Spy: The Inside Story of How the FBI's Robert Hanssen Betrayed America (40 page)

So Hanssen may have rationalized that by secretly sending nude photos of Bonnie to his friend, he was doing his bit on the home front, running a bizarre one-woman U.S.O. show, starring his unwitting and unclad wife. But if that was his reason, it was soon forgotten; even after Hoschouer came home from the war, Hanssen continued to send him photos of his naked wife. It went on for years.

In Vietnam, Hoschouer had received negatives of some of the pictures so he could enlarge them, which he did. But, in time, he began to have qualms about what they were doing. He gave the negatives back to Hanssen. We’ve got to stop this, he told him.

That was in the 1980s, and Hanssen by now was a special agent of the FBI and had begun his second career as a Russian spy. For three or four years, he did stop sending the prurient photos to Jack. But then he started up again.

The photographs were only the beginning. In 1987, the Hanssens bought the house on Talisman Drive; Jack was a frequent visitor and would stay with them whenever he could get to Washington.

The Hanssens’ house had three levels, with a living room, dining room, and kitchen on the ground floor. The Hanssens had added the spacious deck in the rear, just beyond the living room. Up five steps to the left of the front door were three bedrooms and two baths. The Hanssens’ bedroom was one of these; all three boys in bunk beds shared another, and the couple’s youngest daughter had her own small bedroom. Down five steps from the ground floor was another bedroom, where Jack would stay, with a den next to it and a powder room.

And it was in the house on Talisman Drive that Hanssen’s fantasy to have other men, but Jack in particular, view his wife naked moved from photographs to reality. Again without Bonnie’s knowledge, Bob proposed that Jack watch them having sex. Why he did so only he knows, but in an Internet posting about Bonnie in June 1998 on a pornographic website, he wrote: “Bob loved having men’s tongues dangle out looking at his wife.”

Whatever his motive, Hanssen was exposing secrets and at the same time exposing his wife. He betrayed his country and simultaneously betrayed his wife. And all the while he was confessing his sexual sins, and his espionage, to his priests, piously observing the rules and rites of Opus Dei, and urging his friends to get closer to God.

And so, at night, Hoschouer slipped out through the French doors onto the deck where, standing on a chair, he was able to look through the bedroom window and watch the Hanssens having sex. Because the deck backed onto the woods, there was little chance that anyone would see him standing there in the dark.

It was not enough for Hanssen to allow his close friend to watch the most intimate, private moments between a husband and wife; he also later felt compelled to write about it on the Internet. His language was raw and crude, and a few sentences are sufficient to capture the tone:

“He [Jack] could see her walking around the room naked and I’d position her in different ways on the bed while fucking her so he’d get a good look of my cock going in and out or of her tits bouncing. By pure chance, and his good fortune, she even bent over right in front of the window once when he was there, and he got a good view of her pussy from about a foot away. It was great. I was dying watching.… Anyway, Jack and I have our fun. Bonnie looks great. Jack and I love seeing her tits slapping together as she takes cock hard.” And so on.

The live sex show had worked, and more than once, but Hanssen, ever the techie, decided there was a better way. Jack might get chilly standing in the night air, and there was always a chance, however remote, that one of the kids might spot him and wonder what Uncle Jack, as he liked to be called by the Hanssen children, was doing out there in the dark.

Starting sometime in the 1990s, Hanssen hid a small video camera in his bedroom and rigged it up so that Jack, sitting in the comfort of the downstairs den, could watch on television as Bob and Bonnie had sex in the upstairs bedroom.

Jack did, over a period of about three years. The den was cozy; there was a fireplace, a comfortable chair, and the television. Told by Hanssen on what nights to watch, Hoschouer would tune in to his own special, closed-circuit channel.
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If Hoschouer was visiting for several days, Hanssen might ask his friend to watch the first night. Jack would agree. And the next day, Hanssen would ask, How was it? Hanssen would question his friend closely, to be sure Jack had tuned in. “I would tell him something specific I had seen,” Jack said, “so he knew I had watched.”

And the next night, Hanssen would say again, Do you want to watch? “I was uncomfortable, and a couple of times I told him the signal went away. I said this as an excuse when I did not want to watch.”

