American Kompromat

by Craig Unger

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  Powerful, secretive, authoritarian, and deeply deceptive, Opus Dei is a lay “personal prelature,” a bureaucratic entity within the Catholic Church that is not geographic in nature, like a diocese, but that nonetheless is made up of a prelate, clergy, and laity. Founded in Spain in 1928 by Catholic priest Josemaría Escrivá de Balaguer y Albás, Opus Dei was created to promote the idea that people could be holy in their ordinary everyday lives, that work itself could be holy, and that what you do with your friends, family, and colleagues could be sanctified by living the gospel day in and day out.

  At least that’s what Opus Dei says. But that rather tame description doesn’t do justice to a profoundly secretive sect that was closely aligned with Spain’s Fascist Party and that, to a real but unquantifiable extent, has become party to a sophisticated assault on liberal democracy and the rule of law, from the US Supreme Court on down to the Department of Justice, the federal judiciary, major corporate white-shoe law firms, and other institutions—including the executive branch.

  Indeed, it is not possible to fully understand Trump’s success in shattering norms and violating laws without understanding the motivation and mindset of his Praetorian Guard, led by William Barr and a small group of attorneys with ties to Opus Dei.

  “They have become, I think, the most effective secret society in American history,” said human rights lawyer Scott Horton, a lecturer at Columbia University Law School. “Especially when it comes to changing the nature of the judiciary and filling vacancies with people who are their picks.”12

  Hanssen came to Opus Dei through his wife’s family, the Waucks, whose ties to it date back decades to when Bonnie’s mother, Frances “Fran” Hagerty (later Frances Hagerty Wauck) married LeRoy Wauck, a professor of psychology at Loyola University who was also a member of Opus Dei, and put together a family of eight children, at least thirty-three grandchildren, and at least twenty-five great-grandchildren whose existence revolved largely around Opus Dei.

  “Opus Dei is the best thing that ever happened to the world,” Fran told David A. Vise, a Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter formerly with the Washington Post, in his book The Bureau and the Mole: The Unmasking of Robert Philip Hanssen, the Most Dangerous Double Agent in FBI History.13 “All of our children have been influenced by Opus Dei. Now they are better than they ever were. God did this, believe me. They send their kids to schools Opus Dei runs. People like the excellence in Opus Dei schools. Teachers get input to do things for the love of God and not just the monetary reward.” Both Fran and her daughter Bonnie taught at Opus Dei schools.

  Fran wasn’t the only one in her family who was devoutly religious. Her brother Reverend Msgr. Robert Hagerty was a well-known Right to Life activist, and her husband LeRoy Wauck was a Catholic psychologist who helped found the psychology department at Marquette University and later became a professor at DePaul and Loyola Universities in Chicago.14 In his spare time, Bonnie’s father translated ancient Greek scriptures into English-language books sold in Catholic bookstores, as did two of his sons, Mark and John Paul.15

  As for Bonnie, she taught religion part-time at Oakcrest School, a private all-girls school in McLean, Virginia, operated by Opus Dei, and she convinced her husband16 to join Opus Dei and raise their children in the faith.17 The intensely religious family’s dinners were often marked by passionate discussions about spiritual issues.18 Opus Dei was central to their lives, and as longtime personal friends of Father Robert P. Bucciarelli, Opus Dei’s vicar and the highest-ranking US official for the prelature, the Wauck family was Opus Dei royalty.

  When it came to piety, Hanssen was not to be outdone by his wife or his in-laws. He began tithing a portion of his meager income to the parish and sent all six Hanssen kids to Opus Dei schools—the girls to Oakcrest School and the boys to Heights School in Potomac, Maryland. Hanssen himself went to Mass at the Opus Dei–run Catholic Information Center, just a twenty-minute walk from FBI headquarters in Washington and its center of operations in the district, with a board of directors that boasted, at various times, such legal community power brokers as two-time attorney general William Barr, White House counsel Pat Cipollone, and Federalist Society honcho Leonard Leo, among others.

