club.”

  In truth, Hanssen did not approve of women in law enforcement. That retrograde conviction was in tune with his conservative views in general. Women in the bureau, he would grumble, were dysfunctional for the organization. But to hold that opinion, he once complained, was not politically correct.

  At about 3:30 P.M. on February 25, 1993, Hanssen summoned Lichtenberg, a secretary, and a typist to a meeting in his office. There had been some minor squabbling in the clerical ranks and Hanssen wanted to get to the bottom of it.

  “The secretary had been complaining about the typist,” Lichtenberg said. “Hanssen asked, ‘Kim, are you having any problems with the typist?’ I said no, I didn’t. Hanssen said, ‘Well, the secretary says you’ve been complaining.’ I said, ‘No, I’ve no problems with the typist.’ ”

  Lichtenberg was getting nervous about missing her ride in the carpool. She lived near the Baltimore/Washington International Airport and if she did not show up for her ride she would have no way to get home. “I said, ‘I have to leave to catch my van.’ I turned and walked out. I thought the meeting was over. It was a little before four, when I usually leave. I was not being flippant. I was respectful.”

  After she left the meeting, she said, “I was heading for my pod area,” where a friend and fellow FBI employee, Candy Curtis, was waiting for her.

  She had just reached her cubicle, she said, about thirty feet from Hanssen’s office, when he caught up with her.

  “He yelled, ‘Get back here!’ I said, ‘No, I need to get home, this doesn’t involve me.’

  “No sooner had I said that than he grabbed me by my left arm and spun me around. I lost my balance and fell to the ground. He never let go of my arm. He was dragging me by the arm, screaming at me. He continued to drag me back by my arm toward his office, screaming and yelling at me.”

  Lichtenberg, hoping for help, called out to Candy Curtis.

  “He was yelling, ‘I told you to get back in here.’ When I yelled ‘Candy!’ he starts yelling, ‘You’re insubordinate!’ ”

  Candy Curtis, Lichtenberg said, heard the commotion. “When she heard me call her name, she got up, walked out of the pod and saw everything. She saw me in a tug-of-war stance. She didn’t see me fall to the ground, but she saw me trying to get up.

  “I got back on my feet. He was still holding my arm and I hit him on the chest and broke free.”

  Curtis confirmed Lichtenberg’s account. She had heard the commotion and saw most of what occurred, she said. “Definitely. I was there and did witness it. He was pulling her physically. She was still low down, crouched. It went on until he saw me. He had no idea I was there.”

  Once free of Hanssen, Lichtenberg fled with Candy Curtis. “We ran to the section chief, Nick Walsh. He said, ‘Wait here.’ He ran down to talk to Hanssen and came back and said, ‘Do you want to receive medical attention?’ I said, ‘My van is probably going to leave me.’ He said, ‘You better go and come back in the morning.’ ”

  Lichtenberg hurried to her car pool. “I had bruises on my arm and a bruise on my cheek.” She was shaken and upset by the encounter.

  “The people in the van were angry at first. They were waiting. Then they saw me. I cried all the way home.”

  Lichtenberg went to her parents’ house. “I’m their only daughter. When my father saw the bruises, he started crying. My father was a crane operator, a big man, but he was crying.

  “My parents and my husband took me to the emergency room at North Arundel Hospital. I was X-rayed. The tendons on my arm were stretched; they never fully came back to normal. I still can’t sleep on my left side.”

  Michael Lichtenberg called Nick Walsh at the FBI. “I asked if my wife was going to be safe. He said, ‘I can’t guarantee her safety.’ I said, ‘Then transfer her. Get her out of there.’ ” As of now, he added, “She’s not coming in.”

  The next day, Kimberly Lichtenberg said, “Two agents from division five came to the house and took a statement.” Lichtenberg told them what had happened. She also told the agents that Hanssen had made her uncomfortable in various ways. He had a habit, she said to them, of walking up to her desk and staring down at her. When she asked if there was anything he wanted, or that she could help him with, he would answer “No,” and walk away. Sometimes, she recounted to the FBI agents, Hanssen would come up to her and place a hand on her arm or shoulder and shake her slightly. When Hanssen did this, she told the agents, “He would say, ‘I’m just trying to shake you up this morning.’ ”

  In recalling her statement to the agents, Lichtenberg said that although Hanssen did not shake her in a “mean way” on these occasions, he should not have touched her at all. But she said she feared that if she complained, Hanssen, as her boss, could retaliate in various ways—he could block her promotion, for example—so she did not.

  Michael Lichtenberg was worried about what Hanssen might do next, and said so to the two agents. “I told them I felt this guy was very unstable,” he recalled. “I said, ‘I can’t believe nothing is being done with this guy. He has a gun. It isn’t even being taken away from him.’ ”

  The agents later typed Kimberly Lichtenberg’s statement, and she approved and signed it. Candy Curtis also gave a statement to the internal FBI investigation in support of Lichtenberg’s account.

  Kimberly Lichtenberg said she sought to file an assault complaint with the police in Washington. “I wanted to file criminal charges but I wasn’t able to,” she contended. “The detective took notes. He talked to the bureau. He said they told him it was an inside matter.”

