Spy: The Inside Story of How the FBI's Robert Hanssen Betrayed America (45 page)

Other former and current bureau officials agreed, and recognized that, more broadly, the FBI’s well-publicized errors over the past decade have cost it dearly. “I believe we should be criticized, and we will be a better organization for it,” Tim Caruso said. “It will make us better and stronger.”

To an extent, the bureau may have failed to detect Hanssen sooner because it was in love with its own image, carefully orchestrated over the years by J. Edgar Hoover—the cereal boxes with Junior G-Man badges, and the flood of movies, television dramas, news stories, and books glorifying the FBI. For decades, the vast majority of Americans admired the bureau and its agents, who were invariably portrayed as square-jawed and invincible. That image began to change only after Hoover’s death, when congressional investigations revealed secret breakins and various other abuses by the bureau, and again more recently with the disclosures of mismanagement and serious mistakes in the handling of several major cases.

It is a lot easier to catch a spy with the benefit of hindsight. Hanssen took care in his lifestyle not to draw attention to himself. He tooled around in an old Taurus, not a Jaguar, drank very little, and seemed outwardly a deeply religious, model family man, content to live a placid middle-class life in the Virginia suburbs.

Despite these precautions, Hanssen, contrary to popular belief, was far from the perfect spy. He was clever to try to conceal his identity from the Russians, but he made all sorts of mistakes, from repeated use of the same dead drops, whatever his rationale for doing so, to all the clues to his identity that he dropped like a trail of bread crumbs in his messages to Moscow. He even left incriminating letters to the Russians on his computer card in FBI headquarters.

As an experienced counterintelligence agent, Hanssen knew that
his greatest risk was that he might, at any time, be turned in by an equivalent FBI or CIA mole inside the KGB. In the end, that was his undoing. The risk of such exposure is why both Hanssen and Ames betrayed Martynov and Motorin, the two FBI sources inside the KGB’s Washington residency. The best way for a mole to protect himself is to betray and thereby kill the other side’s mole.

Hanssen’s friend Paul Moore summed up the stakes well. “The better you are, the more incentive for someone on to the other side to sell you out. The problem is that once you’re in the game, you’re in the game for life, and you’re betting your life all the time.

“The only way you can get away with it is to die before U.S. counterintelligence finds you, because they will look for you and they will eventually get to you, because what you’re doing is really dumb. The more successful you are, the more valuable it is to the U.S. to find you, and the more salable you are to somebody on the other side. Bob was playing smart moves at a very dumb game and he did not get away with it.”

* * *

In the debris that follows a major spy case, usually the most difficult task is to assess the damage done to U.S. national security. What made the task somewhat easier in the Hanssen case is the file that was recovered from Moscow. The intelligence agencies were able to know much of what Hanssen had passed, and, because of the plea bargain worked out between Cacheris and the prosecutors, to question him directly and at length.

Ranking spies is probably not a very useful exercise. But if there is a pantheon of spies, certainly Hanssen would have to take his place in it, alongside such celebrated moles as Kim Philby and Aldrich Ames. That conclusion is almost inescapable, based on the materials that Hanssen is known to have given to the Russians and the extended length of his spying over twenty-two years.

For example, he disclosed U.S. analyses of Soviet nuclear missile strength, including the numbers and effectiveness of its ICBMs and warheads. He also passed to the KGB the CIA’s estimate of what Moscow knew about U.S. early warning systems and about America’s ability to retaliate against a massive nuclear attack.

In revealing the “continuity of government” plan, he enabled the Russians to discover exactly where top U.S. leaders, from the president on down, would be relocated in the event of a national emergency. That
information took on even greater importance after the September 11 terrorist attacks on America.

Hanssen sold the Russians several documents describing highly sensitive satellite collection and other programs of the National Security Agency, the nation’s supersecret code-making and global electronic eavesdropping arm. He revealed to the KGB that the NSA was exploiting a vulnerability in Soviet satellites that enabled the NSA to intercept their communications. He later disclosed a technical barrier that left the NSA unable to read certain Soviet communications. He betrayed the FBI/NSA tunnel under the Soviet embassy.

