True Spy Stories

True Spy Stories

Kristen Laurence

Smashwords Edition

Copyrights 2014 Author

All rights reserved

Smashwords edition, License notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Contents

True Spy Stories

Smashwords edition, License notes

Robert Philip Hanssen: The Spy who Stayed out in the Cold

Cia Traitor Aldrich Ames

The Cambridge Spies

The Alger Hiss Case

Mata Hari

The Rosenbergs

Thank you for reading.

Robert Philip Hanssen: The Spy who Stayed out in the Cold

Bob Hanssen was about to retire from his life's work. But instead of receiving a gold watch or a modest pension like most employees, he would instead be getting $50,000 in non-sequential $100 bills. And he would have to pick it up in a local park. In five more weeks he would also be retiring from his day jobas an FBI agent. His first job was trading American secrets to the Russians for cash.

Just before daybreak, alone in the gloom of his basement office, he tapped out a letter to his Russian handlers while still dressed in his jet-black pajamas. It was virtually the only color he would wear over his bulky 6-foot-3-inch frame.

The spy thought he could feel something or somebody getting close. He had begun to believe his Ford Taurus was bugged. The radio was making strange crackling sounds.

He was right. His phone was tapped, an FBI surveillance squadron had bought a house across the street, and he was being followed.

Hanssen tapped out his resignation letter on an IBM laptop 365E. He encrypted it, copied it on to a disk, and added it to the package he would be delivering late that afternoon.

Dear Friends:

I thank you for your assistance these many years. It seems, however, that my greatest utility to you has come to an end, and it is time to seclude myself from active service.

I have been promoted to a higher do-nothing Senior Executive job outside of regular access to informaiton (sic) within the counterintelligence program. I am being isolated. Further, I believe I have detected repeated bursting radio signal emanations from my vehicle. The knowledge of their existence is sufficient. Amusing the games children play.

Something has aroused the sleeping tiger. Perhaps you know better than I.

Life is full of its ups and downs.

I will be in contact next year, same time, same place. Perhaps the correlation of forces and circumstance then will have improved.

Your friend,

Ramon Garcia

Ramon Garcia was one of his code names. He thought he had been cautious, never giving Moscow his real name and never meeting with the KGB. But he had not been careful enough. His biggest mistake had been leaving his fingerprints on the plastic garbage bags in which he delivered state secrets. When his file was sold by a former KGB higher-up in September 2000, the FBI lab had asked for everything. Surprisingly, the Russians had kept the Hefty bags and once the prints had been dusted and traced, his fate was sealed.

Bob Hanssen had a friend staying at his house in Northern Virginia that weekend. On this Sunday he took that pal, Jack Hoschouer, to church with the family. The Hanssen brood was large. There were six kids, though only two, Lisa and Gregg, were still living at home. The other four had either married or were in college. The Hanssen family members were Catholic conservatives. They belonged to Opus Dei, a small but powerful faction of Catholicism that many called a cult. The Hanssen family displayed their conservative beliefs prominently, marching in pro-life rallies, slapping anti-abortion stickers on the family van, and attending gun shows. Bob collected guns; there were 14 in the house ranging from an Uzi semiautomatic rifle to Walther PPK pistols. The Walther PPK was James Bond's weapon of choice and Hanssen, a Bond fan, had two in his collection.

Despite Hanssen's conservatism, he and Hoschouer, buddies since high school in Chicago, had done some kinky things together. Bob had once taken nude photos of his wife Bonnie and mailed them without her knowledge to Hoschouer when he was in the Army and stationed in Vietnam. Years later, he topped that by hiding a miniature video camera in his bedroom where he photographed himself making love to Bonnie. Hoschouer and Bob later watched the homemade sex film together in the family den.

After church Hanssen changed from his black suit to a black turtleneck sweater with a black collared shirt over it. The monotony was broken by a pair of dark gray slacks. He drove Hoschouer to nearby Dulles Airport but surprised his friend by not coming in with him to wait for the plane. There were some errands to run, he said, and drove off.

It struck me as odd that Bob didn't come in for a Coke, Hoschouer would say later. I may have been the last friendly face he saw.

But Hanssen was already speeding back down the Dulles Access Road towards a strip mall near the Washington Beltway. The team in the FBI surveillance vehicle was right behind him and watched as he walked around to the trunk of his car. He was photographed taking out documents from the FBI's intelligence files that were each stamped SECRET. There were seven in all. Some detailed the bureau's current surveillance results in recent foreign counterintelligence operations. He added his farewell letter and wrapped everything in the sturdy plastic Hefty bag.

Bob was being tailed by the FBI's Special Surveillance Group and it knew exactly where he was going: Foxstone Park. The 14-acre flood plain-turned-recreation area was less than a mile from his home in Vienna, Va. The group had already watched him drive by the entrance to the park four times in December trying to catch a glance of a white strip of tape that would signal that his Russian handlers were ready to receive his package. In January, his drives by the entrance increased. The agents were certain that this would be the day. They had already intercepted the $50,000 cash dropped at a nearby nature center.

They were right. As the sun fell below the horizon, the agents followed him back to the park and watched him walk into the wood. He stopped at a footbridge and put a package under the trestle. It was the last drop he would ever make.

Freeze! FBI!, yelled one of 10 young men who surrounded him. Another agent began reading him his rights. A third cuffed his wrists behind his back.

One of the agents later recalled, After viewing the arrest video, you could tell that Hanssen knew it was over. You could literally see his shoulders slump.

Robert Philip Hanssen was born April 18, 1944, in Chicago. His father, Howard, was away in the Navy when he was born and his mother, Vivian, was alone. Both parents were in their 30s when their son, and only child, was born.

