Not long ago, Vivian Hanssen gave up her friends and bridge invitations, sold her retirement home in Florida and packed up her wide, beige Oldsmobile with the seat cushion that props her small frame a little closer to the wheel.
At 89, she moved to the suburbs of Washington, where she knows almost no one, to live in the home her only son left behind when he went to jail.
“My son really wanted me to come here,” she says of the bark-colored house where she now lives with her son’s wife, Bonnie, along a street of gardens and driveway basketball hoops in Vienna, Va. “We thought we could help one another. I could help my daughter-in-law, and she could help me.”
Nothing can help enough.
No amount of sorting through the past brings solace to the woman whose son, veteran FBI agent Robert Hanssen, is to be sentenced in three weeks for some of the most damaging espionage in U.S. history–“the perfect spy,” a former boss observes ruefully. For more than a year, Vivian Hanssen has found herself replaying her son’s 58 years, birth to arrest, searching for searching for some reason that he would lead a secret life of deceit and destruction, some clue she should have seen. The initial shock, the tears, the disbelief have faded. The replaying goes on.
Thirty minutes through traffic from the house, she visits him at the Alexandria Adult Detention Center, sunlight sneaking in through the narrowest of slits, caricatures of windows. A clear but sturdy partition separates mother and son.
“It feels good to see him and sad at the same time,” she says. “He has suffered for this, and he needs my love. Of course I will stick with him. You don’t just throw away your child. The hard part, I guess, is that I’m afraid not much can be done for him now.”
Her words trail off, then she is back to a thought she often returns to. “He was against communism. He was devoted to the United States. He loved the FBI,” she insists. “It is impossible for me to understand.”
To his mother and to the world, Robert Hanssen seemed to be the portrait of conventional morality and decency–a career member of the nation’s most elite law-enforcement agency, a disciplined, religious man who made daily trips to mass, and a proud and reliable husband and father of six.
What made him turn his back on such seeming good fortune, embark on a secret life of espionage and sell his nation’s deepest secrets may never be fully known. Some investigators say he did it for money, but those who know him say cash alone cannot explain his actions. In one letter to his Russian handlers, he claimed that he had “decided on this course when I was 14 years old.” It was probably a lie; Hanssen had a habit of making exaggerated boasts about his feats of self-determination.
But even if his conscious decision to betray his country came years later, the forces that shaped this perfect spy found their roots early, in his childhood on Chicago’s Far Northwest Side. He grew up a socially awkward boy, one who responded to his father’s harsh criticisms by withdrawing into a solitary, secretive way of life.
As an adult he never seemed, for all of his arrogance and outward success, to escape the fear of failure. He would never be the brilliant doctor his family expected. He would never be the life of the party. He would never quite reach the top ranks of the FBI.
But in one secret compartment of his life, he found that he could be bold and suave, masterful yet invisible. He could get even.
Norwood Park in the 1950s was a small town inside a big city. For most of the decade, the expressway to the distant Loop was just an idea. On all but the coldest evenings, you could find a game of hide-and-seek between the elms and bungalows.
Nearly everyone was conservative, middle class and white. Fathers worked, mothers stayed home. “Dick and Jane Land” is how one of Hanssen’s neighbors remembers the community.
The Cold War was on, and it went without saying that communism was evil. Rebellion meant cigarettes and hot rods, and the turmoil of the 1960s seemed especially far away. Hanssen’s 8th-grade class picked a line from Hamlet as its motto in 1958: To thine own self be true. “Everyone was straight arrows and patriotic,” says Rose Anne Austin, a Hanssen classmate.
Known to most people as Bob, Robert Hanssen was the skinny boy with pale skin and a swoosh of black hair, his narrow shoulders curved forward slightly as if to erase the height that made him stand out in class photos. Hanssen’s eyes, behind glasses, often gazed off somewhere away from the camera.
Elementary schoolmates remember his mother as a genteel, doe-eyed woman who once co-hosted an elaborate Halloween party for the whole class. “The kind of mom you would pick if you could pick your mom,” says another former classmate.
