Wise explores the why’s of a ‘Spy’

‘Spy’

‘The Inside Story of How the FBI’s Robert Hanssen Betrayed America’

David Wise

Random House; 310 pp., $24.95

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David Wise’s “Spy” presents two conundrums: Why did Robert Hanssen, who long sat at or near the center of the FBI’s counterintelligence operations, betray everything he knew -- about 6,000 pages of top-secret U.S. material -- to the Russians for 22 years? And why did the FBI and the rest of the U.S. intelligence apparatus fail to catch him for so long?

Wise, who has expertly studied and written about spies for a lifetime, attacks the first question diligently, yet in the end leaves it at least partially unanswered. Hanssen fits, Wise writes, “into no known previous category of spies.” He made some money, but he was not entirely motivated by it, and he certainly did not spy for ideological reasons.

Hanssen was, Wise says, “a walking paradox.” The FBI put him in charge of a hunt for a “mole,” while he was the mole himself. He was a zealous anti-Communist. The father of six children, he was a pious Catholic who went to Mass every day. He was an ardent member of the secretive, disciplined Catholic organization Opus Dei.

Hanssen got his longtime best friend to watch him and his wife having sex, then, to make it easier for the friend, he filmed and broadcast the scenes on in-house television. Hanssen imagined drugging his wife and having his friend get her pregnant. He and this friend shared pornography for years. Hanssen gave expensive gifts -- a diamond and sapphire necklace, a used Mercedes-Benz -- to a stripper and even took her to Hong Kong with him on an official FBI trip (at his expense), but he rebuffed her when she came on to him.

With permission all around, Wise talked at length with the psychiatrist who examined Hanssen in prison. The psychiatrist, David Charney, concluded that essentially, in betraying the FBI, Hanssen was getting back at his cold and abusive father (a Chicago cop).

Charney thought Hanssen was also using the money to meet the (unexpressed) expectations of his wife; for instance, they sent their children to private Opus Dei schools. Charney concluded that Hanssen’s sexual activities were not a major part of his betrayal, even though another psychiatrist thought that they were. In any case, “he was a traitor and a pervert,” his wife cried when the FBI told her the whole story.

The answer to the second question, why Hanssen was not caught sooner, comes through clearly enough in “Spy.” In short, the FBI and the rest of the intelligence bureaucracy were hidebound, self-protective and not very smart.

A decade before he was caught, the FBI was told he had a lot of unexplained cash. In 1991 there was the Hong Kong stripper trip; in 1993 he broke into a colleague’s computer. He declined to take a lie-detector test for a better job; in 1997 FBI technicians found he had a “password breaker” on his computer. No one put these clues together. Wise concludes that the reason was that FBI agents were thought to be incapable of such disloyal acts as Hanssen’s.

True, the FBI finally got its man. Through the CIA, the FBI paid $7 million to a Russian for the KGB file that led to Hanssen (and, in February 2001, to his arrest as he left documents for the Russians in a northern Virginia park).

At the request of the intelligence agencies, who wanted to get from him all he knew, the government did not ask for the death penalty at his trial. He is spending his life in prison. But along the way, the FBI had pursued another man as the suspected mole, who was suspended from his CIA job for two years. Even as the new Kissinger Commission investigates the activities of U.S. intelligence before Sept. 11, “Spy” provides substantial evidence of a troubled intelligence community.