Robert Hanssen

• 1. Introduction

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  Robert Philip Hanssen, a veteran FBI agent, drove to Foxstone Park on the 18th of February 2001. The park sits near his home in the Washington suburb of Vienna, Virginia. He was there to leave a package of classified material at a dead drop. Agents were already watching, and they moved in. As they arrested him, Hanssen asked a single question: "What took you so long?" The United States Department of Justice would later describe his betrayal as "possibly the worst intelligence disaster in U.S. history." Between 1979 and 2001, in stretches with long silences between them, he passed secrets to Soviet and then Russian intelligence. Much of that time he worked in counterintelligence, the field built to catch men like him. How did he stay hidden for so long? What did he sell, and who paid for it? And why did the warnings from people around him fail to stop him?

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• 2. Chicago Roots

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  Norwood Park, a neighborhood of Chicago, was home to the Lutheran family into which Hanssen was born on the 18th of April 1944. His father, Howard, was a Chicago police officer who died in 1993. Hanssen was allegedly the target of his father's emotional abuse during childhood. He graduated from William Howard Taft High School in 1962. He then went to Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois, and earned a bachelor's degree in chemistry in 1966.

  After college, Hanssen applied for a cryptography position at the National Security Agency. Budget constraints led the agency to turn him down. He enrolled in dental school at Northwestern University instead, but after three years he shifted his studies toward business. In 1971 he received an MBA in accounting and information systems. An accounting firm hired him, though he quit after a year. He next became an internal affairs investigator with the Chicago Police Department, where he specialized in forensic accounting.

  At Northwestern's dental school, Hanssen met Bernadette Wauck, known as Bonnie, a staunch Roman Catholic. They married in 1968, and Hanssen converted from Lutheranism to Catholicism. In January 1976 he left the Chicago police to join the FBI. On the 12th of January 1976 he became a special agent, and his first posting was the bureau's field office in Gary, Indiana.

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• 3. The First Betrayals

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  In 1978 the bureau moved Hanssen to its New York field office, and his family went with him. It had three children at the time and would grow to six. The following year he was shifted into counterintelligence and handed a project: compiling a database of Soviet intelligence for the FBI.

  That same year, 1979, Hanssen approached the Soviet military intelligence service, the GRU, and offered his services. He never hinted at any political or ideological motive. After his capture, he told the FBI that money was his only reason. During this first cycle, which lasted until 1981, he handed over details of FBI bugging operations and lists of suspected Soviet intelligence agents.

  Dmitri Polyakov was his most damaging disclosure. Polyakov was a CIA informant who passed enormous quantities of information to American intelligence while rising to the rank of general in the Soviet Army. In 1985 the CIA officer Aldrich Ames, also spying for Moscow, betrayed Polyakov a second time. Polyakov was arrested in 1986 and executed in 1988. Ames took the official blame for exposing him, and Hanssen's own attempt stayed unknown until after his capture in 2001.

  In 1981 the FBI transferred Hanssen to headquarters in Washington, and the family settled in Vienna, Virginia. He worked in the budget office, where wiretapping and electronic surveillance fell under his responsibility. Colleagues came to regard him as a computer expert. Three years later he moved to the Soviet analytical unit, which studied and tried to catch Soviet spies in the United States. His section judged whether Soviet volunteers were genuine or secretly double agents.

  Back in New York in 1985, Hanssen made a business trip to Washington and resumed spying. On the 1st of October 1985 he mailed the KGB an anonymous letter that asked for $100,000 in cash. It named three KGB men secretly working for the FBI: Boris Yuzhin, Valery Martynov and Sergei Motorin. Ames had already exposed all three earlier that year. Yuzhin had come under intense KGB scrutiny after losing a concealed camera at the Soviet consulate in San Francisco. Martynov and Motorin were recalled to Moscow, convicted of espionage and shot in the back of the head. Yuzhin served six years in prison before a general amnesty freed him, and he later moved to the United States.

  Because the FBI blamed Ames for the losses, no one suspected or investigated Hanssen. That letter opened the longest and most active stretch of his spying.

