Spy: The Inside Story of How the FBI's Robert Hanssen Betrayed America (41 page)

There was one exception, however. When the FBI searched Hanssen’s car, agents found two photographs of the sultry Welsh actress Catherine Zeta-Jones. “The only time I ever heard him talk about sex,” Mlotek said, “was when he described the actress in the movie with Sean Connery about the bank heist. Catherine Zeta-Jones. He teams up with her because she is also a thief.
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She was wearing tight-fitting bodysuits in the movie. He talked a lot about that. He said she looked really hot. He saw the movie five times. She did something for him.”

But to Bonnie, Hanssen revealed nothing about his sexual escapades, the visits to strip clubs, his relationship with Priscilla Sue Galey, the trip to Hong Kong, the pornography on the Web, or, most of all, how he had turned their bedroom into an X-rated video for the amusement of his friend Jack.

One can only imagine Bonnie Hanssen’s deep humiliation and anger, her utter devastation, when she learned the truth about what her husband had done to her. The intimacies they had shared in the privacy of their bedroom were not only seen by Jack but described by Hanssen and posted around the world on the Internet. Yet she continued to visit her husband in jail. She remained fully supportive of the man to whom she had been married for more than thirty-two years. Friends said she had forgiven him. “Her mission now is to save his soul,” said one.

But there was an even more shocking sexual scheme hatched by Hanssen, worse, if that is possible, than allowing his friend Jack to watch him having sex with Bonnie.

Jack had no children, and over several years, Hanssen, the father of six, had often said how sad he was that the Hoschouers were childless. He suggested that if Bonnie and Jack could, one way or another, make love and have a baby boy—it was always a baby boy—they would be a three-person family. Hoschouer did not take these musings seriously; he knew there was no way that Bonnie would ever agree to it.

But in 1997 Hanssen sent the first of two e-mails on the subject to Jack in Germany. Suppose, Hanssen wrote, there were a relaxed, quiet evening, just the three of them. In the scenario Hanssen imagined, they would all be having drinks. The night would turn romantic, and lead to group sex. Bonnie would be impregnated with Jack’s child.

The next e-mail took on a much more sinister cast. There was a drug, Hanssen wrote, called Rohypnol. The date-rape drug.
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It was called that because teenagers and others have used it to sedate women and then have sex with them. Usually, the women who have been drugged cannot remember what happened. It might be the perfect solution to the problem. As Hanssen knew, Rohypnol is illegal in the United States, but the pills can be obtained by prescription in Europe. Could Jack get some?

Although the drug, if prescribed, is available in Germany, Jack had heard that it could be bought over the counter in the Netherlands. To his later regret, instead of saying no, Hoschouer sent an e-mail back to Hanssen saying he lived near Holland and would look for it.

As it happened, Hoschouer was teaching in Belgium that summer, on the Dutch border. He got on his bike and rode fifteen miles over the border to Eindhoven. “I had no intention of doing it, of buying the drug,” he said. “I did not look for the drug. The only way would have been if someone jumped out of the bushes and gave it to me.”

As for drugging and having sex with Bonnie, Hoschouer said, “There is no way I would do that. It would be rape.” He also said he told Hanssen he could not participate in the scheme.

After Hanssen’s arrest, Hoschouer did tell the FBI about watching the marital scenes in the Hanssens’ bedroom over the years, both
through the window and on TV, but he did not reveal the plan to drug Bonnie. At the request of the FBI, however, he turned over his computer hard drive to the bureau.

Jack usually deleted his e-mail exchanges with Hanssen about sex, and he thought he had done so with the two from 1997. But the bureau’s computer technicians were able to retrieve them.

Much later, almost a year after Hanssen’s arrest, Hoschouer thought he had figured out why his friend wanted him to father a child with Bonnie Hanssen. Maybe, he speculated, Hanssen reasoned that if Jack had the child he would be emotionally bound to the family, so that if Hanssen were caught and sent to prison, Jack would step in as a surrogate father and take care of his family. Their family.

It was a bizarre concept, but Hanssen’s e-mail intrigue with Hoschouer to acquire Rohypnol and sedate Bonnie for sex with Jack was an almost natural progression from the still photos, the visual watching, and the video show. There was not much more Bob could do. He had already violated Bonnie in every other way.

Robert Hanssen, who took a stripper to Hong Kong, used his own wife as an unwitting porn star, and plotted to drug her for sex with his friend, had come a rather long way from the wide-eyed twenty-two-year-old who told Aya Hoschouer in the Playboy Club in Chicago that it was against the rules to touch the cottontails on the waitresses.

Hanssen was denied bail—the federal judge said he posed “a severe risk of flight”—and he was locked up in the Alexandria Detention Center, the same redbrick jail where Aldrich Ames had been housed in the months after his arrest.

Plato Cacheris went to see Hanssen there after receiving the phone call from Bonnie Hanssen. “He asked me to be his lawyer,” Cacheris said. “The government got a court order immediately freezing all his assets. So I am doing this pro bono.” There was no way that Bonnie Hanssen could have afforded Cacheris’s fees in any event; but few criminal defense lawyers would turn away from the public attention that inevitably accompanies a high-profile international spy case.

And Cacheris was no stranger to the bright lights and intense pressures of a major Washington legal drama. He thrived on the combat and controversy surrounding a big case. When he represented Monica Lewinsky during the scandal that led to the impeachment of President Clinton, there were television cameras staked out in front of his office building on Connecticut Avenue. He didn’t seem to mind at all; he held sidewalk press conferences, as tourists and office workers gaped.

