The Bureau and the Mole: The Unmasking of Robert Philip Hanssen, the Most Dangerous Double Agent in FBI History by David A. Vise
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

" He would be living the kind of fantasy he had dreamed of for years, proving to himself that he was smarter than the FBI, more clever than the Russians, and bold enough to pull this off, without Bonnie or anyone in the family noticing."

I can believe this explanation of what led Robert Hanssen, an FBI Special Agent, to become the most dangerous "mole" in the organization's history. I have known several people who think they are smarter than everybody else and attempt to demonstrate it at any opportunity. Anyway.

I find both the title of David A. Vise's The Bureau and the Mole (2002) and the overlong subtitle, The Unmasking of Robert Philip Hanssen, the Most Dangerous Double Agent in FBI History, quite misleading. In fact, the book is framed as a clever juxtaposition of converging life stories and career trajectories of two men, Mr. Hanssen and Louis Freeh, the Director of the Bureau. The author does a good job of presenting the various influences that formed both men. I also suspect that he wants the readers to form their own conclusion about why both these men, driven by their hubris and the arrogance of believing how well they do their jobs (spying against the country in Mr. Hanssen's case, discovering spies in Mr. Freeh's case), eventually failed in a spectacular way.

Mr. Vise's book is to a large extent an indictment of how inept the agency was in detecting moles in their midst, how the illusions of organizational excellence fooled everybody, particularly the people on the top, blinded by their self-perceived excellence. It is quite ironic that Mr. Hanssen's wife discovered her husband's contacts with the Soviets quite early in his spying career. Even more ironic is that the Bureau received a report about Mr. Hanssen hiding thousands of dollars in cash at his home and ignored it. One would like to laugh at the negligence were it not so serious: several agents paid the ultimate price - their lives - for the organization's errors.

The book contains verbatim texts of letters that Mr. Hanssen wrote to his Russian handlers. These are truly painful to read: they reveal Hanssen's "fragile emotional state" and neediness:

"Please at least say goodbye. It's been a long time my dear friends, a long and lonely time."

Appendix II contains selected e-mails written by Mr. Hanssen; I don't find them that interesting. Neither has Appendix III, The Sexual Fantasies of a Spy captured my attention. The sexual fantasies - the reader is warned that they are "graphic" while a more fitting qualifier would be "badly written" - feature Mr. Hanssen's wife. The author - of the book not of the fantasies - states that the wife has declined to comment on the fantasies. Duh!

Among significant criticisms about his tenure, Louis Freeh steps down as the Director of the Bureau in 2001, almost at the same time as Mr. Hanssen cuts a plea bargain deal with the prosecutors. This coincidence provides a neat climax to the story of two parallel lives.

Readable book yet I have no idea how biased Mr. Vise is in his arguments. If what he writes can be fully believed then I am scared. Quite scared that human ambition trumps national interest and that dangerous traitors can operate that easily.

Two-and-three-quarter stars.

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