The Towering Risks of Betrayal

In the fox-and-geese world of spy and counterspy, it sometimes is called “going over.”

And what is at stake in betraying one’s country seems overwhelming: Exposing family to unbearable shame. Jeopardizing every material possession. Risking even life itself.

But today, with the ideological passions of a half-century ago burned to ashes, the rewards that lure people to go over to the enemy often boil down to a mess of pottage. “Improving one’s lifestyle takes precedence today,” said Brian Jenkins, an intelligence specialist at the Rand Corp. “They sell cheap, measured against the risks they are taking and the terrible consequences of their actions.”

That, it now appears, may have been the case with Robert Philip Hanssen, the career FBI counterspy who was arraigned Tuesday on charges of spying for Moscow. Over a 15-year period beginning in 1985, when he wrote an anonymous letter to a Soviet intelligence agent volunteering to work for the KGB, Hanssen allegedly delivered a steady stream of important national security secrets.

Included were the identities of clandestine U.S. intelligence resources within the Russian system, at least two of whom were later executed. Hanssen was also charged with providing what amounted to an ongoing tutorial for Moscow’s intelligence agencies on how to penetrate U.S. security systems and avoid the FBI’s counterintelligence, some of which he himself had helped design and administer.

For all that, the FBI says in court papers filed secretly before he was arrested, Hanssen got some $600,000 in cash and diamonds. He also was to get an additional $800,000 supposedly set aside for him in a Russian bank, though Hanssen himself once told his KGB handlers that he and they knew this promise was little more than a traditional fiction of the spy game, the documents say.

“This has an enormity in terms of consequences that you’d say would require sums more akin to winning the lottery,” Jenkins said in an interview Wednesday. “But the individual usually doesn’t make that calculation. He makes a much more personal calculation”--what amount of money would it take to make a modest difference in an ordinary life.

“Some people like to live on the edge and find it exciting, but that doesn’t seem to fit Hanssen,” agreed Richard Immerman, chairman of the history department at Temple University. Rather, Immerman said, the sketchy picture of Hanssen that has emerged so far suggests that “he did not think he could live the life he wanted for himself and his family without additional money.”

Immerman, Jenkins and others who discussed the case emphasized that too little information was available to permit definitive conclusions about what would drive a 25-year veteran of the FBI’s counterintelligence service to enlist as a KGB spy.

And both outside experts and many who knew Hanssen were quick to add that a mixture of motives was usually present. A yearning to add drama to a humdrum life, a sense of grievance, a thirst for revenge, resentment over the success of others who seemed less talented, even romance--all these can contribute to an individual’s decision to sell secrets to the enemy.

So can the ego-stoking sense of superiority that can come with the successful deception of one’s colleagues--sitting in their midst, knowing they are blind to what is happening around them.

What is almost never seen anymore are spies such as the legendary Kim Philby, a Cambridge-educated member of Britain’s upper class who worked for years in the upper reaches of London’s intelligence community and betrayed Allied secrets to Moscow out of Marxist conviction.

To men like Philby, whose name Hanssen once allegedly invoked in a letter to his Russian handler, capitalism was a decadent ideology that had brought on the Great Depression, the rise of fascism and World War II. Communism, by contrast, was an idealistic quasi-religion that offered the world a brighter future.

Still, especially for former colleagues, money alone is hard to accept as an adequate motive.

James K. Kallstrom, former head of the FBI’s New York office who worked with Hanssen from time to time during their careers but never as a direct supervisor, said: “He had a good reputation. How do you sell your country out for money? There’s a major defect there that allows someone to do that. It’s not the money. They couldn’t buy 99.9% of the people at the FBI--the money doesn’t matter.”

But experts said that while such assessments would be true for the vast majority of government workers in sensitive jobs, history shows that there are always exceptions and their motives tend to be more crass than exotic. Much remains unknown about what drove Hanssen, they said, but the outlines of the case appear to fit familiar patterns.

They pointed especially to the highly personal nature of such decisions and the willingness to take huge risks and commit heinous crimes for what seem to outsiders like modest rewards.

Spread over 15 years, the cash Hanssen allegedly received from his Russian handlers works out to about $40,000 a year. As an annual, tax-free lump sum, that’s enough to permit significant personal extravagance. Hanssen, with his insider’s knowledge of how counterspies identify and trap their prey, understood that any sign of conspicuous spending or unexplained affluence could undo him.

Yet, carefully doled out for the kinds of ordinary household expenses that send other fathers and mothers scurrying to the ATM machine, such cash infusions can make a significant difference without setting off alarms. Especially for a man with six children and a traditional stay-at-home wife who seems to have been more involved with her children and her Roman Catholic faith than with family finances.

“He wanted to live a suburban life,” Immerman noted. “He had six kids. He was not upper management.” If Hanssen received $20,000 to $40,000 a year secretly, he said, “that’s a lot of money for your basic middle-class family.”

All of the Hanssen children--three boys and three girls--attended parochial schools, enough to put a strain on a single-income family budget.

Indeed, neighbors said they sometimes wondered how the Hanssens made ends meet with such a large family. But they drove old cars--a 1993 Volkswagen van, a 1992 Isuzu Trooper, a 1997 Ford Taurus. And their sprawling split-level house in an aging Virginia subdivision was assessed at less than $300,000.