Wise, David. Spy: The Inside Story of How the FBI's Robert Hanssen Betrayed America. New York: Random House, 2002. 309 pages.

In 2001, Robert Hanssen was sentenced to life without parole for spying for Russia for 22 years. Hanssen was a counterintelligence expert for the FBI. His unit analyzed the "feed" from operational agents and suspected double agents, and tried to determine whether operations were penetrated. There are not many positions in U.S. intelligence that would be more useful to a mole paid by Russia. Ironically, after the CIA's spy catchers had missed Aldrich Ames for nine years, President Clinton issued a directive in 1994 that gave the FBI much better access to the CIA's Counterintelligence Center.

Hanssen's motives were curious. He was a devout Catholic and member of the reactionary Opus Dei, and also had some unusual sexual interests -- a combination that produces conflicting speculations. The U.S. paid out $7 million to a defector who furnished Hanssen's file from a well-guarded building in Moscow, and then resettled him in America. Hanssen's name was not in the file (Hanssen never told Moscow his name), but his fingerprint was on a plastic bag retrieved from a drop, and his voice had been recorded. For three years the CIA and FBI investigators knew they had a mole problem, and had quietly focused on a CIA officer during that period. When they got this file they discovered that they were pursuing the wrong man.
ISBN 0-375-50745-0

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