The son of a Greek immigrant who worked as a streetcar motorman in Chicago and a Greek mother who insisted he be named Plato, Cacheris had built a highly successful and lucrative law practice that allowed him to indulge his taste for expensive Savile Row suits, bright suspenders, and monogrammed shirts from Denman & Goddard of London. He grew up in the Maryland suburbs and in Washington,
joined the Marines, graduated from Georgetown Law School, and married his longtime girlfriend, Ethel Dominick.

During the Watergate scandal, former Attorney General John Mitchell hired Cacheris and his partner to defend him against obstruction-of-justice charges. Cacheris got even more attention during the Iran-Contra scandal, when he represented Fawn Hall, Oliver North’s statuesque secretary, who famously hid White House documents in her décolletage.

Despite his somewhat flamboyant public persona, Cacheris was a quiet professional who enjoyed a rock-solid reputation for integrity among his fellow lawyers. Although he might not admit it, he cared deeply about his clients, including those sentenced to prison, staying in touch with them and their families long after he would have any necessity to do so.

Since Cacheris had represented Aldrich Ames in the last big Washington spy case, he was a logical choice for Bonnie Hanssen to contact when she needed a lawyer for her husband.

In the tumult that followed the arrest, finding a lawyer was only one of a series of decisions that suddenly confronted her. To escape the turmoil, Bonnie moved in with her sister Peggy, who lived with her husband in Falls Church, Virginia. It was days before she was able to move back to Talisman Drive. The FBI was still there, searching every inch of the house. In any event, Bonnie did not want to reappear while the press was camped outside.

Hanssen’s family was allowed to see him at the jail, and Bonnie was a frequent visitor. Separated by a thick glass barrier, they could talk there only by telephone. The children came to see him as well. In April, Vivian Hanssen flew up from Florida to visit her son.

“He’s thinner but doing well,” she said. “He’s not depressed, thank God.”

Behind the scenes, the maneuvering over Hanssen’s fate began. Soon after Hanssen’s arrest, Attorney General John Ashcroft told an interviewer: “I would not hesitate to include the death penalty among the options that are to be considered.” In a news conference the same day, Ashcroft also said that in espionage cases the government might seek the death penalty to “send a signal,” but might also explore the possibility of a “plea bargain.”

Cacheris pounced. Federal prosecution guidelines, he pointed out to reporters, prohibit using the death penalty as a threat to gain advantage
in a plea bargain. He lodged an official complaint in a letter to Ashcroft, charging that the attorney general’s remarks were “not appropriate.”
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Ashcroft’s comment had come in answer to a question about whether the government would seek the death penalty for Robert Hanssen. Through a spokesperson, he claimed he was speaking only in general terms about the death penalty. True, Ashcroft had been careful to say he did not want to discuss “specific cases.” But his blunder had given Cacheris an opening. If the government did in fact seek capital punishment, Cacheris said, “the attorney general has made himself our first witness in a motion to dismiss this case at an appropriate time.”

A month after Hanssen’s arrest, there were high-level repercussions. The Bush administration expelled fifty Russian diplomats in retaliation for his spying for Moscow. The State Department said that four of them were intelligence officers “implicated in the Hanssen investigation.” They were declared persona non grata and told to leave immediately. The rest were given until July 1 to go. It was the largest number of Russians ordered out of the country since eighty Soviet diplomats were expelled by President Reagan in 1986. The next day, Moscow said it would expel an equal number of Americans, and it began by ordering four U.S. diplomats to leave.

Cacheris, meanwhile, had hammered out an agreement with the lead prosecutor, Randy I. Bellows, an assistant U.S. attorney in Alexandria, to postpone Hanssen’s indictment for two months, a move that gave the defense early access to the government’s voluminous evidence.

On April 18, Bellows and Cacheris met to discuss for the first time the possibility of a deal. The government wanted Hanssen to admit his spying in return for a sentence of life in prison. The prosecutor warned that the death penalty was still on the table. Cacheris listened, but made no commitment.

A month later, on May 14, they met again. The question of whether to seek the death penalty had still not been settled by the Justice Department, Bellows said. He asked for more time. Cacheris, playing hardball, refused and broke off the talks. The government then said it
would go ahead and issue a detailed indictment of Hanssen, which it did two days later.

Within the administration, officials were divided about whether to seek the death penalty for Hanssen. Ashcroft and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld were reported to favor it; Freeh and CIA director George Tenet were opposed.

The debate was a classic argument about the merits of law enforcement versus intelligence. The CIA and the bureau were much more interested in getting Hanssen to cooperate as part of a plea bargain than in seeing him pay the ultimate penalty for his crimes. If Hanssen was executed, the intelligence agencies would never learn the full extent of what had been compromised.

That fact was Cacheris’s strongest card, but he had others. The government’s espionage case against Hanssen was powerful, because it had the incriminating file from Moscow. Moreover, the former KGB officer who provided the documents was portrayed as willing to testify at a trial if absolutely necessary. But the prosecutors, as Cacheris knew, were anxious to prevent that from happening; the FBI wanted to keep the source’s identity secret if it could.

Beyond preserving the secrecy surrounding the operation to acquire the KGB file, the intelligence agencies were loath to have the secrets that Hanssen had betrayed broadcast to the world in a trial. The Classified Information Procedures Act of 1980 (CIPA) was passed to avoid “graymail” by defendants who might hope to avoid prosecution by threatening to reveal in court the very secrets they had betrayed to another country. But judges have the discretion to require that secrets be disclosed in a trial, so the law is not airtight.

Cacheris’s partner, Preston Burton, a former assistant U.S. attorney, said that the government would have had difficulty prosecuting Hanssen without revealing the secrets he had passed. “Normally the government would seek to keep as many things as possible out of the trial under CIPA,” Burton said, “but in a capital case the government would have had to produce much more evidence, including information about the source of the KGB/SVR file.”