Abstract
Atlantic Monthly Press, 2002 272 pages; $25.00
Robert Hanssen's wife Bonnie, convinced that he was concealing an affair from her, persuaded him to tell her what he was trying to cover up in the basement of their home. He confessed that it was evidence that he had sold government secrets to the Soviet Union. Aghast, she extracted his promise never to do it again. When they went to a priest for advice about the matter, the priest agreed that Hanssen need not turn himself in. Instead, he said, Hanssen could gradually and anonymously give away the money he had been paid.
After this episode in 1980, Hanssen apparently thought long and hard about how to evade detection, not only from his FBI bosses, but from prying wives as well. It was five years before he communicated with the Russians again.
From 1985 to 1990, though, Hanssen was an enormous asset for the Soviets, confirming much of what they learned from CIA turncoat Aldrich Ames, which directly contributed to the deaths of a number of U.S. agents in the Soviet Union. The blizzard of documents Hanssen sent along to his handler at the Soviet embassy included, among other things, the U.S. continuity-of-government plans in case of nuclear war. All of this he did on his own terms—it was he who made the first contact, he who set up the communication system. He refused to meet with the Russians or even to reveal his identity to them, accepting only cash or diamonds in return for what he gave them.
In The Bureau and the Mole, David A. Vise, a veteran reporter for the Washington Post, has written a comprehensive book that tells the reader nearly everything about Robert Hanssen, the FBI mole whose belated discovery in February 2001 signaled a steep decline in the agency's reputation.
Vise includes generous quotes of Hans-sen's communications with his Soviet—later, Russian—handlers, and the book reprints in full a sampling of the pornographic stories and Internet postings authored by the man who sold more secrets than anyone else in Bureau history. Some readers may be attracted by the book's dirty bits alone.
And if the book doesn't answer the question of why Hanssen did what he did, it may be because there is, as yet, no rational explanation. The only conclusion the reader can draw is that Hanssen is a sociopath—even if the S-word is not invoked in the pages of the book. The psychiatrists Vise quotes, including Alan Salerian, who interviewed Hanssen in custody, preferred to describe his as a fractured personality.
But if Hanssen is “fractured,” how did he get that way?
Hanssen's mother Vivian describes him as a well-behaved and dutiful son, whose childhood was more or less normal. Well maybe, maybe not. Vivian Hanssen told Vise that Hanssen's father Howard, a politically connected Chicago policeman, wanted a better life for Robert—wanted him to work hard and grow up to be a doctor. He could, she said, be very tough on the boy to get his point across. Other family members said bluntly that Howard Hanssen physically abused the boy while exhorting him to “be a man.” When Hanssen was little, they reported, his father would twirl him around and around until he became ill, or hoist him into the air by grabbing him by the ankle. So if Vivian Hanssen also reports that her son was a little withdrawn, sometimes spending hours alone in his room, who could blame him?
Howard Hanssen continued to undermine the teenage Robert. For example, when he took the boy to get a driver's license, he bribed the official giving the road test to fail him: “I didn't approve of it,” says Vivian, who explains that her husband “thought Bob was too cocky and thought he believed he was too good a driver.”
Going away to college didn't change things much, either. When Hanssen's parents visited him at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois, his father used the occasion to seek out all of his instructors and warn them that they needed to be tough with his son or the kid would let them down.
Whatever the effect of Howard Hanssen's behavior on his son's psyche, his wife didn't object. Looking back, though, she now says she might have made a difference:
“I had a good relationship with Howard and could have told him to cut out whatever he was doing. I think he would have paid attention.”
But how much human behavior can be explained by having had an abusive father or an oddly inattentive mother? In these psychologically sensitive times, would we explain away the betrayal of one's country on the basis that the traitor had had a Dick-ensian childhood?
Is it enough—fast-forwarding now to the adult Hanssen—to explain his obsessive need to display his wife's nude body to friends, let alone to strangers? Hanssen sent nude photos of his wife to his close—maybe only—friend, Jack Hoschouer, and he also set up a closed-circuit video so that Hoschouer could sit in comfort in the den of the Hanssen house in Vienna, Virginia, watching the Hanssens in their bedroom having sex. He also described his sheer joy, early in his marriage, as he and his wife suntanned on a Lake Michigan beach: He would stealthily roll up the edges of her bikini to reveal more and more flesh for the attention and enjoyment of passsersby.
Hanssen may at times have found comfort in the money his Russian friends paid him, but it appears not to have been much of a motivation: He wrote, for instance, that he knew he would never get the money that the Russians were allegedly holding for him in a secret bank account.
At every juncture, there is a contradiction in Hanssen's life: He expressed enormous loyalty to his wife, yet betrayed her in the first few days of marriage, as she learned from a phone call from his girlfriend; he admired the FBI and wanted to join, yet soon turned against it, feeling his fellow agents were beneath him (they, in turn, nicknamed him “The Undertaker”); he professed religious devotion yet made a pact with “godless Communism”; he spent long hours with his friend of 30 years, Jack Hoschouer, a frequent visitor to his home and someone he traveled with, yet Hoschouer's first inkling that his friend was a spy came when he learned of Hanssen's arrest while watching TV.
Vise alternates chapters on the career of Louis Freeh with chapters on Hanssen's activities. Freeh, who was the director of the FBI at the time Hanssen was apprehended, seems at first to be an admirable poster boy for “the Bureau.”
But on the surface, at least, Freeh and Hanssen had much in common in addition to the Hanssen arrest, which marked their mutual downfall. In addition to their careers at the FBI, both were devout Catholics, and both fathered six children. They attended the same Virginia church (the “right” one), and both had children enrolled in The Heights, an exclusive Catholic boys' school. Both families were deeply involved with the ultra-conservative Opus Dei organization.
And both really knew how to be sanctimonious.
Hanssen expressed moral outrage that other agents he worked with occasionally had a drink after work at a strip club; at the same time, he frequented strip clubs at lunch time and in 1990 became involved with a stripper.
Freeh, for his part, expressed his distaste for the Clinton administration by deciding that administration officials were too immoral to be properly briefed on security matters; in 1997 the Bureau withheld what should have been routine intelligence on Chinese activities from Madeleine Albright before her upcoming trip to China.
Vise, who reports that he interviewed more than a hundred people for The Bureau and the Mole, has collected an impressive amount of information, which he relates in an admirably straightforward fashion. The complete yet unvarnished nature of the tale may be why the reader is left with so many questions.
The question of Hanssen's motives, of course, may never be fully explained. But more troubling questions concern the failures of the Bureau, which is as impenetrable today as it was under J. Edgar Hoover, its actions equally inexplicable. One wonders if the agency has made much of an effort to screen personnel for psychological problems. Does it have the same paranoid profile for which it was famous in earlier days? And what about supervision? Shouldn't someone in authority have sensed there was something wrong with Robert Hanssen?
And finally, why, when Hanssen's own brother-in-law—also an FBI agent—told the Bureau in 1990 that he was certain Hanssen was a spy, did the agency do nothing about it? A decade passed before Hanssen was investigated.
Thinking about the Hanssen case, Ruby Ridge, the Richard Jewell affair, the thousands of documents the FBI failed to turn over in the Oklahoma bombing case, the Bureau's long history of political meddling— one wonders if the FBI will ever be the agency the country needs in an age of terrorism. •