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

by David Wise

  “Not having made it into med school was another confirmation he wasn’t as good as he thought himself to be. He accepted his father’s view of him. An abiding question for him is, ‘Am I or am I not the thing I was led to believe I was?’

  “People often have to prove something, but also they may have to prove what they are not. He may have said, ‘I’m not the little schmuck my father said I was. I’ll show him.’ Then he doesn’t get into med school and says to himself, ‘Maybe my father was right.’ We’re talking about self-doubts.”

  Charney thought that Hanssen’s religious beliefs were real, not a cover for espionage. “I believe it is sincere,” Charney said. “He gave me extended lectures on Catholic theology.” But Hanssen did not suggest that his religion, with its sacrament of confession, enabled him to spy. “He does not at all talk about how he can sin and get absolution. He doesn’t suggest his religion gave him an easy pass. He believes his religion requires him to atone for what he has done and to suffer—he has used the term mortification—to come back to the proper relationship with God. His view is there is no easy pathway out of moral transgressions.

  “Opus Dei believes everyone can become a saint. He believes even with everything he’s done he still has to be working to become a saint.”

  Charney came to see Hanssen as an essentially lonely man. “The thing that was very painful throughout the first couple of decades of his life was loneliness. He was gawky and had thick bottle glasses for many years; at age fourteen he got contact lenses, he still wears them. What he yearned for were friends.

  “But one of his friends when he was eleven or twelve was a little like him, an awkward but brainy kid. That kid had an aneurysm one day while they were playing together. Bob called the boy’s mom, and she didn’t respond right away. That kid was dead within a day. One of the few people he was able to get close to died on him. There were four people in his life he considered friends: one was someone in his FBI class, another died of leukemia, the fourth one, the only one that survived, was Jack. He was the only one that lived to tell the tale.

  “I think a spy is the loneliest person in the world,” Charney said. “The handlers of spies know this and know how to play them like a violin.” That was certainly true of the KGB and the SVR, whose letters to Hanssen shamelessly played on his psychological need for their friendship and recognition. (“Your superb sense of humor and Your sharp-asa-razor mind. We highly appreciate both.” And so on.)

  The mind of Robert Hanssen, which Charney explored with the author, was also a subject of great interest to American intelligence. By early 2002, the CIA was preparing a psychological profile of Hanssen as part of the damage assessment headed by former CIA counterintelligence expert Paul Redmond.

  For the profile, the CIA asked Bonnie Hanssen to meet with an agency psychologist. It was a delicate request, but the CIA was anxious to question her, since she was obviously an important source of information about her husband. After consulting with her attorney, she agreed to the interview and met with the agency psychologist.

  The purpose of the secret study was to try to identify those characteristics of Hanssen that might help intelligence agencies to spot potential traitors in the future. But Hanssen was so unusual a spy, his motives so mixed and complex, that one could only wish the CIA good luck in trying to draw universal conclusions from its study of the most damaging spy in the history of the FBI. The profilers attempting to understand the mind of Robert Hanssen were embarking on a voyage to the dark side of the moon.

  *Woolsey was referring to the book by Robert Lindsey, and the 1985 movie based on it, about Christopher Boyce and Andrew Lee, two young affluent Californians who sold satellite secrets to the Soviets. Lee was sentenced to life, Boyce to forty years.

  *As Charney understood it, there was no microphone—no audio along with the camera—since the room was normally used for attorney-client meetings.

  †Hanssen’s extraordinary decision was based on his anger over statements to the news media by Dr. Alen Salerian, the first psychiatrist who saw him, that attributed his spying to an effort to alleviate his “sexual demons.” With encouragement from Cacheris, he allowed Charney to talk exclusively to the author about their meetings. Cacheris said that in freeing Charney to be interviewed for this book, “Hanssen said, ‘David Wise is the best espionage writer around.’ ”

  *Until his bogus promotion just before he was arrested, Hanssen was earning about $115,000 a year. FBI agents can retire after twenty years at age fifty with a pension that is half of the average of their three highest years, a percentage that increases with up to seven additional years of service. Since Hanssen was planning to retire at the mandatory age of fifty-seven, assuming his salary base was about $111,000, his gross pension would have been $66,800 annually. If he lived for another ten years, he would have received $660,800 pretax, or more than he was paid by the KGB and the GRU combined. If he lived for twenty-one years, he would have received $1,402,800 pretax, or slightly more than he was paid or promised by the Russians, and with no jail time.

