Spy: The Inside Story of How the FBI's Robert Hanssen Betrayed America (20 page)

Not long after the Hanssens moved into their split-level house on Talisman Drive in 1987, they decided to remodel. The major addition on the back of the house was designed by George Beglis, who also supervised the construction. The work expanded the house greatly, adding a large deck in the rear, and below it an extra family room, big enough for a Ping-Pong table for the kids. All told, the remodeling cost about $70,000, but in this instance, despite the cost, it did not create gossip among the relatives because the Hanssens, when they moved back from New York, had sold their house in Yorktown Heights at a substantial profit. And Hanssen told his family that most of the cost of the remodeling had come from the fictional $40,000 insurance settlement.

It was in 1990, not long after Jeanne Beglis had spotted the cash on Hanssen’s dresser, that she remembered telling her brother Mark Wauck about it. But Wauck, like Hanssen an FBI counterintelligence agent, later told investigators that he had heard a different version of the incident.

Mark Wauck, with a law degree from Loyola University of Chicago, had joined the FBI in 1978, two years after his brother-in-law. He was assigned to the intelligence division and sent to New York City, a prime counterintelligence playing field, in the early 1980s. He was there for three years, but these years did not overlap with Hanssen’s two tours in New York. In 1986, he was transferred to the Chicago field office, where he was still assigned when Hanssen was arrested fifteen years later.

Within the family, there were sharply conflicting versions of the story about the money. In August 1990, Mark, his wife, and their children
visited Washington from Chicago. Mark was on business, attending a two-week conference on Soviet and Eastern European affairs at the State Department. The Beglises had invited Mark and his wife, Mary Ellen, to dinner during their visit. Mary Ellen Wauck recalled Jeanne Beglis telling her in the kitchen before dinner that one day, not too long before, Bonnie Hanssen had come running across the street to her house, alarmed that she had found $5,000 in cash on Bob’s dresser.

But Jeanne Beglis remembered only seeing money on the dresser, and Bonnie’s exclamation about it. Bonnie had been looking for something she wanted to give her, perhaps an article of clothing, and that was how they happened to be in the bedroom. Jeanne believed it was her brother Mark whom she had told about the money. In interviews with government investigators, she said she did not recall Bonnie running across the street or being upset at the discovery. Jeanne Beglis did think the amount was $5,000; the money had a paper band around it, like banks use, and the total may have been printed on the wraparound band.

Memories and details may differ after ten years. The bottom line, however, was that both Jeanne Beglis and Mary Ellen Wauck agreed that a large amount of cold cash had been left lying on the dresser of the Hanssen bedroom.

Mary Ellen Wauck recalled telling her husband about the money after they returned to Chicago that August. It was a troubling piece of information, because Special Agent Mark Wauck knew something that other family members did not. He remembered a conversation with Bonnie in 1985, when she had told him of a remark that Hanssen had made to her: “Maybe I’ll retire in Poland,” he had said.

It was the same year that Hanssen had begun spying for the KGB, although no one knew that at the time. The remark about Poland, then a Soviet satellite, had a special resonance for Mark, since he was studying the language in anticipation of working Polish counterintelligence cases, which in fact he did when he returned to Chicago in 1986. The comment struck him as not something any FBI agent ought to go around saying, let alone someone working in counterintelligence. But by itself, it was not enough to act upon. Now, however, he had also been told about the large amount of cash that Hanssen had left on the dresser.

And there was something else, a third element. As an FBI counterintelligence agent, Wauck had heard that the bureau was actively looking for a mole inside U.S. intelligence.

For Special Agent Mark Wauck—a straight arrow, a man who
translated the Bible, a lawyer—the three pieces of information he now possessed posed a terrible dilemma. It was clear to him that his brother-in-law had more money than his FBI salary could possibly provide. Perhaps there was some innocent explanation. But there was another, more ominous possibility, one that Wauck hoped could not be true.

It was hard for him to believe. Wauck knew Hanssen well. For years, the two FBI agents had exchanged e-mails grousing about this or that bureau policy. But that sort of grumbling was common in any bureaucracy, and the two men, after all, were in-laws who could exchange private complaints. Now, however, if Wauck did not report what he knew to the FBI, he himself might be failing in his responsibilities to the bureau and to the country.

