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

by David Wise

  Ironically, Hanssen’s pension, had he not been arrested two months shy of his normal retirement date, could well have amounted to more than the total that the stingy KGB and SVR shelled out.* Hanssen was a budget spy, the actual cash and diamonds he received amounting to far less than the $2.7 million the Russians paid to Aldrich Ames.

  Where did the money go? Spread out over twenty-two years, the total Hanssen received was not a fortune. A senior FBI official said he believed most of it was “pissed away,” into the gas tank and on other mundane, everyday household and living expenses. Some of it was parked in his two Swiss bank accounts, some in the box under his bed. The bureau had accountants trying to figure out exactly where the money went, but it was a daunting task.

  According to Charney, Hanssen really wanted money for one reason: to assure his wife that he was not a failure. “Men are burdened by masculine pride. We put our public face into the world and want to be respected by our fellow men and by ourselves. The person we allow into our most intimate knowledge of our life is our wife. If our wife thinks we are an asshole, we have no protection. We have a chink in our armor; if our wife thinks we are a loser that is intolerable.

  “Bonnie was the one person who brought light into his life. She was the last person he would want to think he was a failure. He reached to prove to her he was a good provider and a good husband. So that when she would express wishes for various things he would always buy them for her. He felt it was necessary to sustain his image in her eyes as successful. That put him into a financial corner, because he agreed to take on various financial burdens, like buying a house out of his reach financially, in Scarsdale.

  “It’s not that it’s wrong to say that he did it for money; you have to go deeper and ask why he wanted the money. Why did Bob Hanssen get into a corner financially? Because he had to keep up his reputation with Bonnie. Because that was the one person in the world whose opinion mattered.”

  But Bonnie, Charney said, was not the sort to place burdensome financial demands on her husband. Hanssen did not blame her; he blamed himself. “She did not put pressure on him; it was his own inner drive to be the good provider and never disappoint her.”

  Aside from the money, many of Hanssen’s colleagues in the FBI, including the friends he made there, strongly believed that Hanssen was motivated to spy because he was excluded from the inner club of counterintelligence agents and relegated to the back room.

  “Bob was always seen as a computer guy, a weenie, a number cruncher,” said David Major. “He was somebody you want on your team, to use. He was never going to lead the team. Don Stukey would be a quarterback, Bob’s always on the sidelines; he would analyze the plays and know what they did right or wrong, but he would never get on the playing field.”

  Jim Ohlson reached much the same conclusion about his friend. “Although Hanssen was involved with and fascinated by CI and Soviet operations, he was never in the core group that actually conducted them. He may have felt excluded, his skills unappreciated. He had longed to be involved in spy work—so he turned to another government to do it.

  “Hanssen had great respect for the KGB and its professionalism. He once said, ‘They’re the only target I want to work against. They’re the only enemy worth fighting.’ So he was drawn to the KGB.”

  Certainly, Hanssen may have felt passed over. He was never a field agent operating against the Soviets, except for a brief tour in New York, and even then he was in a back room in charge of POCKETWATCH, supervising agents with earphones who listened in on Amtorg and other Soviet commercial offices. POCKETWATCH was not the big leagues.

  Joe Tierney, Hanssen’s superior at headquarters in the early 1980s, tended to agree with this analysis. “He had never done anything operational himself,” Tierney said. “He had not been involved in a recruitment or a successful espionage case. People tend to earn their bones in those cases, and then they’re respected by their peers.”

  To Tierney, Hanssen’s betrayal began as an intellectual exercise. “This is something he thought out in his head—this is how you could do it. He was flirting with it and it gets more and more concrete. Then he goes to New York and hits the New York real estate market and that pushes him over the edge.”

  A. Jackson Lowe, Hanssen’s boss on his second New York tour, in the mid-1980s, also remembered him as an outsider. “He never got the respect he thought he deserved. There were always other agents out front getting the glory. Here was a guy who was very bright, he felt like he was not well accepted, an outcast. He did not fit in.”

  As a perennial outsider, Hanssen may have decided to create his own Soviet operation. The feeling of being excluded, combined with his self-image, at least partly justified, as a person of superior intellect and technical gifts, could have created bitterness, a desire to “show them.” And underlying his decision to spy may have been a grandiose belief he could never be caught because he was too clever.

  If Hanssen’s resentment over being excluded led to his spying, however, he did not say that to Charney. He did tell the psychiatrist that “he came to think of himself as an outsider, a nerd.” But Hanssen did not link that to his espionage.

  Instead, Hanssen spent a good deal of time talking about his father. “In the very first meeting we had, that was the very first topic that he brought up,” Charney recalled.

  “You see this often in people. Troubled relationships with a father will affect their thinking for the rest of their life. Hanssen’s father was a difficult father to grow up under, a strong personality. He was not a warm, mentoring person. Hanssen was an only child and his father did not hold him much in esteem. His father had very little time for him.” Hanssen talked at length about the punishments and humiliations his father had imposed, such as wrapping him in the mattress so that his arms were pinned, or making him sit with his legs spread.

