American Kompromat

by Craig Unger

  “I believe they are sufficient to justify a $100,000 payment to me,” Hanssen wrote,7 and in so doing signed the death warrants of two KGB agents who had been recruited by the FBI—Sergei Motorin and Valery Martynov in Washington. Both men were quickly recalled to Moscow and later executed.

  Thanks to Hanssen, Cherkashin may have also learned that the FBI was trying to install tiny bugging devices in the Soviet embassy’s Xerox machines, and also about other state-of-the-art eavesdropping devices beamed at the embassy from the outside.8

  It was during these next six years—right up until the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991—that Hanssen, according to the Justice Department’s IG report, gave so much valuable information to the KGB. In all, officials say, he betrayed a total of nine double agents,9 and gave the Soviets “some of this nation’s most important counterintelligence and military secrets, including the identities of dozens of human assets, at least three of whom were executed.” The report added that during the period in which Hanssen served in this position, “both the CIA and the FBI suffered catastrophic and unprecedented losses of Soviet intelligence assets in 1985 and 1986, which suggested that a mole was at work in the Intelligence Community.” The mole hunts had begun—but no one seemed to suspect Hanssen.

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  Except for Bonnie, who knew something was wrong in 1990 when she discovered the money in Bob’s dresser drawer. Of course, she had not forgotten his earlier indiscretion, a decade earlier, when he confided to her that he sold secrets to the Soviets. This time, he had just been promoted to supervise an FBI technical surveillance squad that kept an eye on Soviet counterintelligence, and as a result, he had access to intel that could be of great value to the Soviets.

  Until this point, with the exception of Father Bucciarelli (and anyone he may have spoken with), Bonnie was the only one who had a clue about what her husband was up to. But Bonnie’s sister, Jeanne Beglis, had been close to Bonnie all her life and in 1990 lived just a block or two away with her family. She found out about the $5,000 immediately, and was suspicious enough that she told at least three people about it—her husband, George, an architect; her brother Greg Wauck; and her sister-in-law Mary Ellen Wauck, who had been visiting the DC area with her husband, Mark Wauck.10 Mary Ellen worked at Northridge Preparatory School, an Opus Dei school outside Chicago, while Mark worked for the FBI.

  On the way back to Chicago, Mary Ellen told Mark about this conversation that she’d had with Jeanne. Then, a few days later, Mark got a call from Greg, who also told him about Hanssen.11

  According to David Wise’s Spy, Greg asked, “Do you think this guy [Hanssen] is fooling around with the Russians?”12

  Mark didn’t respond, but he knew the answer was simple. Yes, his brother-in-law might well be a Soviet spy. But Mark was also an FBI special agent. This was a sensitive matter and his brother Greg did not have security clearance, so he brushed him off.

  “These were pretty highly classified matters, so I couldn’t talk to him about it,” Mark told me.

  Likewise, Mark says he didn’t breathe a word about it to his youngest brother, John. “He’s fourteen years younger than I am,” Mark Wauck said. “Back when this happened, I would’ve regarded him as too young. And besides, he had no need to know. I wouldn’t discuss [my suspicions about Hanssen] with anybody who didn’t have a need to know.”

  To which his younger brother now says that he wouldn’t have known what to make of the information. “Even if I’d have been told about it in 1990, I probably wouldn’t have given it a second thought,” Father John Paul Wauck explained in an email to me. “It might have seemed somewhat odd, but every day brings lots of other things to deal with, and it wouldn’t have seemed like part of an important espionage scenario, because that scenario would never have occurred to me in a million years.”

  But for Mark Wauck, the discovery of Hanssen’s secret cash was the last piece of the puzzle. He had been in the dark about Hanssen and Bonnie’s meeting with Father Bucciarelli in 1980, but in the mid-eighties, Mark had been talking to Bonnie on the phone and mentioned that he was studying Polish.

  “Oh, isn’t that great?” Bonnie replied. “Bob says we may retire in Poland.”

