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A good spy needs a good cover, and Hanssen had one of the best. He looked the quintessential suburban dad, devoted to his wife and six kids, working a government job to pay for a four-bedroom split-level house on a cul-de-sac in a modest Virginia neighborhood, Catholic school and college for the kids, and three aging cars. Neighbors often saw him walking through a neighborhood park at night, letting his dog romp, though he rarely stopped to chat. He piled the family into a van every Sunday for Mass at the same church FBI boss Louis Freeh attended. He and his wife Bonnie belong to the church's conservative Opus Dei society. Bonnie is a devout, spiritual woman, much admired among her neighbors for her sunny optimism and her skill at child rearing. If the reserved, aloof Hanssen was less popular, he was still regarded by those who knew him as a good father, good husband, good professional. And a good son. "He has always been very honest and upright," said his mother Vivian Hanssen, 88, reached by TIME at her home in Venice, Fla. "I don't understand how he could be leading a double life. I hope there are extenuating circumstances."
Yet Hanssen was in the perfect position to spy on his country. For 25 years, he rose through the ranks of counterintelligence agents who toiled on the FBI's "Dark Side," as insiders call the highly secretive National Security Division. In 1978, when Hanssen was posted to the big New York field division, most rookie agents required to work counterintelligence hated the job. The hot career path lay in the dramatic bank robberies and Cosa Nostra cases of the criminal division. Intelligence surveillances took years, decades even, and seldom if ever resulted in actual indictments.
But Hanssen actually seemed to like the slow, intricate building of counterintelligence cases and was well suited to it. If criminal agents called the other realm "Sleepy Hollow," the NSD boys scoffed at their rivals as "knuckle draggers." As an agent who worked with Hanssen in the Soviet unit put it, "The counterintelligence agents read the New York Times, and the criminal agents read the Daily News. Espionage cases are the best cases in the world because they're very cerebral." So was Hanssen. He read voraciously, everything from spy novels to Marxist tomes to the richly detailed logs filed by surveillance squads overnight. "He really wanted to do counterintelligence work," says the agent.
In one of the many letters he allegedly sent to Moscow, Hanssen claimed that what he really wanted was to be a double agent, like the British intellectual turned mole Kim Philby. "I'd decided on this course when I was 14. I'd read Philby's book," he wrote (although Philby's autobiography was not published until 1968, when Hanssen was 24) in a rambling discourse last March to the SVR, Russia's foreign-arm successor to the Soviet-era KGB. "My only hesitations were my security concerns under uncertainty. I hate uncertainty."