Robert Hanssen

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Robert Hanssen

Robert Philip Hanssen (born April 18, 1944) was an FBI agent who was convicted of spying for the Soviet Union and Russia. He was arrested on February 18, 2001 at Foxstone Park near his home in Vienna, Virginia and charged with selling American secrets to Moscow for $1.4 million in cash and diamonds over a 15-year period. His treason has been described as the "worst intelligence disaster in US history."

Born in Chicago, Illinois, he was the son of a policeman. Hanssen suffered terrible abuse during his childhood, both mental and physical, at the hands of his domineering father. Court documents say he told his Moscow handlers that he read Kim Philby's book at age 14 and thought of him as a hero. Philby was a mole in British intelligence who eventually defected to the Soviet Union. Philby's autobiography My Silent War was published in 1968, so Hanssen must have meant a different book, or was lying to his Moscow handlers, or been mistaken.

He attended Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois and studied chemistry and Russian. He enrolled and dropped out of dentistry school, got a masters of accounting, got a business job but quit to join the Chicago police as an internal corruption investigator, then joined the FBI counterintelligence unit.

In 1979 he made his first traitorous act revealing to the Soviets that Soviet official General Dmitri Fedorovich Polyakov of the GRU was selling Soviet secrets to the USA, mostly out of hatred for the current "corrupt" Soviet leadership. He was the most important mole of this period.

Hanssen's wife Bonnie found Hanssen out when she caught him writing a secret letter that she believed was to another woman: Hanssen confessed that he sold some worthless facts to the Soviets for $20,000. Bonnie made him confess to a priest, identified by the New York Times as the Reverend Robert P. Bucciarelli, former head of Opus Dei in the USA. The actual confession and advice is privileged. It is believed that the priest did not break his vow of confidentiality because the spying continued for years. Hanssen's wife Bonnie apparently did not inform anyone in the FBI or elsewhere within the United States government that her husband had confessed his guilt to her either. In 1990, Hanssen's brother-in-law, who was also an FBI employee, complained to the bureau that Hanssen should be investigated for espionage. The brother-in-law had become suspicious when seeing the excessive amounts of cash that Hanssen had in his home. Hanssen's activities continued.

Other warning signs pointed to Hanssen as a spy. Another FBI agent arrested for spying, Earl Pitts, said he thought that Hanssen was also a spy. Hanssen withdrew his name from consideration for a higher post with more money when he discovered that a lie detector test would be required, even though he was under serious financial pressure. Neither of these red flags or other warning signs sparked an investigation that would cause Hanssen's activities to cease.

Hanssen was transferred to the Washington, D.C. office in 1981 and moved to the suburb of Vienna, Virginia. In 1985, he sold to the Soviets the names of three KGB agents in the United States secretly working for the FBI (Boris Yuzhin, Valery Martynov, and Sergei Motorin). These three had already been betrayed by another mole, CIA employee Aldrich Ames; they were soon recalled to Russia to face their fate. Because the FBI could attribute the leak to Ames, the trail to Hanssen was diverted. He also revealed an expensive secret tunnel dug under the Soviet embassy for the purpose of eavesdropping. He compromised the investigation of Felix Bloch, a State Department official accused of working with the Soviets; he gave them the plan of a program for the continuity of government in case of a Soviet nuclear attack and planned defense and retaliation. This included plans for contacting various government officials and securing them in underground bunkers. Additionally, Hanssen handed over extensive information about MASINT including the methods the US used to intercept Soviet transmissions. (Cherkashin 246) On top of this, he wrote up lists of agents that the KGB had a strong chance of recruiting (Vise). On two occasions, Hanssen gave the Soviets a list of all American double-agents, false spies who were designed to pass the Soviets misinformation.

According to USA Today: 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.

A priest at the private school where Hanssen's children attended said that Hanssen had regularly attended a 6:30 a.m. daily mass for more than a decade [Shannon and Blackman p. 86]. Father C. John McCloskey, III, said Hanssen occasionally attended the daily noontime mass at the Opus Dei Information Center in downtown Washington, D.C. (Wise 88).

USA Today: "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 this is what happened." Hanssen took great pains to prevent his Soviet handlers from learning his identity. He used dead drops, aliases, and many other methods to avoid having his identity revealed to the Soviets. The depth and breadth of the information that Hanssen passed would automatically raise suspicion that there was more than one person involved, but Hanssen's cautious practices assured that the Soviets knew of only one anonymous spy.