  On Sundays the family attended Mass at Saint Catherine of Siena Church in Great Falls, Virginia—but not because it was conveniently located.19 Other Roman Catholic churches were closer to the Hanssens’ home in Vienna, but more members of Opus Dei attended Saint Catherine’s than any other church in the region, and on Sundays one might rub elbows at a Latin Mass with such superstars of the conservative Catholic political firmament as FBI director Louis Freeh, Supreme Court justice Antonin “Nino” Scalia, National Rifle Association president Wayne LaPierre, and Senator Rick Santorum (R-PA.).*

  And, of course, there was Robert Hanssen, traitor.

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  Despite all that, Opus Dei is mentioned just once in the entire IG report on Hanssen, in a passage saying that Hanssen “confessed his espionage,” as the report puts it, before an unnamed Opus Dei priest.

  But was it really a confession?

  Confession, of course, is one of the seven sacraments of the Catholic Church, and as such, any conversation that takes place during confession is considered privileged, under both canonical and criminal law. The Church’s teaching on this point is unambiguous, and Catholic priests who violate it can be excommunicated.

  Similarly, when it comes to criminal law, the US Supreme Court has ruled that privileges protecting private communications between a “priest and penitent, attorney and client, and physician and patient . . . are rooted in the imperative need for confidence and trust.”

  As it happens, there is considerable controversy over exactly what took place in 1980 after Bonnie Hanssen came upon her husband scurrying about to hide the letter he was writing to the Soviets. According to the 2003 IG report, Hanssen said that just a few days later “he confessed his espionage to an Opus Dei priest who granted him absolution and told him that he did not have to turn himself in but suggested that he donate the money he had received from the GRU to charity.”20

  That’s the official account in the unclassified version of the IG report, but it wasn’t the whole story, and in fact, it was full of errors. What really happened was this: After Bonnie insisted that her husband consult a priest, they met with Opus Dei priest Father Robert Bucciarelli, who was a cleric at the Overlook Study Center, an Opus Dei–affiliated religious facility in nearby New Rochelle, New York.*21

  Bucciarelli was not a random choice for such a sensitive matter. A diminutive, dark-haired Harvard graduate, he had known Bonnie’s mother since Bonnie was a young child growing up in Park Ridge, Illinois. In addition, Bucciarelli had succeeded Joseph Múzquiz as chief vicar of Opus Dei in the United States, which made him the most powerful person overseeing the American branch of the prelature. The Waucks’ friendship with Father Bucciarelli was one measure of their high standing within the secretive sect.

  The IG report not only omits Bucciarelli’s name; it also presents a confusing picture of exactly what took place at the meeting with Hanssen, Bonnie, and him.22 A more detailed version of this episode was published in David Vise’s The Bureau and the Mole, which reveals that Hanssen’s “confession” to Bucciarelli was not a “traditional one-on-one confession.”

  As Vise later explained in the Washington Post, “He met with Bob and Bonnie Hanssen together to discuss how to handle the situation that arose when Hanssen began spying in 1980, and Bonnie caught him writing a letter to the Russian military intelligence.”23 At the end of the meeting, Bucciarelli advised Hanssen that the right thing to do was to turn himself in—even though such an act might have resulted in life imprisonment or capital punishment for Hanssen, and humiliation for his family.

  Since the sacrament of confession takes place strictly between a penitent and a priest, and since Bonnie was also prese
nt at Robert’s meeting with Father Bucciarelli, it was more a “consultation” than a confession.

  “I’m not clear about what exactly went on,” Opus Dei priest Father John Wauck wrote in an email to me. “But this much I can say: If there was a third person present, then it was not a confession.”

  And if the meeting with Bucciarelli had been a consultation rather than a confession, as such it would not have been protected by confessional privilege.24

  A communications professor at the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross, the university in Rome founded and affiliated with Opus Dei, Wauck is also the youngest brother of Bonnie Wauck Hanssen and the brother-in-law of Robert Hanssen. As a result, he might be said to have a horse in this race.

  Although he declined requests for a phone interview, Father John did respond to my emails, and in so doing speculated that there may have been “a proper confession” that took place at another time.

  But in the end, no such evidence has materialized.

