Spy: The Inside Story of How the FBI's Robert Hanssen Betrayed America (24 page)

When asked to explain what all these elaborate semantics meant, she was more direct. “I was very drunk,” she recalled. She had, she said, begun with oral sex. “And when I started, he said, ‘Where in the world did you learn how to do that?’ I thought, ‘Oh my God, he’s never even had a blow job.’ I think he stopped me when I was ready for intercourse. I came up for that but he was not consenting, he did not want it. I never dreamed that he wouldn’t. As I remember it, that’s what happened. I felt a little bit ashamed, a lot of hurt. I knew what I did had never been done to him before.”

On the trip, there was not much talk about Hanssen’s work. “In
Hong Kong,” Galey recalled, “he mentioned the Chinese mafia, and he mentioned the Russians, but he never went into any details.”

Friends say Hanssen admired James Bond and liked the movies about the exploits of Agent 007. But he may also have fantasized that he was Humphrey Bogart, living a real-life romantic role in
Casablanca
. Whenever they were in a piano bar together, Galey added, there was one song that Hanssen would request. “In Hong Kong,” she said, “he always asked for ‘As Time Goes By.’ ”

Hanssen never took Galey into FBI headquarters, as far as is known, but he did take her to the bureau’s training academy in Virginia, south of Washington. “He took me to Quantico after Hong Kong. He put a CIA badge on me so I would have entry to everywhere. He said, ‘If anybody stops you, you’re to say, “I’m working on the Eisenhower project, or something like that, and it’s top secret, and I can’t talk about it.” ’ It was like a big joke. I saw the library, the shooting range, the little town they set up for training agents. I didn’t shoot in the shooting range, although I would have liked to. He didn’t shoot either, although he bragged how good a shot he was.”

It was in August 1991, a few months after their trip to Hong Kong, that Hanssen urged Galey to get a driver’s license. She said she had not had one for five years, because there was no reason; she could not afford a car. Well, he asked, if you could afford a car, what would it be?

“Either an old Jaguar convertible, with the spoked rims,” she replied, “or it has to be a Mercedes.” Those are good choices, Hanssen said.

Galey got her license and at their next lunch, on August 5, at Jaimalito’s, a Mexican restaurant in Georgetown, Hanssen had some surprises for her. First, he handed her an envelope. “It was an American Express card with my name on it. I never had a credit card. I thought that was wonderful. And then he handed me a pair of keys, and I knew they were nice keys, because they had the little leather holders on them, so they had to be to a nice car, and I was like, ‘What are these for?’

“And he says, ‘This is for your new car.’ And he said, ‘I looked for a Jaguar, but I got to thinking that the maintenance on that might be too much for you. It’s a Mercedes, a champagne silver Mercedes, and it’s being cleaned up, and when we’re through eating, we’ll go pick it up.’ And I’m like, ‘You bought me a Mercedes!’ I couldn’t finish eating, I couldn’t even eat. I kept asking questions, and said, ‘Do we have to eat, can’t we just go?’ ”

Afterward, they drove out to Alexandria to pick up the car, a 1985 Mercedes-Benz 190E Sedan, for which Hanssen had paid the dealer $10,500 in cash. Galey could not believe it; she drove fifty miles out of her way when she went back to her apartment in Silver Spring, Maryland, just to be in the car.

Around the same time, Hanssen gave Galey an expensive laptop. She said Hanssen indicated that if she could learn how to use the computer it would help her out of the strip club and on the path to an office job. But Galey was not able to get the laptop to work, and decided that Hanssen had put in some kind of code to lock the computer and test her abilities. “My mother is good at computers and could not make it work. She couldn’t boot it up, which led me to believe it was protected.”

In retrospect, she wondered if the laptop was part of a plan that Hanssen had to enlist her to help him spy. “It became an obsession that I learn how to use computers. He wanted me to learn how to e-mail, to send him messages from afar. I used to think he was just trying to improve me. Now I think he wanted me as an asset. He was preparing me for something.”