Federal authorities were also aided greatly by the opening of the KGB archives. Within the archives at Yasanevo, there was a taped phone conversation and a bag that might have had Hanssen's fingerprints on it. The archives also contained the entire KGB file on Hanssen (Cherkashin 251; Schiller 260).

According to the New York Observer, August 6 2001:

On July 29, the Los Angeles Times published a lengthy investigation of his role as a top F.B.I. overseer of domestic counterintelligence operations. From documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act...the Times discovered that Mr. Hanssen spent several years directing the bureau's notorious Reagan-era probes of American liberal and peace organizations. Such groups were deemed inimical to the objectives of the conservatives then in power, who tended to regard dissent over the nuclear-arms race and war in Central America as Soviet-influenced and subversive....As later Congressional investigations would show, what this often meant in practice was the harassment and sometimes the smearing of Americans engaged in lawful political activity. Among the many groups under surveillance by the F.B.I. in those days were the Gray Panthers, nuclear-freeze advocates associated with SANE-and the left-leaning Catholic adversaries of Opus Dei who opposed the American-backed repression in Central America.

Robert Novak. The conservative columnist [admitted] on July 12 that Mr. Hanssen had served as his main source for a 1997 column attacking Janet Reno, then the U.S. Attorney General, for supposedly covering up 1996 campaign-finance scandals.

Hanssen hired lawyer Plato Cacheris. On May 10, 2002, in exchange for cooperating with authorities, he was spared the death penalty and sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole, and his wife, along with their six children, received the survivor's part of Hanssen's pension, $39,000 per year. Hanssen is required to submit to a gag order with respect to public comments. Hanssen is currently serving his sentence at ADX Florence supermax penetentiary in Florence, Colorado.

Hanssen admitted to another secret life in having illicit relations with a Washington D.C. stripper. The stripper went to Hong Kong with Hanssen on a trip; he gave her money, jewels and a used Mercedes but ended his relationship with her prior to his arrest.

Hanssen is often portrayed as a mediocre agent, but in the words of David Major, one of his superiors at CI3, “Bob Hanssen was diabolically brilliant (Cherkashin 230).” He refused to use the dead drop sites that his handler, Cherkashin, suggested and instead picked his own dead drop sites. He even designated a code to be used when dates where exchanged. A “6” was to be added to all dates (ex: June 6 at 1:00 pm would be December 12 at 7:00 pm) (Cherkashin 230).

Many claim that Hanssen spied only for monetary gain. However, this appears to be just part of the truth. In an early letter to Cherkashin, he claims, “As far as the funds are concerned, I have little need or utility for more than the 100,000 (Cherkashin 236).” Hanssen felt that his skills were underused and sought acceptance and appreciation from his peers; as such, he began to spy for the KGB which recognized his lack of friends and attempted to compensate. For example, his handlers would often make small talk with him (Vise). Eventually, Hanssen's payments from his contacts in cash and gems would total more than $1.4 million.

Concurrent with the Hanssen investigation was a sensationalized investigation of a CIA employee who lived in Vienna and who was suspected of using dead drops along his jogging route through local parks. At the State Department there were two instances of espionage prior to Hanssen's being posted there (one involved a microphone in a conference room, the other involved a man in a tweed jacket that walked off with documents and has never officially be indentified).

References

Cherkashin, Victor, and Gregory Feifer. Spy Handler: Memoir of a KGB Officer: the True Story of the Man Who Recruited Robet Hanssen and Aldrich Ames. New York: Basic Books, 2005, ISBN 0-465-00968-9
Schiller, Lawrence, Master Spy: The Life of Robert P. Hanssen, (original title, Into the Mirror), based upon an investigation by Norman Mailer, HarperCollins, 2002, ISBN 0-06-051281-4 (a Made for TV movie[link])
Vise, David A. "From Russia with Love; FBI Agent Robert Hanssen Was a Frustrated Loner Isolated From Co-Workers, Family and Friends. Finally He Found Someone to Appreciate His Mind and Talents: the Nice Folks From the KGB." The Washington Post 6 Jan. 2002, Sunday Final ed., sec. W: 18. LexisNexis. LexisNexis. The Harker School Library, San Jose. 27 May 2006.
Wise, David. Spy: The Inside Story of How the FBI's Robert Hanssen Betrayed America. New York: Random House, 2002.

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Robert Hanssen

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