Spy: The Inside Story of How the FBI's Robert Hanssen Betrayed America (44 page)

The tough-guy, Raymond Chandler dialogue and the fascination with guns fit with Hanssen’s quest for something more exciting than the drudgery of the FBI’s budget or analytical units.

“Bob was like the high wireman who wants to touch the wire,” David Major said. “The fifty-thousand-volt wire that he knows will kill him, but he wants to see if he can touch it and get away with it.” Ernie Rizzo, who had learned wiretap skills with Hanssen when they were both police officers in Chicago, compared espionage to skydiving: “Pretty soon you want to go further and further to see how high you can go.”

Hanssen’s curiosity may have also contributed to his journey into espionage, in Moore’s view. “He was a special agent, he had the gun and the badge, but was never put into a situation where he’d use the gun and the badge. He was put in a position to talk to the analysts. His job is to ask, ‘How are these people [the KGB] doing it to our country? What could we do to make the country safer?’ Eventually you ask, ‘How is it possible to attack the country?’ That’s going to land him into, ‘How would one do it?’ That’s always going to be cooking on the stove.

“At some point he decides, ‘It can be done and somebody like me can do it.’ He knows all the cases, how people who spied against the U.S. were caught. And so he crosses the line. Once he got going he set out to be the best spy ever. He’s trying to commit the perfect crime. He’s really excessive in what he passes. In his day job he’s being very helpful to the FBI.

“He’s getting money he can’t spend very well, and he’s getting satisfaction he can’t share with anyone. In the letters you see him forming a relationship with the Russians. The only people he can share his success with are the people on the other side.”

David Charney, too, concluded that Hanssen spied, at least to an extent, because he wanted to peer inside the opposition. “The spying he did was partly out of curiosity: how did the KGB actually operate as opposed to how the FBI thought they operated? How would you ever know that if you did not get involved with them? He would give lectures, brilliant lectures, on how the KGB operated. Because he really knew. He knew better than anybody.”

To many of his colleagues, Hanssen projected an irritating sense of
superiority. That may have stemmed not only from his belief that he was smarter than others, but from his secret knowledge that he was a Russian spy, the spy who at one point directed the very study of moles in the FBI, so that he was looking for himself.

Hanssen exulted in his inside knowledge, Charney suggested. “He wound up in a position where he could regard himself as the puppet master, knowing more than anyone within the bureau or the KGB about the totality of what was happening.”

David Major agreed. “Bob would get a sublime high by being the ultimate inside joke. Everybody is trying to uncover a spy and he’s at the meeting where they are discussing it and he’s the spy. Bob didn’t have to tell that to anybody to get an inner joy out of it. I, Bob, have the greatest inside joke.”

The flip side of his superior manner, however, was very different. According to Charney, one of the main threads in Hanssen’s case “is a sense of failure. Spies may have an intolerable sense of personal failure as privately defined, a tremendous fear they will fail in a key experience in life and that will result in a shameful disclosure of their inadequacy. You might look at their career and say it is exemplary. But if a person does not meet his own standards and goals, then there is a sense of failure.

“Whatever motives a person has to spy, they are conflicted reasons. They are not just ‘I want money, I hate the bureau.’ At some deep level, the decision to spy in the first place represents a failure on the part of the person. They could not manage their lives, things were going wrong, they could not fix it, and they got thrown into a panic stage and the resolution in this cloud of panic was to do spying. They can clothe it in rationalizations but in truth it represents failure. Any time they can, they want to move back away from it and be their normal self.”

Often, in his conversations with Charney, Hanssen compared himself to Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, the Robert Louis Stevenson character who could switch from good to evil and back.
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“He has used the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde explanation several times. A constant struggle with the two sides of himself, the good and the bad. He’s kind of proud and pleased he could quit for a time. He says, ‘I was able to shut down the bad side of myself.’ ”

Sitting in his jail cell, Hanssen had plenty of time to think about his “bad side,” including the video camera he hid in his bedroom for several
years so Jack Hoschouer could watch him having sex with Bonnie. He realized it was “sick and goofy,” but he had gone to church and confessed it, and eventually stopped. He knew it was wrong, of course; in retrospect he saw it as some kind of attempt by him and Jack to hold on to their lost adolescence.

Hanssen talked a good deal with the psychiatrist about his fear of failure. “He, Bob, had many experiences that he considered failure. He was always afraid of flaming out in social situations where that would become apparent.”

One night, at the Alexandria jail, “Hanssen explained that he actually had to deal with social situations by having preset stories and conversations. Like people who, as soon as you meet them, they start telling you jokes. He could be funny and charming in a sort of programmed way. But he could not be with someone for two hours in a row, because he would run out of stories.”

Hanssen’s sense of failure reached back to his early years. “Bob is a very bright man but did B work in college. He got into dental school, although his father wanted him to be a doctor. He was bored in dental school. When he thought of dropping out of dental school, he tried to switch over to medical school, but he could not because of his grades.