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• 4. Searching for Himself

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  In 1987 the FBI recalled Hanssen to Washington with a strange assignment. He was to study every known and rumored penetration of the bureau and find the man who had betrayed Martynov and Motorin. In effect, he was hunting himself. His study gave nothing away, and in 1988 he handed the entire document to the KGB. It included the list of every Soviet who had approached the FBI about FBI moles.

  The same year, according to a government report, Hanssen committed a "serious security breach" by revealing secret information to a Soviet defector during a debriefing. Agents working for him reported it to a supervisor. Nothing happened.

  Felix Bloch, a State Department official suspected of espionage, became the next casualty of Hanssen's leaks in 1989. Hanssen warned the KGB that Bloch was under investigation, and the KGB abruptly cut off contact with him. The FBI could not produce good evidence, so Bloch was never charged. The State Department did fire him and denied him his pension. The puzzle of how the KGB learned of the investigation would eventually lead investigators to Hanssen.

  That year he also gave the KGB extensive details of American planning for measurement and signature intelligence, the collection of information through radar, spy satellites and signal intercepts. In 1977, when the Soviets began building a new embassy, the FBI had dug a tunnel beneath their decoding room. The bureau meant to eavesdrop through it but never did, fearing discovery. The multimillion-dollar tunnel became known to Moscow when Hanssen revealed it in September 1989. A payment of $55,000 reached him the next month. On two occasions, he also gave the Soviets a complete list of American double agents.

  In 1990 a relative came close to stopping him. Mark Wauck, Bonnie's brother and an FBI employee, urged an investigation into Hanssen. Their sister, Jeanne Beglis, had found a pile of money on a dresser in the Hanssens' house. Bonnie had also told her brother that Hanssen once spoke of retiring in Poland, then part of the Eastern Bloc. Wauck knew the FBI was hunting for a mole, and he told his supervisor. No action followed. Within a year, the Soviet Union itself would be gone.

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• 5. Hiding in Plain Sight

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  Ramon Garcia was the name Hanssen used with Moscow, sometimes shortened to Ramon. He never told the KGB or the GRU who he really was, and he refused to meet them in person. The FBI believes the Russians never learned the name of their source. Packages and payments moved through dead drops, public and unobtrusive places where each side left items for the other. His KGB handler, Victor Cherkashin, proposed drop sites, but Hanssen turned them down and picked his own. He also invented a date code. Six was added to the month, day and hour, so a drop planned for January 6 at 1:00 p.m. would be written as July 12 at 7:00 p.m.

  Despite that care, Hanssen could be careless. In one letter he urged the KGB to copy the management style of Chicago mayor Richard J. Daley. That remark could easily have pointed an investigator toward people from Chicago. He even suggested that his handlers try to recruit his closest friend, a colonel in the United States Army.

  When the USSR dissolved in December 1991, Hanssen went quiet for about ten months, possibly fearing exposure amid the upheaval. In 1992 he made a startling approach. He went to the Russian embassy in person, carrying a package of documents, and walked up to a GRU officer in the parking garage. He gave his code name, "Ramon Garcia", and called himself a "disaffected FBI agent". The officer did not recognize the code name and drove away. Russia then lodged an official protest with the State Department, suspecting a triple agent. Hanssen had shown his face and named his employer, yet escaped arrest because the FBI inquiry went nowhere.

  Ray Mislock, a fellow FBI agent, received a visit from Hanssen in 1993. Hanssen had hacked into Mislock's computer, printed a classified document and carried it over, saying, "You didn't believe me that the system was insecure." His superiors opened an investigation and in the end accepted that he was demonstrating weaknesses in the bureau's security. Mislock has since theorized that Hanssen was checking whether he was under investigation and invented the story as cover.

  In 1994 Hanssen showed interest in joining the new National Counterintelligence and Security Center. When told he would need a lie detector test, he changed his mind. Three years later the convicted FBI mole Earl Edwin Pitts told the FBI he suspected Hanssen because of the Mislock episode. Pitts was the second FBI agent to name him as a possible mole, but superiors remained unconvinced.