Vivian Hanssen, perhaps indulging the natural prejudice and selective memory of a mother, remembers her son’s childhood this way: “a normal life; a good, happy life for a boy in Chicago.” He was a Cub Scout, she says. He captained the student safety patrol. He sketched different makes and models of snazzy automobiles.
“It was just kind of ordinary,” she says. “He never seemed to be rebelling. He never smoked. The worst I can ever remember him doing was he wouldn’t cut the grass. He had to be pushed on that.”
But others recall that behind the cheerful facade of the white frame house on Neva Avenue, a deeply troubled relationship developed between young Hanssen and his father.
Howard Hanssen, a Navy man-turned-Chicago cop, was quick to find fault with his only child. Cutting remarks came with regularity, on subjects ranging from the younger Hanssen’s academic performance to his social skills. The father seemed both disappointed by and competitive with his son.
“My husband thought Bob was a bit cocky and needed to be brought down from that,” Vivian Hanssen says, remembering the time her husband paid off an examiner to fail their son on his driver’s license test. “That was terrible,” she acknowledges, but says she never tried to intervene between her husband, who died in 1993, and her young son. She thinks about those incidents now. She wonders sometimes whether she should have spoken up.
The mistreatment was never a “physical thing,” she says, and she did not see signs that her son was suffering emotional damage. Bob always loved and respected his father, she says. From what she could tell, her young boy was going along fine.
But another relative says the reality was far different. “Howard was mentally abusive,” this relative says. “The guy was weird. He wanted to thwart Bob from succeeding.”
Naturally shy to begin with, Robert Hanssen increasingly spent time alone. “The main thing it did was to make Bob withdraw into himself,” Vivian Hanssen acknowledges. “Bob was not as outgoing as he could have been.”
His isolation only deepened when one of his few close friendships as an adolescent ended tragically.
In 6th grade, Hanssen spent afternoons playing at the house of his best friend, another only child named Paul Steinbachner. One afternoon, Paul went into his bathroom. A few minutes later, Hanssen heard a crash. He ran in and found his best friend lying dead on the floor.
It was an era when therapists did not rush into schools to help youngsters work through traumatic events and, though the death was announced sadly to Hanssen’s class the next day, little more was said about it. Some classmates who recall the incident say Steinbachner suffered from hemophilia and had died from a hemorrhage; others say it was a heart condition.
“Bob felt awful, it was a terrible shock,” says Vivian Hanssen. “But he didn’t talk too much about it. These were just things that happened.”
Even before the loss of his friend, Hanssen confided in few people and seemed most at ease in the background of a group. “On the outskirts is how I saw him,” one schoolmate says, an observation echoed by a college friend who described Hanssen as “someone in the woodwork . . . you didn’t notice him.”
On rainy days, Norwood Park Elementary students spent recess playing an indoor variation of tag. A student would be chased up the classroom aisle, then squeeze into another student’s chair to avoid becoming “it.”
Girls usually slipped into the chairs of boys they thought were “cool,” Karen Lison recalls. Hanssen was not one of them. Still, Lison squeezed in beside him one afternoon to let him get in on the game. Instead of being grateful, Hanssen became angry, demanding to know why she had done it. “I realized I really didn’t do him a favor,” Lison says. “I guess he liked not being bothered with. He was an observer.”
In the fall of 1958, Hanssen entered Taft, the high school that would inspire the musical “Grease.” The musical’s co-writer, Jim Jacobs, who graduated just before Hanssen, based his story on Taft’s cliques of greasers and jocks, cheerleaders and collegiates. Hanssen was definitely in the last set. He and his small group of friends were drawn to science and electronics, fields popular in his nerdy crowd after the 1957 launch of Sputnpik awakened the country to a U.S.-Soviet technology race.
Hanssen began spending free time alone in a basement workroom of his house, teaching himself ham radio signals and secretly hooking up a telephone he had managed to acquire. (The phone company still owned all the telephones in those days, and people weren’t supposed to have unauthorized equipment.) “Science is the light of life,” was the quote beside Hanssen’s 1962 graduation photo.
