Spy: The Inside Story of How the FBI's Robert Hanssen Betrayed America (43 page)

Charney identified several factors that led Hanssen to become a spy for Moscow. Many of these were raised by Hanssen himself in his often-weekly meetings with the psychiatrist.

But Charney had a word of caution. “People are complicated beings and motivations are multidetermined and evolve over time,” he said. “Motives may get altered in memory, depending on rationalizations that people bring in explaining themselves to themselves.”

Having said that, Charney affirmed that Hanssen himself pointed to “financial pressure” as one of the reasons he first crossed the line into espionage. To understand the motivation for espionage, Charney said, it is crucial to look at the six months leading up to when a spy first crosses that line. Nor can money be discounted as a continuing motive. For someone on the salary of a midlevel federal employee, the $600,000 that the Russians paid to Hanssen with the promise of another $800,000 is not inconsequential. Hanssen remodeled his house in Virginia at a cost of $70,000, sent six kids to private school, four to college, all of them to the orthodontist. He collected an armory of guns, all sorts of computers and related gadgetry, and spent some $80,000 on the stripper, including a sapphire-and-diamond necklace, the trip to Hong Kong, and a Mercedes, albeit used.

It would be simplistic, however, to say that Hanssen only spied for money. If it was only money, as Ed Curran and others have pointed out, Hanssen could have demanded millions for what he gave, because the secrets he passed to Moscow were not only of enormous value to the Russians but compromised U.S. intelligence-collection programs that cost hundreds of millions of dollars. Yet he never negotiated for more money, airily informing the KGB early on that he really had no need for more than $100,000.

Ironically, Hanssen’s pension, had he not been arrested two months shy of his normal retirement date, could well have amounted to more than the total that the stingy KGB and SVR shelled out.
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Hanssen was a budget spy, the actual cash and diamonds he received amounting to far less than the $2.7 million the Russians paid to Aldrich Ames.

Where did the money go? Spread out over twenty-two years, the total Hanssen received was not a fortune. A senior FBI official said he believed most of it was “pissed away,” into the gas tank and on other mundane, everyday household and living expenses. Some of it was parked in his two Swiss bank accounts, some in the box under his bed. The bureau had accountants trying to figure out exactly where the money went, but it was a daunting task.

According to Charney, Hanssen really wanted money for one reason: to assure his wife that he was not a failure. “Men are burdened by masculine pride. We put our public face into the world and want to be respected by our fellow men and by ourselves. The person we allow into our most intimate knowledge of our life is our wife. If our wife thinks we are an asshole, we have no protection. We have a chink in our armor; if our wife thinks we are a loser that is intolerable.

“Bonnie was the one person who brought light into his life. She was the last person he would want to think he was a failure. He reached to prove to her he was a good provider and a good husband. So that when she would express wishes for various things he would always buy them for her. He felt it was necessary to sustain his image in her eyes as successful. That put him into a financial corner, because he agreed to take on various financial burdens, like buying a house out of his reach financially, in Scarsdale.

“It’s not that it’s wrong to say that he did it for money; you have to go deeper and ask why he wanted the money. Why did Bob Hanssen get into a corner financially? Because he had to keep up his reputation with Bonnie. Because that was the one person in the world whose opinion mattered.”

But Bonnie, Charney said, was not the sort to place burdensome financial demands on her husband. Hanssen did not blame her; he blamed himself. “She did not put pressure on him; it was his own inner drive to be the good provider and never disappoint her.”

Aside from the money, many of Hanssen’s colleagues in the FBI, including the friends he made there, strongly believed that Hanssen was motivated to spy because he was excluded from the inner club of counterintelligence agents and relegated to the back room.

“Bob was always seen as a computer guy, a weenie, a number cruncher,” said David Major. “He was somebody you want on your team, to use. He was never going to lead the team. Don Stukey would be a quarterback, Bob’s always on the sidelines; he would analyze the
plays and know what they did right or wrong, but he would never get on the playing field.”

