Spy: The Inside Story of How the FBI's Robert Hanssen Betrayed America (2 page)

With a wave, Hanssen was gone. Hoschouer checked in and about 6
P.M
. boarded his flight to Phoenix.

* * *

From the airport, Hanssen did not return directly to his home at 9414 Talisman Drive. He drove instead to Foxstone Park, a few blocks from his house.

There, he placed a piece of white adhesive tape in a vertical position on one of the poles that supported the park sign. Like some malign doppelgänger of Clark Kent, Special Agent Robert Hanssen of the FBI had figuratively changed costume and stepped into his other, secret life as “Ramon,” ace agent of the Sluzhba Vneshnei Razvedki, or SVR, the successor to the KGB. The tape was a signal to the Russian spy agency that secret documents would be waiting at a dead drop, a hiding place inside the park, ready for them to pick up.

This was no sudden transformation of loyalties to Moscow by Robert Hanssen. He did not have an epiphany in Foxstone Park. He had secretly been a Russian spy, on and off, for almost twenty-two years. He was Moscow’s mole, operating from within the very heart of American counterintelligence. He had turned over more than six thousand pages of classified documents, including many of the nation’s most sensitive secrets, to the Russians. In return, he had been paid more than $600,000 in cash and diamonds, and told that another $800,000 had been deposited to his account in a Moscow bank, for a total of $1.4 million.

As Hanssen’s reward this day, the Russians had stashed $50,000 in used hundreddollar bills in dead drop
LEWIS
, a hiding place in Arlington beneath a wooden stage in an outdoor amphitheater in the Long Branch Nature Center.

From his car, Hanssen removed a large plastic garbage bag, tightly secured at the top with clear tape. To anyone watching, it might appear, at worst, that someone was furtively dumping unwanted trash in the park. The garbage bag, however, contained not trash but a computer disk and seven FBI documents, each classified
SECRET
. These would be of great interest to the SVR’s leaders in Yasenevo, the agency’s headquarters on the Moscow ring road. They revealed the FBI’s current and proposed counterintelligence operations against certain Russian officials and installations in the United States.

It was just after 4:30
P.M
. Hanssen made his way along the path through the trees to a wooden footbridge that crossed over Wolf Trap Creek, the narrow stream that meanders through the park. To the Russians and Hanssen, this was dead drop
ELLIS
. Carefully, he placed the bag out of sight, just under the bridge.

It took him another four minutes to emerge from the woods and walk to his car.

At that instant, he knew.

The men moving toward him were armed with submachine guns.

Hanssen had realized the risks. He had reminded the Russians in a letter just three months earlier that the espionage laws in the United States had been changed. If caught, he warned, he might not just be sent to prison.

He might face the penalty of death.

Norwood Park is a working-class, predominantly white area on the northwest fringe of Chicago. “It was the only neighborhood in Chicago that looked like the suburbs, with one-family houses set on lawns,” recalled James D. Ohlson, who grew up nearby and later became a friend of Hanssen when both served in the FBI.

The neighborhood’s politics reflected its demographics; Norwood Park was a conservative stronghold. “It was,” Ohlson noted, “the only Republican ward in Mayor Daley’s Chicago. Police, firefighters, teachers, and other city employees had to live in Chicago, and our ward was filled with them.”

Howard Hanssen, a Chicago police officer, and his wife, Vivian, lived in a modest two-story white bungalow in Norwood Park at 6215 North Neva Avenue. Howard Hanssen was serving as a petty officer in the Navy during World War II when, on April 18, 1944, their son and only child, Robert Philip, was born.

Before joining the force, Howard Hanssen had worked for the Campbell Soup Company, mixing spices for the vats. In the Navy, stationed at Great Lakes, Illinois, he had traded one police uniform for another. “He was a shore patrolman and traveled the trains, bringing back prisoners and AWOLs,” Vivian Hanssen recalled.

The Hanssens on Howard’s side were Danish or German, Vivian Hanssen thought. “Most likely Danish because of the double ‘s.’ I was never sure which and I don’t think he was sure. He came from a part that went back and forth.” Vivian Baer Hanssen’s own family background was German.