  “Hanssen wished for his father to be a mentor and a coach and explain the world to him as a father should, welcoming him into manhood. Robert Hanssen didn’t receive that and felt always out of step and lacking knowledge of how the world worked. His mother was a reasonably nurturing person but did not protect and defend him from his father. That is an abiding disappointment that he had.

  “When a boy grows up without effective fathering, it leaves a tremendous empty place, a father hunger. Boys want to be welcomed into adult manhood by their fathers. If they don’t get that, they are always feeling uneasy, not a true member of the club of men. That is one of the things that happened with Hanssen. He was belittled and made to feel inadequate. And yet he loved his father, he worshipped his father. That is not an unusual thing. The very person that abuses you is so powerful that one is in awe of that person.”

  At the same time, Charney said, Hanssen was “infuriated” with his father, his anger deep-seated and intense. Because he feared his father, however, “he had to bottle it up. He used the phrase ‘bottled up’ a lot. But now and then the cork would come out of the bottle. Not so much as a kid but as an adult. At a certain point he would blow like a volcano.

  “Hanssen said when he spied that was the cork coming out of the bottle. He said that about the cork and used it many times.” The way his father treated him, Hanssen said, was “unfair and unjust. That is a theme he brings up a lot.

  “He has this strong sense of injustice. That attitude of being sensitized to unfairness you see throughout his life. He always wants to right things if he is able to do so. In the case of the stripper and others, he sees them as abused people, and if some way he can help them he wants to do that.”*

  Charney, based on his conversations with Hanssen, saw a direct link between Hanssen’s fury at his father and his betrayal of the FBI. “Very often when a person joins an organization or a government agency, they are seeking an emotional resolution for unresolved questions. Any organization can be like a family. How that organization treats you is either going to replay those experiences or help you resolve them. But if you get disappointed a second time in your life, t
he thing you set up as your saving mechanism turns out to disappoint you again. That can bring about the fury and resentment that you were too overwhelmed to bring out when you were a little boy. And you may say, ‘Now I’m going to get back.’ He may have been replaying some things from his boyhood. But this time he had the capacity to get back.”

  Yet it would be a mistake, Charney said, to assume that Hanssen became a spy simply because his father treated him harshly. “Many people grow up emotionally damaged and nevertheless can overcome it and live normal adult lives. There are people who can rebound from any number of terrible circumstances of childhood. But even those who do can unexpectedly enter a period that puts them under tremendous strain and pressure that will reawaken problems of the past and push them into a psychological corner.

  “Even people who are very well adjusted may be shoved into new territory that is quite unexpected and with which they can’t really cope very well. It overwhelms them. Some people are so blighted by their early experiences they never seem to be able to overcome it. But thankfully most people do. A lot of people at the bureau have had rough childhoods. They don’t become spies.”

  Hanssen told Charney his disappointment with the FBI was rooted, ironically, in his conviction that the bureau was focused too much on catching spies and was missing the real threat. “He felt that on a strategic level the FBI was failing to do what it needed to do to protect the country. That the main way the Soviets prosecuted their aims was through subversion of our institutions.” By focusing on arresting people who stole documents, Hanssen told the psychiatrist, the bureau’s resources were failing to come to grips with the enemy. He had made an effort to get the bureau to listen.

  “He had tried, for example, to warn what the Japanese were doing to us economically, and he said the bureau was oblivious, the bureau did not have the depth to oppose those kinds of things. He attempted to say, ‘Wake up,’ and was regarded as an intellectual, not taken seriously; they didn’t get it. He began to be disappointed and angry at the bureau for not paying attention. And that fired up some of his antipathy toward the bureau.”

  Hanssen, Charney said, considered himself a gadfly like John Boyd, a critic inside the Air Force, whom he saw “as a sort of role model.” Hanssen invited Boyd to come to the FBI and give a talk, and he did, but the bureau had shown no interest in his ideas.

  If Hanssen did regard the FBI as a father figure, and sought to vent his suppressed rage by striking back at it, his anger was certainly not the only factor that turned him into a spy. His fascination with James Bond, his desire for excitement, was surely an important element as well. He seemed to enjoy living on the edge. “He said he was bored before he started spying,” Charney said. “The spying produced excitement and made him come alive. The excitement is from doing something different. The risk is part of the excitement.”

  Hanssen may have been seen as a computer nerd, a geek in the back room, but in his own mind he could at times apparently become 007 or something close to it. His attraction to Catherine Zeta-Jones, the Hong Kong interlude with Priscilla Sue Galey, the guns in his car trunk that led Ron Mlotek to call him “Machine Gun Bob”—these were all indicators of someone longing for the supposed glamour and thrills of a real-life spy.

  Paul Moore, who knew Hanssen as well as anyone in the FBI did, once caught a glimpse of his friend’s Bond-like romance with firearms. Hanssen had been down to the FBI’s training academy in Quantico, Virginia, where agents practice shooting in a mock town known as Hogan’s Alley. “He was talking about walking through a new, high-tech Hogan’s Alley at Quantico using virtual reality. He said, ‘I’m good with guns.’ ” Hanssen described how the computer simulation worked, like a video game. “He used a gun to chase the perp into an underground garage. You’re taught how to fire to hit somebody hiding behind a pillar. You hit a cylindrical pillar just right and it spins the bullet around. He shot and got one of the people. He is still chasing the other guy. He shoots the guy on the ground again because he doesn’t know if he’s dead. ‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘I put another one into him.’ Bob used just those words, ‘I put another one into him.’ ”

  The tough-guy, Raymond Chandler dialogue and the fascination with guns fit with Hanssen’s quest for something more exciting than the drudgery of the FBI’s budget or analytical units.