Hanssen went on to Knox College in Galesburg, where he majored in chemistry and took elective classes including Russian. Part of a national campaign to improve Russian skills after the embarrassment of Sputnik, Knox had recently hired a Russian professor. Hanssen picked up words and idioms, but he made no impression on his professor as a serious student of the language.
He was generally a bright student, but did well only if a topic seized his curiosity. He walked out of a Western civilization final because he “didn’t like the questions,” college dormmate Hank Wilkins recalls, but he also digested a physics textbook as though it were a novel.
Hanssen’s father did not allow the 195-mile distance between Chicago and Knox to prevent him from continuing to undercut his son. Howard Hanssen urged school officials not to put Robert on the dean’s list “because he thought that would go to Bob’s head,” says Janine Brookner, a lawyer who represents Hanssen’s wife.
Hanssen’s family had long expected he would become a doctor. He was a science scholar and medical school seemed the next logical step, Vivian Hanssen says. But with less than stellar grades, Hanssen’s adviser at Knox warned, medical school would be a stretch. Dental school was more realistic, the adviser suggested.
So began a six-year period during which Hanssen searched for direction. He entered Northwestern University’s dental school in 1966, but dropped out after two years, later claiming in an alumni newsletter that he had done well academically, but “didn’t like spit all that much.”
Working a summer at a mental hospital in Chicago, he met Bonnie Wauck, a co-worker who was everything he was not: outgoing, talkative, attractive. He liked being seen with her. He told friends she looked like Natalie Wood.
Bonnie, from a large Catholic family in Park Ridge, married Hanssen in 1968, but not before his father got in a jab. The elder Hanssen took Bonnie aside the day before the wedding, according to a relative, and asked, straight-faced: “Why do you want to marry this guy?”
Hanssen studied accounting and information services at Northwestern’s graduate school of business. But an MBA later, he was still looking around for a career. This time, he did something no one expected: He took the test to become a police officer. “It was a surprise to us,” Vivian Hanssen says. “My husband thought his education was a little beyond that. He passed the exam with a very high grade, you know.”
Whatever else may have attracted the young Hanssen to police work, it gave him the chance to both disappoint his father and outdo him at the same time.
Three months after Howard Hanssen retired as a lieutenant in 1972, Robert Hanssen joined the Chicago Police Department. The elder Hanssen spent most of his nearly 30 years working in the Jefferson Park District, before moving to a file room to handle Intelligence Unit records, colleagues say. The younger Hanssen, advanced degrees in hand, would never have to be a regular street cop, and he would make certain of that.
He immediately applied to a new unit formed to root out corrupt police officers. Mitchell Ware, the deputy superintendent who was putting together this elite “C-5 unit,” was determined to recruit the best officers available. “I needed to find people who were willing to jeopardize their own futures and possibly their own lives,” says Ware. He would accept only about 30 members from 1,000 applicants, and Hanssen had the right resume.
“He had one of the best backgrounds you could find,” Ware says. “He was an accountant. He had two languages. He went to church. He had a good dad. His wife’s father was good. And we did background checks in his neighborhood.”
Jack Clarke, an official who says he helped interview officers for the unit, remembers questioning Hanssen. “He was very calm, very cool, very collected,” Clarke says. “He really wanted to clean up corruption.”
To keep other officers from learning who they were, members of the “super secret” unit wore street clothes, drove unmarked cars and met at the Contagious Disease Hospital, miles from police headquarters.
Immediately, the unit stirred controversy. Other cops claimed that the team used overzealous tactics to catch officers taking traffic ticket bribes, shaking down taverns and betting in gambling rings. In an incident that became a centerpiece for critics of the unit, two patrol officers complained that they had been forced to strip to their shorts at gunpoint after C-5 members wrongly suspected them of taking a $40 shakedown.
