My Friend, the Spy

On the morning of February 20, 2001, my phone began to ring early in the morning and continued without letup throughout the day. The callers were colleagues from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, from which I had retired only six months before. One of the special agents who had attended my retirement party to wish me well had graduated from my high school, Taft in Chicago, only a year before I did. I had worked closely with him during several assignments in Washington, D.C., and New York City and I considered him a close friend. Among all of my colleagues at the Bureau, I had always been impressed with the devotion this agent showed for his family and with his deep commitment to the Roman Catholic Church. To say I was stunned when friend after friend called on February 20 to make sure I knew that Bob Hanssen had been arrested as a spy is the great understatement of my life.1

You can gauge the impact of a spy case by the number of authors who rush to write about it. In the two years since Hanssen’s arrest, there have been five books and, recently, a made-for-TV miniseries scripted by Norman Mailer. By comparison, it has taken nearly eight years for five books and a TV movie to be accumulated about Aldrich Ames, the notorious CIA spy arrested in 1994. In 1963, Kim Philby escaped to Moscow after decades of spying for Russia within British intelligence. Over 220 books have now appeared about Philby and the other “Cambridge Reds” with whom he was associated. But no modern spy has been the subject of as much attention so fast as Robert Hanssen. From my perspective, as someone who thought he knew Hanssen fairly well for quite a few years, the books and movie have done a very mixed job at answering the essential mystery. To show why, it will be helpful to address a series of questions.

What did Hanssen give away?

Or what is the damage he caused?

The affidavit in support of Hanssen’s arrest had been approved two days before it occurred. The affidavit was made public immediately thereafter, and it is a most extraordinary document. It reads like a spy novel. It describes the devious methods Hanssen used to communicate with the KGB and other Russians, and it quotes from the actual notes exchanged. The early books by Shannon and Blackman, Havill, and Vise are mostly expanded versions of the affidavit.

To understand what Hanssen gave away requires a bit of reading between the lines in the public documents from the case. These three early books have slightly varying interpretations, but consistent with the affidavit is this brutal fact: Hanssen immediately and purposefully gave the KGB the identities of four Russians working as in-place U.S. sources. Hanssen knew he had to eliminate any potential that someone in the KGB would betray him. Three of these four were subsequently executed and the fourth served a long prison term.

While the early books hinted at the depth of Hanssen’s betrayal, Wise’s volume (released in October 2002) sets it out in nerve-racking detail. Suffice it to say, Hanssen’s position within the Bureau gave him legitimate access to just about every FBI analytical study of KGB operations, most counterintelligence budget program requests (both for the FBI and other U.S. intelligence agencies), many studies detailing technical assessments of new, state-of-the-art collection systems, and just about all the details of ongoing cases. It appears Hanssen was nondiscriminatory, for he gave it all away. Using diskettes with an encryption system he had devised himself, Hanssen turned over 6,000 pages of material from the FBI and other U.S. intelligence agencies. Wise goes into great detail about one particular eavesdropping technique (the laborious construction of a tunnel beneath the new Russian Embassy in Washington) that Hanssen compromised, thereby negating literally years of work by hundreds of U.S. workers.

Hanssen invalidated not only ongoing collection systems used against KGB and other Russian intelligence operations, but he also severely compromised the future capability of the U.S. to conduct effective counterintelligence operations. As Vise’s book points out and as Wise’s volume reaffirms, Hanssen gave the Russians details about plans prepared by the U.S. government to survive a nuclear attack. This betrayal meant that he put every American at risk, since the Soviets not only could have destroyed the known sites of the U.S. government and military, but also could have negated the ability of the U.S. to reconstitute itself following the attack. Hanssen was a trusted insider who used his legitimate access to acquire the most sensitive and the most significant information imaginable, which he then passed freely to the Russians.

Why did he do it?

Hanssen took an oath of office when he became an FBI agent to uphold and defend the U.S. Constitution. He was especially adept when it came to conceptualizing counterintelligence operations. Wise does a very good job describing Hanssen’s brilliance at the business. Ironically, several of the FBI programs Hanssen either built or contributed to have proven to be very effective.