  “Bob was like the high wireman who wants to touch the wire,” David Major said. “The fifty-thousand-volt wire that he knows will kill him, but he wants to see if he can touch it and get away with it.” Ernie Rizzo, who had learned wiretap skills with Hanssen when they were both police officers in Chicago, compared espionage to skydiving: “Pretty soon you want to go further and further to see how high you can go.”

  Hanssen’s curiosity may have also contributed to his journey into espionage, in Moore’s view. “He was a special agent, he had the gun and the badge, but was never put into a situation where he’d use the gun and the badge. He was put in a position to talk to the analysts. His job is to ask, ‘How are these people [the KGB] doing it to our country? What could we do to make the country safer?’ Eventually you ask, ‘How is it possible to attack the country?’ That’s going to land him into, ‘How would one do it?’ That’s always going to be cooking on the stove.

  “At some point he decides, ‘It can be done and somebody like me can do it.’ He knows all the cases, how people who spied against the U.S. were caught. And so he crosses the line. Once he got going he set out to be the best spy ever. He’s trying to commit the perfect crime. He’s really excessive in what he passes. In his day job he’s being very helpful to the FBI.

  “He’s getting money he can’t spend very well, and he’s getting satisfaction he can’t share with anyone. In the letters you see him forming a relationship with the Russians. The only people he can share his success with are the people on the other side.”

  David Charney, too, concluded that Hanssen spied, at least to an extent, because he wanted to peer inside the opposition. “The spying he did was partly out of curiosity: how did the KGB actually operate as opposed to how the FBI thought they operated? How would you ever know that if you did not get involved with them? He would give lectures, brilliant lectures, on how the KGB operated. Because he really knew. He knew better than anybody.”

  To many of his colleagues, Hanssen projected an irritating sense of superiority. That may have stemmed not only from his belief that he was smarter than others, but from his secret knowledge that he was a Russian spy, the spy who at one point directed the very study of moles in the FBI, so that he was looking for himself.

  Hanssen exulted in his inside knowledge, Charney suggested. “He wound up in a position where he could regard himself as the puppet master, knowing more than anyone within the bureau or the KGB about the totality of what was happening.”

  David Major agreed. “Bob would get a sublime high by being the ultimate inside joke. Everybody is trying to uncover a spy and he’s at the meeting where they are discussing it and he’s the spy. Bob didn’t have to tell that to anybody to get an inner joy out of it. I, Bob, have the greatest inside joke.”

  The flip side of his superior manner, however, was very different. According to Charney, one of the main threads in Hanssen’s case “is a sense of failure. Spies may have an intolerable sense of personal failure as privately defined, a tremendous fear they will fail in a key experience in life and that will result in a shameful disclosure of their inadequacy. You might look at their career and say it is exemplary. But if a person does not meet his own standards and goals, then there is a sense of failure.

  “Whatever motives a person has to spy, they are conflicted reasons. They are not just ‘I want money, I hate the bureau.’ At some deep level, the decision to spy in the first place represents a failure on the part of the person. They could not manage their lives, things were going wrong, they could not fix it, and they got thrown into a panic stage and the resolution in this cloud of panic was to do spying. They can clothe it in rationalization
s but in truth it represents failure. Any time they can, they want to move back away from it and be their normal self.”

  Often, in his conversations with Charney, Hanssen compared himself to Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, the Robert Louis Stevenson character who could switch from good to evil and back.* “He has used the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde explanation several times. A constant struggle with the two sides of himself, the good and the bad. He’s kind of proud and pleased he could quit for a time. He says, ‘I was able to shut down the bad side of myself.’ ”

  Sitting in his jail cell, Hanssen had plenty of time to think about his “bad side,” including the video camera he hid in his bedroom for several years so Jack Hoschouer could watch him having sex with Bonnie. He realized it was “sick and goofy,” but he had gone to church and confessed it, and eventually stopped. He knew it was wrong, of course; in retrospect he saw it as some kind of attempt by him and Jack to hold on to their lost adolescence.

  Hanssen talked a good deal with the psychiatrist about his fear of failure. “He, Bob, had many experiences that he considered failure. He was always afraid of flaming out in social situations where that would become apparent.”

  One night, at the Alexandria jail, “Hanssen explained that he actually had to deal with social situations by having preset stories and conversations. Like people who, as soon as you meet them, they start telling you jokes. He could be funny and charming in a sort of programmed way. But he could not be with someone for two hours in a row, because he would run out of stories.”

  Hanssen’s sense of failure reached back to his early years. “Bob is a very bright man but did B work in college. He got into dental school, although his father wanted him to be a doctor. He was bored in dental school. When he thought of dropping out of dental school, he tried to switch over to medical school, but he could not because of his grades.