Robert Hanssen lavished a DC stripper. Was he grooming her to help spy?

Jul 18, 2023

Robert Hanssen, an American spy whose leaks to Russia the FBI dubbed "possibly the worst intelligence disaster in U.S. history," was found dead in prison Monday. The following story was originally published on April 29, 2001.

Robert P. Hanssen sent a note and $10 to the dressing room, telling the slender woman that he never dreamed he’d find such grace and beauty at a strip joint. It was the nicest compliment she’d ever heard, so Priscilla Sue Galey ran to catch Hanssen before he got to M Street. Hanssen handed her his FBI business card and asked her to lunch. Soon, she offered her number.

"He said he already had my phone number and address," Galey said, recalling the summer of 1990, when she was a dancer at Joanna's 1819 Club in the District. "He said he knew I had a clean record and he wanted to see if his instincts were right."

Over the next 18 months or so, Hanssen, who has been charged with spying for Moscow and spilling some of the nation's most guarded secrets for money and diamonds, befriended Galey and showered her with nearly $100,000 in fine jewelry, a sparkling silver Mercedes-Benz sedan, a trip to Hong Kong and cash, Galey said.

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At one point, she said, he got her a passport in less than 24 hours, and at another, he led her on an exhaustive tour of the FBI training facility at Quantico. Later, in the fall of 1991, Hanssen gave her a laptop computer that was protected by a secret code he all but dared her to break.

In interviews last week at her home in the rough-and-tumble Hilltop neighborhood of Columbus, Ohio, Galey said Hanssen did not ask for anything in return, adding that the devoted family man never once wanted sex and tried repeatedly to bring her closer to God.

Hanssen's relationship with Galey shows what may have happened to a large portion of the money Hanssen is charged with taking from the Russians. Speaking publicly for the first time of her links to Hanssen, Galey fills in many details and tells a remarkable tale of an FBI man's double life.

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Galey is now 43 and destitute. She is missing all her upper teeth and says she sells her body on the streets to support an addiction to crack cocaine. Sitting in her house, which is pockmarked from drive-by shootings and where she stays with her mother, 3-year-old son and about eight other people, Galey said her naiveté in the early 1990s led her to believe Hanssen was an angel who was simply trying to help her. Now, Galey said, she believes Hanssen was grooming her to help him, that the alleged double agent was testing her.

"He had to have wanted me for something," Galey said, adding that Hanssen wouldn't even allow her to hug him after giving her the extravagant gifts. "He wanted to see how I handled myself. He wanted to see if he could trust me. I trusted him completely, and if he had asked me to do anything, I would have."

But, she said, their relationship ended before that happened. Hanssen never said a word about spying and didn't say much about his duties at the FBI. He told her the money came from an inheritance.

Hanssen's attorney, Plato Cacheris, said he has "absolutely no comment on Galey. "These allegations have absolutely no relationship to the case we are handling," he said.

FBI spokesman John Collingwood also declined comment.

Hanssen is charged with espionage, accused of selling out his country for $600,000 in cash and diamonds, plus $800,000 in foreign bank accounts. FBI sources and court documents say he betrayed two Russian double agents, leading to their executions, and compromised dozens of intelligence programs, including a secret tunnel beneath the Russian Embassy in Washington.

The FBI says Hanssen began spying in 1985 and remained active until his arrest Feb. 18, when he was seen leaving a package of classified material in a Fairfax County park. But authorities are silent on his activities between fall 1991 and 1999.

Galey said it is difficult for her to remember how many hundred-dollar bills Hanssen handed her in 1990 and 1991, and there is no way she could estimate how much she charged to an American Express card Hanssen registered to "P.S. Galey" in late 1991. She pawned the laptop and jewelry that included a diamond and sapphire necklace for a fraction of what they were worth.

She noted with no irony that the allegedly tainted money ultimately paid for crack on Columbus's worst streets.

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FBI agents, who tracked her for questioning, have interviewed Galey in Columbus and in Washington, trying in large part to determine what happened to Hanssen's money and showing concern for the contents of the laptop, which officials believe was not owned by the FBI but has not been recovered.

Law enforcement sources confirmed that Galey gave them the same account and that they have substantiated much, though not all, of it. Officials are investigating whether Hanssen used his influence to obtain a passport for Galey in a matter of hours, without having her birth certificate or other identification.

Galey, a high school dropout, began stripping as a financially strapped teenager, following the breakup of a turbulent young marriage. She never thought of dancing as a burden. Rather, it was the start of a life that would someday take her away from The Hilltop. "I loved stripping. I really did," Galey said. "And I was really good at it."

In 1980, Galey got her ticket out. She earned an Ohio stripper of the year trophy and headed for Peabody, Mass., where she adopted the stage name Traci Starr at the Golden Banana, a popular strip joint outside Boston.

Galey headed for the District in 1984. Then 27, she grabbed a small apartment in Silver Spring and took a job at Archibald's, where she worked for about three years.

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In the late 1980s, Galey switched to Joanna's and took the afternoon shift, often walking in from M Street in full business attire, strutting directly to the stage and beginning her act: "I’d take off my glasses, let down my hair, set down the briefcase and go to work," Galey said. "I think the guys all saw me as that secretary they worked with or that woman they saw walking down the street."

