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

by David Wise

  “I am the sixth graduate of the naval academy in my family,” he said in an interview in the living room of his home in northern Virginia, where he sat near an oil portrait of his grandfather.*

  In September 1997, the damage assessment team began work. Kimmel headed a group of four agents and four analysts. Their mission was to discover exactly what secrets Pitts had sold to the KGB, what programs might have been compromised, and how extensive the damage was to U.S. security.

  As O’Donnell began examining the documents in the case, including the transcripts of the extensive FBI debriefings of the spy, it struck him that the way the Russians had run Pitts was peculiar. The KGB was not exploiting him. They were not asking for a lot of material or for specific documents. To O’Donnell, one obvious reason might be that the Russians had another source inside the FBI. If the KGB was already getting a plentiful supply of secrets from a mole in the bureau, it might explain its laid-back handling of Earl Pitts.

  O’Donnell shared his suspicions with Kimmel, who agreed and demanded to see sensitive counterintelligence files that he hoped would support their theory. Kimmel soon found himself about as popular inside headquarters as the proverbial skunk at a garden party. In part, the root of the trouble was cultural.

  Division 5, the intelligence division, by then renamed the National Security Division, was a cadre of specialists in counterintelligence. The spycatchers believed they knew their business, and although O’Donnell was an insider, Kimmel was not. At the time he was assigned to the Pitts damage assessment, Kimmel was working on the bureau’s inspection staff, never an admired group to begin with.

  From the start, there was friction between Kimmel and the managers of the intelligence division, including John Lewis, who had taken over as the assistant director in charge in February 1997, and Ed Curran, then the chief of the Russian section.

  Lewis was a husky former captain in the Marines who had served in Vietnam, as well as on the staff of the National Security Council and in the CIA. Although soft-spoken, he left no doubt about who was in charge; he allowed Kimmel to have access to some files, but kept him on a tight leash.

  To Lewis, it appeared that Kimmel was trying to expand his damage assessment in the Pitts case into a mole hunt. But that was not his brief; the bureau and the CIA already had the SIU and dozens of people trying to find the penetration. Kimmel, Lewis made clear, was to stick to his task.

  Kimmel was asking to see case files, including raw files, that had nothing to do with Pitts. That raised Lewis’s hackles. He did not want Kimmel and his team combing through the files of unresolved cases and learning the names of suspects. Some of the files, Lewis said, identified bureau agents who had been scrutinized in the New York mole hunt before Pitts was caught.

  “Others related to sensitive source reporting from both the bureau and the agency on walk-ins around the world, [SVR] hallway gossip about penetrations. We had a walk-in to the Soviet embassy in Portugal where the guy flashed CIA creds. He, Kimmel, wanted everything in the world we had on penetrations to see if it in some way related to Pitts. But his job was to see what Pitts had compromised.

  “We were not about to allow him to be privy to all of those files. My job as assistant director was to protect sources and methods. I was not about to open them up to someone who had no sensitivity nor complete understanding of highly classified information relating to penetration of the U.S. government. I was not going to open up our entire innermost secrets to someone who had never even worked this stuff.” Kimmel, Lewis added, was “a good investigator” but “although well intentioned, he was very difficult to work with. He had confrontations with everyone.”

  Lewis did not disagree with Kimmel’s theory that the KGB’s handling of Pitts might suggest the existence of another penetration. “The fact that the Russians had not tasked Pitts—we knew that. It was common sense there might be somebody else.”

  Kimmel, for his part, strongly defended his study of the Pitts case. “My hypothesis was the greatest damage Pitts was doing was making it more complicated for FBI counterintelligence teams to uncover what turned out to be Ames. The Soviets could play one off against the other and confuse the trail. The great unknown was, are there more than Pitts?

  “It was inconceivable to me that we are saying that the KGB’s number one job is to penetrate the FBI and they have Pitts as a source and are not exploiting him to a greater degree. That doesn’t make any sense to me. If the shoe was on the other foot and we had only one Soviet source, we would be falling all over ourselves to exploit every drop of blood from the guy.”

