Spy: The Inside Story of How the FBI's Robert Hanssen Betrayed America (50 page)

Bonnie Hanssen in 1995. She told investigators she knew nothing of her husband’s spying after 1980. When Hanssen was arrested, she cooperated with the FBI and, as a result, received a share of his pension.

When Tom Burns, who had been Hanssen’s boss at the FBI, retired in 1995, Hanssen collected the money for his farewell dinner.

Hanssen resumed spying for Russia in 1999 while assigned by the FBI to the State Department’s Office of Foreign Missions. In this group photo of OFM, Hanssen, center, towers over a bespectacled Tom Burns, directly in front of him. Next to Burns, with beard and mustache, is Ron Mlotek, OFM’s chief legal counsel, who formed a close friendship with the FBI agent.

Hanssen’s State Department business card.

State Department official Felix Bloch, enjoying a Fourth of July garden party at the U.S. embassy in Vienna, was under surveillance as a suspected Soviet spy when Hanssen tipped off the KGB, which in turn warned Bloch he was in danger. The Bloch case triggered a new mole hunt that eventually led to Hanssen’s downfall.

KGB illegal Reino Gikman, as “Pierre Bart,” met with Bloch in Paris and later warned him of “a contagious disease,” cryptic language that meant the FBI was investigating.

The FBI spy seems unworried at a family picnic in the late 1990s.

FBI agent Thomas K. Kimmel, Jr., thought there might be a mole in the FBI but lacked proof. The portrait in the background is of his grandfather Admiral Husband E. Kimmel, who the FBI man maintains was wrongly blamed for Pearl Harbor.

November 2000: A gloomy Hanssen at a family Thanksgiving gathering in Chicago. He was unaware that three weeks earlier the FBI had spirited a KGB file out of Moscow that conclusively pointed to him as the mole.

Hanssen was to be presented with this souvenir diplomatic license plate when he left the State Department in January 2001. But the gift was not ready at his going-away party and Hanssen never received it; he was arrested five weeks later.

A plastic bag that Hanssen had used to wrap documents he passed to the Russians was recovered by the FBI in the KGB file the bureau obtained from a former Russian spy. Two of Hanssen’s fingerprints were identified on the bag, the final evidence the FBI needed to arrest him.

The FBI retrieved the $50,000 in hundreddollar bills that the Russians had left for Hanssen at dead drop
LEWIS
before his arrest. The FBI man received more than $600,000 in cash and diamonds during twenty-two years as a Russian spy.