  *Hanssen once urged Hoschouer to read Joseph Conrad’s Victory. There are obvious parallels in the novel to parts of Hanssen’s own life, including his escapade with Priscilla Sue Galey. The protagonist, Axel Heyst, has been emotionally damaged by his father and rescues a woman entertainer who is trapped in her job as a musician in an orchestra on an isle in the far Pacific. He eventually pays with his life for rescuing the damsel in distress.

  *In the novel The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, published in 1886, Henry Jekyll, a physician, finds a drug that turns him into a monster, Mr. Hyde.

  31

  “You Would Have to Be a Total Stupid Fucking Idiot to Spy for the KGB”

  Could Robert Hanssen have been caught sooner?

  There were certainly enough warning signs. Whatever else Mark Wauck said to his superior a decade before Hanssen was caught, there is no dispute that he mentioned his brother-in-law’s unexplained cash. In 1991 Hanssen took a stripper to Hong Kong while on an official FBI inspection. Nobody noticed. Hanssen’s attack on Kimberly Lichtenberg in 1993 should have triggered alarm bells that he was unstable, but did not. The bureau was content to administer a mild penalty.

  That same year he broke into Ray Mislock’s computer, but his colleagues accepted that transgression as an effort to point out the vulnerability of the bureau’s system. A few years later, when informed he would have to take a lie detector test to join an interagency counterintelligence unit, he withdrew his name. In 1997, the FBI technicians discovered he had a password breaker on his hard drive, normally a sure sign of a hacker. He was told not to do it again. And in June of that year, Earl Pitts, when asked if he knew of any other moles in the bureau, said he did not, but added that he suspected Bob Hanssen. Nothing happened.

  Other clues were missed as well. Hanssen told investigators for the Webster commission that no one ever questioned him when he made his own photocopies of documents, even though special agents of the FBI normally ask their assistants or secretaries to make copies. The FBI does periodic background checks of its employees; one reinvestigation of Hanssen noted he had money troubles, but “asserted that Hanssen’s wife came from a wealthy family who assisted the Hanssens.”*

  Perhaps none of these incidents and questions about Hanssen was enough, by itself, to lead the counterspies to suspect their own colleague, but taken together they should have triggered an investigation. The problem was that no one looked at the pattern, in part because of hubris, the ingrained belief in the bureau that, despite Miller and Pitts, the FBI did not harbor spies.

  Ed Curran, the veteran counterspy, was blunt about it. “We should have got Hanssen a lot sooner than we did,” he said. “There’s absolutely no excuse for the FBI not, at some point, to have identified Bob Hanssen.”

  Other former and current bureau officials agreed, and recognized that, more broadly, the FBI’s well-publicized errors over the past decade have cost it dearly. “I believ
e we should be criticized, and we will be a better organization for it,” Tim Caruso said. “It will make us better and stronger.”

  To an extent, the bureau may have failed to detect Hanssen sooner because it was in love with its own image, carefully orchestrated over the years by J. Edgar Hoover—the cereal boxes with Junior G-Man badges, and the flood of movies, television dramas, news stories, and books glorifying the FBI. For decades, the vast majority of Americans admired the bureau and its agents, who were invariably portrayed as square-jawed and invincible. That image began to change only after Hoover’s death, when congressional investigations revealed secret break-ins and various other abuses by the bureau, and again more recently with the disclosures of mismanagement and serious mistakes in the handling of several major cases.