According to author James Bamford, an expert on the NSA, perhaps the most damage done by Hanssen was not to the FBI but to the NSA. Bamford expressed surprise at “the fact that he was able to get access to this information even though apparently he had no real need to know.” He had damaged the NSA, Bamford believed, “probably worse than anybody since John Walker.

“By giving away to the Russians the details on which codes are being broken, which communication circuits are being listened to, Russia had two choices: they could either change the codes and cut off those circuits, which would have made NSA go deaf and basically put NSA out of business, or they could use the circuits to feed disinformation back to NSA. Either way it would have been one of the biggest blows to NSA since its founding.”

But the major damage done by Hanssen did not end there. Among his worst actions was his betrayal of
TOPHAT
, one of the most valuable sources of U.S. intelligence inside the Soviet Union, who was later executed. The human costs were high; Hanssen also disclosed the names of the FBI’s two KGB sources in Washington, who were also executed. All three had also been given up by Ames. Hanssen identified half a dozen other Soviet sources of the FBI. By tipping off the KGB to the FBI’s investigation of Felix Bloch, he thwarted the espionage case the bureau was developing against the State Department official.

Cynics might ask, did it matter? After all, the Soviets lost the Cold War and the Communist system collapsed. But to argue that spying against the United States would only matter if America had lost the Cold War would be absurd. Hanssen’s treachery endangered the security of the United States for more than two decades; along with Aldrich Ames, he betrayed three individuals who were executed, and he jeopardized the freedom of dozens of others.

Democracy rests on a compact between the governed, who give their consent, and their elected leaders; its citizens accept government and laws to protect them, preserve their liberties, and prevent chaos. Hanssen took the law into his own hands. That the Soviet Union failed to survive makes his acts no less reprehensible. Hanssen also spied for Russia, which did not collapse. No one would seriously contend that a distinction should be made between spying for the two countries, Russia and the Soviet Union, because one survived and the other did not.

Robert Hanssen’s actions did not demonstrably alter the course of history. But the Communist system was built on quicksand and sank largely under the weight of its own inefficiency and corruption. It was doomed long before Hanssen sold American secrets to the Soviets.

Whenever a major spy case comes along, as they have in recent years with alarming frequency, there are headlines, investigations, a secret damage assessment, and calls in Congress and elsewhere for new procedures and safeguards. Hanssen might have been detected earlier, some suggested, if he had been given a lie detector test. He was never subject to a polygraph examination in his entire FBI career. In the wake of the outcry over his arrest, the bureau somewhat expanded its use of lie detectors.

The fallibility of polygraphs is well known, however, and the FBI has never been as enchanted with them as the CIA has.
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Aldrich Ames, the worst mole in the history of the CIA, passed his polygraph tests. Lie detectors can notoriously result in false positives that may damage the lives of loyal employees. In the fallout from the Ames disaster, it will be recalled, some three hundred CIA employees were placed on the “A-to-Z list” because they had shown “SPRs,” significant physiological responses, on their lie detector tests. Some careers were affected as a result, but no spies were caught.

Psychological testing, at least for agents in the FBI’s counterintelligence division, has also been proposed as a tool to detect potential or actual spies. Former FBI counterintelligence chief John Lewis, who has
thought a good deal about the problem, did not object to such screening before employment but was dubious that psychological testing “could reveal that an individual has committed a crime or was about to.” Lewis favored better periodic background checks, greater awareness by coworkers, and broader use of polygraphs.

There are limits to what defensive measures can achieve, however. All the major powers spy on each other. The SVR is willing to pay large amounts of money to its best sources, and its principal target remains the United States. Washington, in turn, spends some $35 billion a year trying to steal and collect secrets from Russia and other nations, as well as to gather intelligence on terrorists.

In the end, spying will continue as long as there are secrets and a market for them. Espionage has been called the second oldest profession, and with good reason. It is no more likely to disappear than the first.

