The Main Enemy by Milton Bearden (epub e reader txt) 📕

In October 1985, Bob was transferred back to New York, and this time Bonnie was determined to maintain a modest lifestyle so her husband wouldn’t be tempted to go back to the dirty but lucrative game of playing with the Russians. During their first tour in New York, the Hanssens had lived in Scarsdale, one of New York’s most expensive suburbs. This time, Bonnie insisted that they find a cheaper place to live, so they settled in a modest three-bedroom house in Yorktown Heights, a small town about ninety minutes north of New York City. There was no reason now that the Hanssens couldn’t make it on Bob’s FBI salary.

But Bob Hanssen found the pull of espionage too strong to resist. So just as he was transferring back to New York he volunteered again, this time anonymously, and to the KGB in Washington rather than the GRU in New York. The Soviets never connected their new volunteer with the earlier agent working for the GRU in New York. Hanssen didn’t want any more slipups.

At the time he sent his letter to Degtyar, Hanssen was about to take on a job with much broader access to the FBI’s counterintelligence secrets than he had had during his earlier stint as a spy. He had just been named a supervisor in a foreign counterintelligence squad in the New York Field Office, handling technical operations against Soviets operating at the United Nations and in the Soviet consulate in Manhattan.

But more important, he had just completed an assignment as chief of the unit that analyzed information collected by the FBI on Soviet intelligence operations in the United States. He had also served on a special committee that was in charge of coordinating the FBI’s technical intelligence projects against the Soviets. So when Bob Hanssen volunteered to spy for the Soviets a second time, his head was filled with secrets, including many that the FBI had received from the Central Intelligence Agency.

Perhaps the most explosive secret that Hanssen betrayed to the Soviets was the fact that the FBI and the National Security Agency had jointly built a tunnel underneath the new Soviet embassy complex in Washington. The new embassy complex wasn’t fully occupied yet, but the FBI and NSA had already constructed the tunnel in order to eavesdrop on conversations among Russian diplomats and intelligence officers. What’s more, the American contractors working on the embassy compound had been infiltrated with FBI agents, who had worked hard to ensure that the compound was built as one big megaphone. They’d even made sure that a special sound-conducting paint had been used in the embassy, including on internal pipes, so that sound would travel more readily and be easier to pick up from the FBI tunnel.

Hanssen betrayed so many secrets shared jointly by the FBI and CIA, in fact, that years later, when counterintelligence investigators began to hunt down the source of the leaks, they were convinced the betrayal had occurred in Langley, not at the FBI. One innocent CIA officer, who by coincidence was both involved in a case Hanssen betrayed and happened to jog in a suburban Virginia park where Hanssen made some of his dead drops, would come under intense and prolonged scrutiny.

Even Bob Hanssen may not have been quite sure why he had decided to become a spy. He was hardly a classic case. Unlike others who had turned to espionage as a form of revenge against a system that had denied them advancement, Hanssen was not stalled in his career. He volunteered to the Soviets just as he was being given a promotion. Ideology didn’t explain it: Hanssen was a devout Catholic and avowed anti-Communist. He lived modestly with his wife and children and carpooled to work, even after he took the Soviets’ cash. The money was nice, but there was something more. Perhaps the only explanation was that Bob Hanssen had an addictive personality, and espionage somehow fed his cravings.

A native of Chicago and graduate of Knox College, a small liberal arts school in Illinois, Hanssen took a few years to find his footing. After majoring in chemistry and studying Russian at Knox, he switched to dentistry at Northwestern, later shifting to business and accounting. Married to Bonnie by 1968, he received an MBA from Northwestern in 1971, and by 1973 he was a certified public accountant, working briefly as an accountant in Chicago and then as a financial investigator for the Chicago Police Department. By the time Hanssen finally joined the FBI in 1976, he was nearly thirty-two.

Following a stint in a white-collar crime squad in Gary, Indiana, he was transferred to New York in 1978 to work on accounting-related matters, but the next year he volunteered to join the New York Field Office’s intelligence division. With his business and accounting background, he was assigned to help create an automated counterintelligence database for the New York office. The database would help the FBI keep track of Russian intelligence officers operating in the United States.

In 1981, just after he had broken with the GRU, he was transferred to FBI headquarters and began to move up through the ranks. He became a supervisory special agent in the intelligence division and later moved into the budget unit there, helping to prepare the FBI’s classified intelligence budget requests to Congress. Finally, in 1983, he moved into the Soviet analytical unit. The KGB could not have asked for a more knowledgeable or better-placed spy. Years later, American investigators would discover that the KGB came to consider their anonymous new spy, B, to be more valuable than Aldrich Ames.

The trick would be to keep him producing secrets. But Bob Hanssen had his own inner clock that would tell him when to spy and when to lie low.

   15   

Langley, October 1985

Edward Lee Howard had been on the run for over a week when the first solid clues of his whereabouts began to surface. The FBI had traced his travel from Albuquerque to Tucson to Helsinki,