Spy: The Inside Story of How the FBI's Robert Hanssen Betrayed America (15 page)

In order to reach that initial plateau on the way to canonization, a miracle had to be attributed to Escriva and approved by various papal bodies. A year after Escriva’s death, a Carmelite nun was reportedly cured of a rare disease after her family prayed for Escriva’s intercession with God. The miracle was officially accepted and Pope John Paul II, clad in golden robes, beatified Escriva in 1992 before some three hundred thousand people in St. Peter’s Square. He then became known as Blessed Josemaria.

But this elevation did not take place without considerable controversy. Critics of Opus Dei complained that the beatification process had been speeded up, and that Opus Dei had helped to elect Cardinal Karol Wojtyla as Pope John Paul II in 1978 and exercised undue influence in
the Vatican. It was John Paul II who elevated Opus Dei to the unusual status of a “personal prelature” in 1982. And early in 2002, he announced that Escriva would be made a saint in October.

The critics also see Opus Dei as an elitist organization that seeks to recruit talented young people who will rise in their professions and exercise influence in society. The Opus Dei schools, in the critics’ view, play a key role in the recruitment process.

Officials of Opus Dei deny these various criticisms and claim that their influence in Rome is exaggerated. They point out that in the College of Cardinals, the body that chooses a new pope, only one of the 179 members, Juan Luis Cipriani Thorne, the archbishop of Lima, Peru, is a member of Opus Dei. “That is not a very big voting bloc,” said Brian Finnerty, the Opus Dei communications director.

Like Hanssen, about 70 percent of the organization’s eighty-four thousand members worldwide are married or about to be, and are known as supernumeraries. The rest are men and women who commit themselves to celibacy and are called numeraries, if they live in residences in Opus Dei centers, or associates, if they live with their families or on their own.

People who seek to become members must apply in writing and go through a six-month period of familiarization with Opus Dei. Before they are accepted, they must enter into an oral contract to commit to the organization’s aims of holiness and to accept its jurisdiction in religious matters. All members are expected to perform small acts of penance during the day. Some of the celibate members, as a form of penance, wear a chain around their thigh known as a cilice.
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“The cilice is designed to be uncomfortable but not harmful to a person’s health,” Finnerty said. “It does not break the skin.”

Louis Freeh, who was FBI director when the bureau closed in on Hanssen and arrested him, attended the same church as did Hanssen, St. Catherine of Siena, and Freeh’s son went to the Heights, the Opus Dei school, with the Hanssen boys. However, Freeh was not himself a member of Opus Dei, according to Finnerty.
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Was Hanssen’s religion, his constant preoccupation with God, a genuine expression of deep faith, or part of his cover as a Russian spy? Although some counterintelligence officials think Hanssen’s religion was a convenient cloak, those who knew him well disagree. True, his denunciation of “godless Communism” helped to throw off suspicion that he was on the payroll of the godless Communists. But Hanssen spent far too much time in his devotions, at church and with Opus Dei, and in long discussions about religion with his friends, for it all to have been a complete sham.

Ron Mlotek, who became a good friend of Hanssen’s when they worked together at the State Department in the 1990s, had no doubt at all that the FBI man’s faith was authentic. “The first time I set foot in his office to welcome him I saw he had two open Bibles lying on his desk and a crucifix on the wall. That launched us into a deep conversation about our respective faiths.” And it was the beginning of their friendship.

Mlotek, the chief legal counsel of the Office of Foreign Missions, said they became friends “because Bob was a strongly religious Catholic who felt a kinship with an Orthodox Jew.

“Bob’s basic argument is that all Catholics are Jews. Because Jews are our elder brothers. They worship a Jew. The Last Supper was a Passover seder. But Catholics are more fulfilled because of their belief in the resurrection. Those were his arguments. He never said ‘Ron, become a Catholic,’ but he did say, ‘It would be good for you.’ I went with him to Opus Dei meetings. He thought the fact that I was Orthodox was a common link.” Mlotek added: “We had these conversations all the time—about the differences between the two religions, and about philosophy.”

Jack Hoschouer, Hanssen’s closest friend, also believed that he was genuinely devout. “His religion is real,” he said. “When you find out where the money is, I think you’ll find a whole bunch of Catholic charities got big contributions. That’s only speculation. He often said, ‘Evil is well-funded. The forces of good are underfunded.’ He may have wanted to do something that would give him money for that reason.”

Be that as it may, the stark contrast between Hanssen’s militant Catholicism and his simultaneous service to the Soviets was so seemingly irreconcilable as to baffle his most intimate friends and family members. Even Father McCloskey, who was strongly critical of
Hanssen’s betrayal of his country, considered him truly pious. So did Tom Burns, his former boss at the FBI.

“I believe he was seriously religious and a serious spy,” Burns said. “Maybe a diagnosis would find him totally bipolar, able to segment different parts of his life. Parts that to all appearances were a contradiction.”

Although Mlotek did not doubt Hanssen’s faith, he thought he had answered the wrong calling. “He should have been a priest,” Mlotek said. “I think everyone would have been better off. The whole world would have been better off.”

Because Hanssen had suggested a few diamonds might be welcome, the KGB obliged with one in September 1988. Along with the third personal letter of thanks from KGB chairman Kryuchkov, which Hanssen fished out from under a bridge in Idylwood Park in northern Virginia, was a diamond worth $24,720.

