Spy: The Inside Story of How the FBI's Robert Hanssen Betrayed America (19 page)

The agents followed Bloch home. The next day he was questioned again for several hours. He turned over the key to his apartment to the FBI, which removed a briefcase, address books, photo albums, slides, checkbooks, files, and bank and investment records. For the next six months, he was never to be without close surveillance by FBI agents, working in three shifts round the clock.

None of this was yet known to the public. But James Bamford, working on the ABC News investigative team in Washington, learned of the FBI probe
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On July 21, John F. McWethy, the State Department correspondent for ABC News, broke the sensational story that Bloch, a State Department official, was under investigation by the FBI as a suspected Soviet spy. Within minutes, the State Department confirmed the ABC account, naming Bloch as the subject of an FBI inquiry into “illegal activities” involving “a foreign intelligence service.” A security breach “has occurred,” the department added. The statement was highly unusual, since Bloch had not been charged with a crime.

For weeks thereafter, Bloch became the center of a media circus. On television night after night he appeared on the evening news, sometimes walking Mephisto, trailed by reporters, cameramen, and FBI agents. As he passed by, children greeted him as “Mr. Spy.”

Bloch was in excellent physical shape; he had always walked for exercise and he led the reporters and the counterspies on some memorable treks in the heat, including a twenty-two-mile hike in early August that left one female FBI agent with bleeding feet.

When Bloch drove from his apartment, the press cars following the FBI cars following Bloch’s car were reportedly being followed by Soviet cars. The FBI quietly put a stop to that; the Russians dropped out of the caravan.

The bureau, hoping to overhear something useful, had bugged Bloch’s silver-gray Mercedes when he took it to the dealer for servicing in suburban Maryland. But Bloch had assumed his phones were tapped, his car and apartment bugged. His conversations with his wife in the Mercedes were unexceptional.

The FBI was utterly frustrated. Clearly, someone had tipped off the KGB, and that in turn had led to the cryptic warning telephone call to Bloch. But lacking evidence, and with Bloch sticking to his story about simply giving stamps to Pierre Bart, the FBI was stymied. There was no basis to make an arrest.

Early in December, Bloch was in New York shopping at Macy’s with his usual FBI entourage. He went uptown to have lunch at the Waldorf Grill, then to his parents’ apartment. His mother, who was watching his back, was the first to notice. She looked out at the street. “There’s no one there,” she told him. It was true; that afternoon the FBI surveillance suddenly ended. There no longer seemed any point.

Hanssen, from his vantage inside the Soviet analytical unit, had continued to funnel information about the Bloch case to the KGB. In August, he had provided a floppy disk with additional details about the FBI investigation.

More than a decade later, in November 2000, he revisited the Bloch case in a long letter to the KGB. In the letter, he attacked a fellow FBI counterintelligence agent and cited Bloch as an example of why he had refused to meet the KGB overseas. That might reveal his identity, he wrote, but his anonymity was “my best protection against betrayal by someone like me working from whatever motivation, a Bloch or a Philby.”
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Hanssen knew that in May 1989 Donald E. Stukey, a veteran FBI counterintelligence agent, had been sent to Paris to work with the DST in covering the meeting of Bloch and the KGB illegal at the Hôtel Meurice. Stukey was an experienced and well-respected FBI agent. As a former chief of the Soviet section for seven years, he had outranked Hanssen and found him annoying. Now Hanssen, without mentioning Stukey by name, unleashed a vituperative attack on him in his message to Moscow. Although the letter covered a number of matters, it read in part:

After Hanssen’s arrest in 2001, the letter was among the material made public by the FBI. Stukey, who retired from the bureau in 1996, was not amused at Hanssen’s abusive description of him as someone unable to make decisions. “I’ve never been accused up to now of being unable to make decisions,” he said.

Bloch was not arrested in Paris for good reason, Stukey added. “It was early in the investigation, so we weren’t ready to move in. And we didn’t want them [the French] to. The French did not have a case against Bloch, he had not broken their laws, so they had no cause to arrest him in any event.

“We were case-building then. At that time, we didn’t even know if a crime was being committed. To say we were going to make an arrest was patently absurd. Either he [Hanssen] was trying to impress his Soviet handlers or he did not understand the situation. We were working closely with the Department of Justice and trying to wrap this up in the U.S. We thought it was U.S. classified information he was passing. We don’t make arrests without the authority of the Justice Department. We did not have authority from the internal security section of the Justice Department to make an arrest.”

The FBI was determined to find the source of the tip-off to the KGB, the person who had told the Russians about the Bloch investigation so they in turn could warn him. The failure to make a case against Felix Bloch was a constant, nagging reminder to the FBI of an enormous unsolved problem. It stuck in the bureau’s craw and would not go away.

Beyond any other episode, the Bloch case made it apparent that someone on the inside, with access to highly sensitive files, had alerted the KGB. That source had to be found. For more than a decade the FBI and the CIA worked to uncover the penetration. They had Robert Hanssen’s mole study, of course, to provide the necessary historical background.