That Hanssen would risk having anyone else to assist him in his espionage for Moscow seems highly improbable. But Galey’s speculation was not dismissed out of hand by the FBI, which interviewed her after Hanssen’s arrest. “I think he was trying to develop her, Galey, into some kind of cutout,” said one veteran counterintelligence expert. “He gave her the computer, he was trying to test her skills. Otherwise, and assuming there was no sex, why did he spend all that time with her?”

Toward the end of the year, Galey said, Hanssen told her that he wanted to send her to France to see “the incorrupt saint.” Although he did not elaborate, “There is such a shrine in France. He was going to send me there. He always told me, miracles happen every day.”
^*

Aside from the necklace, the trip to Hong Kong, the Mercedes, and the laptop, all big-ticket items, Hanssen had another, small present for Galey. “He gave me a video of
Casablanca
around the time he gave me the computer. He said it was a classic. I took it home for the holidays in
1991.” But before she left, they had dinner together at a club in Maryland. There was a piano bar, and once again, Galey said, Hanssen asked for “As Time Goes By.”

A kiss is just a kiss. With the romantic melody playing in the background, Hanssen surprised Galey with an unexpected question. “That’s the evening when he asked if he wasn’t happily married, would I ever be interested in him? I was totally confused. I said, ‘Of course I would be.’ ”

Galey said her confusion stemmed from the fact that up to that evening, Hanssen had always talked about how important his family was. “It was obvious his wife and kids were everything to him. He often spoke of his wife and children and how dedicated he was to them.”

But as matters turned out, it was to be their last dinner together. The decision to go back to Columbus that Christmas turned into a disaster for Priscilla Sue Galey. Her life went rapidly downhill. She stayed for two months, longer than she had planned, ran up debts, and her car was wrecked in a collision with a city truck.

“The Mercedes was smashed. Totaled. In March of ninety-two. That’s the day my life went really bad. My friends were smoking crack. There was no insurance. The guy who was supposed to pay my insurance on the car said he had smoked it, he spent the money on crack.”

The laptop and the diamond-and-sapphire necklace were pawned for a fraction of their value. When the money ran out, she used the American Express card to buy Easter dresses for her nieces. But Hanssen had told her that the credit card, for which he paid the bills, was to be used strictly for expenses for the Mercedes or for emergencies. When he saw the dresses on the credit card statement, he flew to Columbus. There was an awkward encounter with Galey, “a very stiff meeting,” as she put it, and he retrieved the card and left.

It was not only Galey’s friends who were into drugs. She became hooked on crack, and turned to prostitution to support her habit. She was arrested in 1993, caught in a police sting, when a friend she was with sold crack to an undercover cop. Her mother, Linda Harris, called Hanssen on his direct line at the FBI to ask for help, but he refused. Galey pleaded guilty to avoid a longer sentence and spent a year in the state reformatory for women in Marysville, Ohio. Later, she had a child out of wedlock and fell deeper into her life on the streets of Columbus.

If she could visit Hanssen in prison, which she would like to do, she wants to ask him a question. “I just want to know, ‘Why? What could
ever change you from this paragon of virtue? What could change you?’ In my eyes he was a god.”

Still, Hanssen had helped her more than she ever dreamed any man would. “He showed me a different way of living, a whole new me.” She felt this way even though their relationship had not lasted and she had failed to better herself, as he had seemed to want, instead doing just the opposite.

She was deeply disappointed at the news that Hanssen was a Russian spy. “It kind of hurts my feelings that he lied to me; he was the one man who wasn’t capable of lying, it didn’t seem like, and I trusted him so much. He gave me back my faith in men. I’m just disappointed, that’s all.”

Galey shook her head. “Hell, I’m used to it. For him to make a magical world and then … I guess it’s just, like, there goes my fairy tale again.”

Kimberly Schaefer grew up in a working-class neighborhood in Ferndale, Maryland, south of Baltimore, and got a job at the FBI at age eighteen, right out of high school. She was assigned to the tour office, escorting visitors through the bureau’s headquarters in Washington.