Basically, the job meant spying. It was Hanssen’s first taste of that, and while many officers found the role uncomfortable, the secrecy, the independence and the sheer power of the job seemed to suit him. A former C-5 colleague remembers Hanssen setting up a phone tap at an apartment complex near O’Hare International Airport. Using skills he first began cultivating in his basement workroom, Hanssen linked up the electronic wires flawlessly. “He was standoffish and all business, but–boom–he got that done,” the colleague says.
Soon, the Chicago Police Department wasn’t enough for Hanssen. He wanted to go further than his father and craved the prestige of the FBI. So in 1976, he joined the bureau and signed a pledge of loyalty and confidentiality to his country. The next quarter-century would find him, followed by a growing family, on FBI assignments in Gary, New York, Washington, New York again, and ultimately back to Washington.
He worked his way into management, gaining top security clearances and responsibilities that took him to the intelligence division’s Soviet analytical unit, the budget unit that dealt with FBI spending on intelligence and counterintelligence measures, the New York field office’s intelligence division, the inspections staff and the State Department. At one point, he was program manager for the unit assigned to counter Soviet efforts to acquire U.S. scientific and technical intelligence.
He rose through the ranks, but eventually the promotions stopped coming. That was partly because of his detached personality and partly because his accounting background and computer skills drew him to the technical side of FBI work. In the macho culture of the bureau, former agents say, he was a bean-counter, not a door-kicker. While others made arrests and recruited intelligence sources, Hanssen tapped away at his computer and read reports.
“He wasn’t a guy-guy, if you know what I mean,” says David Major, a former FBI official. “He was a very talented human being and one of the smartest FBI agents I ever met, but he was not in the model of everyone else. He did not possess any level of charisma. He was seen as a back-bencher, in a support capacity.”
His inexpensive dark suits, his slight stoop and his aloof demeanor led some co-workers to call him “Digger” and “The Mortician.” He often discussed matters of philosophy and religion, leading some colleagues to view him as an elitist who held himself intellectually and spiritually above his colleagues.
Though raised a church-going Lutheran, Hanssen converted to Catholicism after he married Bonnie. Like many converts, he became an outspoken, sometimes strident, advocate for his faith. He loaned out books on the subject. He diligently attended a 6:30 a.m. mass each weekday.
And he joined Opus Dei, a small, conservative Catholic group whose members seek to incorporate their faith into their everyday life and work. The 74-year-old Opus Dei (“work of God” in Latin) is embraced by the Vatican, though critics accuse it of being secretive and cultlike. Among its stances is a rejection of communism.
On Sundays, Hanssen drove his family seven miles to Great Falls, Va., to attend St. Catherine of Siena. It was one of the few churches around that maintained a 90-minute, mostly Latin mass.
Hanssen often expounded on his strong religious beliefs in conversations and e-mail. Life’s meaning, he told FBI colleague Jim Ohlson, was that people were God’s creation and should live by God’s principles. He also denounced sex outside marriage, described abortion as the “moral equivalent of slavery,” viewed any spare room in his home as a place for another child, and said his wife should be placed on a pedestal–adored and flattered.
And he did lavish attention on Bonnie and his family. While other wives complained about their husbands, she boasted to relatives that hers helped with chores and attended functions at the kids’ private religious schools. To fit in, he held a cocktail at family events but he truly favored Coca-Cola. He designed a Web page for family vacation photos. He was always home by 5:30 p.m.
His socially outgoing wife did confide one small complaint to her relatives: Bob was a tad dull at parties.
Whenever a spy gets caught, it seems, the damage is described as massive. In Hanssen’s case it is no exaggeration. From the time he began spying for the Soviets in 1979 until his arrest last year, he handed over more than 6,000 pages of documents and 26 computer diskettes filled with top secret reports, analyses, budgets and names, court documents show. He wrote 27 letters to the Soviet KGB and its successor agency, the SVR. He left them 22 packages.
