In the 15 months since her husband’s arrest as a Russian spy, Bonnie Hanssen has struggled to maintain her public silence in the face of a torrent of disclosures about her life with a man she thought she knew.
Now she says she has chosen to speak out because she wants to answer one question she has heard dozens of times: How could Robert P. Hanssen’s wife of 34 years not have known he was a spy?
“I just wish somebody would say that my husband never told me he was spying,” Bonnie Hanssen said in frustration in a telephone interview this week.
One reason for her frustration may be that some government officials were apparently not convinced of her story. The Justice Department’s inspector general has been examining the FBI’s investigation of Hanssen, the former FBI agent sentenced to life in prison on Friday after he pleaded guilty to spying for Moscow off and on for more than 20 years. As part of that review, the inspector general asked Bonnie Hanssen to take a polygraph test, just days before the sentencing.
The bureau had not asked her to take a polygraph test after her husband’s arrest in February 2001. So it appears that the Justice Department’s inspector general, an independent office charged with monitoring the department’s work, was trying to determine whether the FBI had too readily accepted Bonnie Hanssen’s version of events.
Before her May 7 polygraph test began, Justice Department investigators read Bonnie Hanssen her Miranda rights, according to her Washington lawyer, Janine Brookner.
A Justice Department spokesman, citing the inspector general’s continuing review of the case, declined to comment. Another government official confirmed that Bonnie Hanssen was given a polygraph test and said she had passed it.
Bonnie Hanssen acknowledged in the interview that about 1980, she discovered that her husband was having unauthorized dealings with the Russians, but she said she never knew the extent. One day, she said, she found her husband scurrying to cover up some papers in the basement of their home in Scarsdale, N.Y. Pressed to explain what he was doing, she said, he acknowledged that he was dealing with the Russians. At the time, he was assigned to counterintelligence in the FBI’s New York field office.
“But he told me he was just tricking the Russians and feeding them false information,” she said. “He never said he was spying. I told him I thought it was insane.”
But Robert Hanssen was not tricking the Russians; he was a Russian spy and had been working for the GRU, a Soviet military intelligence group, since 1979.
Bonnie Hanssen said she demanded that her husband go with her to see their Catholic priest, the Rev. Robert P. Bucciarelli, to confess.
Bucciarelli came up with a plan to save Robert Hanssen from prison, Bonnie Hanssen told investigators during the polygraph test, her lawyer said. If he gave the money from the Soviets to charity, and promised not to spy again, he would have the priest’s blessing to never report the matter to the FBI. Robert Hanssen agreed.
Her husband told her he had received about $30,000 from the Soviets, more than has previously been disclosed, but he also said that he had spent much of it.
Bonnie Hanssen said she demanded that he repay the entire $30,000. Robert Hanssen began to make small payments over several years to charity, moving the family close to bankruptcy, Bonnie Hanssen told the Justice investigators.
Bonnie Hanssen said she repeatedly questioned her husband to ensure that he was making the payments, and each time he insisted that he was. Over the next few years, she said, she also questioned him about whether he was working with the Russians once more. Each time he denied it and acted as if he was hurt that she did not trust him, her lawyer said Bonnie Hanssen told investigators during the polygraph test.
About 1985, after they had moved to Washington and Robert Hanssen was working at FBI headquarters in a senior counterintelligence post, he told his wife that he had paid the debt, she told the Justice Department.
That fall, Robert Hanssen was transferred back to New York as a supervisor in charge of a counterintelligence squad. This time, Bonnie Hanssen insisted that they find a cheaper place to live than Scarsdale. She did not want her husband to be tempted to work for the Russians again, she told the Justice Department. They bought a modest, three-bedroom home in Yorktown Heights, N.Y., north of New York City.
In fact, her husband resumed his espionage career. In October 1985, he volunteered to spy for the KGB by sending an anonymous letter to a KGB officer based in Washington. In it he betrayed three KGB officers who were working for the CIA and the FBI. All three were arrested; two were executed.
Bonnie Hanssen insisted she never knew about her husband’s second, far longer and more damaging stint as a spy and never saw anything that made her suspect that he had taken up with the Russians again.
“I never knew about anything else after that first time,” Bonnie Hanssen said in the interview.
But she was questioned during the polygraph test about her knowledge of Robert Hanssen’s later spying career. She said she had none, and the polygraph test showed no indication of deception, said Brookner, who watched the polygraph session through a one-way mirror.