  Later, technicians sent to examine Hanssen's desktop computer after a reported failure found signs of tampering. Johnnie Sullivan, chief of the National Security Division's unit involved, had the machine impounded. Investigators found that Hanssen had installed a password-cracking program, and an attempted hack had triggered a security lockup. Sullivan asked the Office of Professional Responsibility for a further investigation. Hanssen said he had only wanted to connect a color printer and needed to bypass the administrator password. The FBI believed him and issued a warning.

  While that inquiry ran, Hanssen searched the bureau's internal case records for his own name. He was careless enough to type it into FBI search engines. Finding nothing, he restarted his spying after eight years without contact and reached the SVR, a successor to the KGB, in autumn 1999. He kept running searches for his name and address even then.

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• 6. The Mole Hunt

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  In 1994 the arrest of Aldrich Ames explained many of the assets U.S. intelligence had lost during the 1980s, including Martynov and Motorin. Two cases stayed unsolved, the Bloch investigation and the embassy tunnel. Ames had been stationed in Rome during the Bloch case, and as a CIA officer he had no access to the tunnel. Another spy had to exist. The FBI and CIA formed a joint mole-hunting team that year and listed every agent with access to the compromised cases. The FBI's codename for the unknown traitor was "Graysuit". The effort did uncover other penetrations, such as the CIA officer Harold James Nicholson, arrested in 1996. Hanssen slipped past, probably because the team concentrated on the CIA rather than the FBI.

  By 1998, criminal profiling techniques led the hunters to suspect Brian Kelley, a CIA operative who had worked on the Bloch investigation. Investigators searched his house, tapped his phone and followed him and his family. In November 1998 they sent a man with a foreign accent to his door. The man warned Kelley that the FBI knew he was a spy and told him to appear at a Metro station the next day to escape. Kelley instead reported the incident to the FBI. In 1999 the FBI interrogated him, his ex-wife, two sisters and three children, and all of them denied the accusations. Kelley was placed on administrative leave and stayed falsely accused until Hanssen was arrested. Michael Rochford, who directed the FBI team that found the key source, had at first assumed Kelley was the master spy.

  The breakthrough came from an operation that paid disaffected Russian intelligence officers for information about moles. The FBI paid $7,000,000 to a KGB man, Aleksander Shcherbakov, who had access to a file on someone labeled "B". The file did not contain Hanssen's name. It did include an audiotape of a conversation on the 21st of July 1986 between "B" and a KGB agent, Aleksander Fefelov. FBI agent Michael Waguespack thought he knew the voice but could not place it. In the other papers, investigators found notes in which the mole quoted a crude line from General George S. Patton's speech to the Third Army. FBI analyst Bob King remembered Hanssen using that same line. Waguespack listened to the tape again and recognized Hanssen's voice. Locations, dates and cases from the file matched Hanssen's career. Two fingerprints from a trash bag in the file proved to be his.

  Surveillance quickly showed Hanssen was in touch with the Russians again. To pull him back to headquarters, where he could be watched and kept away from sensitive data, the FBI promoted him. His new job was supervising FBI computer security. He received an office and an assistant, Eric O'Neill, a young surveillance specialist whose real assignment was to watch him. O'Neill learned that Hanssen stored his information on a personal digital assistant, a Palm III. O'Neill briefly got hold of it, and agents downloaded and decoded its encrypted contents. That gave the FBI conclusive evidence.

  In his last days at the bureau, Hanssen sensed trouble. In early February 2001 he asked a friend at a computer technology company for a job. He also believed he heard noises on his car radio that meant it was bugged, though the FBI could not later reproduce them. His final letter to the Russians, found at his arrest, complained of a "do-nothing job... outside of regular access to information". It added, "Something has aroused the sleeping tiger".

  On the day of his arrest, he left a friend at an airport and drove to Foxstone Park. He put a white piece of tape on a park sign to tell his Russian contacts that a drop was waiting. Then he taped a sealed garbage bag of classified material under a wooden footbridge over a creek. Agents saw him do it. The FBI waited two more days to see if any SVR handlers would come to the park. None did, and the Department of Justice announced the arrest on the 20th of February.

