Spy: The Inside Story of How the FBI's Robert Hanssen Betrayed America (38 page)

Jack Hoschouer remembered it was a little after 4
P.M
. on that Sunday, February 18, when Hanssen dropped him off at Dulles Airport to catch his flight to Phoenix.

The Special Surveillance Group, the Gs, had followed Hanssen to the airport. As he pulled out, heading east, they stayed on him. After days of preparation, everything was ready for the arrest, which officials at FBI headquarters and agents in the Washington field office expected to go down shortly after 8
P.M
.

The bureau knew that Hanssen would appear at Foxstone Park that Sunday because it had found on his computer memory storage card the July 2000 letter from the SVR designating
ELLIS
as the dead drop to be used once a year on February 18.
^*
And the FBI thought it knew exactly when he would show up at the park: when agents had searched Hanssen’s Palm III computer, they found a reference to “
ELLIS
,” February 18, and 8
P.M
.

Neil Gallagher, the chief of the National Security Division, had arrived at FBI headquarters at 1
P.M
. for a final briefing in the Strategic Information Operations Center (SIOC), the secure area on the fifth floor where officials monitor major operations. The floor of the SIOC is raised so that the space below it can be periodically swept for electronic bugs. The setting is what one might expect, with large television monitors,
computers, wall clocks set for time zones around the world, and sophisticated communications equipment. FBI director Louis Freeh planned to join Gallagher there that night to await word of the arrest.

In midafternoon, Gallagher returned to his office on the seventh floor at headquarters to grab a sandwich. Nothing was going to happen for a while.

The FBI, from the telephone taps on Hanssen’s house, knew that his daughter, Jane, his son-in-law Richard Trimber, and their children were expected for Sunday dinner. Instead of heading back home from the airport to join them, however, Hanssen, in his silver Taurus, suddenly pulled into the Pike 7 Plaza shopping center in northern Virginia. As the Gs watched from a discreet distance, Hanssen opened his car trunk. He leaned into the trunk for a long time.

Tim Caruso and other FBI agents were sitting in the command van in a parking lot about a mile from the entrance to Foxstone Park. An agent in the van, relaying minute-by-minute reports from the watching Gs, exclaimed:

“He’s got some documents and he’s putting them in a plastic bag.”

Caruso was as astonished as anyone, but he thought he knew what it meant. He looked around at the agents sitting in the van with him.

“He’s going to do this right now,” Caruso said. “In broad daylight.”

Hanssen had previously prepared the package for the Russians, with four classified FBI documents and his “sleeping tiger” cover letter, but he had decided at the eleventh hour, racing back from Dulles, to add three more documents. He opened the package, put them in, and retaped the plastic bag.

All seven documents were classified
SECRET
. They dealt with current and proposed FBI counterintelligence operations against Russian agents in the United States.

At headquarters, Gallagher’s phone rang. “I get a call around 4
P.M
. saying that something unusual was occurring, you may want to get down to the SIOC right away. I get down there a minute or so later.” Hanssen was at the shopping center, doing something in his trunk, he was told.

Gallagher began trying to reach Louis Freeh.

Hanssen slammed the car trunk shut, got back in the Taurus, and drove the short distance to Foxstone Park.

Debra Smith, the squad supervisor for the Hanssen case at the Washington field office, had been waiting for this moment. It was
Smith who was in charge of the investigation of
GRAYDAY
by WFO and the surveillance operations that had begun three months earlier. Smith was stationed in the command van with Caruso and Dan Cloyd, Caruso’s deputy.

Now it was time. An FBI SWAT team was already in place, just out of sight of the entrance to Foxstone Park. They wore bulletproof vests, because no one knew whether Hanssen, who had boasted of his prowess with guns and owned an extensive personal armory, might start shooting when agents tried to arrest him.

Caruso was right; Hanssen was not waiting for dark. He pulled up across from the park entrance and got out of his car. He placed a piece of white tape vertically on the post of the park sign to indicate to the Russians that the drop would be ready to clear within minutes.

Washington field called the SIOC. He’s at the park, WFO reported.

“I’m still trying to find Louie Freeh,” Gallagher recalled. “SIOC was paging him, we’re beeping him, but we still haven’t reached him. And in the next five minutes Hanssen’s world would turn upside down.”

Carrying the package,
GRAYDAY
disappeared into the woods. It was 4:34
P.M
.

He walked deep into the narrow park, following the path that led to the weathered wooden footbridge that was dead drop
ELLIS
. It took him about four minutes. He looked around and, seeing no one, slipped the package under the bridge, out of sight. Then he walked back out of the park.

Despite Hanssen’s increasingly jittery mood of late, it had, all in all, been a pleasant Sunday: church as usual, of course, playing Frisbee with the dog, seeing Jack again—good old Jack—then a visit to the dead drop so convenient to his house, leaving documents, for which the Russians had rewarded him so well. Now it was time to head home. Bonnie would have supper waiting. He crossed the road and was only a few feet from his car.

At that instant, two vans suddenly appeared from both directions, screeching to a halt, blocking Hanssen’s Taurus. Four agents jumped out, some carrying huge MP-5 automatic weapons, and surrounded him. Four backup agents were ready to move in if needed.

It was the last second of freedom that Robert Hanssen would enjoy for the rest of his life.

“You’re under arrest!” one of the FBI men said. “Put your hands in the air.”

Hanssen did not comply immediately and the agent repeated the command.