  It is a lot easier to catch a spy with the benefit of hindsight. Hanssen took care in his lifestyle not to draw attention to himself. He tooled around in an old Taurus, not a Jaguar, drank very little, and seemed outwardly a deeply religious, model family man, content to live a placid middle-class life in the Virginia suburbs.

  Despite these precautions, Hanssen, contrary to popular belief, was far from the perfect spy. He was clever to try to conceal his identity from the Russians, but he made all sorts of mistakes, from repeated use of the same dead drops, whatever his rationale for doing so, to all the clues to his identity that he dropped like a trail of bread crumbs in his messages to Moscow. He even left incriminating letters to the Russians on his computer card in FBI headquarters.

  As an experienced counterintelligence agent, Hanssen knew that his greatest risk was that he might, at any time, be turned in by an equivalent FBI or CIA mole inside the KGB. In the end, that was his undoing. The risk of such exposure is why both Hanssen and Ames betrayed Martynov and Motorin, the two FBI sources inside the KGB’s Washington residency. The best way for a mole to protect himself is to betray and thereby kill the other side’s mole.

  Hanssen’s friend Paul Moore summed up the stakes well. “The better you are, the more incentive for someone on to the other side to sell you out. The problem is that once you’re in the game, you’re in the game for life, and you’re betting your life all the time.

  “The only way you can get away with it is to die before U.S. counterintelligence finds you, because they will look for you and they will eventually get to you, because what you’re doing is really dumb. The more successful you are, the more valuable it is to the U.S. to find you, and the more salable you are to somebody on the other side. Bob was playing smart moves at a very dumb game and he did not get away with it.”

  * * *

  In the debris that follows a major spy case, usually the most difficult task is to assess the damage done to U.S. national security. What made the task somewhat easier in the Hanssen case is the file that was recovered from Moscow. The intelligence agencies were able to know much of what Hanssen had passed, and, because of the plea bargain worked out between Cacheris and the prosecutors, to question him directly and at length.

  Ranking spies is probably not a very useful exercise. But if there is a pantheon of spies, certainly Hanssen would have to take his place in it, alongside such celebrated moles as Kim Philby and Aldrich Ames. That conclusion is almost inescapable, based on the materials that Hanssen is known to have given to the Russians and the extended length of his spying over twenty-two years.

  For example, he disclosed U.S. analyses of Soviet nuclear missile strength, including the numbers and effectiveness of its ICBMs and warheads. He also passed to the KGB the CIA’s estimate of what Moscow knew about U.S. early warning systems and about America’s ability to retaliate against a massive nuclear attack.

  In revealing the “continuity of government” plan, he enabled the Russians to discover exactly where top U.S. leaders, from the president on down, would be relocated in the event of a national emergency. That information took on even greater importance after the September 11 terrorist attacks on America.

  Hanssen sold the Russians several documents describing highly sensitive satellite collection and other programs of the National Security Agency, the nation’s supersecret code-making and global electronic eavesdropping arm. He revealed to the KGB that the NSA was exploiting a vulnerability in Soviet satellites that enabled the NSA to intercept their communications. He later disclosed a technical barrier that left the NSA unable to read certain Soviet communications. He betrayed the FBI/NSA tunnel under the Soviet embassy.

  According to author James Bamford, an expert on the NSA, perhaps the most damage done by Hanssen was not to the FBI but to the NSA. Bamford expressed surprise at “the fact that he was able to get access to this information even though apparently he had no real need to know.” He had damaged the NSA, Bamford believed, “probably worse than anybody since John Walker.

  “By giving away to the Russians the details on which codes are being broken, which communication circuits are being listened to, Russia had two choices: they could either change the codes and cut off those circuits, which would have made NSA go deaf and basically put NSA out of business, or they could use the circuits to feed disinformation back to NSA. Either way it would have been one of the biggest blows to NSA since its founding.”