Galey said she was at the top of her game when Hanssen noticed her one summer afternoon in 1990, when — he told her later — he was meeting someone at the club "to get some information." He was dressed in a dark suit, "not a hair out of place, not a piece of lint, not a wrinkle," Galey said. "To be honest, I was a little scared of him."

Within days of their first lunch date, Hanssen dropped off an envelope for Galey with $2,000 in cash to help pay for fixing a tooth, she said. The third time she saw him, Hanssen gave her the glamorous necklace.

"He was just the nicest person on earth," Galey said. "I thought he was my own personal angel."

Hanssen told Galey he liked her companionship and respected her intelligent conversation, making no effort to hide his "very happy and stable" family life. Most of their discussions centered on how Galey could better herself and leave exotic dancing — and how he wanted her to go to church.

The idea of Hanssen, now 56, proselytizing a stripper matches the portrait his friends and colleagues have painted in the months since his arrest. A Catholic who regularly attended services in Great Falls, Hanssen believed the basis of morality was God's love.

A 25-year FBI veteran, Hanssen kept a crucifix on his desk and joined Opus Dei, an international organization of conservative Catholics. He and his wife, Bonnie, a part-time schoolteacher, put six children through private school and college — two of whom are still in high school — but otherwise appeared to live quietly in a Vienna home assessed at $290,000.

For her part, Galey saw a man trying to be helpful, someone who paid attention to her and listened to her troubles. "He never criticized me," Galey said. At one point she drove to his church at his invitation, but said she couldn't bear to go inside when she spotted his family getting out of their minivan. "He always pulled at my heartstrings. He thought I could do much better with my life."

Galey said her meetings with Hanssen were incredible. He took her to private law enforcement eating clubs — where she learned he carried a gun when he had to check it at the door — and the fanciest restaurants, where she was impressed that the menus didn't include prices. He escorted her to the National Gallery of Art to see oil paintings and took long walks with her near the White House, once making her exchange her white spiked heels for more sensible blue pumps — which he bought for her on the spot — so she "wouldn't stick out like a sore thumb," she said.

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Whenever Galey needed money, it was there. If she was short on the rent or the electric bill, she could count on Hanssen.

When Galey's sister, Vanessa Bunch, visited from Columbus in August 1990 so they could go to an Aerosmith concert, Galey was already flush with money. "She didn't have a care in the world," said Bunch, now 36. "If she came into a problem, all she had to do was pick up a phone and it was taken care of."

In April 1991, Hanssen surprised Galey with an offer to go to Hong Kong. He met her at Joanna's one afternoon and walked with her to a nearby travel agency, handing her the ticket. They flew separately and stayed in different rooms, meeting only for breakfast and dinner, Galey said.

Hanssen never allowed Galey to take a photo of him, and when he found out there was one shot from Hong Kong, he quickly took it from her and destroyed it. They always met alone. Several times, she wondered what he was up to.

"I got the courage to ask him what was going on a few times, and he’d always laugh and say, ‘I could tell you, but I’d have to kill you,’" Galey said.

Galey's best day came on Aug. 5, 1991 — a day she considers the happiest of a mostly sad life. Hanssen took her to Jaimalito's, a now-defunct Mexican restaurant at Washington Harbor in Georgetown and slid her an envelope with a few $100 bills, the American Express card and keys to a 1985 Mercedes-Benz 190E sedan, her dream car. She was so ecstatic that she couldn't touch her taco salad. FBI agents showed her a receipt for the car from a Virginia dealership that indicated Hanssen had paid $10,500 in cash for it.

"I drove 50 miles out of the way on the way home just to drive it," Galey said. "I spent two weeks peeking out of my apartment windows just to make sure it was there and it was real."

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The dream ended in December 1991, when Galey drove back to Ohio for her birthday and the holidays. She expected to return to Washington for a job Hanssen told her he would line up for her. Hanssen was planning to send her to France in the spring of 1992, but that trip never happened. She started hanging around with her old neighborhood friends, who all were smoking crack, she said. Although she said she never used drugs when she lived in Maryland, she dropped thousands of dollars in a matter of days.

Her contact with Hanssen slowly faded. Galey said the relationship ended for good in 1992 when she "misused" the credit card to buy Easter dresses for her relatives. Hanssen had told her that the American Express card was only for expenses related to the car or emergencies. So when Hanssen saw the bill with the dresses, he got so upset that he flew to Columbus to retrieve it, saying little more than a few words. When Galey was arrested in 1993 on drug charges, her mother, Linda Harris, called Hanssen on his direct line at the FBI to ask for help. He refused.

"He said that Priscilla had made her bed, and now she had to lay in it," said Harris, 59. "He completely turned away, like she never existed."

Her existence now is just a small step from rock bottom. Galey's friends and family say she disappears, sometimes for days, going without sleep or shacking up in abandoned houses with the men who pay her for sexual favors. Her upper plate of fake teeth recently was chewed up by a street dog when she was on a bender.

"I rode in here on a thin, pink cloud, and it just all fell apart," Galey said.

Galey said she thinks Hanssen rejected her because she disobeyed him. She thinks he was disappointed that she wasn't able to crack the code on the laptop — a gift he gave her hoping she would learn about computers.

"I believed he was everything he wasn't," Galey said. "He has taken away any faith I ever had."

White reported from Columbus. Masters reported from Washington. Staff researcher Alice Crites contributed to this report.