How Soviet spy and FBI agent Robert Hanssen let a friend secretly watch him and ... trends now
When he was suddenly arrested as a Kremlin mole in 2001, Robert Hanssen’s shocked neighbors and acquaintances insisted the FBI agent was just a quiet and unassuming man, devoted to Catholicism and his family.
But others knew differently, and none better than the pal Hanssen would invite to secretly watch him and his wife having sex, without her knowledge.
Indeed, Hanssen led a double life in more ways than one – for the father-of-six, who hung a crucifix behind his desk, was also a treacherous double agent whose spying for Russia was described by the Justice Department upon his capture as ‘possibly the worst intelligence disaster in US history’.
Unlike so many traitors before him, however, Hanssen betrayed America and the wider Western security network not for ideological reasons but for money - and for the sheer excitement of putting one over on the bosses he bitterly resented for assigning him to a desk job.
‘He wanted to be James Bond and he thought they’d made him a librarian,’ said Eric O’Neill, an FBI colleague who played a crucial role in bringing Hanssen to justice.
In the end, the investigation to secure his arrest involved some 300 agents. And, no doubt, his death aged 79 on Monday lowers the curtain on one of the most embarrassing and damaging cases for the country he so ruthlessly betrayed.
When he was suddenly arrested as a Kremlin mole in 2001, Robert Hanssen’s shocked neighbors and acquaintances insisted the FBI agent was just a quiet and unassuming man, devoted to Catholicism and his family.
But others knew differently, and none better than the pal Hanssen would invite to secretly watch him and his wife having sex, without her knowledge. (Pictured: Hanssen with wife Bonnie, center, and their six children).
Hanssen – who was serving fifteen life terms without parole for his crimes – was found unresponsive in his Supermax prison cell in Colorado. A cause of death has yet to be announced.
Over a period spanning more than two decades, he leaked over 6,000 pages of secrets to the Kremlin’s intelligence services. Worst of all, some of the information he supplied to his Russian paymasters led to the unmasking of at least nine double agents who were working secretly for the US. Several of them were summarily executed.
He also exposed US nuclear secrets and revealed to the Soviets that American intelligence had dug an ingenious eavesdropping tunnel under their embassy in Washington.
In return for such secrets, he received cash, diamonds and bank deposits amounting to $1.4 million. Although the sum would be worth considerably more now, it doesn’t seem a vast amount for the risks he took. Though Hanssen always insisted it was never totally about the money.
With a reputation as brainy and remote, Hanssen was prone to fury if crossed. He lived frugally – likely one of the reasons why the bureau failed to pick up on repeated clues that he was literally selling the US out to the Soviets.
‘The magnitude of Hanssen’s crimes cannot be overstated,’ said Paul J. McNulty, the U.S. attorney who prosecuted him, on Monday. ‘They will long be remembered as being among the most egregious betrayals.’
Born in 1944, Hanssen was the only child of a Chicago police officer father who emotionally abused him as a boy.
That early trauma may well have lasted into adult life as he developed disturbing sexual proclivities that, after his arrest, prompted a former FBI shrink to diagnose him with a ‘serious psychiatric illness’.
Indeed, he paid regular visits to strip clubs throughout his marriage to Bernadette ‘Bonnie’ Wauck, a devout and strait-laced Catholic for whom he had converted from Lutheranism.
Born in 1944, Hanssen was the only child of a Chicago police officer father who emotionally abused him as a boy. (Pictured: Hanssen at high school, left, and his FBI headshot).
On Monday, Hanssen – who was serving fifteen life terms without parole for his crimes – was found dead in his Supermax prison cell in Colorado. A cause of death has yet to be announced. (Pictured: His arrest in 2001).
Worse, without his wife’s knowledge, he encouraged a friend - retired Army officer Jack Hoschouer - to watch them having sex through a window from a deck outside the marital bedroom. He would also email Hoschouer up to 50 or 60 times a day detailing his sexual fantasies.
Hanssen later concealed a video camera which was connected via a closed-circuit TV network to a guest room in their house from where Hoschouer could observe the sex in more comfort. Afterwards, the men would discuss the session.
But it didn’t stop there. Hanssen was also an early aficionado of anonymous internet chat-rooms where he would provide explicit sexual details of his marriage, and sometimes even take the huge risk of using his and Bonnie’s real names.
Hanssen was also strange around other women, twice touching the exposed breasts of one of Bonnie’s sisters while she was breast-feeding. She fled, demanding that she never be left alone with him again.
Then, when he and Bonnie moved from New York to Washington DC in 1991 so that he could – rather ironically – take over an FBI department monitoring enemy spies in the capital, he struck up a 14-month relationship with a local stripper.
Priscilla Sue Gailey told CNN after Hanssen’s arrest that he had lavished gifts on her including a Mercedes, a sapphire necklace and $2,000 to fix her teeth.
He even took on official FBI trips to Hong Kong and the bureau’s training center at Quantico, Virginia. However, Gailey has always insisted the relationship remained purely platonic and that Hanssen refused to sleep with her, wanting instead to convert her to Catholicism.
Clearly, then, Hanssen had huge issues with women – but he had no trouble deciding what sort of man he wanted to be. In fact, ex-FBI psychiatrist Dr Alen Salerian later claimed the excitement he got from spying was a way for Hanssen to calm his ‘sexual demons’.
Growing up, he was obsessed with James Bond, spying and secrecy. He even opened a Swiss bank account – known for their intense privacy – when he was old enough.
In the 2001 case against him, the FBI cited a letter Hanssen wrote saying he had
