The most harmful spy in the history of the FBI. He couldn’t even choose a tie [FRAGMENT]

Who is Robert Hanssen?

Robert Hanssen is often described by those who knew him as an aloof person, someone who couldn’t live by any idea, a guy who never quite fit in anywhere. Joe Navarro, an FBI agent and counterintelligence expert, worked with Hanssen in the intelligence division for a time. He recalls being with him at a Bureau meeting in Dallas.

– We spent the whole day in meetings, and when we returned from dinner, we were all tired and cold from the walk. The place we were staying at had a semi-indoor pool with a hot tub, and as we walked by, someone in our group said, “Wouldn’t it be nice to get in a hot tub?” “Yes, that’s a great idea!” we replied in unison. We all went to our rooms, changed and were back within minutes. So we tell stories and drink beer, almost all men, and sit around having a good time, everyone except Hanssen. He was just sitting there, outside the hot tub, still wearing his coat. “Hey, Bobby, get changed and come in,” we say. And he said, “No, it’s OK.” “Fine, if you want to sit there and protect us,” we nod. It was like he wanted to be part of it but didn’t know how.

Navarro says he found it “weird.” In fact, an element of strangeness appears in one form or another in almost every description of Hanssen’s behavior.

Jim Ohlson, like Joe Navarro, has a snapshot memory of Bob Hanssen that seems to succinctly capture his character – in this case, an actual photo:

– I think it was St. Patrick’s Day in ’85. We all went to this Irish pub. And we’re all in the picture having fun. But Hanssen is standing off to the right, with some space between the rest of the group and him. He’s wearing a black suit, white shirt and tie, and we’re all dressed casually.

Jim Ohlson is a rarity among FBI agents – someone who still admits that he got along great with Bob Hanssen in the past. Their paths first crossed in 1981 in the budget unit, when Ohlson transferred his responsibilities to Hanssen over the course of several months. They both come from roughly the same areas of Chicago and both are interested in new technologies. They even attended the same high school, although Ohlson was a few years younger.

“I liked the guy,” Ohlson says. – I liked his analytical way of thinking. The way he solved problems. We got along great. We were both interested in computing and had early Apple Two computers. He was adept at using automation to solve a wide range of problems at the FBI, and I really enjoyed working with him on these types of projects. We were both also members of a group called Washington Apple Pi, which was centered around computer games. I often describe the people in the FBI as concentric circles around Hanssen. The inner circle might have consisted of ten people, and I was one of them. We actually liked the guy and liked solving problems with him. We got along and tolerated his eccentricities, which were mostly the result of poor interpersonal skills. Another, larger circle around him consisted of people who appreciated his work but were otherwise uninterested in him. Many of his bosses belonged to this circle. They knew he did his job well. Being a Chartered Accountant, he was able to analyze problems much deeper and classify them, which really helped in finding a solution. And then there was the outer circle of people who knew Hanssen and didn’t like him and thought he was weird. And these are hundreds of people.

Did a warning light go off for Ohlson then? After all, Hanssen had already sold Tophat to the Soviets and found himself at a crossroads, having to choose another job.

“If I had had more knowledge about psychopathic personalities at the time, I think I would have been able to describe him as a psychopath,” Ohlson tells me, “but at the time I neither had the experience nor knew the terminology to recognize it.” He primarily, and I see it now, compartmentalized aspects of his life. Friendship with me in one compartment. Family in the next, and the Church in the next. He also had other friends in other compartments, such as Jack Hoschouer. It so happens that I remembered Jacek from high school. I wasn’t a close friend of his, but Bob always told me after the fact, “Jim, Jack was in town last week.” But he never told me in advance that I couldn’t go out with them. I was just stuck in a different pigeonhole. Then I put a cross on it, so be it, since he is simply not interested. I was very close to him at work, but it never developed into dinner with our wives. It was a different compartment too.

When David Major moves from the White House National Security Council in September 1987 to become deputy director of the FBI’s C13 Section, responsible for Soviet analysis, he inherits Bob Hanssen as a subordinate. Hanssen, Major says, has a disturbing way of sneaking silently into his office and then waiting to be noticed. Other sources told the Webster committee that Hanssen usually entered meetings uninvited when classified material was being discussed. In conversation he tends to whisper, as if to emphasize the secret importance of what is being discussed.

Dave Brown, who works with Hanssen on the technical side of several counterintelligence issues, remembers calling him “Whisperer Bob” because of his habit of speaking in a very quiet and high-pitched voice. He was an arrogant jerk, always fully convinced that he was not only the smartest guy in the room, but also a much better person in every way.”