By all outward appearances, Hanssen was a strong family man, a loving husband, a great father of six children, and a devoted Catholic who was active in Opus Dei (Havill’s book is distinguished by its details on this “small, élitist sect within the Church”). Hanssen was also a good friend to several colleagues within the Bureau—not many, but still a significant few. His natural shyness and slightly aloof manner did not make him the life of the party, but to a handful, he was a valued friend and associate because of his insights into the counterintelligence business, his clever uses of computers, and his commitment to moral first principles. As all the books make clear, Hanssen was bright and enjoyed helping catch spies.

Vise points out interesting parallels between Hanssen and former FBI Director Louis Freeh: both joined the FBI in 1976, were devout Catholics, fathered six children, and left the FBI in 2001. But Vise disappoints in not developing these parallels except to use them as a device for alternating topics within chapters. The extremes in Hanssen’s life seem incomprehensible. To his friends, his family, his wife, and his church, the notion that Hanssen could commit treason was incomprehensible.

The early books building on the affidavit and lacking the knowledge of later revelations about Hanssen’s personal life conclude that he was too clever for his own good, that he got into this spying business because he was attracted to its gamesmanship, and that he enjoyed the simple pleasure of being a spy within an organization charged with looking for spies. Shannon and Blackman conclude, “This awkward son of a Chicago cop was a most unlikely spy. But behind the façade of normalcy, Hanssen was a seething, arrogant man who had spent his life harboring resentments and weaving a web of lies.” As the story unfolded, however, it became clear that these early explanations were too simple to explain this most complex person.

During the summer of 2001, new tidbits about Hanssen came out nearly every week. Those of us who thought we knew him were forced to acknowledge that we did not really know him at all. Hanssen had been the perfect iceberg, at least 90 percent hidden below the surface. All the books mention these underwater depths that Wise develops most fully:

Hanssen had actually started his spying in 1979, not 1985 as stated in the affidavit.
Hanssen had carried on a relationship of nearly two years with a professional stripper to whom he gave expensive gifts (including a used Mercedes valued at over $10,000) and with whom he traveled to Hong Kong for two weeks. With the exception of one botched episode, the relationship was not physical.
Hanssen had posted on various Internet bulletin boards mildly pornographic short stories about his wife and himself, using actual names.
Hanssen’s lifelong friendship with Jack Hoschouer, which began at Taft High School, included the exchange of nude photographs of his wife, and eventually Hanssen arranged to allow Hoschouer to view the Hanssens’ bedroom activities with a small spy camera that Hanssen installed in his own home.
Hanssen had a very abusive father who not only ridiculed him as a boy but also continued to harass him throughout his married life.

Wise devotes a full chapter to “The Mind of Robert Hanssen” in which he recounts detailed conversations with Hanssen’s defense team psychiatrist, Dr. David Charney. In a strange twist, Hanssen gave Charney written permission to talk to Wise exclusively and told his defense attorney, Plato Cacheris, that “David Wise is the best espionage writer around.” As Wise recounts his conversation with Charney, the psychiatrist is not able to identify a satisfying cause for Hanssen’s behavior. Rather, a complex, interconnected story emerges. The desire for money may have been a trigger to start him spying. Yet, as Wise points out, “it would be simplistic … to say that Hanssen only spied for money.”

But why did Hanssen want the money? As you begin to peel the onion, it is clear that Hanssen’s pride motivated him to show his wife that he was not a failure. And yet … Hanssen’s wife, by all accounts, never put this kind of pressure on him.

Charney cites Hanssen’s “troubled relationship” with his father as the reason he wanted so much to appear successful in his wife’s eyes. Hanssen did indeed have conflicted feelings for his father, both longing for a supporting mentor and finding himself “infuriated” at his father’s actions. Hanssen kept his strong feelings toward his father “bottled up,” and as a result, according to Charney, “Hanssen said when he spied that was the cork coming out of the bottle.”

Wise—in my view, rightly—concludes that “Hanssen exulted in his inside knowledge … knowing more than anyone within the Bureau or the KGB about the totality” of his spying. And yet … there is another side to this sense of superiority. According to Charney, Hanssen also had a “sense of failure” that could also be linked to his abusive father. Wise does the best of the authors in answering the why question: “At some deep level, the decision to spy in the first place represents a failure on the part of the person. They could not manage their lives … they got thrown into a panic stage and the resolution in this cloud of panic was to do spying.”

