- To his neighbors, Robert Hanssen was a devout dad. To
his FBI colleagues, he could be controlling and moralistic. To the Russians,
he was B, and Ramon,"a long-term mole in the American government.
His mind and motives."
-
- In his long fight against the forces of evil, FBI Director
Louis Freeh has always drawn on his deep faith. The director is regarded
in the bureau as pure and relentlessly upright. Under the glass on Freeh's
desktop, along with snapshots of his wife and six kids, is a photo of the
late Cardinal John O,Connor.
-
- At least one of Freeh's children attends The Heights,
a small, all-male school in Potomac, Md., affiliated with a powerful and
secretive Roman Catholic order, Opus Dei. So imagine Freeh's discomfort
last fall when he showed up to give a speech at his son's school and was
greeted by another school parent and fellow FBI agent, Robert Hanssen,
who was at that moment under surveillance for turning traitor as a Russian
spy. When Freeh returned to his office the next day, he wearily told a
colleague how difficult it had been to give a speech on ethics and morality,
all the while knowing that Hanssen"a 25-year bureau veteran, father
of six and member of the righteous and anti-communist Opus Dei"had
betrayed everything that Freeh held dear.
-
- The director is trying to put a brave face on the spy
scandal, the worst since CIA turncoat Aldrich Ames was caught working for
the Russians in 1993. Last week Freeh claimed that arresting Hanssen on
charges of espionage was a "counterintelligence coup. From some kind
of unidentified "sources U's. intelligence obtained what seemed to
be virtually the KGB's entire file on Hanssen's case. Sources tell NEWSWEEK
the bureau was able to identify the turncoat"who used code names like
"B and "Ramon"from his fingerprints on the packages he allegedly
sent to his Russian handlers. "It was a eureka moment, said a top
bureau official. Nonetheless, this week Freeh will have the difficult task
of explaining to the Senate Intelligence Committee how such a mole could
have gone undetected by the FBI for 15 years.
-
-
-
- http://www.msnbc.com/news/533588.asp 2-21-1
-
- The FBI says the methods of Hanssen's damaging double
life were deceptively simple. NBC's Fred Francis reports.
-
- In some ways, Hanssen, who is expected to plead not guilty,
is a throwback to the cold-war game of spy vs. spy, when the FBI and CIA
and their Soviet rivals in the KGB (now renamed the SVR) busily tried to
recruit each other's agents. Clearly, the game still goes on: Hanssen was
arrested in a Vienna, Va., park a mile from his home as he dropped off
classified documents, wrapped in a plastic garbage bag, for his Russian
handlers. And the gumshoe's high-tech methods are harbingers of the spy
game of the future. A computer whiz, Hanssen was allegedly able to steal
secrets from the U's. intelligence community by hacking into its secret
databases. In one correspondence with his Russian handlers, Hanssen proposed
that, rather than bother with risky rendezvous in the muddy woods, he just
send Moscow encrypted stolen documents via his Palm pilot (he wanted to
upgrade from a Palm III to a Palm VII).
-
- ASSESSING THE DAMAGE
-
- The damage done will take months, if not more, to sort
out. Over the years the FBI mole delivered to Moscow 6,000 pages of documents
and 26 computer disks detailing the bureau's "sources and methods,
including its latest techniques for electronic eavesdropping. As a counterintelligence
expert at the FBI, he had unusually broad access to the bureau's files.
But the most elusive and intriguing question about Hanssen is his motivation:
why would a God-fearing family man who ardently and even tediously denounced
"godless communism secretly sell out to the Kremlin?
-
- Greed may be only part of the answer. True, he may have
worried about tuition payments for his six Catholic-school-educated children,
but, unlike other alleged traitors, he did not throw money around on booze
or women. According to the FBI's affidavit, the Russians paid Hanssen more
than $600,000 in cash and diamonds, plus the promise of $800,000 more awaiting
him in Moscow for his "retirement. Still, Hanssen lived the life of
a frugal family man in the Virginia suburbs, driving a ,97 Ford Taurus.