In terms of the toll on human lives and the compromised intelligence operations, Hanssen’s spying compares in severity to the work of only one other, CIA mole Aldrich Ames. “These two are the most devastating espionage cases in U.S. history,” says Loch K. Johnson, an intelligence community expert at the University of Georgia.
Hanssen gave up the identities of nine Soviets he said were spying for the U.S. or being recruited to spy. At least three of those agents, who were separately identified by Ames, were sent back to the Soviet Union and arrested. Two were executed.
Spies typically parcel out a few choice morsels of information at a time to maximize their payoffs. Hanssen, by contrast, was a wholesale distributor, turning over virtually everything he came across at the office. If he didn’t find something interesting on his own desk, he would go looking–browsing through the computer system he understood better than most of his FBI colleagues.
“Any clerk in the bureau could come up with stuff on that [computer] system. It was pathetic,” he later told investigators.
He revealed that a tunnel full of spying equipment had been built beneath the Soviet Embassy in Washington. He gave away the “continuity of government” plan, America’s blueprint for running the government from a bunker in case of attack. He revealed reports on the FBI’s double-agent program, on KGB recruitment operations against the CIA, on the KGB’s efforts to get U.S. nuclear secrets. He gave away the budget for the FBI’s counterintelligence program. He told his handlers that U.S. diplomat Felix Bloch was under investigation for espionage, a revelation that allowed the Soviets to warn Bloch and help him avoid prosecution.
Through it all, he never revealed his identity to his handlers, a shrewd and unusual precaution against discovery that bespoke his experience in counterintelligence. He also made sure the FBI wasn’t on to him by routinely searching for his name in the bureau’s computerized file of investigations.
He seemed more absorbed by the tradecraft and intrigue of spying than in the information he stole or the monetary rewards. He created elaborate, time-consuming codes–the more complicated, the better. He instructed the Soviets to subtract 6 from all dates and times in his letters. If he used a return address “Chicago,” information was coming Monday.
If he was ready to turn over documents, he was to leave adhesive tape on certain road signs or stick a white thumbtack in a particular utility pole. Then he would stash a garbage bag of documents in one of a dozen pre-arranged “dead drop” spots in suburban Washington, most of them not far from his home. Soviet or Russian agents would retrieve the bag and replace it with a bag of cash, a note and, in a few cases, diamonds. Hanssen would later return to collect his payment.
But no matter how intricate the arrangements, Hanssen always wanted more planning, more codes, more technology. He once suggested that he and his handlers communicate with encrypted messages over Palm Pilots.
Twice, Hanssen quit spying. In both cases, fear of being caught–not remorse–seemed to drive him to break off his illicit work.
Early on, his wife found him in his study with a lot of cash, relatives say. He confessed to her that day in 1981, but told her he was actually double-crossing Moscow by feeding them bogus information. She sent him to a priest for confession, demanded that the cash go to charity and made him swear never to do it again. He did, but resumed spying four years later. He broke off contact again in 1991 when the Soviet Union was dissolving, apparently fearing disclosure. Again the break lasted only a few years.
He couldn’t give it up.
The letters between Hanssen and his handlers trace the arc of a complicated, manipulative relationship. His Soviet spymasters knew how to feed their secret agent’s emotional hunger for approval and recognition. In the letters he was forceful and knowing; they were fawning and impressed with his prowess and bravura.
They flattered their top spy for his “superb sense of humor” and “sharp-as-a-razor” mind. When Moscow’s political framework was undergoing dramatic change, Hanssen told his handlers that they should study Mayor Richard J. Daley’s method of governing Chicago. “. . .The magical history tour to Chicago was mysteriously well timed,” they replied. “Have You ever thought of foretelling the things?”
At times, Hanssen bossily lectured his handlers on the ways of his government. “The U.S. can be errantly likened to a powerfully built but retarded child, potentially dangerous, but young, immature and easily manipulated,” he wrote. “But don’t be fooled by that appearance. It is also one which can turn ingenius [sic] quickly, like an idiot savant, once convinced of a goal.”