  But the major damage done by Hanssen did not end there. Among his worst actions was his betrayal of TOPHAT, one of the most valuable sources of U.S. intelligence inside the Soviet Union, who was later executed. The human costs were high; Hanssen also disclosed the names of the FBI’s two KGB sources in Washington, who were also executed. All three had also been given up by Ames. Hanssen identified half a dozen other Soviet sources of the FBI. By tipping off the KGB to the FBI’s investigation of Felix Bloch, he thwarted the espionage case the bureau was developing against the State Department official.

  Cynics might ask, did it matter? After all, the Soviets lost the Cold War and the Communist system collapsed. But to argue that spying against the United States would only matter if America had lost the Cold War would be absurd. Hanssen’s treachery endangered the security of the United States for more than two decades; along with Aldrich Ames, he betrayed three individuals who were executed, and he jeopardized the freedom of dozens of others.

  Democracy rests on a compact between the governed, who give their consent, and their elected leaders; its citizens accept government and laws to protect them, preserve their liberties, and prevent chaos. Hanssen took the law into his own hands. That the Soviet Union failed to survive makes his acts no less reprehensible. Hanssen also spied for Russia, which did not collapse. No one would seriously contend that a distinction should be made between spying for the two countries, Russia and the Soviet Union, because one survived and the other did not.

  Robert Hanssen’s actions did not demonstrably alter the course of history. But the Communist system was built on quicksand and sank largely under the weight of its own inefficiency and corruption. It was doomed long before Hanssen sold American secrets to the Soviets.

  Whenever a major spy case comes along, as they have in recent years with alarming frequency, there are headlines, investigations, a secret damage assessment, and calls in Congress and elsewhere for new procedures and safeguards. Hanssen might have been detected earlier, some suggested, if he had been given a lie detector test. He was never subject to a polygraph examination in his entire FBI career. In the wake of the outcry over his arrest, the bureau somewhat expanded its use of lie detectors.

  The fallibility of polygraphs is well known, however, and the FBI has never been as enchanted with them as the CIA has.* Aldrich Ames, the worst mole in the history of the CIA, passed his polygraph tests. Lie detectors can notoriously result in false positives that may damage the lives of loyal employees. In the fallout from the Ames disaster, it will be recalled, some three hundred CIA employees were placed on the “A-to-Z list” because they had shown “SPRs,” significant physiological responses, on their lie detector tests. Some careers were affected as a result, but no spies were caught.

  Psycholog
ical testing, at least for agents in the FBI’s counterintelligence division, has also been proposed as a tool to detect potential or actual spies. Former FBI counterintelligence chief John Lewis, who has thought a good deal about the problem, did not object to such screening before employment but was dubious that psychological testing “could reveal that an individual has committed a crime or was about to.” Lewis favored better periodic background checks, greater awareness by coworkers, and broader use of polygraphs.

  There are limits to what defensive measures can achieve, however. All the major powers spy on each other. The SVR is willing to pay large amounts of money to its best sources, and its principal target remains the United States. Washington, in turn, spends some $35 billion a year trying to steal and collect secrets from Russia and other nations, as well as to gather intelligence on terrorists.

  In the end, spying will continue as long as there are secrets and a market for them. Espionage has been called the second oldest profession, and with good reason. It is no more likely to disappear than the first.

  * * *

  In July 2001, Jack Hoschouer wrote a letter to Bonnie Hanssen. “I said, ‘I’ve sinned against you, please forgive me. I beg your forgiveness.’ ” About six weeks later, in mid-August, after fortifying himself with several drinks, “I called her from London and asked her to forgive me. I said, ‘I understand if you don’t want to see me.’ She said, ‘I forgive you.’ ” But Uncle Jack was no longer a welcome guest in the house on Talisman Drive.

  Vivian Hanssen gave up her home in Venice, Florida, after twenty-seven years, and moved in with Bonnie to be closer to her son. It was difficult at age eighty-nine to pack up, let go of many of her possessions, and say good-bye to friends and neighbors. It was even more difficult, family members said, for her to see her son caged and behind glass, but it was better than not seeing him at all. He was still her son, and she loved him.