-
-
- Some of Hanssen's colleagues surmise that he simply liked
to tempt fate. "He wanted to touch the wire, said David Major, a section
chief in the bureau's intelligence division who worked across the hall
from Hanssen. "It was like he was wondering, Can I do it?, A quirky,
quietly brilliant man whose career never quite lived up to his own expectations,
Hanssen may have been led into temptation partly by the boring, deadening
work of spying in the real world, which involves far more waiting and paper
shuffling than sleuthing in dark alleys.
-
- The forces driving Hanssen were likely complex and possibly
unknowable. He seems to have been on some kind of strange quest, lurching
between religions and ideologies and careers without finding relief, except
perhaps in the thrill of spying. Still, it is possible, from the 100-page
affidavit released by the FBI and interviews with his friends and colleagues,
to begin to piece together clues to the puzzle, to gain the first insights
into the twisted mind of a spy. He is described by those who knew him"who
readily acknowledge that he was hard to truly know"as a brooding,
controlling figure, fascinated by secrecy and obsessed by purity. He was,
for much of his 56 years, a seeker of black-and-white certainty and higher
truth who nonetheless plunged into the gray, morally compromised world
of espionage. He is, in a perverse way, Louis Freeh's doppelganger, a would-be
scourge of evil who ended up collaborating with the very demon he was trying
to exorcise.
-
- Hanssen's own explanation to his Moscow handlers for
his secret life, laid out in the bureau affidavit, was at once cryptic
and grandiose: "I am either insanely brave or quite insane. I,d answer
neither. I,d say, insanely loyal. Take your pick. There is insanity in
all the answers, he wrote the SVR in 1999. In the same rambling letter,
Hanssen went on, "I decided on this course when I was 14 years old.
I,d read Philby's book. Now that is insane, eh!
-
- TAKING AFTER PHILBY
-
- H.A.R. (Kim) Philby is an interesting and provocative
role model. Himself the son of a spy who turned traitor, Philby was an
arrogant, self-loathing aristocrat recruited by the Soviets at Cambridge
University in the early 1930s. Philby wanted to overthrow what he saw as
the corrupt, class-ridden establishment and replace it with a Marxist utopia.
Rising to head the Soviet division in the British spy service in the early
days of the cold war, he led the mole-hunters on a merry chase until he
fled to Moscow in 1963.
-
- Philby did not publish his memoir, "My Silent War,
until 1968, when Hanssen was 24, not 14. Hanssen may just have been flattering
his handlers"or himself"by dropping the name of Moscow Center's
greatest catch. But Hanssen's sense of intrigue"and his fascination
with spying as a moral battleground"started young. With FBI colleagues,
Hanssen would boast that his father had been a Red hunter, a member of
the Chicago police force's Red Squad, which tried to track down subversives
in the 1950s and ,60s. An only child, regarded as a loner and something
of a cipher in high school and college (where he studied Russian), Hanssen
as a 21-year-old nurtured an ambition to join the supersecret National
Security Agency and become a code breaker. He also imagined going to med
school and becoming a psychiatrist. <!--
-
- He ended up at dental school. His classmates there remember
him as quiet, imperturbable, almost invisible"always neatly dressed
in a coat and tie"yet odd. He worked on the weekends at a state mental
facility and enjoyed interviewing the patients, as if he were a real psychiatrist.
Occasionally, he would invite a friend out to the hospital to watch him
perform. "He loved showing people the control he had over the patients,
who were mostly bonkers. He liked to show off for his friends, putting
these people through their paces. He wasn,t mean to the inmates; he just
quietly interrogated them, said John Sullivan, a classmate. Hanssen had
another quirk, said Sullivan: he repeatedly described a dream, in which
he was sitting on a throne, "like Emperor Ming in Flash Gordon,, passing
final judgment on his enemies. "Guard! Hanssen would imagine himself
commanding. "Take them away! Hanssen could laugh, a deep rumble, but
he never opened up about his own family. A dutiful son, he regularly visited
his mother.