And when his handlers failed to answer a signal, Hanssen turned morose. He brooded like a neglected child. “I have come about as close as I ever want to come to sacrificing myself to help you, and I get silence,” he wrote. “I hate silence. . . .
“Please, at least say goodbye. It’s been a long time my dear friends, a long and lonely time.”
Twenty-two years is, indeed, a long time for so destructive a spy to go undetected. Hanssen’s clever and diligent safeguards played a role in his longevity, of course, but so did the FBI’s many blind spots.
Despite a decades-long debate over polygraph tests for agents, Hanssen never took a lie-detector test during his quarter-century there, a former FBI official says. And the bureau missed repeated warnings about a spy in its ranks. In 1997, Earl Pitts, another agent caught spying, told officials to take a look at Hanssen. Four years earlier, Moscow itself had warned U.S. officials that an FBI agent was offering secrets.
Three years before that, in 1990, the bureau missed another chance to catch Hanssen, according to family members. His brother-in-law, Chicago FBI agent Mark Wauck, grew suspicious about money Hanssen had, and approached a supervisor in Chicago about him, the relative says. Wauck declines to comment, and the FBI’s official answer sheds little light on why Hanssen wasn’t caught then. “The episode in question was evaluated at the time,” a bureau spokesman in Washington says. “It did not result in the discovery of Hanssen’s activities.”
Hanssen’s best protection of all, perhaps, was his gray personality, his lifelong invisibility. The FBI would have overlooked him for the same reason as his classmates back in Norwood Park and Knox College. Introverted and nondescript, he hardly leapt to mind when you were hunting a daring spy.
“I have done a lot of soul-searching on that,” says Major, the former FBI official who was Hanssen’s superior. “Should I have seen it? The answer is, there wasn’t any sign of excessive wealth or philandering. There was nothing to see. He was to a great extent the perfect spy. I can sleep at night.”
Even in the end, he was caught mainly by chance. A Russian agent providing information to the U.S. got hold of a file from Moscow about an American spy. The dossier had no name, but yielded an old garbage bag with a clear set of the spy’s fingerprints.
At dusk on Feb. 18, 2001, Hanssen, who by now suspected he was being monitored, stuck a garbage bag with a final letter under a footbridge in Foxstone Park. After a cold walk back to his car down an isolated path, he was arrested.
The pastor at Hanssen’s church in Great Falls will forever wonder why his devout parishioner would betray his country. “I guess I will have God first explain the Trinity to me,” says Rev. Franklyn Martin McAfee, “and then Bob Hanssen.”
Historically, spies are easy to figure. Some are ideologues, philosophically devoted to another nation’s way of life. But Hanssen genuinely seemed to consider Soviet communism morally repugnant and an economic failure.
In many more cases, spies simply do it for cash. In Hanssen’s case, money certainly played a role. In two decades, he received $600,000 in cash and diamonds, and was told of $800,000 waiting for him in a Russian bank. Earning about $114,000 in his final year at the FBI, Hanssen no doubt found the money useful. He had significant costs, including loan payments for his homes and tuition for six children in private schools and colleges. Some investigators say he told them the spying began after he bought a house in the New York suburbs and the payments became overwhelming.
But Hanssen’s former colleagues suspect that something else–something less tangible and more complicated than cash–led him to spy over a 22-year period. “The trigger mechanism was financial,” says Paul Moore, a former FBI analyst and close friend of Hanssen’s. “What kept him spying was not financial.”
Indeed, for the quantity and scope of information Hanssen had to sell, he could have demanded, and gotten, far more. As someone familiar with the world of espionage, he undoubtedly knew that. But he rarely bickered over money or raised the issue with his handlers. He also made it clear that he didn’t expect to ever see the bulk of the money–the $800,000 set aside for him in a Russian bank. He didn’t believe that money existed, telling his handlers not to “patronize” him with such talk. Whether it existed or not apparently didn’t matter; he went right on spying.
In his letters to his handlers, Hanssen’s efforts to explain himself grew muddled and despairing toward the end. “One might propose that I am either insanely brave or quite insane,” he wrote them in March 2000. “I’d answer neither. I’d say, insanely loyal. Take your pick. There is insanity in all the answers.”