  Mark was stunned. Poland? Granted, the Wauck family had Polish roots, but that had nothing to do with it. The Cold War was still very much ongoing. For almost any American, much less an FBI agent, to retire in an Eastern bloc country under the dominion of the Soviet Union, “the Evil Empire” and “the focus of evil in the modern world,” as President Reagan famously called it, was utterly insane.

  “Retiring to a Warsaw Pact country is what spies would do,” Mark told me. “Not normal Americans. And especially not a guy who was working at FBI HQ.”

  Another factor was that a big mole hunt was under way in the FBI, and Mark knew it. Someone in the Bureau must have been talking to the Soviets. There had been too many losses. “Between those two factors, and then finally hearing about the money, I put two and one together and came up with three,” he said.

  But this was still a thorny proposition. Mark Wauck had family loyalties. What about his sister Bonnie and her kids? At the same time, he also had loyalty to the FBI and the country—his oath. He talked to his wife about it.

  “Do what you think is right,” she said.13

  That meant going to his supervisor, who was head of the FBI’s Russian squad in Chicago and whom he saw as a “down-to-earth type of person.” The two men had worked together in New York and had even carpooled together at one time. Mark said he brought up three points: namely, that the bureau was searching for a mole, that Hanssen was thinking of retiring in Poland, and the $5,000 in cash.

  And a few days later, according to Mark, his supervisor said, “It’s handled.”

  “I thought, ‘Okay, fine. It’s out of my hands. I’ve done what I needed to do.’”

  But again, nothing happened. According to the IG report, “Wauck provided the supervisor with enough information to warrant some follow-up. Instead, the supervisor readily dismissed Wauck’s concerns, in part because there was no policy or procedure mandating that he pass the information on for analysis and possible investigation.”

  As a result, even after he had been caught with the unexplained cash from the Soviets, Hanssen continued spying for another decade. By this time, more than half a dozen people were aware of Hanssen’s activities to one degree to another. And most of them were in Opus Dei.

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  About twenty-six years old at the time Hanssen’s cash was found, John Paul Wauck was the youngest of the eight Wauck children, the baby of the family. He studied history and literature as an undergraduate at Harvard, where he wrote for the Harvard Crimson, the university daily. After graduating in 1985, he worked as an editor at an anti-abortion journal called the Human Life Review before joining the Justice Department in fall 1991 as a novice speechwriter during the administration of George H. W. Bush. He later won a doctorate from Rome’s Pontifical University of the Holy Cross, where he now serves as a professor in literature and communication.

  Judging from his messages to me, as well as his various writings, videos, and TV appearances, Father John, who was ordained as an Opus Dei priest in 1999, is cheerful to a fault, gracious, friendly, and disarming—especially for someone who promotes a repressive, book-banning sect that disseminates an authoritarian theology.

  Looking like nothing so much as James Norton of PBS’s Grantchester when interviewed by a reporter for Rolling Stone, Father John, ever the hip priest, excitedly brings up Eminent Hipsters, a highly regarded rock memoir by Steely Dan’s Donald Fagen. Since I trained on the Harvard Crimson myself years earlier, he signs his emails to me, “Best wishes from a fellow Crimson alum.”

  Over the years, he has come to play a special role as a bridge between the religious zealotry of Opus Dei and the secular world, speaking
out for the sect in the national media—ABC, CBS, CNN, BBC, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Time, and many other outlets—on matters ranging from The Da Vinci Code to the canonization of Pope Francis.

  As a result, he had preternatural ability to take an extreme right-wing Catholic sect that still observes such esoteric practices as corporal mortification, and which has been caricatured as a secret society of albino assassins, and make it seem, well, almost normal. When it comes to discourse about the authoritarian theology of Opus Dei, he somehow manages to frame its severe, repressive tenets as nothing more than anodyne homilies.

