Spy: The Inside Story of How the FBI's Robert Hanssen Betrayed America (23 page)

Throughout the intelligence community there was a sense of victory, tinged with relief; the Soviet Union was history. At the CIA, Milt Bearden, the chief of the Soviet division, presided over his office’s annual Christmas gathering. The celebrants sported buttons with a hammer and sickle and star against a white background, and in big letters three words: “The party’s over!” All in all, it did not seem a good time to be spying for the Russians.

But there was another reason that Hanssen broke off all contact in December 1991. More than a decade earlier, he had consulted Father Bucciarelli when he promised Bonnie that he would stop spying. This
time, on a trip to Indianapolis, Hanssen had gone to see a second priest, who also urged him to stop betraying his country.

And so, weighing the dangers of being caught that flowed from the imminent collapse of the Soviet empire, and armed with the importunings of the cleric in Indiana, Hanssen made his decision.

He would go into hibernation.

Joanna’s 1819 Club on M Street in downtown Washington is the sort of place where businessmen slip in on their lunch hour or after work to ogle naked women gyrating to music under the bright lights. Compared to some strip clubs, it gets a fairly sedate crowd: patrons are more likely to be wearing suits and ties than bowling jackets and industrial caps.

Knowing her audience, Priscilla Sue Galey sometimes began her act dressed as a secretary, with a briefcase and glasses. In the anonymity of Joanna’s, the customers could watch Priscilla Sue take it all off.

“They all pictured their secretaries coming into the office that way,” Galey said. “A couple of the men told me that. But mostly it’s ego building. We come and sit and talk to them, hug them. Maybe this is the only place they can get away from their wives. They often come to watch and talk to a particular girl.”

In the fall of 1990, she said, while she was dancing at Joanna’s, a tall man sent a waitress over to her with a ten-dollar tip. The patron had also asked the waitress to relay a compliment. “It was something like he had never expected to find such grace and beauty in a strip club.”

Galey ran after the man as he was leaving and caught him at the door to thank him, more for his words than the money. A couple of weeks later, Robert Hanssen was back. This time, he gave her his business card, with the embossed gold seal of the FBI.

She was awed, and a little scared at first, to find out that her admirer
was an FBI agent. But perhaps, she thought, since he was, he could do her a favor. Then thirty-two, Galey said she had lost track of her father and could only remember meeting him once.

“I asked him to find my father. He said he’d try, ‘We have ways of doing that, we can find almost anybody.’ He wrote down the name of my father, Jerry Roberts. He got my mother pregnant in the church parking lot and my grandfather ran him off with a shotgun, in Marion, Indiana.”

She had last seen her father when she was eight, Galey said. “He came to the house only once, and played the piano with me, and he looked at me and said, ‘She’s mine.’ ” Then he was gone.

Hanssen never found Galey’s father, but at their next meeting he had a surprise for her. He gave her a sapphire-and-diamond necklace.

To Galey, it was as though a fairy tale had come true. Guys who came to strip clubs did not give the dancers jewelry worth thousands of dollars—not, at least, without wanting something in return, and she insisted Hanssen never did. There was, she asserted, except for one time, no sex, no hugs, no kisses, no physical contact.

This was a very unusual man, Galey realized, something far outside her usual experience. She had married briefly at sixteen, acquiring the name Galey, dropped out of high school, and moved to Columbus, Ohio, where she began stripping. There, she won the title of stripper of the year in the old burlesque theater in Columbus. “Charlie Fox was his name, the owner, and he taught me how to do it. He was like a drillmaster, teaching me how to strip. ‘You have to put on a show,’ Charlie would say.”

In 1980, with another stripper, she moved to Boston and danced at the Golden Banana under the stage name of Traci Starr. Four years later, she came to Washington and danced for a time at Archibald’s on K Street, an area notable for its lobbyists and fat cats. Then she switched to Joanna’s.