There were several false starts, and the bureau went down the wrong trail for three years, mistakenly suspecting an innocent CIA officer. But, as events would make clear, the compromise of the Bloch case eventually led to the arrest of Robert Hanssen. It was the unexplained tip-off to the KGB and the subsequent warning telephone call to Bloch that drove the mole hunt for a decade to its ultimate, dramatic conclusion.

Felix Bloch was dismissed by the State Department and deprived of his pension of more than $50,000 a year. He was never arrested for espionage, never indicted or charged. He moved to Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where he worked for a while bagging groceries. He was arrested twice for shoplifting food, the first time at the grocery where he worked. Bloch had wheeled a cart filled with chicken noodle soup, coffee, frozen catfish, and other items out to his Mercedes without bothering to pay.

There are a number of retired foreign service officers living in the area, and because Bloch had never been charged with espionage, he was asked to one of their Foreign Service Day reunions and came. But after his first shoplifting arrest he was not invited back. His wife filed for divorce.

He spent one night in jail after his first arrest, but in both cases was sentenced to perform community service. He volunteered at the local Red Cross chapter, where he put in long hours and impressed the director. By 2001, when Robert Hanssen was apprehended, Bloch was working as a city bus driver, wearing a blue uniform.

Transit officials in Chapel Hill said he was a good bus driver.

It was Jeanne Beglis, Bonnie Hanssen’s sister, who noticed the money, thousands of dollars in bills, just sitting there on Bob Hanssen’s dresser. Beglis immediately pointed out the huge wad of cash to her sister.

“Oh my God, look what he leaves lying around!” Bonnie Hanssen exclaimed.

It was the summer of 1990, and Hanssen by that year had received almost half a million dollars from the KGB, so it was perhaps not surprising that he was getting a little casual about where he left his money. He was normally more careful, hiding much of the cash in a box under his bed.

Despite the startling amount of cash on the dresser in her bedroom, Bonnie Hanssen maintained later that she had suspected nothing. Perhaps another woman would have had questions, family members conceded. But not sweet, naïve, religious Bonnie, they said, whose main focus, as her family and friends saw her, was to be a good mother and an old-fashioned housewife. Her husband handled the family’s money, paid the bills, wrote the checks, prepared the taxes. “She batted out six kids and had at least three miscarriages,” said one family friend. “Taking care of the children and her husband was Bonnie’s life.”

She knew, it was true, that a decade earlier her husband had taken money from the Soviets, but she had insisted he see Father Bucciarelli, and after that he had promised to stop. She loved her husband, and surely this good man, who went to mass almost every day, would not deceive her.

Still, the incident bothered Jeanne Beglis. She never suspected Bob Hanssen was a spy, but she did tell her husband about all the cash she had seen on the dresser. Jeanne, a child psychologist, and her husband, George, an architect and building contractor, lived across the street from the Hanssens on Talisman Drive.

When the Hanssens returned from New York in 1987, Jeanne noticed that a house on the block was up for sale and told Bonnie about it, which is how the Hanssens came to live on the same street. It was nice for the two couples to be so near each other; most of the rest of the Wauck family was in Chicago or scattered elsewhere, and the two sisters and their children were often back and forth in each other’s houses.

Jeanne Beglis regarded her brother-in-law as an enigma. As close as the families were, she never felt she really knew him. Yet Jeanne was fond of Bob. She thought Hanssen a sweet man, goofy but harmless, a big, tall, lumbering, socially awkward guy.

When the Hanssens had lived in New York, before they moved to Talisman Drive, he would call up sometimes and say he would be in Washington and ask to stay with them. He would sit in their living room on those trips, with a big grin, and have absolutely nothing to say. Jeanne would comment privately to George, “For God’s sake, the man cannot make conversation. He doesn’t know how.”

Bonnie Hanssen was not that way. She was known among her siblings as plainspoken. Bonnie would tell you exactly what she thought. Bonnie was volatile and impulsive, and she had quite a temper when angry; get her going and she could fly off the handle. Bob was very different. To Jeanne Beglis, her brother-in-law seemed a dreamer, with an odd fantasy life that could sometimes be glimpsed in sudden, disconnected comments he would make. Not that he ever talked much, but when he did he was always saying bizarre things. After the 2000 presidential election, for example—a few months before he was arrested—he remarked, with a wild-eyed look and a cackle, “Let’s take everybody out who voted for Gore and shoot them.”

It was only a joke, of course, but family members recall that during the Cold War years Hanssen would come up with a lot of crazy schemes to go after the Soviets. Some involved computers. “He’d bore you to death with computer talk—computers were his whole world,” said one.

At the Hanssen dinner table, another family member said, Bob forbade certain topics of discussion. “The family is so strict that they could
not even discuss homosexuality. When the ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy for gays in the military came up during the Clinton years, it was proscribed from family conversation.”

But all that money Bob seemed to have to spend was a frequent topic of discussion among his in-laws for years. The Hanssens had put in all new carpeting when they moved into the house, and an expensive new front door. Where was he getting the money? From the banks and the mortgage lenders, it seemed. He refinanced his house more than once, and frequently restructured his debts and took out loans. “There were always explanations,” a family member said.

Bonnie told Jeanne that after Hanssen’s car accident, he had received $40,000 for his broken wrist from the insurance company. And although he may have told his wife that, it was not true. The actual amount he received was much smaller.