Robert Hanssen was one of the most insidious traitors in American history. The FBI agent who presented the KGB—and its Russian successor—with vital intelligence became a source of fascination, the subject of a welter of books and a couple of movies. Hanssen behaved like a character from a satirical novel (early Kurt Vonnegut?). He was a fierce anti-Communist who worked for the Reds, the arch-patriot who sold out his country and the conservative Catholic who posted porn about his devoted wife on internet bulletin boards.
Trial lawyer and CNN commentator Lis Wiehl adds another book to the Hanssen shelf with A Spy in Plain Sight. She has the benefit of distance, writing years after the initial media frenzy, and sought out new interviews with friends and colleagues. Of course, whether all of their accounts are accurate will always be suspect. After all, time’s passage embroiders all memories and some of his associates might have enjoyed spinning a few yarns.
Wiehl wisely refuses to pretend that she has assembled the full picture on Hanssen’s thinking. The puzzle pieces she gathers includes his sadistic Chicago cop father, his early work as an accountant and his eager, early adaptation of computers. He became the tech nerd who made few close friends in the FBI but was admired for being on the leading edge of new technology. By helping digitize the FBI’s data base, he had access to almost everything before his arrest in 2001.
The worst outcome of Hanssen’s treason was the death, by torture, of America’s leading spy in the Soviet Union, Dmitri Polyakov. The military intelligence chief considered himself a Russian patriot who opposed the country’s Communist leaders. He has even been credited for saving the world by passing information to the Kennedy administration during the Cuban missile crisis. Unlike Hanssen, Polyakov accepted no pay for his espionage.
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What’s knowable about Hanssen is the compartmentalization of his life. He appeared bitter over failing to find the satisfaction he sought, including the camaraderie of the FBI where he was always the odd man out. Perhaps Hanssen was going to show them that he was the smartest man in the bureau. Instead, he’s serving 15 consecutive life sentences (“that is, forever and a day,” Wiehl adds) at ADX Florence, alongside Unabomber Ted Kaczynski and Oklahoma City bomber Terry Nichols.