And the money was good. “At Joanna’s, I could make two, three, four hundred a night—one night eight hundred—on tips. The eight hundred dollars on one night was with a whole bunch of Oriental men. I think they were Japanese. I lit my nipples on fire, and they were pushing all this money at me. It’s a stripper’s trick. You turn away from the audience. First you have to split the matches, wet them, then put them on your nipples, and light the matches and in the dark, it looks like your
nipples are on fire. ‘Oh,’ the Japanese said, ‘Ooh, oh, oh,’ and all of them were pushing hundreddollar bills at me. I’m still laughing about it.”

Galey impressed Hanssen with more than her trim body and her stripper’s skills. Although she never completed high school, she was obviously very intelligent, interested in art, in life, and intellectually curious. She also had a sense of humor. “Stripping isn’t bad,” she said, “once you get over the being naked part.”

According to Galey, Hanssen was always trying to improve her spiritual life, continually urging her to go to church. He would ask, “What are you planning to do with the rest of your life? Are you getting any closer to God?” But, she said, although she passed a church every day on her way to Joanna’s, “I felt it was hypocritical for me to go to church and then go down to the club and take my clothes off.”

Once, Hanssen drove her to his church in northern Virginia, so she would know where it was, and he urged her to attend mass there. She did go to the church one Sunday, but only got as far as the parking lot. “I saw him and his family go in, and I just couldn’t do it.”

Hanssen also drove her by his house on Talisman Drive. “I think he was just proud to show me how he lived.” She envied the placid suburban neighborhood and the ordinary family life it evoked, a stability she had not known. But he never told his wife about her, she said. “He couldn’t explain a stripper.”

The fact that Hanssen frequented strip clubs was a secret that none of his FBI colleagues and friends knew about, except for Jack Hoschouer, who would accompany him to the clubs when he was in town.

Hanssen befriended other strippers besides Galey. He knew Dep Mullins, a Vietnamese woman who danced as “Brooke” at Joanna’s. They met in the summer of 1999 when Hanssen, accompanied by Hoschouer, visited the club. “I speak some Vietnamese,” Hoschouer said. “We invited her over and we spoke a little. ‘Dep’ means beautiful in Viet. She was raised in Hawaii, grew up on Maui. We saw her again early in 2000.” Both the FBI and the Justice Department investigated Hanssen’s encounters with Mullins. There was no evidence, however, that Hanssen ever developed with other strippers the same close and lengthy relationship he enjoyed with Galey.

Often, when an FBI agent retired, his coworkers would give a farewell party for him at one of the strip clubs. The club favored by
many FBI agents was the Good Guys, two blocks down from the Russian embassy.
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Paul Moore remembered a conversation with Hanssen at FBI headquarters around 1990, the same year he met Galey. “I’ve been to strip clubs twice, once at the Good Guys, where a bureau guy who was retiring got a plaque from the club, he’d been there so much. I told Bob about it and I said it was not too tawdry, it was a fairly joyful atmosphere. He said no, it was sinful. He said, ‘You were paying women to tempt men.’ It was just the kind of thing you would get from a priest.”

Some weeks after Hanssen gave Galey the necklace, she mentioned to him that she needed to have a tooth fixed. Before long, Hanssen left an envelope for her at the club; inside she found $2,000 in hundreddollar bills. By this time, Galey had almost convinced herself that Hanssen might be her long-lost father; it might explain his generosity. “I fantasized that he was my father, or an angel.”

Hanssen’s inspection duties that year were arduous, but he apparently had time to see Galey between trips, for they took long walks together, she said. “We walked to art galleries. To the National Gallery, to the Hirshhorn. He did offer to take me to the National Archives, but I was more interested in art than history. I like the old masters, Leonardo especially.”

When they were out together, Hanssen had his own ideas of how Galey should dress. “We were going to one of the art galleries. I had on very high white heels. He said, ‘You know your feet are going to hurt.’ What he really was saying was, ‘Please don’t look like this.’ We walked to a shoe store, picked out a new pair of regular blue or black pumps, and I wore them. He always wanted me to wear navy blue.”