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• 7. Faith and Secrets

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  USA Today reported that people who knew the Hanssens described them as a close family. They attended Mass weekly and were very active in Opus Dei, a Catholic organization. Their three sons went to The Heights School in Potomac, Maryland, an all-boys preparatory school. Their three daughters attended Oakcrest School for Girls in Vienna, Virginia. Both schools are linked to Opus Dei.

  A priest at Oakcrest said Hanssen had gone to a 6:30 a.m. daily Mass for more than a decade. The Opus Dei priest Father C. John McCloskey said Hanssen also occasionally attended the noontime Mass at the Catholic Information Center in downtown Washington. After his imprisonment, Hanssen claimed he had periodically confessed his espionage to priests. He had urged fellow Catholics in the FBI to attend Mass more often, and he denounced the Russians as "godless" while spying for them.

  Jack Hoschouer, a retired Army officer and friend, was part of a different side of Hanssen's life. At Hanssen's suggestion and without Bonnie's knowledge, Hoschouer sometimes watched the couple through a bedroom window. Hanssen then secretly videotaped his private encounters and shared the tapes. Later he hid a video camera in the bedroom, connected by a closed-circuit television line to the guest bedroom so Hoschouer could watch. He also described the details of his marriage in Internet chat rooms, with enough information for people who knew the couple to recognize them.

  Priscilla Sue Galey, a Washington stripper, spent a great deal of time with Hanssen, who frequently visited the city's strip clubs. She traveled with him to Hong Kong and to the FBI training facility in Quantico, Virginia. He gave her money, jewels and a used Mercedes-Benz. He ended contact before his arrest, when she began abusing drugs and engaging in prostitution. Galey says that although she offered sex, Hanssen declined and told her he was trying to convert her to Catholicism.

  Bonnie Hanssen kept teaching theology at Oakcrest until she retired in 2020.

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• 8. Judgment and Afterlife

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  Plato Cacheris, a Washington lawyer, represented Hanssen in a plea bargain that spared him the death penalty in return for cooperation with authorities. On the 6th of July 2001 Hanssen pleaded guilty in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia. The charges were 13 counts of espionage, one count of attempted espionage and one count of conspiracy to commit espionage. He had sold about six thousand classified documents. They covered U.S. strategy for nuclear war, new military weapons technology and parts of the counterintelligence program. Over twenty-two years he had received more than $1.4 million in cash, diamonds and Rolex watches.

  On the 10th of May 2002, Judge Claude Hilton sentenced him to 15 consecutive terms of life in prison without the possibility of parole. Hanssen told the court: "I apologize for my behavior. I am shamed by it." He added: "I have opened the door for calumny against my totally innocent wife and children. I have hurt so many deeply."

  From the 17th of July 2002, Hanssen was federal prisoner #48551-083. He served his sentence at ADX Florence, a supermax prison near Florence, Colorado, in solitary confinement for 23 hours a day. On the 5th of June 2023 he was found unresponsive in his cell and pronounced dead after attempts to revive him failed. His autopsy listed the cause of death as colon cancer.

  Books and screens soon took up the case. David Wise's Spy: The Inside Story of How the FBI's Robert Hanssen Betrayed America came out from Random House in 2002. Eric O'Neill's memoir, Gray Day: My Undercover Mission to Expose America's First Cyber Spy, followed from Penguin Random House in spring 2019. A 2002 television movie, Master Spy: The Robert Hanssen Story, had a teleplay by Norman Mailer and starred William Hurt. Jailers let Hanssen watch it, but he grew so angry that he switched it off. The 2007 film Breach cast Chris Cooper as Hanssen and Ryan Phillippe as O'Neill. A 2007 documentary, Superspy: The Man Who Betrayed the West, traced the hunt. A 2021 documentary, A Spy in the FBI, and a CBS News podcast, Agent of Betrayal: The Double Life of Robert Hanssen, covered his story too.

  Dan Brown's novel The Da Vinci Code names Hanssen in chapter 5 as the Opus Dei member best known to outsiders. His sexual behavior and espionage conviction hurt the organization's reputation.

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