A bright and articulate woman, she was moved to the FBI’s intelligence division in less than a year. In 1992, she married Michael Lichtenberg, then a sales representative for a steamship company. They bought a house in Ferndale, near her parents, and in a few years started a family.

In 1993, Kimberly Lichtenberg was working in the National Security Threat List unit in the intelligence division. The unit chief, Robert Hanssen, presided over an office of about ten people on the fourth floor. There were three or four FBI agents, a few support workers, a secretary, and a typist. Lichtenberg was an intelligence assistant to Supervisory Special Agent James A. Werth.

Hanssen could hardly have failed to notice that Kimberly Lichtenberg was tall and willowy, with long blond hair and striking, clear blue eyes. And by Lichtenberg’s account, at least, he did more than look.

“I never really knew him until I was transferred into his unit,” she said. “I’d heard things about him: ‘Dr. Death.’ As a female, I’d never want to be alone with him. I got weird vibes. He’d make sure he’d brush against me when he passed by. The same with other females in the office.
I never, ever felt comfortable around him.” Hanssen, she asserted, had brushed against her “many times.”
^*

She added, “Hanssen considered women beneath him. He spoke down to them. But if he wanted to rub up against me he would. And the bureau is a boys’ club.”

In truth, Hanssen did not approve of women in law enforcement. That retrograde conviction was in tune with his conservative views in general. Women in the bureau, he would grumble, were dysfunctional for the organization. But to hold that opinion, he once complained, was not politically correct.

At about 3:30
P.M
. on February 25, 1993, Hanssen summoned Lichtenberg, a secretary, and a typist to a meeting in his office. There had been some minor squabbling in the clerical ranks and Hanssen wanted to get to the bottom of it.

“The secretary had been complaining about the typist,” Lichtenberg said. “Hanssen asked, ‘Kim, are you having any problems with the typist?’ I said no, I didn’t. Hanssen said, ‘Well, the secretary says you’ve been complaining.’ I said, ‘No, I’ve no problems with the typist.’ ”

Lichtenberg was getting nervous about missing her ride in the carpool. She lived near the Baltimore/Washington International Airport and if she did not show up for her ride she would have no way to get home. “I said, ‘I have to leave to catch my van.’ I turned and walked out. I thought the meeting was over. It was a little before four, when I usually leave. I was not being flippant. I was respectful.”

After she left the meeting, she said, “I was heading for my pod area,” where a friend and fellow FBI employee, Candy Curtis, was waiting for her.

She had just reached her cubicle, she said, about thirty feet from Hanssen’s office, when he caught up with her.

“He yelled, ‘Get back here!’ I said, ‘No, I need to get home, this doesn’t involve me.’

“No sooner had I said that than he grabbed me by my left arm and spun me around. I lost my balance and fell to the ground. He never let
go of my arm. He was dragging me by the arm, screaming at me. He continued to drag me back by my arm toward his office, screaming and yelling at me.”

Lichtenberg, hoping for help, called out to Candy Curtis.

“He was yelling, ‘I told you to get back in here.’ When I yelled ‘Candy!’ he starts yelling, ‘You’re insubordinate!’ ”

Candy Curtis, Lichtenberg said, heard the commotion. “When she heard me call her name, she got up, walked out of the pod and saw everything. She saw me in a tug-of-war stance. She didn’t see me fall to the ground, but she saw me trying to get up.

“I got back on my feet. He was still holding my arm and I hit him on the chest and broke free.”

Curtis confirmed Lichtenberg’s account. She had heard the commotion and saw most of what occurred, she said. “Definitely. I was there and did witness it. He was pulling her physically. She was still low down, crouched. It went on until he saw me. He had no idea I was there.”

Once free of Hanssen, Lichtenberg fled with Candy Curtis. “We ran to the section chief, Nick Walsh. He said, ‘Wait here.’ He ran down to talk to Hanssen and came back and said, ‘Do you want to receive medical attention?’ I said, ‘My van is probably going to leave me.’ He said, ‘You better go and come back in the morning.’ ”