  Indeed, part of the morbidly fascinating mystery and intrigue of Opus Dei are the exotic rituals that involve wearing cilices spiked with sharp metal prongs that dig into the flesh of the thigh; self-flagellation, usually on the back, and often drawing blood, as a penance to show remorse for sin; and the subjugation of bodily desires, at times to the point of inflicting serious harm. In fact, acolytes say, the real meaning of mortification is to subdue the desires of the body as part of training the soul to live a holy and virtuous life. As Escrivá puts it in The Way, his compendium of 999 axioms for living the Opus Dei way, which serves adherents in much the same manner Mao Tse-tung’s Little Red Book served Communist China, “Blessed be pain,” which is point number 208 among the aphorisms promoting pain and self-mortification. “Loved be pain. Sanctified be pain . . . Glorified be pain!”

  All of which, when framed by Father John Paul Wauck, is normalized. “Corporal mortification used to be universal!” he told Rolling Stone.14 “Until fairly recently, pretty much all religious orders did it. Mother Teresa’s nuns still do. It’s not something unique to Opus Dei. We just didn’t abandon it.”

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  For the most part, Opus Dei founder Josemaría Escrivá, who died in 1975, remained relatively unknown in the United States until he was canonized by Pope John Paul II in 2002 as “the saint of ordinary life.” At the time, Newsweek religion editor Kenneth Woodward noted that Opus Dei prevented critics of Escrivá from testifying at the church tribunals deliberating on his life. “It seemed as if the whole thing was rigged,” he said later. “They were given priority, and the whole thing was rushed through.”15

  In more recent years, Escrivá’s sect won global notoriety, thanks to the villainous albino assassin from Opus Dei and the mysterious rituals featured in Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code potboiler: the wearing of a cilice, a hair shirt or metallic barbed garter that digs into the flesh, and other forms of “corporal mortification”—practices that may sound deeply irrational, mystifying, and superstitious to the secular world but which, adherents say, have been wildly overstated and sensationalized in the interest of book sales and box-office revenue.

  However, the real danger posed by Opus Dei to liberal democracy is not from depraved albino monk assassins, as Frank L. Cocozzelli, the president of the Institute for Progressive Christianity, puts it, but in “its very plutocratic attitude in abhorring dissent. Opus Dei is openly concerned with the economic self-interest of ‘friends’ who already have superfluous wealth and power often at the expense of the economically less powerful.”16

  Plutocratic? Actually, that’s a rather understated characterization of what is really a secretive and forbidding political operation with deep roots in a fascist past.

  And the use of the term “fascism” is not hyperbolic. It is history. It dates back to Opus Dei’s origin in and collaboration with the fascism of Generalissimo Francisco Franco’s Spain in 1936 when Escrivá sent a congratulatory letter to Franco saluting his rise to power—and positioned Opus Dei to play an outsize role in the regime as well.17

  Three decades later, in 1966, Opus founder Josemaría Escrivá delighted in celebrating how Opus Dei had integrated itself into the broader culture in fascist Spain. “It is easy to get to know Opus Dei,” he wrote. “It works in broad daylight in all countries, with the full juridical recognition of the civil and ecclesiastical authorities. The names of its directors are well known. Anyone who wants information can obtain it without difficulty, contacting its directors or going to one of its centres.”18

  But finding out the truth about Opus Dei isn’t as easy as Escrivá suggested. According to The Secret World of Opus Dei, by Catholic historian Michael Walsh, a former Jesuit, that is in part because the principal biographies of Escrivá himself have been so tightly controlled by Opus Dei as to give hagiography a bad name.19

  Of course, Opus Dei regards its founder-saint as pious, virtuous, and godly, but critics, secular and Catholic alike, including several Opus Dei apostates, have a far more negative take on Escrivá. According to Father Vladimir Felzman, who spent twenty-two years in Opus Dei before resigning, Escrivá feared sexuality, believed everything he wrote “came from God,” and even put in a kind word for Adolf Hitler. “He told me that Hitler had been unjustly accused of killing 6 million Jews,” Felzman told Newsweek. “In fact he had killed only 4 million. That stuck in my mind.”20

  Likewise, in 2006, Terry Eagleton, a radical Catholic professor at Britain’s Lancaster University, characterized Escrivá in Harper’s Magazine as “paranoid, self-aggrandizing, vain, and dictatorial. He was also a mightily ambitious political wheeler-dealer, despite his pious insistence that his organization promoted only ‘supernatural’ ends, which seem to have included amassing an enormous amount of money.”21

  Devotees insist that both Opus Dei and The Way eschew political ideologies of all stripes, but in fact Escrivá’s tome is full of aphorisms that can be interpreted as being in service to autocratic, nationalistic, and fascist leaders by glorifying war,22 secrecy, and blind obedience to authority.