  In addition, the day after the Hanssens’ consultation, Bucciarelli did something highly irregular. He called the Hanssens and asked them to return for a second visit. When they arrived, he told them that he had changed his mind about Hanssen turning himself in.25

  The reasons for Bucciarelli’s change of heart are not entirely clear. He had realized, he said, that if Hanssen went to authorities, the entire family, including Bonnie and the Hanssens’ innocent children, would be humiliated.26 That was part of it.

  But it is also worth noting that in the insular, cultlike world of Opus Dei, the Hanssen-Wauck families were not just ordinary parishioners. There were only a few hundred members of Opus Dei in the Washington, DC, area, and the huge size alone of the combined members of the Wauck and Hanssen families meant that they were prominent.

  In addition to numbers, the Waucks had a real history with Opus Dei that predated even Bucciarelli and could be traced to just after the early years of Opus Dei in America, starting in the late forties, when, having achieved a powerful foothold in Spain, Father Escrivá decided it was time for Opus Dei to go global.

  Enter Joseph Múzquiz, a card-carrying member of the Falangist Party who had fought for the Fascists in the Spanish Civil War. Afterward, as a student in Madrid, Múzquiz was introduced to Escrivá’s notion of living in celibacy while in the lay world and honoring God through everyday life and work, but was somewhat dubious. The whole idea struck Múzquiz as “something odd and strange that could not succeed.”27

  When they finally met, however, Múzquiz was transfixed by Escrivá and became one of his first apostles, one of the first three members of Opus Dei to be ordained as a priest, and was sent to the United States as a missionary in 1949. There he helped establish Opus Dei centers in Chicago and Washington, and later laid the foundation for Opus Dei to expand into Canada, Japan, and Venezuela.28

  These were no small tasks, especially in the immediate aftermath of World War II, in which Franco—and by extension, Opus Dei—had supported Hitler, Mussolini, and the Axis powers, and as a result were not held in high esteem in the West.29

  Múzquiz was not alone when he first came to Chicago in 1949. He brought with him the future Father Salvador Ferigle, then a young physicist working on his doctorate,30 and together they opened the movement’s first center, Woodlawn Residence, in a house near the University of Chicago.

  And so with Múzquiz leading the way, and Ferigle as his right-hand man, Opus Dei spread through America. Over the years, Father Ferigle helped build Opus Dei into an organization with more than three thousand members in seventeen cities across the country,31 as well as in Japan, the Philippines, and Australia.32 (In 2018, Opus Dei’s membership was around ninety thousand worldwide.)33

  First stop was Chicago,34 where Ferigle met and later became the confessor to Frances Hagerty Wauck, Bonnie’s mother, and to her youngest son, John Paul Wauck, as well as the entire Wauck family.35 So it was via Múzquiz and his protégé that Frances Wauck first ventured into Opus Dei, brought in her husband, LeRoy Wauck, and later their enormous extended family.

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  As he was the highest-ranking Opus Dei official in the country, it may have occurred to Bucciarelli that having a loyal member of his flock exposed as a Soviet spy, a traitor, a man who had betrayed his country, might be bad PR for Opus Dei. So one can only wonder whether, between his two meetings with Hanssen, Bucciarelli reached out to other officials in Opus Dei to discuss the matter before reducing Hanssen’s penance.

  In any case, Bucciarelli, who died in 2016, reversed course and told Hanssen that he should not turn himself in and should instead give the money from the Soviets to a reputable religious charity. As for Hanssen, he took a break from spying for a few years, only to resume later. He later claimed to have told Bonnie that he gave money to Mother Teresa each month and that he had stopped spying for the Russians. “He said he would stop,” declared Hanssen’s lawyer, Plato Cacheris. “And Bonnie believed him.”36

  And astoundingly, that was it. Robert Hanssen had sold secrets to the Soviets but managed to walk away scot-free. In addition, as the IG report notes without naming him, Father Bucciarelli, the highest official in Opus Dei, had direct knowledge of Hanssen’s treachery. And despite it seemingly not being protected by confessional privilege, Opus Dei kept it secret, thereby allowing Hanssen to continue spying for twenty years. In the process, he revealed the identities of three American assets who were subsequently executed by the Soviets.

  It was not until after Hanssen was arrested in 2001 that Opus Dei went into damage control. By this time it was unclear exactly who knew what. In 1999, the Wauck family, including Bonnie and Robert Hanssen, had all traveled to Rome to attend John Wauck’s investiture as an Opus Dei priest.