-
- Yet he was searching for"or escaping from"something
deep within himself. Bored with dentistry, he dropped out, got a degree
in accounting and became, like his father, a policeman. But not just any
cop: he volunteered for an elite squad that investigated other cops suspected
of corruption. The C5 unit was despised by most Chicago police officers,
who viewed the undercover cops as traitors. "It didn,t seem to bother
him at all, said his supervisor, John Clarke. Hanssen arrived full of insinuating
questions about the regime of Mayor Richard Daley, Chicago's all-powerful
boss. Indeed, Hanssen started asking so many questions that Clarke began
to secretly suspect that the rookie was actually working undercover for
the federal government. "He looked like an altar boy, said Clarke.
"But I was always very suspicious of him.
-
- VOLUNTEER SPYCATCHER
-
- Before long, Hanssen was openly working for the Feds"as
an FBI agent. Joining the bureau in 1976, Hanssen showed little interest
in the normal duties of a junior G-man, standing in the cold writing down
the license-plate numbers of suspected mobsters. He volunteered to be a
spycatcher, to enter the arcane world of counterintelligence operations
against the KGB, which was working hard to penetrate the U's. government
and steal military, political and industrial secrets. In the late ,70s
and early ,80s, with the cold war deepening again after a period of detente,
he could easily imagine the struggle against the "Evil Empire as a
grand stage worthy of his intellectual powers and zeal.
-
- The spy-vs.-spy game that swirled around the United Nations
in New York had been described as a "war by its veterans, but it could
be a dreary, deadening pastime for an FBI agent trying to support a large
and growing family in the city's pricey environs. Agents in the New York
office of the FBI at the time complained of low pay and lower morale. After
a while the duties of a counterintelligence officer"such as reviewing
the expense accounts of businessmen who traveled to Moscow"may have
seemed as dull as dental school to Hanssen. He may also have been going
through some personal crisis at the time. According to family friends,
his wife, Bonnie, was having periodic miscarriages between giving birth
to their six children. The real cause of Hanssen's deep disquiet may never
be known. But in October 1985, a month before the Geneva summit between
Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev signaled the beginning of the end of
the cold war, Hanssen took a step from which"as he well knew"there
is no turning back. According to the FBI affidavit, he offered his services
to the Kremlin, in a letter sent through the regular mail to the Virginia
home of a KGB agent stationed in the Soviet Embassy in Washington.
-
- As a kind of down payment, Hanssen handed over the names
of three KGB agents who were secretly working for the Americans. It was
a deadly gift. Two of the agents"Valery Martynov and Sergei Motorin"were
later executed in Moscow, while the third, Boris Yuzhin, was sent to prison.
(These double agents were doubly unlucky: they were earlier betrayed by
the CIA mole, Aldrich Ames.) Hanssen may also have been protecting himself
by eliminating sources who might finger him to the CIA. The counterintelligence
expert took the usual precautions. The FBI affidavit reads like a how-to
manual of good "tradecraft. He communicated with the KGB through "dead
drops. In order to avoid surveillance, he never met directly with the Soviets.
Rather, he would post a signal"a piece of tape on a tree"alerting
his handlers that he was leaving a package at a predetermined site. They
would leave behind further marching orders in the same spot"and a
reward. Hanssen was careful not to ask for too much. In one of his first
messages, on Nov. 8, 1985, he wrote Moscow, "As far as funds are concerned,
I have little need or utility for more than the 100,000 [dollars]. It merely
provides a difficulty since I can not spend it, store it, or invest it
easily without triping [sic] drug money, warning bells. Perhaps some diamonds
as security to my children and some good will so that when the time comes,
you will accept by [sic] senior services as a guest lecturer. Eventually,
I would appreciate an escape plan. (Nothing lasts forever.)
-
- NEITHER OF US ARE CHILDREN,
-
- Hanssen may have been thinking of his model, the master
spy Philby, who ended his days as a Hero of the State (though a depressed
drunk), lecturing fledgling KGB officers in Moscow. Shrewdly, Hanssen never
revealed his true identity to the KGB, using code names instead. He repeatedly
refused requests to meet a Moscow agent at home or overseas. "Neither
of us are children about these things, he chided his KGB handler at one
point. "Over time, I can cut your losses rather than become one.
