Hanssen, Robert - FBI portrays agent's double l...

FBI portrays Robert Hanssen's double life

February 21, 2001
By Richard Willing and Traci Watson
 

WASHINGTON — He was the son of a Chicago cop, a quiet type who admired strong leaders, went to Mass on Sundays and occasionally shocked colleagues by spouting profanity-laced quotes from Gen. George S. Patton. But to folks such as I.C. Smith, a onetime colleague in the FBI's counterintelligence division, the lanky, sometimes disheveled man named Bob Hanssen was still "not your typical FBI agent." Little did they know. Hanssen, charged Tuesday with spying for 15 years on the government he swore to serve, was an apparent paradox, a man of separate and warring loyalties that seem impossible to have coexisted in one slim human frame.

A 100-page FBI affidavit, filed in connection with the charges, and interviews with neighbors, relatives and law enforcement sources paint a contradictory picture: On the surface, Hanssen was a suburban dad, toiling at his government job, joining with his wife, Bonnie, to raise six children in the Washington suburbs, putting them through Catholic schools and colleges, and making the payments on a Ford Taurus, an Isuzu Trooper and a fast-fading Volkswagen van.

But at the same time, the government says, Hanssen was something else entirely — a spy for the Soviet Union and its successor, the Russian Federation. They were the sworn enemies of his team, FBI counterintelligence, and, in the case of the U.S.S.R., of his seemingly beloved church.

Officials say Hanssen was a spy who profited from his activities, collecting more than $600,000 in cash, about $50,000 in diamonds and the promise, which he never took seriously, of another $800,000 in a Russian bank account.

But in court documents unsealed Tuesday, the government says he also harbored the quaint fantasy of retiring from the FBI and relocating to Moscow to teach college courses and train future spies. His boyhood hero, he told his Russian keepers, was the British intellectual-turned-Soviet mole Kim Philby. In the Cold War of the 1950s, Philby did exactly that — escaped to Moscow.

"Want me to lecture in your 101 course in my old age? I would be a novelty attraction," Hanssen wrote to a Russian contact last November. "I'd decided on this course when I was 14. ... I read Philby's book."

That echoed the thought Hanssen expressed in November 1985, after first approaching KGB agents in Washington and volunteering to supply information. He would work, Hanssen wrote the KGB, for money, a few diamonds for his children and "good will."

"So that when the time comes, you will accept (m)y senior services as a guest lecturer," read the note, found by federal investigators last fall.

"Eventually, I would appreciate an escape plan. (Nothing lasts forever.)"

Policeman's son

Hanssen was born April 18, 1944, in Chicago, the son of a policeman who rose to the rank of lieutenant. He was educated at Knox College, a small and selective liberal-arts college in Galesburg, Ill., then studied dentistry and accounting before landing at the FBI.

Hanssen's late start — he was nearly 32 when the bureau swore him in — meant he was more mature than many recruits. But the age difference left him with disdain for many he would serve with, bureaucratic types who, he once told the Russians, went "all wet" when faced with a decision they had to make by themselves.

In October 1985, Hanssen made just such a decision, the government says, selling Russian intelligence the names of three American-based KGB agents who were secretly working for the FBI. Hanssen had come by the information when working at FBI headquarters in Washington. But he waited until being transferred to New York City before approaching the Russians.

The three KGB agents, who had previously been betrayed by rogue CIA agent Aldrich Ames, were recalled to Moscow, where two were executed and the third given a prison sentence.

In 1987, he and the family returned to Vienna, Va., in the Washington suburbs, and have lived there since.

By all appearances, their lives were solid and unremarkable.

Those who know the Hanssens describe them as a close family. They attended Mass weekly. Four of the children attended Our Lady of Good Counsel Catholic School, which now covers kindergarten through eighth grade, in Vienna. Only two of the children remain at home, a comfortable brown frame house with a basketball hoop on the side of the house.

