Spy: The Inside Story of How the FBI's Robert Hanssen Betrayed America (22 page)

“Later he said, ‘I’ve got a Rolex.’ I said, ‘That’s amazing.’ I turned it over and it had all the stamps on the back. It was a real Rolex, no fake. I said, ‘Bob, this is a real one.’ He said, ‘Yep, I thought I owed it to myself.’ At the time they cost about $7,500.

“He told me he came from money, Bonnie had money, his dad left him money, and he told me he bought his house in New York for two hundred fifty thousand dollars and sold it for five hundred thousand dollars. A day or two later he had another Rolex in his hand. He said, ‘Bill, I want you to have this.’ It was one of the twenty-dollar fakes. ‘I don’t need a fake one, I’ve got a real one.’ So I said, ‘All right, I’ll take it.’ Then he told me he bought a ladies’ Rolex for Bonnie as well.”

But by the summer of 1990, Hanssen could afford to give a real Rolex to Jack; the KGB had already paid him more than $450,000. The Russians heard from Hanssen again that August when he mailed them a floppy disk that contained a variety of classified data. The following month the KGB gave Hanssen another $40,000 in cash, and in a message assured him that some of his material had gone “to the very top,” presumably to the Kremlin and Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev.
That may have been so, but again, the words were also designed to flatter and stroke their man in Washington.

Hanssen did not contact the KGB again until February 1991, when he left an emergency call-out signal. In a message at
CHARLIE
, he revealed that the FBI’s chief of counterintelligence in New York had told him that the bureau had recruited a certain number of Soviet sources, presumably at the Soviet mission to the UN. And in passing, he remarked that the $40,000 he had received was “too generous.”

In the exchange the KGB left $10,000 in cash for Hanssen and a floppy disk pinpointing two new sites. One, codenamed
GRACE
, was located under a footbridge in Washington’s Rock Creek Park. The cash pushed Hanssen over the half-million-dollar mark in KGB income.

On April 15, although the KGB surely understood that Hanssen would not be paying income tax on his money from Moscow, it passed along another $10,000 and a poem that, in effect, urged him to stop and smell the roses. The message was addressed as usual to “Dear Friend.” It began, “Time is flying. As a poet said:

The rest of the letter from the KGB was positively chatty:

By early July 1991, Hanssen’s tour in the inspection division was over. He would spend the next six months at headquarters, in the Soviet operations section, as a program manager in the unit that tried to counter Soviet efforts, in particular by the KGB’s Line X, to steal U.S. scientific and technical secrets.

As soon as Hanssen was back at headquarters, he immediately left a floppy disk with almost three hundred pages of documents for the KGB. “I returned, grabbed the first thing I could lay my hands on,” he explained in his letter. “I was in a hurry so that you would not worry, because June has passed, they held me there longer.”

He had at least five years until he could retire, Hanssen noted, adding: “Maybe I will hang in there for that long.” He also passed along a report on a joint FBI-CIA operation and classified documents dealing with human intelligence plans and nuclear proliferation. He walked away from the drop with another $12,000 in cash in his pocket and a KGB disk that praised “Your superb sense of humor and Your sharp-asa-razor mind. We highly appreciate both.”

Having shamelessly flattered Hanssen once more, his handlers adopted a smarmy, deferential tone: “If our natural wish to capitalize on Your information confronts in any way Your security interests we definitely cut down our thirst for profit and choose Your security. The same goes with any other aspect of Your case. That’s why we say Your security goes first.… We are sure You remember our next contact is due at ‘
FLO.
’ ”

In that next exchange, in August, Hanssen actually suggested that the Soviets could learn something from a thorough study of how Mayor Richard J. Daley, whose autocratic style Hanssen greatly admired, had governed Chicago. Since the Soviet Union was only four months away from collapse, perhaps he was on to something. Still, it seemed a reach to think that a system once run by Joseph Stalin could pick up any pointers from Dick Daley.

On August 19, the same day Hanssen suggested that the Kremlin study Mayor Daley’s leadership style, a group of plotters in Moscow,
among them Vladimir Kryuchkov, the KGB chief, staged an attempted coup against Gorbachev. Russia’s president, Boris Yeltsin, astride a tank, led the countercoup that restored Gorbachev to power. Several of the Soviet republics, including Russia, declared their independence.

This time, the KGB flattered Hanssen for his political advice. They wrote: “[T]he magical history tour to Chicago was mysteriously well timed. Have You ever thought of foretelling the things? After Your retirement for instance in some sort of Your own ‘Cristall [sic] Ball and Intelligence Agency’ (CBIA)? There are always so many people in this world eager to get a glimpse of the future.”

Hanssen came away from that exchange with another $20,000. Finally, in October, along with providing a new secret document on the double agent program, Hanssen got around to responding to the KGB’s request that he suggest others who might be recruited to spy.

He gave them the name of Jack Hoschouer, his closest friend, the man who was like a brother to him. Hoschouer, Hanssen wrote, was an “old friend” and a military officer who had recently been told he would not be promoted.

Hoschouer’s Army career had begun in the late 1960s, after his two years of graduate courses at the University of Hawaii. The Vietnam war was in full swing and Hoschouer, who was in the ROTC, was called to active duty as an infantry officer in November 1968. He was sent to Vietnam as an adviser to a South Vietnamese battalion in 1970, and a year later was a captain in command of an air infantry company in the 1st Cavalry Division.

After Vietnam, he served with the special forces in Germany for three years, returning there in 1989 as a military attaché in the American embassy in Bonn. Although he had been promoted to lieutenant colonel in 1985, it was clear that he would not be advancing any further than bird colonel, which Hanssen knew when he gave his name to the Russians.