Jim Ohlson reached much the same conclusion about his friend. “Although Hanssen was involved with and fascinated by CI and Soviet operations, he was never in the core group that actually conducted them. He may have felt excluded, his skills unappreciated. He had longed to be involved in spy work—so he turned to another government to do it.

“Hanssen had great respect for the KGB and its professionalism. He once said, ‘They’re the only target I want to work against. They’re the only enemy worth fighting.’ So he was drawn to the KGB.”

Certainly, Hanssen may have felt passed over. He was never a field agent operating against the Soviets, except for a brief tour in New York, and even then he was in a back room in charge of
POCKETWATCH
, supervising agents with earphones who listened in on Amtorg and other Soviet commercial offices.
POCKETWATCH
was not the big leagues.

Joe Tierney, Hanssen’s superior at headquarters in the early 1980s, tended to agree with this analysis. “He had never done anything operational himself,” Tierney said. “He had not been involved in a recruitment or a successful espionage case. People tend to earn their bones in those cases, and then they’re respected by their peers.”

To Tierney, Hanssen’s betrayal began as an intellectual exercise. “This is something he thought out in his head—this is how you could do it. He was flirting with it and it gets more and more concrete. Then he goes to New York and hits the New York real estate market and that pushes him over the edge.”

A. Jackson Lowe, Hanssen’s boss on his second New York tour, in the mid-1980s, also remembered him as an outsider. “He never got the respect he thought he deserved. There were always other agents out front getting the glory. Here was a guy who was very bright, he felt like he was not well accepted, an outcast. He did not fit in.”

As a perennial outsider, Hanssen may have decided to create his own Soviet operation. The feeling of being excluded, combined with his self-image, at least partly justified, as a person of superior intellect and technical gifts, could have created bitterness, a desire to “show them.” And underlying his decision to spy may have been a grandiose belief he could never be caught because he was too clever.

If Hanssen’s resentment over being excluded led to his spying, however, he did not say that to Charney. He did tell the psychiatrist that “he
came to think of himself as an outsider, a nerd.” But Hanssen did not link that to his espionage.

Instead, Hanssen spent a good deal of time talking about his father. “In the very first meeting we had, that was the very first topic that he brought up,” Charney recalled.

“You see this often in people. Troubled relationships with a father will affect their thinking for the rest of their life. Hanssen’s father was a difficult father to grow up under, a strong personality. He was not a warm, mentoring person. Hanssen was an only child and his father did not hold him much in esteem. His father had very little time for him.” Hanssen talked at length about the punishments and humiliations his father had imposed, such as wrapping him in the mattress so that his arms were pinned, or making him sit with his legs spread.

“Hanssen wished for his father to be a mentor and a coach and explain the world to him as a father should, welcoming him into manhood. Robert Hanssen didn’t receive that and felt always out of step and lacking knowledge of how the world worked. His mother was a reasonably nurturing person but did not protect and defend him from his father. That is an abiding disappointment that he had.

“When a boy grows up without effective fathering, it leaves a tremendous empty place, a father hunger. Boys want to be welcomed into adult manhood by their fathers. If they don’t get that, they are always feeling uneasy, not a true member of the club of men. That is one of the things that happened with Hanssen. He was belittled and made to feel inadequate. And yet he loved his father, he worshipped his father. That is not an unusual thing. The very person that abuses you is so powerful that one is in awe of that person.”

At the same time, Charney said, Hanssen was “infuriated” with his father, his anger deep-seated and intense. Because he feared his father, however, “he had to bottle it up. He used the phrase ‘bottled up’ a lot. But now and then the cork would come out of the bottle. Not so much as a kid but as an adult. At a certain point he would blow like a volcano.

“Hanssen said when he spied that was the cork coming out of the bottle. He said that about the cork and used it many times.” The way his father treated him, Hanssen said, was “unfair and unjust. That is a theme he brings up a lot.

