Summer reading: Mole-catcher's secret

By MARK FRYER

David Wise: Spy

Random House,

$54.95


In the late 1980s, the FBI had a problem. Details of highly secret operations had been leaked to the Soviet Union. Double agents who were working for the United States had been recalled to Moscow and, in two cases, punished with a bullet to the head.

How could the Soviets know so much? Could the unthinkable be true - were the leaks coming from inside the FBI?

The bureau assembled a small team to hunt for a Soviet mole in the organisation.

The molehunters were groping in the dark, unsure even whether there was a traitor among them, let alone who he or she might be.

But the man supervising the hunt was in no doubt. He, alone in the FBI, knew for certain that the mole existed. He knew where he lived, his name, and what secrets he had betrayed.

Because he was the mole.

"He" was Robert Hanssen, a career FBI man, computer expert, devout Catholic, devoted husband, father of six, sexual fantasist - and veteran double agent for the Soviet Union.

By the time he was arrested in 2001, Hanssen had been working for the other side for 22 years.

In that time he had passed on 6000 pages of secret documents, covering everything from what the US knew about Soviet nuclear missile strength to the "continuity of government" plan which told the Soviets where US leaders - right up to the president - would be in an emergency.

He revealed the existence of an eavesdropping tunnel the FBI had built at vast expense beneath the Soviet embassy in Washington.

He unmasked some of the FBI's most valuable sources within the Soviet intelligence system.

For all this, Hanssen was paid US$600,000 in cash and diamonds, and was told another US$800,000 was waiting for him in a Moscow bank.

David Wise, a long-time writer on intelligence and espionage, details Hanssen's treachery from the day it began, almost as soon as he joined the FBI's counterintelligence arm in 1979.

No entrapment was needed. Hanssen simply walked into the offices of the Soviet trading company Amtorg and offered his services to the GRU, the Soviet military intelligence agency.

Over the years he spied for the GRU, then the KGB and finally for one of its successors, the SVR. Even after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, Hanssen kept working for Russia.

At times, Wise's story owes as much to Maxwell Smart as it does to James Bond.

Even in 2000, when Hanssen was trying to convince the Russians to use palmtop computers to transmit information, they were earnestly suggesting a communication system that relied on sticking coloured drawing pins into a lamp-post.

Then there was the time FBI agents - wearing trenchcoats, naturally - tried to recruit a high-ranking Soviet spy by sidling up to him in a Washington supermarket and offering him US$20 million as he checked out the oranges.

And there's the no-longer-secret tunnel, which the FBI spent hundreds of millions of dollars digging during the 1970s and 1980s beneath the Washington site where the Soviet Union was building its new embassy.

The tunnel, which Wise says the FBI has never admitted to, ran from a nearby townhouse and was staffed round the clock by technicians with eavesdropping equipment.

The ambitious project revealed little, if anything, possibly because Hanssen told the Soviets about it in 1989, five years before the building was finally occupied - by now as the Russian embassy.

But while all the spookery is entertaining, Wise is most compelling when grappling with the puzzle that was Hanssen.

From the outside, he was the very model of the suburban family man, frugal, driving an old car, not much of a drinker and apparently devoted to his wife Bonnie and their six children.

He wasn't merely religious, he was devout, a member of the conservative Catholic group Opus Dei who seldom went a day without going to mass and who would occasionally decry "godless" communism.

But, Wise reveals, there was a touch of the Walter Mitty about Hanssen.

Once, for example, he startled a colleague by opening the boot of his car to reveal a pistol, a machine gun and waterproof bags full of ammunition.

Then there was the stripper, Priscilla Sue Galey, who Hanssen fell for after watching her show in a Washington club.

But it wasn't sex he wanted. Hanssen plied her with the gifts she might have expected from a sugar daddy - expensive jewellery and a second-hand Mercedes - but he also took her to art galleries and tried to get her to go to church.

Wise suggests that Hanssen saw his relationship with Galey as something like a mix of James Bond and My Fair Lady, with him playing Professor Higgins.

He even took her along when the FBI sent him to Hong Kong for two weeks. They stayed in separate hotel rooms and, despite her efforts, there was no sex - not if you define "sex" the way Bill Clinton does.

There was, however, a very much darker side to Hanssen's sex life.

When his boyhood friend Jack Hoschouer came to stay, Hanssen would invite him to stand on the deck so he could peer into the couple's bedroom as he and Bonnie made love.

He later rigged up a hidden camera connected to a television in the spare room so Hoschouer could watch in comfort.

At one stage he even suggested that Bonnie should have Hoschouer's child, and came up with a plan to drug her so Jack could have sex with her.

All this from a man who primly told a colleague that strip clubs were "sinful".

Hanssen's luck ran out when the FBI acquired a new mole of its own, a former KGB man who, in exchange for US$7 million and a new identity in the US, was willing to provide files he had removed from the KGB archive before retiring.

The files were a complete dossier on Hanssen's activities. Not his name, for he had never revealed that, but enough information - including a tape of a telephone conversation between Hanssen and one of his Soviet handlers.- to identify him.

When the end came in 2001, Hanssen could have faced execution. He was eventually sentenced to life in prison, with no prospect of parole, in exchange for telling the agency what he knew.

Wise says he could have been caught much sooner.

Ten years before his arrest, Hanssen's brother-in-law - also an FBI agent - told his superiors about seeing piles of cash lying around the Hanssen home, but the bureau apparently took no action.

The FBI missed another clue when Hanssen applied for a new job within the bureau. Told he had to take a lie detector test, he withdrew his application.

Nor did the FBI notice his relationship with Priscilla Sue Galey, or do anything more than mildly reprimand him when he physically attacked an FBI co-worker in 1993.

He had even confessed to spying, once to his wife (he told her he was passing on only worthless information; she made him promise to stop and give the money to Mother Teresa) and at least twice in the confessional.

Wise tells Hanssen's story in a just-the-facts style low on literary dramatics and high on detail.

There aren't many gaps; one of the few places where Wise is - inevitably - on shaky ground is when he tries to explain what drove Hanssen to do what he did.

The spy himself had a prosaic explanation. He had a growing family and he needed the money.

Apart from US$80,000 or so he spent on Galey, and buying an expensive Rolex watch for his friend Hoschouer, he didn't live the high life.

Most of the money seems to have been spent remodelling the Hanssen home, sending six children to private schools, and four of them to college, and on buying lots of guns and computer equipment.

For what he gave, says Wise, Hanssen could have demanded much more money. What he got was probably less than he would have received from his FBI pension.

A psychiatrist who examined Hanssen after his arrest said he desperately wanted to preserve his wife's image of him as a good provider. The psychiatrist also noted Hanssen's troubled relationship with his father, a man whose strictness bordered on abuse, and who was always ready to humiliate his only child.

Wise says Hanssen may have felt under-appreciated at the FBI, and believed he was intellectually superior to hs colleagues.

Whatever else he may have been, Hanssen was undoubtedly bright. Trouble was, some of his co-workers said, he had a habit of acting as though he knew something that nobody else knew.

Which, for a long time, he did.