February 19, 2007
The Tawdry Tale of Robert Hanssen Posted by Alexander Burns at 09:45 PM EST Over the weekend I went to see the movie Breach. Based on the story of FBI traitor Robert Hanssen, Breach is part of a series of films this year that are beginning to revive the spy movie as a genre. I went in with low expectations, as I am no great fan of Ryan Philippe, the leading man. I came away impressed and disturbed. Like The Good Shepherd, another of this year’s much-heralded spy movies, Breach deals with the fairly recent institutional history of the American intelligence establishment. Robert Hanssen was arrested in the winter of 2001, but his career as a double agent stretched back to 1985. Working simultaneously for the United States and the Soviet and Russian intelligence services, Hanssen became the most damaging traitor in American history. Perhaps because he worked for the FBI, rather than the more enigmatic CIA, Hanssen’s name has never become as famous as that of Aldrich Ames. But the damage he did to his country was at least as significant. Also like The Good Shepherd, Breach makes some revisions to the historical record in order to present a compelling story. Most notably, the movie’s portrait of Hanssen is rather more sympathetic than the man deserves. The ever-capable Chris Cooper depicts Hanssen as a deeply disturbed man who is the victim of his own perversions. His actions don’t come across as malevolent or evil. When he gives state secrets to the Russians, one is tempted to judge his betrayal by the same terms that one judges a binge-drinking alcoholic. He’s clearly doing something terrible—but can he really help himself? The actual history of Hanssen’s arrest and trial shows that he was (and is) a psychologically unstable man. But Hanssen has also demonstrated a self-awareness and level of conscious intent that indicate he’s something more than just a madman. Hanssen compromised some of his country’s most stunning secrets, such as information about America’s missile arsenal and the ways in which it might respond to a nuclear attack. As detailed by the Washington Post, Hanssen did all this not merely for monetary gain but also for the personal satisfaction of becoming a great traitor. To an extent that Breach does not detail, Hanssen was determined to go down in history as a master spy—a far more cerebral, influential, and sexually perverse James Bond. This revision of history is understandable, since the resulting image of Hanssen is much more interesting for its moral ambiguity. Less understandable is Breach’s omission of one vital element of the effort to capture Hanssen. At the end of the film, the FBI and particularly the young do-gooder Philippe come off quite well. They appear to have worked hard to plug a terrible leak, and in so doing helped protect their country and salvage their own careers. What Breach does not depict is the help the FBI got from at least one source inside the Russian intelligence agencies. What ultimately brought down America’s worst traitor was, ironically, another traitor, not just conscientious investigative work by the FBI. In a film that seeks to illustrate some of the ambiguities of espionage, this is a surprising oversight. For a spy movie, though, these are relatively mild alterations of history. The Good Shepherd received even warmer critical appraisal than Breach, despite portraying the Bay of Pigs fiasco as, essentially, a New Haven sex scandal gone crazy. Even considering its creative liberties, Breach is a valuable portrait of the recent past and a chilling reminder of the challenges of counterintelligence. [Editor’s note: Allen Barra’s AmericanHeritage.com review of Breach can be found here.]
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