Spy: The Inside Story of How the FBI's Robert Hanssen Betrayed America

Disaster.

Inside the Soviet counterintelligence section at FBI headquarters in Washington, there could be no other word for what had happened: the two KGB agents who were the bureau’s highly secret sources inside the Soviet embassy in Washington had somehow been discovered. Valery Martynov and Sergei Motorin had been lured back to Moscow and executed. Each was killed with a bullet in the head, the preferred method used by the KGB to dispatch traitors.

There would be no more visits to the candy store by the FBI counterintelligence agents; M&M, as the two KGB men were informally if irreverently known inside FBI headquarters, were gone, two more secret casualties of the Cold War. The year was 1986. The FBI quickly created a six-person team to try to determine what had gone wrong.

Meanwhile, the CIA, across the Potomac in Langley, Virginia, was having its own troubles. It was losing dozens of agents inside the Soviet Union, some executed, others thrown into prison. The agency formed a mole hunt group.

Two years later, in 1988, the FBI still had no answer to how Martynov, whom the bureau had given the code name
PIMENTA
, and Motorin, code name
MEGAS
, had been lost. Something more had to be done, and the FBI now began thinking the unthinkable. As painful, even heretical, as it might be to consider, perhaps there was a traitor—a Russian spy—inside the FBI itself.

To find out the truth was the job of the bureau’s intelligence division, which was in charge of arresting spies, penetrating foreign espionage
services, and, when possible, recruiting their agents to work for the FBI. The division was divided into sections, one of which, CI-3 (the CI stood for counterintelligence), housed the Soviet analytical unit, the research arm of the bureau’s spycatchers. Perhaps, the division’s chiefs reasoned, something might be learned if the analysts, looking back to the beginning of the Cold War, carefully studied every report gleaned from a recruitment or a defector that hinted at possible penetrations of the FBI by Soviet intelligence. Perhaps a pattern could be seen that might point to a current penetration, if one existed.

Within the Soviet unit, two experienced analysts, Bob King and Jim Milburn, were assigned to read the debriefings of Soviet defectors and reports of Soviet intelligence sources who had, over the years, been recruited as spies by the FBI. The two shared a cubicle in Room 4835 with their supervisor.

The supervisor, a tall, forty-four-year-old, somewhat dour man, was not a popular figure among his fellow special agents, although he was respected for his wizardry with computers. He had been born in Chicago, served for a while as a police officer in that city, and joined the FBI twelve years before, in 1976. Now he was responsible for preparing and overseeing the mole study.

For the supervisor, directing the analysis to help pinpoint a possible mole inside the FBI was a task of exquisite irony. For he knew who had turned over the names of Valery Martynov and Sergei Motorin to the KGB. He knew there was in fact an active mole inside the FBI, passing the bureau’s most highly classified secrets to Moscow. He knew the spy was a trusted counterintelligence agent at headquarters. He knew, in fact, that the spy was a supervisory special agent inside the Soviet analytical unit. He knew all this but could tell no one. And for good reason.

Robert Hanssen was looking for himself.

Jack was visiting that Sunday in February 2001, as he did every chance he got when business took him to Washington from his home in Trier, Germany. He was, as usual, staying with Bob and Bonnie Hanssen in their modest brown-shingle home in Vienna, Virginia.

Jack Delroy Hoschouer—“Uncle Jack” to the Hanssens’ six children—was Bob Hanssen’s closest friend; they had met in high school in Chicago. Hanssen was an only child, but Jack considered himself closer than a brother. He had been best man at Bob and Bonnie’s wedding and was godfather to one of their children. He was so close that he telephoned Hanssen every day, without fail, from wherever he was.