A few months later, at Christmas, he received a second diamond valued at $17,748. For Hanssen, diamonds had the virtue of being small and therefore easily concealed. The cash that kept rolling in from Moscow was getting to be bulky and more difficult to hide, especially in a house that he shared with a wife and six children.

At the end of January, soon after the inauguration of the first President Bush, Hanssen left an emergency call-out signal for the KGB in the middle of downtown Washington, just above Dupont Circle at Connecticut Avenue and Q Street. The signal alerted the KGB to clear
BOB
, the drop in Idylwood Park, and it did so immediately. Hanssen had left a package there with a copy of a cable and a note reading: “Send to the Center right away. This might be useful.”

Hanssen’s choice of language was revealing, for it made clear how much he sought to ingratiate himself with his unseen colleagues in the KGB. Perhaps as much or more than the money and diamonds, their respect and approval was plainly important to him. “This might be useful” had the ring of an overeager subordinate trying to make brownie points with his boss. Hanssen was signaling that he was not only the KGB’s man in Washington but always prepared and ever alert to their needs, a blend of Boy Scout and James Bond.

As spring came to the capital, Hanssen placed another signal for the Russians at a prearranged location, this time farther north on Connecticut Avenue at Taft Bridge, a heavily traveled span famously guarded by two pairs of stone lions. In the exchange that followed at dead drop
CHARLIE
, near his home, Hanssen left two packages. One contained a
TOP SECRET/SCI
document from the office of the Director of Central Intelligence that provided guidance for the next decade for MASINT, the most arcane and exotic form of the various types of intelligence collected by the CIA and other U.S. spy agencies.

Although the term is little known to the public, MASINT, which stands for measurement and signature intelligence, applies to a wide variety of data scooped up by satellites and by secret sensors around the globe and under the seas. MASINT includes, for example, satellites equipped with gamma ray trackers and X-ray spectrometers to measure radioactive fallout from a nuclear explosion, as well as infrared sensors to detect antiballistic missile tests. It includes powerful phased array radars, such as
COBRA DANE
at Shemya, Alaska, which was built to watch for a possible Soviet missile attack and measure Soviet missile test launches. And MASINT includes as well the hundreds of hydrophones planted on the ocean floor in a program called SOSUS to measure the distinctive acoustic signature of Soviet (now Russian) submarines.

The document passed to the KGB by Hanssen was significant because it reflected the consensus of the intelligence community on the secret operations and goals of the MASINT program. The report was crammed with specifics and highly technical information.
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Hanssen must have been unusually nervous about transmitting it to the KGB, because for the first and only time he asked that it be returned. Typically there would be numbered copies of a highly classified report of this nature; Hanssen would have a difficult time explaining why the copy he had removed had vanished if he did not get it back.

Hanssen’s second package contained another computer disk and more than five hundred pages of documents, many of them classified. In return, the KGB package was generous; it held $18,000 in cash and a third diamond, worth $11,700.

He had now received diamonds valued at a total of $54,168, and the KGB began to fret about whether Hanssen was concealing the gems or flashing them around. The Russians asked what security precautions he was taking to avoid suspicions about the diamonds. Not to worry, Hanssen told the KGB; if anyone asked, he would say the diamonds came from his grandmother.

But on reflection Hanssen himself decided the gems were risky, or that cash was more practical, because only two months later he returned the first and third diamonds, valued at a total of $35,920, and asked for cash instead, which he received the following Christmas Day.

Although Hanssen was unaware of it, the fact that he was paid in diamonds was the first clue obtained by the FBI about an unknown spy that ultimately fit him. According to John F. Lewis, Jr., the former assistant FBI director in charge of the intelligence division, the bureau learned of a “diamond connection” years before it suspected Hanssen.

“We had heard from a defector that somebody was being paid in diamonds,” Lewis said. “At least ten years ago or more.” That information, while tantalizing, was also frustrating, because the defector, who may have heard corridor gossip at KGB headquarters, had no information about who was receiving the gems, or even in which agency the spy worked.

Four days after receiving the MASINT report, the KGB tried to return it, but for some reason Hanssen failed to retrieve the document the first time it was placed in a dead drop for him. A second attempt also failed, but on the third try, in late May, he got it back.

In Moscow, meanwhile, the KGB officers who had been handling the Hanssen case were recognized in a formal ceremony in April. Among the medals handed out at headquarters were the coveted Order of the Red Banner, as well as the Order of the Red Star and the Medal for Excellent Service.

For Hanssen, there was still the problem of what to do with the cash flowing in from Moscow. Depositing the money in banks or investing it in the market was risky, since to do so would leave a paper trail of unexplained, unreported income.

So when he returned the two diamonds for cash in May, he included a floppy disk on which he broached the idea of the KGB setting up a bank account in Switzerland for him and transferring bonds into it. The traditional secrecy of Swiss banking laws, Hanssen knew, would mask the source of the funds as well as the identity of the account holder.

A few months later, the KGB turned down Hanssen’s idea of establishing a Swiss bank account. At some point, however, he went ahead and opened two bank accounts in Switzerland on his own, one at Credit Suisse and the other at Bank Leu. How much money passed through the accounts is not clear, but only a small amount remained in Switzerland at the time of his arrest.

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Bill Houghton, who worked for Hanssen in the Soviet analytical unit during these years, liked him but remembered some odd conversations they had. “We would occasionally travel on business; we went out to Los Alamos once. He told amusing stories. He always used to kid. If we were waiting in an airport he’d say, ‘That guy’s walking funny. My dad always said to me, Always beware of people walking funny. If you see people walking funny they aren’t normal.’