  On February 12, 1999, Kimmel met in a seventh-floor conference room at FBI headquarters with Louis Freeh, the director; Neil J. Gallagher, who had become the division chief some months after Lewis retired; and other FBI officials. Freeh asked Kimmel whether he thought there were other moles in the FBI, but Kimmel said he had not had access to enough information to form a judgment.

  Freeh ordered Kimmel to investigate further and authorized him to see more files. But Kimmel was not shown all that he wanted to see because counterintelligence officials continued to restrict his access to sensitive cases.

  The following month, Kimmel met with Freeh again. “I did not say definitely that I thought there was a mole in the FBI,” Kimmel said. “But it was perfectly obvious I was concerned there was a mole in the FBI.”

  Looking back on these events, Kimmel said that when he prepared his study he was unaware that when the FBI interviewed Pitts in prison in June 1997, the convicted spy was asked whether he knew of any other moles inside the bureau. Pitts said he did not, but he also said he suspected Robert Hanssen because Hanssen had broken into the computer of another counterintelligence official. Bureau officials assumed this was a reference to the time in 1993 when Hanssen had hacked into Ray Mislock’s computer. Since they already knew about that incident, and Hanssen had come forward and claimed to Mislock that he was simply trying to prove that the FBI computer network was vulnerable, the FBI discounted what Pitts said.

  “The debriefings of Pitts are a foot high,” Kimmel said. “If Hanssen’s name is in any of that I missed it. All the debriefings were recorded. I don’t know if it made it to the transcript. I read every word of every transcript and don’t recall seeing Hanssen’s name. That is not to say I couldn’t have missed it. If I missed it, then shame on me. And in that case, everyone else on my team missed it, too.”

  Kimmel submitted his 250-page report in March 1999. He said that Robert Bryant, then FBI deputy director, had ordered him to confine his assessment to the Pitts case. The report went to the CIA and other intelligence agencies, and to the Senate intelligence committee. Kimmel prepared a shorter, 150-page version for internal use by the FBI. “Neither has anything about other penetrations,” he said.

  But in a separate short memo in April, Kimmel speculated that the bureau might harbor a mole. In May, the National Security Division issued a twenty-eight-page analysis of Kimmel’s memo, concluding that he had not produced any real evidence to support his theory. Nevertheless, when news reports of Kimmel’s study and his turf struggles with the intelligence division were published in The New York Times after Hanssen’s arrest, it was one more blow to the bureau, already battered by a series of embarrassing mishaps in unrelated cases and by the fact that Hanssen had gone undetected for more than two decades.

  The disclosures left the appearance that the bureau had fumbled the chance to catch a mole in its ranks two years earlier. FBI officials in turn argued that Kimmel had never produced any solid evidence, only “hunches” that proved correct but were not supported by hard facts. In effect, the FBI argued that Kimmel had simply lucked out.

  “He was right,” Neil Gallagher said. “But for the wrong reasons.”

  *Kimmel and his family have tried for years to clear the admiral’s name and restore his rank, which reverted to two stars when he was relieved of his command in December 1941 after Pearl Harbor. In 2000, Congress passed a law requesting the pre
sident to nominate both Kimmel and Short to higher ranks.

  22

  Recontact

  The State Department’s Office of Foreign Missions was created by Congress in 1982 in the wake of the controversy surrounding the hilltop location of the Soviet embassy in Washington and the bugging of the American embassy in Moscow. It was time, Congress decided, to establish a watchdog over foreign embassies in Washington, one that could not only control where they were built but could also encourage reciprocity in how the Soviets and other nations treated U.S. missions in their countries.

  It was not accidental that the first head of OFM, with the rank of ambassador, was James E. Nolan, Jr., who had been chief of the Soviet section in the FBI and then moved up to the number two counterintelligence position in the bureau. With Nolan in place, the Soviet diplomats were required to book all travel through OFM.

  “I can’t say they’re overjoyed,” Nolan said at the time. “They can’t even buy a shuttle ticket to New York at the airport now. They can only go on with a prepaid ticket.”

