Book Review | SPY: The Inside Story of How the FBI's Robert Hanssen Betrayed America

CIA's Center for the Study of Intelligence

Studies in Intelligence, 2004

SPY: The Inside Story of How the FBI's Robert Hanssen Betrayed America

David Wise. New York: Random House, 2003. 313 pages, photos, index.

Reviewed by Hayden B. Peake, curator of the CIA's Historical Intelligence Collection

This is the fifth and best book about the Robert Hanssen espionage case.2 It is a strange story of a man who grew up in the Chicago suburbs, studied dentistry before becoming a CPA, married his sweetheart and converted to catholicism, became a Chicago cop, and then, in January 1976, an FBI special agent. Just three years later he began a parallel career as a sometime agent of the Russian GRU and then the KGB/SVR, a career that lasted until his arrest in February 2001. It was during this period that CIA officers Aldrich Ames and Harold Nicholson and FBI special agent Earl Pitts also spied for the Soviets. Both agencies knew there was a leak and each conducted a molehunt. In 1987 Hanssen himself was assigned to study the problem. This gave him access to all the material on previous and ongoing FBI penetration cases. Using his skill with computers, he also learned about the CIA molehunt. With this knowledge he was better able to avoid suspicion.

Wise devotes most of the book to telling how these cases interrelated. We learn how Hanssen managed his relationship with the Soviets, his sometimes skillful, sometimes risky, use of tradecraft and the indications that the KGB knew his identity. Then there was the claim (ignored) of convicted FBI special agent Earl Pitts that Hanssen was a KGB agent. Even more disturbing, was the conclusion (dismissed by the director) of FBI agent Tom Kimmel that the mole was in the Bureau. It is a disturbing tale of personal treachery and bureaucratic ineptitude.

The many threads of Robert Hanssen's life—family, devotion to the church, a stripper girlfriend, Internet pornography, and FBI career—each gave clues to his espionage, and Wise relates them all skillfully. The story of his wife's suspicions when she finds extra money—lots of it—Hanssen's confession of espionage to his priest, the incredible tale of his brother-in-law, also an FBI special agent, reporting him as a Soviet agent with no response by the Bureau, and Hanssen's own predilection that the end was near are just a few examples.

But the reason Hanssen was not caught sooner is even more bizarre: the FBI was convinced, despite a lack of hard evidence, that the mole was in the CIA and that they knew who it was! Once they had a CIA suspect, they never considered an alternative until given hard evidence of the mole's true identity. In a chapter called "The Wrong Man," Wise gives an astonishing account of the more than four-year personal disaster for the CIA officer suspect codenamed Gray Deceiver. He endured 24-hour surveillance, video cameras were installed in his office, audio devices were attached to his home and work telephones, and his personal and work computers were monitored. For the last two years he was placed on administrative leave. Curiously, though Gray Deceiver was serving under cover and the Agency requested his identity be protected, Wise gratuitously insisted on naming him.

In the end, Hanssen was identified through information from a CIA source and a skillfully designed and implemented FBI operation that led to an agent with access to portions of the KGB's file on Hanssen. The agent was eventually paid in the neighborhood of $7 million dollars to provide portions of the mole's KGB file, including a tape of the mole speaking to his KGB control. Only then, after the voice was recognized, was Hanssen identified and FBI efforts redirected to Hansen's arrest, with legendary FBI efficiency. The Gray Deceiver was restored to duty.

In the epilogue, Wise describes the austere life Hanssen now leads in the Colorado supermax prison, noting that he apparently fails "to grasp fully the enormity of what he had done..." (p. 304)

Wise searches in vain for a reasonable way to explain why a man with a good job, a lovely and loving wife, and six fine children would betray his country. He finds no solitary cause. Robert Hanssen was truly a spy for all reasons.

2. Adrian Havill, The Spy Who Stayed Out in the Cold: The Secret Life of FBI Double Agent Robert Hanssen (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2001); Elaine Shannon and Ann Blackman, The Spy Next Door: The Extraordinary Secret Life of Robert Philip Hanssen, The Most Damaging FBI Agent in U. S. History (Boston: Little Brown, 2002); David A. Vise, The Bureau and the Mole: The Unmasking of Robert Philip Hanssen, The Most Dangerous Double Agent in FBI History (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2002); Lawrence Schiller, Into The Mirror: The Life of Master Spy Robert P. Hanssen—based upon an investigation by Norman Mailer and Lawrence Schiller (New York: HarperCollins, 2002). Wise's is the only book to include the correct photo of Hanssen's final drop site.