Spy: The Inside Story of How the FBI's Robert Hanssen Betrayed America (18 page)

When the tunnel surfaced, so to speak, in the days after Hanssen’s arrest in 2001, the Russians issued the usual diplomatic protest, summoning
an American diplomat to the foreign ministry in Moscow. In a statement, the ministry declared: “If these reports prove true, this will be a flagrant case of the violation of generally recognized standards of international law concerning foreign diplomatic missions.”

Russia’s ambassador to Washington, Yuri V. Ushakov, seemed a good deal more laid-back. “If we find it,” he told a reporter, “perhaps we can use it as a sauna.”

What does one do with a used tunnel? In the 1990s, even the project’s champions in the FBI realized that its time had passed. But when senior counterintelligence officials met to consider the fate of the tunnel, a major argument broke out.

“The question,” said one former FBI counterintelligence agent, “was, Should we fill it up? There was this big fight over whether to fill it full of concrete.” John Lewis, for one, argued against it. What if it turns out to be the same old Russia, Lewis asked; suppose the Cold War comes back? The tunnel, Lewis argued, might yet prove useful in the future. At the time, of course, neither Lewis nor his colleagues knew that Hanssen had already betrayed the tunnel.

In the end, a compromise was reached. The tunnel was sealed up at the town house end, but not filled. “Of course you’d want to seal it up,” the former FBI man explained. “How would you like to be living in the house and suddenly the Russians walk in?”

A few months before Hanssen betrayed the tunnel under the Soviet embassy, he had also disclosed to the KGB the FBI’s investigation of Felix Bloch, an American diplomat who had returned to the State Department after seven years in Austria.

It was in 1981 that Bloch began his secret Saturday morning visits in Vienna to Tina Jirousek, a prostitute specializing in sadomasochistic sex. At the time, Bloch was an economic officer in the American embassy on the Boltzmanngasse, a rising star in the State Department’s foreign service who was promoted to deputy chief of mission two years later.

Bloch was one of the first to telephone Jirousek after she advertised in the
Kurier
, giving her measurements and her address and phone in the Lassallestrasse, near the Prater and its famous giant Ferris wheel, depicted in the film
The Third Man
.
^*

Bloch would come to see her on Saturday mornings for a couple of hours, she recalled. She would always be dressed in leather costume and boots, with a whip. “He came every week, or almost every week,
for seven years. He did not want regular sex. He only wanted to be beaten and humiliated.” She would beat him, she said, “sometimes with my hands and sometimes with a whip.”

For these services, Bloch paid her about $200 a week, or $10,000 a year, she said, which would add up to some $70,000 over seven years. She knew he was an American diplomat and had the impression that he was frustrated in his career and felt he deserved to be the ambassador. “He’s complicated and it is hard to get to know him, he has a contact problem with people. It was very difficult to begin a conversation with him.”

Bloch’s preference for kinky sex would be of no relevance but for the fact that the FBI suspected he might be selling secrets to the KGB to pay for his weekly visits to Tina Jirousek, and perhaps others before her, when he was stationed in East Germany in the 1970s. The FBI brought Jirousek to Washington and put her up at a Ramada Inn in northern Virginia while she testified twice to a federal grand jury investigating Bloch.

Although Bloch could not easily have afforded to pay for his Saturday morning visits on his foreign service salary, he came from a moneyed background, so the investigators’ theory that he might have sold secrets for sex was plausible but not necessarily persuasive.

Felix Stephen Bloch was born in Vienna in 1935. His parents were Jewish and got out with Felix and his twin sister in 1939, a year after the Nazis marched into Austria. The family settled in Manhattan, where his father prospered in the paper export business. Bloch and his sister were raised as Presbyterians.

He joined the State Department in 1958 as an intelligence specialist. A year later he married Lucille Stephenson, whom he had met in Italy when they were both graduate students in Bologna. Diplomatic postings followed in D.üsseldorf, Caracas, West and East Berlin, and Singapore.

Bloch was sent to West Berlin in 1970. In the fall of 1974, the United States established diplomatic relations with East Germany and Bloch was assigned to East Berlin. The Blochs, by now with two daughters, moved to Pankow, a suburb of East Berlin. Bloch traveled to Leipzig several times. It was a period that the FBI scrutinized with special care as it delved into Bloch’s past.

Unlike many foreign service officers who try to keep the CIA at
arm’s length, Bloch cooperated with the intelligence agency during his tour in Singapore. “Bloch was always courteous and helpful,” recalled David T. Samson, who served in the Singapore station in the mid-1970s, when Bloch was in the embassy. “I even got him involved in an operation. The East German news agency had a correspondent there who obviously worked closely with the KGB. I introduced Bloch to him in September 1975 so that Bloch could develop this guy. Bloch was willing to do that for us.”

In 1980, Bloch was sent to his native Vienna, where he was in his element. A tall, bald, compact man with an almost military bearing, Bloch seemed the perfect diplomat in Vienna, fluent in German and close to a number of Austrian officials, although he chafed under two successive ambassadors who were political appointees. He and his wife had a spacious house in Oberdöbling, one of Vienna’s best neighborhoods. An opera and art lover, he collected the paintings of Gustav Klimt.

When Vice President George Bush visited Vienna in 1983, Bloch was the official in charge of the visit. He met Bush at the airport, and the photo album the Blochs carefully kept contained several pictures of a smiling Vice President Bush and Felix Bloch.

But while Bloch lived stylishly as second in command of the American embassy, as he glided through the endless round of diplomatic cocktail parties and receptions, there was another man present in Vienna, dispatched there as an illegal by the KGB, who moved in an entirely different world. He called himself Reino Gikman, although that was surely not his true name. Following standard KGB procedure for illegals, he had acquired the birth certificate in Finland of the real Reino Gikman, who was probably long dead, and stepped into his skin.