By now Hoschouer had retired from the Army in Germany, where he worked for an arms dealer and lived in Trier, an ancient industrial city. Hanssen always looked forward to Jack’s visits and their shared secret, of which Bonnie remained unaware.

According to Hoschouer, he never asked to view the sex show. “I never initiated it. I was always invited to watch. And sometimes I didn’t want to. I didn’t think it was right. But he wanted me to do it so bad.” He paused, and added, “I’ve got no excuse.”

Hoschouer could have said no, but he never did. He never told his friend to stop. And he could not deny that he was sometimes turned on by what he saw.

Once, but only once, he asked Hanssen:

“Why do you do this?”

“I’m a human and I’m weak,” Hanssen replied.

When the bizarre story of the video camera in the bedroom and the televised sex show leaked to the media several months after Hanssen’s arrest, Hoschouer struggled with the notoriety it brought.
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The close bond formed between two teenagers had resulted, decades later, in an outcome that Hoschouer could hardly have foreseen; his friend in prison for life as a Russian spy, and his own participation as a voyeur exposed to the world.

In his late fifties, Hoschouer was a handsome man, still with a touch of military bearing, square-jawed but now gray haired, his face lined. He told the FBI and the Justice Department’s internal inquiry how the sexual activity had begun with still photos and moved on to live watching, and then the closed-circuit television. He was also remarkably candid, if initially reticent, in a series of more than a dozen interviews by telephone from Germany and in person in Washington. He
appeared to be remorseful and vastly embarrassed by what he and Hanssen had done, but he did not attempt to deny any of it.

Their mutual preoccupation with sex and pornography had gone on for years, not only in the house on Talisman Drive but in their exchanges of transatlantic e-mails, their visits together to strip clubs in Washington, and once to a bordello in Germany, where Jack had watched as a prostitute performed oral sex on Bob.

Hanssen’s obsession with the idea of other men seeing his wife naked was the consistent theme of his various Internet writings. In June 1998, he posted a story on an adult website, a fantasy about Bonnie, naked and fixing her hair in their apartment near the elevated railway in Chicago, when suddenly, at least in Hanssen’s imagination, she spots a group of five men, track workers, staring at her through the window. At first, Bonnie tries to pull the shade, but it keeps rolling up, exposing her “cute little bush.” Hanssen went on: “She felt aroused. ‘If only Bob were here,’ she thought, ‘I’d show him even a better time.’ ” Then she performs a striptease for the track workers. “Bonnie was starting to enjoy this.”

In another of Hanssen’s Internet fantasies, at a party in their apartment Bonnie becomes groggy when she has a few drinks and puffs on a joint. She strips in the bedroom and he orders her to stay that way as two of the male guests wander in and see her. Then Hanssen enters the bedroom. “Bonnie was there lying completely nude on her bed, with her pussy held open, her legs splayed wide, just as I had told her. She was a good obedient wife.” Was Hanssen, in his Internet fantasy, reenacting the punishment he had received when his father made him sit with his legs spread wide? The parallel was striking.

In the spring of 2001, some three months after Hanssen’s arrest, Bonnie found out for the first time that Jack Hoschouer had been watching her make love to her husband for years, live, and on television.

Bonnie was told the horrendous truth, not directly by her jailed husband or by Jack Hoschouer, but by a psychiatrist hired—and soon thereafter fired—by Plato Cacheris. Dr. Alen J. Salerian was a fifty-four-year-old Armenian, born in Turkey, who received his medical education in Istanbul and in the United States, to which he emigrated in 1971. He had worked for the FBI and had previously consulted on cases for Cacheris. This time, however, their relationship went rapidly downhill.

The root cause was that Salerian, although warned not to do so by Cacheris, revealed to Bonnie that Jack had watched her for years having
sex with her husband. Cacheris was also outraged that the psychiatrist planned to go on BBC television and talk about Hanssen, whom he had evaluated at the request of Cacheris.

Salerian had learned about the photographs, the video camera, and Jack’s role when he met with Hanssen over a period of days in a small interview room at the Alexandria Detention Center.

“You’re not a good Catholic and you cannot put this behind you until you confess to your wife,” Salerian insisted. Salerian also told Hanssen that Jack had talked to the FBI. “We can assume everything Jack knows will surface,” the psychiatrist said. “So it should also surface between you and Bonnie.”