“Not having made it into med school was another confirmation he wasn’t as good as he thought himself to be. He accepted his father’s view of him. An abiding question for him is, ‘Am I or am I not the thing I was led to believe I was?’

“People often have to prove something, but also they may have to prove what they are not. He may have said, ‘I’m not the little schmuck my father said I was. I’ll show him.’ Then he doesn’t get into med school and says to himself, ‘Maybe my father was right.’ We’re talking about self-doubts.”

Charney thought that Hanssen’s religious beliefs were real, not a cover for espionage. “I believe it is sincere,” Charney said. “He gave me extended lectures on Catholic theology.” But Hanssen did not suggest that his religion, with its sacrament of confession, enabled him to spy. “He does not at all talk about how he can sin and get absolution. He doesn’t suggest his religion gave him an easy pass. He believes his religion requires him to atone for what he has done and to suffer—he has used the term mortification—to come back to the proper relationship with God. His view is there is no easy pathway out of moral transgressions.

“Opus Dei believes everyone can become a saint. He believes even with everything he’s done he still has to be working to become a saint.”

Charney came to see Hanssen as an essentially lonely man. “The thing that was very painful throughout the first couple of decades of his life was loneliness. He was gawky and had thick bottle glasses for many years; at age fourteen he got contact lenses, he still wears them. What he yearned for were friends.

“But one of his friends when he was eleven or twelve was a little like him, an awkward but brainy kid. That kid had an aneurysm one day while they were playing together. Bob called the boy’s mom, and she didn’t respond right away. That kid was dead within a day. One of the few people he was able to get close to died on him. There were four people in his life he considered friends: one was someone in his FBI class, another died of leukemia, the fourth one, the only one that survived, was Jack. He was the only one that lived to tell the tale.

“I think a spy is the loneliest person in the world,” Charney said. “The handlers of spies know this and know how to play them like a violin.” That was certainly true of the KGB and the SVR, whose letters to Hanssen shamelessly played on his psychological need for their friendship and recognition. (“Your superb sense of humor and Your sharp-asa-razor mind. We highly appreciate both.” And so on.)

The mind of Robert Hanssen, which Charney explored with the author, was also a subject of great interest to American intelligence. By early 2002, the CIA was preparing a psychological profile of Hanssen as part of the damage assessment headed by former CIA counterintelligence expert Paul Redmond.

For the profile, the CIA asked Bonnie Hanssen to meet with an agency psychologist. It was a delicate request, but the CIA was anxious to question her, since she was obviously an important source of information about her husband. After consulting with her attorney, she agreed to the interview and met with the agency psychologist.

The purpose of the secret study was to try to identify those characteristics of Hanssen that might help intelligence agencies to spot potential traitors in the future. But Hanssen was so unusual a spy, his motives so mixed and complex, that one could only wish the CIA good luck in trying to draw universal conclusions from its study of the most damaging spy in the history of the FBI. The profilers attempting to understand the mind of Robert Hanssen were embarking on a voyage to the dark side of the moon.

Could Robert Hanssen have been caught sooner?

There were certainly enough warning signs. Whatever else Mark Wauck said to his superior a decade before Hanssen was caught, there is no dispute that he mentioned his brother-in-law’s unexplained cash. In 1991 Hanssen took a stripper to Hong Kong while on an official FBI inspection. Nobody noticed. Hanssen’s attack on Kimberly Lichtenberg in 1993 should have triggered alarm bells that he was unstable, but did not. The bureau was content to administer a mild penalty.

That same year he broke into Ray Mislock’s computer, but his colleagues accepted that transgression as an effort to point out the vulnerability of the bureau’s system. A few years later, when informed he would have to take a lie detector test to join an interagency counterintelligence unit, he withdrew his name. In 1997, the FBI technicians discovered he had a password breaker on his hard drive, normally a sure sign of a hacker. He was told not to do it again. And in June of that year, Earl Pitts, when asked if he knew of any other moles in the bureau, said he did not, but added that he suspected Bob Hanssen. Nothing happened.

Other clues were missed as well. Hanssen told investigators for the Webster commission that no one ever questioned him when he made his own photocopies of documents, even though special agents of the FBI normally ask their assistants or secretaries to make copies. The FBI does periodic background checks of its employees; one reinvestigation of Hanssen noted he had money troubles, but “asserted that Hanssen’s wife came from a wealthy family who assisted the Hanssens.”
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Perhaps none of these incidents and questions about Hanssen was enough, by itself, to lead the counterspies to suspect their own colleague, but taken together they should have triggered an investigation. The problem was that no one looked at the pattern, in part because of hubris, the ingrained belief in the bureau that, despite Miller and Pitts, the FBI did not harbor spies.

Ed Curran, the veteran counterspy, was blunt about it. “We should have got Hanssen a lot sooner than we did,” he said. “There’s absolutely no excuse for the FBI not, at some point, to have identified Bob Hanssen.”