They had bonded almost immediately at Taft High School in Chicago’s Norwood Park, the bookish, bespectacled Hoschouer and his taller, somber friend. Both were quiet and not drawn to sports, but they shared an interest in Formula One racing and girls. As adults, both were avid surfers of Internet porn sites; they were connoisseurs of the wide range of naked women, appealing to various sexual appetites, depicted in cyberspace. Hanssen would e-mail Hoschouer in Germany: had Jack seen this or that website? Check it out, Hanssen would suggest, the women and the sexual acrobatics on display were awesome.

Bob Hanssen, as Hoschouer well knew, was fascinated by sex and pornography, and not only on the Internet. When Jack was in Washington, they often secretly slipped away to visit strip clubs.

They also spent hours discussing philosophy, religion, and literature. Their career paths had diverged. Hoschouer was a military man; he had commanded an air infantry company in Vietnam and went into the
arms business after he retired from the Army. Hanssen, meanwhile, was in Washington and New York, building his career in FBI counterintelligence.

The two friends talked about more than sex and salvation. Intelligence was another subject of mutual interest. At the bureau, it was Hanssen’s daily preoccupation. And Jack had served five years as an Army attaché at the United States embassy in Bonn, a job in which he had a lot to do with intelligence. In Germany, Hoschouer had often met with his Soviet opposite number in an accepted, familiar game of trading intelligence tidbits.

Now, in northern Virginia on this February 18, Hoschouer was enjoying the last day of his visit. The quiet winter Sunday had begun like any other. The Hanssens, as usual, went to church. To those who knew the family, the Roman Catholic Church appeared central to their lives. Born a Lutheran, Hanssen had converted to Catholicism at the behest of his wife soon after their marriage. Their three boys and three girls attended Catholic schools. Hanssen not only went to mass frequently—often daily—he was a dedicated member of Opus Dei, a secretive, highly conservative, and somewhat mysterious Catholic group that emphasizes spirituality and prayer in the daily lives of its lay members. Hanssen frequently tried to persuade Catholic friends to come with him to Opus Dei meetings.

Hoschouer was about to join the Hanssens as they were leaving for church when his wife, Aya, called from Germany. He decided to talk to her rather than accompany the Hanssens.

After lunch, Hoschouer and Hanssen lazily threw the Frisbee for Bob’s dog, Sunday, a black mixed breed, part mastiff, part Labrador. Around 3
P.M.
, back inside, Hanssen handed his friend a copy of
The Man Who Was Thursday
, G. K. Chesterton’s novel about seven men who are apparent anarchists—the early twentieth-century version of today’s terrorists. Hanssen urged Jack to read it.

Each of the characters in the novel is named for a day of the week. Sunday, their leader, is a massive, outsize figure with supernatural powers who represents nature or the universe. But in the dreamlike fantasy, nothing is as it first appears. All six of Sunday’s followers turn out to be undercover Scotland Yard detectives, recruited in a dark room by a mysterious, unseen man who, of course, was really Sunday. But why was a senior police official leading such a convoluted, complex double life?

Hoschouer, later reflecting on that day, thought he understood why the book held a special attraction for Hanssen. Not one of the characters was what he first seemed to be; all were secretly somebody else. There were other intriguing bits. Of Gabriel Syme, the first police detective introduced to the reader, Chesterton wrote: “It never occurred to him to be spiritually won over to the enemy.”
^*

In midafternoon, it was time for Hoschouer to head for the airport. He was flying to Phoenix to visit his elderly parents in Mesa, Arizona. The two friends climbed into the Hanssens’ three-year-old silver Ford Taurus for the trip to Dulles.

They reached the airport, but Hanssen did not follow their customary routine. “Usually he’d park and he’d come in and we’d have a cup of coffee,” Hoschouer recalled. “Actually, he didn’t drink coffee, he’d have a Coke. This time he just dropped me off. I didn’t think anything about that because I knew his daughter Jane and his son-in-law were coming for dinner, so it seemed perfectly normal.” Richard Trimber, Jane’s husband, was a young associate in a downtown Washington law firm. The Trimbers had four children; Bob Hanssen, at fifty-six, was a grandfather.