* * *

In July 2001, Jack Hoschouer wrote a letter to Bonnie Hanssen. “I said, ‘I’ve sinned against you, please forgive me. I beg your forgiveness.’ ” About six weeks later, in mid-August, after fortifying himself with several drinks, “I called her from London and asked her to forgive me. I said, ‘I understand if you don’t want to see me.’ She said, ‘I forgive you.’ ” But Uncle Jack was no longer a welcome guest in the house on Talisman Drive.

Vivian Hanssen gave up her home in Venice, Florida, after twenty-seven years, and moved in with Bonnie to be closer to her son. It was difficult at age eighty-nine to pack up, let go of many of her possessions, and say goodbye to friends and neighbors. It was even more difficult, family members said, for her to see her son caged and behind glass, but it was better than not seeing him at all. He was still her son, and she loved him.

A year after her husband’s arrest, Bonnie Hanssen was thinking about an annulment. In the eyes of the church, an annulment means that a marriage never existed. They are rarely granted, and only for grave cause.

The Hanssen children made it clear to their mother they would not be opposed to an annulment. Her mother and other family members had indeed urged it. Bonnie was only fifty-five. With an annulment and a
civil divorce, she could remarry and change her name. But Bonnie, despite all she had been through, might never be able to bring herself to break her marriage vows to Bob, the father of her children. In the meantime, she was back teaching full-time at Oakcrest.

In her visits to the Alexandria jail, Bonnie asked her husband why he had spied, and why he had allowed Jack to watch them in their marital bed. He had very little to say about either subject, Bonnie told family members.

When the story surfaced about his relationship with Priscilla Sue Galey, Bonnie asked him point-blank whether he had had sex with the stripper. At first she thought he admitted he had, in Hong Kong, but when she asked about it on a subsequent visit to the jail, he said no, she had misunderstood. It was noisy in the background when we spoke before, he said; nothing had happened with the stripper.

In March, Bonnie went to the Justice Department to answer questions by the lawyers conducting the internal inquiry of the case. They took her into the bubble, a soundproof, secure room, for the all-day session. They still harbored suspicions that she knew of her husband’s continued spying after he said he had stopped.

Two months later, just before her husband was sentenced, she was read her Miranda rights by the department lawyers and given a polygraph. Her lawyer, Janine Brookner, who watched through a one-way mirror, said she had passed it. During the polygraph examination, Bonnie denied she had any knowledge of Hanssen’s later spying career, which began in 1985. She also denied finding any large amount of cash on her dresser.
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Bonnie Hanssen also insisted to
The New York Times
that after her husband said he had stopped spying, in 1980, she repeatedly questioned him to make sure he was, over time, paying the $30,000 he had received from the Russians to the Mother Teresa charity. He said he was. According
to Brookner, Bonnie Hanssen also said during the lie detector test that over the next few years she asked her husband whether he was again working for the Russians, and he always denied it, acting as though he was hurt that she did not trust him.
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Bonnie also heard from Opus Dei, which was not at all happy to be linked to Robert Hanssen, whose arrest led to a flurry of news reports about the controversial organization. Early in 2002, the prelature of Opus Dei in Rome wrote to Bonnie, urging her to make no statements about her husband. Opus Dei may have been particularly anxious to avoid more adverse publicity in the months before October of that year, when the organization’s founder, Josemaria Escriva de Balaguer, was to be elevated to sainthood by the Vatican.

* * *

A few weeks after Hanssen’s arrest, Tom Burns received the red, white, and blue diplomatic license plate with the name
BOB
in big black letters, the present that had been made up for Hanssen’s going-away party when he left the State Department. Wherever Hanssen was sent by the Federal Bureau of Prisons, he would not be needing it, Burns decided. “I think I will keep it as a memento,” he said.

A year later, the lives of the actors in the Hanssen drama had changed.

Neil Gallagher had retired from the FBI to an executive position in the private sector.