Spy: The Inside Story of How the FBI's Robert Hanssen Betrayed America (39 page)

And it was only then, during the debriefing, that the FBI learned why the KGB’s file on Hanssen contained no evidence of his earlier spying. The reason, Hanssen told the FBI, was that in 1979 he had volunteered his services to the rival GRU.

At the Residence Inn, Bonnie continued to talk and respond to questions almost until dawn. The agents seemed satisfied with her answers. The FBI appeared persuaded that she had really believed her husband’s promises in 1980 that he would never spy again. She was clearly distraught and shocked by his arrest. It was 4
A.M
. Monday before she fell, exhausted, into bed.

So far, the public knew nothing of the arrest of yet another world-class mole, this time not within the CIA, like Aldrich Ames, but inside the FBI itself. And to make matters worse, the spy was not only in the FBI, he was a counterintelligence agent in the National Security Division, the very part of the bureau responsible for catching spies. The FBI braced for the storm that was sure to come.

After the arrest, the FBI retrieved the package that Hanssen had left under the footbridge and substituted another, prepared in advance, containing only blank paper. It kept the drop site in Foxstone Park under surveillance, hoping to catch an SVR officer in the act of retrieving the package that Hanssen had left under the footbridge. Nabbing a Russian officer in the act would, at least a little, offset the bad news about Hanssen.

But no Russian showed up Sunday night, or the next day. On Monday night, the FBI continued to keep the drop site under surveillance. “We were hoping a Russian would come out,” Gallagher said. “It didn’t happen.”

The FBI was not able to determine why. Perhaps, it was thought, the Russians were spooked. They might have had countersurveillance in the vicinity of the park and spotted the FBI cars in the area. That Sunday afternoon, the FBI knew, a number of Russians had left the embassy complex on Wisconsin Avenue. At 6
P.M.
, around the time that Bonnie and the Trimbers were having dinner, Gallagher said, “we still had some Russians unaccounted for.”

For a week, agents had been lying in the woods in the cold and the rain at the Long Branch Nature Center, nine miles from Foxstone Park, watching the dead drop there, codenamed
LEWIS
, where the SVR had left the $50,000 for Hanssen. About two hours after Hanssen’s arrest agents also picked up the money at the Nature Center. Hanssen would not be needing it.
^*

Word of the arrest could not be held indefinitely, and on Tuesday, February 20, FBI director Louis Freeh scheduled an afternoon press
conference. He was too late; at 7
A.M
. NBC’s
Today
show broke the story of Hanssen’s arrest.

* * *

Aboard Air Force One on the way to St. Louis to speak to parents and teachers at an elementary school, President Bush issued a statement about the arrest a few minutes before Freeh faced the press. It was, he said, “deeply disturbing,” but he had confidence in the FBI director and the men and women of the bureau. In language that foreshadowed the words he would use months later, after the September 11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, he added: “I thank the men and women who proudly serve our country. But to anyone who would betray its trust, I warn you—we’ll find you and we’ll bring you to justice.”

* * *

Freeh looked grim as he faced a huge crowd of reporters and television lights in the FBI auditorium. The CIA director, George Tenet, sat on the stage, but said nothing and stole away early, before the news conference was over.

Attorney General John Ashcroft began with the obvious. “This is a difficult day for the FBI,” he said.

Then Freeh took the microphone. Hanssen’s arrest, he said, was the result of a mole hunt that followed the Aldrich Ames case. It had happened, he added, because of “a counterintelligence coup by the FBI,” working with the CIA.

Freeh was attempting to put the best face on the capture of a penetration who had spied intermittently for almost twenty-two years. Yet his words were not an exaggeration. The arrest
was
the result of an extraordinary counterintelligence operation.

The FBI director did not spell out the details; he did not disclose the name of Mike Rochford, the secret meetings with the former KGB officer in the New York hotel room, the file the Russian had spirited out of SVR headquarters, or the $7 million paid to the ex-KGB man. He did let drop that the FBI had obtained “original Russian documentation” that had pointed to Hanssen. But that hint was as far as he went.

The damage Hanssen did, Freeh admitted, was “exceptionally grave.” He added: “The criminal conduct alleged represents the most
traitorous actions imaginable against a country governed by the rule of law.… I stand here today both saddened and outraged.”

In Washington, when political figures find themselves in major hot water, they appoint a commission. Freeh announced that he had named William Webster, the respected former director of both the FBI and the CIA, to examine the bureau’s internal security and procedures and recommend improvements. But Webster was investigating his own former agency; Ashcroft ordered the Justice Department’s inspector general to launch a separate inquiry into what had gone wrong.

Soon afterward, although there was no public announcement, Paul Redmond, the former CIA counterintelligence expert, was named to run the intelligence community’s detailed damage assessment of the Hanssen case. It was the task of Redmond’s group, working in the shadows, to determine exactly which programs Hanssen had betrayed and destroyed, how costly were the compromises, and what changes U.S. intelligence agencies would have to make to repair the breach.

As FBI officials well understood, Congress and the public would focus on the fact that a mole had gone undetected among the counterspies for a very long time, not on the resourceful and imaginative way he was unmasked. For Freeh and the FBI, the public revelation that the bureau had harbored its very own Aldrich Ames in its ranks for more than two decades was only the latest in a seemingly endless series of disasters.

The string of debacles had begun at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, in 1992, when the wife of the white supremacist Randall Weaver was mistakenly shot and killed by an FBI sharpshooter. That was followed in 1993 by the FBI siege of the compound in Waco, Texas, that left seventy-five members of the Branch Davidian religious sect dead. Freeh did not become FBI director until later that year, but he was criticized for failing to crack down on subordinates in the cover-up that followed Ruby Ridge.

