Spy: The Inside Story of How the FBI's Robert Hanssen Betrayed America (3 page)

Except for the years in Wauwatosa, Wisconsin, when her father taught at Marquette, Bonnie grew up in Park Ridge, an upscale suburb of Chicago where Hillary Rodham Clinton also came of age. The Waucks lived at 609 Vine, in an old Dutch Colonial on a pleasant, tree-shaded street.

Bonnie, Frances Wauck recalled, was “a normal child, nothing extraordinary, a good kid, an average student, not a brilliant student.” She went to the Mary Seat of Wisdom parish school. The Waucks, her mother said, were a close-knit family. “We all swam—summers on a lake in Wisconsin.”

Leroy Wauck had once worked at the Chicago State Hospital, a psychiatric institution, and some of the children, including Bonnie, held summer jobs there. It was at the hospital that Bonnie encountered a tall dental student from Northwestern who worked there on weekends, sometimes even interviewing patients as though he were a psychiatrist. Bonnie was a sociology major at the time at Loyola, where all but one of her brothers and sisters went, taking advantage of the free tuition for children of faculty members.

When she brought Bob Hanssen home to meet her parents, they both liked him. “He was tall, dark, and handsome,” her mother said. “He seemed to adore my daughter, he had good credentials in education—that was important to us—and treated her like a queen. That was enough for me.”

They dated for about a year, and after Bonnie graduated from college, they were married in Park Ridge on August 9, 1968, at Mary Seat of Wisdom church. Leroy walked his daughter down the aisle. Bonnie Hanssen was twenty-one; her husband was three years older.

The young couple moved into an apartment on Chicago’s north side. Bonnie taught grade school while Bob, who had by now abandoned dentistry, continued at Northwestern in his accounting classes.

But within a week of their wedding, Bonnie Hanssen received a highly disturbing phone call from a woman who said she was Bob’s girlfriend and had just had sex with him. Bonnie might have married Bob, she said, but he belonged to the caller. When Bonnie confronted her new husband, he admitted he had seen the woman, but insisted there had only been some hugs and kisses. Bonnie tried to put the phone call out of her mind; she comforted herself by recalling what had occurred at a party at the state hospital. As Bonnie recounted it to family members, the woman was there and jumped onto Bob’s lap; he had stood up and dumped her unceremoniously on the floor. Still, it was not a phone call that a wife would ever forget.

Having married into a rigorously Catholic family, it was almost inevitable that Hanssen would join the church. Before converting to Catholicism, however, he discussed the move with his mother, with whom he had always remained close. “It was shortly after they were married,” Vivian Hanssen said. “He was friends with a monsignor who was a member of Bonnie’s family; he has since died. He [Bob] asked me if it would hurt if he changed religions. I said no, I thought it was good for families to have the same religion.” After joining the church, Hanssen became, to all appearances, ultrareligious, a devout, zealous Catholic, and like his wife and in-laws a member of Opus Dei.

Hanssen graduated from Northwestern in 1971 with an MBA in accounting and information systems. Afterward, he worked for a year as a junior associate at an accounting firm in Chicago. In 1973, he became a CPA.

But Hanssen, even at this early stage, hoped to get into intelligence work. He applied for a job at the National Security Agency, the nation’s code-breaking and electronic eavesdropping arm. The NSA did not hire Hanssen, and he then sought work in law enforcement.

At the time, his father’s career as a police officer was coming to an end. First a sergeant and later a lieutenant on the Chicago police force, Howard Hanssen had been for several years the district commander in Norwood Park, at the police station closest to the Hanssen home. Later, he was assigned to the notorious Chicago police “red squad,” which engaged in illegal domestic surveillance of suspected Communists, leftists,
political activists, and others deemed dangerous by Mayor Richard Daley’s police force. In the early 1970s, the red squad fell into disrepute, as its activities and “subversive” targets—including the League of Women Voters and church groups—became known.
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Bill Houghton, a senior FBI analyst, had worked with Hanssen and knew him well. “He always spoke incredibly highly about his father. At one time after his father died he brought up his father’s badge and held it like it was an icon. He used to talk about his father a lot. He would talk about his dad once a week. He always referred to his father in glowing, positive terms. He appeared to me to worship his father.”

Hanssen told Houghton about his father’s work on the Chicago red squad in the 1950s and 1960s. “Bob was proud of all the wiretapping and the breakins and all the stuff that the squad did back then. In the early seventies the Chicago PD was starting to look into these things. He told me the squad was under his dad’s supervision by then and a lot of the material that was collected had been gathered illegally.

“He said his dad took full responsibility for it. He told me there was a mysterious fire that broke out in the room that contained the file cabinets, and only the cabinets that contained the material from the red squad were destroyed; the cabinets right next to it were not burned. He told me the authorities were not amused by this incident. His father retired but there was a serious cloud over him. And Bob expressed great anguish about it. ‘These liberal pinko bastards got away with everything and here they are trying to blame it on my dad.’ He was very angry and bitter over a system that would allow his father to take the heat, while a lot of these pinko liberals got away with it.”

Was Robert Hanssen angry that his father was wrongfully blamed, or because his father had in fact burned the files and was condemned instead of being secretly applauded inside the department? Houghton said Bob Hanssen was clear on the point. “He said his father had instigated the fire to destroy the evidence. Exactly.”
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It was in July 1972 that Howard Hanssen retired. He did not, according to Jack Hoschouer, want his son to follow in his footsteps as a
cop, but Hanssen did exactly that, joining the department in October, three months after his father had left the force.

