WASHINGTON — Near the end, Robert Philip Hanssen descended into a madness of his own making. Caution gone, he prowled the darkness of a neighborhood park with a penlight searching for a signal that wasn't there. A lumbering figure, he waved his arms and seemed to shout at the sky.
"I have come about as close as I ever want to come to sacrificing myself to help you and I get silence. I hate silence," he had complained a few months earlier when communications with his Russian handlers had lapsed. "One might propose that I am either insanely brave or quite insane. I'd answer neither. I'd say insanely loyal. Take your pick. There is insanity in all the answers."
"Set the signal at my site any Tuesday evening. I will read your answer," Hanssen is quoted as saying in an FBI affidavit released last week in support of allegations that Hanssen was a Russian spy.
"Please, at least say goodbye," Hanssen pleaded. "It's been a long time my dear friends, a long and lonely time."
This account of Hanssen's saga was put together from dozens of interviews with people who knew him and who have studied espionage, coupled with the detailed FBI affidavit that includes many letters and other communications between Russian officials and someone identified by the FBI as Hanssen. His lawyer Plato Cacheris said he would not comment beyond saying that Hanssen would plead not guilty.
It had not been so dark at the beginning a decade and a half ago.
Yes, he had been needy then, too--needing to support a burgeoning family, to savor the drug-like rush of outsmarting his dull but self-important colleagues, to build inside himself a private world that reflected his superior talents.
But those needs had felt different. The outside world had seemed simpler then and his nerves steadier. As he set out to make himself a Soviet mole, Hanssen had floated on clouds of self-confidence.
The alleged mole had insisted on his own way in everything. He had lectured the KGB on security. He had brushed aside suggestions on trade craft and doled out condescending compliments when a Soviet agent met his professional standards. He had been cavalier about money too.
"As far as funds are concerned," he had said, "I have little need or utility for more than the $100,000" initially requested. "It merely provides a difficulty. . . . Perhaps some diamonds as security for my children and some good will so that when the time comes you will accept [my] senior services as a guest lecturer" at the Center, as the KGB called its Moscow headquarters.