After spending time in Germany to build his cover, he came to Vienna in 1979, lived obscurely in a hotel for five years, and then moved into a modest gingerbread cottage in Hietzing with a widow named Helga Höbart. Supposedly a computer salesman for IBM, which he was not, “Gikman” was a regular at Kern’s, a
Gasthaus
in the Wallnerstrasse, heavy on pork schnitzels and beef, where many people who worked in the nearby government offices ate lunch.

The FBI suspected that Gikman was Bloch’s KGB control in Vienna, but neither the FBI nor the Austrian federal police were able to establish that the two had ever met there. Bloch told me that he had never
known Gikman in Vienna but had met him in three other European cities, where he knew him as “Pierre Bart.”
^*

Around 1986, Gikman was said to have been spotted by Austrian military counterintelligence entering the back door of the Soviet embassy in Vienna. This information made its way to the CIA, which opened a file on Reino Gikman and began tracking his activities.

In July 1987, Felix Bloch returned to the United States and a job at the State Department. Two years later, on April 27, 1989, U.S. intelligence overheard a telephone call between Reino Gikman and Bloch. The FBI opened a file on Bloch the next day. Because Bloch was now back on U.S. soil, the case was handed off by the CIA to the bureau.

The next month, Bloch flew to Paris and checked into the Hôtel Pullman St.-Honoré, a small, elegant right-bank hotel. Early on the evening of May 14, he strolled down the rue du Faubourg-St.-Honoré, a street lined with some of the world’s most expensive shops, carrying a black airline-type bag with a shoulder strap. He stopped to look in the shop windows, perhaps studying the reflections in the glass to see if he was being followed.

And he was. At the request of the FBI, agents of the Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire (DST), the French counterintelligence service, were on him. At the Hôtel Meurice, across from the Jardins des Tuileries, he walked through the ornate, chandeliered lobby to a small bar in the rear. Gikman, the man he said he knew as “Pierre Bart,” was waiting for him there.

The KGB illegal was a big, heavyset man, close to six feet, with dark hair, a beard, and a mustache. Gikman/Bart and Bloch had whiskies, then moved downstairs to the hotel’s opulent Restaurant le Meurice, a place of dark-paneled wood, red walls, and hovering waiters. The French counterintelligence agents were close by. The DST secretly photographed the pair, both in the bar and in the restaurant.

Bloch placed his bag under the table. The two men chatted over wine and dinner. It was an expensive meal, but Gikman picked up the check. Bloch was first to leave the restaurant. When Gikman/Bart left,
he was carrying the bag. Soon afterward, the DST videotaped him entering his budget-priced hotel, the Saphir, near the Gare de Lyon.

Eight months later, I sat in Bloch’s apartment in the Kalorama section of Washington. His little white dog, Mephisto, kept trying to jump into my lap. By that time, Bloch had been questioned intensively by the FBI. He had denied passing any documents to the Soviets or receiving any money. He had also checked Mephisto’s collar, looking for FBI bugs, but did not detect any.

I asked him about the man he had dined with in Paris. “He was someone I knew as a stamp collector,” he said. “I knew him as Pierre Bart. I don’t know the name Gikman.” And what was in the bag that he had left under the table in Paris? “Stamps were in the bag. Albums and pages of stamps.”

That, at least, is also what Bloch told the FBI. Bloch, to be sure, had an extensive stamp collection in red leather albums, which he pulled from a bookcase and spent some time enthusiastically showing to me. He had, he said, been collecting stamps since childhood.

On May 22, 1989, eight days after Bloch met Gikman/Bart in Paris, Robert Hanssen told the KGB that the FBI was investigating Bloch and Reino Gikman.

Something very interesting happened after that. Although Moscow now knew that the FBI was on the case, and despite the risks, it permitted Gikman to meet again with Bloch in Brussels six days later, on May 28. Bloch was then in Belgium on official State Department business.

A few days later, early in June, Reino Gikman disappeared from Vienna. Helga Höbart was devastated. The friendly Finn had suddenly vanished from their house and from the
Hofräte-Stammtisch
, the bureaucrats’ table, at Kern’s. Gikman, pulled out of Vienna by the KGB, had gone to ground in Moscow.

Then, just after 6
A.M
. on June 22, Bloch received a telephone call at his apartment in Washington from a man who identified himself as “Ferdinand Paul.” But the person who called him, Bloch told me, was Pierre Bart. The FBI was listening.

The man told Bloch that he was calling “in behalf of Pierre” who “cannot see you in the near future” because “he is sick.” The caller added, pointedly: “A contagious disease is suspected.” The man then told Bloch: “I am worried about you. You have to take care of yourself.”

Bloch said he hoped the disease was not serious. He wished the caller well and hung up.

To the listening FBI agents, the telephone call was clearly a warning to Bloch that his contacts with the KGB had been discovered. Worse yet, it meant that someone inside U.S. intelligence might have tipped off the Russians. When Bloch arrived at the State Department that day, he was summoned to the office of Ambassador Robert E. Lamb, the assistant secretary for diplomatic security.

Three FBI agents were waiting for Bloch. They questioned him for two and a half hours, confronting him with the surveillance photographs of both Bloch and Gikman taken in the restaurant in Paris.

The questioning went nowhere. Bloch denied to the agents that he had sold secrets to the Soviets or had ever met Gikman in Vienna. According to Bloch, “After a while they said, ‘This is a lot of bullshit. Tell us the truth.’ ‘You can accept it or not,’ I said.” Bloch surrendered his black diplomatic passport and his blue regular passport. His building pass was revoked and he was placed on administrative leave.