Then came the FBI’s pursuit of Richard Jewell, initially a suspect but later cleared, in the bombing at the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta; the disclosure of sloppy work in the bureau’s crime lab, resulting in skewed testimony in court; and the mishandling of the case of Los Alamos scientist Wen Ho Lee.

During his eight-year tenure, Freeh had criticized President Clinton about the FBI files obtained by the White House, supposedly for political
purposes, and he fought with Attorney General Janet Reno, who rejected his recommendation that she appoint an independent counsel to investigate fund-raising abuses in the 1996 Clinton-Gore presidential campaign. That won him strong Republican support on Capitol Hill, but at a price; it created the perception among the public that the FBI and its director had become embroiled in politics.

On May 1, 2001, Freeh announced he was leaving his post. He knew what was coming; nine days later, the Justice Department reported that the FBI had failed to provide what was eventually revealed to be a total of more than three thousand documents to defense lawyers for Timothy McVeigh. As a result, Attorney General Ashcroft was forced to postpone the scheduled execution of the Oklahoma City bomber for a month.
^*

By the time Freeh announced he was calling it quits, public confidence in the FBI had plummeted to 24 percent, according to a CBS News poll, down from 43 percent a year earlier.
^†

* * *

Jack Hoschouer had arrived in Arizona Sunday night to visit his elderly parents, who lived in Mesa during the winter months. On Tuesday morning, they were watching television when they heard the news.

“My mother said I turned white,” he said. “At first I thought it had to be a mistake.”

Hoschouer dialed his wife in Germany. “I told her to turn on CNN. My parents don’t get CNN—they are in kind of a retirement community—so I went over to the clubhouse later and watched the press conference. I was devastated. I felt like Hiroshima the day after the bomb.”

Jack Hoschouer knew the FBI would want to talk to him. He called the bureau’s field office in Phoenix and arranged to fly back to Washington, where he was interviewed at length at the Washington field office.

In the course of the questioning, Hoschouer mentioned the Rolex that Hanssen had given to him in 1990. “They said, ‘Give us the watch.’
I didn’t have it right then. It was in repair.” The Rolex was potential evidence, and Hoschouer understood why the government wanted it, “but I told them I want it back.”

The Rolex was being repaired in Bonn. Hoschouer had to retrieve the timepiece from Germany to give it to the FBI. Later, he said, he tried to get the watch back and could not. Randy Bellows, the lead federal prosecutor in the Hanssen case, explained the reason. “Randy Bellows told me since it was a gift, and I didn’t pay anything for it, they have a right to it. I paid $250 to get the watch fixed and had it for two days. If I’d known the government was going to take it, I wouldn’t have had it fixed.”

* * *

Bonnie Hanssen faced a bleak future, with no husband, six children, substantial debts, and Hanssen’s FBI salary cut off. And there was always the possibility that the FBI would change its mind and come after her, even though they seemed to buy her story that she knew nothing about his espionage after 1980. There was also a chance that federal prosecutors would begin to place pressure on her, since she had known of Hanssen’s earlier espionage, to try to get him to cooperate with the government and reveal the full extent of his treachery.

Under the circumstances, she decided she had better get herself a lawyer. She contacted Janine Brookner, a former CIA officer who had been awarded $400,000 by the intelligence agency for gender discrimination against her. The CIA had investigated Brookner and subjected her to various false accusations after she had disciplined several subordinates while she was station chief in Jamaica. Brookner, who went to law school after leaving the CIA, agreed to represent Bonnie Hanssen.

But who would defend her husband? When high-profile figures in Washington get into major trouble, there is one lawyer they often seek out. President Nixon’s attorney general, John Mitchell; Aldrich Ames; and Monica Lewinsky had done so, among others. Bob would need a lawyer who could play in the big leagues. Espionage was punishable by death.

Bonnie Hanssen reached for the telephone and called Plato Cacheris.

It had begun in 1970, when Jack Hoschouer was serving in Vietnam as a U.S. Army adviser to a South Vietnamese battalion. The package from the States had arrived in a plain brown envelope.

Hoschouer remembered his amazed reaction when he opened it: holy Toledo! Out fell several photographs of Bonnie Hanssen, completely naked, some in provocative poses. Hoschouer wrote back to Bob Hanssen, asking, Did you make a mistake, sending these to me? But the next day a letter arrived from his friend. I hope you liked the little morale builder I sent you, Hanssen wrote.

More photos came while Hoschouer was in Vietnam. Along with them, in his letters Hanssen would ask, What kind of poses do you like? Hoschouer would tell him, and Hanssen would try to photograph Bonnie in the ways his friend would enjoy.

Bonnie Hanssen posed willingly for her husband of two years in the privacy of their bedroom. But she had no idea that he would ever share the photos with anyone.

At the time, Hanssen was studying accounting at Northwestern University. He looked up to Jack; there was his friend, risking his life for his country while he was safely in Chicago, getting his MBA, learning how to prepare a balance sheet and reconcile assets and liabilities. Over the years, Hanssen often told Jack he felt “rotten to the core,” and that Jack was a better person. Men like Jack who fought in Vietnam were heroes, he would say.

Hoschouer did see combat in Vietnam; he was one of the first Americans into Cambodia when Richard Nixon ordered the incursion
that led to the deadly clash between students and the National Guard on the campus of Kent State. He earned a bronze star when his unit came under heavy fire as helicopters lifted them out of Cambodia. Hoschouer decided to remain in the military and become a career Army officer. The following year, now a captain, he commanded an air infantry company in the 1st Air Cavalry Division in Vietnam; he received a purple heart after he was wounded in the left arm by shrapnel in an engagement with North Vietnamese forces.