Personal Life
According to USA Today, those who knew the Hanssens described them as a close family. They attended Mass weekly and were very active in Opus Dei. Robert Hanssen's three sons attended The Heights School in Potomac, Maryland, an all-boys preparatory school. His daughters attended Oakcrest School for Girls, an independent Roman Catholic school. Both schools are associated with Opus Dei. Hanssen's wife, Bonnie, taught religion at Oakcrest.
The priest at the Oakcrest School said that Hanssen had regularly attended a 6:30 a.m. daily mass for more than a decade. Opus Dei member Father C. John McCloskey III said Hanssen also occasionally attended the daily noontime Mass at the Catholic Information Center in downtown Washington, D.C. After going to prison, Hanssen claimed he periodically admitted his espionage to priests in confession. He urged fellow Catholics in the Bureau to attend mass more often, and denounced the Russians as "godless", even though he was spying for them.
However, there was a second side to Hanssen's private life much as there was a second side to his professional life. Unbeknownst to his wife, and at Hanssen's suggestion, a friend would watch the Hanssens having sex through a bedroom window. He also began to secretly videotape their sexual encounters and shared the videotapes with him. Later, Hanssen hid a video camera in the bedroom that was connected to a closed-circuit television line so that his friend could observe the Hanssens from his guest bedroom. He also explicitly described the sexual details of his marriage on Internet chat rooms, giving information sufficient for those who knew them to recognize the couple.
Hanssen frequently visited D.C. strip clubs, and spent a great deal of time with a Washington, D.C., stripper named Priscilla Sue Galey. She went to Hong Kong with Hanssen on a trip and on a visit to the FBI training facility in Quantico, Virginia. He gave her money, jewels and a used Mercedes, but cut off contact with her before his arrest, when she fell into drug abuse and prostitution. Galey claims that although she offered to sleep with him, Hanssen declined, saying that he was trying to convert her to Catholicism.
Read more about this topic: Robert Hanssen
Famous quotes containing the words personal life, personal and/or life:
“A man lives not only his personal life, as an individual, but also, consciously or unconsciously, the life of his epoch and his contemporaries.”
—Thomas Mann (1875–1955)
“Wilson adventured for the whole of the human race. Not as a servant, but as a champion. So pure was this motive, so unflecked with anything that his worst enemies could find, except the mildest and most excusable, a personal vanity, practically the minimum to be human, that in a sense his adventure is that of humanity itself. In Wilson, the whole of mankind breaks camp, sets out from home and wrestles with the universe and its gods.”
—William Bolitho (1890–1930)
“O hiding hair and dewy eyes,
I am no more with life and death,
My heart upon his warm heart lies,
My breath is mixed into his breath.”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)