A spy in plain sight

Just finished reading “A spy in plain sight: The Inside Story of the FBI and Robert Hanssen―America's Most Damaging Russian Spy” by Lis Wiehl. While this book continues my diet of history, it’s a bit of a departure from my usual fare of economic and military history. Hanssen recently died in prison, so I was interested in the backstory, and this is certainly an interesting tale. Hansson not only betrayed national secrets to the USSR and Russia, but he named sources, which got at least a couple of them killed. A lot of the book is focused on how he got away with it for so long while working for the FBI. Partly, it was because he was computer-savvy and partly because he exploited a culture that didn’t believe FBI agents and employees could be spies. That was CIA stuff, confirmed by the Aldrich Ames case. Hansson was able to trade secrets for KGB money on and off for 20 years before he was caught.

Hansson himself was a bundle of contradiction. A political conservative and devout Roman Catholic—a member of the right-wing Opus Dei cult—Hansson cheated on his wife and sent nude pictures of her to his friend, who he later set up to view having sex on CCTV. To most of his colleagues, Hansson was arrogant and aloof, although the social distancing probably made it easier for him to photocopy and steal massive amounts of secret materials to sell to his handlers.

The writing in this book is uneven. There were sections that were riveting, and other passages that I felt were unnecessarily repetitive or were filler. There are extended passages near the end on Hansson’s motivation and psychology that I found too speculative. But it is a fairly short book, and a breezy read.