On the other hand, if he did report his suspicions to the bureau, he might damage the career of his sister’s husband, placing him under a cloud even though he might well be innocent of any wrongdoing. And in that case, if it somehow got back to Hanssen that his brother-in-law had reported him as a possible spy, it would destroy Mark Wauck’s standing within the family.

If Hanssen was in fact innocent, Wauck might even be harming his own FBI career by speaking out. He did not want to seem a nutcase, making wild allegations. He expected that the bureau would be skeptical of his information; the traditional attitude of the FBI at the time was that we don’t have moles; we don’t hire those kinds of people. And to think the unthinkable, if Robert Hanssen
was
a spy, he might well be dooming his brother-in-law to life in prison.
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It was not only that. His sister would be left alone, her husband probably behind bars for the rest of his life. His six nephews and nieces would, for all practical purposes, be deprived of a father. Even for someone who had not translated the Gospels, Mark Wauck faced a choice of biblical dimensions.

He agonized over it for weeks. Unlike his parents, his sister Bonnie, his brother Greg, and his brother-in-law, he was not a member of Opus Dei, but he was a good Catholic, and a man of strong conscience. In the end, he knew what he had to do.

Sometime in September, he went to a supervisor in Chicago. There was the stack of money on the dresser, thousands of dollars; Bob Hanssen’s remark about maybe retiring in Poland; and Mark Wauck’s knowledge that the bureau was actively looking for a mole. Wauck later told investigators that he related all this to the supervisor and said he was concerned that his brother-in-law might be involved in espionage.

Soon, Wauck believed, there would surely be major repercussions inside the FBI. He was confident the bureau would act swiftly to determine if Bob Hanssen was a spy, a Soviet mole. Hanssen would be investigated. If it somehow became known within the family that he had turned in his own sister’s husband, he might become a pariah.

Wauck waited as the weeks, then months, went by.

And nothing happened. To Special Agent Mark Wauck, it was as though he had tossed a paper airplane into the Grand Canyon and watched the wind take it in long, slow spirals until it disappeared from view. He could not even be sure that his report ever got out of Chicago.

Mark Wauck was not the only family member to harbor suspicions about Hanssen. Greg Wauck, later a postal inspector in Philadelphia, was living in Chicago at the time. As he recalled, he had heard from his sister Jeanne about the money and that Bonnie Hanssen had been upset. He was sufficiently concerned that he called his brother Mark and asked: “Do you think this guy is fooling around with the Russians?” Mark, who may already have warned the bureau by that time, changed the subject.

Several months after Hanssen’s arrest, Mark and Mary Ellen Wauck were questioned by lawyers from the Department of Justice at the Marriott hotel at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport. The lawyers, acting for the inspector general’s office of the Justice Department, were conducting the internal probe of the FBI’s handling of the Hanssen case for Attorney General John Ashcroft. Mary Ellen Wauck repeated her recollection that, as the story was related to her, Bonnie Hanssen had run across the street to tell Jeanne about the money.

Mark Wauck was interviewed for hours, both by the FBI and by the department’s lawyers. According to the account that he gave, the superior to whom he had reported his suspicions was Special Agent Jim Lyle, the supervisor of the Russian counterintelligence squad in Chicago. He said he had asked Lyle to accompany him to a small interview room so that they could meet privately.

Wauck knew Lyle; they had worked on the same KGB squad in New York and had commuted into the city together. A reddish-haired Southerner, born and raised in eastern Tennessee, Lyle was a respected counterintelligence specialist who, after New York, had been a supervisor in the GRU unit at FBI headquarters and then was transferred to Chicago. Like Bob Hanssen, Lyle was a great admirer of General Patton and collected photographs and books of the World War II soldier. Wauck believed that Lyle, despite what he considered his gruff, military manner, would act on his warning.

Wauck told the Justice Department lawyers that in his meeting with Lyle he ran through the three elements that concerned him: the cash in the bedroom, his brother-in-law’s comment about retiring in Poland, and the fact that there was an ongoing mole hunt.

“Do you know what you’re talking about?” he said Lyle asked. Wauck claimed he replied, “Yes, I’m talking about espionage.”

Wauck said Lyle questioned him closely about the money. Couldn’t there be innocent, alternative sources of money that would just as easily explain it?

