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Hanssen got something of a late start in the spy business. He was born April 18, 1944, in Chicago to a veteran cop engaged for nearly 30 years in local anticommunist intelligence work. He was raised as a Lutheran on a street lined with towering elms in a middle-class neighborhood of northwest Chicago. Next-door neighbors remember Bob as polite, a good kid who did well in school and pleased his teachers. He went to the select liberal-arts Knox College in Galesburg, Ill., where he majored in chemistry but had few extracurricular activities, unusual in the busy, close-knit society of the school. He also studied Russian, something even his mother Vivian says she did not know. "He might have been one of those loners," says Bruce Spencer, who attended Knox but doesn't remember him. Hanssen went on to graduate school at Northwestern University, where he studied first dentistry, then accounting.
After a stint with the Chicago police department's short-lived "supersnoops" unit, Hanssen eventually joined the FBI. At 32 he was more mature than most brash recruits, often condescending to his colleagues, and he wore his religious faith on his sleeve. "People who are super-religious, and only God meets their standards, usually have no time for mere mortals," says a retired agent who worked in the New York field office's Soviet division, where Hanssen was assigned from 1978 to '81 and again from 1985 to '87. "He thought he was mentally superior to his peers and probably his leadership," says Robert Bryant, former FBI assistant director. That subtle arrogance made him few friends there, and he was nicknamed Dr. Death for his sallow complexion, dark hair, black suits and humorless stare. Because he had no bedside manner, he was never sent out to recruit Soviet turncoats. "He had no people skills at all," says the former colleague, who wonders if the cruel nicknames helped set Hanssen on his traitorous course.
Yet he became a clever inside man, adept at the computers the FBI was introducing to keep track of its counterintelligence activities. He helped set up the Intelligence Investigative System into which agents dumped names, addresses, likes, dislikes and other telling minutiae about Soviet targets, giving him access to the true names of every FBI intelligence source in New York. He also worked with the electronics specialists who roamed the night streets installing bugs and cameras to watch over Soviet officials. And he was very inquisitive about everything going on around him. "I just figured he was nosy," says the former colleague, who nevertheless wrote off his curiosity as genuine interest in the unit's work. During Hanssen's stints at headquarters in Washington, from 1981 to '85 and again from 1987 to his arrest, his increasingly important assignments let him poke unnoticed into virtually every corner of government intelligence, surveying a complete library of sources, methods, techniques, targets, plus secret-operations plans and analytical assessments. "He couldn't have had better assignments," mourns a top G-man.