  Under the law, OFM could require the Soviets to call the State Department if they needed a repairman at the embassy. This, of course, opened up all sorts of possibilities for U.S. intelligence agencies. Recalling the Watergate break-in, one insider said: “Nixon’s plumbers had worked for the CIA. Now if you work for CIA, you may have to be a plumber.”*

  In May 1995, Robert Hanssen was dispatched to the State Department for what turned out to be six years as the FBI’s senior representative to the Office of Foreign Missions. He settled into Room 2510C on the second floor of the main State Department building.

  Tom Burns was glad to see his old friend again. Burns, still with the FBI, was the deputy assistant secretary of state for OFM. He had been Hanssen’s boss in the FBI’s Soviet analytical unit more than a decade earlier. Both had six children and were members of the same parish, St. Catherine of Siena. Hanssen advertised his religion, Burns remembered. At the State Department, “He had a crucifix and a picture of the Blessed Mother on the wall of his office.”

  In his State Department post, Hanssen, acting for the FBI, monitored travel by foreign diplomats and plans by foreign countries to acquire additional property or build new embassies. Russian diplomats and those from certain other countries were subject to restrictions on travel beyond twenty-five miles from Washington.*“If a travel request came in,” Burns said, “Hanssen would clear it with the Soviet section of the bureau. The same request would go via OFM to the Defense Department, and they would also reply. Then we would come back with an answer.

  “Hanssen at the State Department was also on an interagency counterintelligence group. The interagency group consulted by phone and fax, and sometimes there were meetings, usually at State.”

  Occasionally Burns would lunch with Hanssen. “He was frugal with lunch,” Burns recalled. “We would eat in the State Department cafeteria. His choice for lunch would be a burger or a slice of pizza. There was a whole array of stuff at the steam table, but he never chose anything. He never spent a lot of money.”

  It was at State that Hanssen forged his friendship with Ron Mlotek, the chief legal counsel at OFM. In part, that friendship flourished because of their mutual interest in religion. The two became close enough that Mlotek invited Hanssen to the bar mitzvah of his son, Noah, in 1999. It was to take place at the Georgetown Synagogue, which Mlotek attended, as did Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, Al Gore’s running mate in 2000.

  The lights in the synagogue were on a timer, since Orthodox Jews are forbidden to touch anything electric on the Sabbath. On the appointed day, the timer failed and the lights went out. Oh no, Mlotek thought, my son will have to stumble through his bar mitzvah in the dark.

  “Fortunately,” Mlotek said, “Hanssen was one of the first guests to show up and quickly figured out how to fix the timer.” He was, said Mlotek, the “shabbas goy,” or Sabbath gentile.*

  Some months later, Hanssen attended the wedding ceremony for Mlotek’s second marriage. Noah had planned to videotape the wedding, but he got caught up helping out and talking to the guests, and Hanssen stepped in. Mlotek may have the only wedding video of a State Department official taken by a Russian spy. Hanssen, of course, is nowhere in it; he was behind the camera.

  “In my family, we called him ‘Machine Gun Bob,’ because he had one,” Mlotek said. “In his car trunk, with four hundred rounds of ammunition.” Mlotek discovered this one day when Hanssen offered to drive him to the FBI. Mlotek was puzzled when Hanssen did not go down to the State Department garage to get his car. “I thought he had a parking permit for the basement. But we went across the street to the parking lot off Twenty-third Street in the old OSS buildings on Navy Hill.”

  “Bob, why do you park across the street?” Mlotek asked.

  “I can’t park in the basement because you have to leave the key in the car,” Hanssen replied.

  “Why can’t you leave the key?”

  Mlotek was in for a surprise. “He opened the trunk and there was this armory. The machine gun was a bureau gun he had checked out, and a nine-millimeter pistol. The ammunition was in waterproof bags. He said, ‘I could drive my car into the Potomac River and come out shooting.’ ”

  When Mlotek pressed Hanssen on why he drove around with a machine gun in his trunk, “He said his commute took him past the CIA, on Route 123. The day that Kansi killed the people there, he had driven by eight minutes earlier.* It haunted him. Ever since that day he felt this sense of guilt and powerlessness. This had such a profound effect he said he would get weapons and keep them with him. That maybe he could prevent it from happening again.