Psychiatrist Alen Salerian, who spent 30 hours interviewing Hanssen in jail, maintains that Hanssen suffered from a serious, untreated psychiatric disorder that led him to spy.
“I would bet my diploma on it: If Bob Hanssen had been on the right meds and with the right therapist, U.S. spy history would be different,” says Salerian, who was removed from the defense team after a dispute with attorneys. “His biggest problem was not his spying. His biggest problem was his psychological demons, coming from his past. His own family has caused him pain. He was a sensitive kid who was hurt by early life experiences.”
Another psychiatrist might reach a different conclusion, but there’s no doubt of this: In spying, Hanssen’s needy ego found something he had found nowhere else– not at his father’s house in Norwood Park, not in church, not in the halls of the FBI. As a spy, he was lavished with praise. He was powerful. He commanded attention. He was exciting.
“He wanted to feel the rush,” says Major. “He wanted to be the best spy you could be. I think Bob had a psychological high that way. Other than that, you know, his life was very boring.”
There was another side to Hanssen’s clandestine life besides spying.
In 1990, he secretly befriended an exotic dancer in a Washington strip club. Priscilla Galey has insisted that she and Hanssen did not have sex, although he bought her a car, jewels and a trip to Hong Kong when he went there on FBI business. Galey says he merely tried to get her to quit her job and convert to Catholicism.
At home, too, Hanssen had sexual secrets. Without Bonnie’s knowledge, he posted stories on the Web about exhibitionist fantasies of sexual exploits with his wife using their real names. In one posting, Hanssen boasted that he secretly set up a camera in his bedroom so that an old Taft High School friend–the best man at their wedding–could watch the Hanssens having sex when he was a houseguest. “Bonnie may be the only teacher at the elite girl’s school where she works who is also a porn star!” Hanssen wrote.
Hanssen’s contradictions are stunning to the point of absurdity: A man who vehemently opposes communism gives secrets to Moscow. An Opus Dei member who fawns over his wife makes her a voyeuristic object.
Was Hanssen’s wholesome, religious side just a grand cover invented to disguise his darker side?
Colleagues, relatives and his former doctor say no.
Rather, they say, Hanssen compartmentalized his life into radically different, contradictory, but equally real sides. “He is not a fake,” says Salerian. “He truly prays.”
Hanssen was committed to each role. At the FBI, he worked hard, designing a new way to keep track of agents’ time and diligently working to improve the computer system. As a husband and father, he was loving and steady. As a spy, he was productive and efficient.
“It goes on all the time,” says Robert Motta, a psychology professor at Hofstra University. “People are very readily able to lead double lives even to themselves. It’s not that they aren’t conscious of the other side. It’s that they can rationalize their different sides.”
On May 10, Hanssen expects to be sentenced to life in prison, the final step in a plea bargain that spares him from execution.
For Bonnie Hanssen, the deal means she will continue to receive her husband’s annual pension of about $40,000. For the government, the plea means avoiding an embarrassing, sensitive trial and gaining the leverage to make Hanssen reveal details of his espionage.
For months, officials have quizzed him about his spying, and, for the first time, he has had to take polygraph tests to confirm his accounts.
He has lost 60 pounds in jail. He spends days reading books and writing letters. He sees his mother and his wife, who has stood by her husband and is focusing her energy, her friends say, on saving his soul. He meets with a priest.
And he ruminates on his life, playing and replaying his thoughts and actions.
“There is no way that I can justify what I have done,” he told investigators. “It’s criminal and deceitful and wrong and sinful.”
But his old friend Moore says Hanssen also believes that he has sought to do good with 99 percent of his life. His bad acts, he says, consumed only 1 percent.
It’s a moral calculus that all but ignores the staggering betrayal of a nation’s secrets and the loss of human life, but “that’s his frame of reference,” says Moore. “I guess it gives him some measure of comfort.”