Hanssen also seems to have an instinctive sense of who is in control of the secrets and who is not. He is the one who greets the Major on his first day on the job, but he almost never exercises or plays basketball with the other special agents in the gym and court at the headquarters building. He is also not predisposed to casual conversation. Small talk about the last Redskins game means nothing to him. Colleagues who stop by his various FBI offices in Washington over the past fourteen years are more likely to hear a monologue about Catholicism or godless communism. Even politics within the office, the common language of bureaucracy, it seems, does not interest him at all.

Instead of discouraging David Major, these qualities endear him to him. In time, he would become Bob’s biggest advocate in the FBI’s Russia counterintelligence division.

– It’s strange to say it – Major tells me – but we had professional respect for each other. Bob had a very high IQ. If he walked into my office, I knew I was in for an interesting conversation. We had some very deep discussions about the Russians, how to defeat them, how they are organized. We weren’t drinking partners, but we went to company events together, him and his wife, me and my wife. Bonnie is a very attractive woman. I knew Bob well enough that when I first met her I could tell him, “Is this your wife? How the hell did you do that?”

Others who have worked with Hanssen over the years are much more irritated by his aloofness and tendency to flaunt his faith, especially after he joined Opus Dei. With the zeal of a convert, Hanssen attacks many issues typical of conservative Catholicism. What really brings it to life is the famous Roe v. Wade case and its aftermath. Over the years, Bob and Bonnie would march in anti-abortion demonstrations, and the family minivan would be plastered with numerous right-to-life slogans. At work, everyone, regardless of how much they meant to the organization, was subjected to conversion attempts by Hanssen.

“He was like someone who quits drinking or smoking and becomes horrible to the people who continue to do it,” Mike Rochford tells me. – He found out that some of the girls at headquarters were living with their boyfriends and he didn’t approve of it, so he started lecturing them about birth control and calendar methods and stuff like that. Many of them were not impressed at all.

“Impression” doesn’t convey how IC Smith feels about Hanssen. Hanssen reports to Smith when he is assigned to the budget unit, and later works alongside him when Smith oversees the Chinese part of the counterintelligence division.

“Honestly, I thought Hanssen was just a disgusting person,” Smith says. – His whole demeanor, his whole dark knight look and the black suits he always wore. I can’t think of any Bureau employee who was as disliked as Hanssen.

Hanssen, Smith says, works hard to appear to be of higher intelligence – one notch above the rest of the herd at the Bureau. In fact, according to Smith, he is not at all like that.

– I base this not only on conversations with him, but also on observations of his work. He wasn’t seen as someone who could be promoted to a higher rank, and that was an assessment I wholeheartedly agreed with.

Hanssen’s latest position – he was assigned to the State Department as the FBI’s foreign mission liaison – “is not without responsibility,” Smith says, “but he’s not someone they’re looking at as a future head of the unit.”

Ironically, what Smith calls Hanssen’s “mediocrity” in his day job perfectly orients him to the work of a night mole: while other employees are transferred to one place or another as they climb the ladder into the Bureau’s senior management, agents , who will never be able to get there, may burrow deeper and deeper into the place to which they are assigned. Every cloud has a silver lining.

Yet another agent, Jerry Doyle, describes Hanssen as having an almost macabre appearance and personality: “He reminded me of Ichabod Crane. If you saw him on Halloween, he would terrify you.” His colleagues, inspired both by his behavior and his love of black suits, began calling Hanssen the Mortician and Doctor Death. If they could see Hanssen at night, they would be even more convinced of their opinion, because he slept only in black pajamas.

Perhaps Bob Hanssen sees himself as a sort of ninja warrior, carving out a space between two superpowers seeking global domination. The black pajamas bring this to mind. Perhaps, as one of his colleagues suggests, he’s enamored with the mid-century G-man look – black suits, white shirts and ties straight from the set of the 1959 film “The FBI Story.” But black is also the favorite color of magicians and illusionists, trick masters and window burglars, and, for that matter, judges, executioners and priests. Hanssen has a little bit of everything. He is the man behind the curtain, the one you never see but who is watching you all the time.

“I feel like he really liked to think of himself as a puppet master, pulling strings and making other people do what he wanted them to do,” says his brother-in-law Mark Wauck. – If I asked him a simple question about some configuration issue with my Lynx, he would often formulate his answer in terms of “Do this… now do that” and so on, instead of explaining what I needed to know. He wanted me to follow his instructions and not understand the issue. This was very typical of him. He’s pulling the strings. He controls what happens.

On one level, Bob Hanssen is an even more enigmatic figure to his Soviet and later Russian handlers and paymasters. His bosses, colleagues and subordinates in the FBI at least know his name and surname, what he looks like and even what he sounds like. They may tell you that he’s tall, that he’s something of a tech geek, and that he has terrible taste in ties, which are mandatory for FBI agents at all levels except undercover.

Hidden in plain sight – cover promotional materials of the Znak Horyzont publishing house