Spy: The Inside Story of How the FBI's Robert Hanssen Betrayed America (7 page)

Motorin provided the FBI with the name of every KGB agent in the Soviet embassy. But more important, the FBI man said, “he revealed the tasking he had received from Moscow Center, what they were told were priorities. But that was a joke; they were afraid of doing anything aggressively. Because they didn’t want to be caught and thrown out of Washington. They loved being in Washington.”

The KGB expected its officers in the capital to be alert. “Motorin told us once if they could send something to Moscow Center twenty-four hours before it appeared in
The Washington Post
, they were heroes.”

The FBI was paying Motorin two hundred dollars a week and putting five hundred dollars a week into his escrow account. The bureau also bought him a tennis racket and a two-thousand-dollar diamond ring that he had picked out to give to his mistress in the embassy. “But he never gave it to her,” the FBI man said. “We kept it. A big ugly diamond that really stuck out. It might have raised questions. We talked him out of it.”

To preserve security, the FBI set up separate special rooms for the agents handling Motorin and Martynov. The room for the squad working the Martynov case was on the ninth floor of the Washington field office, then in a remote section of the capital on the Anacostia River with the unappealing name of Buzzard’s Point. Another special room was set aside on the eleventh floor, the building’s top floor, for the agents handling Motorin. Both rooms were locked and soundproofed.

Despite these elaborate precautions, word circulated within the tight, closed world of the intelligence division that the bureau had acquired sources inside the Soviet embassy.

And Hanssen, in the Soviet analytical unit, read the reports of the debriefings of the two KGB agents. “We got the product,” Burns said. Although the FBI documents referred to Martynov and Motorin by their code names, it would not have been all that difficult for an insider to learn their true names. For example, by comparing the biographical information the FBI routinely compiled on Soviet diplomats in the Washington embassy with internal references in the debriefings of the two sources, their identities might become clear.

“Although it would be compartmented,” Burns conceded, “the analysts might know the identities of sources. Hanssen probably would have learned of Martynov and Motorin’s identity by name.”

He did. Jim Ohlson, who kept up his friendship with Hanssen over the years, believes Hanssen learned their identities in subtle ways. “Even when he was in the budget unit he often talked to people in the Soviet analytical unit,” he said. “In the analytical unit, he would have learned some clues. Sometimes the bureau would list an active source as inactive as a ploy to protect the source’s identity. Hanssen could have detected this and put it together with other bits of information.

“Then there was the Hengemuhle incident.” Joseph F. Hengemuhle was one of two top FBI counterintelligence agents working against the Soviets in New York; he was transferred to headquarters in the early 1980s to be chief of the Soviet section. But he came reluctantly, saying he would only stay until the bureau got a Soviet recruitment. His vow became known among his counterintelligence colleagues. After more than a year, Hengemuhle returned to the field in New York.

Hanssen remarked to Ohlson: “Hengemuhle’s gone back. He must have gotten his recruitment.” And in fact the bureau had gotten two.

Robert Hanssen, as he worked in the Soviet analytical unit, was a man with an enormous secret; he was himself a Soviet penetration of the FBI. One might assume that Hanssen would have been frightened that the two KGB sources would somehow learn his identity, or learn at least that an FBI man had sold secrets to the Russians, and reveal that to the bureau. But not to worry: it was to the GRU that Hanssen had betrayed
TOPHAT
, and the FBI’s KGB sources in the embassy could not be expected to learn that, or indeed to know anything about a GRU asset. As long as he did not pass secrets to the KGB, his own secret was safe.

Hanssen knew that for his past sins, Martynov and Motorin could not betray him. But he could betray them.

* * *

Life was pleasant on Whitecedar Court, although the Hanssens, now with two more young boys, lived frugally with their five children. To all appearances they were a typical American family. They seemed so normal, in fact, that more than one acquaintance compared them to June and Ward Cleaver, the stereotyped suburban couple in the classic 1950s TV show
Leave It to Beaver
.

Vienna, Virginia, where the Hanssens lived, was a leafy bedroom community of well-kept lawns and watchful neighbors. Once a year, Bob and Bonnie and the children drove down to Florida to visit his parents. When Hanssen’s father left the police force, he and his wife could not really afford the old neighborhood in Chicago anymore. After one big snowstorm, Howard developed bursitis in both shoulders. That did it; Howard and Vivian Hanssen retired to Venice, Florida. Bonnie’s parents remained in Park Ridge, even after her father retired from the university.

Friends did notice how little Bob Hanssen seemed to spend, how careful he was about parting with his money. “They had three mortgages and drove used cars,” said one. “The Hanssens never spent money, never went out to eat, except McDonald’s on the way to Florida to see his parents.”

To supplement her husband’s FBI salary, Bonnie Hanssen taught religion and church history at Oakcrest, an Opus Dei Catholic school, which the couple’s girls could attend with low tuition. The boys went to the Heights, another Opus Dei school in Potomac, Maryland.

Occasionally the Ohlsons, or Paul Moore and his wife, were invited for dinner. “When he lived out in Vienna we had dinner in each other’s homes,” Moore said. “He had this houseful of kids.”

Hanssen seldom missed a day going to mass. Sometimes he would duck in for the noon mass at the chapel in the Catholic Information Center in downtown Washington, not far from FBI headquarters. The mass there was celebrated by the center’s director, Father C. John McCloskey, an Opus Dei priest who knew both the Hanssens.