The ambivalence of Hanssen’s relationship with his father was underscored by his decision to join the police force. On the face of it, Hanssen appeared to be duplicating his father’s career, perhaps trying to win his approval. In fact, his motive was just the opposite, in Jack Hoschouer’s view: “His father made fun of him because he was only a cop; he put him down. He wanted his son to be more. He may have tried to emulate his father, but I think he did it to spite his father.”

Yet Howard Hanssen must have harbored some internal pride in his son’s decision, because of the symbolic act that followed. “His father sent him his gun when Bob joined the Chicago force,” Hoschouer said. But the gesture resulted in some complications. “The postal service found the gun and intercepted it, and Bob had to go identify himself and pick it up someplace.”

Robert Hanssen did not start out, like most rookies, as a beat cop. Instead, he was assigned to C-5, a secretive intelligence unit that investigated police corruption. As might be imagined, the unit was highly unpopular with the rank-and-file officers. It was an elite group that paralleled the internal affairs division but was separate from it.

Mitchell Ware, who was deputy police superintendent when Hanssen was on the force, supervised C-5. The unit’s members ran sting operations, he said, and sometimes posed as drug dealers to snare crooked cops on the take. Chicago has traditionally had a high level of tolerance for municipal corruption; it is possible that the Daley machine decided to make a show of cleaning up the police force before the federal authorities moved in and did it for them.

Pat Camden, a spokesperson for the Chicago Police Department, said he assumes that Howard Hanssen advised his son not to go into C-5, whose members were regarded as finks. “If it was my son,” Camden said, “I would be more concerned about his becoming a policeman first. Hanssen must have had total disregard for his father. In the unit you had qualified policemen, but he never made a street stop. How can you work in C-5 if you’ve never walked a beat?”

By May 1973, Hanssen was listed in VCD, the vice control division. “That was just a cover because C-5 was so secret,” Camden explained. “He was never really in VCD.”

At some point while working for the Chicago police, Hanssen was sent to a secret counterintelligence school to learn how to install bugs
and other high-tech surveillance equipment. Ernie Rizzo, a Chicago private investigator, said he met Hanssen at the school, which was a storefront disguised as a television repair shop.

Robert Hanssen’s three years as a cop were for the most part uneventful. He did receive one commendation. In June 1975, while waiting to testify in a case at the criminal courts building, Hanssen spotted a man running out of a courtroom. He was Donald Jackson, a prisoner with a long arrest record and a habit of trying to escape from the courthouse. There were hundreds of people in the halls as Hanssen and a burglary detective pursued the man through corridors and stairwells. Hanssen caught the culprit as he fled down a fire escape outside a second-floor window.

But Hanssen had set his sights higher than Richard Daley’s police department. If the NSA would not have him, perhaps the FBI would. He applied to the bureau and was accepted. On January 12, 1976, at age thirty-one, he was sworn in as a special agent of the FBI.

After training at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia, Hanssen was assigned to the Indianapolis field office, where he worked white-collar crime at the bureau’s resident agency in Gary. The growing family, with two children, lived in nearby Munster.

All was far from harmonious when Hanssen’s parents came to visit. According to Aya Hoschouer, who had married Jack in 1967, Bonnie Hanssen had confided to her that she finally confronted her fatherin-law about the way he continued to treat Bob. “Early in their marriage when his parents would come to dinner, Bob would not come downstairs, he would get sick to his stomach and could not face his father at the table. Bonnie finally said, ‘If you are under this roof, if you cannot be respectful to Bob, then you are not welcome to come.’ ”

In August 1978, Hanssen was transferred to the New York City field office. Now with three young children, Bob and Bonnie left the Midwest and moved into a house in Scarsdale, in Westchester County. In time, the Hanssens would have six children, three boys and three girls.

Although a transfer to the Big Apple might have seemed a welcome move up the bureau’s career ladder, many agents shunned assignments to New York because of the high cost of living. Very few FBI agents could afford to live in the city itself. For most, the job meant a long commute by car or train from the suburbs, or being jammed into crowded subways, riding in from Queens. Scarsdale is an affluent community. The Hanssens bought a relatively modest house, and Bonnie joked to her mother that she lived “in the Scarsdale slums.” Still, it was
an expensive suburb, beyond the means of a young FBI agent with a growing family.

Nor was Hanssen’s new job inspiring; he worked at first as an accountant in the criminal division. In March 1979, however, he was moved into the intelligence division. Now, for the first time, Hanssen was in the business of counterintelligence. But he was not, then or later, a street agent. Others might be assigned to the more glamorous job of surveillance and actually catching Russian spies; Hanssen was always in the back room.

His job was to help create a new, classified national counterintelligence database for the FBI. Much of the input came from New York, a major center of Soviet intelligence activity. In the city, the KGB operated from the Soviet Mission to the United Nations. In addition, there were Russian and other eastern bloc intelligence officers working in the secretariat of the UN itself. Both the Soviet mission and UN headquarters were thus prime targets for the FBI’s counterintelligence agents in New York. The automated database Hanssen worked on contained information about hundreds of foreign officials, including intelligence officers. Its contents were classified up to the level of
SECRET
.
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In effect, Hanssen was compiling a who’s who of Soviet intelligence. The data was not limited to the KGB and its known officers. Although the KGB, the Komitet Gosudarstvennoi Bezopasnosti, or Committee for State Security, was the best-known Soviet spy agency, its rival, the GRU, the Soviet military intelligence agency, was equally active in the United States. The GRU—the initials stood for Glavnoye Razvedyvatelnoye Upravlenie—was also a major target of the FBI.