Review: Book reveals much about Hanssen, FBI

"The Bureau and the Mole"
By David A. Vise
Atlantic Monthly Press
Non-fiction
352 pages

(CNN) -- The most devastatingly effective Soviet spies in history were all Americans. And none of them did more damage to U.S. national security than Robert Phillip Hanssen, the FBI counterintelligence agent who spent a quarter century selling secrets to Moscow. Washington Post reporter David A. Vise explains how Hanssen got away with it -- and ultimately got caught -- in "The Bureau and the Mole."

Although the book has all the elements of a cloak-and-dagger thriller, Vise chooses to arrange them in a very different way: His approach is more biographical. He peels back the layers of Hanssen's life, exposing the personality traits that led him to treachery.

"The Bureau and the Mole" is almost a double biography, for there's another person who is vital to understanding what Hanssen did -- former FBI Director Louis Freeh. Vise chronicles the careers of both men through the ranks of the FBI, Hanssen to the top of the counterintelligence unit, Freeh by a more circuitous route to the directorship.

EXTRA INFORMATION In-Depth: The case against Robert Hanssen

What startles the reader is how much the men have in common. Both come from working-class families, both are educated, both are married with large families, both are devout Catholics and neither could abide the bureaucratic morass of the FBI.

What is markedly different about them is the way each responded to the challenges they faced inside the Bureau.

Hubris

Freeh worked harder and smarter than other agents to bring criminals to justice. Hanssen diverted his energies toward proving he was better than his colleagues by selling out his country.

On this point Vise is clear. Hanssen wasn't driven by ideology (he hated Communism) or greed (even though he accepted substantial payments from the Soviets). He was driven by hubris.

Each time he passed another stack of secrets to his handlers, he had to be wearing a self-satisfied smirk. He was showing up his own organization by spying from within its midst. He was also showing up the Russians, because in all the years he spied for them, they never found out who he really was.

A double life

Perhaps it was inevitable that Hanssen and Freeh, with their similarities and their differences, were on a collision course. Vise certainly thinks so.

"Though the two men had taken radically different courses over the past quarter century," he writes, "their destinies were inextricably intertwined in the Bureau that one loved and the other loathed. It was no longer just the deep interest they shared in clandestine FBI operations, their respective families of six children, their membership in the same church, and their decision to send their children to the same school that bound one to the other. Now, they would share something else -- a bond forged by their exits from the Bureau."

Espionage wasn't the only thing Hanssen was keeping secret. He was also fascinated by pornography and had relationships with strippers -- either of which would have stunned co-workers who considered him prudish and unemotional. One of their pet names for the dour, black-clad agent was "The Mortician."

"The Bureau and the Mole" does more than explain how Robert Hanssen betrayed everything he was sworn to protect. It explains why he did it, and why he was ultimately found out. The account Vise gives of the Hanssen case is as thought-provoking as it is riveting.