And once a month, Hanssen would go to the “evenings of recollection” at the Opus Dei Tenley Study Center on Garrison Street, just off upper Wisconsin Avenue in northwest Washington. The modern, redbrick building, formerly the high school of the Heights, houses a
Catholic youth center “dedicated to the character development of young men,” its brochure explains, to help them become “committed to live by Christian principles.”

The evenings of recollection were men-only events. According to Frank Byrne, the center’s administrator, “Typically a priest delivers a meditation, talking for half an hour, perhaps on some point of doctrine, then the men repair to the living room for readings, perhaps the works of Ronald Knox,
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then they return to the chapel and the priest gives the benediction.” Sometimes guest speakers were invited as well. Twice, Hanssen persuaded Paul Moore to talk at the Tenley Center about his work for the FBI.

One night on the way to the Tenley Center, Hanssen had a serious automobile accident. “Some young guy made a left turn in front of him,” Moore said. “Bob was badly hurt. I think his elbow was broken. He ended up with a very awkward cast, with his left arm out at an angle, and a rod sticking out. He couldn’t drive.

“I lived in Arlington. I called him up and said, ‘How are you getting into work?’ He said, ‘The car is wrecked, we have only the one car.’ But he thought that God would provide.”

A more secular solution ensued; Moore offered to drive Hanssen to headquarters. “It turned out I picked up not only Bob but his two girls in their high school outfits, saddle shoes and tartan skirts, and drove down Chain Bridge Road into Georgetown. At the time Oakcrest, the girls’ school, was on MacArthur Boulevard. We dropped them off, and then we went downtown to the bureau.”

And at work, Hanssen was gaining access to more and more sensitive material. In the analytical unit, Hanssen now sat on the FBI’s foreign counterintelligence technical committee, which coordinated all of the division’s electronic surveillance operations.

By late summer of 1985, Hanssen’s headquarters time was coming to a close. For the FBI, it was an eventful year; an astonishing number of espionage cases were wrapped up by the bureau with a series of arrests, so many that the news media dubbed 1985 the Year of the Spy.

The extraordinary series of spy cases had actually begun the previous year with the arrest in October of Richard Miller, the first FBI agent ever to be charged, and later convicted, of espionage. Miller, seriously overweight and bumbling, was working as a counterintelligence agent in the Los Angeles FBI office when he began an affair with Svetlana Ogorodnikov, a Soviet émigré woman whom he was supposed to be watching. Instead, she persuaded him to spy for the KGB, promising him $65,000 and a Burberry trench coat.
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Officials at FBI headquarters, greatly embarrassed by Miller’s arrest, closely followed developments in the case, nowhere more so than in the intelligence division. Richard Miller’s first trial opened August 5, 1985, a little more than six weeks before Robert Hanssen was to report to New York for a second tour in the city.

So Hanssen was well aware of the Miller case, and of the highly publicized arrest by the FBI a few months earlier, on May 20, 1985, of John A. Walker, Jr., the former Navy chief warrant officer who headed a family ring of Navy spies. Walker, who sold U.S. codes to the KGB, had spied for eighteen years.
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On August 1, 1985, as Hanssen also knew, Vitaly Yurchenko, a senior KGB official, had defected to the CIA in Rome, and information he provided led the FBI to place a former CIA officer, Edward Lee Howard, under surveillance. But Howard, aided by skills he had learned in the CIA, escaped into the New Mexico desert on September 21 and turned up in Moscow, a fugitive on espionage charges.

On the day that Howard escaped from the FBI, Hanssen was beginning his new assignment in New York, this time as a supervisor of a counterintelligence squad.

The march of espionage cases continued in rapid succession as Hanssen settled into his new job. On November 21, Jonathan Jay Pollard,
a U.S. naval intelligence analyst, was arrested as a spy for Israel.
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Only one day later FBI agents arrested Larry Wu-Tai Chin, a former CIA broadcasting analyst who had passed secrets to Chinese intelligence for thirty-three years, for which he received about $140,000.
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Three days after that, on November 25, Ronald W. Pelton, a former NSA employee who sold that agency’s secrets to the Soviets, was arrested as a result of clues provided by Vitaly Yurchenko.
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Sometime before leaving Washington, in the months that Hanssen worked in the Soviet analytical unit, the decision to resume his career as a spy that had been forming within him became final. He knew by then of the arrests of Richard Miller and of the Walkers, the defection of Vitaly Yurchenko, the escape of Edward Lee Howard, and the fact that his counterintelligence colleagues were working overtime to close in on more spies. In the single year 1985, in fact, eleven persons were arrested for espionage and fourteen persons were convicted.

None of this deterred Hanssen in the least. His mind was made up. This time, he decided, he would play in the majors. Despite the risks, he would volunteer his services to a different branch of Soviet intelligence: the KGB.

The tiny CIA camera, disguised as a cigarette lighter, was like something straight out of a James Bond movie, a gadget that Q might have handed over solemnly to a nonchalant 007. Only this one was real.

In a San Francisco hotel room in 1981, Boris Yuzhin, a KGB officer assigned to the Soviet consulate in that city, met with a veteran CIA officer and an agency technician. The officer gave the miniature camera to Yuzhin, whose cover was that of a correspondent for Tass, the Soviet news agency.

The CIA camera, known as a tropel, was tube-shaped, with the lens at the opposite end from the flint. The specially designed lens was not much bigger than a dime. Yuzhin smoked, so a cigarette lighter would not be expected to arouse suspicion. The device actually worked, if only briefly, as a lighter.
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