  In an email to me, however, Father Wauck said he learned nothing about the Hanssen case until his brother-in-law was arrested in 2001. “Prior to that,” he wrote, “it was completely off my radar screen, utterly unimaginable, and I don’t see much indication that it was on the radar of anyone else.”

  Regardless, the Hanssen case is newly relevant because so many key figures tied to Opus Dei have become leading figures in Donald Trump’s Praetorian Guard and, deliberately or not, have played key roles in opening the doors to both Soviet and Russian intelligence and enabling Trump.

  Unhappy at being linked in the press with Robert Hanssen, Opus Dei officials in Rome wrote to Bonnie Hanssen, counseling her to make no public statements about her husband. With the exception of a few interviews arranged by her attorney, she has remained tight-lipped about her husband’s case to this day.

  At the time David Wise wrote his book Spy, he had no idea that John Wauck was Bonnie Hanssen’s brother. When questioned by me, John Wauck claimed to have no idea who from Opus Dei in Rome contacted his sister. But what remains exceedingly curious is that several key figures on the board of the Catholic Information Center—Attorney General William Barr, White House counsel Pat Cipollone, and the Federalist Society’s Leonard Leo, among others—ended up becoming central figures in Trump’s Praetorian Guard.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  BETRAYAL

  In September 1985, Robert Hanssen was transferred back to the FBI’s New York office, where he had served six years earlier. For several years, he had largely stayed away from the Soviets. But the positions he held, first in the FBI Budget Unit and then in the Soviet Analytical Unit at FBI headquarters, gave him access to a broad range of sensitive information from all components of the Intelligence Division as well as the National Security Agency and the CIA.1

  At the time, the spy wars were heating up. Kislin and Sapir’s electronics store was functioning as a KGB front. Donald Trump had laundered Russian Mafia money through real estate, and, though the floodgates had not yet opened for Trump, there was much more to come. Dozens of spies were at the Soviet Mission to the United Nations, and hundreds more were inside the UN
Secretariat, the executive arm of the UN, under the cover of being international civil servants. Altogether, the FBI had identified roughly six hundred KGB agents out of about two thousand Soviet officials living in the United States.2

  Soviet operations were overpowering American counterintelligence. “We don’t even have a man-to-man defense,” CIA director Bill Casey told the New York Times in 1985.3

  That Hanssen, of all people, had been selected to supervise a division battling Soviet spies was extraordinary. He received favorable performance reviews with the unit, but his supervisor, as noted, made a point of describing Hanssen as the “strangest person” he had ever worked with in the FBI, adding that he was a “kind of cipher who was rigid, dour, and a religious zealot.” Colleagues regarded him as distant and arrogant. His subordinates were aware that he mishandled classified information but didn’t bother to report it to his superiors.4

  Over the years since her husband’s “confession” with Father Bucciarelli, Bonnie had repeatedly questioned him about whether he was honoring his promises. Each time Hanssen insisted that he was sending checks to Mother Teresa.5 But in fact the payments had tailed off. He had begun his perfidy in New York in 1979, and now that he had been transferred back, he reverted to his old ways. On a quick trip to Washington in October 1985, just a month after he moved to New York, Hanssen resumed contact with Soviets, though this time it was the KGB rather than the GRU. Using the alias “Ramon” or “Ramon Garcia,” he sent a letter to Viktor M. Degtyar, the press secretary for the Soviet embassy in Washington, inside of which was another envelope marked, in uppercase letters, “DO NOT OPEN. TAKE THIS ENVELOPE UNOPENED TO VICTOR I. CHERKASHIN.”6

  As a counterintelligence officer in the KGB’s First Chief Directorate, Cherkashin was Yuri Shvets’s immediate superior in counterintelligence at the Washington rezidentura, and was the case officer for both Hanssen and Aldrich Ames. Inside the second envelope was a letter to Cherkashin in which Hanssen promised to send a box of documents to Degtyar from some of “the most sensitive and highly compartmented projects of the U.S. intelligence community.” The documents would be originals, not copies, to facilitate authentication, he said.