Into the Mirror, the nonfiction novel on Hanssen’s case “based upon an investigation by Norman Mailer and Lawrence Schiller,” reveals the interesting fact that Hanssen’s favorite novel is Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday. On the very day of his arrest, when Hanssen drove his best friend, Jack Hoschouer, to Dulles Airport, he gave Jack a copy of this book and said, as reported by Schiller, “It’s a classic, and it will give you some idea of what I am all about.” In the novel, Gabriel Syme, a police spy, infiltrates the Central Anarchist Council, the seven members of which are identified only by the names of the days of the week (Syme is Thursday). But as the novel unfolds, it is revealed that another of the council members is also a police spy, and then another, and so on, until the final revelation that Monday through Saturday are all police spies—and the mysterious, godlike figure who recruited them for the police is none other than Sunday, the head of the council. Was this Hanssen’s way of telling his lifelong friend that things are not always as they seem, perhaps with a hint that at some stratospheric level, his duplicity was justified?

As Hanssen went down this road, he knew better than most that there was no turning back. In my own view, committing treason comes very close to committing suicide. If you are to get away with it, you need to be prepared at any time to give up everything that has gone into making up your life—your history, your family, your friends, your associates—in order to go on “living” as Kim Philby did in Russia after he bailed out from Britain, a cipher without friends, context, family, environment, and self-respect. For Hanssen, I do not believe living in Russia was ever a viable option despite some of what he suggested in his communications with the KGB. He knew he was either to remain undiscovered or eventually be caught.

How was he caught?

Wise answers this question much better than do the authors of the books that were left to extrapolate information from the original affidavit. The quick answer is that the FBI acquired Hanssen’s actual KGB file with the original messages, diskettes, and packages passed by Hanssen. This treasure trove of counterintelligence information included a voice cassette of Hanssen talking to a KGB officer, the notes written by Hanssen, and, amazingly, one of the black plastic bags he had used as a container for the information he dropped off for the KGB, on which two of Hanssen’s fingerprints were found.

And yet … the more complicated answer has not been provided by any of the authors. Wise’s is the only book that explains how the FBI went after one particular “retired KGB officer” after agents had concluded that he should have information about a mole within the ranks of the U.S. intelligence services. In an earlier book, Molehunt: The Secret Search for Traitors that Shattered the CIA (Random House, 1992), Wise described the special team put together to find this mole. That book was written several years before Hanssen’s spying came to light, yet it speaks of a long-term effort to find the person responsible for a string of severe intelligence losses.

Thus the arrest of Hanssen appears to top off years of “molehunting” by U.S. intelligence agencies. Wise’s book, however, does not tell us how and why this particular retired KGB officer was selected. It does not tell us how he had managed to secrete away Hanssen’s monumentally important file. Wise suggests that it might have been his “rainy day” account. But that explanation hardly accounts for the huge risks the ex-KGB officer took by keeping it hidden away so long. It does not tell us why the KGB and its successor agencies within post-communist Russia did not miss this file—which, after all, was not just another file but rather a full documentation of the KGB’s single most valuable asset.

As is obvious from these mysteries, espionage piles up double questions upon double questions. In The Wilderness of Mirrors (Harper & Row, 1980), with a title from a phrase describing espionage by the CIA’s supremely devious James Jesus Angelton, David C. Martin developed a long argument concerning the double thinking that necessarily accompanies espionage work and counterespionage investigations. Following Martin, we can only conclude that chiefs within the U.S. intelligence agencies are even now asking themselves whether Hanssen was truly the last significant mole—or whether, inconceivable as it may seem, the Russians reluctantly gave him up in order to protect an even deeper penetration.

How did he get away with it?

For this particular query, there are two subquestions: How did Hanssen conceal his activities? And why didn’t the FBI discover his deception sooner? Because Hanssen was a true student of the profession, he knew how other spies had been caught, and he took great care to avoid their mistakes. Thus, he never provided his name or the name of his organization (the FBI) to the Soviets. He never met with them personally, and only once talked to them by phone (a lapse that came back to haunt him when the ex-KGB officer came out with Hanssen’s complete file).

