Spy: The Inside Story of How the FBI's Robert Hanssen Betrayed America by David Wise
Picked up a new book today - Spy: The Inside Story of How the FBI's Robert Hanssen Betrayed America by David Wise and I cannot wait to dive into it.
This is a very revealing book on Robert Hanssen, the FBI agent who spied on the US for the Russians for over 20 years before he was finally caught. If you saw the movie "Breach" with Ryan Phillipe and Chris Cooper, this is a much more in-depth view of the incident, though, interestingly, Eric O'Neill (Phillipe's character) is never mentioned. "Spy" provides a solid look at Hanssen's upbringing and early marriage, and shows how there were several times he might have been caught, but wasn't - usually due to someone finding evidence that might be incriminating, but not presenting it because they either believed Hanssen wasn't the type of person to spy (he was very staunchly Catholic, appeared to live by what might be called "old-fashioned" mores, and often espoused strongly conservative values,) or because after discovering what Hanssen was up to, he promised them he wouldn't do it again. It also details how he accomplished his spying, and the impact his activities had - from the deaths of a number of Soviet officials who had been turning over information on the USSR's, to giving the Soviet Union our "continuity of government" plan, which details not only who will be in charge of what in case of emergency (and who takes over for whom if someone is killed - all the way up to the President) but also the locations where important government officials were to be held (e.g. Dick Cheney's infamous "undisclosed location.") David Wise is a well-respected author on topics of espionage and, in addition to an engrossing story, he provides a number of footnotes, offering notes to help clarify situations, terminology, apparent questions about dates, and the some of what happens in the book had on the wider national and world stages. He also provides copious references to back up the information he provides. Wise is also the author of [book: Nightmover: How Aldrich Ames Sold the CIA to the KGB for $4.6 Million], about the Ames, who - until Hanssen was caught, was considered the worst traitor in American history. "Nightmover" was written well before Hanssen's treachery was uncovered, and reading both of them provides an even deeper understanding of what the world was like - and how governments reacted - during the cold war. When I read them, I read "Spy" first and then "Nightmover" and I found that doing so put a kind of interesting twist on things. I would read about questions that had arisen during the Ames investigation which hadn't been satisfactorily answered, but were somewhat set aside either as dead ends or dismissed as likely being the result of some of the vagueness that is a natural part of the espionage business. Many of these questions would be answered years later when Robert Hanssen was captured and it was made clear that both Ames *and* Hanssen had been, separately, working for the Soviet. The fact that the USSR had control of both of them at the same time was a significant advantage to them - the would often get the same information from both men, which was a pretty strong indicator that the information was, in fact, accurate - coming as it did from two different agencies who rarely cooperated, and could hardly be expected to be working on a coordinated effort to use disinformation to the Soviets in order to flush the spies out of hiding. If you are at all a fan of real-life spy stories, then this is one to get.
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