Wauck said he had suggested some possibilities. He knew the Hanssens had sometimes received financial help from Bob’s parents; when they needed a car, Howard would buy it for them. Wauck admitted he could not prove the money had not come from Howard Hanssen, or was not cash that his brother-in-law had raised for Opus Dei or other charitable or religious purposes.

Wauck told investigators that Lyle seemed skeptical, which did not surprise him, given the enormity of what he was suggesting. After about half an hour, Wauck related, Lyle said he had done the right thing by coming forward; the matter would be handled in an appropriate fashion. Wauck did not put his suspicions in writing, nor was he asked to do so.

Jim Lyle also told his version of their conversation to the FBI, but it differed in many significant details from Wauck’s story. In an interview with the author early in 2002, Lyle agreed that Wauck had spoken to him about some unexplained money that Hanssen had possessed. On virtually every other point, however, he disputed Wauck’s version of their conversation.

“He was telling me something about Bonnie along the lines of, it could have related to Bonnie had a question about something Bob had done or was doing, and it may have been something about money; she
may have found some money in a drawer, Bob had some money and she didn’t know where it came from.

“I don’t remember what I said. I know there was a question about Bonnie and money. Also that Bonnie had raised a question about somebody; Bonnie was concerned Bob had a relationship with somebody, but not with the Russians. I don’t remember any remark about Russians, or speculation that it involved espionage.

“It was some questions Bonnie had about Bob and some things she didn’t understand about Bob. My thought was, ‘What is this to me?’ ” According to Lyle, the discussion seemed to him to involve marital problems between Bob and Bonnie Hanssen.

Lyle said he did not even recall the conversation until the FBI interviewed him about it after questioning Wauck. “When I learned that Bob Hanssen was a spy for the Russians I was as surprised as anyone,” Lyle said. He also insisted that the conversation had taken place not in 1990 but in 1992. By that year Wauck had transferred to Lyle’s squad, which is how he said he placed the date. Their talk, he added, took place not in an interview room but by Wauck’s desk along the window of the squad room. “He was sitting in his chair, and I was leaning against the window.” The conversation, Lyle said, had not taken half an hour. “It lasted two, three minutes at the most.”

Lyle said he wondered, “Was Bonnie Hanssen making some allegation to Mark about misconduct? It was not specific, and almost as though he was just asking my opinion about it. My reaction was, ‘I dunno, Mark, if she’s got questions about something he was doing, why doesn’t she ask him?’ He didn’t say this was something that had to be investigated. I never gave it another thought. I didn’t document it, I didn’t write it up, I didn’t it report to anybody.

“He did not approach me in any formal sense to allege that he suspected or Bonnie suspected that he was spying for the Russians. In retrospect do I think he was talking about espionage? You bet. But we now know that she [Bonnie] already knew about espionage, so why would she be asking about money?”

Did he recall that Wauck said Hanssen had made a remark about retiring in Poland? “I don’t remember anything about Poland. But if he said it, I would have said, ‘What is he, nuts?’ ”

And did Wauck say he knew the FBI was looking for a mole? “If he said that to me, I would have said, ‘What mole hunt?’ I didn’t know anything about a mole hunt.”

Still, Lyle confirmed a key element of Wauck’s story. “There was an issue about money. Bonnie didn’t know where Bob got some money.” But, he said, “I walked away thinking, What was that about?”

After Chicago, Lyle returned to Washington in 1998 and was detailed to the CIA. A year later he was named chief of the Russian espionage unit at FBI headquarters. In 2000, he went back to the CIA as chief of the Counterespionage Group, the agency’s main unit in charge of catching Russian spies. As head of the CEG, he also was in charge of the Special Investigations Unit, which has the responsibility for ferreting out moles inside U.S. intelligence.
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Did Wauck’s warning ever reach FBI headquarters? Lyle’s statement that he never passed Wauck’s concerns on to Washington was supported by his superiors at headquarters at the time. The senior FBI officials to whom such a report would have gone all agreed that it never reached headquarters. Robert B. Wade, the longtime deputy chief of the Soviet section, held that position in 1990 and 1992. “A report like that would go to the section and probably go to me,” Wade said. “I was the operational guy. If it didn’t go to me, I would be asked about it.” And did he recall any such report about Hanssen? “No, nothing,” he said.