“He has this strong sense of injustice. That attitude of being sensitized
to unfairness you see throughout his life. He always wants to right things if he is able to do so. In the case of the stripper and others, he sees them as abused people, and if some way he can help them he wants to do that.”
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Charney, based on his conversations with Hanssen, saw a direct link between Hanssen’s fury at his father and his betrayal of the FBI. “Very often when a person joins an organization or a government agency, they are seeking an emotional resolution for unresolved questions. Any organization can be like a family. How that organization treats you is either going to replay those experiences or help you resolve them. But if you get disappointed a second time in your life, the thing you set up as your saving mechanism turns out to disappoint you again. That can bring about the fury and resentment that you were too overwhelmed to bring out when you were a little boy. And you may say, ‘Now I’m going to get back.’ He may have been replaying some things from his boyhood. But this time he had the capacity to get back.”

Yet it would be a mistake, Charney said, to assume that Hanssen became a spy simply because his father treated him harshly. “Many people grow up emotionally damaged and nevertheless can overcome it and live normal adult lives. There are people who can rebound from any number of terrible circumstances of childhood. But even those who do can unexpectedly enter a period that puts them under tremendous strain and pressure that will reawaken problems of the past and push them into a psychological corner.

“Even people who are very well adjusted may be shoved into new territory that is quite unexpected and with which they can’t really cope very well. It overwhelms them. Some people are so blighted by their early experiences they never seem to be able to overcome it. But thankfully most people do. A lot of people at the bureau have had rough childhoods. They don’t become spies.”

Hanssen told Charney his disappointment with the FBI was rooted, ironically, in his conviction that the bureau was focused too much on catching spies and was missing the real threat. “He felt that on a strategic
level the FBI was failing to do what it needed to do to protect the country. That the main way the Soviets prosecuted their aims was through subversion of our institutions.” By focusing on arresting people who stole documents, Hanssen told the psychiatrist, the bureau’s resources were failing to come to grips with the enemy. He had made an effort to get the bureau to listen.

“He had tried, for example, to warn what the Japanese were doing to us economically, and he said the bureau was oblivious, the bureau did not have the depth to oppose those kinds of things. He attempted to say, ‘Wake up,’ and was regarded as an intellectual, not taken seriously; they didn’t get it. He began to be disappointed and angry at the bureau for not paying attention. And that fired up some of his antipathy toward the bureau.”

Hanssen, Charney said, considered himself a gadfly like John Boyd, a critic inside the Air Force, whom he saw “as a sort of role model.” Hanssen invited Boyd to come to the FBI and give a talk, and he did, but the bureau had shown no interest in his ideas.

If Hanssen did regard the FBI as a father figure, and sought to vent his suppressed rage by striking back at it, his anger was certainly not the only factor that turned him into a spy. His fascination with James Bond, his desire for excitement, was surely an important element as well. He seemed to enjoy living on the edge. “He said he was bored before he started spying,” Charney said. “The spying produced excitement and made him come alive. The excitement is from doing something different. The risk is part of the excitement.”

Hanssen may have been seen as a computer nerd, a geek in the back room, but in his own mind he could at times apparently become 007 or something close to it. His attraction to Catherine Zeta-Jones, the Hong Kong interlude with Priscilla Sue Galey, the guns in his car trunk that led Ron Mlotek to call him “Machine Gun Bob”—these were all indicators of someone longing for the supposed glamour and thrills of a real-life spy.

Paul Moore, who knew Hanssen as well as anyone in the FBI did, once caught a glimpse of his friend’s Bond-like romance with firearms. Hanssen had been down to the FBI’s training academy in Quantico, Virginia, where agents practice shooting in a mock town known as Hogan’s Alley. “He was talking about walking through a new, high-tech Hogan’s Alley at Quantico using virtual reality. He said, ‘I’m good with guns.’ ” Hanssen described how the computer simulation worked, like a video game. “He used a gun to chase the perp into an underground garage. You’re taught how to fire to hit somebody hiding behind a pillar. You hit
a cylindrical pillar just right and it spins the bullet around. He shot and got one of the people. He is still chasing the other guy. He shoots the guy on the ground again because he doesn’t know if he’s dead. ‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘I put another one into him.’ Bob used just those words, ‘I put another one into him.’ ”