  After Hanssen attacked her, Kimberly Lichtenberg took a monthand-a-half leave from the FBI. “I had physical therapy for a few months. I also saw a psychotherapist, a woman who said, ‘Kim, you’ve got to do something about this.’ ”

  A year later, the Lichtenbergs filed a civil complaint in the District of Columbia Superior Court against Hanssen for “assault and battery, gross negligence,” and “intentional infliction of emotional distress.” They asked for $1,360,000 in damages.

  Because Hanssen was a federal employee, the case was transferred to federal court in Washington. The Justice Department, defending Hanssen, moved to dismiss the complaint. In a statement filed with the court, John D. Bates, the chief of the civil division, found that “defendant Robert P. Hanssen was acting within the scope of his authority as an employee of the United States at the time of such alleged incidents.”

  In other words, the government was arguing in Hanssen’s defense that because he was on duty at the time he dragged Lichtenberg down the hall, she and her husband had no cause of action.

  Lichtenberg also filed a workers’ compensation claim for her injuries. Her lawyer, Steve Huffines, represented her in both the lawsuit and her compensation hearing. Because the government said Hanssen was acting within the scope of his official duties, Huffines maintained, it would have been “a d
ifficult standard to overcome. The only way to get action outside a claim of ‘scope of employment’ would be if he pulled a gun out and shot her.”

  In the end, the civil suit was dismissed by Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson after Huffines, apparently as the result of a clerical mixup, did not appear for a court date. Lichtenberg fared better in her compensation claim. She was awarded $16,000 for her injuries and continuing disability.

  When she returned to work, she was transferred out of Hanssen’s unit into a new job administering clearances and background checks for bureau employees. Even so, she could not avoid running into Hanssen. When that happened, “He smiled and would say hi, but he never apologized. I learned he was suspended for five days.”

  Lichtenberg got a letter of censure from the FBI. “It said what he did was wrong but that I had provoked him by leaving the meeting without being dismissed and I was insubordinate.” Lichtenberg has asked that the letter be removed from her employment file.

  Two years after the attack, Lichtenberg was working in the basement of the FBI in a SCIF. (The acronym, pronounced like a word, stands for Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility, a place where highly classified documents are kept.) The SCIF was specially enclosed so that its equipment would not give off electronic emanations.

  “I was pregnant and Hanssen would come to the basement office where I was working, 1B045, where he signed in and got his mail.” At the time, Hanssen had been assigned to duty at the State Department but would come to headquarters daily. “I went to see Joe McMahon, the section chief. ‘You know they’ve put Hanssen down here?’ The section chief said yes, he knew. ‘Don’t worry about it.’ ”

  But Lichtenberg did worry. She talked to her supervisor. “My immediate boss wrote a two-page memo about the situation, but the bureaucracy did nothing.” Hanssen continued to report to the basement office. “I ran into him five or six times a week. I was losing weight and my OB said, ‘If they don’t remove him, you will lose the baby.’ ”

  “I went to Barbara Duffy, the FBI ombudsman. I told her the whole story. She called McMahon and said get him out of there.” Hanssen then reported in to another office, on a different floor, and Lichtenberg, to her immense relief, seldom encountered him after that.

  The last time she saw Hanssen was about three weeks before his arrest. “The elevator was coming up from the garage. I was on 1B, the floor where I work, so he had to be coming up from the garage. The elevator door opened and he was there. It was just him. He said, ‘You getting on?’ I said, ‘No.’ If there had been somebody else on the elevator I would have. I just didn’t want to get on it with him.”

  On February 20, 2001, she was at work at FBI headquarters as usual. “I usually watch Channel 13, the local television news, in the morning. That morning for some reason or other I didn’t. I came into work. I’m at my desk. My former unit chief came to me. I’d heard rumors of a spy case brewing. He said, ‘They arrested him.’ I said, ‘Anybody I know?’ He said, ‘Oh yes, you know him. It’s Bob Hanssen.’ ”

  A few months before Hanssen was arrested, Michael Lichtenberg had taken a job at the FBI in the criminal division. As a result, he knew more about the structure and operations of the bureau than he did in 1993. He recalled the visit of the two FBI agents who had come to the house to interview his wife after Hanssen had manhandled her. “The two agents were from the intelligence division. They should have given it to the criminal division. I didn’t know that at the time; now I know.”

  If Hanssen had been suspended and investigated by the FBI’s Office of Professional Responsibility, he said, the outcome might have been different. Perhaps a clue pointing to Hanssen’s espionage activities might have been turned up. “If they had pulled him and done a thirty-day OPR investigation,” he said, “they might have found something. That’s the sad part.”

  *Lichtenberg agreed to meet with the author to recount her story although she was still employed by the FBI in a sensitive position in the intelligence division, now the National Security Division. She expressed some concern that her criticism of how the bureau dealt with her case might cause problems in her job, but she was willing to speak out anyway.

  19

  Hibernation

  Although Hanssen had gone into his hibernation mode at the end of 1991 as the Soviet Union collapsed, he volunteered his services to the Russians again in 1993, a fact that the FBI learned to its surprise only when it debriefed him after he had pleaded guilty to espionage.