Bernadette "Bonnie" Hanssen, who turns 55 this month, was raised in Park Ridge, Ill., in a family that included eight children. Her father, Leroy Wauck, was a professor at Loyola University in Chicago, a Jesuit institution, where Bonnie earned a bachelor's degree in sociology. She teaches nearly full time at Oakcrest School in McLean, Va., a small Catholic girls' school .

Robert and Bonnie met while they were both working in the Chicago area, Wauck said. An acquaintance who spoke to her Tuesday described Bonnie Hanssen as "in shock" after the arrest. She had no notion, the acquaintance said, that her husband was even under suspicion of spying.

The Hanssens' son Mark is a politics major at the University of Dallas in Irving, Texas, and their son John attends law school at the University of Notre Dame. One of their daughters is married and has at least one child, said Nancy Cullen, a neighbor of Hanssen.

Devoted mother

Bonnie is universally described as a devoted and skillful mother who even recorded a commercial tape about activities a family can do together.

"They're a wonderful family. They've been so concerned about raising their children well," said Mary Ann Budnik, CEO of R.B. Media, the company that sells Bonnie Hanssen's tape. "The more I think about it, the more I think he's being framed."

Two of Bonnie's sisters live nearby with their husbands and children. One, Jeanne Beglis, lives just a few doors down the street .

Wauck said his son-in-law didn't complain about his job. "It just doesn't make sense," he said. "No one anticipated anything like this."

The charges read like a continuous drumbeat:

Amid these events, bits of Hanssen's personality can be spied.

He was obsessive about security, blowing off one document drop when the Russians were three minutes late.

He had contempt for his colleagues, and even for some fellow spies. Bloch, he wrote in one letter to the Russians, is a "shnook" whom he saved only because he was a "friend" of Russia's intelligence community.

He had advice for his Russian buddies: Study the methods of the late mayor Richard J. Daley, the boss of Chicago, to learn how to run a government. And technical tips, too. Though he used a Palm III organizer, he told the Russians in March 2000, the VII version comes with built-in wireless internet capability. "Could be quite effective" in spying, Hanssen said.

He could be humorous. Overconfidence, he warned the Russians, can lead "cocksure officers" to "step in an occasional cowpie."

"Message to the translator," Hanssen wrote in November 2000. "Got a good word for cowpie ?"

And salty. In December 1991, when a promotion and a new job temporarily sidetrack his spying, he quoted Patton to show the Russians that he was anxious to keep working for them.

"As General Patton said, 'Let's get this over with so we can go kick the (expletive deleted) out of the (expletive deleted) Japanese,' " Hanssen wrote.

Occasionally, Hansen enjoyed chatting, spy to spy, with his Russian handlers. That $800,000 set aside for him in the MOST bank in Moscow? He understood, he wrote in November, that it was only an "accounting notation" that may or may not be paid "at some uncertain future."

No hard feelings, he said. "We do the same."

But the job could be frustrating. "You waste me!" he complained when the Russians failed to keep in touch. Last year, he told his Russian keepers, he knew all about the discovery of a Russian bug planted in the State Department but had "no effective way" of tipping them off quickly.

And dangerous. His biggest fear, Hanssen confided, was "someone like me" — an agent on the Russian side with knowledge of Hanssen's spying who decided to work for the Americans. A former CIA counterintelligence expert, Vincent Cannistraro, suspects that that is what happened.

Sometimes the work just seemed to be getting to Hanssen. He could get the death penalty if caught, he said. Sometimes, the Russians didn't seem to appreciate the risks he takes.

"I have come about as close as I ever want to come to sacrificing myself for you," he wrote in March 2000.

"Conclusion: One might propose that 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."

Some former colleagues are saddened but not shocked that Hanssen may have led a secret life.

"He was kind of a loner, introverted, didn't laugh easily," I.C. Smith recalled. "I could never figure out how he hung on as a headquarters supervisor."

Contributing: Edward T. Pound, Kevin Johnson, Toni Locy and Barbara Slavin

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