-
- As the chief of a counterintelligence unit in New York,
then as a fairly high-ranking analyst of Soviet spying back at FBI headquarters
in Washington, Hanssen was in a position to know a great deal about the
FBI's spycatching operations. Intelligence experts say that Hanssen probably
told the Russians how, where and when U's. intelligence agencies, like
the eavesdroppers at the NSA, were listening in on Russian communications.
-
- The true cost to national security is hard to determine.
During the 15 years when Hanssen was operating as a mole, the crumbling
Soviet Union and its chaotic successor, the Russian Republic, was not much
of a real threat to the United States. Oleg Gordievsky, a Soviet spy who
defected to Britain in 1985, suggests that the Russians might have given
or sold information turned over by Hanssen to scarier enemies"rogue
states like Iraq and Libya, or terrorist groups in the Middle East. But
a senior FBI official interviewed by NEWSWEEK was doubtful. He observed
that Moscow's paranoid and clannish SVR has always been reluctant to share
secrets even with its Russian military counterpart, the GRU.
-
- Hanssen seems to have been satisfied by his secret life
for a time. According to the affidavit, his handlers cleverly nurtured
him with cash and stroking and even snatches of poetry. His correspondence
with the KGB is full of salutations to "dear friends. The chairman
of the KGB himself, Vladimir Kryuchkov, sent along his personal congratulations.
But by the end of that year, Hanssen had gone to ground. His next contact
with the Russians, it appears, was not for seven years.
-
- BUSY MOLE-HUNTERS
-
- Hanssen may have felt a need to lie low. Aldrich Ames
was exposed as a Soviet agent in 1993, and the mole-hunters were busily
searching for other turncoats. Some serious security lapses could not be
explained by Ames's perfidy. FBI and CIA officials wondered why some of
the intelligence community's listening devices were going deaf. And they
still couldn,t explain how the Russians had been able in 1989 to tip off
a State Department official, Felix Bloch, who was under surveillance for
spying. (According to the FBI affidavit, it was Hanssen who warned the
Russians that the noose was tightening around Bloch. "Bloch was such
a shnook, Hanssen wrote his handlers, "I almost hated protecting him.)
In the mid-,90s, the spycatchers did snare a couple of lesser moles, the
CIA's Harold Nicholson and the FBI's Earl Pitts. But they remained suspicious.
When Hanssen was arrested on Feb. 18, as many as half a dozen American
intelligence officials were under close scrutiny at the time. Their fates
remain uncertain.
-
- There were complaints last week that longtime FBI agents
had been exempted from taking lie-detector tests, unlike CIA officials,
who"especially in the wake of Ames case"were routinely "fluttered.
But even if Hanssen had been strapped to a polygraph machine, that might
not have incriminated him. Investigating his home life would not have revealed
a hint of wrongdoing. According to neighbors, he got home every night at
5:30; the kids were doing their homework and dinner was on the table within
a few minutes. Wife Bonnie is described as a "cute, pixie, Doris Day-like
person, her home "as neat as a pin. The dog's name is Sunday, as in
church. The Hanssens are devoutly religious. Although Hanssen rarely mentioned
religion while growing up (he was at least nominally a Lutheran), he became
an ardent Catholic, like his wife, in the mid-1970s.
-
- His attachment to Opus Dei stands in stark and perplexing
contrast to his work for the Kremlin. Officials of the order hotly dispute
descriptions of Opus Dei (Work of God) as a secret sect. Its followers
are supposed to live a godly life while here on earth, but fellow Catholics
sometimes find Opus Dei members to be a little spooky and holier-than-thou.
Hanssen's colleagues regarded him as a moralizer. He refused to attend
a going-away party at a girlie bar near FBI headquarters, calling the party
"an occasion of sin. Riding home one night with another FBI official,
he bridled when an NPR commentator remarked that "the implied social
contract is the basis for morality. Turning off the radio in disgust, Hanssen
muttered, "The basis of morality is God's law.