An intelligent and articulate woman, Vivian Hanssen was eighty-eight years old, widowed, and living in Venice, Florida, when her son was arrested as a Russian spy. Devastated by the news, she could offer no explanation for his actions. “He had a normal childhood. He was never in any trouble. Maybe a few things he wasn’t happy about that I didn’t know. But I don’t want to talk about that.

“He had a pretty strict dad,” she added. “I was the lenient one. He never showed any problems with me.”

But Howard Hanssen, by several accounts, was more than strict; he was a stern disciplinarian, verbally and sometimes even physically abusive toward his son. Once, his father rolled him up in an old Navy mattress so he could not move. Trapped, with his arms pinned, Robert became frightened and began to cry. According to another account, Hanssen’s father would spin him around until he became so dizzy he threw up, a bizarre punishment apparently designed to toughen him up. For much the same reason, his father, when Hanssen was a teenager, even secretly arranged for his son to fail his driving test. As a Chicago cop, Howard Hanssen could have managed this without any great difficulty.

* * *

When Hanssen was arrested, his wife, Bonnie, immediately called Plato Cacheris, the celebrated Washington defense attorney, and asked him to represent her husband. Cacheris agreed. He was used to high-profile cases; he had represented Aldrich Ames, the CIA spy, and Monica Lewinsky, among others. Cacheris asked Dr. David L. Charney, a Washington psychiatrist, to evaluate Hanssen, who talked at length to him about his father. Charney spent more than thirty hours with Hanssen, visiting him in jail in the months after his arrest.

“If I had to pick one core psychological reason for his spying, I would target the experience he had in his relations with his father,” Charney said. “Hanssen’s father seemed to be fundamentally impatient with him.” His father, Charney concluded, was “borderline abusive.” Among the various punishments he imposed on his son, “he forced him to sit with his legs spread in some fashion. I’m not implying a sexual element to the abuse. But he was forced to sit in that position and it was humiliating.”

Jack Hoschouer, Hanssen’s closest friend, said Howard constantly put his son down, and frequently complained that he would never be a success in life.

These accounts might be discounted as efforts to explain away Hanssen’s espionage by apportioning some of the blame to his dead father. In American society, people who commit crimes often seek to paint themselves as victims. Whether Hanssen’s treatment by his stern father was linked to his later betrayal of his country can be debated, but the relationship was without doubt a troubled one.

Jack’s mother, Jeanette Hoschouer, said she had a clear memory of several encounters with Howard Hanssen, in which he openly and repeatedly bad-mouthed his son. She remembers running into Howard at the Jewel grocery store in Norwood Park. “He would say, ‘Oh, my son, my son, is he ever going to amount to anything?’ Always something belittling about Bob. No matter what Bob did, it wasn’t right. I’ve never seen a father like that. He would never have a kind word to say about his only child.”

Aside from putting down his son, Howard Hanssen’s chief interest seemed to be betting on the horses. He spent almost all of his free time at the track. Even family vacations were planned around a day at the races in whatever city they were visiting.

People tend to edit out the bad experiences in the past and remember the good times. Hanssen knew his father was deeply disappointed in him. But in later life he preferred to cling to happier memories: his father taking him fishing, teaching him to shoot, building things together with Lincoln Logs. He remembered how he had tried to please his father by bringing him solutions to algebra problems.

As a boy, Bob Hanssen attended Norwood Park Grammar School and went on to Taft High School. It was there, in chemistry lab in his sophomore year, that he and Jack Hoschouer met, beginning their lifelong friendship. Jack, whose family owned a printing business, had grown up next door to Norwood Park in Edison Park.

Hanssen’s high school years sounded fairly normal. “We liked to look at girls, go out; we sometimes dated the same girls,” Hoschouer recalled. It was all casual, he said. “Bob did not have a particular girlfriend.”

Auto racing also captured their imagination. Trying to emulate their hero, Stirling Moss, the legendary British racing driver, the two teens ran their own version of the Grand Prix on the back streets of Chicago. “We broke a few traffic laws,” Hoschouer said, “but we never got caught. We found some real curvy streets and saw how fast we could go. Testing our cornering skills.” These antics usually took place in a Corvair that belonged to Hoschouer’s mother.