According to Hoschouer, the KGB did not follow up on Hanssen’s suggestion. “I was not contacted,” he said. “If the Russians pitched me, I was too dumb to realize it. If they wanted to approach me, I had a lot of official contacts with the Soviets in Bonn and it would have been easy to do.” But he could remember nothing that even remotely resembled a pitch.

Hoschouer retired from the Army in 1994. What was his reaction to learning seven years later that his closest friend had offered him up as a
morsel to the KGB? “I still don’t know,” he said. “I was disappointed I’d been passed over for promotion, in ninety-one, I think, that was true. Maybe he thought in some twisted way he was trying to help me out. My own feeling is he was under so much stress from his own situation, he wanted somebody he could talk to.”

Did Hanssen really think that if the Russians ever managed to recruit Hoschouer, they could pal around as spies together, just as they had broken a few traffic laws as teenagers in a Corvair on the back streets of Chicago?

Even if Hoschouer had agreed to become a spy, he pointed out, “I would not have been able to discuss it with him, since he was in the FBI.” Moreover, the KGB is careful not to tell one spy about another. Aldrich Ames worked for the KGB during some of the same years as Hanssen did, but there is no evidence that either was aware of the other’s role.

By the time of the October exchange between Hanssen and the KGB, the Soviet Union was teetering on the edge of disaster. The political upheavals in Moscow had directly affected the KGB. Kryuchkov, who had sent all those nice letters to Hanssen, was sitting in prison, which must have been somewhat unnerving to the FBI man. The KGB’s first chief directorate (FCD), its foreign intelligence arm at Yasenevo, had been split off and declared an independent agency. After the final collapse of the Soviet Union, it would be rechristened the SVR.

Hanssen’s handlers were anxious to assure him that despite all these seismic events, he could rely on business as usual. The spies had survived, and were now actually more independent.

“There have been many important developments in our country lately,” the Russians acknowledged to Hanssen. “So many that we’d like to reassure You once again. Like we said: we’ve done all in order that none of those events ever affects Your security and our ability to maintain the operation with You. And of course there can be no doubt of our commitment to Your friendship and cooperation which are too important to us to loose [sic].…”

The spies in the
les
(forest), as the officers in the first chief directorate often called their organization, were obviously deeply worried that Hanssen would decide, in light of the instability in Moscow, to disappear forever, as suddenly as he had appeared in 1985. The genie might vanish back into the bottle and be permanently beyond their reach.

But in the meantime, there was work to be done. The Russians provided new communications plans and asked Hanssen for a broad variety of classified information. They also requested a specific current document that analyzed Soviet knowledge of U.S. reconnaissance satellites. “It’s fun to read about the life in the Universe to understand better what’s going on on our own planet,” they wrote.

Gently, they also asked about some pages that seemed to be missing from Hanssen’s hastily assembled July package. “Sometimes it happens, we understand,” the Russians said. “Life is becoming too fast.”

On December 12, the KGB received a letter from Hanssen postmarked in Washington but with a bogus return address of “J. Baker, Box 1101, Houston, TX.” In it, Hanssen alerted the Russians to a new electronic eavesdropping gadget that was about to be targeted against them. “DEVICE APPROVED … COMING SOON,” he warned.

Four days later, Hanssen and the KGB carried out an exchange at
BOB
, in Idylwood Park. Hanssen turned over a classified research paper from the CIA’s Counterintelligence Center dated November 1990 entitled “The KGB’s First Chief Directorate: Structure, Functions, and Methods.”

He also passed to the Russians a budget summary from the office of the Director of Central Intelligence, stamped
SECRET
, that revealed the scope of the FBI’s foreign counterintelligence programs. And on the twenty-sixth floppy disk that he passed to the KGB, he said he was embarrassed about the pages missing from his July package.

Hanssen was about to be promoted again; this time he would be chief of the new National Security Threat List unit at headquarters. At NSTL, he would be working on the FBI’s efforts to counter economic espionage. He had received “an increase in salary and authority,” Hanssen wrote. That was the good news. The bad news was that this moved him “at least temporarily out of direct responsibility.” He added that “a new mission for my new group has not been fully defined” but “I hope to adjust to that.… As General Patton said … ‘let’s get this over with so we can go kick the shit out of the purple-pissing Japanese.’ ”
^*
Hanssen often quoted Patton, whom he admired almost as much as Mayor Daley.

The technically minded Hanssen also proposed a new communications system to replace the cumbersome dead drops, the plastic bags squirreled away under footbridges, and all that unpleasant slogging around in the dark in the mud. As Hanssen outlined it, he would set up an office somewhere in Washington that would not be tapped or bugged by the FBI, since the bureau would be unaware of it. There, he and the KGB could communicate directly by computer, using special equipment with advanced encryption technology.

From the drop in Idylwood Park, Hanssen extracted $12,000 in cash and a KGB floppy disk that contained communications plans and asked for information about various classified matters.

But Hanssen did not reply. What the KGB had feared all along now happened. Their apprehension was always there in the background; it could be sensed between the lines of their warm and fuzzy letters to Hanssen. It was the fear that one day he would simply disappear.

As often as the Russians might drive by the emergency call-out site near Dupont Circle, there were no chalk marks, no sign that their man was ready for another exchange of money and secrets. As often as they checked their mail at the accommodation addresses in Alexandria, there was no word from “Ramon Garcia,” no more letters from “Jim Baker” or “G. Robertson.”

Robert Hanssen had gone to ground.

In less than two weeks, the Soviet Union would be no more. Defectors from the KGB were already knocking at the door of the CIA, and their numbers were likely to increase. Even though Hanssen had been careful to conceal his name, perhaps one of the defectors might know something that would lead to him. He may even have wished he had not quoted General Patton, or talked about Chicago, or provided other clues that might point to his identity.