-
- THE LUGUBRIOUS DR. DEATH
-
- At bureau headquarters, Hanssen was known for dressing
in black and for a somewhat lugubrious manner, which some compared to that
of an undertaker. To investigative journalist James Bamford, he handed
windy assessments of the evils of communism, long after communism had collapsed.
He was called, behind his back, Dr. Death. Speaking in low tones, smiling
little, he had few real friends.
-
- He may have missed his Russian handlers. "A spy
is one of the loneliest people in the world, says Dr. David Charney, a
psychiatrist who has spent 20 hours interviewing Earl Pitts about his career
as a spy. "He is completely dependent on his handler. In late 1999,
Hanssen allegedly renewed contact with Russian intelligence, which was
gearing up again under President Vladimir Putin, an old KGB hand who is
eager to revive some the Soviet Empire's glory days. "Dear friend:
welcome! began a letter to Hanssen from the SVR on Oct. 6. "We express
our sincere joy on the occasion of resumption of contact with you. Yet
there was a new, panicky note on Hanssen's end. "I have come about
as close as I ever want to come to sacrificing myself to help you, and
I get silence, he petulantly wrote the SVR in March of last year. "I
hate silence.... I hate uncertainty. So far I have judged the edge correctly.
Give me credit for that. He seemed to know that the end was coming near.
"Please, he begs his handler, "at least say goodbye. It's been
a long time my dear friends, a long and lonely time. Then, more sardonically,
"Want me to lecture in your 101 course in my old age?
-
- He was worried that he faced the death penalty if he
got caught by the mole-hunters, but he didn,t really believe that a welcome
suite awaited him in Moscow if he bolted. As for the $800,000 supposedly
set aside for his retirement, he scoffed, "we do both know that money
is not really put away for you, except in some vague accounting sense.
Never patronize me at this level, he warned. "It offends me, but then
you are easily forgiven. But perhaps I shouldn,t tease you. It just gets
me in trouble.
-
-
- "The family is devastated. We don,t even know who
he is. - FRAN WAUCK Hannsen's mother-in-law
-
- THE OFFER OF A BIG OFFICE
-
- Big trouble was just around the corner. In October, after
receiving the case file of the SVR agent known as "B, the FBI had
little trouble zeroing in on Hanssen. A senior FBI official said the top
brass was stunned when the fingerprints on the packaging materials turned
out to belong to one of their own. Hanssen was immediately put under round-the-clock
surveillance. Perhaps sensing the dogs circling, he was beginning to talk
to his FBI bosses about retirement. He was offered instead a nice big office
at headquarters, NEWSWEEK has learned. When he went over for a look, the
FBI bugged his old office.
-
- The gumshoes were waiting when Hanssen went to a northern
Virginia park to visit a dead drop in the gloom of a February late afternoon.
He walked into the woods and placed an inch-thick package under a footbridge.
As he turned to go to his car, agents yelled, "Freeze! FBI! The long
wait was over. Newsweek.MSNBC.com
-
- Hanssen did not resist or even say anything. His brokenhearted
wife hired one of the best criminal-defense lawyers in Washington, Plato
Cacheris, who said the government's case may not be as solid as it seems.
If history is a guide, Hanssen will cut a deal. To avoid the death penalty,
he will have to help the FBI figure out just how much damage he did. Repairing
the harm done his family may be harder. Hanssen's children are assuming
the allegations against their father are true, said Hanssen's sister-in-law
Liz Rahimi. "They just think there was something wrong with their
dad, and they didn,t know, she said. Hanssen's mother-in-law, Fran Wauck,
told NEWSWEEK, "The family is devastated. We don,t even know who he
is. It's not clear that anyone ever really knew Bob Hanssen, perhaps not
even himself.
-
- With Eleanor Clift, Michael Isikoff, Mark Hosenball and
Donatella Lorch in Washington, Dirk Johnson, Flynn McRoberts and Karen
Springen in Chicago and Christian Caryl in Moscow
-
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- © 2001 Newsweek, Inc.
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