  For most of the 1990s, Hanssen the spy was dormant, having abruptly cut off his contacts with the KGB. But in 1993 he revolunteered to the GRU, the Russian military intelligence arm for which he had spied in 1979, when he had received the $30,000 that he later told Bonnie Hanssen he had sent to Mother Teresa.

  Hanssen explained to his FBI and CIA debriefers that his reemergence in 1993 was the result of overwhelming curiosity, to which he succumbed. It was a curiosity about what had happened to information he had previously passed to Moscow.

  At least twice, Hanssen had provided the KGB with a complete roster of the FBI’s double agent (DA) cases. Typically, in these operations, an American military enlisted man or officer under FBI control would offer secrets to Soviet military intelligence. One frequent goal would be to see what secrets the Russians asked the double agent to obtain. That in turn would indicate what Moscow did not know. Conversely, the questions that were not asked might suggest what the Russians already knew. It was these double agent operations that led to Hanssen’s fleeting, risky attempt to recontact the GRU, because it was the GRU that the FBI had targeted in these cases.

  “It was almost an academic curiosity,” one senior intelligence official explained. “He had given up a lot of DA cases that the FBI and the military ran with the GRU as the target. They were joint ops. Hanssen sees them continue to operate and wonders why. Is the KGB not sharing his information with the GRU? Why are these cases still going on?” It was beginning to drive Hanssen up the wall; he had to know the answer.

  “So he makes an approach to a GRU officer stationed in the Russian embassy in Washington. He has a package of documents with him that he was ready to give to the GRU guy. He approaches him early one morning in the garage of the apartment building where the GRU man lives and introduces himself. ‘I am Ramon Garcia,’ he says.

  “The GRU man thinks it is a trap, gets into his car, and drives away. It apparently stunned Hanssen. He may have thought that all of Soviet intelligence would know by now about the famous Ramon Garcia.”

  Hanssen’s risky move then took an astonishing turn. The Russians, convinced that the episode was a ploy by U.S. intelligence to entrap the GRU officer, lodged an official protest with the State Department. They even said that the unknown man who had approached their officer described himself as “a disaffected FBI agent.”*

  The FBI opened an investigation to try to determine the identity of the man who had, in Deep Throat fashion, approached the Russian spy in the parking garage. But there was very little to go on, and the case went nowhere. This was noted with relief and satisfaction by Hanssen, who closely followed the progress of the investigation in the FBI’s internal computer system.

  * * *

  Hanssen was acting more and more like a man who had come loose from his moorings. There was his bizarre attack on Kimberly Lichtenberg in February, and the risky, Walter Mitty–like failed approach to the GRU. Hanssen’s father died that same year, bringing to an end their difficult, complex relationship. And it was also in 1993 that Hanssen broke into Ray Mislock’s computer.

  Mislock, a tall Texan who commanded a Swift Boat in the Vietnam war, had joined the FBI in 1972 and two decades later had risen to chief of the former Soviet section, by then renamed the Eurasian section.

  “One day I was sitting there in my office,” Mislock recalled, “and Hanssen comes in with a piece of paper in his hand. He said, ‘You didn’t believe me that the system was insecure.’ He handed me the piece of paper and it was an exact copy of a d
ocument I had just written on my computer! I think it was a memo I was writing to the director. The memo was sensitive, and classified.

  “I grabbed it out of his hand and ran down the hall to Pat Watson’s office, the deputy assistant director for operations. He was angry.” Together with Watson, Mislock marched into the office of Harry “Skip” Brandon, the official in charge of computer and security programs for the intelligence division.

  “We had a very loud conversation,” Mislock said. “We had a very animated conversation. I was really ripshit.”

  Brandon tried to calm Mislock down. “Okay,” Brandon said, “we’ll look into it.”

  Mislock was not appeased. “Having been told the system was secure, I wasn’t going to accept that,” he said. “I went into the counterespionage unit and disconnected all the computers from the LAN. That happened in a space of thirty minutes, and I was still steaming.”

  Hanssen was delighted to explain how he had hacked into the computer of the FBI’s top official in charge of countering Russian espionage. “At some point we ended up in Hanssen’s office and he gave a demonstration of how he did it,” Mislock said. “After that, the computer people in the division worked to plug the vulnerability. I was not angry at Hanssen. I was angry at the people who had given me assurances that the system could not be hacked. At the time, people were appreciative he had done what he had done.”

  In retrospect, Mislock theorized that Hanssen had hacked into the FBI’s computers for his own reasons. “He went in to look and see if there was anything to indicate he was being watched. He had to come up with a story to explain why he was in the system in case there was some tracking software he didn’t know about.” Hanssen may have been worried, Mislock believed, that he had left computer traces that might lead back to him.* “So he came forward and was the person who pointed to the vulnerability.”

  Everyone in the division knew what Hanssen had done, and there was considerable buzz about it. Once again, Hanssen had demonstrated his computer wizardry. By breaking into Ray Mislock’s computer, he was dancing on the edge, but he had gotten away with it.