“Do you have a weapon?” he was asked.

“No,” Hanssen replied. The agents made sure.

Quickly, Hanssen was handcuffed with his arms behind his back and hustled into an SUV.

At almost the same moment, Gallagher finally reached Freeh, who started for headquarters.

Hanssen, meanwhile, was being driven to the FBI field office in Tysons Corner, not far from his home. Doug Gregory, the case agent for the
GRAYDAY
investigation, was in the car with the prisoner, along with another case agent, Stefan A. Pluta.

Hanssen was read his Miranda rights. In the car, the agents played for Hanssen the tape of his conversation of fourteen years earlier with KGB officer Aleksandr K. Fefelov. They showed him photographs of the drop sites he had used, and copies of his letters to the SVR that had been retrieved from his computer memory card. It was a kind of psychological warfare, designed to convince Hanssen that the evidence against him was irrefutable and overwhelming.

He was asked if he had ever spied for anyone other than the Russians. “No one but the Russians,” he replied.

Then Hanssen claimed he had wanted to get caught.

For how long? he was asked.

“Since I started,” he said.

He promised to tell everything now that it was over. He wanted to know how Bonnie would get the news.

Two agents were on the way to his house, he was told.

Hanssen’s life is over
, Doug Gregory was thinking. Despite everything, Hanssen had been a fellow FBI agent for twenty-five years.

“Bob, this is a sad day for all of us,” Gregory said. “This is just terrible.”

Expressionless, Hanssen replied: “Life has its ups and downs.”

* * *

Bonnie was growing worried when Bob did not return home for dinner. It was getting past 6 o’clock. She waited a while, then served dinner to her daughter and son-in-law and their young children. Still no sign of Bob.

She tried his cell phone, but it wasn’t turned on. Someone called the
FBI to see if they knew where Hanssen was. No, the word came back, they had no information. Then the Trimbers left.

Bonnie telephoned her mother in Chicago. Pray for Bob, she said, something odd is going on, he hasn’t come home. Bonnie feared there might be a medical emergency; Bob had kidney problems, and his blood pressure had been way up lately. He might be lying in a hospital somewhere, unable to contact her.

Bonnie was becoming frantic. It was well after dark now, and Bob had still not returned from the airport. Nor had he called. What was keeping him?

Finally, she could stand it no longer. She got in her car with a friend and drove out to Dulles to look for him. She did not know what else to do.

The FBI followed her to the airport. In the parking lot, the Gs approached Bonnie and told her that her husband was unharmed and that an agent would be along in a minute or two to explain. The agents appeared and took Bonnie to a room inside the terminal. There she was told that her husband had been arrested for espionage.

“She was destroyed,” one FBI man said. “She was in a very emotional state already, and more so afterward. She was devastated.”

The agents drove Bonnie, weeping and overcome, from the airport back to her house. They stayed with her as she made a series of telephone calls to family members to tell them what had happened. She called her mother again and told her the dreadful news: Bob had been arrested. For espionage.

Jeanne Beglis, Bonnie’s sister, and her husband, George, arrived from across the street to do what they could.

The FBI agents, although polite, weren’t about to leave. The house was a crime scene and would have to be searched from top to bottom. The bureau had obtained search warrants two days earlier.

Bonnie was upstairs with a female agent, Peggy Casey Cash, throwing some clothes together. Upset as she was, Bonnie wanted to talk, and they did.

Downstairs, Special Agent Dave Lambert was already going through the house with Greg Hanssen, the couple’s seventeen-year-old son. Lambert was asking about Bob Hanssen’s guns: where were they? Greg knew exactly where they were, showing the FBI man the location of each firearm: in closets, under beds, seemingly all over the house.

Lisa, then fifteen, the only other Hanssen child still living at home, returned from a date with her boyfriend and stepped into the chaos.
When she heard that her father had been arrested as a spy, she broke down sobbing. Jeanne Beglis cradled Lisa in her arms.

The FBI agents pointed out to Bonnie that soon the house on Talisman Drive would become the center of a media frenzy, with yellow tape stretched across the lawn, television satellite trucks clogging the street, and reporters swarming the neighborhood. They offered to take her and the two children to a hotel to escape the mob scene. She accepted, and the agents escorted her and the children to the nearby Residence Inn at Tysons Corner.

As she left the house, Bonnie remarked: “He did it. He just did it.”

While still at the house, and again in more detail at the hotel, Bonnie volunteered startling new information. Until then, the bureau’s counterspies believed that Hanssen had begun spying in October 1985. That was the date on the first letter from Hanssen to the KGB in the file that the FBI, with help from the CIA, had purloined from Moscow.

Now, for the first time, the FBI learned from Bonnie that Hanssen had begun his espionage career in 1979 in New York. She revealed how she had come upon her husband in the basement of their home in Scarsdale writing a letter, which he had hastily tried to conceal. She told how he claimed he had been scamming the Soviets, providing worthless information—which, although she did not know it, was a lie. She had insisted he see Father Bucciarelli and said that Hanssen later contended he had given the money, $30,000, to Mother Teresa.

Not until months afterward, when Hanssen had pleaded guilty and was being debriefed, did the bureau learn from him that in 1979 he had betrayed to the GRU not worthless information but the identity of
TOPHAT
, General Dimitri Fedorovich Polyakov, one of the most important U.S. agents inside the Soviet military.
TOPHAT
was executed after he was also betrayed, in 1985, by the CIA’s Aldrich Ames.