The Spy Who Stayed Out in the Cold
The Secret Life of FBI Double Agent Robert Hanssen
-
- $11.99
-
- $11.99
Publisher Description
Robert Philip Hansen thought he was smarter than the system. For decades, the quirky but respected counterintelligence expert, religious family man, and father of six, sold top secret information to agents of the Soviet Union and Russia. A self-taught computer expert, Hansen often encrypted his stolen files on wafer-thin disks. The data-some 6000 pages of highly classified documents-revealed precious nuclear secrets, outlined American espionage initiatives, and named names of agents-spies who covertly worked for both sides.
Soviet government leaders, and their successors in the Russian Federation, used the stolen information to undermine U.S. policies and to eliminate spies in their own ranks. Moscow did not allow their moles the luxury of a defense: at least two men named by Hanssen were executed; a third languished for years in a Siberian hard labor camp.
For more than twenty years, Bob Hanssen was the perfect spy. He personally collected at least $600,000 from his Russian handlers while another $800,000 was deposited in his name at a Moscow bank. Along with the cash came Rolex watches and cut diamonds. The money financed both his children's education at schools run by the elite and ultra-conservative Catholic organization, Opus Dei, and an inexplicably strange fling with a former Ohio "stripper of the year."
But he didn't just do it for the money; he did it for the thrill and for a mysterious third reason rooted in religious mysticism. He lacked the people skills to play office politics, and it seemed the aging FBI analyst faced a disappointing career mired in middle management. Instead, he chose to become one of the most dangerous spies in America's history. And no one suspected him until just weeks before his arrest.
Robert Philip Hanssen thought he was smarter than the system. And until February 18, 2001, he was right. That's when federal agents surrounded him while he was attempting to complete an exchange with his handlers at a Virginia park. When the G-men captured their mark, they catapulted the once innocuous bureaucrat onto the front pages of every newspaper in America. The most notorious spy since the Rosenbergs had finally become a victim of his own undoing.
Now, drawing on more than 100 interviews with Bob Hanssen's friends, colleagues, coworkers, and family members, and confidential sources, best-selling author Adrian Havill tells the entire story you haven't read as only he can. The Spy Who Stayed Out in the Cold tells not only how he did it, but why.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
FBI agent Robert Hanssen began spying for the Soviet Union in 1985. By the time he was arrested in February 2001, he'd received over $600,000 payment in cash and diamonds and turned over hundreds of pages of top secret documents. In the process, says Havill, Hanssen did as much damage to U.S. national security as "anyone since the Rosenbergs." But why did he do it? And how? Havill, a journalist and true-crime writer (While Innocents Slept), devotes most of his book to these two questions. Hanssen, Havill reports, had been fascinated by the romance of international espionage from an early age. When he was 14, he became obsessed with the memoir of a notorious British double agent; his favorite film was From Russia with Love. But after a decade of FBI service, Hanssen found himself unsatisfied, underappreciated and underpaid. And so, using the code name Ramon, Hanssen turned over his first packet of secret files to the KGB. Havill's chronicle of the Hanssen-KGB relationship reads like a John le Carr novel, full of codes and secret signals. The notes between Hanssen and his Russian handers, excerpted extensively by Havill, are the most fascinating parts of the book. Frustratingly, Havill is unable to provide any details concerning the contents of the documents Hanssen turned over this is, of course, an unavoidable flaw in any book dealing with espionage and national secrets. Despite this, Havill's book remains an intriguing, unsettling portrait of a man whose poor finances and personal frustration drove him to betray his country.