Spy: The Inside Story of How the FBI's Robert Hanssen Betrayed America (48 page)

Bob and Bonnie at a Wisconsin park in the early 1970s. In 1972, after working briefly as an accountant, Hanssen was hired as a police officer in Chicago and assigned to investigate corruption on the force. Four years later, he joined the FBI.

A pudgy Hanssen, now a special agent at FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C., relaxes on the deck of his Vienna, Virginia, home in the early 1980s. He had already begun his career as a Russian spy and betrayed vital secrets to Moscow.

The spymaster. Viktor Cherkashin, the KGB counterintelligence chief in Washington, was contacted by Hanssen in an unsigned letter when the FBI agent resumed spying in 1985. Cherkashin told the author that the KGB never learned Hanssen’s identity.

After a two-year tour in New York City, where Hanssen wiretapped Soviet installations, the couple returned to Washington in 1987 and bought this house on Talisman Drive in Vienna.

Jack Hoschouer. He was unaware that Hanssen, his best friend, had offered him up to the KGB as a possible target for recruitment. But the Russians never approached him.

Bob and Bonnie Hanssen in Vienna, Virginia, in the late 1980s. It was his most active time as a Soviet spy.

Hanssen would leave a piece of white tape on this signpost near his home to signal the KGB that he had left secret documents at dead drop
ELLIS
, a hiding place under a footbridge in the park.

A satellite view of dead drop
ELLIS
in Foxstone Park, the signal site, and the Hanssen house on Talisman Drive.

Dead drop
LEWIS
, used by Hanssen and the KGB to exchange documents and money, was beneath the wooden stage in this outdoor amphitheater in Arlington, Virginia.

The electric utility pole used as the signal site for dead drop
LEWIS
. Hanssen failed to pick up the last $50,000 the Russians left for him at
LEWIS
after rain washed the tape off the pole. The FBI recovered the money.

In 1989, Hanssen tipped off the KGB to one of the FBI’s biggest secrets—the eavesdropping tunnel it had dug under the new Soviet embassy in Washington. The FBI wondered why the multimillion-dollar project produced so little of value.

“He knew all the secrets.…” David Major, a former senior counterintelligence agent who worked with Hanssen, said the FBI spy’s job gave him access to the bureau’s most sensitive operations.