Howard Hanssen was a Chicago cop before going into the Navy. After World War II he rejoined the police force and made a 30-year career of it. The Hanssen family bought its first and only Chicago house in the Norwood Park section of the city. It was a modest two-bedroom bungalow on North Neva Avenue and considered a safe, cop neighborhood. Soon after the family began living there, Howard's mother moved in with them. Bob Hanssen, called Bobby in his childhood, was fussed over by the two women, with his father behaving somewhat coldly toward his son. Bobby Hanssen was remembered as a silent, non-talkative child, who was eager to please.

He would say hello, recalled neighbor Pauline Rutledge, but he was so quiet. He wouldn't say much else.

Bob's passion was reading the satirical magazine Mad and comic books that featured action heroes. His subscription to Mad, which had a regular back-page feature called Spy vs. Spy, continued through college.

Was he beaten by his father?

Oh, no, Vivian Hanssen said. Of course his father {was} strict. I was always the easy one. But aren't most families like that?

In the early 1950s, Howard Hanssen became part of the Chicago Police Department's famed Red Unit. It was the McCarthy era, and Howard's mission was to uncover politicians inside the city government who had communist leanings. Some neighbors viewed the Hanssens as secretive.

They were a real policeman's family, neighbor Ruth Kremske remembered. I don't think they wanted anyone nosing around in their business.

Following high school, where he was remembered as a bit of a geek, Hanssennow going by Bobwent off to Knox College in Galesburg, Ill. He matriculated in chemistry. As a requirement of graduation he had to take a foreign language for two years. Bob chose Russian, a popular choice among college students in the mid-1960s. The Cold War had many of them believing that the language could come in handy if a shooting war broke out with the Soviet Union. Bob also studied the masters of Russian writing: Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky.

After getting his B.S. degree from Knox, Bob applied unsuccessfully for a position as a cryptographer at the National Security Agency just north of Washington, D.C. An NSA official explained to him that the rejection was due to budget cutbacks. It was the middle of the Vietnam War, and Hanssen wasn't anxious to be drafted. He again turned to higher education, enrolling in Northwestern University's Dental School. At Northwestern, just north of Chicago, Hanssen shared a dormitory room with a Hawaiian classmate, Jerry Takesono, who remembers a quirky, introverted youth who sometimes behaved a bit strangely, always wearing a black suit, white shirt and tie to class when everyone else wore sweaters and jeans. Hanssen also wore the black suit to his cadaver class, carving up the dead bodies without even taking off the jacket. He continued to wear the same black suit after the dissections, something Takesono hasn't forgotten.

The suit smelled of formaldehyde and he was hanging it up each night in our room. Our place reeked of the cadaver. I finally had to ask him to get it drycleaned. Takesono recalled.

Another classmate, Marty Zeigner, said it was impossible to miss Hanssen's brilliant mind, however disturbed. He recalled an episode that demonstrated his ability to retain information.

"I sat across from Bob in a lecture on tooth structure. The professor was someone called Dr. Chasen, who liked to hear himself talk. He was a bit long-winded. Everyone but Bob was fervently taking notes. Instead, he had a single sheet of paper and had used it to doodle a bird and had also drawn a sketch of an anatomically correct nude woman. He had written just one word on the page: bicuspid.

"The professor walked around the room as he talked. It was hard for him to miss Bob's naked lady. He came over to his desk and just lost it. He began reaming Bob outsomething about how Northwestern was a professional school and how he was lucky to get in. Bob sat there, but you could see he was pissed off. Finally, he couldn't take it anymore and interrupted him.

He told the professor he had accused him of not listening and didn't appreciate it. Bob said, 'Why don't you go back in front of the class and start over and I'll pick it up from there.' When the professor began, he interrupted and began repeating the lecture word-for-word. It was like he had a tape recorder inside his brain. Afterwards he told me, 'I can remember every conversation I have ever had.'

Despite good grades, Hanssen tired of dental school, saying, I don't think I want to spend my life picking pieces off of someone's teeth. Instead he began telling his classmates that he had decided to be a psychiatrist.

Howard Hanssen helped his son test the waters by getting him a weekend job as an orderly at a city-run mental hospital. There Bob delighted in pretending he was a doctor, calling mental patients into an office and interviewing them. A Northwestern classmate, John Sullivan, often sketched the inmates as Bob talked to them.

He loved showing people the control he had over them, Sullivan said. They were mostly bonkers, but he would perform for his friends, putting the patients through their paces. He wasn't mean; he just quietly interrogated them.

Another college friend, Robert Lauren, tells an anecdote indicating Hanssen had traitorous leanings long before he joined the FBI. Though the episode occurred three decades ago it now must be considered remarkable.

I was leaving his houseI think it was 1968 or 1969and Bob handed me the memoirs of a British traitor who had spied for Moscow over a 20-year period, Lauren said. The book was My Silent War by Kim Philby. He thought the book was terrific. After a few weeks I returned the book and he asked me if I liked it and I said it was very interesting. Bob then saidand I've never forgotten it, particularly nowhe said, 'You know, someday I'd like to pull off a caper like that.'

Bob Hanssen eventually rejected the psychiatry profession. Although he had given up on three careers, he persevered, returning to Northwestern where he eventually got an MBA degree in accounting. Perhaps he had no choicehe was in love and the soon-to-be spy was married, with a child on the way.

Bernadette Bonnie Wauck was as different from Bob Hanssen as day is from night. She was one of eight; he was an only child. She was Catholic; he was Lutheran. His father was a cop; her father was a University professor. She lived in upscale Park Ridge, just outside the Chicago city limits. Norwood Park, three train stops away, was working class. And Bonnie was also