In mid-May, three months after Hanssen’s arrest, Salerian went to Bonnie and told all. “I came to a conclusion in my work with Bob that Bonnie’s knowledge was critical,” he said. “There would be no relief for this man without her knowing. It was just a matter of time before Bonnie had this information. I thought his wife must be told. He totally agreed with me after many hours, tearful hours in prison. This happened in a crisis over the weekend. On Monday after, I talked with Bonnie. I told her everything. I spent four hours with her. Bonnie cried and hugged me. Bob said he was very happy about what I did.”

Only afterward did Salerian tell Cacheris what he had done. The legendary defense attorney went ballistic when he heard the news. Cacheris was a gentleman of the old school. He felt Bonnie Hanssen had suffered enough when her husband was arrested as a Russian spy; her life had already been shattered; she did not need to know the rest. Moreover, at a meeting on May 14, Cacheris had explicitly warned Salerian not to reveal the sex show to Bonnie.

Cacheris called Salerian into his office. In a tense confrontation on the morning of May 17, Cacheris told the psychiatrist he had disclosed to Bonnie Hanssen, in Cacheris’s words, “highly sensitive matters which we had specifically directed him not to disclose to her.” According to Cacheris, Salerian replied, “It went over my head. I dropped the ball. I goofed.”

Cacheris had also heard reports that Salerian was preparing to do an interview on BBC television to discuss the case.
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It was true, and
Cacheris, declaring he no longer had confidence in the psychiatrist, handed him a letter dismissing him.

In defending his decision to inform Bonnie about what her husband had done, Salerian said, “In my mind I was part of the defense team, and I was working with them. I saw myself as a team member. I didn’t think I was reporting to him [Cacheris]. I was joining the team as a forensic expert to offer my opinions and advice, but primarily to work with Bob and Bonnie Hanssen.”

Cacheris disagreed, suggesting that Salerian had another agenda. “He [Salerian] got the idea there was a psychiatric defense, and I think he envisioned himself as the star witness in a highly public trial,” Cacheris said.

Having fired Salerian, Cacheris still felt he needed a psychiatrist to evaluate his client. It was then that he turned to Dr. David Charney, an Alexandria, Virginia, psychiatrist who had made a specialty of studying the minds and motivations of spies.

The two psychiatrists who saw Hanssen disagreed sharply on whether his sexual obsessions were related in any way to his espionage. Salerian thought there was a link. “He felt extremely guilty about his psychological behavior,” he said. “He wanted to get rid of and contain his sexual demons. He found some comfort in religion and in Opus Dei. Opus Dei told him to pray to heal the demons. He prayed and failed. He became increasingly despondent over his inability to help himself. He was a tormented soul as a result of his psychological wounds and sexual demons.

“The spying in some symbolic and psychological way was an attempt to keep his sexual demons at bay. The spying was a diversion, keeping his mind preoccupied. Spying was less of an evil than his own illness. It would keep him busy and away from his own demons.”

Dr. Charney, on the other hand, saw little relationship between the kinky goings-on at Talisman Drive and Hanssen’s spying for the KGB. “The sexual stuff has very little to do with the espionage,” he said. “I’m not going to say zero, but I think it’s very incidental to the true dynamics of his involvement with spying. He had a great hunger for not being lonely, and Jack was so valuable to him, he had to do with Jack what he thought it took to keep Jack’s interest sustained. Jack had the same struggle within as Hanssen did, and one or the other would get very remorseful.

“Bob valued Jack’s friendship a tremendous amount, and their relationship was sealed at the time they were eighteen years old. When you
are eighteen, relationships are coarse, physical, athletic, towel-snapping in the locker room, bragging, sexual. I believe their relationship was arrested at that time psychologically. It [the live and video sex show] was a very middle-adolescent or late-adolescent thing.”

Except for Jack, no one knew of Hanssen’s infatuation with pornography. To his colleagues, he went out of his way to appear straitlaced and even prudish, as he did when he told Paul Moore that strip clubs were sinful.

“Bob never indicated any interest in sex,” said Ron Mlotek, Hanssen’s friend at the State Department. “He was to all intents and purposes almost asexual. In the cafeteria we’d see a short skirt go by. I’d say, ‘Wow, look at that.’ From Bob, no reaction, never.”