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On the morning of February 20, 2001, my phone began to ring early in the morning and continued without letup throughout the day. The callers were colleagues from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, from which I had retired only six months before. One of the special agents who had attended my retirement party to wish me well had graduated from my high school, Taft in Chicago, only a year before I did. I had worked closely with him during several assignments in Washington, D.C., and New York City and I considered him a close friend. Among all of my colleagues at the Bureau, I had always been impressed with the devotion this agent showed for his family and with his deep commitment to the Roman Catholic Church. To say I was stunned when friend after friend called on February 20 to make sure I knew that Bob Hanssen had been arrested as a spy is the great understatement of my life.1
You can gauge the impact of a spy case by the number of authors who rush to write about it. In the two years since Hanssen's arrest, there have been five books and, recently, a made-for-TV miniseries scripted by Norman Mailer. By comparison, it has taken nearly eight years for five books and a TV movie to be accumulated about Aldrich Ames, the notorious CIA spy arrested in 1994. In 1963, Kim Philby escaped to Moscow after decades of spying for Russia within British intelligence. Over 220 books have now appeared about Philby and the other "Cambridge Reds" with whom he was associated. But no modern spy has been the subject of as much attention so fast as Robert Hanssen. From my perspective, as someone who thought he knew Hanssen fairly well for quite a few years, the books and movie have done a very mixed job at answering the essential mystery. To show why, it will be helpful to address a series of questions.
What did Hanssen give away?
Or what is the damage he caused?
The affidavit in support of Hanssen's arrest had been approved two days before it occurred. The affidavit was made public immediately thereafter, and it is a most extraordinary document. It reads like a spy novel. It describes the devious methods Hanssen used to communicate with the KGB and other Russians, and it quotes from the actual notes exchanged. The early books by Shannon and Blackman, Havill, and Vise are mostly expanded versions of the affidavit.
To understand what Hanssen gave away requires a bit of reading between the lines in the public documents from the case. These three early books have slightly varying interpretations, but consistent with the affidavit is this brutal fact: Hanssen immediately and purposefully gave the KGB the identities of four Russians working as in-place U.S. sources. Hanssen knew he had to eliminate any potential that someone in the KGB would betray him. Three of these four were subsequently executed and the fourth served a long prison term.
While the early books hinted at the depth of Hanssen's betrayal, Wise's volume (released in October 2002) sets it out in nerve-racking detail. Suffice it to say, Hanssen's position within the Bureau gave him legitimate access to just about every FBI analytical study of KGB operations, most counterintelligence budget program requests (both for the FBI and other U.S. intelligence agencies), many studies detailing technical assessments of new, state-of-the-art collection systems, and just about all the details of ongoing cases. It appears Hanssen was nondiscriminatory, for he gave it all away. Using diskettes with an encryption system he had devised himself, Hanssen turned over 6,000 pages of material from the FBI and other U.S. intelligence agencies. Wise goes into great detail about one particular eavesdropping technique (the laborious construction of a tunnel beneath the new Russian Embassy in Washington) that Hanssen compromised, thereby negating literally years of work by hundreds of U.S. workers.
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