In 1962, at age eighteen, Hanssen graduated from Taft. His photograph in the
Aerie
, the high school yearbook, reveals a crew-cut young man, wearing a tie, looking perhaps slightly younger than his age. Near his picture, he listed only three extracurricular activities—the Radio Club, the Honor Club, and Teacher’s Helper—far fewer than many other students.
^*
For his motto, he chose: “Science is the light of life.”

Hanssen won a scholarship to Knox College, a small liberal arts school in Galesburg, Illinois. Hoschouer went off to St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota. Although the two friends were separated geographically, they remained in close touch. “We spent our vacations almost every minute together,” Hoschouer recalled. “He came up to St. Olaf once to see me and I went to Knox once.”

At Knox, Hanssen majored in chemistry and math but also studied Russian. Momcilo Rosic, Hanssen’s Russian teacher, was an anti-Communist Yugoslav. “I taught him only language, a requirement,” he said. “Three or four hours per week, probably four.

“I think Hanssen took one year of Russian; he was a chem major, and Knox recommended that people in science should take French, Russian, or German. I am a strong anti-Communist; my students knew that. It was the Cold War; it was a struggle between two systems.” Rosic said he was surprised that Hanssen chose to spy for Moscow. “He was certainly not influenced by me.”

Nor was he influenced by his father, at least initially, in his choice of a career. Howard Hanssen wanted his son to become a doctor. Instead, after graduating from college in 1966 with a bachelor’s degree in chemistry, he returned to Chicago and studied dentistry at Northwestern University for three years. The choice may have been calculated. “I think he went to dental school because his father wanted him to go to medical school,” Hoschouer said.

Hanssen himself later claimed that he, too, wanted to enter medical school, but lacked the grades. In any event, cavities and bicuspids held little fascination for Hanssen. “After college I went to dental school,” he
wrote years later to the editor of his high school alumni bulletin, “didn’t like spit all that much (though I was in the 98th national percentile on my Dental Board exam), and decided to get an MBA and a CPA and go into law enforcement.”
^*

In one of Howard Hanssen’s encounters with Jeanette Hoschouer at Jewel’s grocery, he complained about his son’s tuition bills at dental school: “He’s not going to amount to anything; I’m spending all this money on dental school.”

In 1966, when Hanssen was studying dentistry, Hoschouer was taking graduate courses at the University of Hawaii. Jack’s fiancée, Ayako Matsuda, was a nurse at the nearby Northwestern Memorial Hospital and lived in the nurses’ residence. “Bob came over periodically to make sure I was okay,” she recalled. “I’d feed him sandwiches, sometimes a grilled steak.

“He was so thoughtful. He knew I had to learn how to drive. He started to teach me. He took me onto the Kennedy Expressway, but I think my driving unnerved him. There were no more lessons after that.

“As a student at the dental school, he got a complimentary membership at the Playboy Club; all the first-year dental students did. He was so excited he called me up and said, ‘Do you want to see what the Playboy Club is like?’ And we rushed over there. And Bob was so innocent, he said, ‘See those little things like bunny tails, you’re not supposed to touch them.’ ”

While he was in dental school at Northwestern, Bob Hanssen met Bernadette Wauck, known as Bonnie, who came from a large and staunchly Catholic family in Chicago. There were eight children in all, four girls and four boys. One of her brothers, John Paul, became an Opus Dei priest and a professor at the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross in Rome, an Opus Dei institution; before entering the priesthood, he was a speechwriter for Robert P. Casey, the Democratic governor of Pennsylvania, who was an outspoken opponent of abortion. Bonnie Hanssen’s uncle, Robert Hagarty, was a monsignor.
^†

Bonnie Wauck was the daughter of Dr. Leroy A. Wauck, a Chicagoan, Navy veteran, and distinguished clinical psychologist who taught in Milwaukee at Marquette University, a Jesuit institution, and later for twenty years at Chicago’s Loyola University.

Leroy Wauck, whose grandparents emigrated from Poland, was trained by the Jesuits in high school and seriously considered becoming a priest. He entered a seminary and studied there for two years until deciding it was not his calling. Before studying for the priesthood, he had dated Frances Hagarty, whose family roots were in Ireland, and they were married in 1944. Bonnie, their second daughter, was born two years later.