What was going on here? Hanssen may have been having some sort of midlife fling, except it wasn’t much of a fling by Galey’s account. More likely, it seemed he was living a weird combination of a James Bond fantasy—the spy with a pretty woman on his arm—and the
My Fair Lady
version of the Pygmalion myth, with himself in the role of Professor Higgins to Galey’s Eliza Doolittle. He would uplift Galey, improve
her mind, and help her into a spiritual realm that somehow was lacking at Joanna’s. Or, on the other hand, as one observer suggested, “Maybe it was Opus Dei’s idea of an affair.”

Whatever Hanssen’s motive, his involvement with Galey went on for more than a year, and he risked taking her to places where they could be seen together. “One time he took me to lunch at a cop club, a private club. He said they were policemen and FBI agents. You had to be buzzed in. It was in Washington somewhere. On the way to the club, I discovered he was carrying a gun. He said, ‘I wonder if they’ll make me check this.’ ”

It was en route to the same lunch that Hanssen made a remark that startled Galey. She had asked him a question about something—she did not recall what—“and he said, ‘I could tell you, but I’d have to kill you.’ You could see it was a joke. He was smiling.” Still, Galey was unsettled by the remark.

Sometimes, Hanssen talked politics. “He explained Communism. He said it’s not like America, where you have individual rights; in Russia, the government has control of everything. But the way he explained it, it didn’t sound as bad as everyone made it out to be. It probably did have its good aspects. Because no one went hungry. It was like Communism is not all bad, but they did control every aspect of your life.”

In April 1991, Hanssen told Galey he was going on a trip to Hong Kong. Galey had a genuine enthusiasm for anything Asian, not just because of the eight-hundred-dollar night and how the Japanese patrons had appreciated it when she set her nipples on fire, and she pleaded with Hanssen to bring her back a souvenir. To her amazement, he asked if she would like to go with him.

She said she could not afford the trip, but Hanssen asked her to walk with him to a travel office. There, he picked up his airline reservation, and before she knew it, he had handed her a round-trip ticket to Hong Kong. When she tried to hug him for the gift, he shrank back. “He said, ‘Oh no, that is not necessary, it’s not necessary,’ and he smiled, like he didn’t want to hurt my feelings.” If she changed her mind about going, he said, she could turn in the ticket and keep the cash. “It was all magic,” Galey remembered.

If she asked him where all the money was coming from, “he would explain it away by telling me it was his inheritance.” Her time with Hanssen “was the most wonderful thing that ever happened to me. I really didn’t want to question it too much. It might make it go away.”

And so they flew to Hong Kong, on separate flights, and stayed at the same hotel in separate rooms for two weeks. They had breakfast together every morning and dinner at night. Once, they took the ferry to Kowloon, and Hanssen showed her around the streets and shopping malls. Galey was thrilled when they visited a sailing ship in the harbor. On most days, however, while Hanssen went about his inspection duties for the FBI, Galey shopped and went sight-seeing.

“Over cheesecake in Hong Kong, I said, ‘Mr. Hanssen, you must have done something wrong in your life.’ He thought for a while and said, ‘Well, I changed some test scores in college.’ That was it. I said, ‘You never cheated on your wife, you never went out with the guys and did something crazy?’ He said, ‘No, I’ve never done any of that.’ He lived a very sterile life as far as I could see.

“He was very straitlaced. He had compassion. You could see it, and you could tell that he was a good man.”

She was baffled as to what Hanssen wanted. “I never met any man who didn’t deep down want to screw me,” she said, matter-of-factly. “I had to find out.” She had wondered, she said, “if he was repressed because of his family and church.” She had to know “if he really wanted sex.”

So in Hong Kong, far from Talisman Drive, Galey made her move. “I had a lot of souvenirs and needed a bigger suitcase to get them home,” she said. “I asked him to come to my room to see the souvenirs and see how big a suitcase I would need. He came to my room.”

Galey was circumspect at first in describing what happened, but said that in the hotel room, she came on to him. What occurred next, she said, wasn’t “finished.” She regards sex, she added, as “meaning intercourse between two consenting persons that is finished,” a definition almost Clintonian in its precision. “There was no consent,” she said.