Hanssen’s bona fides with the Russians were established by the high quality of information he passed. The KGB recognized that there was no need on their part to discover his name, since by not knowing it they actually were protecting him and the information he delivered. Hanssen knew that most previous spies had been caught when someone within the opposing intelligence service provided the full identity of their mole. Hanssen was not going to be caught this way—so he thought.

When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1992, Hanssen no doubt was worried. In fact, he soon broke off contact with the Russians and did not resume his espionage until 1999. When he did resume, Hanssen regularly checked the FBI’s relatively new wide-area-network for any information that might indicate that he was under investigation. His skills with computers were well known, and so he could find information that had been meant to be tightly controlled. He was, let us not forget, a trusted insider. Hanssen, in sum, was a master at managing his contacts with the Russians so as to draw the least attention possible to himself.

But the FBI’s business is to catch spies. Why did the bureau not catch Hanssen early on, instead of after he been spying for 20 years? Wise suggests that Hanssen’s many personal foibles, when coupled with two incidents where he was observed with large amounts of cash, should have opened the eyes of counterespionage agents. And yet … for 20 years I knew him as well as anyone in the FBI. I recognized that he appeared slightly awkward at times, but he nonetheless came across to me as someone genuinely interested in making the FBI a better organization. There was nothing in my lengthy personal observation of his makeup that even hinted at the hidden depths that have since been revealed. Indeed, it was quite the opposite. Looking back, I can say he compartmentalized himself masterfully. I have concluded the FBI would never have caught him without the KGB file. This brings us to a truism about espionage: no matter your value to another country, there will always be someone willing to sell you out.

Near the end of the CBS miniseries, there are two powerful scenes. The first shows Hanssen meeting after his arrest with his wife and then with his daughter and son-in-law. To his daughter he says, “someday maybe I’ll be able to give you the answer.” The second, and closing, scene shows Hanssen in his jail cell talking to himself: “Jane, you ask why did I do it or why has it happened?” After a moment of silence, he answers, “Hubris, overweening vanity, feeling myself equal to God. Bestowing good on both sides, but it’s a nightmare of illusion for anyone seeking the truth, dodging between the problems and the principles. The price is high.” I understand from Larry Schiller that these words were based in large measure on the letters Hanssen has written to his children. They bring us close to hearing the real Hanssen.

Hanssen is a man of faith. It was always clear in my conversations with him that he considered the Catholic Church the best representation of how humans should be ordered to God. Even casual associates would learn quickly of his devout devotion to the church. And yet … it is amazing to me that this friend of mine, this man of faith, could actually, and quite effectively, commit the faithless act of treason. Faith is an act of selflessness. You give up of yourself in order to grasp the “substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” Treason is taking control of yourself in godlike fashion to determine what should and should not be given away, who should and who should not die. If the words from the television movie about “hubris” and “overweening vanity” really come from Hanssen, he may be recognizing now the utter contradiction between faith and treason.

As the movie ends, Hanssen is standing in his cell, quietly talking to himself introspectively, as it gradually gets darker and darker. You realize this is how he will spend the rest of his life.

Discussed in this Essay:

The Spy Who Stayed Out in the Cold: The Secret Life of FBI Double Agent Robert Hanssen, by Adrian Havill (St. Martin’s Press, 2001).

The Spy Next Door: The Extraordinary Secret Life of Robert Philip Hanssen, the Most Damaging FBI Agent in U.S. History, by Elaine Shannon and Ann Blackman (Little, Brown, 2002).

The Bureau and the Mole: The Unmasking of Robert Philip Hanssen, the Most Dangerous Double Agent in FBI History, by David A. Vise (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2002).

Into the Mirror: The Life of Master Spy Robert P. Hanssen, by Lawrence Schiller (HarpersCollins, 2002).

Spy: The Inside Story of How the FBI’s Robert Hanssen Betrayed America by David Wise (Random House, 2002).

CBS’s four-hour, two-night production of Master Spy: The Robert Hanssen Story, aired November 10 and 17, 2002; screenplay by Norman Mailer, directed by Lawrence Schiller.

Jim Ohlson retired from the FBI in 2000 with over 28 years as a special agent.

1. Hanssen had been arrested Sunday evening, February 18; the arrest was made public the following Tuesday morning.