  “A favorite quote of his, of both of us, was that civilizations collapse when good men do nothing.”†

  Sometimes, Hanssen talked to Mlotek about the clout his father enjoyed as a Chicago cop. “He told me about all the perks his father had. For example, if they were going to a movie and it was sold out, his father could get him in, often without having to pay. In high school, he took his prom date to a fancy Chicago restaurant and the maître d’ recognized him as Captain Hanssen’s son.” (In fact, Howard Hanssen never rose above the rank of lieutenant.)

  “Bob admired Mayor Daley. ‘This is a guy who knew how to run things,’ Bob would say. Bob was a neoconservative and a Republican. He was a great fan of Ronald Reagan, as I am. He abhorred Bill Clinton, whom he called the scum of the earth and someone corrupting the entire nation. He thought counterintelligence and counterterrorism had been degraded under Clinton, and he felt the bureau’s counterintelligence people were incompetents.”

  Hanssen shared his conservative political views with Mlotek. He made no secret of his antipathy toward gays, for example. “Hanssen despised homosexuality and homosexuals in general,” Mlotek recalled. “He was opposed to homosexuals in government not because they were security risks susceptible to blackmail, which is no longer true if they are out of the closet, but because of his belief that homosexuality was a great moral perversion, a gross abnormality.”

  Mlotek’s duties at the State Department brought him into frequent contact with intelligence officials. Since Hanssen was an FBI counterintelligence agent, they would often discuss espionage. “Driving through Georgetown, he showed me some famous espionage sites. He pointed out signal sites, such as the mailbox on which Aldrich Ames placed a chalk mark. He knew an enormous amount about cryptography and one-time pads. We talked about the great game between the United States and the Russians and how it was affected by the demise of the Soviet Union. He said that nothing had changed—the Communists were still there, they were regrouping and as active as ever. The KGB had only changed its name.

  “His view was that Communism was the work of Satan. He said that all the time. He was a great expert on Communism. He had read Marx and many books on Marxist philosophy. The great fallacy of Communism, he said, was that they believed that man is perfectible by his own effort. He said that man can’t be perfectible by his own effort because he is in
herently sinful.”

  Despite his serious, somber manner in the FBI, Hanssen had yet another side that few colleagues ever saw. “He had a great sense of humor, a British sense of humor,” Mlotek said. “It was subtle, refined humor. He was a huge aficionado of Monty Python, Fawlty Towers, and John Cleese. He had Monty Python tapes in his car and he knew them by heart.”

  * * *

  In 1997, Hanssen, while still working at the State Department, requested access to the FBInet, the bureau’s internal computer network. He could not gain entry to the FBI network on the State Department computers.

  Nothing happened with Hanssen’s request, so he turned to his friend Jim Ohlson for help. As Hanssen knew, Ohlson had just been appointed chief of FBI security. To put Hanssen on the FBInet would require a dedicated line linking the FBI and the State Department, with encryption at both ends. Bureaucracy being what it is, installing the special line would have taken some time to arrange. Ohlson called the computer support staff for the National Security Division and asked them to expedite matters. Hanssen got his dedicated computer and the access he wanted to the FBI network.

  But about a month later, Hanssen’s computer crashed and failed to boot up. He asked for an FBI technician to fix it, but again nothing happened. Once more, he turned to Ohlson for help.

  Ohlson obliged. He again called the computer staff and told them to fix Hanssen’s problem. Although Ohlson was not in charge of the computer staff, he was senior enough that they sent a technician who swapped out Hanssen’s hard drive for one that worked. The failed hard drive was routinely sent to CART, the FBI’s Computer Analysis Response Team at Quantico, which analyzes computer problems.

  To their surprise, the CART techies found a password breaker on Hanssen’s hard drive. A password breaker is a program that can be downloaded from the Internet and is used by hackers to attack webpages or other data that are password-protected. What was Hanssen doing with a password breaker?