  Indeed, perhaps the single most disturbing value promoted in The Way is that of authoritarianism. In that regard, as Canadian journalist Robert Hutchison writes in Their Kingdom Come, Opus Dei demands that its disciples accept that they were mere children when it came to spiritual matters, an acknowledgment that led to obedience. “Obey intelligently, but blindly,” Hutchison wrote.

  All of which goes hand in glove with Opus Dei’s strict regulation of literature and the arts, the promotion of secrecy and intolerance, and Escrivá’s need for secrecy, even deceit, as it became an increasingly powerful force in Franco’s regime. Escrivá himself said as much in The Way, point number 643: “Be slow to reveal the intimate details of your apostolate. Don’t you see that the world in its selfishness will fail to understand?”

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  Escrivá’s history with Franco provides some insight into why he might have wanted to keep “intimate details” secret. Historians quarrel over the extent to which Opus Dei allied with Franco, with its apologists noting that the so-called Red Terror, which came in the wake of Franco’s coup d’état, unleashed a massive wave of anticlerical violence that resulted in the deaths of nearly seven thousand people.

  Nevertheless, when Franco took over, he ended secular government in Spain. National Catholicism was on the ascent, rejecting everything that was vaguely non-Catholic—Protestantism, Judaism, liberals, and socialists.23 “Our war is not a civil war,” Franco himself declared, “. . . but a Crusade. . . . Yes, our war is a religious war.”24

  To that end, according to Jesús Ynfante, author of The Founding Saint of Opus Dei, Escrivá was “an unashamed fascist” and a powerful ally to Franco, who aggressively recruited new members from the wealthiest and most powerful families in Spain and staffed Franco’s government with Opus Dei–approved ministers. “He had Madrid under his control, starting with the dictator [Franco],” Ynfante wrote. “Under Franco the clerical fascism of Opus Dei won out over the true fascism of the Falange [Franco’s ultra-right-wing political party].”25

  Nor when it came to commerce were these Opus Dei clerics innocent of the ways of the world. “Opus Dei’s hierarchy knows very well that money rules the world and that religious hegemony in a country or a continent is depend
ent upon obtaining financial hegemony,” said Javier Sainz Moreno, a law professor at the Autonomous University of Madrid.26

  To that end, according to Their Kingdom Come, Opus Dei used offshore shell companies and arcane and obscure financial instruments such as anstalts and stiftungs* to keep its business and financial dealings secret from the outside world. A joke around Opus Dei was that one of the secret companies was really a coded word meaning “We take money from unholy souls to finance holy works.”

  In other words, Opus Dei and Escrivá didn’t care where the money came from so long as it aided Opus Dei. The end justified the means.

  Initially, Opus Dei kept a fairly low profile. But in July 1960, according to a report by New York Times reporter Herbert L. Matthews, Franco brought three or four ministers into his cabinet who were in Opus Dei. “One is never sure, because the organization works with a high degree of secrecy in names, numbers, and activity,” Matthews wrote. “Almost all of its work is done by members acting as individuals, so that the association as such can disclaim direct involvement. . . . The government ministries are believed to be honeycombed with members and ‘simpatizantes.’” (English-speaking Spaniards referred to the “simpatizantes” as fellow travelers.)27

  Matthews’s report added that many of the top businessmen and bankers in Spain were Opus Dei. So were the top military officers and the top officials in academia. “They are always seeking men high up in the professions. Many monarchists belong to Opus Dei,” the article said. “Opus Dei controls newspapers, magazines, radio stations, movies, and advertising agencies. . . . Politically, it is very conservative and—this is what many Spaniards consider its dangerous side—it is linked to the church and firmly opposes separation of church and state or the weakening of the church’s powerful role in education.”